Introduction:
Today, everybody knows Pronob Paul as Bhasha Bodoler Kobi (the poet of language alteration), but for the younger generation it may come as a bit of a surprise to know that he was initially a popular (certainly non-commercial) poet whose poetry used to get loud clapping of the audiences. He has written many songs from his leftist ideology, which are available as a cassette and collected in his book Aagun Album (fire album).
He is still leftist at heart but because of his new spectacle to re-view old things with a new angle of observation, with a new point of view, he takes a leap to go beyond the known for discovering the other that carries the soul of a new. ‘New’ is an entity that goes beyond the tainted past of the previous position to enter into the present and remains in its active state looking towards the future. This is the dream of every innovative poet to get freedom from the known, to open up a new trail in an unknown terrain, because truth of a poetry is born in the womb of a new. His passion for a new and his quest for other pushes him to take the challenge of language alteration. Although he respects our traditional language, he is ready to keep them in mind but reluctant to put them on the tip of his pen. So, he started his prolonged experimentation with the poetic language throughout nineties and beyond. He always attacks grammar rules, etymology, and the conventional semantics of the Bengali language. His experimentation includes not only verbification or word-recombination, but also includes a brilliant performance of onomatopoeic usage to create a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that describes the action of the object. And finally, he emerges as Bhasha Bodoler Kobi.
However, nothing happened overnight, neither easily nor just in one step. It’s a prolonged experimentation through various difficult but exciting stages. That is where we are here to explore his poetic journey.
Literary Ambience before Setting off
In late eighties, a feminine phenomenon of poetry had already been established in the Bengali poetic society. She had philosophy in her eyes, emotional rhapsody in her heart, melody of recitation in her voice, and conventional costume on her breast. She used to deliver didactic speech, born from the poets’ deep thought, to educate the reader/listener. She used to ring wakeup calls for the stupid, by making vivid pictures of the ongoing time with the extracts of complex psychology and subconsciousness. Most of the readers used to equate poetry with these dimensions. The mainstream poets were coolly exploiting popularity by learning this phenomenon by heart and used to beat their drums to reject others by stigmatizing them as offbeat voicing.
Pronob can sense that our taste or preference is controlled by a group of those middlemen who are sharing out our world and running it by buying and selling. Universities and multinational companies are playing football with the brains of educated people. How to smile, how to express love, what to apply on our skin, what to sing, what to say, how to say⸺ everything has been already charted. We all are acting as fathers, friends, or husbands of the chart where the chart controls our small everyday world. This is our present practice of life to live with happiness and peace.
Every word of our joy and sorrow, our pleasure and pain, has been already written in the dictionary, and we have to play within this boundary, even if our feelings go beyond this boundary. If we leave these mythos and beliefs and the already established standards of social understandings of our own time, we are stigmatized as villain of the Bengali poetic world.
Pronob has started his alternative journey of language alteration at this juncture and hence he has to overcome the difficult path of negative comments, adverse criticism, from his contemporary world of Bengali poetry. Estrangement and alienation have become his part of life. However, he always believes the necessity of a new language for writing new poetry, and necessity is the root of any invention. Neither an expedition nor an exploration is possible unless we shrink our available space by trimming everything of the existing phenomenon of our contemporary poetics. His self-imposed limitation pushed him to start his language alteration process.
Why Language Alteration?
Pronob gives a psychological answer to this question⸺ he thinks that the question is synonymous with the question like why we are after the Mars or Moon exploration! Not the purpose but the individual interest becomes the key for the quest of a new one. The excitement of knowing the unknown is another name of life. A dead one possesses no queries. When human beings can manage to continue his life with this known world only, the mystery of unknown universe will no longer stir their brain. We enter a strange ice age where science comes to a halt, and history becomes paralyzed, where birth of a new one is no longer needed, because a dead brain or ageing eyes never disturb themselves.
