Selected Short Stories Read online

  Kripalani, Krishna, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (London: Oxford University Press, and New York: Grove Press, 1962; revised edn, Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1980).

  Kundu, Kalyan, Sakti Bhattacharya and Kalyan Sircar (eds.), Imagining Tagore: Rabindranath Tagore and the British Press (1912–1941) (Kolkata: Sahitya Samsad in collaboration with The Tagore Centre UK, 2000).

  Lago, Mary M. (ed.), Imperfect Encounter: Letters of William Rothenstein and Rabindranath Tagore 1911–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).

  Lago, Mary and Ronald Warwick (eds.), Rabindranath Tagore: Perspectives in Time (London: Macmillan, 1989). Includes essays on Tagore’s Western career, his short stories, his educational ideals, Tagore and Elmhirst, Tagore’s paintings, Tagore and Western composers, etc.

  O’Connell, Kathleen M., Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet as Educator (Kolkata: Visva-Bharati, 2002).

  Radice, William, Poetry and Community: Lectures and Essays 1991–2001 (New Delhi: DC Publishers, 2003). Includes essays on translating Tagore, and on Tagore and the Nobel Prize.

  Radice, William, ‘Rabindranath Tagore’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 53 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  Ray, Sibnarayan, From the Broken Nest to Visva-Bharati: Six Exploratory Essays on Rabindranath (Kolkata: Renaissance Publishers, 2001).

  Robinson, Andrew, The Art of Rabindranath Tagore, with a foreword by Satyajit Ray (London: André Deutsch, 1989).

  Sahitya Akademi (ed.), Rabindranath Tagore 1861–1961: A Centenary Volume (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1961, reprinted 1986). Introduction by Jawaharlal Nehru; memoirs by several of Tagore’s associates; essays on all aspects of Tagore’s life and work; essays on Tagore in other lands; bibliography of Tagore’s Bengali and English works (with dates); very useful chronicle of his life compiled by Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee (Tagore’s biographer in Bengali) and Kshitis Roy.

  Thompson, Edward, Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1926; second edn 1948; new edn with an introduction by Harish Trivedi, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989).

  Chronology

  1858 The British Crown takes over the Government of India, following the Mutiny of 1857.

  1861 Tagore born in Calcutta, in the family house at Jorasanko.

  1873 Goes with his father Debendranath Tagore on a tour of the Western Himalayas.

  1875 His mother dies.

  1877 Starts to publish regularly in his family’s monthly journal, bhāratī.

  1878 First visit to England.

  1880 His book sandhyā saṅgīt (Evening Songs) acclaimed by Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the leading writer of the day.

  1883 Controversy over Lord Ripon’s Ilbert bill, to permit Indian judges to try Englishmen, intensifies antagonism between British and Indians.

  Tagore marries.

  1884 His sister-in-law Kadambari commits suicide.

  1885 First Indian National Congress meets at Bombay.

  1886 Tagore’s daughter Madhurilata (Bela) born.

  1888 His son Rathindranath born.

  1890 His father puts him in charge of the family estates.

  Second, brief visit to England.

  Starts to write prolifically for a new family journal, sādhanā.

  1898 Sedition Bill; arrest of Bal Gangadhar Tilak; Tagore reads his paper kaṇtha-rodh (The Throttled) at a public meeting in Calcutta.

  1901 Marriage of his elder daughters Bela and Renuka (Rani).

  Inauguration of the Santiniketan School.

  1902 His wife dies.

  1903 Rani dies.

  1904 Satischandra Ray, his assistant at Santiniketan, dies.

  1905 Svadeśī agitation against Lord Curzon’s proposal to partition Bengal, with Tagore playing a leading part.

  His father dies.

  1907 His younger son Samindra dies.

  1908 Thirty-five revolutionary conspirators in Bombay and Bengal arrested.

  1909 Indian Councils Act, increasing power of provincial councils, attempts to meet Indian political aspirations.

  1910 Bengali gītāñjali published.

  1912 Third visit to England; first visit to America; publication of the English Gitanjali.

  1913 Tagore awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  1914 230,000 Indian troops join the first winter campaign of the Great War.

