\n| <\/p>\n
\nVI <\/b><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\nWhat He Did for Bengal<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\nI<\/span> HAVE<\/b><\/span><\/span>
\nkept so far to Bankim’s achievement looked at purely as literature. I now come to speak of it in the historic sense, of its relations to the Bengali language and potency over
\nthe Bengali race. Of this it is not easy to suggest any image without
\nspeaking in superlatives. I had almost said in one place that he created the language, and if one couples his name with Madhu
\nSudan Dutt’s, the statement is hardly too daring. Before their advent the Bengali language, though very sweet and melodious, was an instrument with but one string to it. Except the old
\npoet Bharatchandra, no supreme genius had taken it in hand; hence
\nwhile prose hardly existed except in
\nBaital Pachisi <\/i>and some other tales about Vikramaditya, Bengali verse had very little to recommend it beyond a certain fatiguing sweetness.
\nVirility, subtlety, scope, these
\nwere wanting to it. Then came Madhu Sudan and Bankim, and, like Terpander and Orpheus added
\nfresh strings to the lyre. In Madhu Sudan’s hands that nerveless and
\nfeminine dialect became the large utterance of the early Gods, a tongue epic and Titanic, a tongue for the storms and whirlwinds to speak in: he caught and studied his diction from the
\necho and rumour of the sea. All the stormiest passions of man’s soul he expressed in gigantic language. We seem to hear
\nMilton’s Satan speaking in every line he wrote. But in Bankim’s hands the
\nBengali language, before stammering and inarticulate, became a rich, musical and flexible organ vibrating to every human
\nemotion and expressive of every beautiful or noble thought. I do not mean that there were no labourers in the field before Bankim
\nand Madhu Sudan. The paths of the Gods are always prepared for them. Many daring minds were already at work, but they
\nfell short of their high conception. Rammohan Ray, the great Vidyasagara, Okhay Kumar Dutt and the Bengali playwrights
\nwere all working bravely towards the same consummation. But<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\nPage \u2013 112<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\nVidyasagara, though he had much in him of the scholar and
\ncritic, was nothing of an artist; Okhay Kumar’s audience ran only to the subscribers of a single magazine; and the literary
\noriginality of the rest was not equal to their audacity. None of them could transform and recreate with that sure and easy
\ntouch, which reveals the true maker of language.<\/span><\/p>\nBankim moreover has this splendid distinction, that he more
\nthan anyone exalted Bengali from the status of a dialect to the majesty of a language. The immediate effect of English education
\nhad been to foster an undiscriminating love of things English and an unwise contempt for things Bengali. Among the rest
\nthe Bengali tongue was put by as an instrument hopelessly bad and unsatisfying; even Madhu Sudan in his youth neglected and
\nforgot it. The strivings of Vidyasagara and Okhay Kumar Dutt were the strivings of a few far-sighted and patriotic men in a
\ngeneration misled by false ideals. On that generation Madhu Sudan’s first great poems, Sharmishtha
\n<\/i>and Tilottama<\/i>, had a complex effect much of a piece with the
\nsensation created by Marlowe’s Tamburlaine <\/i>in Elizabethan England or Hugo’s
\nHernani <\/i>in nineteenth century France. They took men’s imaginations by storm with their splendour, passion and mighty imagery; by creating the Bengali blank verse they freed poetry from
\nthe facilities and prettinesses of the old rhymed stanza; by their
\nmagnificencies of style and emotion they brought new elements into Hindu literature, and they gave battle with their strange and fiery coloured music to the classic frigidity of the
\nSanscritists. They first sounded the note of Romanticism which still governs
\nour literature. They revealed too those magnificent possibilities, latent in every
\nSans critic language, which only wait for the magic
\ntouch of original genius to open out their store; and they set flowing that perennial fountain of gracious and noble poetry
\nwhich is doing so much to bring beauty and high feeling into our lives and to produce a race of Bengalis braver and better
\nthan we. But at the same time they had to overcome a vast opposition. Lauded with rapturous enthusiasm by the cultured,
\nthey were anathematised by the pedants. All the Pandits, all the Sanscritists, all the fanatics of classicism, even the great
\n<\/span><\/p>\n
\nPage \u2013 113<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\nVidyasagara himself, then the intellectual dictator of Bengal,
\nwere startled out of their senses by these magnificent and mighty poems. Tilottama <\/i>was a gauntlet thrown down by the Romantic
\nschool to the classical. Romanticism won: it was bound to win: it had on its side youth, fire, enthusiasm, the future, and the poems of an unexampled genius for its battle-cry.