This paralyzed condition triggers the poet to declare that ‘It Must Change’[1] (in Wallace Stevens’ word), because change is the essence of life that ‘sails on the uncrossed sea whose waves chase each other in an eternal hide-and-seek./ It is the restless sea of change, feeding its foaming flocks to lose them over and over again’[2], as Tagore reveals for a fugitive poet who wants to free himself from the poetic prison. If the same words are used decade after decade, they lose their inner essence, and they are neither able to create any rhythm, nor able to add a new dimension. They are surviving only because of the ruminating habit of the present poetic world. The repetition of the same words, such as ‘moonshine’ or ‘sunshine’ or ‘love’, with the same tones, same gestures, same dimensions, becomes cliché and boring. So, it is very natural to feel an urge for renewing language for an expression by other means. As the use of pronouns has been developed to break the monotony of nouns, it becomes important to bring an alteration of the words that are not producing any sound effect, rather making noise pollution. That is where the requirement of language alteration comes into picture.
This is one of the most important answers to the question of why language alteration, but there are more. Let me tell you a story of an important incident, happened at Kolkata in 1990 that prepared the stage to gear up Pronob’s process of language alteration. Pronob Paul was then editing the magazine ‘Anti’ and he used to meet regularly with some of his poet-friends of that time for discussion and debating about poetry in the College Street Coffee house[3] at Kolkata. They were Dhiman Chakraborty[4], the editor of ‘Aalaap’ (conversation), Shuvankar Das, the editor of ‘Somobeto Artonad’ (assembled screaming), Alok Biswas, the editor of ‘Cartridge’, and Soumit Basu, Ramprasad Gangopadhyay, Nrisinghamurari Dey, Ratan Das etc. In some later stage, Ranjan Maitra[5], the editor of ‘Yuga Rig Vedic’ (era of Rigveda) and poet Swapan Roy[6], the editor of ‘Dridim’ (a combined word with a sense of rhythm with the sound of war-trumpet), joined with them. All of them were renowned poets of the nineteen eighties. They united to find a way of alternative literature in the Bengali poetic society, and they were running a group, named ‘Kobita Campus’ (poetry campus), to explore the arena of poetry with their new thoughts of aesthetic creations. Although all of them knew the Kaurab as a renowned journal but they didn’t know Kaurab poets personally. In April 1990, they joined the last Kaurab poetry camp. This meeting of Kaurab and Kobita Campus team is an important event that has fueled not only Pronob’s journey of language alteration, but also the emergence of ‘New Poetry’, a new genre of poetry, which slowly gathered its momentum thereafter.
Kobita Campus team has published their first magazine in January 1991 with the same name Kobita Campus magazine. Then the full team has arrived at Dhalbhumgarh forest rest house, situated in the present state Jharkhand, to celebrate their first publication of magazine, and to spend few days with their poetries with the Kaurab team. Just like the style of Kaurab’s poetry camp, they were spending with daylong poetry reading, discussion, criticism, construction, and deconstruction, and so on. Although, they have been discussing about the possibilities of new poetry by removing its emotional part, but at the end of the day, everyone used to sink in the emotion of wine! They have liked the poetry experience of this event and named the event as Poetry Workshop.
Barin Ghosal of Kaurab has hosted many such poetry workshops where they have discussed on various national and international poetics, their success and failure, impact and excellence, temporality and gimmick, remake and remix, imitation and inspiration, and the sparks generated by the turning of Bengali poetics in the last decades. Everyone in the workshop has taken an oath that they would not write the old poetry anymore, nobody would ever write for the poetry institutions, which is making the market of remake and remix poetry with a coating of aesthetics. The aim is to question the present poetic thoughts, to identify the enemies of poetry, to understand Barin’s theory of ‘otichetona’ (expansive consciousness), and to invent and implement a new poetics. The idea of the workshop’s activities has been acted as a catalyst for everyone of the workshops because of their quest for the possibilities of other approaches, other expressions, other meanings, other values, outside the assumed frames of poetry. They started to publish the outputs of the poetry workshops through Kobita Campus magazine.
