MICHAEL MADHUSUDAN DUTT (Translated from Bengali By Umanath Bhattacharya). (Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-1873), the herald of a new epoch in Bengali litera ture wrote his immortal epic 'Meghnad Badh' and 'Tilottama Sambhava' as well as 'Virangana Kavya, or The Letters From The Heroines' in Blank Verse, --an innovation in our literature. His 'Lyrics From the Gopees' are tender and sweet, --their the me being the eternal love of Radha and Krishna. Dutt was also the first poet to naturalise the sonnets in Bengali. His sonents written in Versailles in 1865 were after Petrarch and through them he paid tributes to the great poets of India and Europe, the immortal heroes and heroines of our literature, hoth Sanskrit and Bengali, and his great contemporaries such as Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, Love of Country, large-heartedness, loftiness of ideas, homesickness and grief for India's subjugation are the keynotes of these poems. We publish below the translation of a few introductory poems from his Book of Sonnets (The Chaturdaspadi Kovitabali) for the enjoyment of the lovers of poetry. It is not deemed necessary to retain in the English peatameter the special rhyming arrangement of the original Bengali verse, apprehending that fulness of emotion which is the essence of poetry may get lost in hammering the sonnet-pattern into shape in the translation. -Translator) 1. THE INTRODUCTION Duly saluting th' Sea of Ecstasy, years The Prince of the Rakshas, a dread to th' demons, men Who heard the lament of Radha, roaming forlorn, Their Lords. Tis me; Listen! Sons of Bengal ! 2. THE SONNET Famous is Italy, the Paradise of Poets. Many a warbler sweetly flute in Her forest-bower, pouring th' melody and thrilling The heart with the mirth of Spring eternal. Where in olden days came to birth Petrarch, the Prince of Poets; Favour'd by Muse, He came in the lime-light, a lyrist honey tongued, Finding this tiny gem in the mine of Verse, 3. TO HIS MUSE Like a lotus sketching on the crystal waters Of love, with th' lustre of the Sun, the portrait I tread? As the Ganges abides with the Sea for aye Where'er I go, come what may, I'll serve Thee, far or near where'er I dwell. Thou art The image of love in light and shade, enshrined Mate on this side of the grave! by Muse! 4. THE RHYMES How callous was he !-oft I think within, - When I consider this, my bosom burns With rage. O say, had he no wealth of thought,- Ah, what's the use of rouge to a lotus red? Fair is the Crescent in the sky, aglow With charms innate. Why chant the scriptures to hallow The Ganges? Who showers the scents on a flower fragrant? Lovely by nature is Poetry true. Then why The shackles of iron shoon, like women of China? NABIN SEN-ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL MILIEUX (c. 1850-1905) DR. MISS INDIRA SARKAR Nabin Sen (1847-1909) held forth as author for nearly four decades from 1871. The period of creativity falls within the last thirty years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. His first work, Avakasha-ranjini (Leisure-Entertainer), Vol. I., was published in 1871 and last work Amritabha dealing with the life of Chaitanya, published posthumously, was left incomplete at the time of his death. These years are momentous in the history of Bengali literature and civilisation. They generate and witness the élans de la vie which ultimately take shape in the transformations and remakings known as the Bengali revolution of 1905. Nabin Sen is an architect, father and pioneer of this revolution and of the ideas of 1905. During this period the economic pattern of Bengal as of the rest of India, generally speaking, was in the main non-industrial or pre-industrial. About the middle of the nineteenth century railways and telegraphs made their debut as well as coal-mining and jute mills in Bengal and cotton mills in Bombay. But in Bombay the mill-owners were Indian (Gujarati, Parsi and Maratha). Banking institutions and insurance companies had hardly yet been tried by Bengali and other Indian business organizers. In these lines Bombay Indians were relatively more advanced than Bengalis, both Hindu and Muslim. Industrialisation was to all intents and purposes unknown to Indian masses and classes. The industries in so far as they existed were virtually monopolised by the British entrepreneurs. Modern capitalism started its career in India under foreign auspices, Factory legislation was enacted in the eighty's of the century. It affected Bombay capitalists. Labour movement to a certain extent getting established among the mill-workers in the cotton mill area. But labour as a category was hardly yet known in Bengal even among the intelligentsia. Bengal as the rest of India continued to be the land of cultivators, artisans and cottage industries as well as of rural population, Calcutta did not have more than 850,000 and Bombay more than 800,000 inhabitants, down to 1900. On the whole, both journalism as well as belles lettres, stories and intellectual curiosity generally were almost non-industrial