Combating Familiarity: Exploring the motif of the Prodigal Calcuttan in Nabaneeta Dev Sen's 'Return of the Dead'
"Poetry is like war", Dev Sen wrote, "a war with oneself"- an intensely personal engagement, the yield of which ruthlessly exploits and inhabits the poetics of vulnerability in trying to accommodate the overt rawness of the emotions that Dev Sen sought space for in her lifelong creative undertaking. The poetry of Nabaneeta Dev Sen embodies a curious blend of emotions, the multifariousness of which offered to the poet, and subsequently the reader, a chance to explore and identify an abundance of thematic underpinnings. It was through poetry, the unfailing coherence of her words, and the brutal honesty that she resorted to, that Nabaneeta sought to confront and articulate pieces of her life at junctures of turmoil and dissonance. In the light of her failing marriage with economist Amartya Sen, returning to Calcutta in 1974 as a single mother of two, Nabaneeta inadvertently sparked significant curiosity. “When Ma came back as a young mother with two kids and a marria