To expel the thoughts of old poetry first they decide collectively and consciously to sort out all the attributes of old poetry, and record them as⸺ emotion, rhyme, analogy, symbol, metaphor, description, history, story, drama, news, comment, speech, exaggeration. However, next question comes to mind that if everything is excluded, what else to write? How to cook without cooking spices and formula? Barin explained the importance of this self-imposed constraint of a poet: If a positive person is held within a boundary, he definitely explores to blossom within his boundary. Poetry is also like that. Because of the change of their poetic thoughts and philosophy, now it becomes necessary to form a suitable language to carry it. Then Pronob paul has come forward with his innovative process of language alteration.
What is Language Alteration
The answer to ‘why’ leads us to the next question ‘how’⸺ what will be the process of language alteration? I think, the answer is hidden inside the poet’s name. According to Sanskrit verb-based semantics, Pronob means prakṛṣṭa nava (excellent process of making new). prakṛṣṭa = pra+kṛṣṭa — the suffix ‘kṛṣṭa’ carries the same Sanskrit verb-root of cre(ate)— Cre — “to do”. And English dictionary says that ation is an action. So, cre–ation is to do an action. And the suffix ‘pra’ elevates the soul of this action with its action-actor entity to go beyond the existing kṛṣṭa. The word ‘nava’, the new, is the entity that always wants to go beyond the known. So, by his own nature itself, Pronob’s motto is always to square off against the status quo. In other words, Pronob’s excellent process of making a new is to attain the escape velocity to go beyond the boundary of the accepted gravitational influence of the conventional thoughts of poetic culture. It’s to explore the other, the alternative, the unknown, where the knowability works not from the faculty of intellect but from the faculty of intuitive mind, the source of imaginations of a poet.
When the existing means of expressions become repetitive, monotonous, and boring, we take a leap to find the other that forms a suitable means for carrying the soul of a new, and then engage the other means with the unknown space that reveals its face to arrive at the expressions by other means. But what are those other means for Pronob?— verbification, word-recombination, adverbial and adjectival modification, abolition of pronouns, onomatopoeic usage to create new words, alternative structure of sentence etcetera to create an altogether different poetic language for Bengali poetry.
Making of Magic Canvas
Pronob’s poetic journey has started with Magic Canvas, his first book of poetry, published in 1991, under the initiative of Ekhon Bangla Kobitar Kagoj and Journey 90s. To create a Magic Canvas with his new color and brush Pronob calls the sun to say—wait a little, let me make you brighter. In this phase his poems are in prose format and his experiment is on the usage of words differently to get an alternative structure of phrase of his verses. The poems are subject oriented with its deep penetration into subject, and indirect reflections of dialectical materialism with the philosophy of socialism of a leftist ideology. He is trying here to negate already established logocentric words, used by the class-conscious contemporary poets, and the conventional metaphors, imagery, and figure of speech. His alternative construction of poems here is to explore the queer magical play with his color of imagination for painting his Magic Canvas.
Kicking Off with The Poems of Language Alteration
Though the poems of his Magic Canvas have received popularity, but he himself has felt boring with the same words and their same phonetics. His poems are not able to make the sensation up to his desires, not able to strike the chord he wants to play, not able to make the difference he wants to create with the existing one. Everything is appearing to him as external or physical, and full of gimmick. His own dissatisfaction with his construction process of his Magic Canvas has pushed him towards the process of language alteration.
In their poetry workshop during 1993-94 both Kaurab and Kobita Campus team have been thinking about the uses of ‘verb’ in a poem. Despite of richness of our Bengali language, monotonous uses of a limited number of verbs slow down its dynamicity when we are living in a fast-paced society. All the universities, professors, academicians, linguists, grammarians, and the conventional poets could just stare at the present state of our language, but no one to question it. Pronob could feel how a single sentence, loaded with too many verbs, slows down the language. Verbs are very important for a language. It’s the backbone of a language that provides its strength and dynamicity. A language, like English, where both nouns and adjectives can be transformed into verbs to take part in the direct actions, becomes stronger as well as dynamic. However, Bengali language is not like that. Pronob has to take the challenge of verbification in Bengali language for the construction of his new poems, under the heading of Bhasha Bodoler Kobita (the poems of language alteration) and published the book in 1994 from Kobita Campus publication.
