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Reflections

The world of Buddhadeva Bose

Syed Badrul Ahsan
TWO decades ago, perhaps more, a reputed Bengali language weekly in Calcutta serialized a number of letters written by Buddhadeva Bose to his daughter. Till then, my idea of Bose had been pretty much vague. You could even say that I had little idea, apart from having heard of him, of the position he enjoyed in modern Bengali literature. It was not until Waheedul I laque, the guru who literally led me by the hand to enlightenment and had me get a taste of Bengali literature, indeed the Bengali cultural tradition, pointed out the letters to me, instructing me to read them, that I went looking for Buddhadeva Bose. Those letters opened up a whole new world for me. I laving studied English literature at university and with a smattering of Urdu poetry and prose in my academic background at school (which was in pre-1971 West Pakistan), 1 suffered from indescribable poverty when it came to understanding the literary nuances of my own country. If my mother taught me how to write and read Bengali (and this was when I was in college), it was Waheedul Haque who opened the doors and windows to the Bengali literary7 and cultural heritage for me.
And so it is that 1 recall today the man of letters that Buddhadeva Bose was. He died in March 1974, when 1 was a student of Notre Dame College. In all these years that have flown by, 1 have tried connecting with him, as 1 have tried linking up with so many others, through finding and poring through his essays. It was a huge pleasure to discover, at one of those moments when you least expect to be surprised, that Buddhadeva Bose had obtained record grades at his honours and masters examinations in English literature at Dhaka University in 1930 and 19.31. That has made him, for me, a major intellectual figure to be emulated. But, then, emulating great men is often an arduous exercise. The standards they set are exacting. When you consider Bose's life, as you go back to a study of his youth — in Noakhali and Comilla and Dhaka, but more in Dhaka — you seem to be in a position to understand that his early infatuation for poetry7 was a potent sign of the love with which he would pursue literature someday. I le was constantly into poetry7, into literary criticism. And as his subsequent career would demonstrate, after he had
moved to Calcutta, it was literature that he lived and breathed. Tor him, as Professor Serajul Islam Choudhury7 once put it, poetry was a good deal more important than life. One tends to wonder if Bose's literary7 instincts came to be encapsulated in the name he gave his home, or call it his world. In Kavita Bhavan (1 louse of Poetry7), for decades Bose and his friends, among whom were many who were prominent on their own in the literary world or would go on to make a name for themselves, would discuss poetry7, indeed an entire range of literature that went beyond Indian shores.
The life of the mind was what mattered to Bose. His poetry7 journal Pragati remains one of the earliest indications of the way7 he saw the place of literature in life. And then there was the decisive matter of the Kallol school of thought, the young poets who were clearly inclined to make their own niche in the Bengali literary7 firmament. Yes, there was Tagore, almost in the twilight of his life and yet even then an overwhelming presence across the cultural landscape of Bengal, indeed of India. If the world knew of Gandhi in the political sense of the meaning, it identified with Tagore in the aesthetic mould. Rabindranath Tagore's was a vital image, deep-rooted and constantly branching out towards an equally ever-expanding sky. Buddhadeva Bose, like the realist he was, acknowledged Tagore's pre-eminence (who would not?) and yet there was this all-encompassing need in him to chart a new course in modernist literature. In his Kobi Rabindranath, Bose explains in great detail the place of Tagore in the world of the Bengali. His respect for the poet was abiding, as was the appreciation of the older man for the young Bose he had earlier met in Dhaka and whose poetry7 had charmed him. But even as Bose remained, like so many others, in thrall to Tagore, he veered away from him into a different sphere. 1 le had to, in a way7. It was his view that poets in the post-Tagore era would find it difficult to follow theTagorean approach to literature. 'It was impossible (for these poets)', said he, 'not to imitate Rabindranath; and it was impossible to imitate Rabindranath.' Romance became a hallmark of his poetry. Eor all his literary7 differences with Tagore, though, there were (and are) people who truly believed that historical links were what tied the two men to a common tradition. Listen to Ketaki Kushari Dyson. In her view, Buddhadeva Bose 'is the most versatile
literary7 figure in Bengali after Rabindranath Tagore, someone about whom it could be said that Tagore's mantle had come to rest on his shoulders.' Dyson then gives you a definitive understanding of Bose: he was a Renaissance man. And that says it all.
