JORA SANKO

JORA SANKO
The name ‗Jora Sanko‘ reminds us of the Jorasanko Thakur Bari, house of the Thakurs (anglicized to Tagore), located in the northern part of Calcutta. This is actually the ancestral home of Rabindranath Tagore, who was born and had spent his childhood days in this house. Until now Tagore is the only Bengali poet to have received the Nobel Prize in literature. He received the honor for his English rendition of the Bengali poetry, Gitanjali.
Editing Jora Sanko has been a wonderful experience. I did some similar work in one of my books, The Reciting Pens (published by Inner Child Press, limited, U.S.A.) that included three contemporary Bengali poets and the interviews that I held with them. The book bore a few of their poems, which I translated into English. I remember that the noted poet W.F. Lantry (Washington, DC) wrote this in the foreword: ―…we don‘t know enough about contemporary Bengali poets, and we should. Yes, we all love Tagore, and maybe we have read a little of Kazi Nazrul Islam, if we‘ve been lucky, we have sampled Shanka Ghosh. But we are far more likely to know the tradition from which contemporary Bengali poetry draws its strength: the Mahabharata, the Bahgavad Gita, the Vedas, the Sufis...‖ (Ref: The Reciting Pens, page no. vi, ISBN: 9780615861869)
Prior to explaining our motto I must say that literary workers across the globe are not so aware of the Bengali poetic heritage. Here again I will quote an excerpt from The Reciting Pens as I had probed the poet Suddhasatya Ghosh about his take on this issue. Ghosh had been elaborate in his answer, but I would rather like to put down this: ―…Hopefully you are aware that Bankim Chandra and Madhusudan Dutt had written in English during their early literary career. That was way before Rabindranath. But they were silently ignored and so were the others who wrote after them or had translated their works into English until 1947. The Rulers tried to keep themselves up above the ruled. After 1947 (post independence) it was a bit different issue altogether. Although we had our own government, we had almost a no-show in the international market. If you closely watch the
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development of Indian English authors you will find out that neither Salman Rushdie nor V. S. Naipaul can be considered among the Indian English authors. Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh or Chetan Bhagat arrived after a long period. It all began when a few Indian companies and/or International publishers considered the Indian domestic market seriously. Taru Dutt (1856-77), an Indian English poet-cum-novelist (she wrote a novel in French) with some renown was not evaluated properly at her time, yet Arundhati Roy received Booker in 1998. This is quite a long journey, and if it is the Indian scenario of English literature then what can be expected from the translations done from the native languages?‖ (Ref: The Reciting Pens, page no. 51)
Here in this anthology our aim was to compile select works (in English language) of the contemporary Bengali poets. No translations, but poetry that was primarily written in English. We had numerous submissions, but we were absolutely strict in our selection. The final result is now to be evaluated by the readers and critics. I‘m confident of the contributing poets, and I am sure that their works, as contained in the following chapters will speak for themselves! Unfortunately we could not include all well-known poets, for we had to rely on the electronic communications, and that not everybody was available on the World Wide Web. Again, we had a definite time-frame, but I think that we have been considerably successful in our attempt. Let me congratulate and thank all the contributing poets for trusting my vision. I am indeed grateful to Jaydeep Sarangi, Sudeep Sen and Madan G. Gandhi for supporting me in this endeavor.
Thank you,

Kiriti Sengupta
Secretary-cum-Editor,
The Poetry Society of India, Gurgaon (Haryana, India)
25th of March, 2014.