Intertextuality In Nazrul's Poems

1. Introduction: Nazrul’s poetry and songs, in particular, are abundant with religious allusions. Therefore, there is an apparently high degree of intertextuality between the external religious texts and the poetry of Nazrul. Religious allusions in Nazrul’s poetry are culled from major world religions i.e. Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism etc. being diverse sources, exploitation of which propagates that Nazrul as a poet was blessed with a God–gifted unparallel talent, who was marginally educated - merely a 10th grader - but it implies that he had an ample amount of reading and understanding of the world religions or theology. Exposure of religious education in his early days of innocence may have imprinted on Nazrul’s mind a deep image

It primarily evolved in the theories of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘deconstruction’. The term ‘intertextuality’ was first used by Julia Kristeva in her essays of Word, Dialogue and Novel (1966) and The Bounded Text (1966-67). Kristeva (1980) explicated that ‘a text is a dynamic site, not static structures or products’; it is a dialogue in several writings; ‘there are always other words in a word, and other texts in a text’. Broadly speaking, intertexuality theory has formed new conceptions of the text, the reader, the author and the context. As stated by Kamberelis and McGinely (1992), ‘a text speaks dialogically to other texts, utterances, images etc’. It may have multiplicity of sources. Plottel (1978) says, ‘Every text echoes another unto infinity.’ Over and above, the word ‘text’ derives from the Latin word ‘textus’ which means woven as in fabric. So, it expounds that a text corresponds with a textile and it interweaves the present text (of one) with previous texts (of others). According to Landow & ow (1991) and Deleuze (1968),‘a text is spatially and temporally networked with other texts’. A text, therefore, has nomadic centers of meaning. Meaning drifts as per the contexts of other texts and also that of the new text. Furthermore, intertextuality theory substantiates that each reader has a text in his /her mind which Pearson and Tierney (1984) call an ‘inner text’. This inward text procreates an intertextual link among many textual resources. Thus, it results in a web of meaning. In this assignment of meaning making, a reader has to accomplish some activities i.e. borrowing, adapting, appropriating, and transforming the texts in their mind as and when it fits the context. Hartman’s (1992) view of a reader is ‘one of a centoist’ whose job is deconstruction and reconstruction within the textual worlds of plurality, thereby making meaning dialogically. As far as an