Pen, power, and poetry

Nirendranth joined Bengali vernacular journalism in 1943, when he was nineteen, and when the world was going through a war and Bengal was subjected to a cruel man-made famine (Chapter 2). He remained a full-time journalist till the late 1980s and remained attached to newspapers in some way or the other even after that. He had started his career as a trainee part-time sub-editor, and soon became a ‘leader writer’ of repute, rising to the rank of an editor, and remaining an editorial advisor till 1990s. This long career in journalism intertwined with his long poetic life.

Nirendranth was into media from a very early period of his life indeed. While still an undergraduate, he joined Dainik Pratyaha, which had started experimenting with standard colloquial Bengali (as distinguished from then-dominant Sanskritized high Bengali), and Niren was associated with this first experiment in any Bengali newspaper to court the quotidian language in print. From there, he went to Dainik Matribhumi, came back to Dainik Pratyaha which soon closed, and then moved to Swaraj.

Swaraj was edited by the formidable nationalist Satyendranath Majumdar whose fiery prose was acclaimed by all except Niren: the young poet did not like that genre of volcanic high-Bengali editorials, which was in fashion at that time. When he switched over to Dainik Bharat, he finally found his mentor in the news editor Amulyachandra Sen, who taught him the basics of journalism as well as printing. When that paper faced closure, Niren shifted to Satyajug, where he found his life-long friend Gour Kishore Ghosh (1923-2000) who would later receive the Magsaysay Award in journalism. From there, the two friends went to Anandabazar Patrika. From 1951 to late 1990s, Nirendranath was with Anandabazar, the market leader of vernacular journalism in West Bengal and one of the largest vernacular media groups in India. He remained their pillar till the end and saw the combination of print capitalism and nationalism from close quarters. The strength of the print media was at its peak then, yet unchallenged by electronic and digital/social media.

The background of print journalism had three major implications for his literary life. First, it connected him to the longue durée of the bardic tradition of social narrative-building in Bengal. The medieval and early modern poems in Bengal, called the Mangalkavyas, documented and narrated the evolution of the region’s social history for several hundred years. Arguably one of the greatest poets of this tradition was Kavikankan Mukunda Chakravarti, who was uprooted in his childhood from his ancestral home in the district of Bardhaman in the sixteenth century, whereupon he migrated to another area of southwestern Bengal to write his famous Chandimangal, which is seen as the most comprehensive story of his times (including a story of a state formation in a new land). One of Nirendranath Chakravarti’s pen-names was Kavikankan, and he wrote his popular book on the craft of poetry under that pen-name. In modern times, Ishwar Chandra Gupta (1812–1859) was associated with journalism, while Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838–1894) edited his Bangadarshan with scathing commentaries on—and critiques of—contemporary affairs. Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) contributed regularly to news journals and periodicals on topical issues, and Ramananda Chattopadhyay (1865–1943), the founder-editor of the influential journal Modern Review, was a close friend of his. It was only during the inter-war years that the relations between journalism and literature snapped in Bengal. The bhadralok Hindu intelligentsia somewhat receded from the increasingly Muslim-dominated vernacular public space, and the dominant literary magazines like Kallol and Kabita, the latter edited by Buddhadeva Bose, became forums of poetry, sans politics. In the decades of ascendancy of vernacular muffasil politicians, many of them Muslims and some Dalits, the Hindu bhadralok poets took resort to their cultural salons and showed signs of withdrawal from the public domain, while the quotidian looked non-poetic. The turbulence of the 1940s, the competition between different ideological currents (Chapter 3), the Partition of 1947, the birth of a truncated soft-Hindu secular state in the newly created space of West Bengal, the defining role of mainstream vernacular media in the postcolonial linguistic society and the marriage between print capitalism and nationalism in the 1950s brought back the Bengali bhadralok to public space with vehemence. The intellectual leadership that the poets and the journalists and the other members of the Bengal bhadralok intelligentsia provided during this period has to be seen in this historic backdrop. Nirendranath’s resurrection of Kavikankan was like picking up a lost thread. Mangalkavyas represented marriage of journalistic narration with poetry: the trope was revived in Nirendranath.

