Sukanta: The Poet of a Scorched Life

It’s a name on a million lips, yet there are few poets in our literary world who are so little known as a person. We have made him great, made him a revolutionary politician but he exists very little as a human being.
We often say that the socio-economic reality of Bengal was captured by him through the imagery of a "scorched bread" in his poetry but in the process, we have vanished Sukanta Bhattacharya the human being. He is a political symbol but not a person anymore.

This happens to many famous and epochal poets and writers—the person disappears behind their literature. They no longer belong to themselves; we construct them in our own mirror according to our own needs. To me, Sukanta seems to be the most painful example of this trend.

We turned Rabindranath into a superhuman, losing him behind an enchanted curtain, yet thankfully we know a great deal about him. As a human being, he peeps through occasionally, which is our good fortune. Rabindra-studies is a vast field with many active scholars, so we at least know about his joys, sorrows, and loves and heartaches.

A notch below him is Nazrul, about whom we also know a lot—though there are many aspects we do not know, or choose not to know. And then there came a point when Nazrul’s life came to a standstill with Pick’s disease, a form of early-onset dementia. After that, he became a silent legend, no more.

Lately, more is being uncovered about Jibanananda Das, particularly regarding his love life and its complications. He is however rarely allowed to step outside the realm of love—the poet of romantic love and nature, the poet of ''Ruposhi Bangla,'' the ultimate poet of Bengali nostalgia.
These are our three primary poets. There may be one or two others, but broadly speaking, these three dominate.

And then there is Sukanta: the image of all our ideal political consciousness, the poet of the promise to transform society and establish the rule of the masses, the artisan-poet of the Bengali’s cherished slogan, "land for all." That is what many socialists claim and tell their followers—the people with whom the poet had a lifelong connection.

This gallery of ideas was at its strongest in the 1970s, during the youth of our generation. There was a kind of unspoken duty among all political and cultural workers to adore him. Besides, how many people die of tuberculosis at twenty or twenty-two after writing such "scorching" poetry

Sukanta was, in a sense, a martyr.

That is why I believe the Sukanta we have constructed in our minds is actually the reflection of our own desired goal, not Sukanta’s own singular reality. This is why we know—or bother to know—so little about his real life.

We have turned Sukanta into a deeply beloved poet but one with only a political bio, one without a personal history.

The poet did not die at a mature age but it was a terrifying slow burn death from disease in his youth. Happiness never found a home anywhere in his entire life. In that respect, his death was cut from the same cloth as his morbid life.

One rarely says that his frail health and death by tuberculosis were almost inevitable. Given the environment and conditions into which he was born, grew up, and lived, it was only the conclusion of a doomed process.
He was born into an impoverished family; his mother was his father’s second wife. But he lost his mother at the age of just six, growing up with no affection touching his life after that.

The person to whom he was the closest was Ranidi, his paternal cousin, who gave him the name "Sukanta"—taken from a character in a story by Manilal Gangopadhyay. Ranidi introduced Sukanta to poetry in his childhood. She was a great admirer of Tagore and would read his poems aloud to him. From her, his love for poetry was born.

Yet his mother and Ranidi—the two people in his life who loved him with unconditional affection departed when he was just a child. He had very few close souls in this world after that. This aching truth is preserved in the letters he wrote to his friend Anirban Basu.

His relationship with his father was never good and deteriorated further as he grew older. His father was a chronically unlucky man whose two wives died soon after their marriages to him. His book publishing and selling business never took off, driving the family into perpetual genteel poverty. Thus, when Sukanta did poorly in his examinations—making an uncertain economic future inevitable, the relationship soured further. A futureless, unemployed Sukanta was, to his father, a failure much like himself.

Sukanta’s poverty was not wrapped in any poetic cloak of glamour; he had to pay for it with his entire life and untimely death. The Communist Party paid him a meager stipend for editing the party's anti-fascist journal and directing its youth organisation. It was very little. Often, Sukanta skipped meals because he had no money. And he would sometimes even give away that tiny sum to someone hungrier than himself out of his natural empathy.

The party naturally lacked the resources to help a full-time cadre to survive, someone who already had health issues. Sukanto was unwell.  People knew this but what could they do? It didn’t benefit the party but what choice did it have?

Letters to Anirban Basu reveal a mind which is exhausted and helpless. But who could he tell all this to? To speak out meant betraying the party, the ideology, and himself, exposing cowardice and weakness. So Sukanta never thought of complaining. He accepted his sacrifice for the ideal as part of his life. Only a few people close to him knew of his pain.

