Tagore, Rabindranath; Sisir Kumar Das (ed.);
The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, v.2: Plays, Stories, Essays
Sahitya Akademi, 1994, 669 pages
ISBN 8172019459
topics: | fiction-short | drama | essays | bengali | translation | tagore
The whole world is becoming one country through scientific facility. And the moment is arising when you also must find a basis of unity which is not political. If India can offer to the world her solution, it will be a contribution to humanity. There is only one history - the history of man. All national histories are chapters in the larger one. - Nationalism, (v.2/453)
I PLAYS Chitra Sacrifice and Other Plays Sanyasi or the Ascetic Malini Sacrifice The King and the Queen Autumn-Festival The Trial The Waterfall Red Oleanders II STORIES The Victory Giribala The Patriot The Parrot's Training III ESSAYS SADHANA The Relation of the Individual to the Universe The Problem of Evil The Problem of Self Realization in Love Realization in Action The Realization of Beauty The Realization of the Infinite PERSONALITY What is Art? The World of Personality The Second Birth My School Meditation Woman NATIONALISM Nationalism in the West Nationalism in Japan Nationalism in India The Sunset of the Century THE CENTRE OF INDIAN CULTURE CREATIVE UNITY The Poet's Religion The Creative Ideal The Religion of the Forest An Indian Folk Religion East and West The Modern Age The Spirit of Freedom The Nation Woman and Home An Eastern University TALKS IN CHINA Introduction Autobiographical To My Hosts To Students Leave Taking Civilization and Progress Satyam IV APPENDICES TALKS IN CHINA First Talk at Shanghai To Students at Hangchow To Students at Nanking To the Boys and Girls at Pei Hei, Peking At a Buddhist Temple, Peking To Scholars at the Temple of the Earth, Peking To Students at Tsing-hua College, Peking At the Scholar's Dinner, Peking To the English Teachers' Association, Peking First Public Talk in Peking To the Public at the Theatre in Peking Farewell Speech at Shanghai To the Japanese Community in China Religious Experience To a Surprise Gathering of Students in the National University, Peking At Mrs. Bena's, Shanghai The National University, Peking The King of the Dark Chamber The Crown King and Rebel Notes Index
J. South Asian Literature, Vol. 12, 1977, pp. 103-107
Among the 1916 lectures is one titled "Woman," published in 1921 in
his Personality: Lectures Delivered in America* a somewhat disparate
collection of six lecture-essays.
His stated thesis in "Woman" is that men, because they have cut themselves
off from Nature, have led the world through a succession of wars, and the
resulting instability is abhorrent to woman, whose nature is passive and a
medium of growth, like the soil.
A masculine civilization has thrust woman aside, and she has reacted with
a restlessness that is inimical to her innate ability to appreciate the
commonplace. The sympathy that makes her an effective home-maker is
needed in the world of affairs as well, but she will not achieve her place
and purpose there if she indulges in strident masculine protest and behavior.
Even though another of the 1916 lectures dealt with his school and its
philosophy, the lecture on "Woman conveys virtually no impression of the
courage that Tagore had already shown in this area by making his school at
Santiniketan co-educational.
It conveys nothing at all of his achievement in creating, in a number of his
short stories, some of the most powerfully convincing women characters to be
found in any of the world's literatures, and in describing, in terms so
specific and true in social and psychological detail as to make the reader
cringe in sympathy, their struggles to assert themselves as personalities in
their own right. Most of these stories were written before 1916; some of the
best were written, in fact, during the 1890's, when the modern short story
was an evolving genre everywhere and in Bengal was virtually non-existent
until Tagore took it up. If, in 1916, these stories had been available in
English translation, they could have explicated, ad- mirably and in practical
terms, general statements in his public lecture that might otherwise have
been construed as gratuitous comments upon de- ficiencies in Americans' sense
of values.
literature is the key to liberation: the protagonist is consumed by a longing
for literacy and for books, and in some cases she becomes a creator of
literature- This obsessional longing for a literary outlet develops in
different ways, and at different stages of life, but it is always a factor.
