Gora Read online

  RABINDRANATH TAGORE

  Gora

  Translated by

  Radha Chakravarty

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Gora

  Epilogue

  Notes and Glossary

  References

  Copyright Page

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  GORA

  Born in 1861, Rabindranath Tagore was one of the key figures of the Bengal Renaissance. He started writing at an early age, and by the turn of the century had become a household name in Bengal as a poet, a songwriter, a playwright, an essayist, a short story writer and a novelist. In 1913 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his verse collection Gitanjali. At about the same time he founded Visva Bharati, a university located in Shantiniketan near Kolkata. Called the ‘Great Sentinel’ of modern India by Mahatma Gandhi, Tagore steered clear of active politics, but is famous for returning the knighthood conferred on him as a gesture of protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919.

  Tagore was a pioneering literary figure, renowned for his ceaseless innovations in poetry, prose, drama, music and painting, which he took up late in life. His works include some sixty collections of verse, novels like Gora, Chokher Bali (A Grain of Sand) and Ghare Baire (Home and the World), plays like Rakta Karabi (Red Oleanders) and Post Office, over a hundred short stories, essays on religious, social and literary topics, and over 2,000 songs, including the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.

  Rabindranath Tagore died in 1941. His eminence as India’s greatest modern poet remains unchallenged to this day.

  Radha Chakravarty teaches English in Gargi College, University of Delhi. She has translated several of Tagore’s works, including Boyhood Days, Chokher Bali and Farewell Song: Shesher Kabita. Other works in translation include Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Kapalkundala, In the Name of the Mother by Mahasweta Devi, and Crossings: Stories from Bangladesh and India. She has edited Bodymaps: Stories by South Asian Women and co-edited Writing Feminism: South Asian Voices and Writing Freedom: South Asian Voices. Her latest book is Feminism and Contemporary Women Writers. She is currently translating a collection of Tagore’s writings for children and co-editing The New Tagore Reader for Visva-Bharati.

  Introduction

  Gora was serialized in Prabashi from Bhadra 1314 to Phalgun 1316 in the Bengali calendar (August 1907 to February 1910), and appeared as a book in the Bengali year 1316 (February 1910). Several portions of the serialized original were omitted from this book version. Some of the deleted passages were restored in the Visva-Bharati edition of 1928. The Rabindra Rachanabali of 1941 restored some more of the excised passages, and is now regarded as the standard edition, upon which the present translation is based.

  This monumental, dynamic novel, so vibrant with ideas, passions and conflicts, has lost none of its immediacy and relevance today. The idea for the book probably occurred to Tagore in 1904, when he narrated the story at the request of a visitor to Shilaidaha, the Irishwoman Margaret Noble who took the name of Sister Nivedita when she became the disciple of Swami Vivekananda (Dutta and Robinson 154). In a letter to W.W. Pearson (July 1922) Tagore says: ‘You ask me what connection had the writing of Gora with Sister Nivedita. She was our guest in Shilida and in … improvising a story according to her request I gave her something which came very near to the plot of Gora’ (Pal 1990, 215). The basic plot concerns the extraordinarily fair-skinned young man Gora, an orthodox Hindu nationalist who spurns the Brahmo Samaj but falls in love with a Brahmo girl Sucharita. Gora ultimately discovers that he is not a Hindu, but the orphaned child of an Irishman killed during the 1857 uprising. In the published novel, Gora and Sucharita are united in the end, but in the story that Tagore narrated in 1904, the Brahmo girl rejects Gora upon discovering his European origins. Tagore says he wanted to demonstrate to Nivedita the strength of orthodox prejudice against Europeans, but his story made her angry, and she accused him of being unfair to Hindu women. ‘No, it can’t be so. It will be a great tragedy not to unite the two. Why won’t you let things happen in literature that do not happen in real life?… Unite them. United they must be.’1 This might explain why Tagore changed the ending in the published version, but it is equally likely that the change of storyline was triggered by his disillusionment with the Swadeshi movement in 1905 and his awareness that women were now coming out of purdah to claim greater autonomy in their lives.

