The Bengali Book of English Verse/Foreword
Foreword.
The following anthology has its greatest interest in being a self-recording evidence of the earliest response that Bengal gave to the touch of the West. I think we can safely assert that she is the only country in the Orient which has shown any distinct indication of being thrilled by the voice of Europe as it came to her through literature. We are not concerned with a critical estimate of Bengal's earliest literary adventures in the perilous fields of a foreign tongue. But the important fact is this, that while there are other eastern countries captivated by the sight of the immense power and prosperity which Europe presented to us, Bengal has been stirred by the force of new ideas breaking upon her from the western horizon. One of its earliest effects upon our students was to rouse them into an aggressive antagonism against all orthodox conventions, irrespective of their merits. It was a sudden self-assertion of life after its repression for ages. This shock, which roused Bengal, mainly came through literature, and a great part of her energy followed the same channel of literature for its expression.
The most memorable instance of the working of ideas in Bengal in the time of her early contact of mind with Europe, has been Rammohan Roy's message of life to India,—a life centering in the spiritual idea of the all-pervading oneness of God, as inculcated in the Upanishads, and comprehending in its circumference all varieties of human activities from the moral down to the political. It was a call to move and fully to live, not from a blind love of movement, but as directed by an inner guidance coming from the heart of India's own wisdom.
Though the above instance does not directly touch the literary side of our life, yet I cite it to show that it was through her sensitiveness to ideas that Bengal has been deeply moved from the time of her first acquaintance with Europe. And ever since, the same formation of ideals has been going on through various stages of action and reaction. Those who have the talent and love for constructive work can show their productions in a palpable form and with a rapidity of results. But Idea works in the depth of life, bringing about fundamental changes in the very soil and seeds, and sprouts forth from the unseen in its own time in a living creative form. Its early energies are engaged and seem wasted in work of destruction, in explosions of discontent, in constant vacillation in choice, thus easily lending itself to the charge of volatility and indecision. But life has its side which is vigorously destructive and full of uncertainties and contradictions. The signs of perturbation so evident in Bengal, in her social and religious life, in her intellectual adjustments, only show that creative ideas are at work in the centre of her being. I trust I do not merely prove my patriotic bias by saying that, of all countries in the East, Bengal is most earnestly engaged in the exploration of life's ideal. All the great personalities she has produced in the modern time have presented to us according to their light, some ideal solution of life's inner problem. We are fully aware that this is not all that humanity requires, that there are other questions more immediately importunate which have to be answered if we must live; and there are signs that we are beginning actively to recognise this important fact. But all the same we must confess, that whatever it may have cost us, we have dealt more with the ideas that move our soul by kindling our imagination than with acquiring and arranging materials to help us in our struggle for existence. This has led to an active conflict in Bengal between the Old and the New, a constant shifting of her outlooks upon life and an unrest owing to her groping for something positive, by which she can win for good her own true place in the world.
Our present age of renaissance began its career with an exaggerated faith in the foreign and the external, to find out at last that life is a process of constant self-unfolding, whose impulse comes from the centre of its own being. In Bengal we meet with all the different stages of this development, and therefore, more than in other parts of India, it is here that love of imitation of the West runs to excess, pompously proud of its tawdriness and incongruity. On the other hand in Bengal have been originated all the recent movements for the seeking of truth that is our national heritage. The West, which at first drew us on to itself, has forcibly flung us back upon an intense consciousness of our personality. The breath of inspiration, coming from the West, has kindled the original spark in us into a flame that lay smothered in the ashes of dead habits and rigidity of traditional forms. This has been illustrated by the course our literature has taken, almost completely abandoning its earlier foreign bed, finding its natural channel in the mother tongue. The following collection of English poems written by Bengali authors also proves it, in which the earlier writings are timorously imitative, while the later ones boldly burn with their own fire, daring to challenge time's judgment with their claim of immortality. I believe foreign readers, while reading this book, will find much to think of in the fact that Bengal's response through literature to the call of the West is something unique in the history of the modern East. It has a future, for it is quickened with life, and it carries within itself a hope that one day it will become a great channel for communication of ideas between the adventurous West and the East of the immemorial tranquillity.