On “Reading Scriptures,” “Topshe Fish with Eggs,” and “Pineapple”

Iswar Gupta was a poet in the Bengali language whose literary achievements were rooted in a modern urban idiom unknown to those who lived before him. Born in 1811, he came to Calcutta after his father died, and standard biographies take care to mention that he was never formally educated, emphasizing instead his natural abilities in versification and song writing, his keen memory, and sharp intellect.

His friend from the wealthy Tagore clan, Jogendramohan Tagore, helped him to establish the Bengali newspaper the Sambad Prabhakar in 1831 when he was only nineteen. From this date till his death in 1859, Iswar Gupta flourished as the preeminent poet and editor of Calcutta, publishing poetry regularly in the columns of his newspaper, composing songs, anthologizing and annotating the poetry of the preceding era to create an unprecedented archive of literary gleanings, as well as commenting, in verse and prose, on most aspects of the new life of the Bengali people in the mid-nineteenth century.

By 1885, Iswar Gupta was all but forgotten. It was the famous novelist Bankimchandra Chatterjee who reintroduced him to readers as the last “authentic” Bengali poet (khānti Bāngāli kabi) before Western conventions began to infiltrate “educated Bengali poetry.” Looking at the language, idiom, style, and substance of the poems in this issue, however, it is obvious that Gupta was, rather, a “painter of modern life” as Baudelaire defined it. If by “modernity” we “mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable,” then this is our first poet of Indian modernity.