\nTilottama <\/i>had been the casus belli<\/i>; that marvellous epic, the
\nMeghnad-badh, <\/i>was the coup de grace<\/i>. When Vidyasagara praised the Meghnad-badh <\/i>as a supreme poem, the day of the Sanscritists was over. That
\ncabal of Pandits which had shouted against Madhu Sudan, could only
\nmurmur weakly against Bankim; the conscience of the nation had passed out of their keeping. But still the victor’s audience was small and went little beyond the class that followed him
\ninto battle, the geniuses, the literary men, the women, the cultured
\nzamindars and those men of the stamp of Rajah Jyotindra Mohan Tagore, men of an extraordinary and original culture, who
\nwere then so common in Bengal, but are now almost obsolete. The great poet died with a limited audience and before the full
\nconsummation of his fame.<\/span><\/p>\nBankim came into that
\nheritage of peace which Madhu Sudan had earned. There is, indeed, a curious contrast
\nbetween these two builders of the Bengali language, so alike in their
\nmission, but in their fortunes so dissimilar. Both were equipped with enormous stores of reading, both were geniuses of a vast
\noriginality, both had creative power, a fine sense for beauty, and a gift for emotion and pathos: both made the same false
\nstart. But here all likeness between them stops. One was the king of prose, the other the king of poetry; and their lives were of a piece with their writings. Madhu Sudan’s is full of
\nsound and passion, violence of
\nheart, extravagance, intemperance, self-will, a life passing through grief, bitterness and anguish to
\na mournful and untimely doom. As we read the passage of that
\nTitanic personality over a world too small for it, we seem to be listening again to the thunder-scene in
\nLear<\/i>, or to some tragic piece out of Thucydides or Gibbon narrating the fall of
\nmajestic nations or the ruin of mighty kings. No sensitive man can read it without being shaken to the very heart. Even after his death<\/span><\/p>\n
\n
\nPage \u2013 115<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\nMadhu Sudan’s evil star followed him. Though a great poet
\namong the greatest, he is read nowhere outside Bengal and the Panjab; and his name is not heard even in Bombay and Madras,
\nprovinces of his own native land. How different was it with Bankim, the genius of prose. His nature, with plenty of strength in it, was yet mild, calm and equable, clear and joyous, but
\nnot intemperate. Fortune’s favourite to whom every door opened
\nwithout keys, his life had in it that sedate maturity and august quiet, which, according to Epicurus, is the true attitude of the
\nGods, and which the Gods only give to those mortals, who, like themselves, have seen life steadily and seen it whole. And if his
\nlast years were stained with suffering, yet he died in the fruition of his greatness, amid the mourning of a nation which he had
\ndone much to create and whose imagination he had filled with so many beautiful thoughts and so many tender, passionate or
\nglorious images.<\/span><\/p>\nBankim’s influence has
\nbeen far-reaching and every day enlarges its bounds. What is its result? Perhaps it may very
\nroughly be summed up thus. When a Mahratta or Gujerati has anything
\nimportant to say, he says it in English; when a Bengali, he says it in Bengali. That is, I think, the fact which is most full of meaning for us in Bengal. It means besides other things less germane
\nto literature, that, except in politics and journalism which is the
\nhandmaid of politics, English is being steadily driven out of the field. Soon it will only remain to weed it out of our conversation;
\nand even to that wheel I am told that Babu Kali Prasunna Ghose has set his shoulder. However that may be, the works of this
\ndistinguished prose-writer are a remarkable proof of what I have just been saying. Not long ago anyone moving in that province of the mind which Babu Kali Prasunna has annexed,
\nwould have held it beneath the dignity of his subject to write in any
\nmedium but English. Work like Babu Kali Prasunna’s marks an important stage in the great revolution of sentiment which our
\nliterary class has set going, the revolution of sentiment which promises to make the Bengalis a nation. <\/span><\/p>\n
\nPage \u2013 115<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" VI What He Did for Bengal I HAVE kept so far to Bankim’s achievement looked at purely as literature….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-01-early-cultural-writings","wpcat-49-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2378"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11850,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2378\/revisions\/11850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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