In this phase he has mainly emphasized the formation of verbs from uncommon nouns and adjectives. He is combining two verbs into a single verb which is not only pairing of words but also making new phonemes with word-pairs. Though he himself has felt that the poems look like a troublesome jeep, bumping along the hilly and rough road, but he could recognize the new phonetics in his verbification. Many poets and readers have commented about the poems as jumble of words without poetry. But the perception of the difference from others has excited Pronob because he compares his first stage of creating new phonetics as the human’s primitive form, which cannot be compared with any other things. Despite of the huge resistances and debates about his new experiment, our great Barin Ghosal could feel the possibilities of Pronob’s inventions on language.
Read More: Barin Ghosal: A New Era of Bengali Poetry
Let me tell you an interesting story about this phase of Pronob paul that he has described in his book Bhasha Bodoler Godyo (prose of language alteration). Few days after the publication of Kobita Campus magazine, Issue:34, in 1994, Dhiman Chakraborty, Ranjan Maitra, Alok Biswas, and Pronob Paul from Kobita Campus team have reached to Jamshedpur to set up their poetry workshop with Barin Ghosal and Pronab Kumar Dey in the rest house of Dalma Wildlife Sanctuary at Jamshedpur. It was 7:30 pm, a thrilling evening at outside. Pronob Paul was reading his few poems, written on Dalma hills. Since the conventional sense of sound was not permitting phonetically in many places of those poems, a loud resistance has been raised from the group. Perhaps, it is difficult for a new listener to comprehend Pronob’s inventions, but he himself knew that his experiment might not be easy but surely possible. Again, an inventor too needs some kind of acknowledgement that can provide the crucial encouragement to go on. Yes, that is where Barin Ghosal stands out. In the debate with Pronob’s poems, Barin has raised his firm and strong voice to say— this is completely a new thing, an invention, in Bengali poetic world. One day Pronob himself will rectify its excesses and clumsiness. No one else has done this type of work in Bengali poetry.[7]
Let me give you an essence of Pronob’s poem from this poetry book Bhasha Bodoler Kobita[8]:
Disruptionist
Everyone nostalgiating, who be the otherharbinger! Which ladytable will be the highjumper! Who will glassify the glass, flamify the flame, dangle and waggle over the flametongued wings of ladyfire! It’s a game of georacing to conquer the map, a topsy-turvy game on every page with vowelic, consonantic, and alphabetic scriptism. His globeoccuping mouth spits in the face of grammatical authority.
Still unidimensioning! Swinging in a muddy and slimy whirlpool or practicing to belong to Mr. and Mrs. products. Cigaraing with crosslegged relaxation. Mr. and Mrs. intellecthawkers guarding the city of language, and this bandit logicizes his disruptionistic game, trapezifies autonome-territory, to destruct, and calls for an open sesame.
Making Melody with the Orchestra Alone
In the phase of Bhasha Bodoler Kobita, the process of verbification with new phonetics of his neologism for the alternative expressions of poetry has excited Pronob but their cacophonic effect instead of 
melodic effect has made him irritated. His own dissatisfaction pushed him to find some methods, which will give musical flavors to remove the irritation of his new coinages. So, he has started his experimentation not only on verbification to shift the uncommon nouns, but also adverbial and adjectival modification, abolition of pronouns, combination of Bengali words with the words of other languages. His new process discovers new dimensions, adds new phonetics, and takes a leap beyond the linguistic fundamentalism. This phase of experimentation gifted us his third poetry book Ekla Orchestra (Orchestra Alone), published from Kobita Campus in 1997. The name suggests that he is preparing to play an entire orchestra himself. The book has become an important turning point for his experiment on language alteration, where subjects speak directly, scenes express themselves, and old perceptions renew themselves with new language.
