{"id":88,"date":"2013-07-13T01:25:49","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:25:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=88"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:25:49","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:25:49","slug":"13-what-he-did-for-bengal-vol-03-the-harmony-of-virtue-volume-03","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/03-the-harmony-of-virtue-volume-03\/13-what-he-did-for-bengal-vol-03-the-harmony-of-virtue-volume-03","title":{"rendered":"-13_What He Did for Bengal.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n

\n
\nSIX<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nWhat He Did for Bengal<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

 
\n            I<\/b><\/font> <\/font>
\nHAVE <\/b><\/font>
\nkept so far to Bankim’s achievement
\nlooked at purely as literature. I now come to speak of it in the
\nhistoric sense, of its relations to the Bengali language and
\npotency over the Bengali race. Of this it is not easy to suggest
\nany image without speaking in superlatives. I had almost said
\nin one place that he created the language, and if one couples his
\nname with Madhusudan Dutt’s, the statement is hardly too
\ndaring. Before their advent the Bengali language, though very
\nsweet and melodious, was an instrument with but one string
\nto it. Except the old poet Bharatchandra, no supreme genius
\nhad taken it in hand; hence while prose hardly existed except
\nin Baital Pachisi<\/i> and some other tales about Vikramaditya,
\nBengali verse had very little to recommend it beyond a certain
\nfatiguing sweetness. Virility, subtlety, scope, these were wanting
\nto it. Then came Madhusudan and Bankim, and, like Terpander
\nand Orpheus added fresh strings to the lyre. In Madhusudan’s hands that
\nnerveless and feminine dialect became the large utterance of the early Gods, a tongue epic and Titanic, a tongue for
\nthe storms and whirlwinds to speak in: he caught and studied
\nhis diction from the echo and rumour of the sea. All the stormiest passions of man’s soul he expressed in gigantic language.
\nWe seem to hear Milton’s Satan speaking in every line he wrote.
\nBut in Bankim’s hands the Bengali language, before stammering
\nand inarticulate, became a rich, musical and flexible organ vibrating to every human emotion and expressive of every beautiful or
\nnoble thought. I do not mean that there were no labourers in
\nthe field before Bankim and Madhusudan. The paths of the
\nGods are always prepared for them. Many daring minds were
\nalready at work, but they fell short of their high conception.
\nRammohan Ray, the great Vidyasagara, Okhay Kumar Dutt
\nand the Bengali playwrights were all working bravely towards<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 95<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

the same consummation. But Vidyasagara,
\nthough he had much
\nin him of the scholar and critic, was nothing of an artist; Okhay
\nKumar’s audience ran only to the subscribers of a single magazine ; and the literary originality of the rest was not equal to their
\naudacity. None of them could transform and recreate with that
\nsure and easy touch which reveals the true maker of language.<\/font><\/p>\n

Bankim moreover has this splendid
\ndistinction, that he more
\nthan any one exalted Bengali from the status of a dialect to the
\nmajesty of a language. The immediate effect of English education had been to
\nfoster 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
\nand unsatisfying: even Madhusudan in his youth neglected and
\nforgot it. The strivings of Vidyasagara and Okhay Kumar Dutt
\nwere the strivings of a few far-sighted and patriotic men in a generation misled by false ideals. On that generation Madhusudan’s
\nfirst great poems, Sharmistha<\/i> and Tilottama<\/i>, had a complex effect
\nmuch of a piece with the sensation created by Marlowe’s Tamburlaine<\/i> in Elizabethan England or Hugo’s Hernani<\/i> in 19th
\ncentury France. They took men’s imaginations by storm with
\ntheir splendour, passion and mighty imagery; by creating the
\nBengali blank verse they freed poetry from the facilities and
\nprettinesses of the old rhymed stanza; by their magnificences of
\nstyle and emotion they brought new elements into Hindu literature, and they gave battle with their strange and fiery coloured
\nmusic to the classic frigidity of the Sanskritists. They first sounded
\nthe note of Romanticism which still governs our literature. They
\nrevealed too those magnificent possibilities, latent in every
\nSanskritic language, which only wait for the magic touch of original genius to open out their store; and they set flowing that
\nperennial fountain of gracious and noble poetry which is doing
\nso much to bring beauty and high feeling into our lives and to
\nproduce a race of Bengalis braver and better than we. But at
\nthe same time they had to overcome a vast opposition. Lauded
\nwith rapturous enthusiasm by the cultured, they were anathematised by the pedants. All the Pandits, all the Sanskritists, all
\nthe fanatics of Classicism, even the great Vidyasagara himself,
\nthen the intellectual dictator of Bengal, were startled out of their<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 96<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nsenses by these magnificent and mighty
\npoems. Tilottama<\/i> was
\na gauntlet thrown down by the Romantic school to the Classical.
\nRomanticism won; it was bound to win; it had on its side youth,
\nfire, enthusiasm, the future and the poems of an unexampled
\ngenius for its battle-cry. Tilottama<\/i> had been the casus belli<\/i>;
\nthat
\nmarvellous epic, the Meghnad-badh<\/i>, was the coup de gr\u00e2ce<\/i>. When
\nVidyasagar praised the Meghnad-badh<\/i> as a supreme poem, the
\nday of the Sanskritists was over. That cabal of Pandits which
\nhad shouted against Madhusudan could only murmur weakly
\nagainst Bankim; the conscience of the nation had passed out of
\ntheir keeping. But still the victor’s audience was small and
\nwent little beyond the class that followed him into battle, the
\ngeniuses, the literary men and women, the cultured zamindars and
\nthose men of the stamp of Rajah Jyotindra Mohan Tagore, men of an extraordinary
\nand original culture, who were then so common in Bengal, but are now almost obsolete. The great poet
\ndied with a limited audience and before the full consummation
\nof his fame.<\/font><\/p>\n