Secondly, the postcolonial democracy’s anxiety to reach out to the last citizens in words that would be intelligible to them informed vernacular journalism and vernacular poetry equally, and simultaneously. There were mutual correspondences there. The domain of formal associational governmental politics was continually expanding in India since the beginning of the twentieth century. British decennial constitutional-legal reforms (responding to the increasing depth and reach of Indian national movements) progressively Indianized the polity and expanded the elective principle within the colonial regime. Yet till 1947, only a limited percentage of the Indian adults, the propertied educated male ones, had effective franchise rights, and it was only in 1950 that the universal adult franchise was finally introduced by the postcolonial Constitution of India. This gradual democratization of the political space corresponded to the gradual movement of the Bengali vernacular newspapers to the standard colloquial idiom. To be sure, Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) and others had experimented with the power of the standard colloquial in their robust Bengali prose even in the second half of the nineteenth century, and Tagore too inspired his relative Pramatha Chaudhuri (1868–1946) to steer the Bengali language more and more towards a form of spoken Bengali through journals like Sabujpatra in the early twentieth century. Yet, traditional high Bengali with its preference for Sanskritic elements retained its hegemony in much of the Bengali literature and most of the Bengali newspapers till the 1940s. The impact of political empowerment of more and more sections of people, the turbulence in the everyday life of Bengal in the 1940s, the influx of millions of people from East Bengal/East Pakistan into West Bengal in and after 1947, the decline of old Bengali aristocracy (due to abolition of zamindaris and tenancy reforms), the increasing radicalization of vernacular political rhetoric, and the banishment of old high Bengali from vernacular Bengali newspapers were interwoven and mutually related. Bengali vernacular journalism brought Bengali journalistic prose closer to people and trained Nirendranath to adopt directness, simplicity and people’s language in his poems. While his elders like Sudhindranath Dutta (1901–1960), a journalist in The Statesman, then the premier English daily of the city, used chaste Sanskritic words in his Bengali poems and Bishnu Dey invoked archaic inter-continental references in poems that lay beyond the comprehension of many common readers, Nirendranath preferred ordinary phrases and commonplace narratives to invoke and convey his humour or pathos. Nirendra (and his contemporaries like Subhas Mukhopadhyay) de-aristocratized the poetic dictions of Bengal (see Chapter 7) and brought them out of the salons and into the streets. The sense of drama and the ironical twists that Nirendra displayed in his narration of episodes from everyday life were products of journalistic training. The journalistic gaze and the poetic gaze fed on each other. The journalist gave the poet his exposure to the daily real: the poet gave the journalist a glimpse of the extra-ordinary in the ordinary.

Thirdly, the world of journalism gave Nirendranath wide exposure to varied things—local, national, and international. Locally, of course, he was continually either editing copies or commenting upon evolving affairs; but nationally and internationally he got some prestigious reporting assignments too. His coverage of Ayub Khan’s first visit to East Pakistan (Niren’s native land: Chapter 2) and Satyajit Ray’s outdoor shooting of Shatranj Ke Khilari in Lucknow were products of such reportages. But probably the most significant exposure that he received in the world of journalism was to the underbelly of print capitalism itself. The dimly lit dungeons of the printing presses of central Calcutta underlay the burgeoning publishing industry of the metropolis and Nirendranath knew that his grandfather Loknath had worked in such a depressing environment during his working life in Calcutta: he saw no change in the contours of the underbelly in the postcolonial 1950s. Bourgeois nationalism, thriving print capital and vibrant intellectual activities coalesced in the postcolonial vernacular public sphere of Calcutta, of which he was now an increasingly influential member: but the substructure of darkness did not evade his poetic gaze. Light did not enter the pressroom where Niren’s schoolfriend Amalkanti worked now, the shop-floor was a dungeon where his childhood desire to become sunlight eluded him forever. Nirendranath, himself then “sun-crowned in his eminence”, famously wrote in the summer of 1958 about Amalkanti, his friend, now “a denizen of the half-light.”

Amalkanti

Amalkanti is a friend of mine,

We were together at school

He often came late to class

and never knew his lessons.

When asked to conjugate a verb,

he looked out of the window

in such puzzlement

that we all felt sorry for him.

Some of us wanted to be teachers

some doctors, some lawyers.

Amalkanti didn’t want to be any of these.

He wanted to be sunlight—

the timid sunlight of late afternoon,

when it stops raining

and the crows call again,

the sunlight that clings like a smile

to the leaves of the jam and the jamrul.

Some of us have become teachers,

some doctors, some lawyers.

Amalkanti couldn’t become sunlight.

He works in a poorly lit room

for a printer.

He drops in now and then to see me,

chats about this and that

over a cup of tea, then gets up to go.

I see him off at the door.

The one among us who’s a teacher

could easily have become a doctor.

If the one who’d wanted to be doctor

had become a lawyer,

it wouldn’t have made much difference to him.

All of us got more or less, what we wanted,

all except Amalkanti—

who used to think so much about sunlight

That he wanted to become sunlight.

(Excerpted with permission from Alapan Bandyopadhyay’s ‘Nirendranath Chakravarti’; published by Sahitya Akademi)