Author: Sumanta Banerjee
Editor(s): Sumanta Banerjee
Publisher: Thema
Year: 2009
Language: English
Pages: 133
ISBN/UPC (if available): 9788186017661
Description
Wars and their heroes have stepped down from the pages of our ancient epics as living letters in the streets and fields, hills and jungles of India today. The poems brought together in this anthology are about these living letters. They describe an important turning-point in a war that is still on, and the mood of the men and women who are fighting it.
The poems included in this anthology therefore may often sound different, the conventional meters or poetic images having been abandoned. But an imaginative identification, or even sympathy on the part of the readers, will help their appreciation better. The present introduction and the accompanying notes are meant to explain the context.
Sumanta Banerjee, author of The Simmering Revolution, the most objective and authoritative account till date of the Naxalite Revolt of the late sixties and early seventies, places his collection of Naxalite poems and songs, both urban and rural, in a fairly elaborate theoretical matrix that gives a short account of the Revolt through its various phases and how it redefined the social function of literature, and goes into an analysis of the changing attitudes of the participants and sympathetic observers.
Contents
Introduction
Cup of Sorrows
Resistance and Repression
Poems from Jail
Retrospection
Notations