Uma, in "The Notebook" (Khata, 1893), is seized by it as a beginner at
school; as soon as she learns to write she scribbles primer quotations on the
walls at home, on the novel hidden under her sister-in-law's pillow, on her
father's accounts book, on an essay by her brother. In "The Postmaster"
{Postmãstãr, 1891), learning to read and write gives the orphan girl, Ratan,
what she hopes may become a bond to a new family of her own. ' Charlulata,
of the novella, The Broken Nest {Nashtanir, 1901), stumbles quite
accidentally into the knowledge of her own literary capacities, and in "A
Wife's Letter" (strir patra, 1914), Mrinalini finds in the writing of poetry
a refuge from her in-laws' petty persecutions and their jealousy of her
superior education. The accuracy of Tagore's descriptions of these heroines
and their struggles are the fruit of long years of observing the consequences
of India's failure to make use of her women's talents. In creating these
women characters, he describes specifically the power that, in his American
lecture, he designated as being uniquely woman's: the power "to break through
the surface and go to the centre of things, where in the mystery of life
dwells an eternal source of interest."
In the second place, he makes it yery plain in these stories that
these women's pursuit of intellectual enlargement through literature is
non-utilitarian. It is put to no commercial use whatever; it is always
presented as a home-based means of self-realization and fulfillment. The
only emphasis that might be called utilitarian is the strictly therapeutic
use the protagonists make of it for refuge or escape from situations that
for one reason or another they find intolerable. As Tagore said, in the
idiom of his American lecture, women's magic wands "are not the golden
wands of wealth nor the iron rods of power.
In the third place, it is always a man, or a social situation that
ratified male domination of home and community, that is seen precipi-
tating or perpetuating these intolerable situations. The man is always
a destroyer, but he seldom destroys out of malevolence or sheer wicked-
ness; he does so as the result of a mode of behavior that is expected, or
that he thinks is expected, by the men (and sometimes by the women as well)
around him. Out of sheer pompous stupidity and vanity, Uma's husband
destroys her access to books. The postmaster for whom Ratan is housekeeper
destroys her hopes for a new life because he himself is spoiled,
self-centered, and trivial. The husband of Mrinalini, the wife of "A Wife's
Letter," destroys her respect for him by the callousness with which he
takes her for granted and by his obliviousness to both the cruelties of
his relatives and to what poetry means to her. Charulata's husband, the
good-hearted but obtuse Bhupati, puts an end to her literary attempts
through the excess of his efforts to atone for having taken her equally
for granted, while failing utterly to understand her reasons for having
turned to literature in the first place.
The weakness and obtuseness of Tagore 's male characters, in contrast to such
women, has been frequently commented upon; what makes the men in these
stories so hard to forgive, whether they act from admirable or despicable
motives, is their mindlessness. They behave like automatons, plugged into a
social system that they do not question until, having ignored the first faint
signals of something short-circuited in their relations with the women in
their lives, they receive a really severe jolt, the reason for which they
seldom understand and frequently do not try to analyze. Tagore does not go
out of his way to castigate these men. His dismissal of them, his leaving
them, so to speak, where they fall, is more eloquent than any authorial
tirade. The men have his understanding, as creatures of a restrictive social
code, but the women receive his active sympathy. It is they who suffer,
question, and look for answers. They actively cast about for some means of
making an emotional and intellectual statement about themselves; herein is
the substance and the boundary-line of their liberation
Herein also is the point as it applies historically to Tagore: once
again, as in his views on education, politics, and agricultural economy,
he was decades ahead of his time, not only in relation to India, but in
relation also to the countries that regarded themselves as more advanced
and therefore superior to India. If women's liberation in the West had
even now passed beyond the limits marked out in Tagore's pre-1916 stories,
these stories would seem dated, and they would have passed into the category
of period pieces. But they are not dated. Mrinalini, the most articulate
of the protagonists in these representative liberation stories, tells her
husband, "It didn't take you long to forget my [good] looks, but the fact
that I had intelligence rankled in your mind. ... If one who must live
according to rules tries to use her mind, she is sure to stumble and be
cursed. But tell me what I could do. In an unwary moment God had given
me more sense than was necessary for a housewife in your family."