  1915 Tagore’s first meeting with Gandhi.

  He receives a knighthood.

  1916 Home Rule League formed by Annie Besant and B. G. Tilak.

  Tagore goes to Japan and the USA; lectures on Nationalism and Personality.

  1917 E. S. Montagu, Secretary of State, declares the development of self-government in India to be official policy.

  Tagore reads his poem ‘India’s Prayer’ at the Indian National Congress in Calcutta.

  1918 Rowlatt Act against Sedition provokes Gandhi’s first civil disobedience campaign.

  Tagore’s eldest daughter Bela dies.

  German-Indian Conspiracy Trial in San Francisco implicates him: he sends a telegram to President Wilson asking for protection ‘against such lying calumny’.

  1919 Gen. Reginald Dyer’s Amritsar Massacre; Tagore returns his knighthood.

  1920 Death of Tilak leaves Gandhi undisputed leader of the nationalist movement. Tagore travels to London, France, Holland, America.

  1921 Back to London, France, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, Germany again, Austria, Czechoslovakia.

  After meeting with Gandhi in Calcutta, Tagore detaches himself from the Swaraj (home rule) campaign.

  Visva-Bharati, his university at Santiniketan, inaugurated.

  1922 Gandhi sentenced to six years imprisonment.

  Tagore tours West and South India.

  1923 Congress party under Motilal Nehru and C. R. Das ends its boycott of elections to the legislatures established by the Government of India Act (1919).

  1924 Tagore travels to China and Japan.

  After only two months at home, sails for South America: stays with Victoria Ocampo in Buenos Aires.

  1925 Returns via Italy.

  Gandhi visits Santiniketan; Tagore again refuses to be actively involved in Swaraj, or in the charka (spinning) cult.

  Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act crushes new terrorist campaign in Bengal.

  1926 Tagore travels to Italy, Switzerland (staying with Romain Rolland at Villeneuve), Austria, England, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany (meets Einstein), Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Greece, Egypt.

  1927 Extensive tour of South-east Asia.

  1928 Starts painting.

  1929 To Canada, Japan, Saigon.

  1930 To England (via France) to deliver Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford (The Religion of Man); to Germany, Switzerland, Russia, back to Germany, USA.

  Exhibitions of his paintings in Birmingham, London and several European capitals.

  Gandhi’s ‘salt-march’ from Ahmedabad to the coast inaugurates new civil disobedience campaign.

  1932 Tagore travels (by air) to Iran and Iraq.

  His only grandson Nitindra dies.

  Gandhi declares fast-unto-death in jail in Poona; later breaks his fast with Tagore at his bedside.

  1934–6 Tours of Ceylon and India with a dance-troupe from Santiniketan.

  1935 Government of India Act emerges from Round Table Conferences of 1930–32, with all-India Federation and provincial autonomy as its main aims.

  1937 Tagore delivers Convocation Address to Calcutta University, in Bengali.

  Starts Department of Chinese Studies at Visva-Bharati.

  Congress Party ministries formed in most states.

  Tagore falls seriously ill in September.

  1939 Congress ministries resign on grounds that the British Government has failed to make an acceptable declaration of its war aims.

  1940 Tagore’s last meeting with Gandhi, at Santiniketan.

  Death of C. F. Andrews, Tagore’s staunch friend and supporter at
Santiniketan.

  Oxford University holds special Convocation at Santiniketan to confer Doctorate on Tagore.

  Muslim League under Jinnah demands separate state for Muslims.

