ABSTRACT
This chapter reads the complementary poems on Bengal by Jibanananda Das as aesthetic responses to the impending threat of Partition. In doing so, the chapter argues that the poetic evocations of a serene and timeless chronotrope of Bengal are epistemic attempts to locate the spatial in a mythic-poetic isolation, liberated from the perturbing shadows of the immanent real. The chapter takes into consideration the condition of exile and the ideal of return and substantiates how Das’s poetics of return is situated within a paradigm of the timeless spatial and not the temporal, thus provoking return as a perennial possibility, non-actualized yet never discarded.
