Vijana Grāma (The Deserted Village)

translated by Swami Bhaktivijñāna Giri

Returning to the village of his childhood, Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura found it emptied by death. Written in 1863, Vijana-grāma (“The Deserted Village”) is an autobiographical poem of remembrance and loss, composed after the young Ṭhākura journeyed back to his birthplace of Ulāgrāma and found it devastated by a cholera epidemic – its houses empty, its dead unburied, its once-lively world vanished. As he mourns the friends and teachers who are gone, personal grief deepens into a meditation on impermanence: the whole material world, he sees, is a vijana-grāma, a deserted village where nothing permanent endures. Invoking Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life,” he turns at last from the dead past toward the living present and dependence upon God.