Introductory Notes
"Banalata Sen" was composed by Jibanananda Das in 1934 when he was living in Calcutta, at a time in his life when he had lost his job of Assistant Lecturer at the City College, Kolkata. The relevant manuscript was discovered and labelled Book-8 while preserved in the National Library of Calcutta; the poem occurs on page 24 of this manuscript. It was first published in the December 1935 issue of the poetry magazine Kavita, edited by poet Buddhadeva Bose. It is also the first poem of his third collection of poetry published in 1942 under the title Banalata Sen. Earlier, the lyric was collected in Modern Bengali Poetry, jointly edited by Abu Sayeed Ayub and Hirendranath Mukhopadhyaya, published in 1939. Although popularly regarded a romantic lyric, the poet’s historical sense of human existence is unmistakably the underlying essence.
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