In a 1940 essay, well-known poet-critic-editor Buddhadeb Bose welcomed twenty-one-year-old Subhash Mukhopadhyay as (pre-partition) Bengal’s youngest poet at the time. He pointed to a feature of the younger poet’s art, which set him apart from every other poet in Bose’s view: that Subhash had begun his career as a poet of neither love nor nature.Bengal’s youngest poet’s point of departure was man in society – in other words, the human collective rather than the individual human, and the universe of that individual’s hopes and disappointments and longings and triumphs.Bose also noted Subhash’s exceptional technical virtuosity, something that even a considerably older, far more experienced poet could learn from. Then there was the twenty-one-year-old’s irrepressible sense of humour, sparkling wit and uncanny ability to harness irony to unexpected uses. Finally, there was such verve as could pull off the near-impossible: marrying the unapologetically ideological to first-rate poetry.Buddhadeb Bose’s commentary was based on Padatik (The Foot-Soldier), Subhash Mukhopadhyay’s debut book of poetry anthologising such irony-laden sparklers as May-Day’s Call, which begins:My love, now’s not the time to dally with flowers,For ruination, stark, stares us in the face.Gone from our eyes are the blue dreams of pleasure,As a remorseless sun our backsides bakes.Bose cites with relish such verses, tongue-firmly-in-cheek critiques of liberal sanctimony:Should Your Grace want us to take the battle to whoever, my liege!we won’t demur, we’ll pick up our guns quietly.No job holds us down, so who cares if we live or die.And god forbid that we may ever forgetyour whiplash is at the ready all the time.No rough-and-ready translation can hope to suggest, let alone recreate, Mukhopadhyay’s incredibly rich poetic idiom, especially as we approach the final lines of this magnificent little poem Prastab (Proposal):Should the enemy fire off his biggest guns suddenly,let’s tell them, “Boys, don’t let us forget civility”.Eyes tight shut, let’s then turn our earsto the nightingale’s sublime song.Bose, a political liberal who in the Cold War years gravitated towards the Free World, was scarcely on the same page as Subhash on the themes running through the Padatik poems. After all, Subhash had announced here, clearly for all the world to hear, which side of the barricades he was on in a deeply unequal world. (At twenty-one, he was a member of the Communist Party.)Unsurprisingly, therefore, even as Bose saluted the young poet’s panache and technical brilliance, he was not quite sure that Subhash Mukhopadhyay could stay both an activist and a poet.Cover of Jato Durei Jai (No Matter How Far I Go), Subhash Mukhopadhyay.Subhash chose to stay true to himself, however: he would continue to write poetry even as he remained a communist activist. It is arguable that, had he not been a trade union organiser and party agitator, he might have been a more prolific poet. But would that have made him a better poet, though, no doubt, the trajectory of his artistic development would likely have traced a different arc?In the event, he moved to the suburban industrial town of Budge Budge, not far from metropolitan Calcutta (Kolkata) as a party whole-timer and his craft evolved at astonishing speed. He found a voice distinctly his own and finessed an idiom that became his signature: crisp, lively and piquant, but intensely lyrical.Of course, he always had the poet’s natural feel and flair for words, but what helped meld the committed polemicist and the consummate craftsman into a mature artist was his varied and sustained exposure to the human condition. That exposure not only gave him an enormous fund of experience of life as it was lived in Bengal’s industrial ghettos, it also gave to his vision a new capaciousness and depth.His idiom now began to mirror that new vision. His tone was now softer, his craft less self-consciously urbane or canny than in the Padatik years, but with a compelling new urgency to it. Consider For the Sake of a Poem, from Subhash’s 1948 book Agnikone (Abode of Fire-God):A poem is about to get written. For its sakethe sky, like the blue tongue of fireseethes in fury, over the sea a violent stormflails its wings, the smoky locks of the clouds’ wild hairunravel, the roll of thunder echoes in the forest,in its roots a terror of landslides throbs fiercely,lightning cranes its neck to look back, andby its light, over the entire valley,into its own image mirrored in dark red blood,peers the terrifying Moloch.A poem gets written for its sake.A poem is about to get written. For its sakeare men pasting on these wallsthe decree of an unborn day.Hanging the fear of death by its neckthey walk on, a tumultuous column of menfilling the wind and the sky with its songand its throaty roar –on its thumbnail etcheda new world, unbounded joy, endless love.A poem gets written for its sake.Subhash wrote these lines when he was not quite twenty-eight – and that was nearly eighty years ago. The unrelenting intensity of the poem’s tone and the incredible sharpness of its images, however, remain untouched by time. Even that the world which birthed that impassioned, electrifying, poetic idiom lies in ruins today has done little to diminish the authenticity of his poetry.Essentially, his Weltanschauung remained unchanged, but it was broader in scope now, and the sweep of his sympathies was wide enough that they tempered the stridency of tone of his earlier poetry and made his vocabulary feel somewhat less cerebral. Salemon’s Mother, from the book Phool Futuk (Let Flowers Bloom) shows how:The sky is like Babarali’s crazed eyes.Underneath it, walking with a processionand struggling to keep pace, many miles from home,is Babarali’s little daughter Salemon,looking forher mother.Where in the city’s labyrinthof alleyways and blind lanes,where are you hiding.Salemon’s mother?Where under the skythat looks like Babarali’s deranged eyes,have you set up home,Salemon’s mother?Do you hear how,in chorus with other voices in the procession –the corners of her sticky eyes running with tears –and calling out to you,Salemon’s mother,is your daughterborn in the time of a famineand now staring at another?It’s only you, Salemon’s mother,that she is searching for.Buddhadeb Bose had noted the young Subhash’s precocious command of Bengali metrical patterns and his ability to manoeuvre established, time-honoured rhythmic arrangements to achieve surprising metrical, also tonal, outcomes. Quite as effortlessly in his post-Agnikone years, however, Subhash essayed into the prose poem and stayed with that genre through much of his later work. But he stood out with his rich lyrical felicity with words and phrases; remarkable, considering that he crafted his diction entirely out of the spoken, everyday language of urban Bengal.However far I gowith me goes the name of a riverstrung in a garland of wavesHowever far I goOn my eyelids lingersthe memoryof a courtyard scrubbed cleanand on ita long row of the marksof Lakshmi’s feetHowever far I go.Indeed, his anthology Jato Durei Jai (However Far I Go), 1962, from which this poem as well as the one that follows have been taken, showed Subhash really standing in a clear line of descent from modern Bengal’s great lyric poets, going all the way back to Rabindranath Tagore. This may sound counter-intuitive, because wasn’t the trajectory of Subhash’s poetry fundamentally unlike a lyric poet’s? But then, consider the following:Where under a cataract-blinded skyhis ancient head sagging to his kneesa ragged stick trembling in his handsits doddering old darkness.Where all through the long nightand the unending dayautumn leaves falldrip-drop drip-dropto the barren ground.Where like a steamer’s stevedorememory sits silentlyplumbing the depth of life’s oceanall day.Towards thereI knowthe icy winds of Decemberwill shove me tooone day.Oh, mother Earth,that I may neversee the faceof that wasted day.Before that time comesplease take out my eyesand tie themlike two jingling ankletsto my two feet.Clearly, Subhash was now a very different kind of poet to the one Buddhadeb Bose had greeted on his arrival into the world of Bengali poetry. Was Bose glad that Subhash had achieved what he had achieved without throwing out his activist’s hat? One can never be sure.Beginning the late 1950s, the two poets’ world-views – and their worlds, too – drifted steadily apart. At least this writer isn’t aware of any instance of Bose celebrating, in his later years, his younger contemporary with anything approaching the warmth that suffused his 1940 acclamation.In his mature poetry, as much as in his earliest work, Subhash’s politics could be divined by any attentive reader. But the poetry was a lot less cerebral now. Indeed, its compelling quality now derived from what can be described as a clear stream of universal humanism from which readers of all kinds of ideological sympathies could drink deeply.With Phool Futuk, love had also entered Subhash’s canvas (hopefully, Bose had taken note) but, strikingly, the context of love, more often than not, was organised human action for radical social change. This, then, was love in the dark times, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, though not about the dark times. For witness these magnificent lines from Lal Tuktuke Din (The Crimson-coloured Day) from Phool Futuk:Yours is the face that I kept looking forfrom the procession’s one end to the otherall day long.Then back homein the evening, I find that facelighting up my room, like a lamp on its stand.Through the long day you had kept me away,but at day’s end you came near –in the scalding heat of May’s mid-daynot a shade did I find anywhere.The heat also singed the dark blue ocean,I rub my eyes now:are you a dreamor an illusion? Oh! clasp me tightly in your arms,let all of heart’s frozen tears melt –you give to love the room to be born,while I string anew my bow of hate. The long day went by, why, O whydid you not show up even once for me?And blow out all of the world’s lightswith scorn, till eternity?Even now, is that whyas the storm rages fiercely,does thunder rip the sky apartagain and again, remorselessly?Hearing us stir, who there at horizon’s endput gleaming saddles on seven-coloured horses’ backs?You are the light, and Idown the dark alley-wayam on my way to fetchthe crimson-coloured day.For Subhash the Indian communist, the bright and hopeful 1950s through the early 1960s yielded to the dispiriting 1970s when everything looked like it was falling apart. It looked as though he was staring at the wreck of his fondest hope, his dearest dream.What, more than anything else, would have troubled him, one suspects, was the incredibly bitter factional struggles that raged within the Indian Left in those years, drawing from Subhash his 1972 anthology Chheley Gechhe Boney (My Exiled Son).Here are excerpts from the poem Jelkhanar Golpo (Prison Tales) where two old comrades, now implacable ideological enemies, meet fortuitously after many years. Jail-mates once, they reminisce about the great battles they once fought together, about prison hunger strikes when they fended off authorities’ attempts to force feed them, and when that failed, to teargas them into compliance, about some comrades’ death-defying courage … But then came time to talk about their lives now, which looked completely unrecognisable to each other. And(s)uddenly, before our eyes,rose a sheer wall –and leaning against the iron-dooroutsidestood the dark night.With a start, we realisedwe stood once againin two tiny cellsnext to each othercaught in our own web, back in the prisonthat we had built ourselves.In one of the Indian Left’s great tragedies, Subhash Mukhopadhyay appeared to have given up on the great dream that once animated him – and many other creative artists of his generation – in his later years. One of the most poignant testimonies to that loss of hope may be found in the poem Aranye Rodan (Cry in the Wilderness) from the 2001 book Chhorano Ghunti (The Flying Dice):The dust of roadsthat I walked on long, long ago,chases me around in my sleepevery day.Hissingand swaying its sinister headlike the hood of a cobra,a flag – thrust high in the sky –is discharging its load of poisonon to the ground.Eyelids droopin dark fear.Saroj Roy, who couldcatch a snake with bare hands;Robi Mitra, who in ‘forty-twohad taken the plunge, headlong,with his bow and arrow;Satya Ghoshal, that wizard of words,who could cast a spellon whole crowds of men –From Garbeta to Keshpur,from Keshpur down to Chandrakona –I go around, calling out namesin vain:my cry in wildernessupon a dark night.In the end, this is poetry at its simplest – but also its noblest.The translations are from the author’s 2014 book As Day is Breaking. Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com