  Since Gora was born in 1857, the narrative is probably set in the 1880s, when he would have finished his studies at the University. The action of the novel thus takes place about three decades before the date of its composition. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the initial euphoria about the benefits of exposure to western culture had begun to give way to a certain disenchantment, for it had become clear that access to western education and culture did not grant Indian intellectuals equality with their British rulers. Bengali society at that time was divided into two wings, the liberals and the conservatives, who were engaged in a lively debate about every aspect of Bengali life. The social reform movement in Bengal was being countered by a new revivalism, a nationalism based on Hindu values (Mukherjee ix). The liberal movement was led by the new monotheistic Brahmo sect, but it also had other followers, educated Bengalis who had not joined the sect formally (Chaudhuri 608-9). The conservative school was led by Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Swami Vivekananda, who created a revised version of Hinduism that Nirad C. Chaudhuri calls Bengali Neo-Hinduism, which had a larger following at the turn of the century (Chaudhuri 609). Its power was reinforced by Bengali nationalism, and during the agitation of 1905, conservatism dominated Bengali thinking. The popular Hindu conservatism was a ‘mixture of chauvinism with crude and often superstitious religious beliefs and cultural obscurantism. Hindu megalomania and xenophobia were their strongest passions. They were wholly impervious to any ideas not in agreement with the nationalist myths, and were also fiercely intolerant’ (Chaudhuri 609).

  Nationalism forms an important aspect of the historical context of Gora, but instead of focusing solely on Indo-British relations, the text lends greater prominence to Hindu-Brahmo tensions. The novel dramatizes these internal conflicts within Bengal society, but without resorting to simple polarizations. Instead, the text presents a spectrum of possible positions within Hindu and Brahmo systems of thought. The elite Hindu group is not homogenized: from the rigid, unworldly orthodoxy of Krishnadayal to Abinash’s naïve celebration of ritual and Harimohini’s growing inflexibility about Sucharita’s habits, the narrative represents varying facets of religious conservatism. Within the domain of Brahmoism, too, the characters chart a range of attitudes, from Poreshbabu’s tolerant liberalism to Baradasundari’s shallow adherence to convention, Haranbabu’s extreme rejection of Gora and Binoy, and Sucharita’s spirit of intelligent enquiry. Poised between these two factions, unable to find a place in either party, is the figure of Anandamoyi, who in a single gesture of defiance gives up all claim to social acceptability when she adopts the orphaned Gora as her foster son. In a parallel gesture, Lalita too breaks away from societal straitjackets when she leaves on the steamer with Binoy. Through these acts of rebellion, the text gestures at the need to seek alternatives beyond the prevailing tensions of factionalism. Gora’s Irish birth is also no accident, for the context of Irish nationalism locates him beyond the simple opposition of British and Indian, colonizer and colonized.

  Though ostensibly set in the 1880s, Gora is in many ways charged with the political consciousness of the Swadeshi movement of the early twentieth century. This movement, part of the Indian struggle for Independence, involved boycotting British goods in support of indigenous products, in an effort to
promote economic self-sufficiency. Gora’s confrontation with the British magistrate, which results in his imprisonment on a flimsy pretext, reveals a spirit more in tune with the period in which the novel was actually written (Malini Bhattacharya 130). There are thus two contexts to the anti-colonialism of Gora and Lalita. As Michael Sprinker says: ‘the titular hero’s strict observance of traditional Hindu customs throughout the novel is directly linked to his patriotism. Extremism is not yet on the horizon in the novel itself, which is set in the late 1870s or early 1880s, but Tagore composed it after the demise of swadeshi during the moderate-extremist Congress split. Interpreting the narrative in the light of its contemporary context is surely justified’ (125n). Through the figure of Gora, the text expresses Tagore’s interrogation of the more extreme forms of nationalism.

  The tensions in Gora are also the product of Tagore’s own inner conflicts, dramatized through the extensive use of dialogue, argument, discussion and disagreement. Despite his liberal leanings, Tagore also sympathized with certain conservative principles. The school at Shantiniketan for instance was based on ancient Hindu ideals of education such as the Guru-Griha described in Hindu sacred law. According to Nirad C. Chaudhuri, ‘Tagore also gave the most competent description of the nationalistic Neo-Hinduism in his novel Gora. Although in it he made Liberalism win, he also showed how strong the Hindu case was’ (Chaudhuri 609). Gora is a powerful dialogic novel. The text seeks to tackle its own creative tensions through its use of doubles or paired characters such as Gora and Binoy, Sucharita and Lalita. This technique anticipates, for instance, Joyce’s use of Bloom and Stephen in Ulysses (Ray 30-31). It expresses a modern awareness of the fragmentary, incomplete quality of the human self, which can seek completeness only outside itself, in its opposite or ‘other’ (Ray 28). Gora in this sense is a novel that is ahead of its time, though some readers have compared the text with nineteenth century European novels such as George Eliot’s Felix Holt and Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (Priyaranjan Sen 224-5; Mazumdar 87-93). Contradictions and paradoxes haunt the narrative of Gora, culminating in the ultimate paradox at the end, when Gora’s cry of pain upon discovering the truth about his birth becomes simultaneously a cry of liberation. Ironically, it is in losing everything that had previously marked his sense of identity—nation, caste, religion, parentage—that Gora becomes free to claim his identity as a true Indian, Bharatvarshiya. Irony is central to the narrative mode, for the reader is privy to the secret of Gora’s parentage, which he discovers only at the end. The reader’s perception of Gora’s words and actions is constantly coloured by this secret knowledge, and the disclosure of Gora’s identity at the end comes as no surprise. The revelation is also not entirely devastating for Gora himself. He is able to recognize the positive potential of his dispossession, because he has already undergone a process of mental development, and the preceding events have conditioned him for a transformation of perspective.

