The Blazing Comet
by Prof Serajul Islam Choudhury
His revolt, it is important to remember, was aimed not only against the foreign rulers but against oppression of all kinds-social, economic and political. Nazrul Islam was not a nationalist, although he knew that national liberation was the first step towards the liberation of the masses from social and economic oppression. His outlook was international, and it was no accident that it was he who rendered the Internationale into Bengali.
Nazrul Islam called himself the poet of rebellion, this name he richly deserved, while it is true that in some respects he is like Michael Madhusudan Dutt, who lived and wrote in the late nineteenth century and was defiantly rebellious. Nazrul Islam is different even from Michael because of his nearness to the poor and the oppressed. One of the symbols that he used in his most widely known and justly famous poem called Vidrohi (the Rebel), whence the appellation of the rebel poet, was of a comet blazing its trail and portending evil for the world. Later, when he founded a bi-weekly, he called it the Dhumketu (the Comet) Rabindranath Tagore sent it a message which read:
To Kazi Nazrul Islam
Come, ye comet,
come to build a bridge of fire across the dark,
Hoist up on the castletop of evil days
Your flag of victory!
Let omens be carved on the forehead
of the night,
Awaken, startle those that drowse,
This tribute Nazrul Islam richly deserved. His career has been one of peculiar restlessness; his arrival in the literature of Bengal was quite sudden and surprising. He conquered as he came. In a creative life of only twenty three years between the two world wars, Nazrul Islam covered an area of remarkable width and variety. He is acknowledged as the poet of revolt. But he also wrote with equal facility on nature and love. Nazrul Islam’s depiction of the world of children is no less satisfactory than his treatment of the theme of violence. He wrote satires and devotional poems, celebrated heroism as well as sentimentalism. Like Blake, he was a self-taught man and did not have any formal education, and like Blake again, he stands outside the regular line of literary succession, he was not anticipated by any immediate predecessor. As much unlike this predecessors as his contemporaries, he is an exception, and remains, and will continue to remain, a surprise to all. His critics were indeed right in pointing out that the poet did not show any capacity to grow. But it must be pointed out that even his early writings do not display signs of immaturity. He unites in him the simplicity of a child with the intelligence of a mature man. In the best of his poems Dionysus and Apollo wrestle, without upsetting the necessary balance. Restlessness and impatience constitute his characteristic weaknesses; but they are also his peculiar strength. For they enabled him to write with exceptional rapidity on an astonishing variety of subjects. His likening of himself to the comet was not a chance discovery, it was a very truthful description of his nature as a poet.
Good poetry, it has been said, is dramatic in nature, having a life of its own and being capable of inducing the reader to suspend his disbelief, to use Coleridge’s words and surrender himself to the life of the poem. A poem that fails in this fails as poetry. One of the striking features of Nazrul Islam’s poetry is its dramatic quality. There are attributes that his poetry lacks; he is not, for one thing, always restrained and is, at times, even chaotic; he is not, for another, deep in thought-content ; but he is always dramatic, sometimes, perhaps, dramatic to a fault. And consequently, he does unfailingly attract and absorb the attention of his readers and, like all genuine poets, communicate even before he is understood.
But we must qualify the observation. Nazrul Islam was not, because he could not be, dramatic in the sense that a poet like Browning is dramatic. For he was not an objective writer. On the contrary, Nazrul was egotistical, always full of himself though without the sublimity of a Milton or a Wordsworth. He wrote a few plays but like the plays by the something more, it prevented him from reaching a philosophical height. Critics have accused him, not without Justice, of a propensity to repeat himself. Like Kipling he is loud. These are limitations indeed; and an inferior poet would have sunk under them, but Nazrul Islam did not; he was strong enough to carry them along and write enduring poetry in spite of them. It is not difficult to find fault with his poetry but it is impossible not to be moved by his writings.
Nazrul Islam was not unaware of his weaknesses. But he was not apologetic and said in his verse:
“I am a poet of the present, and not a prophet of the future.”
“At the turn of the century I may survive, I may not but I should not care.”
“I have turned mad having seen what I have seen, having heard what I have heard.
Therefore, I say whatever occurs to me.
