Sheser Kobita | রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর | ব্রততী বন্দোপাধ্যায়

Dramatic readings from the novel of Rabindranath Tagore. Sesher Kavita (Last Poem) was published in 1929. Its modern setting, its playful mocking tone, its challenging style, the author’s trick of introducing himself as the butt of the hero’s merciless criticism, the brilliant sparkling wit of dialogue, and the final tragic note voiced in the beautiful poem which gives the book its title – all these won for the novel an immediate popularity with the youthful public.

The author draws an amusing picture of an ultra-modern Bengal intellectual whose Oxford education, while investing him with a superiority complex, has induced in him a craze for conscious originality which results in a deliberate and frivolous contrariness to all accepted opinion and convention. His agressive self-complacence, however, receives a shock when as the result of an accicental meeting he falls in love with, and wins in return th heart of a quite different product of modern culture-a highly educated girl of fine sesibility and deep feelings. This love being more or less genuine and different from his previous experience of coquetry releases his own submerged depth of sincerity, which he finds hard to adjust to the habits of sophistry and pose, practised so long. In the process he manages to strike a new romantic attitude. The struggle makes of him a curiously pathetic figure-one who is being worked against his grain. The tragedy is understood by the girl who releases him from his troth and disappears from his life.