The Poetry of Kamini Roy

One of the Bengali poetesses whose work is likely to survive is Mrs. Kamini Roy ¹ who died at the age of sixty-nine, on September 27, 1933. She was born in 1864 at Basanda in the district of ergunj; and was a daughter of Chandicharan Sen who was a writer of some reputation himself, being the author of a Bengali rendering of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ and of a novel ‘Ajodhyar Begum’ or ‘The Begum of Oudh.’ She was one of the earliest of Bengali ladies to become a graduate of the Calcutta University: she graduated with Honours in Sanskrit in 1886. She received her early training from her father, a man of character who had become a Brahmo in 1870. Even as a girl she had begun to write poetry. Her early poems had remained unpublished for long, until these attracted the notice of Hem Chandra Banerjee, one of the greatest of Bengali poets. These poems, collectively called ‘Alo O Chhaya’ (Light and Shade), Hem Chandra extolled to the skies, and advised their author to have them published. The young poetess requested Hem Chandra for an introduction, and the famous poet wrote: ‘These poems have impressed me very greatly; in places they are so very sweet and so full of deep thoughts that one’s heart is charmed directly one reads them…..I have praised their authoress at heart when reading them myself. And, to be candid, I have even envied her at times.’ This was in 1889, when the poetess was twenty-five years of age, and when Rabindranath Tagore had not yet become famous as a writer in Bengal. She had already passed her Entrance Examination at the age of sixteen, and her B.A. at twenty. Most of the poems, however, were written many years before the one of publication. And this, her first publication, with the above-mentioned introduction from the pen of Hem Chandra, made her famous in a day.

Most of the poems of ‘Alo O Chhaya’ which are sixty-one in number,–including a quintette on Love and two longer but exquisite poems in blank verse ‘Mahasweta’ and ‘Pundarika’ both based on the ‘Kadambari’ of Banabatta,–were conceived in an autobiographical vein. Sweetness of lyric measures, a beautiful mode of expressing poetical thought, an elusive gracefulness, the first hopes of early youth and its doubts, desires that were great and lovely at the same time, love of country and of God, sympathy for fallen humanity, love of Nature, and the early experience of growing womanhood, combined to make it a unique contribution to Bengali poetry. These are the things which had made the poems of the collection instantaneously popular and captivated readers, some of the most famous of whom gave expression to their feelings of the time when they first had read them, at the time of the death of the poetess. Even Sir P. C. Ray the eminent scientist is reported to have said: ‘I do not like to say more than this, that even at this old age of mine the poems of ‘Alo O Chhaya’ remain imprinted on my heart.’ Another Bengali poet, the late Devendranath Sen, eulogised the book as unique in the field of Bengali literature. And Dr. Brajendranath Seal wrote in this ‘New Essays in Criticism’ (1903): ‘It is a work of great talent and greater promise, and is of unique interest as carrying one of the three elements of the neo-Romantic poesy further than any other Bengali poem. In point of natural magic, a transfiguration of the subjective egoism, the lyrics are nowhere beside Babu Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Songs of Sunset,’ and as regards the creative imagination, unfolding deathless visions of sublimity or beauty, the finely imaginative pieces of this volume, ‘Mahasweta,’ ‘Pundarika’ and ‘Chandrapida’s Awakening’ are eclipsed in the blaze of ‘Valmikir Jaya’ (M. M. Haraprasad Shastri) and the ‘Sarada Mangala’ (Beharilal Chakravarty). But in the other element, the objective criticism of life, the previous poems are meagre beside Miss Sen’s poetry.’ ²

The late Mr. Roby Datta remarked in a note in his ‘Echoes from East and West’ that Mrs. Roy’s ‘L’ Allegro’ comes after her ‘Il Penseroso.’ ‘The very first poem in Mrs. Roy’s ‘Light and Shade’ is ‘In the Gloom’; but the very next one shows her ‘In the Light.’ This duality of mood is peculiar to her temperament.’ This is why the book begins with the poem ‘In the Gloom’ which is as follows: -

Creatures we are of gloom!
In gloom awhile we play,
In gloom doth melt away
The mart of life and bloom.
There, thro’ the gloomy wood,
A dim, dark ray is seen;
Who knows whence it hath been?
Its beauty who hath view’d?
As long as life may stay,
Since certain is the doom
That we must move thro’ gloom,
O seek and chase the ray.
Amid this solemn gloom,
Seek we and follow we
The little light we see;
Therein we’ll play, O come. ³