  Tagore’s Gora, Ghare Baire and Char Adhyay ushered in a new kind of novel in Bengal, the political novel. Between 1910 and 1934, there were only two other significant novels in this genre: Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Pather Dabi (1926) and Tarasankar Bandopadhyay’s Chaitali Ghurni (R. Bhattacharya 143). But from the late 1930s onwards came a spate of political novels in Bengali, of which Tagore must be acknowledged the forerunner. In his analysis of Gora, Ghare Baire and Char Adhyay, Ashis Nandy takes an ahistorical view of Tagore as a political novelist: ‘Tagore’s political concerns in the three novels were roughly the same; they did not change over the twenty-five years of his life that the writing of the three novels spanned’ (Nandy 10). This is not an accurate observation, for Tagore’s views on nationalism actually remained complex and mutable. At first, he participated actively in the Swadeshi movement. He composed songs and even led demonstrations. But gradually, he became disenchanted with the growing signs of communalism, extremism and factionalism within the movement. Eventually, he left the National Council of Education and turned away from political activities. It was not through any overt public statement, though, but through his fiction, in novels such as Gora and Ghare Baire, that he expressed his disillusionment with the Swadeshi movement. Gora thus marks a particular phase in Tagore’s evolving attitude towards the discourse of the nation (Sumit Sarkar 2003, 154).

  Gora is today widely recognized as an important postcolonial text. There is a strong anti-colonial vein in the narrative, underscored especially in two episodes where Indians oppress other Indians, but in the context of colonial influence (Malini Bhattacharya 130). One occurs on the steamer where an Englishman and a ‘babu’ mock the plight of less privileged passengers. In the second incident, a poor Muslim is almost run over by an affluent ‘babu’ as he walks down the street carrying a load of household provisions for his English ‘master’. The novel is also frequently compared to Kipling’s Kim, because the shared motif of the Irish foundling makes it easy to read Gora as Tagore’s subversive reworking of Kipling’s colonial text (Spivak 143, Nandy 43, Mehta 199). As Meenakshi Mukherjee argues, however, this deflects attention from the central issue in Gora (xxiv). Rather than a literary source in Kipling’s Kim, some readers trace the origins of Gora’s character to historical figures, such as Swami Vivekananda and Brahmobandhav Upadhyay (Mukherjee xiii, Pandit 213).

  Despite Tagore’s growing reservations about Swadeshi, ‘Gora is more about inclusion than rejection’ (Anisuzzaman). The real strength of the novel lies in its critique of both colonial and nationalist extremism in favour of a more inclusive vision. Edward Said insists that the postcolonial intellectual must use his critical sense in all public matters, giving priority to ‘critiques of the leadership, to presenting alternatives that are often marginalized, or pushed aside as irrelevant to the main battle at hand’ (41). He praises Tagore as a model intellectual of this type, a nationalist who never allowed his patriotic sentiments to cloud his critical sense (41). As a political novel, Gora wrestles with the challenge of defining the ‘real India,’ an issue that remains alive even today (Ray 26). The narrative charts the quest for a resolution to the tension between the integrative impulse and the divisive forces that make it so difficult to construct a collective idea of the nation (Nair 57-8). The image of ‘Bharatvarsha’ is crucial to this project. At first Gora identifies country with religion, but his vision of Bharatvarsha slowly evolves ‘from the abstract to the concrete, from the symbolic towards the actual’ (Mukherjee xviii). In this evolution, his dialogues with Sucharita play a dynamic role. The vision of Bharatvarsha that emerges in the course of the novel suggests the need to think beyond the limiting, opposed ideologies of colonialism and nationalism: ‘Tagore uses Bharatvarsha as a heuristic concept, an ongoing and unfinished experiment: it serves as an open gestalt, an inclusiveness that accommodates disparities and differences in its hunger for wholeness, free from the totalizing and homogenizing impulse implicit in colonialism/imperialism as well as nationalism on the imperial model’ (Chakrabarti 70). Bharatvarsha in Tagore’s novel is not a fixed, immutable idea but a fluid, changing concept.

