An Anglo-Bengali Prophecy in Iambic tetrameter

 The inward eye has been a powerful theme in Indo-English poetry. The sages declare that there is no greater truth than that which is discoverable within our own selves. Yet, the supreme pervades the world just as much. In this background, my inward eye takes me to the streets of colonial Calcutta, Anglicised as she was, with an old soothsayer, rags and all, proclaiming in chaste iambic tetrameter. 

Forewarn she did Bengal's subjects

Augment they must unique objects

Displeased within appaled Burmese

Firament we saw despite unease

One wonders how the average Bengali college graduate would have felt on hearing this incoherent prophecy. Faced with a culture which is in stark contrast with their own, these 'Anglo-Bengalis' must have experienced in full, the paradoxes of the Orient in Occidental light. Famous is Bengal's economic and cultural decline after colonisation. The tension between Bengalis, and the neighbouring Burmese, also colonised, is also well known. The soothsayer embodies these fault lines, and it is for the listener to work their way out of them, or perhaps into them.