The turbulence of the 1940s had given birth to multiple and mutually competing thought currents, and young Niren was influenced by some of them, even while he rejected, or steered clear of, some others. He was eclectic and syncretic, and generally moderate. The choices made by him are worth studying.
Sushama, who was an active revolutionary and had married him during this period, used to teach then in the Muslim Anjuman girls’ school in the riot-affected central Calcutta, and the unshaken bonds of affection (as well as the demonstrated reaffirmations of mutual loyalty) between the young Hindu teacher and her younger Muslim students amidst the riot inspired Nirendranath ever after. Sushama had been imprisoned in 1942, during the Quit India movement, as a revolutionary socialist, and remained socially sensitive and inclusive in these tumultuous years. She was a sane influence on him in insane times.
At another level, somewhat paradoxically, there was visible Communist influence in the public life as well. Despite the unpopular pro-British role played by the Communists during the Quit India movement of 1942, they were gaining some ascendancy in the second half of the decade, particularly among the urban students and in the cultural front, and later among the Bengali Hindu refugees. The left-leaning Bengal Provincial Student Federation became particularly active with the demand for release of INA prisoners and Niren himself was deeply influenced by this churning. On 21 November 1945, a young student named Rameshwar Bandyopadhyay was killed in police firing on a students’ assembly on the tram tracks of the city and Niren, being present on the spot, was traumatized by the spectacle. That night he wrote a poem invoking Rameshwar’s martyrdom, which was immediately published in the prestigious magazine Desh and became instantly popular with the agitated students of Bengal. But the young poet shunned the pursuit of firebrand poetry and chose not to walk the path of Communist creativity. Some of his seniors like Bishnu Dey (1909-1982) and elder contemporaries like Subhas Mukhopadhyay (1919-2003) invited Communism into their poems: but he did not. He befriended the Royist radical humanists of the day, was himself radicalized to a degree, had many leftist friends, and his wife for some years continued to be a member of the Revolutionary Socialist Party, but he averted politics and extremism. He abhorred partisan totalitarianism and famously said:
Rather disagree, believe that there is always a second way.
Rather get scarred by the stone of questions.
Rather sharpen the nails of intelligence, do protest.
However, Nirendranath averted the other extreme credo of art for art’s sake too, which some of his other seniors like Buddhadeva Bose (1908-1974) were professing. Rejecting the moral fervour and the occasionally high-pitched messages of the socialistically inclined poets like Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), Buddhadeva proposed a politically amoral poetic universe where the poets would be spared from external ethical anxieties and related organizational constraints: they would be allowed to retain their sacred private selves for pursuit of pure poetry. Plato was condemned in this prism as an enemy of open poetry, much as he was criticized by Karl Popper (1902-1994) to be an enemy of open society: poetry lay in free will, in idiosyncrasies, and in privacy, argued Buddhadeva, disgusted by leftist propaganda poetry. Younger poets like Sunil Gangopadhyay (1934-2012) would later take the credo of freedom and privacy to the point of anarchic bohemianism, but Nirendranath remained a virtuous householder in his personal life and a socially responsible poet in his creative world. While writing on “Why Poetry”, Nirendranath did not argue that poetry did not need defence: he rather offered a defence for poetry by saying that poetry provided courage, inspiration, solace, instruction, and, above all, an aesthetic view of things.
In defying all cultural camps (art for art’s sake versus art for the sake of Communism) during the global Cold War, and in retaining his ideological non-alignment as a poet, away from all value extremes, Nirendranath kept Tagore as his pole star. In marrying poetry with social anxiety, and in providing moral legitimacy to the pursuit of arts, or at least, seeing some room for ethics in the artist’s creativity, he was continually inspired by the gentle humanism of Tagore’s (1861-1941) universe, and kept on deriving sustenance from the seer’s worldview. Nirendranath was also deeply influenced in his craft by the genius of Jibanananda Das (1899-1954). But the surreal melancholia of the famously displaced poet of the East (whom Nirendranath considered to be the finest in Bengali literature since Tagore) did not negatively affect his core optimism as a social being. While many of Nirendra’s seniors, contemporaries, and juniors saw evil, decay or degeneration in the urban wasteland all around, he retained a genuine faith in the fundamental goodness of the scheme of things, a scheme where the poet had a positive role to play. Since he was a theist without being an obscurantist or a bigot, he really believed that God is good, and evil shall not win. According to him, the poet’s duty was to keep that goodness alive in one’s eyes, and occasionally to play the role of a vanguard soldier.
For Nirendranath, the poet was a citizen, pained by realities, but provided with some magical candour to see through things. It was not in some de-classed revolutionary zeal that the poet’s strength lay, nor did the strength lie in some ivory tower of fine art: the poet’s strength lay in his truthful gaze and candid utterance. The conceit of the state was punctured by the deep and direct vision of the citizen poet and therein lay for him the simple raison d’étre of poetry. In 1969, in the context of a broad public disenchantment with the postcolonial state, vanity collapsed in front of the child’s gaze, as Nirendranath famously wrote: They can all see the king is naked, yet/They’re all applauding/Everyone’s shouting, “Bravo, bravo”... Some really think the royal robe’s so fine/It’s there though you can’t see it/At least it may be so... (The King Without Clothes).
Excerpted with permission from Sahitya Akademi