This
has hundreds of modern echoes, from Sylvia Plath to The Diary of a Mad
Housewife.
REFS
1. For a full account of the circumstances surrounding the publication
of Gitanjali (London, 1912), see Imperfect Encounter: Letters of
William Rothenstein and Rabindranath Tagore, 1911-1941, ed. Mary M.
Lago (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 38-131
6. Tagore, "The Notebook," in his The Housewarming and Other Selected
Stories, trans. Mary Lago and Tarun Gupta; ed. Amiya Chakravarty (New
York: New American Library, 1965), pp. 29-34.
7. Tagore, "The Postmaster," in his Mashi and Other Stories (London:
Macmillan, 1918)), pp. 157-16
8. Tagore, "A Wife's Letter," in his The Housewarming, pp. 125-150.
9. Tagore, The Broken Nest, trans. Mary Lago and Supriya Sen [Bari]
(Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1971; New Delhi:
Macmillan, 1973).
http://www.parabaas.com/rabindranath/articles/pClinton1.html Charulata, a woman in her early twenties, had been married as a child to a husband, Bhupati by name, some ten to fifteen years her senior. She grew to maturity in her husband's household, benignly ignored by him. Bhupati has his own interests, in fact one all-consuming interest, that of publishing an English-language political newspaper in colonial Calcutta. He seemed almost oblivious to the presence of a wife who has, at the time of the story begins, become a mature young woman. Also living in that household, while he attends college in the city, is Amal, cousin-brother of Bhupati and someone with aspirations of becoming a writer. Charu and Amal are close in age, closer by far than Charu and her husband. The two near- contemporaries bond in many ways, like brother and sister, like intellectual equals, like young adults excited and at times overwhelmed by the literary culture of Calcutta of that day. Charu, confined by the then current mores to the house, albeit a very richly furnished upper-class house, gets to live in part vicariously through her brother-in-law who brings to her life some of the thrill of a fuller intellectual outside world. Eventually, it becomes evident to Amal that this relationship with his sister-in-law may have crossed the emotional boundary into forbidden territory. Amal withdraws; Charu is heartbroken, devastated; Bhupati feels sadly betrayed. End of story. Shifting from literature to life, I shall similarly reprise as briefly and selectively events in the Tagore household seemingly pertinent to Tagore's tale. Kadambari Devi came into the Tagore extended family at a young age, as the child bride of Jyotirindranath Tagore, one of Rabindranath's elder brothers. Rabindranath was the fourteenth and youngest living child of his parents. Jyotirindranath was thirteen years his senior. Concerning Kadambari Devi and Rabindranath, who was close to her in age, Tagore's most authoritative biographer, Probhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, writes: "He had been her playmate and companion ever since her marriage." [1] On December 9th of 1883 at the age of 22 Tagore himself was married to a girl of 11, whom he renamed Mrinalini and with whom he had five children. One of them, Rathindranath, as this Tagore Festival audience is well aware, studied at the University of Illinois. Tagore and wife Mrinalini lived happily together until her premature death in 1902. In the words of biographer Mukhopadhyay, Tagore's marriage at the end of 1883 had been "sudden and unexpected." [2] In late April of the following year, slightly more than four months after his wedding, Kadambari Devi committed suicide. Why she took her own life, if known, has never been made public. Biographer Mukhopadhyay writes of Kadambari Devi's death: "The reasons are shrouded in mystery. But that there was some family misunderstanding, it cannot be doubted." [3] Krishna Kripalani -- a relative of Tagore's; he married Tagore's granddaughter -- tells us bluntly in his own biography of Tagore not to speculate on the cause of the suicide. That Kadambari Devi's death was profoundly felt by Tagore can be readily established through Tagore's own words. To a young Amiya Chakravarty of about 16, who would a decade or so later become Tagore's literary secretary for a period of time, Tagore wrote in 1917, and I translate: Once, when I was about your age, I suffered a devastating sorrow, similar to yours now. A very close relative of mine committed suicide, and she had been my life's total support, right from childhood onward. And so with her unexpected death it was as if the earth itself receded from beneath my feet, as