Moonlit Rats and Owls
Manash Bhattacharjee Today is the sixtieth death anniversary of Jibanananda Das (17 February 1899 – 22 October 1954). Shaking himself off Tagore’s Victorian and mystical influences, Jibanananda made the most distinctive mark in the early modernist phase of Bengali poetry. There was as much a new, naturalist lyricism in his poetry as much as new ways of describing time. Time in Jibanananda’s poems was not an abstract, contemplative category, but an optical one, visible in the passing of seasons and the activities of birds and insects. It is through time one measures two intimate aspects of human life: waiting and memory, and Jibanananda’s poetry is replete with imageries where the lover waits and remembers through the passing of time, most intensely captured through naturalistic images. Nature in Jibanananda’s poetry does not resonate with the exuberant charms found in Tagore, but appears, rather, in slow, terrible images of decay. The birth of each new season and activity in nature also marks an end, a death of the previous season. There is also ‘human’ nature, and Jibanananda’s sensibility is equally tilted towards the harsh, primitive naturalism of ‘human nature’. The sexual ‘nature’ of feelings is often described in predatory terms, through the dangerous lures hiding in the dark belly of nature. This created controversy around his poems. Jibanananda was a master of bleak images, and the shadow of pessimism haunted his poems. The effects of early industraialisation and the moving away from village to city life disturbed him. This theme would become the preoccupation of many later poets from Calcutta. To conclude with a word on his most celebrated and well-known poem, Banalata Sen: Today the poem reads like an allegory imagining an impossible juxtaposition—a Bengali woman from a mofussil town of Bangladesh, belonging to the ‘vaidya’ caste, being emblematic of a Buddhist era that flung across ‘national’ boundaries, mapping a geography and time most palpably remote. The poem is perhaps still as enigmatic as ever because it manages to violently juxtapose the petty everydayness of contemporary life with a longing for a place, an era and a pair of eyes that no longer exist. ——————————– After the Harvest The harvest was over who knows when – hay, leaves, various remains, broken eggs scattered in the fields – snake skin, nest-like cold. Beyond all these, at the heart of the field, sleep a few familiar people, strangely inert. There someone else sleeps too – day and night the one I used to meet for a long time. With heart-games, so many misdeeeds I committed on her. Peace still reigns: deep green grass, grasshoppers today envelop her thoughts and the taste of her dark questions. Simple You will never come to hear this song – tonight my call will float in air along the pathway, yet this song comes to heart. Yet I do not forget the language of calling – love still stays alive in the heart, I still sing into the earth’s ear into the star’s ear; I know you will never hear it – tonight my call will float in air along the pathway, yet the song comes to heart. You water, you wave – your body paces like sea-waves – your simple mind floats by the surge of sea waters; some wave she doesn’t know touched her in which darkness; a wave she doesn’t know searches her in the dark; you are Sindhu’s night-waters, Sindhu’s night-waves; who loves you, does anyone carry you in his heart. You go along the surge of waves and far-flung waters behind call you back. You are only a night’s single day; A crowd of men and women Call you far away – so far away – To some sea coast, forest – field – or A sky where floats a make-believe Light of falling stars, Or a sky where the bent Moon like a crescent Raises up – sinks – your life’s taste For you are them, all; Where tree branches shake In a cold night – like the white Bone of dead hands – Where the forest takes dark Primal smells to heart And sings a song. You had come like a Night’s wind to the solitary Heart‘s song And gave whatever a night could. After Twenty Five Years For the last time when I met her in the field I said, ‘One day at such hour come again – if you so desire – after twenty five years’. Saying this I returned home. Later the moon and stars died so many times in the field, in the moonlight rats and owls in search of paddy fields came and went; with eyes closed on the left and right so many people fell asleep; I alone stayed awake; though times arrives faster than the flight of stars, twenty five years don’t get over. Then – one day the field is again full of yellow grass; dew drops float on leaves, dry branches, everywhere; the sparrow’s broken nest is wet with dew; broken bird-eggs on the road, cold – stiff; cucumber flowers, one or two rotten white cucumbers, broken spider webs, dried-up spiders over leaves and stems; the road is visible in the bright moonlight; a few stars are seen in the cold sky – rats and owls roam over the fields their thirst even today quenched by seeds, twenty five years however were long over. A Strange Darkness A strange darkness has set upon this world. Today the blind Are the most clear sighted Those without any love, friendliness or stirrings of pity: the world today is paralysed without their advice. Those who still have deep faith in human beings; even now before whom great truths, art and piety come naturally: today their hearts are food for vultures and jackals. Banalata Sen A thousand nights I have walked this earth. From the Singhalese sea to the Malaya ocean in the dead of night