Banalata Sen

However, Banalata Sen of Natore, a tiny town in the Rajshahi area of what was then Bengal, has become an emblem of feminine mystery as well as beauty and love.

"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.

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.

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.

Then the traveller-narrator recollects that when he saw her in the shadow it was like a mariner whose ship was wrecked in a faraway sea spotting verdant land among barren islands.

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.

Jibanananda progressively develops these same four images throughout the poem, metamorphosing these from remoteness to intimacy, dimness to distinction and from separation to union.

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.

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.

They include Martin Kirkman, one with the initials S.D., Puroshuttam Das together with Shamosri Das, P. Lal, Mary Lago in collaboration with Tarun Gupta, Pritish Nandy, Chidananda Dasgupta, Ananda Lal, Clinton B. Seely, Sukanta Chaudhuri, Anupam Banerjee, Hayat Saif, Fakrul Alam, Anjana Basu, Joe Winter, Ron.

D K Banergjee, Joydeep Bhattacharya, Arun Sarker, Amitabha Mukerjee, Santanu Sinha Chaudhuri, Shamik Bose and Tanmoy Sanyal.

The first line haajaar bochor dhore aami path haatitechi prithibir pothey is in present perfect continuous tense.

A recent translation by Arun Sarkar again considers present perfect continuous tense : For thousand years I have been walking all over the world.

Almost unknown in literary circles, Sushil Kumar Jha has also attempted to translate Banalata Sen into Hindi retaining the essence of the poem in its true spirit.