Kazi Nazrul Islam was a Bengali poet, writer, musician, and is the national poet of Bangladesh. Nazrul is regarded as one of the greatest poets in Bengali literature. Popularly known as Nazrul, he produced a large body of poetry, music, messages, novels, stories, etc. with themes that included equality, justice, anti-imperialism, humanity, rebellion against oppression and religious devotion. Nazrul's activism for political and social justice as well as writing a poem titled as "Bidrohī", meaning "the rebel" in Bengali, earned him the title of "Bidrohī Kôbi". His compositions form the avant-garde music genre of Nazrul Gīti.
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee CIE was an Indian novelist, poet, Essayist and journalist. He was the author of the 1882 Bengali language novel Anandamath, which is one of the landmarks of modern Bengali and Indian literature. He was the composer of Vande Mataram, written in highly sanskritized Bengali, personifying Bengal as a mother goddess and inspiring activists during the Indian Independence Movement. Chattopadhayay wrote fourteen novels and many serious, serio-comic, satirical, scientific and critical treatises in Bengali. He is known as Sahitya Samrat in Bengali.
Anita Desai, born Anita Mazumdar is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters. She won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea. The Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain and an anthology of short stories, Games at Twilight. She is on the advisory board of the Lalit Kala Akademi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London.
Michael Madhusudan Dutt (Maikel Modhushudôn Dôtto ; was a Bengali poet and playwright. He is considered one of the pioneers of Bengali literature.
Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, alternatively spelt as Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, was a Bengali novelist and short story writer of the early 20th century. Most of his works deal with the lifestyle, tragedy and struggle of the village people and the contemporary social practices that prevailed in Bengal. He remains the most popular, translated, and adapted Indian author of all time.
Samar Sen was a prominent Indian Bengali poet and journalist in the post-Independence era.
Bengali literature denotes the body of writings in the Bengali language and which covers Old Bengali, Middle- Bengali and Modern Bengali with the changes through the passage of time and dynastic patronization or non-patronization. Bengali has developed over the course of roughly 1,300 years. If the emergence of the Bengali literature supposes to date back to roughly 650 AD, the development of Bengali literature claims to have 1,600 years of old. The earliest extant work in Bengali literature is the Charyapada, a collection of Buddhist mystic songs in Old Bengali dating back to the 10th and 11th centuries. The timeline of Bengali literature is divided into three periods: ancient (650–1200), medieval (1200–1800) and modern. Medieval Bengali literature consists of various poetic genres, including Hindu religious scriptures, Islamic epics, Vaishnava texts, translations of Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit texts, and secular texts by Muslim poets. Novels were introduced in the mid-19th century. Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore is the best known figure of Bengali literature to the world. Kazi Nazrul Islam, notable for his activism and anti-British literature, was described as the Rebel Poet and is now recognised as the National poet of Bangladesh.
Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful" poetry of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. Referred to as "the Bard of Bengal", Tagore was known by sobriquets: Gurudeb, Kobiguru, Biswokobi.
—From A Prayer for My Daughter by W. B. Yeats, written on the birth of his daughter Anne on February 26
Buddhadeva Bose, also spelt Buddhadeb Bosu, was an Indian Bengali writer of the 20th century. Frequently referred to as a poet, he was a versatile writer who wrote novels, short stories, plays and essays in addition to poetry. He was an influential critic and editor of his time. He is recognised as one of the five poets who moved to introduce modernity into Bengali poetry. It is said that since Rabindranath Tagore, there has not been a more versatile talent in Bengali literature.
Subhash Mukhopadhyay was one of the foremost Indian Bengali poets of the 20th century. He is also known as the "podatik kobi" in the field of Bengali literature. A book of thirty of Subhash's best known poems in English translation, titled ' As Day is Breaking', was published in 2014 by Anjan Basu, a Bangalore-based writer/critic. The book includes a rather detailed introduction to the poet's work as well. He was honoured with Jnanpith Award in 1991.
Subhash Mukherjee was an Indian scientist, physician from Hazaribagh, Bihar and Orissa Province, British India, who created the world's second and India's first child using in-vitro fertilisation. Kanupriya Agarwal (Durga), who was born in 1978, just 67 days after the first IVF baby in United Kingdom. Afterwards, Dr. Subhash Mukherjee was harassed by the then West Bengal state government and Indian Government and not allowed to share his achievements with the international scientific community. Dejected, he committed suicide on 19 June 1981.
Dr. K. Ayyappa Paniker, sometimes spelt "Ayyappa Panicker", was a Malayalam poet, literary critic, and an academic and a scholar in modern and post-modern literary theories as well as ancient Indian aesthetics and literary traditions. He was one of the pioneers of modernism in Malayalam poetry, where his seminal works like Kurukshethram (1960), is considered a turning point in Malayalam poetry. Many of Ayyappa Paniker's poems and his several essays were an important influence on later generations of Malayalam writers.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
The 12377 / 12378 Padatik Superfast Express is a daily Superfast train which runs between Sealdah in West Bengal and New Alipurduar in West Bengal via New Jalpaiguri Junction (Siliguri) in West Bengal.
Arup Chandra, born in 1951 in Murshidabad district in the state of West Bengal, is a writer, poet, essayist, art critic, and an educator. He is the writer of more than fourteen books, and has edited twelve others. Two of his books are translated into English and published. His research speciality is the history, poetry, art, culture and literature of Murshidabad District.
Bong is a neologism that originated in cosmopolitan India in the 1980s as a slightly pejorative exonym for the educated middle-class Bengalis from the Indian state of West Bengal. In the 21st century, the term became a self-appellation of pride through the use of satire and self-reflexive irony by the Bengali blogging community, which came to stand for West Bengalis as a whole. Bong has been noted as a word of Indian English, used in the Indian newspapers.
Shesh Namaskar is a 1971, Indian, Bengali-language novel that was written by Santosh Kumar Ghosh. The novel, which is considered to be its author's magnum opus, is written in the form of a series of letters from a son to his deceased mother. It won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1972.
Krishna Dhar, was an Indian poet, playwright, writer, journalist, columnist and teacher. He has written poetry alongside verse drama, nonfictional prose of varied nature and journalistic columns since the mid 1940s.
Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay was an Indian Bengali poet, translator and novelist.
