BINOY MAJUMDAR : UNSUNG POET OF BENGAL

Binoy Majumdar

Binoy Majumdar. Source : Pinterest

In Bengali contemporary literature, the influence of Binoy Majumdar is unparallel. He is one of the most prominent poets of Bengali Modern Poetry. When a group of young radical poets, began to evoke a new voice to poems during the tumultuous times of the sixties and seventies, a new style of poetry was birthed in Bengal, which is full of angst. Binoy’s poems are not an exception to the time, but his words and style are clearly much more different from his other more politically active comrades.

After studying for a few years in Presidency College, he moved to Shibpur to earn a degree in engineering. He even wrote three books on mathematics, but they remained unpublished, although the drafts are available in the National Library. His mathematically sharp brain was an inseparable part of his poetry. The molding of science with poetry is a rare instance in world literature. Binoy successfully did this when he wrote a verse such as:

“If you never come again. Never blow through this steaming regions/ Like cooling drifts of the upper air, even the absence is an encounter.”

Binoy’s mind made him think about desires, love and suffering in terms of angles of geometry, or enigmatic algebra.His first book, “Nakshatrer Aloye” was published in the year 1958. After that his most popular and groundbreaking collection of poetry , “Fire Esho, Chaka” was published in 1962. It was first published under the name of “Gayatrike” but then Binoy changed the name and added a few more poems to this anthology.

“Fire Esho, Chaka” was a collection of seventy-seven poems and each poem had a rhythmic language which was groundbreaking at that time. Binoy composed the verses in his favorite “Payar” (A Bengali poetic meter) meter, and  wrote short poems. The verses, walked the lanes of melancholia, desires, and pangs of separation. One of his verses read :

“I walk back three paces then hit / by the revelation swing forward / your thought only seemingly far out of the reach of mind / like a comet periodically returns”.

Love and separation are the major themes in Binoy’s poetry, but the theme of separation intensified as time passed by. it can be seen in verses like “Starting from experience I’ve slowly known you / Like news of the colorless sky.” The presence of a lover, more specifically a failed lover is predominant in Binoy’s poems. Like the lonely lover, torn in his own mind due to separation from the beloved. Binoy  had taken self-imprisonment in an obscure part of West Bengal. His mental health started to deteriorate when he was writing “Fire Esho, Chaka.” He was admitted to the hospital and had to receive electric shock therapy. Although Binoy wrote poems even after that, his mental health never fully recovered.

Binoy’s poems always tell the brilliance of a lonely lover who never could love the beloved and his desires and passion, found words that created beautiful imagery in his poems.