Unqualified statements like these indicate that he had an enormous amount of self- confidence and conviction in the justness of his cause. Nazrul Islam was a committed writer. What he said in his deposition before the British magistrate who was trying him on charges of sedition has no parallels in the history of Bengali literature. In translation, a part of the statement reads as follows:
‘I have been accused of sedition .That is why I am now confined in the prison. On the one side is the crown, on the other the flames of the comet One is the king, sceptre in hand; the other Truth worth the mace of justice. To plead for me, the king of all kings, the judge of all judges, the eternal truth the living God. My judges employed by none. Before this great judge the king and the subject, the rich and the poor, the happy and the sad are alike and equal. Before his throne the crown of the king and the string of the beggar have equal places of honour. His laws are Justice and Religion. These were not manufactured by any victor to rule over the vanquished. His laws emerged out of the realisation of a universal truth about mankind. They are for and by a sovereign God. The king is supported by an infinitesimal creature; I by its eternal and indivisible Creator. I am a poet; I have been sent by God to express the unexpressed, to portray the unportrayed. It is God who is heard through the voice of the poet. My voice is but a medium for Truth, the message of God. To legal sophistry that message may appear to be mere sedition, but to Justice it is neither unjust nor untrue. The king can muzzle that voice, but to Religion and Justice it will always remain the innocent, immaculate, undimmed and ever-burning Truth. Truth is self-evident. It cannot be destroyed by any angry-eyed sceptre. I am the instrument of that eternal self-evident truth, an instrument that voices forth the message of the ever-true. I am an instrument of God. The instrument is not unbreakable, but who is there to break God? It is undeniable that Truth exists, that there is God has always been and shall always be.
He who has gagged the voice of God today and is trying to silence it for ever is but a very small particle created by Him. That it exists to-day is because He has willed so, if he should not want it to stay it will disappear tomorrow. Only the ignorant can afford to be vain. The created is now trying to punish the Creator. But such vanity is foredoomed to be drowned in tears....’
The sincerity and conviction with which he speaks in the deposition has a frightening intensity that reminds one of the courage of conviction that the terrorists of Bengal displayed.
His revolt, it is important to remember, was aimed not only against the foreign rulers but against oppression of all kinds-social, economic and political. Nazrul Islam was not a nationalist, although he knew that national liberation was the first step towards the liberation of the masses from social and economic oppression. His outlook was international, and it was no accident that it was he who rendered the Internationale into Bengali. Nazrul Islam knew that the exploitation that the British were carrying out was imperialist in character, and that the oppressed people all over the world must unite to overthrow the forces of imperialism. Thus in 1926 he wrote one of his very well-known poems in support of the striking workers of England, knowing that the cause of the workers was the same everywhere. This awareness was a completely new element in Bengali literature. Two great events had taken place in the world before Nazrul Islam came to literature : the First World War and the Russia Revolution. The War fond its echoes in Bengali poetry, but the revolution did not. There were political workers who were acquainted with the writings of Marx and with the achievement of Lenin: there were political thinkers who wrote about the Russian Revolution; but it was left to Nazrul Islam to introduce the message of the international communist movement into the hitherto closed house of Bengali poetry. As a young man of twenty he had read about the Revolution and the Red Army, and was very deeply stirred. In an early poem called Prolaynliash (the Joy in devastation) he spoke of the coming of the Russian Revolution. Later he wrote a whole group of poems called the Samyavaihi (one who believes in Communism). But Nazrul Islam’s writings on Communist themes are of more than historical value, for as poetry also they are excellent. Nazrul Islam preached direct action and did not believe in the politics of petition and appeal. Begging, he said, was an evil, to be sent to jail for writing poems was completely new in the Bengali literary life.
The violence Nazrul Islam preached was antibourgeois. The middle-class temperament abhors chaos, which it designates as the law-and-order problem; Nazrul Islam did not. What he said fifty years ago has been said later by writers like Frantz Fanon. Violence must be met by counter-violence, the oppressors have been violent for centuries, so must be the oppressed if they want to win their freedom.
A poet who desires to use his poetry not as a source of pleasure for a chosen few, but as a weapon for waging a war of emancipation for his country must be simple and passionate. Nazrul Islam writes with involvement and wants to move his audience emotionally. He has neither the modern poet’s ironic self-detachment nor his conversational tone. Like Milton, he is fond of details and he moves on from one image to another in the process of making his ideas perceptible to the reader. In fact images come to him not singly but in numbers, like a crowd, almost in a procession. His images are concentrated and visual, they act and demonstratem. As we read them we realise how a poet’s imagination is like the child’s world inhabited by characters and figures that are more alive than their real counterparts, that the real is incomparably less real than the poetic. It is, of course, meaningful that he was fond of comparing himself with Keats, for like Keats he not only conceives an image but loves it and even partakes of its life. He adopts myths and legends from local as well as alien traditions and also creates new ones.
