Jibanananda Das

Biography

Jibanananda Das (17 February 1899 - 22 October 1954) is the most popular Bengali poet after Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam. He is considered one of the precursors who introduced modernist poetry to Bengali Literature, at a period when it was influenced by Rabindranath Tagore's Romantic poetry.
During his lifetime he published only 269 poems in different journals and magazines of which 162 were collected in 7 anthologies, from Jhara Palak to Bela Obela Kalbela.However, since his expiry in 1954, many of his unpublished poems have been discovered and published, thanks to the dedicated initiative of his brother Asokananda Das, encouragement by his sister Sucharita Das and nephew Amitananda Das, and, above all, tireless efforts of Dr. Bhumendra Guha, who spent decades in copying from worn out pubclished and unpublished manuscripts. By 2008, the total number of published and unpubsliehdd poems stood at more than 788. In addition, a huge number of novels and short-stories were discovered and published about the same time.