Nationalist Literature in Bengal

SISIR KUMAR DAS

There are scholars too eager to claim on the basis of a few sporadic literary evidences that the concept of nationalism was not alien to pre-British India. Even if such a concept was there in our earlier traditions, it was too nebulous to create an impression upon the nineteenth century intellectual who considered the concepts of nation and nationality essentially foreign. Bankim Chandra Chatterji, the author of the song “Vande Mataram”, wrote in an essay in the ’Seventies of the last century that Hindus, unlike the Greeks, never valued freedom as a great ideal of life, and that the Indians learnt two very important things, namely, liberty and nationality, from the British. One Bengali intellectual of that period was so disappointed by the absence of patriotic writings in Sanskrit, that he refused to learn a language which did not have a word for “patriotism”, and poems like the Battle of Baltic and Pro-Patria Mari.

The patriotic and the nationalistic spirit grew in India in the nineteenth century and a response to and a reaction against a foreign domination, but its artistic expression found inspiration not from Sanskrit on medieval Indian literatures, but from European literature in general and English in particular. The first patriotic expressions in Bengal are to be found not in the Bengali language, but in the English writings of the Bengalese. Henry Vivian Louis Derozio, one of the most remarkable personalities of the nineteenth-century Calcutta, wrote as early as 1928:

My country in the days of glory past

A beauteous halo circled round thy brow

And worshipped as a deity thou wast

Where is that glory, where that reverence now?

About twenty-five years later Michael Madhusudan Datta, then an anglicized Indian, wrote in his long poem King Porus, almost echoing Derozio.

And where art thou, fair freedom! thou

Once goddess of Ind’s sunny clime!

When glory’s halo round her brow

Shone radiant, and she rose sublime

Like her own towering Himalaya

To kiss the blue clouds thron’d on high

And when Bengali became the vehicle of patriotic and nationalistic spirit, English literature remained its main source of inspiration. In 1858, a Bengali poet wrote a long poem on the siege of Chitor by Alauddin. In the medieval period this particular theme was used by some Indian poets to express the Sufi allegory of love. The nineteenth century poet created a patriotic poem out of the same legend. It is indeed interesting to note that the Rajput soldiers in the poem sing a song – Svadhinata hinatay ke banchite chay he ke banchite chay – (Who wants a life without freedom? Who loves the chains of slavery?) – which is a free translation of Thomas Moore’s:

From life without freedom

Oh! who would not fly?

For one day of freedom

Oh! who would not die?

This new literature grew out of a new historical situation to meet the emotional requirement of the people of Bengal, its expression was powerful and its feeling sincere, nonetheless its inspiration was European at least in its initial phase of growth. Only with the passage of time it developed its own, form and discovered a new idiom.

The growth of patriotism and nationalism in India found a great fillip from the historical research about Indian integrity and particularly, from the efforts of the Orientalists who presented the story of wonder that was India. Patriotic literature in any language particularly of a subject-nation, often derives its strength from the history of the people. Bengali literature was no exception. It was shaped by a sense of pride in Indian past as well as by a sense of humiliatl0n for the present. The pride in past gave impetus to the growth of historical poems, plays and romances presenting characters speaking eloquently about the achievements of the Indians and thus to encouraging the Indians to face the foreign rulers with courage and determination. The battles of Marathon and of Thermopyle fired the imagination of the Indian poets as did the courage and patriotism of the Greek and Roman soldiers and also of more recent heroes of European history, particularly of Cavur, Garibaldi and Mazzini. The Indian poets looked for their counterparts in our legends and history and a search for national heroes continued throughout the nineteenth century. The other stream of this literature which evolved out of the response to the present condition of India was marked by an awareness of the colonial exploitation. Many songs and poems written during the Hindu Mela days anticipated the theory of economic drain later establishes with statistical data by Dadabhai Nauroji and R. C. Dutt. They also propagated the ideas of economic Swadeshi first propounded by the organizers of the Hindu Mela.

