Shamsur Rahman : Poet, poetry and the people

artwork by t h lisa

In his death, he came closest to the people who loved him for making their simple thoughts extraordinary through the magic chemistry of poetry. In life, and more so in death, he was their poet; for those who had read him as well as for those who chose simply to admire him. There may be greater poets but few so close to an entire nation's identity. It's in this description that Shamsur Rahman joins the company of immortals.

Shamsur Rahman belonged to the poets who came to the forefront in the 1950s, triggered by the Bhasha Andolon of 1952. Most of them were bound between the covers of possibly the most significant literary anthology of the Bengali people to commemorate the battle of 21st February 1952---, published the following year. Edited by his school friend and poet Hasan Hafizur Rahman, this class of '52 contributed their verses, written with raised fists signaling the birth of a new history.

Shamsur Rahman, Alauddin Al-Azad, Obaidullah Khan, and many others were there. Not very many times has politics been served by a greater set of cultural and literary luminaries.

"First song before the second death"
As a new flag was being waved within rebellious Bengali souls chafing under Pakistan rule, many turned to political activism but Shamsur Rahman kept his distance. He was not removed from politics but neither was he a political organizer as many other writers were. He was primarily a poet in whom politics, love and the awakening of an existential consciousness lived together. In his first collection of poems,"Prothom Gaan Ditio Mrittur Agey" (First Song Before the Second Death) he explored themes of love and death mixing Greek and Indian myths with equal ease. Western imagery and Modernist ideas are deeply embedded in him. Telemechus and Odyssey became recurring motifs, including his 1970 collection, "Niraloke Dibborath", his most formal set of poems,

Shamsur Rahman was both urban and urbane, not apologetic about his love for city lights. He was anchored in his land but not in the village. He wrote about the fading older parts of Dhaka and its bustling energy, and steered clear of the rustic images that illuminate and glorify rural Bengal in the poems of Al-Mahmud, Obaidullah Khan and others.

It helped him reach hitherto unscaled heights in Bangladesh poetry as provincial Dhakamirroring the poet's work grew into a ramshackle, half-crazed city. In his youth the sound of horse hooves were louder than the horns of motorcars but that soon gave way to a messy urban din. He captured this transition, the product of deliberate state investment to generate a middle class between 1958 and 1968, with an élan and honesty that became his most arresting set of poems.

In his second poetry collection,"Roudro Korotitey", Shamsur Rahman may well have peaked. Neither the poet himself nor his contemporaries may have ever matched the genius glowing in that slim volume. Here he dwelt on the angst of a "meaningless life" with as much ease as he mocked dictators- "Icchey tar icchey"- or described the pleasures of domesticity. In a long poem titled "Dukkho" he described "sadness" through a series of sequenced images. He found "sadness" in rolled trousers to newspaper headlines to a child's book of rhymes and pornography and so on, finding eloquence in everyday imageries. This style was personal and populist at once, and connected him to readers easily. This style, his 'signature' voice, was to be his ever after, which, along with his "Swadhinata" poems made him the public poet after 1971.

The later poems may not be his best but were the most adored by a people who identified with the clear and robust voice speaking about their own preoccupations.

"What are you searching here so desperately, Shamsur Rahman?"
The private poet and his personal poems, often much better crafted, were therefore eclipsed and have suffered from a degree of obscurity. A good example is the long-ago-published (a pre-1970 collection titled "Biddhosto Nilima" - The Shattered Sky) where a collection of 14-liners explored the private universe of this now most public of poets. In its introduction he wrote, addressing himself, "What are you searching here so desperately Shamsur Rahman?/ saying this someone departs into the deserted garden./ I scream "please answer me"/ but there is only the silence of the vanished/ The blue sky that I have loved all my life/ is swiftly crumbling and falling apart/ like the rotting flesh of a festering wound."

The above lines were written by a poet almost unknown to his various readers. Here his personal agony rules over other emotions and obligations and he can step back to deal with his personal demons. In this collection he takes on the many voices of his private self, such as that of a pilot who wants to fly away from a terra firma he abhors. Another is titled "autobiographical" where he confesses to his incurable loneliness.

