Saliencies of Emerging Sounds: Rajbanshi Poetry and the
Idioms of Identity





The Rajbanshis as a nation have been long engaged in a search for a workable historical address informed by their shared emotional legacies. They betray a deep urge to emerge, imagined or otherwise, as a nation across the geo political boundaries that had divided their cultural territory. This seems, to put in a term used by Benedict Anderson, a ‘historically ordained’ enterprise of a nation. Anderson locates three temporal junctures of nation’s ‘historically ordained’ rise. One such juncture is when a particular language gains privileged access to ontological truth and attains an inseparable linkage to this. There is a second juncture: when society evolves into a naturally organised body around or under a hierarchically superior power centre (like that of a monarch who is supposed to have obtained the authority to rule from a shared cosmological disposition reflecting the essential human loyalties for the hierarchical and the centripetal). There is a third occasion, mentions Anderson, when nations rise- that is at the time when conception of temporality is achieved and cosmology and history become indistinguishable (italics mine) from each other, the juncture when the origin of man and the world become essentially identical (Anderson, 1991, 36).

The Rajbanshi consciousness arrogates itself through an experiential geo political contingency that elicit meaning to their everyday ‘fatalities of existence’. The Rajbanshi consciousness is embedded with a strong awareness of a disembodied cosmology and history that used to govern their communal universe of meaning and sense of space. The distillation of this uneasy awareness keeps haunting the body of the texts that form the tangible contours of the sounds in the emerging narrative of Rajbanshi poetry:


King’s canopy crumbled
Washing away river’s rules
……………………………..
Yet it hardly pleases your heart:
Old folks, ancient lores
The heart had its own say:
“The days of the king had a glorious sway”

We only had the wild roots for food
Yet we had Bhawaiya to sing

(‘Phoolti Abo’s Tales’, Tr. Jyotirmoy Prodhani))


The Rajbanshis , living intimately with their folkways, found adequate expressions in the rich spool of the Rajbanshi folk narrative. But their contingent encounter with the reality beyond their bucolic familiarity and the settled landscape of the memories of their history impel them to invent alternative sites and tools of expressions compatible to organise the anarchic hinterland of their present mind in formal linguistic articulations. Poetry is born out of an imperative to relocate their social self for they are alert to the processes of a political and a cultural displacement or, critic and translator Pradip Acharya puts it, poetry is born out of a ‘plurality of pain’:

I beat the drum and it
Blows like glass
In search of diverse claims
The inkpot is veiled
I feel I know it
But I don’t

I would rather ask
Who are you
The whole realm is the clamour crows
(‘It Shocks’, Hiralal Das, Tr. Pradip Acharya)

Chronologically the beginning of modern Rajbanshi Poetry has an old history. It dates back to the early twentieth century with the pioneers like Rai Saheb Panchanan Burma whose collection of poems, Dangdhari Mao (Menacing Mother), considered one of the first published anthologies of, what we can call, ‘Modern Rajbanshi Poetry’. This birth of modern Rajbanshi poetry seemed to have been a palpable linguistic manifestation of a deep sense of agony in sharp contrast to the dominant mood of romantic ease and mystic melancholy of their folk songs. Rajbanshi poems betray a perpetual sense of anger and a helpless nostalgia for a seemingly lost horizon that used to nestle their myths and lore. They relocate themselves as helpless onlookers of the processes that have mutilated the very references of understanding their own self, which they so confidently used to refer to as the repository of their community identity and consciousness. The resigning of a clueless nation to this fate makes the alert members of the community livid. Rai Saheb Panchanan Burma’’s Dangdhari Mao is an enraged mother, restless at the apparent inertia of the able bodied male folk when their soul is symbolically molested:

The scream startled my menacing mother
………………………….
Her scream clamour from earth to sky
………………….
The men folk just gaze and are shocked

And menacing my mother shouts her anger
And rages beyond brandishing the pestle

(Menacing Mother, Rai Saheb Panchanan Burma, Tr. Pradip Acharya)


