Saturday, November 27, 2010

Rabindranath and Bangadarshan

Rabindranath, in 1901, took the charge of editing Bangadarshan, a monthly literary journal founded in 1872 by Bankimchandra (1838-1894), who also served as editor up to April 1876 and was its main contributor.
The financial responsibility was undertaken by Sailesh Chandra Majumdar, brother of Srish Chandra, who opened  a publishing agency in the name of 'Majumdar Agency'. He also took the responsibility of publishing many books of Rabindranath. A club known as  Alochana Sabha,  comprising of literary persons was organised with the publishing agency as  its center. Many essays written by Rabindranath was first read there. Many such organizations started functioning from this place.
Rabindranath created a novel, 'Chokher Bali', for Bangadarshan. A few days earlier he had started writing a story named Binodini. He converted this story to Chokher Bali for Bangadarshan. Rabindranath had until that time focused on writing short stories and 'Nashtanir' was among one his last stories. His next project was a novel with a revolutionary plot.
'Bishbriksha', when written by Bankimchandra, had been a new experience for Bengali readers.  In Chokher Bali, they first encountered a novel with psycho-analysis.  In the mean time Rabindranath enunciated the relation between country and god in the kabyagrantha, Naibedya.  He wanted to express the same idea in prose in Bangadarshan. Thus he wrote, "when India was great, she was great in all respects-in vigor and wealth, in knowledge and religion, in national and international policies."