The Bengali patriotic and nationalist literature acquired a new dimension in the writings of Bankim Chandra Chatterji who created a new symbol of mother-land in the form of a goddess in his most famous and to some extent controversial, novel Ananda Math written three years before the Indian National Congress was founded. In this novel, which made a tremendous effect on national movement, Bankim Chandra presented three images of mother goddess – mother as she was, mother as she is, and mother as she will be – symbolizing the past and the present and the vision of the future of the country. The nationalistic literature in Bengal dealt with these three themes – glorification of the past, lamentations and broodings over the present humiliation and a vision of a new and rejuvenated India. The most powerful expression of nationalism and patriotic feelings came from Bankim. Even the religious movements in Bengal were conspicuous by an intensely national spirit. Vivekananda declared patriotism as a religious ideal as did Bankim Chandra in his exposition of Hinduism as well as in Ananda Math which became a sacred book for the revolutionaries in the early period of this century. This identification of patriotism with religion, and mother-land, with the Divine Mother, naturally raised nationalism to much higher status from a mere political concept, and the nationalistic writings assumed a new height and profundity of thought. But the religious symbolism, all with a strong Hindu bias, also created a discord between the Hindus and the non-Hindus. This prompted the modern historians to describe the nineteenth century Bengali nationalism as a form of Hindu nationalism.

Creative Phase

The most creative phase of nationalistic literature in Bengali began in the twentieth century, particularly from 1905 when Bengal was partitioned for the first time. The greatest artist of this period was Rabindranath Tagore who actively participated in the movement against the obnoxious British policy, but there were other writers too–and they were of no mean merit – who wrote with felicity and feeling and power. Tagore had already published a number of ballads and narrative poems recreating his country’s past and its cultural heritage, its saints and heroes, and depicting their heroism and nobility on the basis of legends and historical anecdotes called from the ancient lore and the annals of the Rajputs and the Marathis and the Sikhs. He also wrote a sequence of sonnets whose religious spirit merge and mingle freely with the patriotic and nationalistic sentiments. In the partition days the poets and writers were possessed with a new vision and a new social awareness. Literature was effectively used as an instrument to rouse the anger of the people against a forcing rule and of the love of the people for the country as a whole. No other period in Bengali literary history became so completely identified with the aspiration of the people. It was a period of great creative abundance and of poetic power. The poets of this period finally discovered a new idiom of nationalistic literature. Tagore particularly portrayed feeling the charm and beauty of the rivers and fields and hills of the country, his patriotism being always tempered by his humanism and with a touch of spirituality. All that is best and moving in the patriotic and nationalistic writings in Bengal was produced daring this period.

After that period, gradually with the spread of political consciousness among the people and intensification of political movement, which culminated in the emergence of Gandhi, the nationalistic literature took a new turn. It broadened its scope and grew in size and vigour and displayed new abilities to exploit new ideas and responded to various political programmes. But it lacked the intensity of passing and certainty never did it attain the beauty of the earlier phase. In the new phase, Bengali picture saw the emergence of a hero with a strong political commitment. The literature reflected the aspirations of various organized political groups. The new hero, after often representing the revolutionary groups which established secret societies and planned armed uprising against the British, fired the imagination of the Bengali writers. Their spirit of heroism found its most congenial expression in the fiery rhetoric of Kazi Nazrul Islam, and in the novel of Sarat Chandra Chatterji, which was immediately banned. Later in the ’Thirties, emerged a new hero, a follower of Gandhi, with a new political philosophy.

The patriotic and nationalistic literature in Bengali is both rich and copious. It was created out of a social as well as artistic necessity. Despite the obvious limitation imposed by the contemporary demands of a subject-nation on such literature, it can claim a high literary distinction. Much of it is loud and pompous vain glorification of the past and sentimental in the main. But a significant part of this body of literature can claim immortality in our literary history, and will act as a source of inspiration for the posterity and haunt the imagination of the later poets, if only because of its spontaneity of expression and tenderness of feeling as well as of a vision which transends the barriers of nationalism. One can hope that the future generation will murmur slowly with Tagore–

Awake, my mind, gently awake in this holy land of pilgrimage on the shore of this vast sea of humanity that is India.

Here I stand with arms outstretched to hail man – divine in his own image –

and sing to his glory in notes glad and free.

–COURTESY, AIR, Delhi

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