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In a 1940 essay, well-known poet-critic-editor Buddhadeb Bose welcomed twenty-one-year-old Subhash Mukhopadhyay as (pre-partition) Bengal’s youngest poet at the time. He pointed to a feature of the younger poet’s art, which set him apart from every other poet in Bose’s view: that Subhash had begun his career as a poet of neither love nor nature.

Bengal’s youngest poet’s point of departure was man in society – in other words, the human collective rather than the individual human, and the universe of that individual’s hopes and disappointments and longings and triumphs.

Bose also noted Subhash’s exceptional technical virtuosity, something that even a considerably older, far more experienced poet could learn from. Then there was the twenty-one-year-old’s irrepressible sense of humour, sparkling wit and uncanny ability to harness irony to unexpected uses. Finally, there was such verve as could pull off the near-impossible: marrying the unapologetically ideological to first-rate poetry.

Buddhadeb Bose’s commentary was based on Padatik (The Foot-Soldier), Subhash Mukhopadhyay’s debut book of poetry anthologising such irony-laden sparklers as May-Day’s Call, which begins:

My love, now’s not the time to dally with flowers, For ruination, stark, stares us in the face. Gone from our eyes are the blue dreams of pleasure, As a remorseless sun our backsides bakes.

Bose cites with relish such verses, tongue-firmly-in-cheek critiques of liberal sanctimony:

Should Your Grace want us to take the battle to whoever, my liege! we won’t demur, we’ll pick up our guns quietly. No job holds us down, so who cares if we live or die. And god forbid that we may ever forget your whiplash is at the ready all the time.

No rough-and-ready translation can hope to suggest, let alone recreate, Mukhopadhyay’s incredibly rich poetic idiom, especially as we approach the final lines of this magnificent little poem Prastab (Proposal):

Should the enemy fire off his biggest guns suddenly, let’s tell them, “Boys, don’t let us forget civility”.

Eyes tight shut, let’s then turn our ears to the nightingale’s sublime song.

Bose, a political liberal who in the Cold War years gravitated towards the Free World, was scarcely on the same page as Subhash on the themes running through the Padatik poems. After all, Subhash had announced here, clearly for all the world to hear, which side of the barricades he was on in a deeply unequal world. (At twenty-one, he was a member of the Communist Party.)

Unsurprisingly, therefore, even as Bose saluted the young poet’s panache and technical brilliance, he was not quite sure that Subhash Mukhopadhyay could stay both an activist and a poet.

Cover of Jato Durei Jai (No Matter How Far I Go), Subhash Mukhopadhyay.

Subhash chose to stay true to himself, however: he would continue to write poetry even as he remained a communist activist. It is arguable that, had he not been a trade union organiser and party agitator, he might have been a more prolific poet. But would that have made him a better poet, though, no doubt, the trajectory of his artistic development would likely have traced a different arc?

In the event, he moved to the suburban industrial town of Budge Budge, not far from........

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