Banalata Sen
Jibanananda Das · 1942
First edition, Ek Poyshay Ekti series, 12 poems
Kavita Bhavan, 'the house of poetry', was the name of the poet Buddhadeva Bose's home at 202 Rasbehari Avenue in Kolkata, where he lived from 1937 to 1966. It became a meeting place for writers and, in time, a publisher of poetry, at a time when few publishers would take a book of verse.
Under this name Bose published Subhas Mukhopadhyay's first book, Padatik (1940), Samar Sen's Koyekti Kobita, Amiya Chakravarty's Abhigyan Basanta and his own Kankaboti. From 1942 to 1944 it issued the Ek Poyshay Ekti series, eighteen slim books of sixteen pages each. One of them, in the winter of 1942, was the first edition of Jibanananda Das's Banalata Sen, with twelve poems. Bose's magazine Kavita, begun in 1935, ran until 1961.
Kavita Bhavan no longer publishes; its books live on in later editions and on second-hand shelves.
The house itself is gone. Ask the desk, and we will look for its books in reprint or second-hand.
