“Blood mist blurs my vision”: Six poems by Sukanta Bhattacharya

ABSTRACT

Sukanta Bhattacharya’s powerful, bittersweet verses portray experiences of shared loss and survival in colonial Bengal of the 1940s – a cataclysmic and watershed decade in the region’s history. The emotional intensity and intellectual honesty of his work led to his being regarded as a celebrated Bengali poet. While the appeal and relevance of his poems remain undiminished, the meagre efforts to translate them into English have hitherto confined his reputation to a restricted circle of Bengali poetry lovers. Six of his poems are presented here in English translation in order to introduce readers of poetry in English to his artistic sensibility and concerns. Uniting the communicative and aesthetic functions of literary translation, this project aims to surmount the inadequacies of most existing translations of Bhattacharya’s poetry that have not only failed to impress the target readership, but also diminished his poetic significance and marginalized his contribution to Indian and world literatures.

KEYWORDS:

• Sukanta Bhattacharya
• Bengali literature
• Indian poetry
• colonial Bengal
• South Asian history

Notes

1. See Bhattacharya (1978, viii).

2. A cousin and friend of the poet.

3. Diwali (also known as Deepavali) is the festival of lights in many Indian religions, primarily Hinduism. The occasion is marked with the lighting of lamps and exchange of greetings and gifts.

4. Calcutta (now Kolkata), Dhaka (formerly Dacca), and Noakhali in the Bengal province of Undivided India witnessed some of the worst communal carnages in the months and years leading up to India’s political independence from British rule in 1947.

5. Bhattacharya was a committed Marxist and firmly believed that self-rule, peace and human dignity could be restored only by means of mass revolution.

6. Realizing that political negotiations to discuss his demand for a separate independent nation for the Muslims of British India were not making any headway, M.A. Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, called for a hartal or general strike on August 16, 1946. He urged Muslims to observe August 16, 1946 as “Direct Action Day”. This protest for a separate Muslim homeland triggered off a massive communal riot between Muslims and Hindus in Calcutta, the capital city of Bengal province. Thousands were killed in the violence and counter-violence during and after the riot. The events became known as the “Great Calcutta Killing”. The Calcutta riots of 1946 foretold the Partition of India and its violent consequences.

7. A reference to what in military parlance is called “flag march”, i.e. the marching of troops in file formation through the streets of disturbed areas to warn miscreants and reassure those affected.

8. Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the Bengali poet and the first non-white recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, dominated the literary landscape of not just Bengal but the whole of India in the first half of the twentieth century. After his death a new generation of poets emerged whose works reflected the changed reality and circumstances of the 1940s in Bengal. They attempted to eschew Tagorean influence in their poetic content and expression. Though Tagore never really regarded art and politics as separate compartments, the new generation of poets considered art and politics to be even more closely intertwined than Tagore perhaps ever did. The gentle idioms and mellifluous cadences of poetry were anathemas to them. In one of his celebrated poems, Sukanta Bhattacharya declared: “There is no use for the sweet nothingness of poetry / Poetry, today I grant you a long leave from duty / In hungerland, the world is steeped in prosaicality / For the unfed the full moon is a burnt round bread” (my translation).

9. Sukanta Bhattacharya wrote his poems in the shadow of the devastating Bengal famine of 1943 which claimed around three million human lives.

10. Sirens of police or military vehicles, ambulances, and fire engines. Sirens were also sounded when Japanese fighter planes bombed Calcutta during World War II. The material damage caused by the air raids was negligible, but the raids caused panic among the Calcuttans and crushed their morale.

11. A line from one of Tagore’s poems.

12. “Fiends” is an umbrella term for all oppressors ‒ the class of people who made the conditions of life unbearable for the common Indian people. It includes the colonizers, feudal lords, moneylenders, food hoarders, and black marketeers.

13. In World War II, Indian soldiers were despatched to different parts of the globe to fight for the Allied powers. The speaker of this epistolary poem is an Indian soldier who participated in battles against totalitarianism. It is ironic that though he liberated various occupied territories and raised the flag of democracy in those places, his own homeland was suffering under colonial yoke.

14. The title of the poem in Bengali is “Bodhan”, which literally means: awakening, rousing, or inspiration. In the wider cultural context, the term is associated with the invocation of a deity, especially Goddess Durga. The poet here is disillusioned with reality and fervently pleads with his compatriots to not remain passive but to rise against injustice and call the corrupt and the wicked to account.

15. “Devils” here refers to all exploiters, in a similar way to “fiends” in the poem “To Rabindranath”.

16. The original Bengali title of the poem is “Chadpatra”. The word variously means permit, passport, visa or clearance certificate for goods.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amitendu Bhattacharya

Amitendu Bhattacharya teaches English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani) – K.K. Birla Goa Campus, India. His research interests include South Asian literature, ecological humanities, and comparative studies and translation. He translates from Bengali and Urdu into English.