Years of family alienation and lifelong poverty plus lack of any paid work merged to extract a price from his body and health—a price claimed by history, personal and political. Sukanta already suffered from prolonged malnutrition. Sleeping on the floor may carry an aura of ideological romanticism, but the damage this lifestyle inflicted on his young but already decaying body was heavy. He contracted malaria in 1944.

Though seemingly a minor illness, it struck a severe blow to his already weakened body. Long years of meagre food, living in unhygienic conditions, restlessness, and mental anguish lined up like a hostile procession to deal an angry blow.

By then a full-time party member, Sukanta was diagnosed with tuberculosis. This was no surprise tragedy; it was not a random turn of events. It was inevitable. Having barely passed eighteen or nineteen, he began a life confined to a hospital bed—his final destination.
If one examines his way of life, it becomes clear that his body had become a germinator for this wasting disease from long before. And his final address at Jadavpur Hospital turned into a manufacturing factory of agonising experiences.

Tuberculosis was contagious, so hardly anyone came to visit him. The man who spent his whole life alone became even lonelier on his deathbed. When a person’s life is so cruel, does death bring relief? Thus, the boy who grew up without affection, spent an equally loveless youth, left behind a few poems and the romantic legend of his death from consumption for the romantic Bengali population before vanishing from this earth.

Sukanta was a soldier-poet of socialism. But what became of the politics for which he sacrificed his life he thought? Perhaps this is the most depressing part. During the Second World War, the Soviet union aligned itself with the British for its own self-interest. How that news landed on Indians, and how it felt to them, is something that is often overlooked.

Suddenly, India’s primary enemy—the British—had become the chief ally of the Left. For the Left, raised on simple, one-dimensional narratives, this posed a deep crisis. The ideological image they had projected to the public suffered a huge blow.

At the same time, it proved that the nationalist politics based on intra-class conflict was far more robust and direct than the simple, linear, party-based communist politics that claimed to be superior. Along with this came the birth of two new states, neither of which stemmed from Sukanta’s party’s ideals or politics. For him, as for many other leftists, this was a cause for deep distress. Looking at the state of left-wing politics today, that pain only deepens.

It is within this backdrop that his widely regarded final poem should be read. Beyond the romantic, sorrow-tinged empathy with which we read of the "scorched bread" or shed tears thinking "ah, poor soul," we rarely bother with the reality of this poem and its imagery. To me, it feels like an image of his own autobiography—far more self-centric than a poem about politics.

It may be hard for us to accept based on how we have read him in the past but when a poet says to poetry itself, “No more poetry, please” it is not a mere poetic nuance—it is a deeper declaration. Poetry was everything to him and its enemy was prose, a "cruel axe."

That is why the poem feels like a summation of Sukanta’s entire life.  Poetry was not merely literature to him; it was the foundational experience of the most important relationship of his life, his beloved Ranidi.

She had given him his name, read him his first poem in childhood, took him by the hand and led him to poetry—his true identity. Thus, this utterance is less a measure of life's poverty-stricken reality but more an utterance describing the long tortuous travelogue of his own life’s journey.

Those who have read Sukanta’s works will know he was careful in constructing his imageries, and "The full moon is a scorched bread" is a fiercely radical image. There are few like it in Bengali literature—perhaps none. Although the poetry of the 1940s was politically charged, it retained a polished middle-class demeanour, as seen in the work of Nazrul or Subhash Mukhopadhyay.

But inside that ailing body, drawing near to death, Sukanta was no longer a party cadre, nor an unemployed, failing son, nor did he feel the need to remain a follower of any ideology. Facing the face of death, it is impossible to ignore one’s life history and end and he seemed to have done so himself too.

Bengalis, especially left-leaning readers, may call this a political poem. But he himself had given poetry “a leave of absence.” When he dismisses his primary reality, whether that is his political testament or it’s the personal utterance of a youth standing on the final step of his painful existence looking back at his own scorched life and symbolising it as a piece of scorched bread is for the readers to decide. The human being can’t be killed by dogma.

Oh life unbound
The moon is a piece of scorched bread
Oh life unbound, enough of poetry now
Now strike with the stony, cruel axe of prose
Let the poetry-laced symphony end now
Hit hard with the stony hammer of prose.
No need for the chiming harmony of poetry anymore
I have let you go poetry, today.
The world of hunger is enveloped by the embrace of prose
The full moon is no more than a piece of scorched bread.