though the skies above me all went dark. My universe turned empty, my zest for life departed. [4] In the reminiscences entitled Jiban-smriti (1911-12), Tagore wrote in a similar vein. His mother's death, as it occurred when he was quite young, did not affect him strongly, he tells us. Part of the reason for this was Kadambari Devi, who immediately assumed the role of surrogate maternal figure. Kadambari was herself a young girl at this time and, as Tagore's biographer informed us above, Tagore's playmate. It is her passing that traumatizes him or, as he put it, "It was my acquaintance with death at the age of 24 that left a permanent impression on me." [5] Kadambari Devi's death is that to which Tagore refers here, though he was actually 22 at the time, just a couple of weeks shy of his 23rd birthday, not 24. There are a number of poems by Tagore that speak to or about the deceased Kadambari Devi, as the editor of Tagore's collected works calls to our attention. Shortly after her death, Tagore in his mid-twenties calls out to her. I'll read only bits and pieces of this poem entitled "Where" (kothay): Alas, where will you go! In that endless, unknown land, and you alone, all alone, How will you find your way! Alas, where will you go! [hAy kothA JAbe. ananta ajAnA deshe...] None of us will be there for you None of us to chat and talk to We shall sit here and shall weep, Gazing off into the void, we'll call to you; Amidst that vast, that lonely place perhaps our lamentations You might chance to hear from time to time, Alas, where will you go! [from kaRi o komal] And then some 30 plus years later, Tagore composed the following equally poignant piece. I shall first read the entire translation into English, untitled, that Tagore himself made. I was walking along a path overgrown with grass, when suddenly I heard from some one behind, "See if you know me?" I turned round and looked at her and said, "I cannot remember your name." She said, "I am that first great Sorrow whom you met when you were young." Her eyes looked like a morning whose dew is still in the air. I stood silent for some time till I said, "Have you lost all the great burden of your tears?" She smiled and said nothing. I felt that her tears had had time to learn the language of smiles. "Once you said," she whispered, "that you would cherish your grief for ever." I blushed and said, "Yes, but years have passed and I forget." Then I took her hand in mine and said, "But you have changed." "What was sorrow once has now become peace," she said. [trans. Tagore] The Bengali original was published in 1919 in the magazine Sabuj Patra and then in the volume called Lipika (1922), which is a collection of prose poems or in some cases actually short, short stories. The Lipika version of the piece corresponding to what I just read is entitled "First Sorrow" (pratham sok). There are a number of lines in the middle of the original work left out of Tagore's English poem - nearly half of the original has been omitted. I cite here the entire Bengali poem (elided parts in italics): [...] She said, "I am that first great Sorrow whom you met when you were young (twenty-five)." Her eyes looked like a morning whose dew is still in the air. I stood silent for some time till I said, "Have you lost all the great burden of your tears?" She smiled and said nothing. I felt that her tears had had time to learn the language of smiles. I asked, "Still today you've kept with you that youth of mine when I was twenty-five?" Said she, "Here, just look, my garland." I could see, not a petal had fallen from the garland of that springtime back then. I said, "Mine has become completely withered, but my youth at twenty- five is still this day as fresh as ever, hanging there about your neck. Slowly, she took off that garland, placing it around my neck. "Once you said," she whispered, "that you would cherish your grief for ever." I blushed and said, "Yes, but years have passed and I forget." She added, "He who is the bridegroom of my inner thoughts, he had not forgotten. Since then, I've sat here secretly beneath the shadows. Accept me now." Then I took her hand in mine and said, "But you have changed." "What was sorrow once has now become peace," she said. He speaks in the original of his youth of age 25, and asks whether she has kept that youth of his with her. She replies by calling attention to the garland around her neck, a garland that is as fresh now as it was back then. His, however, has dried up in the intervening years. She then takes the still fresh garland from her neck and places it around his.