Application of a community language in formal forms like poetry is a remarkably formidable project, for the Rajbanshi language had remained a living linguistic heritage outside the ambit of any official patronage in the post independent Indian context. This language seemed to have been without any official warrant for its manifestation in solemn formal discourses. Despite the current linguistic protocol, most scholastic investigators had ticked it off as a dialect. Some called it a sub-dialect of Assamese and Bengali by the scholars of the respective language groups. Prof. Suniti Kr. Chatterjee, Dr. Sukumar Sen, Dr. Upen Goswami in Bengal and the scholastic icons like Dr. Banikanta Kakati in Assam were the major champions to have identified Rajbanshi language as a dialect/ sub dialect of Bengali and Assamese respectively. There is a parallel school belonging to the scholars of relatively less scholarly eminence who claimed Rajbanshi as a sovereign language. This school of thought includes scholars like Khan Choudhury Amanatullah (author of Coochbeharer Itihas), Rai Saheb Panchanan Burma, Gauri Nath Shastri, Upendranath Burman, and more recently this school has found critical support in Dr. Girija Shankar Ray, Dr. Dwijendra Nath Bhakat, Dr Ramendranath Adhikary, Dr. Girindranath Roy et al. Despite being a language yet to obtain constitutional recognition or become a part of curriculum, the speakers of the language opted for urgent articulations in their own idioms rather than train their voice to express in acquired languages.
There was an early instance of this endeavour of locating the self beyond folk narratives in the works of Ratikanta Das of Itakumari village in Rongpur district of present Bangladesh. He had published a collection of Rajbanshi poems during the reign of Warren Hastings. Nevertheless, there has been a steady growth of Rajbanshi publications from the late fifties onwards. In the sixties, Pathik had published a collection of Rajbanshi Bhawaiya songs; in the sixties Saat Bhaiya (Seven Brothers) had brought out an anthology of poems by seven poets. In the seventies Tushar Bandopadhyay had published an anthology of Rajbanshi poems – Aloloi Jhololoi Moderer Phool. Meanwhile several collections of poems were being published by individual poets. Perhaps the first most significant anthology of Rajbanshi poems was the Rajbanshi Kavita Sankalan (1996), co-edited by Jatin Burma and Vinod Bihari Burma of Toofanganj in Coochbehar District of North Bengal, which included fifty poets writing in Rajbanshi language in Assam and Bengal.

The growing emergence of printed literature in Rajbanshi provides a steady foundation to the emerging awareness of the Rajbanshi community as a nation with the idioms its own, peaking of its own reality. This also has become an exercise of rediscovering the settled landscape of their native histories which was erased by the ruling forces that control the apparatuses of culture and education. Without a space in history they are a veritable homeless nation. The poems betray a sympathetic camaraderie between a defeated generation and their progenies, where the former makes poignant efforts to retrieve the lost country by exhorting their successors to claim the sites of their belongingness:


Hey son, come kido
Come and hear this, won’t you?
The gazing land gone forlorn
The garden and the fields
The home fronting east

Tied to, attached
The bonny lass with glowing skin

They are all yours, son.

(‘River of Wishes’, Ramakanta Ray. Tr. Pradip Acharya)


Their endeavours to address their realities in the form of poetic narrative enables them to expand the ‘horizontal proliferation’ of their experiential realities. The ritual of reinventing their language in formal poetry in prints assures the speakers of the language, who share as much historicity and common cultural conjectures, begin a process of regaining a sense of self dignity which was obstreperously mutilated by the strategic disruptions of the political paradigms in force. The Rajbanshi poem is not a militant overture despite being abidingly aware of being subjected to a process of forced displacement. This is rather a lonely lyric seeking the warmth of the lost terrains and its intimate shibboleths:

Someone get my bosom a patch of green
My importunate mother cries.
She wails and asks:
“Where is my youth vanished?
Where is my village gone?
Where is the rivers
The boats bobbed so in the winds?”

(‘A Patch of Green’. Salil Panchanan. Tr. Pradip Acharya)

The historical misfortune of the Rajbanshis to have been fragmented into multiple national identities particularly because of forceful annexation of Coochbehar with Bengal through the shrewd political moves by the erstwhile Bengal Chief Minister, Dr. Bidhan Ch. Ray, and the subsequent demolition of the Princely State of Coochbehar, which used to be the centre of the Rajbanshi history and culture, made this, in retrospect, an imperative for the Rajbanshis to get engaged in the enterprise of social and cultural re-signification. Political commentators like Naren Das, Lalit ch. Barman and others have pointed out how the acceptance of about 16 lakh Bangladeshi refugees in 1949 by the Bengal government and their accommodation in Bengal was one of the vital factors behind the jealous campaign of both the Bengal Congress party and the opposition (Dr. Bidhan ch. Ray of Congress and Sarat ch. Bose of the opposition party et al) to annexe Coochbehar with Bengal thwarting attempts of both keeping Cochbehar a separate state or its merger with Assam with which Coochbehar had historical and cultural proximity. The annexation of Coochbehar by 1950 was followed by the imposition of the state language of Bengal upon the people and the quick removal of all historical references of the Rajbanshis from the official history texts of the state coupled with the disfiguration of historical and cultural sites of the place and people that were the living testimonies of a past of the community beyond the claims of newly adopted official textbooks. With the advent of the current political regime the state went for forced confiscation of land right of the Rajbanshis through the large scale conversion of their land into ceiling land as part of the dubious land reform drive in Bengal. The Rajbanshis, who sustained primarily on agriculture on the land they had inherited from their forefathers, found themselves as virtually landless and became either labourers in the same plot of land which they owned just the other day or had to migrate as urban unskilled labourers.

