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Understanding Jibanananda's Different Poetic Sensibility Understanding Jibanananda’s Different Poetic Sensibility Jibanananda Das’s poetry has the power to transport one to the obscure region of one’s being and sensibility beyond the everyday bounds of sense and reason. He achieves it characteristically by endowing mystical attributes to mundane everyday objects of nature, especially the ordinary objects that we see in and around Bengal as Bengal was known then in its undivided entity. This rootedness of his imagination and sensibility is what makes Jibanananda Das a unique poet, different from almost all the modern poets of Bengal. Bengal has produced a great number of nature poets, the finest specimen of which could be no other than Tagore himself, the pictorial as well as spiritual quality of whose images has touched thousands of people across the world. But never before, perhaps, was there a poet in Bengal who like Jibanananda, time and again, made the so-called lowly and unattractive creatures and plants like idur (mouse), shalik (Indian maynah), pecha (owl), kaak (crow), churui (sparrow), hash (duck), ghash (grass), akanda (cr own flower, calotropis gigantea), dhundul (a kind of local vegetable) and so on so 'ordinary' yet significant. I intend to discuss three poems by Jibanananda Das and all three are my favourite ones, namely ‘Before Death’ from his collection Dhushar Pandulipi (Grey Manuscripts), ‘I Shall Return To This Bengal’ and ‘Banalata Sen’ from his collection Rupashi Bangla (Beautiful Bengal) to examine his poetic sensibility as a modern poet, to examine his relationship with nature, a relationship with a difference, and the transformation that Bengal had undergone in his poetry because of this special bond. The order of discussion in my paper will have first ‘Banalata Sen’ to be followed by ‘Before Death’ and then ‘I shall Return to this Bengal’. In this context, it would not be wrong to refer to Tagore, and indeed I have already mentioned him as one of the finest examples of Bengal’s nature poets. With his vast range of songs and poems in praise of Bengal he remains not only relevant but a necessity for the expression of nearly all our moods and occasions, his songs fitting in and therefore being played during every single festival today in Bengal. Yet his description of Bengal remains more general, symbolic and romantic. Nature perhaps was a means of transcendence for Tagore, to be one with a greater being. Jibanananda’s association with nature and specifically that of Bengal is more specific, everyday, ordinary, and common but at the same time sensuous and mysterious. If transcendence is the uniqueness of Tagore’s verse, then that of Jibanananda is surely immanence, and this quality perhaps establishes Jibanananda as one who comes after Tagore with altogether a new sensibility and quest. Never before or since were the poems of his kind written. Buddhadeva Bose in his book An Acre of Green Grass rightly says of Jibanananda: A nature-worshipper, but by no means a platonist or pantheist; he is rather a pagan who loves the things of nature sensuously, not as tokens or symbols, nor as patterns of perfection, but simply because they are what they are . Jibanananda’s singularity lies in his ability to perceive beauty in the unacknowledged and small objects of nature, and in that sense he truly made ordinary Bengal beautiful in the eyes of his readers. At a time when Jibanananda Das was writing, many readers and admirers of his poetry had called him the lonely or the loneliest poet. The reason for using such a label was perhaps because of the pervasive sense of melancholy and of death in his poems. That label has remained with him forever. He was aware of it and had referred to it in the Introduction to the collection of his poems published in 1954 called Jibanananda Daser Shreshto Kobita (The Best Poems of Jibanananda Das). In the Introduction he says that many labels have been tagged to his name from time to time. Some have called him a nature-poet, some a poet of historical and social consciousness, while there are still others who would prefer to call him a poet of the subconscious or more specifically a surrealist poet. Many of these, as the poet observes, stand true for specific poems, but none describes his whole oeuvre. This problem of defining Jibanananda, as I see it, lies in the unusualness of his poetry. Jibanananda lived during difficult times. It was a time of severe political disturbances, the rise of the Left movement, unemployment, financial crisis, and so on. Premendra Mitra and Subhash Mukhopadhyay, Jibanananda’s contemporaries, had once even