জাতি, আত্মা এবং সংবেদনশীলতা হিসাবে প্রকৃতি : রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর, বিভূতিভূষণ বন্দ্যোপাধ্যায় এবং জীবনানন্দ দাস এর দৃষ্টিভঙ্গিতে পরিবেশগত সচেতনতার একটি সমালোচনামূলক বিশ্লেষণ/ Nature as Nation, Spirit, and Sensibility : A Critical Analysis of Environmental Aw
Keywords:
- Bengali literature,
- Rabindranath Tagore,
- Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay,
- Jibanananda Das,
- environmental awareness,
- ecological sensibility,
- postcolonial ecocriticism,
- Pather Panchali
Abstract
Bengali literature occupies a singular position in the global literary cartography of ecological sensibility. Long before the formalisation of ecocriticism as an academic discipline in the Western academy during the 1990s, Bengali writers were composing texts saturated with what can only be described as environmental consciousness - an awareness of the non-human world that went beyond pastoral decoration to interrogate the philosophical, spiritual, and ethical relationships between human beings and the living earth. This paper undertakes a critical analysis of environmental awareness as it manifests across three foundational figures of modern Bengali literature: Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (1894–1950), and Jibanananda Das (1899-1954). Through close reading of selected texts - Tagore's nature poetry and his philosophy of Jeevan-devata, Bibhutibhushan's epic prose evocations of the Bengal countryside in Pather Panchali and Aranyak, and Jibanananda's radical dissolution of human selfhood into natural imagery - the paper argues that each writer constructed a distinct yet related ecological vision. Tagore articulated a spiritual ecology grounded in cosmic unity; Bibhutibhushan produced a phenomenological ecology of intimate local landscapes; Jibanananda Das advanced a proto-modernist, melancholic ecology in which the natural world becomes simultaneously refuge and reproach to a disenchanted modernity. Together, these three writers constitute a coherent tradition of environmental literary thought within Bengali modernity, one whose significance extends well beyond its regional linguistic context and anticipates concerns that have become urgent for global environmental humanities in the twenty-first century.
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