Bangladesh

Introduction This introduction was meant to be written in Dhaka in the stifling pre-monsoon heat. I had planned to read many of the books during my visit. But as Burns knew well our “best-laid schemes [...] go often askew”, for the pandemic brought travel to a halt and “lockdown” became the defining term of our lives. As I wondered how I would get hold of books “published in the streets of Dhaka”, to borrow a phrase from Kaiser Haq’s poem, whilst under lockdown in Sussex, a dear friend managed to send me e-copies, thus saving the day. I re-read the poetry of Jibananada Das, especially Clinton Seely’s The Scent of Sunlight, for Das, who is both a romantic and a modernist, a symbolist and a surrealist, captures for us the intense longing for the riverine landscape of Bengal. Re-reading his poems in time of forced isolation, I imagined various ways in which a return to Bengal could be facilitated. Das obsessively imagined his rebirth in Bengal, as “a shalik bird or a white hawk”, maybe as the “crow of dawn” or “as a spotted owl” or even as “[t]aking on the compassionate flesh of a cold tangerine/At the bedside of some dying acquaintance”. Of course, the pandemic robbed us of such farewells, and we mourned the passing of family members from afar. But lockdown also brought us a ruminative state of being. I was reminded of a line from the wonderfully titled Buddhist text Khaggavisana Sutta (Discourse on the Rhinoceros Horn): “to be alone like the horn of a rhinoceros”. The South Asian rhinoceros not only has one horn but is also a solitary creature. The Buddhist text extols the virtues of solitude, a prerequisite for the contemplative life: “Having left son and wife, father and mother, wealth and corn, and relatives, the different objects of desire, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros”. I do not know if Das read the Khaggavisana Sutta, but that inclination for solitude is one of the most notable aspects of his poetry, along with unexpected metaphors like silence that creeps in through an open window like the neck of a camel. Das would not have minded lockdown as long as it was in Barisal, the place in present day Bangladesh where he was born and spent most of his life, until the Partition of 1947.