Entering into the Forbidden World
At this stage, Barin Ghosal’s theory of Expansive Consciousness (EC) has taken the center stage that paves the way for the journey of Notun Kabita (New Poetry), a new genre of poetry, in the world of conventional Bengali poetry. And this New Poetry needs a new language, where Pronob Paul is building a new world of language with his own word’s sculptures. In this phase he has prioritized absurdity in the construction of poems. By limiting his use of new words, he has emphasized on phrasing and poetic verbalism to make them more melodious. Being a poet of New Poetry he is always in a quest of his own light house and continues his process of language alteration to find his own radical space for coming out from the logocentric language. No doubt, the new world of language remains outside the contemporary poetic zone, because institutional authority fails to feel the need of new, the need of change, and tries to marginalize those who value aesthetic consciousness, and stigmatizes their poetry as odd and awkward to restrict the power of new inventions and new aesthetic adventures. So, Pronob’s world of new language is made forbidden by the authoritarian voice of the Bengali poetic society that propel him to name his next book Nishidha Bhuban (Forbidden World), published by Kobita Campus in 2002.
Striking with The Pain of Striding Outside the Manual
Expanded consciousness reveals unknown dimensions. The imageries needed to capture this expansion properly is a surge of sheer feelings. They have no specific forms or so-called solid words, and they are not supposed to be in the Bengali dictionary. They must be developed. Pronab has taken the challenge for this development. His process of development always moves against the prescribed norms and grammar rules, against the standardization of language, which leads towards the boundless diversity where every moment opens up the horizon of infinite possibilities. But the diversities in aesthetic creations may evoke incommensurable frames because every individual imagination is distinct and defamiliar. The language lawyer may be annoyed by his process of language alteration, but when the revelation brings out many unknown worlds into knowledge by breaking the prison of logic, the illogic becomes the logic of language. It is to make the sign of strain against the grain that redefine the words through his own imaginations. Therefore, he has to gain The Pain of Striding Outside the Manual— the name of his next poetry book— Shastraheen Chalaar Bedanaa, published by Kobita Campus in 2004.
Human thoughts and sense of melody are rapidly changing all over the world to tune in to our multidimensional reality of life. So, a poet has to go beyond the unidimensional meaning of life and poetry to cope up with ever-evolving aesthetic values through our space-time for getting the affirmation with our desires and dreams of life. He thinks that the poetic license must be granted for its dynamicity. Poetic license is not just a word, but it demands proper application, so that language alteration can add new dimensions to the texture of Bengali language.
In this phase Pronob has started to develop his neologism with the flavors of known words for increasing communication with the readers. He used to join native and foreign words by twisting stubborn suffixes of Bengali words to make them melodic. The formation of new words with the word-combinations of many languages adds an international flavor to its domestic essence that makes the language more reckless for going beyond the periphery. It is to change the old words with new meanings for the rebirth and revival of dead words. The aim is to overcome the inertia of the existing semantics to open up their possibilities with melodic flavors. Pronob thinks that our past is not the way of journey, but the documents of the experience of journey, which sharpens our new inventions. It is not the nostalgia that pulls back to the past, but the freedom from the known in true sense for going beyond the past.
Beyond the Poem of Language Alteration
The journey of a poet of the New Poetry is not static but dynamic. So, Pronob Paul has started his new experiment to write a new set of poems for language alteration with rhyme to listen to the rhythm of his coinages of new words. In 2007 these poems are published by Kobita Campus publication with the book name Bhasha Bodoler podyo (poem of language alteration), which has received Vishnu Dey Award. It’s not the socalled rhyme, rather, he has demythified rhyme in the playroom of poetry with new construction and application of his own coinages of words.
If the color of the world was maroon before the poem of language alteration, then what will be the color of the world after the language alteration— the answer is Pronob’s next book Rodgraph (graphic sunshine), published in 2010 from Notun Kobita publications. It’s a unique graphics in the construction of poetry with words of language that dazzles with the color of sunshine, to brighten its language with multidimensional radiance for going beyond language alteration. The book has received Kabi Sunil Kumar Memorial Award in 2012.