  The text also destabilizes the notion of identity in order to demonstrate its mutable, multiple and contingent nature. The presence of many orphaned characters in the text—Sucharita, Binoy, Gora—constitutes a questioning of the myth of fixed origins (Nair 59). Gora for instance has three father-figures: Krishnadayal, Poreshbabu, and his biological father (Nair 57). Colour does not matter, the rhetoric of the text would suggest, but culture and character do (Nair 60). ‘Character’ too is not an unchanging essence, but a process of development, both individual and a matter of locating the characteristics of Bharatvarsha. Seen in this way, the recurring motif of the foster-parent’s love for the foster-child may be taken to represent the ‘inexhaustible generosity and hospitality’ of Bharatvarsha (Chakrabarti 70). Nowhere is the idea of identity subjected to more intense scrutiny than in the figure of Gora, whose entire sense of self is premised upon a lie. It is this spirit of constant questioning and self-crit
icism, this rejection of dogmatic certitudes, that Said admires in Tagore.

  This same spirit pervades the way Tagore’s text challenges caste hierarchies. Through Gora’s mistaken pride in his caste and his eventual disillusionment, the novel makes a powerful statement against caste discrimination. In the essay ‘Brahman’(1902), Tagore had supported the varna system, but by 1910, his perspective had begun to alter (Sumit Sarkar 2003, 154). In the Gitanjali he wrote:

  My wretched country, those whom you have crushed and trampled, deprived of their rights, made them stand and wait and never drew them close,

  Share you must their indignities and sufferings

  …

  Can you not see Death’s messenger at the door

  Stamping his curse on the arrogance of your superiority;

  If you still do not beckon them,

  and remain coldly distant

  and still immured in pride,

  then equal must you be in death and ashes of pyre.2

  The textual rhetoric of Gora evinces a similar sentiment. ‘If caste discrimination causes men to treat other men with such humiliation and contempt, how can I call it anything but anti-religion?’ Poresh says to Sucharita (165).

  Gora’s attempts to connect with the masses, and his travels in the countryside, especially his visit to Chor Ghoshpur, underscore the related issue of class discrimination and the rural-urban divide. Readers point out an autobiographical element in Tagore’s portrayal of Gora’s exposure to the common people of the land. It is only by stepping out of Kolkata that Gora is able to expand his sense of the vastness of Bharatvarsha. Tagore, too, had attained a sense of another India beyond the city, after observing rural life in his role as member of a zamindar family. Here he saw poverty, and also, from visiting Muslim localities, realized that Bharatvarsha did not belong to Hindus alone (Murshid 66). Tagore at this stage blamed village poverty on ‘an educational system which alienated English-educated urban elites from the rural population; and absentee landlords who had abandoned their responsibility for the welfare and cultural life of their tenants … He also blamed superstition, credit procedures and oppressive social customs’ (O’Connell 192). In a similar vein, Gora too observes ‘that in these rural areas, social restrictions were far more powerful than in educated, cultured society … The practices that only drew boundaries, divided people and tormented them, that would even deny the intellect and keep love at arm’s length, were the ones that constantly hindered everyone in every respect’ (261-2). Patrick Colm Hogan cites two historical prototypes for Gora’s defiance of the magistrate and his subsequent imprisonment: Ram Gopal Ghose, who traveled across the indigo plantations and described in a book the injustices he had witnessed; and the Irishman, Reverend James Long, who was imprisoned for a month after he arranged the translation and publication in 1861 of Dinabandhu Mitra’s play Nil-darpan (1860), depicting the brutality of the indigo planters and the magistrates (Hogan 194). Gora thus provides an example of postcolonial historiography, which tries to recover unwritten histories, especially of the masses (Nair 52). Rukmini Bhaya Nair calls it ‘the Indian novel of high bourgeois nationalist aspiration,’ citing Gora’s rejection of Marshman’s textbook as Tagore’s bid for rights over history (Nair 53-55).