It is followed by one on ‘Light’ in which we find the poetess singing,

Children we are of light;
O what a concourse bright!
In light we sleep and wake,
And life’s carousal take.
Amid this splendid light
No more we lose our sight,
No more we wander blind
Where we the path can find. ⁴

We should like to give here the renderings of some of the headings of the poems, so that the reader can form an estimate of the contents of this first book by Mrs. Roy. These are, The Quest after Happiness, Sorrow, Renunciation, Lest Some should say Something or Moral Cowardice,⁵ New Year’s Eve, Destiny, The Pole-Star, The Dream of Youth, Hope’s Enchantment, Farewell, Asunder, In Abraham’s Bosom, The Mother’s Call, The Uninvited, A three Years’ Child, Where?, The Question, The Inner Soul of Beauty, The Days Fly, The Awakening, In Silence, Nirvan, The Dream of Hope, The Story of a Widow, The Girl and the Star, The Marriage of Krishnakumari, Desire, Pain in Love, The History of Love, The Awakening of Chandrapid, The Voice of Woman, and The Disappointed. ⁶

Some of the poems are tinctured with the youthful pessimism of the poet,–she felt lonely and she expressed her sense of loneliness in more poems than one, like Mrs. Browning who wrote,

Oh my God,
Thou hast knowledge, only Thou.
How dreary ’tis for women to sit still
On winter nights by solitary fires
And hear the nations praising them far off.

But, in some other poems also, we find the authoress struggling out of pessimism into optimism, as in her poem ‘The Broken Soul.’ But her self-revelation is in ‘Sukh’ or ‘Happiness,’ which has been rendered by Roby Datta as ‘From Gopa to the Buddha’ in ‘Echoes from East and West,’ in a footnote to which he says, ‘Here we get an insight into the mind of the poetess.’ The names Gopa and Goutam are the insertions of the translator, so also are the five opening couplets of the last stanza.

Yet, the most significant thing about these exquisite poems of Mrs. Roy is their revealed femininity. In this respect she stands side by side with a more modern poetess, Laurence Hope, who wrote,

Your beauty puts a barb into my soul,
Strive as I will it never lets me go;
My love has passed the frontiers of control,
You are so fair and I desire you so.
Others may come and go, they are to me
But changing mirage, transient, untrue,
My faithlessness is but fidelity
Since I am never faithful but to you.
Yet is your beauty so divine a thing,
So irreplaceable, so haunting sweet
Against all reason, I am fain to fling
My life, my youth, myself, beneath your feet.

In a poem called ‘Joubana Tapasya’ (The Penance for Youth) the poetess calls upon Time not to take away her youth, the prime of her life, as she cannot bear the idea of a life without the freshness of youth. She said therefore that she would undertake a long penance for the preservation of life-long youth–youth that would not be possible for even Time to deprive her of. It was indeed this life-long craving for youthfulness that gives her poems a peculiar sadness and also a unique sweetness.

Man says that the mind of woman remains inscrutable to him, but woman fears that man looks down on the mind of woman. There is for ever a difference in the angle of vision of the sexes. This she has revealed with a force and frankness which can again be compared with that of Laurence Hope who has written,

Rarely men understand our way of love,
How that to women in their wedding hours
Lover and priest and king are blent in one;
Hence the awed worship of these hearts of ours.
At times love for a little lifts the veil,
And men and women see each other’s heart,
But swiftly passion comes, obscuring all,
And thus the nearing souls are swept apart.
To us love is a sacred rite; to man
Custom, perhaps affection, or desire.
Before we hold our lovers in our arms
They are too fiercely amorous to inquire.

The sacred ideal of love in the heart of a woman she reveals in a poem of extreme beauty, in ‘What is That?’ The trend of thought which delights in giving expression to ideas about love is to be found in some poems of her second book of poems ‘Malya O Nirmalya’ (The Garland and The Remains of Offerings to the Deity), a collection of as many as one hundred and ten poems, and by some regarded as a greater achievement than her first book. It is interesting to see that the poetess gives in detail the story of a man in love in orthodox Bengali society, his final disappointment in life, and of the consequent sorrow, in ‘Nothing in Particular.’ This may be read with ‘A Loving Conversation of a newly wedded Bengali Couple’ in ‘Manasi,’ in which Tagore has very humorously denounced child-marriage.

