‘There is a ban even on breathing’: Leftist poet Birendra Chattopadhyay on the horrors of war

Three poems by the leftist Bengali poet Birendra Chattopadhyay seem to be conversing from the past with our beleaguered, volatile, bloodthirsty present. They are not so much about war or conflict per se as they are about man’s insatiable and ironic capacity to ponder upon and perpetuate his own destruction.

Birendra Chattopadhyay (1920-1985) was a poet of socialist causes and small presses, of lived humiliations and unsung ironies. Marxist to the core, he was one of the most prominent Bengali poets of the 1950s and 1960s, writing in the wake of the Second World War, the global rise of communism, and the ambiguities of the new Indian state. Never the tendentious peddler of agitprop, he was a poet of the political, rather than merely a political poet.

Against War

Let us all go to the nation of the moon.
While there is time, let’s plant the towering
Flags of our nations on moon’s highest peak,
And make its soil more valuable than gold.

On Earth is left no river, mountain or sky,
Or even six feet of land to find sleep.
The tiny speck needed to shelter a bird’s nest,
For one stalk of grass to stand erect, are
History’s memory, or grandmother’s oral tale.
It is a sham that men, on radio and television want
To clinch...

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