Prominent poet of Tripura Chandrakanta Murasingh death cast a shadow of deep mourning across the state.
He died of heart attack on Monday morning. Poet Chandrakanta Murasingh did sit down to rest after his daily morning walk and sports at Swami Vivekananda Maidan Agartala.
Then he fell off the chair. Immediately everyone took him to the hospital.
The doctor on duty at the hospital declared him dead.
The body has been kept at the hospital morgue for post-mortem. After the post-mortem, the body was brought to the residence of Murasingh at Abhoynagar.
Then the body was brought to the Swami Vivekananda Maidan where he used to play. Then the body was taken to Nazrul Kalakshetra. Then the body was taken from there to Rabindra Bhaban. From there the body was taken to his birthplace in Twibandal under South Tripura District.
As the news of the death of prominent poet Chandrakanta Murasingh spread the entire state is in mourning.
Chief Minister Dr Manik Saha, CPIM Tripura Secretary Jitendra Choudhury expressed grief over his death.
Born in 1957, Chandrakanta Murasingh was one of the best-known poets from the Northeast Indian state of Tripura. He wrotes in Kokborok, the language of the indigenous tribe of the state, and has published five books of poetry.
His poetry reveals a commitment to recording “the agonies of life in contemporary Tripura”, a land where “the ugly thud of the boots of both extremists and the Indian Army” is fast replacing the cadence of rivulet and birdsong.
He received the Bhasha Samman Award from the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, in 1976 for his contribution to the development of Kokborok literature.
He lived in Abhoynagar, Agartala, and worked in a bank. Born to a family of shifting cultivators in the remote hamlet of Twibandal, Murasingh recalled his early struggle to receive a primary education.
He described his poetic enterprise as an attempt to capture the varied tones and shades of the Tripura landscape. This, as his poetry reveals, is not a merely natural landscape, but the complex terrain of everyday negotiation where nature and politics, the physical and the cultural, are inextricably engaged.
He remains acutely aware that he represents a language that has faced a long history of marginalisation (Kokborok was declared a state language as recently as 1979). While he acknowledges certain similarities between the poets of the Northeast, he is conscious of the trend to view the region as culturally amorphous – an impulse that invariably irons out the distinctive identity problems faced by smaller ethnic groups like his own.
Far from being romantic or escapist, his vivid evocation of his beloved and embattled forests make his political comment all the more searing.
The reader also realise that there are certain moments in the process of cultural, political and spiritual upheaval that can be archived only by the voice of a poet.
