On Buddhadeva Bose’s experiments with English

Bengali poet and novelist Buddhadeva Bose wrote a series of dazzling essays in English, on subjects ranging from art and literature to cinema and food. Vineet Gill writes about Bose’s English prose.

writer” in India. Nazrul Islam’s output suffered from a “thinness of thought-substance”. Subhas Mukhopadhyay “quite succeeded in asphyxiating the poet in him with the gas of political propaganda”.

These figures were Bose’s contemporaries or near-contemporaries. of the mentor’s work, thus setting the scene, before letting fly and giving free rein to every patricidal impulse. By contrast, Bose’s writings on Tagore are remarkable for their generosity. They can be seen as a tribute from one writer to another—a rare gift in a literary culture that celebrates “hatchet jobs” and “takedowns”. Some of the most moving passages in this book are to be found in the essay entitled “The Last Days of Rabindranath”. It is an account of Bose’s valedictory visit to Santiniketan, where the great poet lay dying. (Shambhu Shaha’s beautiful photographs of Tagore in his final years, reprinted here, add to this chapter’s poignancy.)

Bose is extraordinarily sensitive towards his subject, so that sometimes even the blemishes are embraced as part of the package. (“A Tagore freed from his faults would not be Tagore at all…”; Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago “has all the faults and glories of a novel written by a poet”.) The phrase he used in relation to Ezra Pound, “a world-faring mind”, applies to Bose as well. An Acre… gives us a fair portrait of that mind.