Sudhindranath Dutta

From An Acre of Green Grass: "The majority of our modern poets have welcomed the prose poem, but two have stood against it, both in theory and practice, Sudhindranath Dutta and Annadasankar Ray. It is well worth saying here that the two, in two different worlds, are artificers in prose: Sudhindranath's critical essays are an illumination, and Annadasankar, in his fiction and belles-lettres, is a writer of beautiful prose. He began as ardently in verse as in prose, but turned more and more to the sumptuousness of the latter, and for some years wrote no verse, or all but none. His recent appearance in the sphere of limericks, clerihews and doggerels is a joyful event: for he is a scholar on the subject of light verse, and light verse is not necessarily slight. Annadasankar has effected that marriage between poetry and wit which is at once so happy and rare; he has the secret of turning topical comments to an art, and his fun ranges from the 'People's War' to mosquito-bites. That rippling, dancing lightness which marks his prose also animates all the verse he has written, and has led him to rediscover the chhada, the measure of our old ballads and nursery rhymes. Sudhindranath Dutta is altogether different. There is nothing in him that is happy or light or sparkling; all is dark, darkly and bitterly passionate. There is a profound unity in all his poems; each is a part of a larger whole, and that whole larger than the sum of his poems. Poem after poem, he is working on a theme, expounding and elaborating it, repeating and correcting himself. His first mature work, Orchestra, is in some way a unique book in our language. It is a book of love poems, not the mystical love of the Vaishnavas, nor the idyllic love of Rabindranath's Ksanika, but a blind, violent and terrible love, born and bound in the body, without relief, release or hope of release. The poems have an unprecedented setting; for the lover is blase' and past his prime, and the mistress a young foreigner whose country is the place of action. The moment of time is when the lovers have been separated—irrevocably; and the whole drama, seen and revealed through memory, is charged with an anguish and a fury that the poet strains every nerve to hold in leash. It is characteristic, and also a measure, of Sudhindranath's powers that, in these poems, he has combined the passionateness of youth with the contemplation of maturity. Separation, in Indian poetry, is traditionally sweet and serene, and even a channel of grace; but to this poet, separation is infernal and serenity death. yet this has not made of him an youthful idolater of the flesh; his is a mind that can see the clay in the idol, though not the symbol in the clay; a mind brave and self-reliant, desperately holding on to the ceremony of the intellect when all his world appears to be doomed. Orchestra is breathless with pain, the pain of memory which the poet can neither bear nor bear to think that time will deaden; it is 'heavy with the burden of Fate', for the present is dead and the future lightless, the only reality being the past, red with the flames of memory. the poems have caught the glow: they are as living as the love they describe. Sudhindranath Dutta appeared on the literary scene rather late in life. His poems were not an immediate 'success'. He has been blamed for obscurity, and mentioned in the same breath with Bishnu Dey, though the two have little in common. Sudhindranath's model is lucidity, and he does his best to give his verse a prose-like regularity. He is ratiocinative, and delights in pursuing an argument from point to point, and from stanza to stanza, right to its logical conclusion. Indeed, I should rather find fault with him for being, on occasions, too logical, too conclusive, and making a poem, with an array of `although's, `therefore's and `yet's, almost like a Euclidean proposition. The only difficulty we are likely to encounter in him is a highly Sanskritic vocabulary, and here it is not the words that so much trouble us as their connotations, for he often uses some word in its original Sanskrit sense, a sense lost to Bengali, or coins new forms from old, well-known roots, and that for a very good reason. His aim being to charge words with maximum meaning and reduce their number, he is not to be blamed if the current Bengali vocabulary does not suffice him. He is direct with the language, has coined vital words and compound, and has made newly and differently aware of the riches of Sanskrit.” Rabindranath once wrote of him in a letter: "I know Sudhindra Datta's poetry from its beginning, and have grown rather partial to it. One reason for this is that it has taken much of its shape, and that quite unhesitantly, from my work. Yet its nature is entirely his own. His individuality, free from arrogance, has never neglected to make acknowledgements to the proper sources. This courage comes from power. " •Extract from Modern Bengali Prose: Sudhindranath's prose has been praised for its ability to blend a rigidly Sanskrit diction with common spoken idioms, some of which lack direct English translation. What makes his prose look 'foreign' is that, unlike his verse, it is untraditional; neither Pramatha Chaudhuri whom he ardently admires, nor Rabindranath whom, this side idolatry, he worships, is its moulder or starting point, or if so, he has concealed the fact so well as to make a complete denial. He gives us a new prose, or a new mode of prose, sombre, ponderous, of a compactness not known before, an enhancer, we might say, not only of the potency of our language, but also our own capacity for abstract thinking. For language modifies thought as much as thought organizes language; the more words we have, the more variously we learn to use them, the better we can think. Bengali as I have already implied, is in its present stage practically debarred from certain abstract subjects; Sudhindranath, at least, has shown a way. It is a way he has found, but not traversed; he has worked hard to forge new implements but not long enough to devise new means. Here and there in his prose we come upon sparks to ignite our mind, exquisite, memorable, quotable phrases and sentences; yet on the whole he makes us wrestle too much, sends us too often to the voluminous dictionaries, confounds us too frequently with an almost mathematical compression; and although the few who have submitted themselves to the hardship of unravelling him have been amply repaid, the great majority of readers have not been disposed to follow suit. Some other writer or writers, it is likely, will, in the near future, use him as a base, modify, extend and adapt this new mode so as to combine its advantages with the primary quality of ease which Sudhindranath admires but lacks. He would have done it himself if, like Atulchandra Gupta, he had not practically abandoned writing."