{"id":2364,"date":"2013-07-13T01:41:09","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=2364"},"modified":"2020-10-08T17:47:56","modified_gmt":"2020-10-09T00:47:56","slug":"09-bankim-his-literary-history-vol-01-early-cultural-writings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/01-early-cultural-writings\/09-bankim-his-literary-history-vol-01-early-cultural-writings","title":{"rendered":"-09_Bankim – His Literary History.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nHis Literary History<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

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\nB<\/font>ANKIM’S<\/font><\/b>
\nliterary activity began for any serious purpose at Khulna, but he had already trifled with poetry in his
\nstudent days. At that time the poet Iswara Chandra Gupta was publishing two papers, the Sangbad Prabhakar <\/i>and the Sadhuranjan<\/i>, which Dwarkanath Mitra and Dinbandhu Mitra were helping with clever
\nschool-boy imitation of Iswara Chandra’s style. Bankim also entered these fields, but his
\nstriking originality at once distinguished him from the mere cleverness of his competitors, and the fine critical taste of Iswara Chandra easily discovered in this obscure student a great and splendid
\ngenius. Like Madhu Sudan Dutt Bankim began by an ambition to excel in English literature, and he wrote a novel in English
\ncalled Rajmohan’s Wife<\/i>. But, again like Madhu Sudan, he at once realised his mistake. The language which a man speaks and
\nwhich he has never learned, is the language of which he has the nearest sense and in which he expresses himself with the greatest
\nfullness, subtlety and power. He may neglect, he may forget it, but he will always retain for it a hereditary aptitude, and it will
\nalways continue for him the language in which he has the safest chance of writing with originality and ease. To be original in an acquired tongue is hardly feasible. The mind, conscious of
\na secret disability with which it ought not to have handicapped
\nitself, instinctively takes refuge in imitation, or else in bathos and the work turned out is ordinarily very mediocre stuff. It has something unnatural and spurious about it like speaking with a stone in the mouth or walking upon stilts. Bankim and
\nMadhu Sudan, with their overflowing originality, must have very acutely felt the tameness of their English work. The one wrote no second English poem after the
\nCaptive Lady<\/i>, the other no second English novel after Rajmohan’s Wife<\/i>.
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\nBankim’s first attempt of any importance was begun at<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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\nKhulna and finished at Baruipur, the birthplace of some of his finest work. It was the
\nDurgesh Nandini<\/i>, a name ever memorable as the first-born child of the New Prose. At Baruipur he
\nwrote also Kopal Kundala <\/i>and
\nMrinalini <\/i>and worked at the famous Poison-Tree<\/i>. At Barhampur, his next station, he began
\nediting the Bangadarshan<\/i>, a magazine which made a profound impression and gave birth to that increasing periodical literature of to-day, of which
\nBharati<\/i>, the literary organ of the cultured Tagore family, is the most finished type. Since then Bankim has
\ngiven us some very ripe and exquisite work,
\nChandrashekhar,<\/i>
\nKrishna Kanta’s Will, Debi Chaudhurani, Anandmath, Sitaram,<\/i> Indira
\n<\/i>and Kamal Kanta<\/i>. Dating from his magistracy at Barhampur broken health and increasing weakness attended the great
\nnovelist to his pyre; but the strong unwearied intellect struggled with and triumphed over the infirmities of the body. His last
\nyears were years of suffering and pain, but they were also years of considerable fruitfulness and almost unceasing labour. He
\nhad been a sensuous youth and a joyous man. Gifted supremely with the artist’s sense for the warmth and beauty of life, he had
\nturned with a smile from the savage austerities of the ascetic and with a shudder from the dreary creed of the Puritan. But
\nnow in that valley of the shadow of death his soul longed for the sustaining air of religion. More and more the philosophic
\nbias made its way into his later novels, until at last the thinker in him proved too strong for the artist. Amid his worst bodily
\nsufferings he was poring over the Bhagavadgita and the Vedas, striving to catch the deeper and sacred sense of those profound
\nwritings. To give that to his countrymen was the strenuous aim of his dying efforts. A Life of Krishna, a book on the Essence of
\nReligion, a rendering of the Bhagavadgita and a version of the Vedas formed the staple of his literary prospects in his passage to the pyre. The first realised themselves and the
\nBhagavadgita was three parts finished, but the version of the Vedas, which
\nshould have been a priceless possession, never got into the stage of execution. Death, in whose shadow he had so long
\ndwelt, took the pen from his hand, before it could gather up the last gleanings
\nof that royal intellect. But his ten master-pieces <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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\nof fiction are enough. They would serve to immortalise
\nten reputations.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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\nHIS PLACE IN LITERATURE <\/font><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

