Arun Mitra

Arun Mitra (Bengali: অরুণ মিত্র) (November, 1909 - August, 2000) was a Bengali poet.

He was born in Jessore, now in Bangladesh, Arun moved to Kolkata when he was a young boy and did most of his schooling there. In college he was very fascinated by the life sciences, although he was officially a student of English. At that time he was also writing a lot of poetry and reading his way through his new-found love—French literature.

After college, Arun Mitra became a successful journalist in the Bengali daily Ananda Bazar Patrika which at that time was edited by Satyendranath Majumdar, a prominent Bengali journalist-writer of that time. Arun's colleagues included the playwright Bijon Bhattacharya, and the novelist Subodh Ghosh. In 1937 Arun Mitra married Shanti and together they lived with Satyendranath who also happened to be Shanti Mitra's uncle. Shanti herself was an important short fiction writer.

In collaboration with Satyendranath, Arun edited Arani a progressive literary magazine which spearheaded the anti-fascist writers' movement in Bengal and where many of the stalwarts of Bengali literature were first published. Throughout the period that spanned World War II and the partition of India (into India and Pakistan), Arun Mitra remained a staunch advocate of freedom and sanity—as poet, journalist and writer. This commitment to humanity was the driving force of his life.

In 1948, Arun Mitra was awarded a scholarship by the French government to do his doctoral work at the Sorbonne, and Arun went reluctantly as he was not happy to leave Shanti and their two children behind. In Paris, Arun befriended the historian Ranajit Guha and the painter Paritosh Sen and also spent time with Aldous Huxley and French poets like Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon. After his return to India, Arun joined the faculty at Allahabad University and taught there until his retirement. He was always a poet first, and during his Allahabad years published much, including his only novel and translations of various French poets and writers—from Rimbaud to Sartre, from Voltaire to St. John-Perse.

The Mitras finally settled once again in Kolkata, living most of the rest of their lives in Tiljala, a poor and working-class neighborhood of the city. It was in Tiljala that Arun Mitra produced his best work and brought a decidedly new direction to Bengali poetry. Throughout their lives, people from all walks of life and across many generations befriended Shanti and Arun Mitra. Arun's fame actually made him more accessible to ordinary people, and along with them he mourned Shanti's death in 1998 in several of his last poems about his "fallen fellow-warrior".

He died in Kolkata, India. Two days before his death, Arun Mitra said his head was full of poetry that must be spoken, and dictated some lines, his last poem, to a young publisher friend.