"Banalata Sen" was composed by Jibanananda Das in 1934 when he was living in Calcutta, at a time in his life when he had lost his job of Assistant Lecturer at the City College, Kolkata. The relevant manuscript was discovered and labelled Book-8 while preserved in the National Library of Calcutta; the poem occurs on page 24 of this manuscript. It was first published in the December 1935 issue of the poetry magazine Kavita, edited by poet Buddhadeva Bose. It is also the first poem of his third collection of poetry published in 1942 under the title Banalata Sen. Earlier, the lyric was collected in Modern Bengali Poetry, jointly edited by Abu Sayeed Ayub and Hirendranath Mukhopadhyaya, published in 1939. Although popularly regarded a romantic lyric, the poet’s historical sense of human existence is unmistakably the underlying essence.
The poem consists of three stanzas each comprising six lines composed in the Bengali metrical pattern Aksherbritta or Poyar. The title of this lyric poem, Banalata Sen, is a female character referred to by name in the last line of each of its three stanzas. The poem is self-narrated by an unnamed traveller. Banalata Sen is the name of a woman whom the poem describes as being from the town of Natore, a town in Bangladesh.
In the first stanza the traveller describes seeing her after having wandered upon the earth over thousands of years. The narrator says that it has been a thousand years since he started trekking the earth. He describes it as a long journey in night’s darkness from the Ceylonese waters to the Malayan seas. From this geographical expanse he goes on to the extent of time, saying that, in the course of his wanderings he has traversed the fading world of Vimbisara and Asoka. He adds that he went further, to the forgotten city of Vidarva. Finally he speaks of himself as now being a weary soul although the ocean of life around continues to foam and adds that in the meanwhile he had a few soothing moments with Natore’s Banalata Sen.
In the second stanza the traveller describes Banalata Sen. First he compares her hair with the dark night of long-lost Vidisha. Then he compares her face with the fine works of Sravasti. Then the traveller-narrator recollects that when he saw her in the shadow it was like a cinnamon island lined with greenish grass spotted by a mariner whose ship was wrecked in a faraway sea. In the first encounter Banalata Sen, raising her eyes of profound refuge,[clarification needed] inquires of him, “Where had you been lost all these days?”
In the third stanza the traveller returns from geography and history and recalls Banalata Sen with emotion. He says that when at the day’s end evening crawls in like the sound of dews and the kite shakes off the smell of sun from its wings; and, then, when all colours take leave from the world except for the flicker of the hovering fireflies as all birds come home and rivers retire, a time comes when all transactions of the day are done. Then nothing remains but darkness when the traveller would like to sit face-to-face with Banalata Sen and share with her his ballad of stories.
The poet-narrator proceeds by alluding to different mythological and ancient persons, places and events. He describes having wandered from the Ceylonese ocean to the seas of Malaya, having travelled in Ancient India in the times of Emperor Bimbisara, and centuries later, in the times of Ashoka the Great. He describes having wandered in darkness in the ancient cities of Vidarbha and Vidisha, yet, for his tired soul, the only moment of peace in any age was with Banalata Sen of Natore.[2]
The lyric Banalata Sen is the most representative of the essence of Jibanananda's poetry and exemplifies his use of imagery.[3] The weary traveller is an interactive motif in his poetry.[4] The poem itself uses four key images comprehensively, namely the darkness, flowing water, passage of time, and a woman.[3] Jibanananda progressively develops these same four images throughout the poem, metamorphosing these from remoteness to intimacy, dimness to distinction and from separation to union.[3]
Often Jibanananda's Banalata Sen has been compared with "To Helen" by Edgar Allan Poe. In a certain sense, Banalata Sen is akin to "To Helen". However, while Helen's beauty is the central theme in Poe's work, for Jibanananda, Banalata Sen is merely a framework to hold his anxiety for apparently endless human existence on earth since primordial time. She has occurred with various names like Shaymoli, Sobita, Suronjana, etc. However, one can see that while Poe has ended by appreciating the beauty of a woman, Jibanananda has gone far deeper and on the landscape of a woman's beauty has painted the expanse of human existence both in terms of time and topography, drawing attention to the ephemeral existence of human beings. Unlike the poetry of many others, Jibanananda's poetry is the result of filtered interaction between emotions and intellect. In the endless tumultuous continuum of ‘time’ Banalata Sen is a dot of quietude and tranquillity. Banalata Sen is a feminine emblem that Jibanananda created in his virtual world and faced on many occasions with wonder and questions as embodied in different poems. In sum, although popularly regarded a romantic lyric, the poet’s historical sense of human existence is unmistakably the underlying essence.
[Link- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banalata_Sen]