Nazrul Islam did what no other Muslim poet in modern Bengal had dared to do. He created images and symbols out of the well-known heroes from Muslim history. Thus Triq and Qasim, All and Omar, Hasan and Hussain and even the Prophet himself figure in his poetry as historical beings. He also transformed men like Kamal Pasha and Anwar Pasha into symbols. The method is somewhat similar to the one Yeats employed in his poetry.
Nazrul Islam was a religious man, but he was absolutely non communal. He had married a Hindu woman, and he knew about both the Muslim and the Hindu ways of life. This gave him an incomparable advantage over his other contemporaries, for it enabled him to choose his myths and allusions from two pantheons and not one. He did this deliberately and, as he himself realized, at the cost of art. Others, even Rabindranath, used only one, leaving the other source untapped. The cause of Communal harmony owes not a small debt to him. The literary significance of this was enormous; for it gave his writings an exceptional breadth and variety.
The poetry Nazrul Islam wrote is characterised by an abundant use of rhetorical devices. Rhetoric can be used to hide vagueness of thought; but rhetoric can also be a product of sincerity and conviction. Nazrul Islam’s rhetoric belongs to the second category. He is rhetorical because he is sincere to himself; and convinced about the rightness of his cause. It is true that he did not always have time to polish his lines, it is also true that he was not a fastidious writer. He writes with passion, and, therefore, sometimes, without proper organisation. Still he had a regular and settled style, which was free from artificiality and was rich in sensuousness. Nazrul Islam is not a scholarly poet; hut despite his occasional lapses into verbosity, he ‘sees’ through his words no less than he ‘feels’ for them. What is most important of all is that polished or unpolished his lines never fail to communicate the intensity of feelings that they contain of him one should say, as Dr. Johnson once said of Pope, ‘if he is not a poet, where is poetry to be found’?”
In his poetry Nazrul Islam had announced his very lofty sense of individualism. He would not bow down to any authority, to any power however great it might be, not even to the Creator, as he once declared in a frenzy of exuberance. Yet it is clear even to the most casual of his readers that the poet is not so much against God as against the wrongs that are perpetrated in the name of God. “I do not salute any one-except myself” was his motto. The bi-weekly Dhurnketu (Comet) declared in 1922 that it stood for full independence. This declaration was as unequivocal as it was courageous. For although people all over India had felt the need for full independence and there was much talk about it in the educated circles, Nazrul Islam’s was the first newspaper in Bengal 10 make the demand in public.
To Nazrul Islam freedom was a wide concept, for apart from political freedom it included freedom from rules and conventions, bonds and chains, prohibitions and taboos. We must therefore rise in revolt. But before that it would be necessary to know ourselves. With bold hearts we should declare, “I bend my head to none except myself”. This is selfreverence and selfconfidence rather than egocentricity. The ‘I’ is not selfish, arrogant, or conceited; on the contrary, the poet has identified himself with the suffering humanity, he is speaking on behalf of the lowly and the under privileged. He is present in every line he wrote and it is always a pleasure to meet him.
Devotionalism has been one of the outstanding features of Bengali poetry. Poets have sung of the ultimate reality and have craved for a union with it. Rabindranath sums up in himself all that is best in devotionalism. While it is true, as we have already noted, that Nazrul Islam has written on God and has sought. His guidance, the more significant is the fact that he has also dared to defy Him. This defiance was new in Bengali poetry.
Like all great poets, Rabindranath had made it difficult for a new poet to be original. One could not see what lay beyond him as Dr. Johnson did not see how Pope could be improved upon by any succeeding practitioner. It seemed to all that Rabindranath had exhausted the possibilities of the language. To write poetry in the age of Rabindranath was to imitate him. Nazrul Islam entered the literature of Bengal when Rabindranath was at the height of his glory and proved, as soon as he came, that he was very different front the great master.
