Buddhadeva Bose’s poetry is characterized by pointed images and a visibly meticulous arrangement of words and lines. What shines through most of Bose’s poems is not spontaneity or even literary pleasure, but the workings of a critical mind. The pleasure of reading Bose’s poetry is also largely intellectual.

Hilsa, one of Bose’s most memorable shorter poems, is an outstanding example of his economy of words, his creative synthesis of rural and urban scenarios, and his detached cynicism. The poem, which first appeared in Damayanti, is about the mass of hilsa fish—a Bengali delicacy—harvested during the night in the river Padma (now in Bangladesh) and transported overnight by train to Calcutta, India, where it is distributed to be sold in the local markets.

The first line is beautiful and terse as it establishes the natural premises of the poem: “Asharh’s in the heavens, and Bengal’s monsoon-drunk.” (Asharh is the first month of the rainy season in the Bengali calendar.) Against a background of “rows of coconuts on cloud-colored” riverbanks and a century-old palace, Bose introduces “half-naked” fishermen in “little darting boats” as they “furiously cast the nets, haul the ropes.”

The fishermen are creatures of need and habit, and in the poet’s view are “famished themselves, but are food’s pipeline for others.” The night ends with the “blind black wagons” being filled up with “heaps of hilsa corpses, the water’s lucent harvest, / hillocks of death for the river’s deepest delight.”

It is impossible not to compare Baudelaire’s Albatross and its “drunken sailors” to the hilsa and the “naked fishermen.” The scene of the poem shifts at the end of the poem to Calcutta, “in a bleary morning, leached of color and light.” The air is fragrant with “the rising smell of frying hilsa,” and “the clerk’s wife’s kitchen” is “tangy with mustard.”

The last line of the poem is characterized by a terrible beauty that is both a mark of Baudelaire’s influence and of Bose’s creative genius: “The monsoon’s here, and with it the hilsafest.” The monsoon, or the rainy season, has been the subject of sublime art, literature, and music in most Indian languages and traditions. The way Bose has managed in Hilsa to juxtapose that classical-romantic connotation of the monsoon with the sordid banality of seasonal commerce is quite remarkable.

Bibliography
Bose, Buddhadeva. Selected Poems of Buddhadeva Bose. Translated by Ketaki Kusari Dyson. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003, 38.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, World Literature

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