Sukanta Bhattacharya reached the 100th anniversary of his birth on 15 August 2025. This great Bengali poet has not gotten the recognition he deserves. For many of us who try to write poetry in Bengali, however, Sukanta Bhattacharya was as loved as Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam when we were kids. But though at one point of time in Bengal his name was taken along with Tagore, Sukanta has never been compared with him. He has even been considered less important than Nazrul.
But he was a poet for even less time than Nazrul was active as a poet as he died when he was only twenty-one. Sukanta Bhattacharya, however, was not simply a poet. He was a political activist too. He worked for the Communist Party of India. He was also the first secretary of Kishore Bahini or the Youth Brigade, a left organization that still works with kids and teenagers. Annadasankar Bhattacharya, a communist student leader, had been trying for a long time to start a group like this for the teens. On 15 April 1943, Kishore Bahini was finally set up in Kolkata (1st Baisakh, 1350 in the Bengali calendar). Sukanta Bhattacharya, a close friend of Annadasankar, took over as its chief a year later.
Sukanta set up Kishore Bahini’s main office in a corner of the Students’ Federation office with just an old tin box. He would often sit there and oversee the activities of Kishore Bahini. Under his leadership, Kishore Bahini slowly grew beyond Kolkata to other parts of Bengal and even beyond Bengal. Where does Sukanta stand as a poet? Some critics say that Sukanta’s poems are too raw and that in his poetry he reveals his feelings too explicitly. That might be true for some of his poems. But we should keep in mind that he wrote most of his poems when he was in his teens. Interestingly, many of Sukanta’s lines are still remembered by Bengalis. People use his words a lot in newspapers, protest placards, ads, and even on TV. History has shown us that this only happens with poets who are really great.
Let me quote at random a few of his lines to show how popular some of his lines still are: “I will make this world a good place for this child to live;” “Your bright presence still moves me, even when things are quiet, as always;” “I” ll pick a blooming morning from the deep stalk of night;” “Let eighteen come down on this land;” “Revolution beats in my heart; I feel like Lenin.” These are just five examples, but the list could easily grow to twenty-five. These lines show that Sukanta’s name will live on as long as Bengali poetry does. “Ekti Moroger Kahini” (“The Story of a Rooster”) is one of the most popular poems of Sukanta. While reading it, a reader is struck by how he made a simple rooster a symbol of all poor people. In the poem, the rooster dreams of entering the huge palace of a rich man.
The last line of the poem really hits one hard: the rooster does get into the palace, not to eat, but to be eaten! Sukanta was also capable of writing poetry which was purely lyrical. “Chirodiner” (Eternal) is one such poem, which paints a vivid picture of rural Bengal. We can have a look at the first stanza of the poem: “Here, in a shy village washed by rain,/ The busy clock’s ticking has stopped, /The green fields give way to feet that wander,/Even though there are no roads, one walks a path.” It sounds like something that was written just today.
Doesn’t it also seem that not a twenty year old boy but a mature poet wrote this, using a six-beat metre like a magician? To be honest, even if I put aside my personal assessment and judge him by the strict rules of literary criticism, I have to admit that Sukanta was a great poet who died before he reached full maturity. For instance, look at his poem “Chharpatra,” which means “The Clearance Letter.” He writes that a baby screams loudly when it is born to claim its rights. Then: “The weak, helpless body, yet clenched fists ~ Raised, radiant, As if in some incomprehensible vow.” The poem’s power comes from the picture of a baby reaching for the sky and Sukanta seeing it as a promise. Only a true poet, a seer, can make such a leap.
Or think about this line: “I’ll pick a blooming morning from the deep stalk of night.” It is common to compare the morning to a flower. But it’s not normal to compare night to the stem of a flower; it takes a lot of imaginary power to do so. He also compared the moon with bread in one of his very famous poems. It might now seem like a cliché to compare the full moon to a burnt piece of bread. But when Sukanta wrote it, it was completely new. His rhymes for kids were ahead of their time. He never changed his political views in writing rhymes, but his rhymes never seemed inappropriate for kids. How many Bengali rhymes can compete with “Purono Dhadha,” “Black Market,” “Bhalo Khabar,” and “Sepoy Bidroho”?
The last line of “Bhalo Khabar” still shocks us: the rich landlord Dhanpati Pal doesn’t like any food until he finally says, with a wicked grin, “The blood of the poor is the tastiest dish.” As a reader, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to love Sukanta’s letters the most. They show how deeply romantic he was ~ not just a revolutionary thinker, but someone whose heart was broken by love. As we read his letters, we learn how much an unfulfilled love hurt him. As one reads these letters today, one also notices he realised that money was necessary for a healthy life as he got sick. In a letter to his friend Arunachal Basu, he wrote: “I don’t care about love anymore. I only want to make money. I need money for my health, to pay off debts, and even to buy a shirt.
Life itself seems pointless because I don’t have any money.” Sukanta really showed us that even a great poet needs care and attention. He needs social support. Too many talented poets have died too soon because they were poor, hungry, or didn’t have a good life. But what they were able to write still amazes us. A lot of them have stood the test of time and are now known as “immortals.” But is the way they lived and died a good example of how people should live? If they had lived longer, wouldn’t human civilization have been richer? What Sukanta wrote is already immortal. But we’ll never know what he could have written had he lived a full life. Yes, poets have a duty to society. But does not society also have duties to the poets?
(The writer is Professor, Department of English and Culture Studies, and Director, Centre for Australian Studies, the University of Burdwan. All translations by the writer)