Remembering Sukanta

Sukanta Bhattacharya reached the 100th anniversary of his birth on 15 August 2025.

- ANGSHUMAN KAR The writer is Professor, Department of English and Culture Studies, and Director, Centre for Australian Studies, the University of Burdwan. All translations by the writer

This great Bengali poet has not gotten the recognition he deserves. For many of us who try to write poetry in Bengali, however, Sukanta Bhattacharya was as loved as Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam when we were kids.

But though at one point of time in Bengal his name was taken along with Tagore, Sukanta has never been compared with him. He has even been considered less important than Nazrul. But he was a poet for even less time than Nazrul was active as a poet as he died when he was only twenty-one.

Sukanta Bhattacharya, however, was not simply a poet. He was a political activist too. He worked for the Communist Party of India. He was also the first secretary of Kishore Bahini or the Youth Brigade, a left organization that still works with kids and teenagers.

Annadasankar Bhattacharya, a communist student leader, had been trying for a long time to start a group like this for the teens. On 15 April 1943, Kishore Bahini was finally set up in Kolkata (1st Baisakh, 1350 in the Bengali calendar). Sukanta Bhattacharya, a close friend of Annadasankar, took over as its chief a year later.

Sukanta set up Kishore Bahini's main office in a corner of the Students' Federation office with just an old tin box. He would often sit there and oversee the activities of Kishore Bahini. Under his leadership, Kishore Bahini slowly grew beyond Kolkata to other parts of Bengal and even beyond Bengal.

Where does Sukanta stand as a poet? Some critics say that Sukanta's poems are too raw and that in his poetry he reveals his feelings too explicitly. That might be true for some of his poems.