Samar Sen

Samar Sen (Bengali: সমর সেন;)(10 October 1916 – 23 August 1987) was a prominent Bengali-speaking Indian poet and journalist in the post-Independence era.

He was a graduate of the Scottish Church College, at the University of Calcutta.

Sen's grandfather, Dinesh Chandra Sen, was a well-known writer and member of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad. His father, Arun Sen, an academician, had remarked, "I am the son of an illustrious father and the father of an illustrious son!" Samar Sen, along with Subhash Mukhopadhyay, belonged to the second generation of modern Bengali poets. However, he gave up poetry fairly early and devoted the better part of his later life to Marxism and journalism. He was the editor of the leftist newspaper Frontier published from Kolkata, which was banned during the period of the Indian Emergency (1975 -1977) declared by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi.

Samar Sen, like his other illustrious contemporaries, grew up under the gigantic impact of Rabindranath Tagore. Yet Samar Sen was perhaps the first to 'break' with the lyrical romanticism of Tagore and introduced "modern" (disenchantment, decadence, avant garde urban heterotopia) in Bengali verse. Influence of French and English modernism was originally translated into Bengali verse. A certain convergence of modernism and Marxism was evident in his poetic thought and style. His poetic life was somewhat over shadowed by his very original journalism as the editor of legendary Frontier in his later life. He was also chosen as the translator in the translator program for Soviet literature, he spent nearly five years in Moscow in the translators job, and in later part of his life became somewhat doubtful about bureaucratic "Communism" in general. Samar Sen also edited the intellectually avant garde magazine, Now that published a galaxy of prominent writers like Joan Robinson and Satyajit Ray and his deputy was the playwright and great actor Utpal Dutt. Samar Sen in private was a man with a wry sense of humour, sometimes acerbic but usually clinching in its aptness. He never regretted the sacrifice of what could have been a comfortbale material life, accompanied by adulation. His loyalty was to be downtrodden and that really was it though one may now, in retrospect, question, the path he thought best suited to their rescue. But he was a loss to poetry because his acute perception and extraordinary command of languages would have produced memorable verse of lasting significance. He decided poerty was a luxury in a world of gross deprivation and injustice and decided he would take up the cudgels on behalf of the poor regardles of the cost to himself. And he stuck to it to the bitter end though experiencing significant impoverishment in his own daily life.

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