Shyamal Bagchee

Shyamal Bagchee (born 1945 in Kolkata, India) is a Canadian poet, academic, and critic. He is particularly interested in Critical Theory, Poetry and Poetics, as well as their socio-cultural and philosophical underpinnings. In 1981 Bagchee earned his doctoral degree from York University in Toronto. In 1982 he joined the University of Alberta’s English Department as an Assistant Professor (promoted Associate Professor 1985, Tenured 1987, and Full Professor in 1991). Shyamal Bagchee retired in 2015, and is now Professor Emeritus. Bagchee has held Visiting Professorships at several universities in Canada and abroad. He has lived in Canada since 1969 and naturalized in 1978.

History

Shyamal Bagchee was born in a working middle-class family that valued education highly. His father, Shyamadas Bagchee, received his research training under the mentorship of Professor (Sir) Shanti Saroop Bhatnagar. He then worked most of his professional life in the field of Applied Petro-Chemistry at an Indian government ‘national laboratory’ in New Delhi, and later retired as Deputy Director of the institute. Shyamal Bagchee’s mother, Kanika Bagchee (nee Moitra), was a poet, novelist, and essayist. His grandfather, Capt. Kalidas Bagchee, a physician with the British Expeditionary Force, served and died in Mesopotamia during the First World War. Shyamal Bagchee’s eldest cousin, Professor Ashoke Bagchi was one of India's pioneering neurosurgeons; he received his specialist training at the University of Vienna. He returned to Calcutta to start the Medical Faculty’s Neurosurgery operating and training facility in 1954.

Bagchee completed high school studies at Sardar Patel Vidyalaya in New Delhi, followed by a B.A.Honours degree in English, with a minor in Philosophy from the University of Delhi in 1965, and obtained an M.A. in English and American Literature (1967) from Visvabharati University. At Visvabharati he met his future spouse, Sumana Senbagchee (nee Sen), and they were married in early 1969. In the fall of that year Bagchee came to Canada as a Graduate Fellow in English at McMaster University. Next year his wife joined him at the same University on a similar Fellowship. Bagchee earned his second M.A. degree at McMaster in 1971 (with a thesis on W.B. Yeats). Sumana Sen-Bagchee earned her McMaster M.A. a year later with a dissertation on the British homosexual novelist Angus Wilson. Following this they moved to York University in Toronto for Bagchee’s doctoral studies.

During his years in Toronto, Shyamal Bagchee was fortunate to be closely mentored by Sir William Empson, whose critical writings had long inspired him, and he still regards the small body of Empson’s poetry to be among the most stimulating as well as demanding in 20th century English literature. Later Empson wrote about Bagchee:

He suited a prejudice in my own feelings by being independent of the current orthodoxy in ‘Eng.Lit.’ of England and the United States, which has become very narrow. But I had prejudices on the other side; I expected him to be a ‘Babu’, that is, have the faults of the highly educated Hindu which were not merely a legend. While dealing with him, I came to suspect that it had done India a great deal of good to get rid of the British Raj. From whatever cause . . . [h]is mind as a critic is peculiarly sunny, untainted, ready for anything . . . [and] he approaches a piece of literature as one who already knows what is good and can be confident in using his own judgement.>

While still a graduate student, Shyamal Bagchee launched the refereed journal Yeats Eliot Review. YER drew original critical essays and reviews by leading Modernist scholars from across the world. The journal moved to a US university in 1989.

Bagchee has published scholarly papers on topics and authors as diverse as Cyril Tourneur, Thomas Dekker, Henry King, Romantic Theories, William Blake, Symbolism, Thomas Carlyle, Walter Pater, 19th and 20th Century American Studies, Cultural Studies, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Ethics, Socialism, Early and Later Modernism, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Yvor Winters, on Canadian poetry by Al Purdy, P.K. Page and Irving Layton, on Postmodernism, Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, Influence Studies, Eroticism, and Pornography. He has edited several influential volumes of original essays: T.S. Eliot Annual No. 1 (Macmillan, UK, 1989), A Voice Descanting: T.S. Eliot Centennial Essays (Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 1990, and St. Martin’s Press, USA, 1990), Perspectives on O’Neill (ELS Monographs, Univ. of Victoria, 1988), and with Elisabeth Daumer, International Reception of T.S. Eliot (Continuum/Bloomsbury, UK, 2007). He has refrained from writing any academic book because for him the matter in most, though not all, monographs can be precisely and elegantly presented in four or five tightly argued articles.

Although Bagchee came to Canada as an immigrant from India, he has mostly refrained from the self-created ghettos where Indians remain cocooned, sentimentally trying to keep their fantastic notion of a ‘home’ half a world away. He has not felt or regarded himself to be an alien, or in exile in Canada, and found that kind of immigrants’ anguish-ridden art insincere and having a hidden agenda of emotionally blackmailing the new country to which the same authors moved without being under duress. Obviously, the situation has been entirely different for many other people who needed to escape their original countries due to war, political strife and other horrifying situations most pervasive and real in recent times. ``Where I am Indian I do not find myself at odds with being Canadian. People who call themselves Ital-Canadian or Indo-Canadian haven't understood what it means to be Canadian”—a point-of-view Bagchee firmly maintains. ``We do not need to have an artificial hyphenation. We have an exceptionally large multiple living space. Bagchee’s academic interest in exilic writing is limited to studies of alienation and homesickness among imperial occupants of distant colonized societies.

In 1988 Bagchee was invited to deliver the Eliot Centennial Address at University of Arkansas where he was also awarded a special Eliot Centennial Citation. Two years later he presented The T.S. Eliot Society of America’s 11th Eliot Memorial Lecture in the poet’s city of birth, St. Louis, Missouri. In 2001 Bagchee was elected President of The T.S. Eliot Society of America (now The International T.S. Eliot Society<3, 4>) for three years--the first non-US citizen to be elected to the position. Other positions held by him include Chair, Board of Directors of University of Alberta Press, and a Director of Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute. He also served on the Institute’s Executive Committee and as Chair of its Canadian Studies Committee. His students teach at several Canadian and American Universities—including Harvard.

Shyamal Bagchee’s poems have been widely published in Canada, USA, and elsewhere. He has published two well-acclaimed volumes of his verse: Gabardine and Other Poems (Toronto: TSAR Books, 2006), and A Scrupulous Meanness and Other Poems (Ottawa: Buschek Books, 2007). A third compilation of poems entitled Nightsoil is currently in press. In 1997 on the 50th anniversary of Canadian Citizenship Act of 1947, Bagchee was awarded a Distinguished New Canadian Award for Creative Arts. He has been invited to read his work in a large number of countries including Australia, Britain, China, Finland, France, India, Singapore, Republic of South Africa, and Thailand.