  1941 Tagore dies in Calcutta.

  1942 Congress Party calls on Britain to ‘quit India’ immediately.

  1946 Congress forms interim Government under Jawaharlal Nehru.

  1947 Viscount Mountbatten announces partition: India and Pakistan become independent dominions.

  1948 Assassination of Gandhi.

  1950 India is declared a Republic.

  … I may, if I am lucky, tap the deep pathos that pertains to all authentic art because of the breach between its eternal values and the sufferings of a muddled world…

  Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature

  Introduction

  Rabindranath Tagore wrote over ninety short stories during his long and abundant literary career. It would be possible, though not very satisfactory, to make a one-volume selection from the full range of his stories; but a selection of those written during the 1890s is indicated not only by the need to limit numbers. Tagore was specially committed to the short story during this decade, and fifty-nine stories belong to it. From 1891 to 1895 he wrote forty-four – almost one a month. In 1896–7, and again in 1899, he stopped writing short stories as such, but his interest in story-telling was sustained in the narrative and dramatic poems that made up his books kathā (‘Tales’) and kāhinī (‘Stories’), published in 1900.1 If we count these in with the prose stories, we arrive at over eighty narratives in prose or verse, an astonishing flow that only waned when Tagore’s interest shifted to the psychological novella. cokher bāli (‘Speck in the Eye’) and naṣṭanīṛ (‘The Broken Nest’) appeared simultaneously in serial form in 1901. With their greater length, narrower time-scale, and emphasis on detailed analysis of emotion rather than factual life-history, they mark a break with the short stories that preceded them. The stories that Tagore produced at intervals over the rest of his career are related to his novellas and novels, rather than to his earlier stories. For this, and for several other reasons, the stories from which I have made the present selection form a group.

  Why did Tagore – always primarily a lyric poet – write so many short stories at this time? The simplest answer is that the periodicals with which he was associated, and the readership for those periodicals, demanded them. Most nineteenth-century Bengali literature reached its readers initially in the pages of periodicals. The leading literary figure of the 1870s and 1880s, Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1838–94), established new artistic, intellectual and typographical standards in his journal baṅgadarśan, serializing many of his own novels in it; and Tagore recalled in My Reminiscences (1917) the feverish excitement with which each monthly issue was awaited. His own first attempts at prose fiction, such as bhikhārinī (‘The Beggar-girl’, 1877) or the historical romance rājarṣi (‘The Royal Sage’, 1887), were published in periodicals; and he was fortunate, as he strove to establish himself as a writer, to live at a time in which Calcutta’s literary-magazine culture was reaching its zenith. The periodicals to which he contributed so extensively were packed with ideas, debate, reviews and counter-reviews, as well as the latest poetry and fiction. Writers and editors were keenly alive to literary developments abroad; and as the taste for short stories developed in America, Britain and Europe, so it did in Bengal.

  On 2 May 1891, an advertisement appeared in The Bengalee for a new weekly magazine, hitabādī, listing a number of prominent writers among its contributors. Tagore’s name was among them, as well as Nagendranath Gupta (already established as a short-story writer) and the great Bankim himself (‘religious subjects only’). No copies have survived; but Tagore certainly contributed at least one short story to each of the first six issues. It is said that he stopped contributing because the editor, Krishnakamal Bhattacharya, complained that his stories were too sophisticated for the general reader. Before long, however, he had a much better showcase – the magazine sādhanā (‘Endeavour’), whose significance in the development of modern Bengali literature is comparable to Bankim’s baṅgadarśan or Pramatha Chaudhuri’s sabuj-patra (‘Green Leaves’, started with Tagore’s encouragement in 1914).

  The first issue of sādhanā was advertised on the back of another leading journal, the tattvabodhinī patrikā, in its Āśvin (September–October) issue, 1891. It was clear from the list of contributors that it was to be virtually a Tagore family magazine, with eight of Rabindranath’s brothers or cousins included. The contents of the first issue included poetry, criticism, ‘Modern Science’, music, reviews of books and other journals, and short stories by Sudhindranath Tagore and Rabindranath himself. But such was the size and prestige of the Tagore family that the magazine instantly acquired a central position in Calcutta literary life. Rabindranath’s nephews Sudhindranath and Nitindranath (sons of his eldest brother, Dwijendranath) were named as editor and manager, but it soon became obvious that Rabindranath was the magazine’s prime mover, closely directing not only its contents but its printing and design. Like hitabādī, sādhanā was paid for by persuading wealthy Calcuttans to buy ‘shares’ – which were actually more like subscriptions, as no one received any return for his investment.