‘Alo O Chhaya’ contains, as I have already said, two bigger poems, ‘Mahasweta’ and ‘Pundarika.’ Both these, like ‘Vaisampayana’ and ‘The Awakening of Chandrapid,’ are based on the ‘Kadambari’ of Banabhatta. But these adaptations of Mrs. Roy have a peculiar charm of their own. These are as graceful in descriptions of natural scenery as in the delineation of the budding soul in love. And their blank verse is admirable, full of an elusive grace and such as can come only from the pen of a female poet of fine sensibility.

‘Alo O Chhaya’ is important in other respects too. It contains three poems, ‘The Dream of Hope,’ ‘Mother Mine,’ and ‘The Voice of Woman’ which all reveal the poetess’s great love of country, and of ancient India with her greatness and high ideals of life. In ‘Mother Mine’ her song rises like the following hymn about New Jerusalem: -

For thee, O dear, dear country,
Mine eyes their vigils keep;
For very love, beholding
Thy happy name, they weep.
The mention of thy glory
Is unction to the breast
And medicine in sickness,
And love, and life and rest. ⁷

It may be compared with Rabindranath’s,

’Tis for thee, O mother mine,
My limbs I throw away;
’Tis for thee, O mother mine,
My life adown I lay.

‘Malya O Nirmalya,’ Mrs. Roy’s second book, published in 1320 B. S. (1913), is full of the pathos of life and testifies to the truth of,

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

In it the ideas of the poetess are fuller, and more mature in expression than in her first book. This book has been dedicated to God, a fact testifying to the godliness of the poetess. In a poem ‘Ashirbad’ (Blessing), which was composed in October, 1891, she has sung of her own ideals in life. This forms the theme of another poem ‘The Poet’s Desire.’ She is wide awake to the ideal of service and believes with Robert Browning that

All service ranks the same with God,
…………….there is no last, nor first.

In a poem ‘In a Half-Sleep’ the poetess has given us a spiritual poem of a very high order, which is entirely personal too. This book contains many love-poems among which ‘Pariksha’ or ‘Trial’ reminds one of Mrs. Browning’s ‘Rhyme of the Duchess May’ and Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Lord of Burleigh.’ ‘Love to Genius’ is on love which is particularly unselfish; while ‘Hisab’ or ‘Reckoning’ puts us in mind of Mrs. Browning’s ‘Courtship of Lady Geraldine.’ These poems are, however, original in their own way, and cannot be said to be imitations of the poems named with them.

In 1899, Mrs. Roy published her ‘Pouraniki’ or ‘Poems on Legendary Subjects.’ Amongst the poems in this book are, ‘Drona to Dhristadyumna,’ ‘Ahalya to Rama,’ and other pathetic poems that will ever please. This book of poems may be said to have closed a part of the poetess’s poetical career.

From 1900, storms of grief began to blow and blast the soul of the poetess. One of her children died in the same year. In 1908, died her husband K. N. Roy, I.C.S., who, being charmed with her poetical accomplishments, had married her after the death of his first wife. Her eldest son Ashoka died in 1913; and her grown-up daughter Leela died of consumption the same year. These griefs well-nigh benumbed the poetess. The sad sense of bereavement for her eldest son she latterly expressed in ‘Ashoka-Sangita’ (Songs to Ashoka.) And ‘Jibaner Pathe’ (On the Path of Life) is her ‘In Memoriam’ enshrining her grief at the death of her husband.

In 1915, Mrs. Roy Published her poetic drama ‘Amba’ which she had written as early as 1891. This is an episode from the Mahabharata, but differently treated. It has been staged successfully by school and college students. The heroic visage of Amba inspired the poetess to write a drama on her.

