Dhaka, Jan. 31 -- If any poet anywhere was killed by the sentimentality of his fawning fans, it was is Jibanananda Das. Bengalis have condemned him to a sylvan paradise, full of river banks, birds in flight, mellow evenings and dawns and all that is wonderful in the imagined paradise of most, essentially unable to reconcile with the modern urban life.

"Ruposhi Bangla" published after his death epitomizes this but in most Bengali minds, he is still walking the banks of Dhanshiri, where women come to collect polluted water from the river and possibly spread diarrhea.

I am being deliberately prank-nasty because the kind of imagined Bengal which Jibanananda depicts and readers adore never existed and rural life was hardly pleasant. It wasn'...