Renaissance men are unconventional men. You will have been made aware of this fact through his bold exploration of sexual desire in Raat BhorBrishti (quite remarkably7 translated as It Rained All Night by Clinton B. Seely). The dilemma of a woman trapped between her deep affection, if not love, for her husband and her sexual desire for his friend (which desire is fulfilled) is a hint of the modernism Bose sought to bring into his fiction. To be sure, he was dragged through the courts on charges of promoting obscenity through the work. 1 le survived, yes, but one cannot quite be sure that it did not leave him feeling bitter. And bitterness was there too in his discovery that as an emigrant from Dhaka, then a nondescript place when juxtaposed with the very cosmopolitan Calcutta, he was unable to scale the academic heights he ought to have. All that came to him was a position at Jadavpur University, where he set up a department of comparative literature in 1956 in his capacity7 as head of the department. Bose's stint at Jadavpur does not appear to have been a happy7 one, seeing that he
left, or found it necessary7 to leave, the university in circumstances that have never been clear. But those few years spent in pursuing the field of comparative literature was eventually7 to come in handy when Bose travelled abroad and taught at universities in the United States. With teaching came an interest in literary translations of western writers. Convinced that literature had no boundaries, persuaded into rejecting nationalism of all kinds as a constricting factor in life, Buddhadeva Bose went into serious, purposeful studies of Baudelaire, Rilke and others before presenting them to his fellow Bengalis in translation. And, of course, there is Tithidore, a tale of a man and a woman caught up in the frenzied grief that follows Tagore's death, on the day the great man dies. In those moments, when an entire Calcutta appears to be lost, unable to deal with the poet's death, images of the city's landmarks — College Street, Chitpore, Kalighat, Chowringhee, Dhurrumtola and Esplanade — flash before the reader. Calcutta will not be the same without Tagore; and yet it will move on, beyond Tagore. It will weather the storm.
Nostalgia for the past, whether in the personal or in a comprehension of literary7 trends, was a major factor in Buddhadeva Bose's life. But if he felt he had missed out on a rich literary7 past, he did the next best thing: he observed that past as a continuity of tradition and sought to link it with his times. That, for him, was modernism. As to the personal, there were the enduring images of Dacca (as it was known then) that shone through his recollections of Purana Paltan, the area where a significant part of his life as a young man, nine years to be precise, was spent. Amar Chhelebela relates the story7. Curiously, though, he appears quite indifferent to Comilla, where he was born, and pretty bitter, if not exactly hostile, to Noakhali, where he went to school. Noakhali for him was the heart of darkness, with little to recommend itself. Docile, quiet, rather philistine (which was not the case as other accounts of the period have sometimes shown), Noakhali was one place Bose was happy7 to turn his back on. Years later, Noakhali was to lower itself even more in esteem before him through the riots in the run-up to the partition of India. It would explode in communal fury and would not simmer down until Gandhi's arrival there. No one else went there. It was the frail Gandhi who sloshed through the mud and grime and layers of hate to restore peace. But, says Bose,
Noakhali had taken its revenge.
The critical faculty in Buddhadeva Bose is a reminder of other critics y7ou have been in company7 with, A.L. Rowse and ER. Leavis and Maurice Bowra for instance. Bose's review of modern Bengali literature in An Acre of Green Grass (1948) remains a shining example of what literary7 criticism ought to be. His portrait of Pramatha Chaudhuri shows the way:
'Sharp eyes, a dagger-like nose, a clean-shaven handsome face wreathed with wrinkles, a splendid body of a man shattered by illness, looking for all the world like a great mountain eagle, wounded in combat, wings broken, alone.'
A little later, Bose brings in Tagore, yet once again:
'Rabindranath and Pramatha Chaudhuri represent two altogether different worlds; one, the winding stair of imagination panting up to the starry7 tower; the other, the comfortable well-lit drawing-room of the intellect. Rabindranath is ever drunk with dreams; Pramatha Chaudhuri is incorrigibly sober.'
Buddhadeva Bose was small in build, almost frail. And yet he was an individual larger than life. 11 is opinions on issues, almost all of which touched upon literature, were strong. Politics certainly7 affected him, but it was an area he was not unduly7 concerned with. Reading was a preoccupation all his life. Perhaps it was the Frenchman Charles de Gaulle who, while speaking of himself, could well have been speaking of Buddhadeva Bose as well: 'Do not ask me who has influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he has digested; and 1 have been reading all my life.'
Bose was forever reading. And, of course, writing. I lere he is, in his own words (in the article 'Bathroom', translated from Bengali into English by 1 lanne-Ruth Thompson):
'1 am a man of moderate temperament. My imagination is so unrestrained that, in order to keep a balance, I have very few needs on the physical level. 1 can make do with very7 little. Io tell the truth, as long as 1 have a room where 1 can sit and lie down, a few books, and food, water and tea available at the usual times, 1 can spend my days happily. . . It is not that the blows of the world don't touch me but they wash over and off my7 skin — they don't leave a mark on the inside.'
(Buddhadev Bose — story7 teller, poet, essayist, critic — was born in Comilla on 30 November 1908 and died in Calcutta on 18 March 1974).