Until his death in 1941, Tagore towered over the rest of his
contemporaries. Awarded the Nobel prize for literature, he has left
a lasting imprint. It is a commentary on the vitality of Bengali
literature that even the presence of a Tagore did not stultify the
growth of talent in others

At the turn of the twentieth century, Bengali had already emerged as
a remarkably versatile medium of expression, rich in vocabulary and
capable of articulating the most complex logical concepts and
structures as well as delicately chiselled literary metaphors. This
was mainly the result of its evolution during the nineteenth century
when it was used in debates that accompanied social and religious
reform movements, literary activity spurred by the nineteenth
century Bengali Renaissance and by a strident vernacular Press.
Bengal's distinguished literary pantheon included people like
Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, D.L. Roy,
Kaliprasanna Sinha, Dinabandhu Mitra, Girish Chandra Ghose,
Nabinchandra Sen, Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay and that emperor of the
muses, Rabindranath Tagore.

All of them were from the ranks of the Bhadralok. There was
considerable overlap between the latter and the middle class; yet,
the two were not identical. In his Elite Conflict in a Plural
Society: Twentieth Century Bengal, J.H. Broomfield defines them as a
socially privileged and consciously superior group, economically
dependent on landed rents and professional and clerical employment.
The Bhadralok dominated the debates and movements that profoundly
changed Bengal's cultural and intellectual life in the nineteenth
century.

Economically, increasingly weakened by falling incomes from land,
thanks to fragmentation and sub-infeudation, and extremely tardy
expansion of clerical jobs and berths in the professions compared to
the growing demand, they continue to dominate politics in West
Bengal in India and Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) though not
to the extent they did earlier. They also retain their hegemony in
the intellectual and cultural fields.

The evolution of Bengali language and literature in the current
century mainly reflects the Bhadralok's response to a number of
historical events and processes - the agitation against Lord
Curzon's partitioning of Bengal leading to the decision's rescission
(1905-12), freedom movement, left-wing protest (socialist realism),
communal harmony, war and its consequences, industrialization,
urbanization and anomie. The forms of literary expression included
novels, short stories, poetry, plays, musical dance dramas, essays,
belle's lettres, travelogues, and satirical and humorous writings.

Until his death in 1941, Rabindranath Tagore towered over the rest
of his contemporaries. Along with Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838-
94), he had taken the Bengali novel and critical writing to new
heights of excellence in the nineteenth century. Awarded Nobel prize
for literature in 1913, he has left a lasting imprint on poetry,
short stories, plays, and musical dance dramas.

It is a commentary on the vitality of Bengali literature that even
the presence of a Tagore did not stultify the growth of talent in
others. Thus one had in the first half of the twentieth century
outstanding novelists like Mir Musharraf Hussein (also a
playwright), Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan
Bandyopadhyay. Balaichand Mukhopadhyay, Manik Bandyopadhyay and
poets like Satyendranath Datta, Mohitlal Majumdar, Kazi Nazrul
Islam, Premen Mitra, Sudhindranath Datta, Jibanananda Das, Bishnu
Dey and Buddhadev Basu.

All of them had their distinct personal styles and some, like
Sudhindranath Datta and Buddhadev Basu, made a special - and
successful - effort to break out of the influence of Tagore. Kazi
Nazrul Islam's poetry could be thundersqualls of rebellion as well
as celebration of tender romance.

Sukanta Bhattacharyya, who died in 1947 at the age of 21, was
another rebel poet who promised much. Manik Bandyopadhyay depicted
the commoners' lives in all their harshness and also the strong
survival instinct of those trapped in it. Annadashankar Ray created
a stir with the publication of his personalized travelogue, Pathe
Prabashe.

The second half of the 20th century has witnessed a seminal event in
the emergence of Bangladesh as a sovereign state with Bengali as its
official language. The genesis of the freedom movement lay in the
language movement of the 1950s, which had thrown up two important
institutions: the Bangla Akademi and the Bangla Prabartan Samiti
(Organization for the introduction of Bengali).

The main work of the former related to Bengali language and
literature ; the latter concerned itself with the use of Bengali at
all levels of official and non-official work. Not surprisingly,
Bangladesh has witnessed a renaissance of Bengali literature. Poets
like Shamsur Rahman and Al-Mahmud; novelists like Selina Hossain,
Rizia Rahman, Shaukat Ali, Shaukat Osman and Syed Walliullah; short-
story writers like Hasan Azizul Huq and Mahmudul Huq, have given
Bengali literature a new depth in one of its traditional
geographical cradles.

The more prominent novelists in West Bengal have been Tarashankar
Bandyopadhyay, Narayan Gangopadhyay, Subodh Ghosh, Ramapada
Chaudhury, Bimal Kar, Samaresh Basu and Shyamal Gangopadhyay. Sunil
Gangopadhyay has declined as a novelist after some fine work but
continues to write good poetry.

There have been a number of competent playwrights Badal Sircar,
Bibhas Chakravarti, Bijan Bhattacharyya, to name a few but no
Sophocles, Aristophanes, Euripedes or Aeschylus. A major development
has been the emergence of literature that is consciously left and
revolutionary, focusing primarily on the struggle of the rural and
urban disprivileged. Mahasweta Devi is its most celebrated proponent
and Prafulla Ray is a highly talented novelist.

An equally significant trend has been existentialist writing whose
protagonists include Buddhadev Basu, Gourkishore Ghosh, Shirshendu
Mukhopadhyay and Sandipan Chattopadhyay. They mainly reflect
atomized urban life and the growing pressures of external forces on
human relationships at a time of anomie.

There have been a number of well-known women litterateurs since the
nineteenth century: Swarnakumari Devi, Mankumari Basu, Sita Devi and
Shanta Devi, Jyotirmoyee Devi, Sukhalata Rao, Shailabala Ghoshjaya,
Leela Majumdar, Ashapurna Debi, Pratibha Basu, Radharani Devi. A
feminist movement, however, is a recent development and one sees its
strong imprint on the writings, among others, of Nabaneeta Dev-Sen
and Suchitra Bhattacharyya.

The twentieth century has also seen the emergence of children's
literature as a distinct genre. The trail-blazer was Upendrakishore
Raychaudhuri, who was also an outstanding painter, musician,
violinist, and printing technologist. Equally famous was his son
Sukumar Ray, father of the noted film director, Satyajit Ray, who
was also celebrated for his apparently nonsense verses which had the
deepest of double meanings. Sukumar's sisters, Sukhalata Rao and
Punyalata Chakravarti, also made significant contributions.

Throughout all this, Bengali has continued to evolve as a language.
It owed the rebirth of its prose in the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries to the work done at the Bengali Department of
Fort William College where every European, joining the services of
the East India Company, learnt oriental languages, and the efforts
of Christian missionaries like N. Halhed and William Carey and the
great scholar, educationist and social reformer, Ishwarchandra
Vidyasagar. Writers like Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Haraprasad
Shastri, Pyarichand Mitra, and, later, Tagore, also made significant
contributions.

For a long time, however, the language of literature and journalism
was Sadhu or chaste Bengali as opposed to Chalit or colloquial. Over
the decades, however, the dividing line between the two grew
increasingly thin. Currently, the main medium of literary expression
and news reporting in journalism is what is known as Standard
Colloquial Bengali or Manya Chalit Bhasha which has its own distinct
characteristics in both West Bengal and Bangladesh.

Despite the remarkable achievements of Bengali language and
literature, doubts about the future assail writers and critics at
the threshold of the third millennium. Will both survive or perish
because of television which, many feel, is sealing the doom of the
written culture.