Alokeranjan Dasgupta

Alokeranjan Dasgupta (1933–2020) was a highly acclaimed Bengali poet, scholar, and translator. Born in Kolkata, he studied at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, and the University of Calcutta, where he earned a Ph.D. for his studies on the lyric in Indian poetry. He taught comparative literature at Jadavpur University and later at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Dasgupta authored over 20 books of poetry and was prolific in translating Bengali and Santal poetry and plays into English and German, as well as German and French literature into Bengali. He received numerous accolades, including the Goethe Prize (1985), Ananda Purashkar (1985), Rabindra Puraskar (1987), and the Sahitya Akademi Award (1992) for his poetry collection `Marami Karat`. His works include `Buddhadeva Bose - Makers of Indian Literature` and `The Lyric in Indian Poetry: A Comparative Study in the Evolution of Bengali Lyric Forms Up to the Seventeenth Century`, which reflects his scholarly focus on the development of poetic forms.