Political Consciousness in Jibanananda Das’s Poetry

Abstract

This study aims to continue the argument of Clinton B. Seely in A Poet Apart on the political consciousness of Jibanananda Das’s poetry. Seely limits his discussion mostly to Darkness of Seven Stars (Satti Tarar Timir). The thesis draws upon Seeley’s idea to apply political consciousness in Das’s other works. Growing up in the early twentieth century, Das studied and acknowledged the mobility of world history and literature. His keen insight and poetic diction never avoided politics in his poetry from the Fallen Feathers (Jhara Palak, 1927) to Darkness of Seven Stars (Satti Tarar Timir, 1948). Despite his love for flora and fauna as symbols and metaphors, his poems contain his consciousness on love and death, time triangle, historical sense, and human emotions. Das’s poems refer to existential philosophy, collective consciousness, Freudian concepts, and his frequent use of symbols, mixed metaphors, allegory kept his political ideas silent in many poems. His ideas of politics assimilate his historical and cultural views and criticized contemporary reality. His continuous changes in poetic philosophy and his engagement with the conflict between the material and the non-material has made him universal both as a poet and a human. This study thus traces Das’s gradual changes of political consciousness in his published volumes during his lifetime and posthumously.