A look at Bengali literary canon through pre-Tagore figures

Perhaps no place on earth has spawned more poets than the lower delta of Bengal, and now­here has poetry been so intima­tely connected with the ideas of nation and nationality, culture and society. But the figure of Tagore has loomed so large over this landscape that other poets have often been consigned to the margins of this literary history. Rosinka Chaudhuri’s ambitious new study is an attempt to rem­edy this lack and throws light on early attempts to construct a Bengali literary canon.