Nazrul Islam is different. For although there are streaks of sentimentalism in him, on the whole he is more rugged than Rabindranath. This is at once is weakness and strength. Rabindranath’s sophistication and refinement one should not expect in Nazrul Islam who was almost an outsider to the tradition of which Rabindranath was the consummation. Just as Blake rehabilitated in English poetry the lyricism of Elizabethans, Nazrul Islam brought back to Bengali poetry masculine words of Arabic and Persian origin which the muslims used in everyday conversation. Poets like Satyendranath Datra and Mohitlal Majuimder had used such words in their delineation of a few, only a few, Muslim subjects and themes; but these words were not a part of their regular vocabulary. It was Nazrul Islam who, for the first time, in the history of modern Bengali poetry, made these words an irnportant constituent of poetic diction. What is more, he was not apologetic. This scandalized the writers, even Rabindranath, who thought that the young man was trying to shave with a sword. But despite opposition and ridicule, the words endured. Because Nazrul Islam had a keen ear for music and knew how to fuse a unity between words and sounds and between sounds and sounds. Words, phrased and idioms that had grown musty with neglect he dusted and forced into use with a skill not usually paralleled. The result was an enrichment of the literary expressiveness. Thus he performed a function which only a man of genius, a poet like Wordsworth, for example, can do. Also, he freely employed words of Sanskrit origin arid achieved unprecedented effects. A part of the virility of his lines lay in the harmonious juxtaposition of the two kinds of words.
Nazrul Islam was always responsive to the contemporary issues and wrote on most of them. He added to Bengali poetry its note of contemporaneity, a quality that constitutes one of the characteristic marks of modernity in poetry. This greatly helped the process of bringing Bengali poetry closer to life. But he was, as we have suggested earlier, aloof from the modern poets of the thirties, smart young man turned out by the universities of Calcutta and Dhaka who hurled notes of defiance at an elderly Rabindranath and shocked the prudery of Bengal by writing without inhibition on sex. They introduced to the reading public poets like Eliot and writers like Lawrence and Huxley primarily because they thought it was by imitating European writers that they would be able to escape the all-pervading influence of Rabindranath. They took an academic interest in low and humble life. Nazrul Islam made friends with them, wrote in their journals, but could never be one of the group, because his differences from them were basic. He was loud and rhetorical, simple and passionate, attributes that modernist writers strove to relinquish.
It has been said that men are either Hamlets or Quixotes. We have had the self-conscious, middleclass intellectuals, one of whom, Bishnu Dey, attempted “to produce in his writings a synthesis of Marx and Eliot; but we were in need of a Don Quixote, the archetypal adventure, the fighter against evil and the prototype of the good man. Nazrul Islam is our wayfaring Don Quixote.
The rebellious self of the young poets like Buddhadeva Bose was different in character from the revolt of Nazrul Islam. For their rebellion was against Rabindranath; it was a literary revolt and it was foredoomed to fail because Rabindranath was overwhelmingly more powerful than the young aspirants to literary fame. They wanted to go beyond Rabindranath; but Rabindranath was not stationary, he was changing his style, to the despair of the young rebels. The literary rebellion did not come off. In Nazrul Islam there was no conscious desire to revolt; his revolt sprang inevitably from his way of life, it came in response to a deeply felt necessity. Rabindranath was not the name of a poet only, he represented an outlook on life. Hence he could not be excelled by anyone having the same taste or temperament as his. Nazrul Islam had read Rabindranath, he sang Rabindranath’s songs, but he was different. We can do no better than quote from an essay Nazrul Islam wrote:
‘Rabindranath has been fortunate, he has no idea how the young writers have to struggle for existence, sometimes going without food. We do not grudge him his fortune, we pray that he spared our experience. Rabindranath has never stepped inside our cottage, his greatness would not have been soiled if he had done so; and if he had he would have seen how great our poverty was. We hide ourselves in a corner. Far from touring one country after another on missions of preaching, we are even afraid of coming out of our houses. The mended patches on our torn clothes are much too conspicuous for that. We feel out of sorts in the company of educated gentlemen. The more fierce becomes the lashing of poverty, the more strong gets the revolt of our mind.’
Youth is usually very short-lived in Bengal. We have extended childhood and very early dotage; our children behave like old men and women, carrying with them the burden of agonies and miseries that best life in this poor land, and grown up persons behave like children, having had premature senility in their childhood. Bold and adventurous youth is difficult to find. The sense of responsibility that goes with adulthood is peculiarly absent. In this atmosphere if adolescence and dotage, Nazrul Islam introduced the spirit of youth and responsibility. He is nothing if not bold and adventurous, conscious and responsible.