Pronob’s language alteration is not to obliterate conventions but to swerve it from its past, its real existence, through constant convening and reconvening 
of language. When the readers respond outside the assumed frames with his own imaginations by negating predefined thoughts, limited forms, or fixed norms of poetry, they could discover new meanings and new values. His language alteration is a process of negation, where the negation of ordinary is to explore the possibilities of extra-ordinary by negating all limiting adjuncts of ordinary. It’s an attempt to make a move from unidimensionality towards multidimensionality, beyond the iron cage of rationality and logocentric conventions of words. Let me stop here with a poem of Pronob paul from his latest book Jajaghor[9] ( Jaja(bor) + ghor — nomad + home) —
Randomious
Colorcrazy mathematics.
Writing down the fraction of stars
in the full moon of the planet bearing trees.
Shirt’s collar on fire.
Retouching errors across the blank space.
Unfolding an abstract in the inflamed geography
and the story of an empty plate
on the ground floor of the globe.
Rhythmic system turns off
the song of silence
A night call in the midnight whistle
lying a mile across
in the white sleep of the widow paper.
So many turnings of the same pen.
Reddish and bluish birds
sit in the gray land of the scarecrow village.
Characters’ skulls write their self-elegy
in the dryland of the scattered books.
Discovery burns in the hanging pyre,
full sleeve mood turns off by its own fire.
I write colorful posters of Diwali
on the back of the bright moon
with melancholic notations.
I write the nickname of poems
on the back of the pale evening.
I sharpen the dark with the bullets of
letters, words, and rhythms
in the language-drawing school beyond known.
Pronob Paul’s Oeuvre
- Agun Album (fire album), collection of songs.
- Magic Canvas, Ekhon Bangla Kobitar Kagoj and Journey 90s, 1991
- Bhasha Bodoler Kobita (poems of language alteration), Kobita Campus, 1994.
- Ekla Orchestra (orchestra alone), Kobita Campus, 1997.
- Nishidha Bhuban (forbidden world), Kobita Campus, 2002.
- Shastraheen Chalaar Bedanaa (the pain of striding outside the manual), Kobita Campus, 2004.
- Bhasha Bodoler podyo (poem of language alteration), Kobita Campus, 2007.
- Rodgraph (graphic sunshine), Notun Kobita, 2010.
- Jajaghor (nomad-home), Notun Kobita, 2013.
- Bhasha Bodoler Godyo (prose of language alteration), Notun Kobita, 2013.
- Bhasha Bodoler Mandakranta o Onnyo Kobita(Mandakranta of language alteration & other poems), 2018
- Edited three magazines Ḍhē’u (wave), Anti & Kabita Campus — experimental Bengali poetry journals.
[1] Long poem: “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” by Wallace Stevens, 1942. “It Must Change”─ One of the three parts of the poem. https://genius.com/Wallace-stevens-notes-toward-a-supreme-fiction-annotated
[2] Poem from The Fugitive by Rabindranath Tagore, 1919, London: Macmillan, 1921, The Fugitive II, no.28
[3] Coffee house – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Street_Coffee_House
[4] Dhiman Chakraborty – Bengali poet and writer, editor of ‘Vinnomukh’ (Other Face) magazine.
[5] Ranjan Maitra – Bengali poet and writer, one of the editors of ‘Natun Kobita’ (New Poetry) Bengali magazine
[6] Swapan Roy – Bengali poet and writer, one of the editors of ‘Natun Kobita’ (New Poetry) Bengali magazine
[7] Bhasha Bodoler Godyo (prose of language alteration) by Pronob Paul, published by Natun Kobita, 2013. I’m indebted to this book for various views of Pronob Paul.
[8] Bhasha Bodoler Kobita (poems of language alteration) by Pronob Paul, Kobita Campus pub, 1994
[9] Jajaghor (nomad-home) by Pronob Paul, Notun Kobita, 2013.