There are a host of memories here, bringing the perennial lamp post lighter, the dying jockey and such other souls into his poems. They are brothers of his long lost, poetically famous creation "Bacchu", the one person who can move him from "apni" to "tumi" to "tui" through a hierarchy of intimacy like no one else can. They are denizens of a beloved and lost past who emerge like a chorus of actors talking about love, fate and tragedy, his own and that of his world. Such poems don't lend cheer to an angry procession but speak of the poet and his internality, the essential intimacy between himself and his poetry. Around this time he also wrote "Asader Shirt" or "Safed Punjabi" (on Maulana Bhashani) and this was the poet's other self. It was more noticed, read and defined him to a public that needed such a poet at that fateful moment of their history. It seems the definitive Shamsur Rahman was already being constructed by his readers and perhaps even the poet was not in control of this process. History was dictating his literary persona.

Something was lost even as something was gained in this transaction. One wonders how the poet felt about this.

The poet of Swadhinata and his second birth
1971 was the most momentous year of our lives and even more so in the case of Shamsur Rahman, who spent that particular year of exile in his own land. The poem "Swadhinata Tumi" became the literary anthem of an entire, occupied, and subsequently liberated, people. It competed with, and overwhelmed, all other poems that Bangladeshis recite to become the most treasured and popular piece of literature of the majority of Bengalis.

If its literary ancestor was his private poem "Dukkho" -- elegiac, romantic, ironic -- "Swahdinata" was written with broader strokes, spontaneous and direct. It also heralded the second or ditio Shamsur Rahman, who would set aside literary explorations and became the voice of a populace imprisoned in their own land.

In this second birth after 1971, the poet was identified more with gatherings and discussions where rebellions were declared more than addas where literature was spawned. Of his contemporaries, many were more political and some were even activists, but they would ultimately become part of the crowd while Shamsur Rahman represented it. If he voiced the middle class angst of the individual when he began his journey as a poet, he ended up as the poet who represented the collective self of his people. What he said mattered because that's what everyone wanted to say.

No litterateur ever got so close to the crowd and yet the poet kept a distance of sorts. During the anti-Ershad movement he peaked in this persona and become the literary lion, and though many voices joined in it was his voice that exemplified the collective roar. Where the crowd ended and the poet began became blurred. The poems became the crowd.

His private and personal thoughts receded as his public identity became almost completely dominating. He was the spirit of opposition to autocracy, Islamic fundamentalism, corruption, power politics and all the other ills that have befallen the populace.

He too was helpless in many ways but he fought back and the attack by a group of fanatics on him became a symbolic attack on a people. No politician can claim this representation but Shamsur Rahman could because he was the embodiment of something both strange and sublime. He could usually describe what people felt better than they could. In the end he became the people, moving from representation to personification.

A very public death, the final hurrah
In his final days, the relentless media light on him, which denied him all privacy from the day he was taken to the hospital, was inevitable. The most intimate agonies of the poet and his family were beamed to millions hooked to cable TV. Shamsur Rahman was a public poet and now he could not have the luxury of a private death. The public that had sought him out now claimed him fully and the millions who grieved for him claimed that right too. He triumphed completely in death and became part of those who read him and also those who remember him without knowing his poems. He had gone beyond the world of poets and into the crowd. At his funeral, people came from all strata of life and every corner of the land to participate in this most genuine of mourning rituals and funeral in our history, saluting their own poet, their own struggle, their own song.

Many years ago he had written, addressing the powerful as a poet of the denied: "I shall not know to whom this skull belongs/ whether to a clown or a king and it doesn't matter/ but I shall know that I will remain the eternal witness of your cowardice." (Roudro Korotitey).

He had not only become the trusted witness of his time but its chorused voice of protest as well.

Shamsur Rahman lies in peace, triumphant.

Afsan Chowdhury writes for various South Asian newspapers and magazines.