A Bengali anti-fascist literary anthology remembering the Spanish Civil War

Spain-er Grihajuddha: Panchash bachar pare (Civil War in Spain: Fifty Years Later) was printed in Kolkata by Dey’s Publishing in 1988. This left-wing literary anthology of 480 pages was an anti-fascist compilation by professor and author, Manabendra Bandyopadhyay (1938-2020) who taught Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. 

The book was dedicated to the ‘memory of the countless martyrs’ of the Spanish Civil War with a quiet pledge that they will never be forgotten (‘Jano bhule na jai’).  The titles of the sections are ‘Remembrance’, ‘Blood of Spain and us’, ‘War drums’, ‘Guernica! Guernica!’, ‘Spain in my heart’, ‘Picasso’s paintings’, ‘Resistance’.  The collection contained an introduction by the editor, interviews with Bengali communist leaders and anti-fascist intellectuals who remembered the war (Jyoti Basu, Hirendranath Mukhopadhyay, Arun Basu, Sushobhan Sarkar, Buddhadeb Basu, Ashok Mitra), and original essays by Binay Ghosh, Ashok Mitra, Sourin Bhattacharya and others and poems by prominent communist Bengali poets, such as Bishnu Dey and Subhash Mukhopadhyay. They reflected the anti-fascist cerebral concerns in the course of the 1930s and from the 1940S up to the late 1980s among Bengali writers, strongly underlined by socially emancipatory visions. The research articles by Robin Pal and Subhendu Sekhar Mukhopadhyay offered historical perspectives on the engagements of Rabindranath Tagore and other Bengali writers, activists and intellectuals with the Spanish Civil War. 

Poems and eye-witness accounts by Spanish, European, North American and Latin American poets, activists and authors, translated into Bangla by leading scholars, are also to be found in this anthology. These selections include pieces by Spaniards Dolores Ibárruri, Rafael Alberti, Miguel Hernández, Antonio Machado, Americans Paul Robeson, Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner Jr., and Lillian Hellman, Chilean Pablo Neruda, Peruvian Cesar Vallejo,  John Cornford, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Laurie Lee from the United Kingdom,  Hans Eisler and Bertolt Brecht from Germany, Ilya Ehrenburg from the Soviet Union, and Paul Éluard, from France, among others.

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