It would be illuminating to place him, once again, alongside Buddhadeva Bose. Buddhadeva Bose was and important writer, he also was youtful in his outlook and language, and had an appeal to the youth. But Buddhadeva’s youthfulness was that of an educated young man’s. It was more deliberate and less unselfconscious than Nazrul Islam’s. Buddhadeva represented the urban middle-class youth, his heroes are university-trained men who had read a lot of literature, were fond of quoting poetry, and were more at home in the world of book than in the world of politics or that of the struggle for existence. Nazrul Islam’s youthfulness is more reckless and loud, his heroes have sentiments but they are not denizens of the world of books.
Poetry came to him naturally and without effort. He produced lines that no effort could improve. But in his brief and hectic career as a poet he never any respite. He could not afford to recollect his emotions with tranquility, he delivered the ideas as they occurred to him.
Although it is customary to consider Nazrul Islam as a poet of revolt yet no account of his poetic career is complete without taking into account the poems of love and nature that he wrote. In fact there are critics who believe that Nazrul Islam’s poems on love and nature would last even when his more widely known poems of protest and defiance have been forgotten.
In his reply to the address presented to him at the civic reception in Calcutta, the poet said:
‘I do not hesitate to admit that I have not been able to rise above Power-truth and Beauty-truth. What I have given is petty and I do not know how far I have succeeded in giving something worthwhile to society, but I am sure I have not yet been able to offer to it the whole of myself; my desire in this respect is yet to be fulfilled. The lost spring of water that I am looking for is at the top of the mountain and I beseech you to pray that I do not desecrate the glory at the top.
I belong to this century of unattainable achievements. Let this be my greatest mark of distinction My birth in this country and this society does not mean that I shall be constricted and confined to them. No, I belong to all countries and to all men. To contemplate and sing of Beauty is my worship, my religion.’
To come from his world of power, truth as he calls it, to that of Beauty-truth is to enter a different world and meet a different aspect of the poet. For here in this region of beauty, we have a poet who is quiet, melancholy and contemplative.
Nazrul Islam wrote unforgettable poems on love and nature and created a sensuous world rich in colour, sound and smell. In his nature poems we see almost all the flowers we know in Bengal, hear almost all the tunes we have heard in this country. Not satisfied, he makes journeys to the Middle East in search of mountains and hills, blowers and singing brooks. In his love poems Nazrul Islam is sentimental, pining, imploring and almost effeminate. He is sad, suffering from self-pity, and he enjoys being sad. A heavy feeling of separation oppresses him, relentlessly. Gone are the notes of turbulence and violence: he has become tame and restful. It is on more tranquil things that his imagination now dwells. The silent tree, the melancholy sky, slow moving river, the shining moon and the shy village girl are some of his oft-repeated images in his love poetry. The Dionysian seems to have turned the Appollonian.
His lines on love are richly embellished, but they are never fustian. As a love poet Nazrul Islam is fairly traditional: does not break or overthrow the old concepts and modes of expression; he accepts them, masters them, and uses them in his own distinctive style. While singing of love he has disemburdened himself of his public responsibility and has become a singing voice, connecting himself with the long and rich tradition of love-poetry in the Bengali language. He connects himself with history, and yet retains his individuality. Nazrul Islam suffers from self-pity, not so much because the beloved is unattainable, though unattainable she is, as because he is in love with himself. He needs his beloved, and to win her he is prepared to throw himself at her feet; but whatever he does or says, he remains incapable of forgetting himself.
The beloved is a cruel woman, prone to reject and difficult to please. Yet she is a creature of flesh and blood. Nazrul Islam did not believe in disembodied love as many others in our literature did. It is not incorrect to say that his concept of love is not different from Whitman’s. Incidentally, Nazrul Islam had translated Whitman into Bengali.
When he writes on nature Nazrul Islam invests nature with a personality: natural objects in his poetry are alive, not mere spectators, but participants in human affairs. In some poems he has used natural objects as symbols; but most of his nature poems are statements of relationship with, and love for, nature. He sees, interprets and appreciates nature in human terms. In Bengal nature has never been a more backdrop, and Nazrul Islam’s poems are an important addition to our rich heritage of nature poetry.