declared that they were poets of the ‘coolie and the lowly’ and ‘workers and peasants’ respectively. In terms of poetry writing European modernist poetry was a big influence on the poets of this generation, so much so that many of Jibanananda’s contemporaries were called Eliotesque poets. Jibanananda too had been at the receiving end of all this turmoil, but his uniqueness lies in dealing with the same situation in a different way. The world may have been chaotic, but the fecundity and correlative quality of Jibanananda’s mind, helped him create a unique world for himself even in the midst of all this turmoil. Hence most of his poems are neither rebellious nor angry nor dark, characteristics common to the poetry of many of his contemporaries. They are rather characterized by silence, tranquillity and a dreamlike ambience. This perhaps was the reason behind calling Jibanananda a surrealist by many. The Surrealists believed that the vagaries of the outside world could be overcome by invoking the powers of the mind to emancipate and escape into the world of amazing possibilities. Angst which is the hallmark of modernist poetry was present in most of the poets of the time, including Jibanananda Das. Its presence can be felt in the pervasive presence of the sense of fragmentation, meaninglessness and even death in their poetry. But Jibanananda’s poetry is not to be marked by any of these, neither in terms of celebration nor lamentation. Rather his antidote for all this is to celebrate life, to be bound in love with this pulsating life as such in nature that makes it possible to be one with one’s own subconsciousness. The mysteriously beautiful and distant places as well as the sensuous opulence of nature that his poetry draws on make this imaginative journey to be one with nature and hence with oneself possible and deeply enjoyable. In Banalata Sen we encounter such a ‘tired’ soul of a journeying poet looking for peace and oneness. He claims he gets it from ‘Banalata Sen’, and we have the unmistakable feel that Banalata Sen, the loved one, is emblematic of Bengal, Bengal’s nature, its deep solace and shelter, so to speak. As he says: For thousands of years I roamed the paths of this earth, From waters round Sri Lanka, in dead of night, to seas up the Malabar coast. Much have I wandered. I was there in the gray world of Ashoka And of Bimbisara, pressed on through darkness to the city of Vidarbha. I am a weary heart surrounded by life's frothy ocean. To me she gave a moment's peace—Banalata Sen from Natore. The poet, as we see in the poem, has travelled far and wide, but peace eluded him. It is only when he comes face to face with Banalata Sen, does he feel peace. Jibanananda gives free rein to his imagination illustrated by his travels to ancient and remote places of great beauty and attraction. Yet his quest ultimately brings him back to Bengal, to Banalata Sen. Hence it can be said that Banalata Sen is identified with Bengal, and to give a sense of more rootedness, with Natore of Bengal. As is the case, Jibanananda’s poems often give ethereal feelings and exotic sensation, yet the images which abound in them are enough to evoke one’s deep-buried memories of Bengal. Even when he describes a woman or a beloved, he draws comparison from nature and uses images which offer a larger-than-life or stranger- than-life impression of the person. Yet he makes sure that the person is situated and identified in the familiar sights and sounds of the soil she belongs to. Hence Banalata Sen belongs to Natore and her eyes are like the nest of a bird. When the poet encounters her, she says, ‘Where have you been so long? And raised her bird's-nest-like eyes—Banalata Sen from Natore’. At the end of the poem when the poet describes darkness as it descends on the Earth, the end of the day symbolizing end of life as well, he returns to Banalata Sen, his refuge. Jibanananda’s images come out brilliant and evocative, but often puzzling and therefore lasting for their oxymoronic effects. Banalata Sen’s ‘bird’s-nest-eye’ image is a case in point. It has made us all willing captives. It is his innate ability to give a fantastic touch to the so-called commonplace things; it is the ability to perceive the extraordinary in the ordinary; it is the ability to perceive pulsating life in the apparently inanimate; and it is this ability that opens the gateway for him to reach out to the life in nature and thereby to his own substratum. It is this ability that makes Jibanananda a modern poet with a difference. A sense of melancholy pervades in the last few lines of ‘Banalata Sen’ as he describes the day coming to an end.
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