Jibanananda Das’s famous love poem Banalata Sen was first published in the journal Kavita (Poetry) in 1935 and later anthologized in a 1942 collection to which it gave its name. It is widely regarded as one of Das’s finest poems and is certainly his most popular work. Of great historical expanse, the poem conjures up the splendor of classical antiquity through an invocation of the names of the august Indian kings Vimbisar and Asok and the fabled cities of Vidarbha, Vidisa, and Sravasti.
From such grandiosity, the poet returns with each refrain to the ordinariness of Banalata Sen, a woman from Natore, a small town in the Indian state of Bengal. Such down-scaling parallels the movement from distinguished kings such as Asok to the unknown Banalata Sen and from past millennia to the present moment and a much-diminished modern world.
Like its historical complement, the geography of the narrator’s travels is also cast on the grandest possible scale, covering the Indian subcontinent—from cities in north and central India, to the seas in the south, and finally, to Bengal in the east. For a long time, critics assumed that “Malay Sea,” in the first stanza, was a reference to the waters around the Malay Peninsula in Southeast Asia, so that the poet somewhat inexplicably had in this single case referred outside the Indian subcontinent. However, a recent study by Clinton Seely argues convincingly that “Malay” actually refers to the Malabar region, or the southwestern coast of India, so that both “Malay Sea” and “Ceylon waters” refer to the southern seas surrounding the Indian subcontinent (Ceylon is present-day Sri Lanka). Thus does the poet suggest that all of Indian history and geography somehow culminate in the beauty of a girl from a nondescript village.
The reference to Banalata Sen recurs in the last line of each stanza of the poem. She is presented with few specifics beyond her full name, place of origin, and some details of her person—her face and dark hair, both of which evoke past perfection for the narrator, and her eyes. She speaks in no elevated rhetoric, but simply greets the narrator with the rather quotidian “Where were you so long?” It is an expression of Das’s modernism that he integrates in this way Banalata Sen’s colloquial speech with the narrator’s more poetic language.
Banalata Sen is an 18-line poem divided into three sestets. It is composed in the Bengali payar meter, and the rhyme scheme is ababcc / dedecc / fgfgcc, so that the last line of each sestet ends with “Banalata Sen.” Opulent and sensuous imagery creates scenic spaces: dark nights over ancient cities, a mariner lost in stormy seas, islands redolent of cinnamon, and so on. Surprising metaphors characterize Das’s poetry, and Banalata Sen is no exception.
For instance, the last line of the second stanza makes an unconventional comparison between a woman’s eyes and a bird’s nest. Still, the simile is perhaps intelligible if we shift from a literal reading of visual resemblance to a more philosophical one. A “nest,” as a home for a bird at the end of the day, suggests shelter and repose. Similarly, Banalata Sen, in the tired narrator’s mind, promises tranquility; and if her soul is mirrored in her eyes, as the saying goes, the simile no longer seems quite so strange. Both a bird’s nest and her eyes come to symbolize restfulness.
The phrases “the sound of dew” or the “scent of sunlight,” which occur in the third stanza, combine two different sense perceptions and thus also form one of Das’s more favored figures of speech—synesthesia. Repeated references to darkness evoke a general melancholy throughout the poem, but it ends on a note of hope, ripe with the assurance of rest and the companionship of Banalata Sen.
Works Cited
Chaudhuri, Sukanta. “Introduction.” A Certain Sense: Poems by Jibanananda Das. Translated by various, edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri, Sahitya Akademi, 1998.
Seely, Clinton B. A Poet Apart: A Literary Biography of the Bengali Poet Jibanananda Das. University of Delaware Press, 1990.
Seely, Clinton. “Shifting Seas & ‘Banalata Sen.’” Paper presented at the Centre for Studies in the Social Sciences, Kolkata, and Bangiya Sahitya Parishat (Bengal Council of Literature), Kolkata, 2004.
Categories: British Literature, Literature
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