       Bankim
\ncame into that heritage of peace which Madhusudan had earned. There is, indeed, a curious contrast between
\nthese two builders of the Bengali language, so alike in their mission but in their fortunes so dissimilar. Both were equipped with
\nenormous stores of reading, both were geniuses of a vast originality, both had creative power, a fine sense for beauty and a
\ngift for emotion and pathos: both made the same false start.
\nBut here all likeness between them stops. <\/b> One was the king of
\nprose, the other the king of poetry; and their lives were of a piece
\nwith their writings. Madhusudan’s is full of sound and passion,
\nviolence of heart, extravagance, intemperance, self-will, a life
\npassing through grief, bitterness and anguish to a mournful and untimely doom.
\nAs we read the passage of that Titanic personality over a world too small for it, we seem to be listening again
\nto the thunder-scene in Lear<\/i>, or to some tragic piece out of
\nThucydides or Gibbon narrating the fall of majestic nations or
\nthe ruin of mighty kings. No sensitive man can read it without being shaken to
\nthe very heart. Even after his death, Madhusudan’s evil star followed him. Though a great poet among the
\ngreatest, he is read nowhere outside Bengal and the Punjab;<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 97<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nand his name is not heard even in
\nBombay and Madras, provinces
\nof his own native land. How different was it with Bankim, the
\ngenius of prose. His nature, with plenty of strength in it, was yet
\nmild, calm and equable, clear and joyous, but not intemperate.
\nFortune’s favourite to whom every door opened without keys,
\nhis life had in it that sedate maturity and august quiet, which,
\naccording to Epicurus, is the true attitude of the Gods, and which
\nthe Gods only give to those mortals who, like themselves, have
\nseen life steadily and seen it whole. And if his last years were
\nstained with suffering, yet he died in the fruition of his greatness,
\namid the mourning of a nation which he had done much to create
\nand whose imagination he had filled with so many beautiful
\nthoughts and so many tender, passionate or glorious images.<\/font><\/p>\n

\nBankim’s influence has been
\nfar-reaching and every day
\nenlarges its bounds. What is its result? Perhaps it may very
\nroughly be summed up thus. When a Mahratta or Gujerati has
\nanything important to say, he says it in English; when a Bengali,
\nhe says it in Bengali. That is, I think, the fact which is most full
\nof meaning for us in Bengal. It means, besides other things
\nless germane to literature, that, except in politics and journalism
\nwhich is the handmaid of politics, English is being steadily
\ndriven out of the field. Soon it will only remain to weed it out of
\nour conversation; and even to that wheel I am told that Babu
\nKali Prasunna Ghose has set his shoulder. However that may
\nbe, the works of this distinguished prose-writer are a remarkable
\nproof of what I have just been saying. Not long ago anyone
\nmoving in that province of the mind which Babu Kali Prasunna
\nhas annexed, would have held it beneath the dignity of his subject
\nto write in any medium but English. Work like Babu Kali
\nPrasunna’s marks an important stage in the great revolution of
\nsentiment which our literary class has set going, the revolution
\nof sentiment which promises to make the Bengalis a nation.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 98<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SIX What He Did for Bengal                 I HAVE kept so far to Bankim’s achievement looked at purely as literature. I now come…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-03-the-harmony-of-virtue-volume-03","wpcat-4-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88","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=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}