Surrealism, Vernacular Modernism, and the Poetics of the Uncanny: Re-reading Jibanananda Das

Abstract

This article re-examines the relationship between European Surrealism and the poetry of Jibanananda Das (1899–1954) through a comparative close reading of selected poems, with particular attention to imagery, temporality, colour, dream logic, defamiliarization, and the representation of the uncanny. Existing criticism has established important connections between Das and surrealistic poetics, but the question of influence requires greater methodological caution: Das was not a declared Surrealist, nor can his poetry be reduced to an Indian replica of Bretonian automatic writing. The article therefore distinguishes between direct historical influence and structural affinity. Drawing on Breton’s theory of psychic automatism and the marvellous, together with scholarship on modernism, image theory, and Bengali literary modernity, it argues that Das selectively appropriates avant-garde procedures while relocalizing them within the ecological, historical, and affective landscape of Bengal. Poems including “Banalata Sen,” “Nilima,” / Blue Skies, “Abar Ashibo Phire,”/I Shall Return to this Bengal, “Shob,” “Phire Esho,”/ Come Back, “Harinera,”/The Deer, “Beral,”/The Cat “Ghoda,”/Horse and “Ratri” /Night demonstrate recurrent mechanisms of surrealistic construction: incongruous juxtaposition, animated objects, unstable temporal scales, synesthetic colour, and the collision of ordinary material details with dreamlike perception. The analysis further shows that Das’s use of blue differs significantly from its more outwardly liberating function in European Surrealism: in his poetry, colour frequently becomes a medium of memory, mortality, ecological belonging, and historical estrangement. The article concludes that Das is most productively understood not as a derivative Surrealist but as a vernacular modernist who transforms selected Surrealist techniques into a distinct poetics of the uncanny. This reframing contributes to comparative modernist studies by shifting the discussion from a simple model of Western influence to one of selective appropriation, translation, and aesthetic localization.