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\nTo assign Bankim’s place in Bengali literature is sufficiently easy: there is no
\nprose-writer, and only one poet who can compete with him. More difficulties enter into any comparison
\nof him with the best English novelists; yet I think he stands higher
\nthan any of them, except one; in certain qualities of each he may fall short, but his sum of qualities is greater; and he has
\nthis supreme advantage over them all that he is a more faultless artist. In his life and
\nfortunes, and sometimes even in his character, he bears a striking resemblance to the father of
\nEnglish fiction, Henry Fielding; but the literary work of the two men
\nmoves upon different planes. Philosophical culture, and deep feeling for the poetry of life and an unfailing sense of beauty
\nare distinguishing marks of Bankim’s style; they find no place in Fielding’s. Again, Bankim, after a rather silly fashion of speaking
\nnow greatly in vogue, has been pointed at by some as the Scott of Bengal. It is a marvellous thing that the people who misuse
\nthis phrase as an encomium, cannot understand that it conveys an insult. They would have us imagine that one of the most
\nperfect and original of novelists is a mere replica of a faulty and incomplete Scotch author! Scott had many marvellous and some
\nunique gifts, but his defects are at least as striking. His style is never quite sure; indeed, except in his inspired moments, he has no style: his Scotch want of humour is always militating
\nagainst his power of vivid incident; his characters, and chiefly those in whom he should interest us most, are usually very
\nmanifest puppets; and they have all this shortcoming, that they have no
\nsoul: they may be splendid or striking or bold creations, but they live from outside and not from within. Scott could paint
\noutlines, but he could not fill them in. Here Bankim excels; speech and action with him are so closely interpenetrated and
\nsuffused with a deeper existence that his characters give us the sense of their
\nbeing real men and women. Moreover to the<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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\nwonderful passion and poetry of his finest creations there are
\nin English fiction, outside the Brontes and that supreme genius,
\nGeorge Meredith, no parallel instances. Insight into the secrets of feminine character, that is another notable concomitant of the
\nbest dramatic power, and that too Bankim possesses. Wade as you will through the interminable bog of contemporary fiction,
\nyou will meet no living woman there. Even novelists of genius stop short at the outside: they cannot find their way into the
\nsoul. Here Fielding fails us; Scott’s women are a mere gallery of wax figures, Rebecca
\nherself being no more than a highly coloured puppet; even in Thackeray the real women are
\nonly three or four. But the supreme dramatic genius has found out
\nthis secret of femineity. Shakespeare had it to any degree, and in our own century Meredith, and among ourselves Bankim.
\nThe social reformer, gazing, of course, through that admirable pair of spectacles given to him by the Calcutta University, can find nothing excellent in Hindu life, except its cheapness, or
\nin Hindu woman, except her subserviency. Beyond this he sees only
\nits narrowness and her ignorance. But Bankim had the eye of a poet and saw much deeper than this. He saw what was beautiful
\nand sweet and gracious in Hindu life, and what was lovely and noble in Hindu woman, her
\ndeep heart of emotion, her steadfastness, tenderness and lovableness, in fact, her woman’s
\nsoul; and all this we find burning in his pages and made diviner by the
\ntouch of a poet and an artist. Our social reformers might learn something from Bankim. Their zeal at present is too little ruled by discretion. They are like bad tailors very clever at
\nspoiling the rich stuffs given over to their shaping but quite unable to fit
\nthe necessities of the future. They have passed woman through an English crucible and in place of the old type, which, with all
\nits fatal defects, had in it some supreme possibilities, they have turned out a soulless and superficial being fit only for flirtation,
\nmatch-making and playing on the piano. They seem to have a passion for reforming every good thing out of existence. It is
\nabout time this miserable bungling should stop. Surely it would be possible, without spoiling that divine nobleness of soul, to
\ngive it a wider culture and mightier channels! So we should have<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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\na race of women intellectually as well as emotionally noble, fit to be the mothers not of chatterers and money-makers, but
\nof high thinkers and heroic doers. <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nOf Bankim’s style I shall hardly trust myself to speak. To
\ndescribe its beauty, terseness, strength and sweetness is too high a task for a pen like mine. I will remark this only that
\nwhat marks Bankim above all, is his unfailing sense of beauty. This is
\nindeed the note of Bengali literature and the one high thing it has gained from a close acquaintance with European models. The
\nhideous grotesques of old Hindu Art, the monkey-rabble of Ram and the ten heads of Ravan, are henceforth impossible to it. The
\nShakuntala <\/i>itself is not governed by a more perfect graciousness of conception or suffused with a more human sweetness than Kopal Kundala
\n<\/i>and the Poison-Tree<\/i>.<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n


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