‘Deep a Dhup’ (The Lamp and Incense) consists of poems written during many years, and reveal the inward religious nature of the poetess. These reveal a sadness born of past experience; but it is religious faith that bears her up under deep depression. The poetess here gives vent to her patriotism in many poems. In ‘On the Path of Immortality’ she expresses her kinship with the lowliest in Indian society. She expresses her resolve to make herself free from the trammels of a life of ease, only to make it worthy of action for the alleviation of the sufferings of humanity, and for unbinding the fetters which bind her country. In some poems she deals with contemporary political events in India. ‘The Song of Awakening,’ ‘The New Awakening,’ ‘The Cry of the Weak,’ ‘Let Him be Victorious,’ ‘The Liberated Prisoner,’ ‘The Satyagrahi,’ ‘Regarding Tarakeswar,’ and such other poems are full of patriotic fervour. In ‘If they Awake’ she sounds the same note which is being sounded by Mahatma Gandhi as a champion of the cause of the untouchables. She gives expression toher naive sense of humour in ‘The Letter of the Grandmother,’ ‘The Reply of the Granddaughter’ and ‘The Reply of the Grand-daughter-in-law.’ And she becomes exquisitely pathetic in ‘In the Mud of the Pond,’ and in ‘The River it is that makes me say.’

But more beautiful and more exquisite self-revelation comes in ‘On the Path of Life’ which can be rightly styled her domestic and spiritual autobiography. This is a book of Poems of the same kind and of the same rank as ‘La Vita Nuova’ of Dante, ‘The House of Life’ by D. G. Rossetti, ‘The Sonnets from the Portuguese’ of Mrs. Browning and ‘Monna Innomianata’ of Christina Rossetti. This is a sonnet-sequence, and is divided into three sections,–‘Companionship,’ ‘Alone,’ and the ‘Fallen Flower.’ The first section contains poems dealing with the maidenhood of the poetess, her life with its hopes and fears, as it was before her marriage. In such sonnets as the following she gives expression to the recollection of her life as a maiden: -

Afar I dwelt, and you to bring me near,
Dared even death. What was the wizardry
That made you see a goddess’ aureole here
About the brow of a woman such as I?
And all unasked you lavished at my feet
The treasure that was yours. High on the height
I lived, my heart like ice.–To the valley sweet
You brought me down, and chill and hard and white
I am no more. Your love has thawed my soul,
Melting it drop by drop. O love, slake
Your thirst, with this my cup be satisfied.
…………………O let me hide
Within the sanctuary of thy heart.
But if the spell dissolve and your love fly,
What resting place in all the world have I? ⁸

I do not mean that the above lines were inspired by Tennyson, but the reader when reading them will be strongly reminded of the following lines from Tennyson’s ‘Princess’:

Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height:
What pleasure lives in height (the Shepherd sang),
In height and cold, the splendour of the hills?
And come, for love is of the valley, come,
For love is of the valley, come thou down
And find him…………….

The poetess, as in the above poem, still doubted the constancy of her lover and remained unmoved; but he still came,–

You said–‘Yes, I have come again for you.
The more repelled, the closer am I drawn.
Hope, like the daily dark-dispelling dawn,
After each disappointment wakes anew.
Look round and see what light, what sound, the play
Of the waves of life,–how beautiful it seems.
Who would remain stricken by sorrowful dreams
With wilful eyes close shut when all is day?
Come, let us walk together in this light,
Our perfect life’s fulfilment to attain.’

Yet she would not listen, for,

Both day and night, I walk in dreams, I said,
A twilight world, nor dark nor bright is mine.
With longings undefined my heart is fed,
Dimly a hundred hopes within it shine,
As gleam the small stars in the evening sky,
Seeking an everlasting refuge there.
Such love you ask for–is it mine to give,
Your thirst to quench, your fever to allay?
Could we pursue together while we live,
Doubting and fearing not, the self-same way?
And if your heart’s desire be thus fulfilled,
Would not new longings rise again unstilled?

But her lover would put a stop to all her questionings by asking her to trust in his love, because he said,–

Your love is the only goal of my desires.
Rejected I still urge my bitter need.

This at last set at rest all her doubts, and she could not but give herself up to his love; and she said,–

Let this your love lovely and fruitful be.

She added,

Burdened with ill
And heavy load of pain, a woman halts
Weary through life; but heaviest she bears
The burden of herself. O lift this load
And help me.

Her lover wants to question her again; but she refuses to be disturbed with questions, as she wants all thoughts of the past and the future to be banished from her mind and also because she believed,

Safe in the heaven of your arms is peace.

This all-sufficing and all-confiding love was to suffer a rude shock at some future time in the life of the poetess, and she sings,–

Hand still clasps hand, but soon unheeding drops,
The Malati garlands lose their fragrant air,
The song I sang sudden unfinished stops.
Look in my eyes, the clouds are gathering there,
My heart feels it will break. Is this the end
Of all my dreams, or but an evil one
That yet may pass?

