Perhaps no place on earth has spawned more poets than the lower delta of Bengal, and nowhere has poetry been so intimately connected with the ideas of nation and nationality, culture and society. But the figure of Tagore has loomed so large over this landscape that other poets have often been consigned to the margins of this literary history. Rosinka Chaudhuri’s ambitious new study is an attempt to remedy this lack and throws light on early attempts to construct a Bengali literary canon.
The figures who constitute this canon are a group of poets of the mid-19th century: the prolific Ishwarchandra Gupta, the scholar-administrator Rangalal Bandyopadhyay, the nationalists Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay and Nabinchandra Sen, and of course, the trailblazing Michael Madhusudan Datta. In the concluding chapter, the young Tagore’s waking to the ‘extraordinary dawn’ of Nirjharer Swapnabhanga (Awakening of the Fountain) serves as coda to this narrative. But as Chaudhuri points out, this is not an excursion into straightforward...