After a phase of economic and cultural devastation the Rajbanshi consciousness is trying to rebuild its identity picking on the severed ends of their history and memory. This process, however, creates a mode of identity category. Paula Moya points out the exposition of the Ethnic organizing principles which claims that formulations of identity categories do not necessarily devolve into essentialist programme. It rather “provides modes of articulating and examining significant correlations between lived experience and social location” (2001, 4). In the process, they underline the need to prioritize the emotional and psychological features, which might seem to be irrational at times, in relation to their social identity reformulation. Ethnic studies scholar Lola Romanucci, nevertheless, justifies this response (Ethnic Identity 1996).

This journey work from the oral to the written; from the folk songs to poems; the Rajbanshi consciousness encounters and accommodates alien urban realities and the entire contour of these verses transforms and bears testimony to these changing exigencies. This becomes an imperative for them to redeem their collective memory of a lost landscape which was their collective belonging. The poems, therefore, manifest the subdued pain and agonies they are smarting from the turmoil of their inner desperations:

Let the sky crush on the earth
And the earth crush over the sky
I want just this much
……………………….
Let the adamantine Himalaya
Stand up proud
And laugh and clear
….
I want just this much.

(‘I Want’. Dharma Narayan Burma. Tr. Pradip Acharya)

These poems are a body of lyric that inadvertently aim at heralding a change. Change, in fact, as an idea, has a threat perception to those who are ensconced in the comfort of certainties. Historically the attempts of dissolving self within the territory of the governing class resulted in further disfiguration and fragmentation of their native identity. The young disjunctives, therefore, to redeem their wounded souls, take up this project of change in earnest. This is the juncture when they embark on the search for their receding address making a way for the Rajbanshi poetry to arrive:

No, I don’t want anything else
The fecund field of my adolescence
The green expanse of emptiness
………………………………………..
Give that back to me
I don’t want anything else, not me.
(This Land, This People’, Ramakanta Ray. Tr. Pradip Acharya)





























Works Cited


Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Community. London: Verso, 1993.


Barth, Frederick. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Boston: Little Brown, 1969.

Adhikary, Dr. Ramendranath. Introduction. Rajabanshi Kavita Sankalan. Eds. Jatin Burma and Binod Bihari Barman. Calcutta: Anima Prakashani, 1996.


Barman, Binod Bihari. Ed. Apon Sur Rachanay Pathik. Jalpaiguri : 1957


Burma, Jatin and Binod Bihari Barman. Eds. Rajabanshi Kavita Sankalan. Calcutta: Anima Prakashani, 1996.

Barman, Lalit Chandra. “Couchbeharkè Pachchimbanger Antarbhukta Kora Hoyechila Keno?”. Bartaman, Siliguri edition, 31 March/ 2006.

Bhakat, Dr. D.N. Rajbanshi Bhasa Prashanga. Golakganj: Centre for Ethnic Studies and Research, 2004

Chatterjee, Suniti Kumar, in Dr. Girija Shankar, ibid.

Das, Naren. “Couchbeharer Bhabishyat Bheb è Dekhar Agè Atiter Kothgulo Bhebè Dekha Bhalo”. Bataman. Siliguri edition, 9 Sept/ 2005


Dutta Ray , Dr. Suranajan and Dr. Girija Shankar Ray. Eds. Upabhasha Prashange Loka Shilpa. Vol I No. II, 1974.

Grierson, George. Linguistic Survey of India. 1897.


Khan Choudhury, Amanatulla, “Rajbanshi Bhasha Tattva”. Souvenir of Uttar Banga Sahitya Sanmelan, Coochbehar : 1911.

Khan Choudhury, Amanatulla. “Coochbeharer Prachin Bhasha”. Paricharika. Behar: 1914.

Moya, Paula, M.L. & Michael R. Hames- Garcia. Reclaiming Identity : Realist theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2001.


Ray, Dr. Girija Shanka. “Foreword”. Rajabanshi Kavita Sankalan. Ibid.

Romanucci-Ross, Lola and George A. DeVos. Eds. Ethnic Identity: Creation, Conflict and Accmodation. London: Almitra Press, 1996.

*( Translations cited in the paper are from This Land, This People: Rajbanshi Poems in Translation. Translated from Rajbanshi to English by Pradip Acharya and Jyotirmoy Prodhani. The book is under publication)




The paper was presented in the national seminar on Society and Change in the North East, in Dibrugarh University, Dibrugarh, 2006.