  Tagore published his story khokābābur pratyābartan (‘Little Master’s Return’) in the first issue of sādhanā (30 November 1891). He also wrote all the reviews of recent books and other magazines, and a selection of scientific reports. Although other members of the family shared the reviewing in later issues – covering English as well as Bengali publications – Tagore’s dominance continued. To the sixth issue, for example, he contributed a short story, an article on ‘Ignorance of Bengali Literature’, an instalment from his yurop-yātrīr ḍāyāri (a diary of his second visit to England in September–October 1890), bimbabatī (a ‘fairy-tale’ poem, later included in sonār tari, ‘The Golden Boat’, 1894), translations of Heine’s poems from the original German, two songs written for Brahmo worship,1 reviews, and replies to readers’ letters.

  sādhanā continued until October 1895, with Tagore becoming its official editor in November 1894. In the end, financial difficulties, weariness with what had become an unshared editorial burden, and attacks from literary opponents, all got the better of him, and he closed the magazine down. In a letter to one of the contributors to the magazine he wrote: ‘I have broken my ties with sādhanā completely. My enemies will sneer no doubt, but I can’t go on exhausting myself merely in order to ward off the sneers of my enemies.’ 2 From other letters we gather that he had been tiring of the magazine for the past year. Not the least of his difficulties was his distance from Calcutta: collection of material, editing, arranging the printing, proof-reading, all had to be done from remote Shelidah in East Bengal, as we shall see.

  Thirty-six of Tagore’s short stories were published in sādhanā. It is quite possible that he would not have written them at all if the magazine had not existed. His story-writing paused when it closed down, and revived again when he reluctantly became editor of another monthly journal, bhāratī, from May 1898 to April 1899. This magazine, however, was more of a forum for the writings on the political and social questions that were preoccupying him at the time. All in all, it is with sādhanā that his best short stories of the 1890s are most closely associated. It was sādhanā that was their sine qua non.

  In various letters, interviews and comments on the stories (which the reader of Bengali can conveniently find in the Appendix to Volume IV of galpaguccha, Tagore’s collected short stories1), Tagore repeatedly gave a rather different explanation. In 1909 he told a questioner:

  To begin with I only wrote poetry – I didn’t write stories. One day my father called me and said, ‘I want you to take charge of the estates.’ I was astonished: I was a poet, a scribbler – what did I know about such matters? But Father said, ‘Never mind that – I want you to do it.’ What could I do? Father had ordered me, so I had to go. Managi
ng the jamidāri gave me the opportunity to mix with various kinds of people, and this was how my story-writing began.2

  In an English interview given in 1935, when asked about ‘the background of your short stories and how they originated’, Tagore replied:

  It was when I was quite young that I began to write short stories. Being a landlord I had to go to villages, and thus I came in touch with village people and their simple modes of life. I enjoyed the surrounding scenery and the beauty of rural Bengal. The river system of Bengal, the best part of this province, fascinated me and I used to be quite familiar with those rivers. I got glimpses into the life of the people, which appealed to me very much indeed. At first I was quite unfamiliar with the village life as I was born and brought up in Calcutta and so there was an element of mystery for me. My whole heart went out to the simple village people as I came in close contact with them. They seemed to belong to quite another world, so very different from that of Calcutta. My earlier stories have this background, and they describe this contact of mine with the village people. They have the freshness of youth. Before I had written these short stories there was not anything of that type in Bengali literature. No doubt Bankimchandra had written some stories but they were of the romantic type; mine were full of the temperament of the rural people… There is a note of universal appeal in them, for man is the same everywhere. My later stories haven’t got that freshness, that tenderness of the earlier stories.1

  This explanation of the origins of the stories is what Tagore believed and has been widely accepted by Bengali readers and critics. In many ways it is true, and the reader of the marvellous letters that Tagore wrote describing his life as manager of the family estates will find passages that relate quite exactly to characters, feelings and places in the short stories. The description of the boys playing at the beginning of chuṭi (‘Holiday’), for example, is taken straight from observation, though the girl who sits on the fallen mast becomes a boy in the story: