The Politics of Poetry

Abstract

When Nabinchandra Sen published his epic poem, Palashir Yuddha, in Calcutta in 1875, a stormerupted in civil society that divided the literary community and disrupted the functioning of the Text Book Committee for a number of years afterwards. The objections of some men in the TextBook Committee of Bengal was fundamentally connected to their bias against the representation of the Muslim king Sirajuddaula as the last independent king of Bengal, fighting to save the independence of his nation from the British aggressor. Why should a Hindu poet, they argued in private correspondence, depict a Muslim king in heroic light? Do the Hindus not have enough heroesof their own that they need to portray a Muslim as the last defender of the motherland? NabinchandraSen, in response, desperate to re-insert his text into the syllabus, sat down and amended line afterline in his poem to suit the inclinations of his right-wing critics. Railing in private against thecommittee, he nevertheless changed his text substantially, deleting the word ‘Bharat’ and ‘motherland’ from Siraj's speeches in the poem, changing the portrayal of Siraj's defence of the realminto a representation of parochial landlordism instead. This article will attempt to detail theresponses to Nabinchandra Sen's book and show how they reflect different positions on the Hindu-Muslim question, demonstrating how opposite ends of the spectrum responded in both a narrowand hostile manner as well as a liberal and secular way to a seminal text of its time.