He has treated of all the seasons of the year. But he is not a poet of the summer and the spring, as we would expect him to be in as much as he is a poet of both revolt and love, but a poet of the rainy season in the same sense in which a contemporary of his, Jibanananda Das, is a poet of the autumn. His is a wet world wet with tears, rain and dew. Real and metaphorical water abound on his poetry. Apart from the well-known rivers of the Padma, the Jamuna and the Karnaphuli, we have, in his poems, rivers of melody, of sorrow, and even of benevolence. He has written a poem of unequalled beauty on the sea; and there are places where the sea is used as a symbol of strength and youth. We see him writing on boats, sails and boatman. In one poem the ferry boat takes on a symbolic meaning. Very often the poem is found weeping together with the wind and the sky. His thirst is unquenchable.
Nazrul Islam wrote many devotional poems, most of which are for the Muslims, but some are for the Hindus. That the poet who was rebellious should be so submissive as he is in the devotional poems need not surprise us. For similar instances are known in literary history. Swinburne is a case in point. He had defied the Victorian values; but time and again, he had returned, like an exhausted bird, to the rooted tradition. After having claimed to be a worshipper of none but himself and priding himself upon his rejection of the creator, Nazrul Islam bowed down to God with a quietness similar to the one that comes over nature after a violent storm. If Nazrul Islam was repetitive, so was Swinburne, and both suffered from certain fixations created in their adolescence.
Nazrul Islam was like Swinburne in his skill in versification. Like Swinburne, be was given to playing with metres. There are instances where he seems to have been swept off his feet by the charm of sounds and stopped when his physical power, and not his ideas, had exhausted itself.
Some critics are inclined to think that Nazrul Islam’s writings on love and nature constitute his real title to greatness and that these quiet poems will outlast his loud poems on revolt. This is an arguable point. Nevertheless the fact remains that it is in the region of his revolt that this poet’s distinction, peculiarity and characteristic are to be sought and found. He would not be as significant as he is, had he written only on love and nature. It would not be untrue to say that his love and nature poems derive a part of their importance from the very fact that they were written by a rebellious poet.
And it is also true that between the loud poet and the quiet poet there is a unity which should not lost sight of, because to miss the relationship between the rebel and the lover would be to misunderstand Nazrul Islam as a poet. Nazrul Islam is always a lover of beauty and he wants life to be beautiful. But seeing life robbed of its beauty he revolted, revolted against the forces that were responsible for the destruction of beauty . His vision is of a complete life, but he found real life to be miserably incomplete. His protest is an outcome of his love.
It is to be noted that despite his proclamation that he said in his poetry whatever occurred to him at a particular moment, despite his saying that he was not an artist at all, he remained a poet whenever he wrote. His aesthetic standard was sure and steady, he would make no compromise there. He is rough in his anger but not in his style. He is no ascetic in literature, he is a sensuous man. Nazrul Islam’s style is never barren, bare or naked. He deals with reality, but reality is idealised in his poetry. In his poem on the subject, poverty is cruel and relentless, but is yet capable of according its victim a certain Christ-like dignity. His poetry is about life, but it is also above life. Nazrul Islam knew the glory of life as much as he knew ‘its horror and boredom’. The two faces of the poet, one of the rebel and the other of the lover, complement, rather than contradict, each other.
The unity is reflected in the fact that he wrote the two kinds of poetry simultaneously. Thus while doing the translation of the Internationale and writing the poem called ‘the song of the bloodstained flag’, he took his time off to write poems like “Your raven eyes are so tearfuf” and ‘why are your young fresh eyes so sad ?“ Angry revolt and gentle contemplation of beauty have sometimes coalesced within the same poem. Vidrohi, for example, is a turbulent poem, but it has a still, unagitated central core. Whatever he is speaking of, of violence or surrender, the poet is always romantic.
His world of love and nature is shaded and secluded, tranquil and tearful. But it has its own strength and vitality. His love poems have a dramatic quality. The poet addressees his beloved about whose real identity he is uncertain, for she is eternally mysterious. Now she is jealous, in the next poem she is absent-minded. She is cruel and also sad. She is unknown and also familiar. If she is a neighbour now, she may become a wayfarer the next moment. We even see her living in an island as a prisoner. The lover himself changes continually. There is variety, curiosity and. liveliness, spontaneity and ease in Nazrul Islam’s love poems. Some of his love poems are written in the form of dramatic monologues; many of his poems have a musical quality and can be sung as songs.
