Sri Aurobindo. Bankim Chandra Chatterji. VI. What He Did for Bengal // Early Cultural Writings (1890-1910)

Sri Aurobindo

Early Cultural Writings

(1890 — 1910)

Part Two. On Literature
Bankim Chandra Chatterji

VI. What He Did for Bengal

I have kept so far to Bankim’s achievement looked at purely as literature. I now come to speak of it in the historic sense, of its relations to the Bengali language and potency over the Bengali race. Of this it is not easy to suggest any image without speaking in superlatives. I had almost said in one place that he created the language, and if one couples his name with Madhu Sudan Dutt’s, the statement is hardly too daring. Before their advent the Bengali language, though very sweet and melodious, was an instrument with but one string to it. Except the old poet Bharatchandra, no supreme genius had taken it in hand; hence while prose hardly existed except in Baital Pachisi and some other tales about Vikramaditya, Bengali verse had very little to recommend it beyond a certain fatiguing sweetness. Virility, subtlety, scope, these were wanting to it. Then came Madhu Sudan and Bankim, and, like Terpander and Orpheus added fresh strings to the lyre. In Madhu Sudan’s hands that nerveless and feminine dialect became the large utterance of the early Gods, a tongue epic and Titanic, a tongue for the storms and whirlwinds to speak in: he caught and studied his diction from the echo and rumour of the sea. All the stormiest passions of man’s soul he expressed in gigantic language. We seem to hear Milton’s Satan speaking in every line he wrote. But in Bankim’s hands the Bengali language, before stammering and inarticulate, became a rich, musical and flexible organ vibrating to every human emotion and expressive of every beautiful or noble thought. I do not mean that there were no labourers in the field before Bankim and Madhu Sudan. The paths of the Gods are always prepared for them. Many daring minds were already at work, but they fell short of their high conception. Rammohan Ray, the great Vidyasagara, Okhay Kumar Dutt and the Bengali playwrights were all working bravely towards the same consummation. But Vidyasagara, though he had much in him of the scholar and critic, was nothing of an artist; Okhay Kumar’s audience ran only to the subscribers of a single magazine; and the literary originality of the rest was not equal to their audacity. None of them could transform and recreate with that sure and easy touch, which reveals the true maker of language.

Bankim moreover has this splendid distinction, that he more than anyone exalted Bengali from the status of a dialect to the majesty of a language. The immediate effect of English education had been to foster an undiscriminating love of things English and an unwise contempt for things Bengali. Among the rest the Bengali tongue was put by as an instrument hopelessly bad and unsatisfying; even Madhu Sudan in his youth neglected and forgot it. The strivings of Vidyasagara and Okhay Kumar Dutt were the strivings of a few far-sighted and patriotic men in a generation misled by false ideals. On that generation Madhu Sudan’s first great poems, Sharmishtha¹ and Tilottama, had a complex effect much of a piece with the sensation created by Marlowe’s Tamburlaine in Elizabethan England or Hugo’s Hernani in nineteenth century France. They took men’s imaginations by storm with their splendour, passion and mighty imagery; by creating the Bengali blank verse they freed poetry from the facilities and prettinesses of the old rhymed stanza; by their magnificencies² of style and emotion they brought new elements into Hindu literature, and they gave battle with their strange and fiery coloured music to the classic frigidity of the Sanscritists³. They first sounded the note of Romanticism which still governs our literature. They revealed too those magnificent possibilities, latent in every Sanscritic⁴ language, which only wait for the magic touch of original genius to open out their store; and they set flowing that perennial fountain of gracious and noble poetry which is doing so much to bring beauty and high feeling into our lives and to produce a race of Bengalis braver and better than we. But at the same time they had to overcome a vast opposition. Lauded with rapturous enthusiasm by the cultured, they were anathematised by the pedants. All the Pandits, all the Sanscritists⁵, all the fanatics of classicism, even the great Vidyasagara himself, then the intellectual dictator of Bengal, were startled out of their senses by these magnificent and mighty poems. Tilottama was a gauntlet thrown down by the Romantic school to the classical. Romanticism won: it was bound to win: it had on its side youth, fire, enthusiasm, the future, and the poems of an unexampled genius for its battle-cry. Tilottama had been the casus belli; that marvellous epic, the Meghnad-badh, was the coup de grâce. When Vidyasagara⁶ praised the Meghnad-badh as a supreme poem, the day of the Sanscritists⁷ was over. That cabal of Pandits which had shouted against Madhu Sudan, could only murmur weakly against Bankim; the conscience of the nation had passed out of their keeping. But still the victor’s audience was small and went little beyond the class that followed him into battle, the geniuses, the literary men, the women⁸, the cultured zamindars and those men of the stamp of Rajah Jyotindra Mohan Tagore, men of an extraordinary and original culture, who were then so common in Bengal, but are now almost obsolete. The great poet died with a limited audience and before the full consummation of his fame.

Bankim came into that heritage of peace which Madhu Sudan had earned. There is, indeed, a curious contrast between these two builders of the Bengali language, so alike in their mission, but in their fortunes so dissimilar. Both were equipped with enormous stores of reading, both were geniuses of a vast originality, both had creative power, a fine sense for beauty, and a gift for emotion and pathos: both made the same false start. But here all likeness between them stops. One was the king of prose, the other the king of poetry; and their lives were of a piece with their writings. Madhu Sudan’s is full of sound and passion, violence of heart, extravagance, intemperance, self-will, a life passing through grief, bitterness and anguish to a mournful and untimely doom. As we read the passage of that Titanic personality over a world too small for it, we seem to be listening again to the thunder-scene in Lear, or to some tragic piece out of Thucydides or Gibbon narrating the fall of majestic nations or the ruin of mighty kings. No sensitive man can read it without being shaken to the very heart. Even after his death Madhu Sudan’s evil star followed him. Though a great poet among the greatest, he is read nowhere outside Bengal and the Panjab⁹; and his name is not heard even in Bombay and Madras, provinces of his own native land. How different was it with Bankim, the genius of prose. His nature, with plenty of strength in it, was yet mild, calm and equable, clear and joyous, but not intemperate. Fortune’s favourite to whom every door opened without keys, his life had in it that sedate maturity and august quiet, which, according to Epicurus, is the true attitude of the Gods, and which the Gods only give to those mortals, who, like themselves, have seen life steadily and seen it whole. And if his last years were stained with suffering, yet he died in the fruition of his greatness, amid the mourning of a nation which he had done much to create and whose imagination he had filled with so many beautiful thoughts and so many tender, passionate or glorious images.

Bankim’s influence has been far-reaching and every day enlarges its bounds. What is its result? Perhaps it may very roughly be summed up thus. When a Mahratta or Gujerati has anything important to say, he says it in English; when a Bengali, he says it in Bengali. That is, I think, the fact which is most full of meaning for us in Bengal. It means besides other things less germane to literature, that, except in politics and journalism which is the handmaid of politics, English is being steadily driven out of the field. Soon it will only remain to weed it out of our conversation; and even to that wheel I am told that Babu Kali Prasunna Ghose has set his shoulder. However that may be, the works of this distinguished prose-writer are a remarkable proof of what I have just been saying. Not long ago anyone moving in that province of the mind which Babu Kali Prasunna has annexed, would have held it beneath the dignity of his subject to write in any medium but English. Work like Babu Kali Prasunna’s marks an important stage in the great revolution of sentiment which our literary class has set going, the revolution of sentiment which promises to make the Bengalis a nation.