She, in utter bewilderment, asks,–

Is my spring-time done?
What place is this, what time, and who are we
Who sit side by side? By what strange ways
Have we been faring? Did fatality
Lead you astray? Where searches now your gaze?

She feels greatly perturbed at the fickleness of love,–

Alone, my dark self-questionings never cease.
Is this love’s way–to swell and overflow
And then to move indifferent and slow?

And she asks,

Is it impossible that love and peace
And joy in work together ever dwell?

Yet, she will go hand in hand, for she says,–

.... Let pity be the band
That holds us each to each…..
Let us two frightened hearts, clasped as in love,
Fight with our fears

She becomes great with the greatness of self-effacement and self-abnegation,–

Let love go and let joy forsake our lives,
Let hope be shattered and in fragments hurled,
But memory knows no death, it still survives,
Let us not drift afar in this cold world.

Then death comes and intervenes and takes her companion in life away to the other world; and she remains all alone behind. But she does not feel the pain of separation, for she knows that her marriage is endless matrimony and she believes that her beloved is always with her, though now removed from the field of human experience and the phenomenal world.

‘On the Path of Life’ is in its own way a great book, and is one of the greatest of sonnet-sequences written on love. Its diction is faultless and its metre, following the Petrarchian model, may rank with the noblest efforts of that great but dangerous form. It reveals also that

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
’Tis woman’s whole existence. ⁹

In her life-time Mrs. Roy was regarded as the greatest of Bengali poetesses, though some might maintain Mrs. Mankumari Bose’s claim to the highest rank among them, as Mrs. Roy falls short of Mrs. Bose, the writer of an epic poem, ‘Beerkumar-badh’ or the ‘Slaughter of Abhimanyu,’ in the power of conceiving and giving shape to a poem of great bulk. But whatever may be the opinion of some, most will certainly admit that Mrs. Roy has no superior among Bengali poetesses.

The death of Mrs. Roy, though at the age of sixty-nine, is a distinct loss to Bengali poetry; for had she lived longer she could have Presented it with more works that would endure. At her age her powers remained undiminished; and she identified herself, with the ardour of youth, with many social and humanitarian activities. Her poetical work is of rare value. This will give her a rank in Bengali literature with the best of our poets; and, though herself free from all blemishes of form and metre, with Mrs. Browning in English, for, like her, she was pure in sentiment and generous at heart. Her sincerity too was unquestionable; and she had ‘the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is, in the sight of God, of great price.’ ¹⁰ Like that of Mrs. Browning, her yearning heart said to her lover,–

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love’s sake only………..
A creature might forget to weep who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
Thou mayest love on, through love’s eternity.

1 Mrs. Roy was well-known in Bengal not only for her work as a poetess, but also for her social service, and her great love for her country and womankind. All these varied aspects of her life are expressed in her poetry. After her marriage she practically ceased to write poetry, and when asked the reason, pointed to her children and said, ‘These are my living poems.’ After graduating she worked for some time as a mistress in the Bethune Collegiate School and later was appointed a Lecturer in the Bethune College, Calcutta. She was a champion of women’s rights and in 1923 she headed the Deputation that waited on Lord Lytton, then Viceroy, for the removal of sex-disqualification for the purposes of election to the (then) Calcutta Municipality. And, in 1930, when the Labour Commission came out to India to enquire into the conditions of the labouring classes, the Government of Bengal secured her services as an assessor to make the Commissioners acquainted with the grievances of the women workers of Bengal. One of her brothers, Mr. Nisith Sen, is a well known Advocate of the Calcutta High Court; and Mr. S. N. Roy, C. I. E., I. C. S, Additional Secretary to the Government of Bengal in the Political and Appointment Departments, is one of her step-sons.

2 The maiden name of Mrs. Roy was Miss Kamini Sen.

3 ‘Echoes from East & West’–Roby Datta.

4 ‘Echoes from East and West’–Roby Datta.

5A popular poem included in Secondary School text-books.

6 It reminds one of Moore’s ‘Light of other days.’

7 By Bernard of Morlaix, 1140; Tr. by J. M. Neale, 1851.

8 This and all the following renderings of Mrs. Roy’s poems are from ‘Sonnets from the Bengali’ by Mrs. Jessie Duncan Westbrook. The Modern Review, November, 1929.

9 Byron, Donna Julia.