His awareness of, and acquaintance with, glory in life is seen not only on his poems on love and nature but also in what he wrote for the children.
Like Rabindranath, Nazrul Islam knew the psychology of children. He had two purposes in writing for children: to create fun, and to rouse in them a curiosity to know and an ambition to achieve greatness.
One of his remarkable poems is on a young hero who went to steal fruits from the garden of a neighbour. The adventure promised to be successful till suddenly the branch he was hanging on broke and he fell down. To add to his misery he fell on the head of the guard who was standing beneath the tree. The guard was a wicked man. He gave the little thief a good smacking. But the hero was not to be put off, he ran for his life. Then. lo and behold , there was an owlish jackal waiting. No, not a jackal, it was only a dog. “I was struck with horror”, says the thief, for he is narrating his adventure in the poem. He started running, so did the dog. Escaping narrowly, the boy says he will not go for stealing again. Anyone who has read this poem, and it has been read by all educated men in Bengal, will find it impossible to forget. In the poem’s child’s feelings of greed, fear, courage and his bravado have been treated with consummate skill. The moral lesson at the end comes inconspicuously but inevitably, like the beating that the guard had given the luckless thief.
There are other pieces which are equally popular. A child’s reaction to the breaking of dawn, his dramatic monologue with a squirrel, his poking fun at the snub nose of his grandfather — whatever Nazrul Islam writes on he writes with a magic that pleases not only the young but also the adult. He enters the very soul of the child, looks at the world with the eyes of a child, and speaks in the language that a child would be expected to use. Our only regret is that he did not have the time to write too many of these poems. For any poet the poems would be a major achievement, for a poet who is noted for his anger they were an astonishing feat. Children were dear to his heart. It is generally held that the death of his second child, Bulbul, was a major factor contributing to the mental disorder that silenced the most loud voice this century had produced in Bengal. What Nazrul Islam wrote for the children confirms us in our belief that inside all his sound and fury there was a central core of innocence; he who wrote of ‘experience’ knew ‘innocence’ very intimately indeed.
Some of the poems were written with the purpose of stimulating in the minds of children, a desire to know the unknown, to conquer the unexplored, to win wreaths of honour and glory. He wanted the children to be free in mind and thinking, when the daily ‘Azad’, a popular newspaper during the last days of the British in India, started a page for the children, Nazrul Islam’s message to young readers was characteristic:
‘Do consider the honour of martyrdom
more glorious than slavery,
Consider the sword to be nobler than
the belt of the peon,
Do not pray to God for anything petty;
Bow not your head to anyone except God.’
If poems are untranslatable, Nazrul Islam’s poems are particularly so, and in the English rendering attempted above and elsewhere, it has been possible to give only a paraphrase of what the lines contain; the actual lines are infinitely more artful, much of their appeal being dependent upon the sound of the word and the vigour inherent in the rhythm. In most other poems the message is concealed, the lesson is woven into the imagination. Nazrul Islam never sees the child from the outside, he speaks as an insider, as a child. When one of the boys in the group of poems called Sat Bhai Champa (Seven Brothers) tells his mother about his intention of being a bird of the dawn of his desire to rise before everything else, one feels that it is none other than a child who is speaking. ‘Mother’, says the boy, ‘you will try to keep me in bed, you’ll say, it is too early to rise, it’s not morning yet. But I’ll tell you, foolish girl; you’re mistaken, if your son does not rise how do you think the day shall break?’ Another child declares in its own unmistakable voice that he wants to be a merchant, braving the uncharged waters.
Like all great poets challenging the established literary taste, Nazrul Islam met opposition from the literary establishment. Some critics found fault with his diction, some write parodies of his more well-known poems. Social hostility was even fiercer. By writing in favour or progress and change Nazrul Islam had earned the wrath of the British rulers as well as of the orthodox sections of his own community. The British government threw him behind of society. He was called an atheist, a renegade Muslim, a son of Satan born to sow seeds of discord and confusion-among the faithfuls. But however shrill the voice of conservatism might be, the popularity of the poet grew apace and unabated. The forces that opposed him suffered defeat, and, like all great poets, he succeeded in creating his own audience. He refused to be ignored or patronised.
Reprinted from Kazi Nazrul
