উনিশে মে

arak produce poems, fictions and essays too. It also has its contribution in novels and plays. Important of all, these creative expressions are not recent phenomena. Since time immemorial, Bengalis inhabit Barak Valley which suggests, Bengalis are no expatriates here.

In undivided India, Barak valley used to be the natural extension of the cultural impulse of the erstwhile Eastern Bengal (Not East Pakistan). Though, at the same time, a unique diction of poetic and other literary expressions in the literature patronised by the Dimasa royalty emerged. Those writings, at the same time, bore the imprint of medieval Bengali literature too.

The literature is unique in the sense that it owed to a great extent for its flowering to the splendour of the languages in the neighbourhood. That, a language in ultimate analysis is a result of the mingling of history and geography, is testified by the literature of Barak Valley. The vast canopy of folk tradition in which Bengalis in Barak Valley live and die doesn’t segregate communities apart and as a result, Bengali literature of Barak Valley till date, in the same fashion of the time of Dimasa royalty of yesteryears, is enriched by the participation of ‘others’, the writers of Bishnupriya Manipuri, Hindi and Punjabi origin.

Tagore-inspired poets were dominant in Barak Valley. The early generation of Anti-Tagore school of poetry didn’t find a footing in this soil. In the post-independence years, apart from the poetries, the brunt of partition and the tumultuous events taking place alongside the language crisis, inflicted a change in the prose and the theatre of this region to make it a chronicler of time. The peripheral nature of the geography eventually made the poets-writers-playwrights more and more homebound. The theatre of Barak Valley, once resounding the footsteps of the heroes of Greek tragedy, came nearer to the folk tradition of the soil. The narratives, which once sought to seek refuge in modernist sensitivity to decadence, set to tell the saga of destitution, desperation, hope and quest for roots.

Bengali, the language remains unchanged in all Bengali-lands, but the literature, takes its flight in a different trajectory in the sky of West Bengal literary circle. Again, when it builds the edifice of literature in Bangladesh, the rhythm of its movement sounds different. In the enclave of Barak Valley, the same Bengali literature unfurls and knits itself in a unique way.

Unless the literature of Barak Valley is read, its theatre is seen, the larger segment of Bengali geography would remain ever oblivious of this hamlet of Bengali language and literature.