and non-economic. Poverty was an appalling fact. But the consciousness of publicists, litterateurs and thinkers, about the miseries of the teeming millions was not much influenced by realistic economic considerations. It was more sentimental, humanitarian and philanthropic or religious and moral. Technical schools and colleges with special reference to mechanical, electrical and chemical engineering were conspicuous by their absence. Sanitary and public health institutions and ideologies did not make their appearance. There were distinguished medical practitioners of the modern type among Indian as well as professors of physics, chemistry, botany and so forth. But researches in medicine or physical and natural sciences were few and far between. The star-gazers, idealists, highbrowns and social reformers or patriots of the second half of the nineteenth century were then chiefly persons of non-scientific, non-technical, non-industrial, non-capitalistic and non-socialistic enthusiams. Their ideologies of public and social service were derived in the abstract from the study of literature as developed in the progressive countries of the West, especially of England. The University of Calcutta as well as the other Indian Universities served to cater among young intellectuals morsels of theoretical knowledge in arts and sciences. It was poetry, fiction, philosophy, logic, economic and political theories, elementary physical and chemical ideas and so forth that constituted the spiritual food of Young India. It was as It was as a youngster nurtured in the all-too philosophico-literary and speculative milieu of Calcutta University and untouched by industries, banks, factories, mines, working-men, labour-movement and so forth that Nabin Sen developed and exhibited his creativities as a poet, man of letters and thinker. It is to combat this ultra-literary, ultra-theoretical and ultraspeculative tendencies of thought and life that the revolution of 1905 was engineered by Young Bengal. Bengalis wanted to industrialise themselves, introduce machinism and capitalism as well as organise schools for modern science, technocracy and engineeering and assert themselves as peers of the politically free nations in achievements of all domains. These are the ideas of 1905 associated with the swadeshi (one's own industry) movement. In the making of this: ideology Sen's speculative idealism had a great part as a foster-nurse and a transformer. It is not irrelevant to note here that in Europe also it is during the transition between pre-industrial and industrial ages romanticism in literature and art flourished. Or, at any rate, European romanticists hardly ever considered it worth their while to attempt grasping the economic conditions in a realistic manner. Their social philosophies were more or less idealistic and utopian. We may refer to the works of Lamartine (1790-1869), Vigny (1796-1863), Huge (1802-1886) and Musset (1810-1857). The industrialisation of France was in its infantile stages, so to say, while these romaticists were holding forth. In the case of Hugo perhaps the influence of industrial economy may be said to have had some role. But altogether the socio-economic conditions of France hardly affected the romanticists. Bengal during the second half of the nineteenth century,-chiefly agricultural and rural as it was,—was nearly identical with France during the first half. Madhusudan Datta (1824-1873), Rangalal Banerji (1826-1887), Dinabandhu Mitra (1830-1873), Bihari Chakravarti (1836-1891), Hem Banerji (1838-1903), Nabin Sen (1847-1909)—all these romanticists of Bengal, like the romanticists of France, had their spiritual urges almost uninfluenced, so to say by the economic conditions. The works of British romanticists, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Byron, were likewise uneconomic and unindustrial. Goethe, Schiller, Klinger and other romanticists of Germany flourished under the agricultural and virtually non-industrial regime of Central Europe, during the early years of the nineteenth century. Politically, the period witnessed the beginnings of the nationalist movement. Agitation of the intellectuals, lawyers and industrial pioneers against the British bureaucracy and bourgeoisie was getting more and more vocal. Indian National Congress was established in 1885. The sessions of this body became the nucleus of organised and systematic propaganda among the highbrows and higher intellectuals. One of the chief targets was the British tariff and currency policies which had been adversely affecting the growth and development of modern industries in Indian hands. Another target was the inequalities between Britons and Indians on Indian soil in regard to the services and other fields. The democratic language and egalitarian theories of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were on the lips of the fathers and volunteers of the Indian National Congress as we as in the columns of the daily newspapers. Lawyers and journalists were adept in the humanitarian principles of the 7-2016P-V |