Description

This is a collection of poems on Calcutta translated from languages and dialects other than Bengali, which is the language most people in Calcutta speak and is Calcutta’s natural medium. It gives an indication or outline of how Calcutta has inspired people, places and ideas. That way we go back almost three hundred years to the founding of the city, counting from the day Job Charnock laid anchor at the cluster of villages, viz. Sutanuti, Kolikata and Govindapur, from the north to south on 24 August 1690.This anthology of poems with Calcutta as a theme or backdrop, or making suitable mention of the city. With the tercentenary of Calcutta in 1990, this was taken up as an exercise in fraternity and national integration.The criterion for selection has been either that the poem or the poet is well known, even though Calcutta is mentioned in passing, or that the city features in it as a strong presence, even though the poet may not be a celebrity.
There are eighteen national languages recognized in Schedule of the Constitution of India: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Manipuri Marathi Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil Telugu and Urdu. All of them are represented here. There are four dialects very close to Hindi which have been pre send : Bhojpuri, Garhwali, Mal Paharia, and Rajasthani. Nepali poems have been gleaned from Darjeeling. There are 22 more dialects or un recognized languages which have contributed poems : Adi (from Arunachal), Bodo, Chakma, Dogri Garo, Kakbarak (from Tripura), Kangri Himachali Kharia, Khasi, Kinnauri Ladakhi, Maithili, Mundaria, Nagpuri, Pali, Rabha, Santali, Siraji-Himachali and Toto (from West Bengal).Chakma, a dialect of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, now in Bangladesh, is represented by the contributions of two refugees settled in Calcutta It may be added that two of the above dialect, viz. Dogri and Rajasthani, have for long been recognized by the National Sahitya Akademi. Rajasthani, denoting an agglomeration of dialects, viz. Marwari in the west, Mewari in the south, Hadoti in the Kota-Bundi area and Dhunderi in Jaipur, is represented here by Marwari. Poems collected from Kumaoni, Mizo and Oraon could not be included in the anthology for constraints of space.In this compilation we have, besides English, the following twelve foreign languages: Arabic, Burmese (Myanmar), Chinese, French, Ger man, Hungarian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Sinhalese, Spanish and Tibetan. The Arabic poem is by a Bengali Maulana, and the Persian poems are by two poets of the Delhi area in the last century, and the Tibetan by an expatriate from that country. The Portuguese poem is from Goa. Although English has been mentioned as a foreign language, it has not only a pre-eminent position in the country, as the link language among the States, but is also the official language in a few of them in the north-east, like Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Arunachal.Despite the best efforts of the editor the State of Nagaland and the Union Territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands could not contribute any poems in the native dialects.