Banalata Sen: A Bilingual Edition

by Jibanananda Das

₹225.00In stock

Translated by: Sunandan Roy Chowdhury

Banalata Sen, a landmark in Bengali and Indian literature, was published in 1952, just two years before the poet's death. The poems touch upon philosophy, politics, nature, universe and love. It scripts a world of the universal mysteries of time, space, stars, skies and oceans, and also a time of quiet beauty in the world of pigeons, owls, vultures, wild ducks the poet's playmates in the flight of imagination in his city of time. The poet does not preach ecology but lives it, here is the Bengali intellectual who does not create the impoverished peasantry of class and dogma, but blows life into the imagery of a lover farmer. Jibanananda's social views quietly challenge power, his nature questions universalism, his timelessness scripts a new time.

About the Author

Jibanananda Das

Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) is widely accepted as the most important Bengali poet since Rabindranath Tagore. Das lived as a poet and died as a poet a tragic death hit by a tramcar in south Calcutta.

He taught English literature, wrote in Bengali and lived his life in the rural world of eastern Bengal and in the colonial/post-colonial metropolis of Calcutta. Das wrote poetry, novels, short fiction and published only a small part of his harvest. Most of his work has been published posthumously. His dream-poems created a new language for a generation of Bengali dreamers and created a poet's landscape where civilisation's life merged with nature's, man's longing for feminine love merged with the angst of a time ridden by war, violence and political meanings.