Letters From a Young Poet 1887 1895 Read online

  The letters collected in Chinnapatrābalī were written by Rabindranath Tagore to his niece, his brother’s daughter Indira, between September 1887 and December 1895, from when he was twenty-six to the age of thirty-four, a period he later described as being ‘the most productive period of my literary life’.2 At first they were put together in Indira’s own hardbound exercise books (there were two), into which she copied out all the letters written to her by him in this period. These were a present from her to the uncle who was, by then, a well-known literary figure, soon to be Nobel laureate and knight of the realm. The idea of copying the letters into exercise books is one he expressed himself in these letters:

  Give me your letters once, Bob, and I’ll copy out just the experiences of beauty from them into an exercise book. Because if I live for a long time then I’m sure to grow old; then all these days will become things of remembrance and consolation…. Then this Padma’s sandbank of today and the soft, peaceful, spring moonlight will return to me afresh in exactly the same way. My days and nights of joy and sorrow are not woven together like this anywhere else in my poetry or prose.*

  When a selection of these letters was first published in 1912 as Chinnapatra, they had been revised and edited by Rabindranath himself from the version that existed in the exercise books at the time, giving them a ‘literary’ shape, and arguably turning them into a distinct fictional narrative of his own.3 In that collection, the first eight letters were written to his friend Srishchandra Majumdar, and the rest to Indira Debi. The volume could almost be thought of as a prose companion to the English Gitanjali that had been published exactly in the same year, 1912. In it, every element of the personal, the angular, the obstreperous and the banal was carefully pruned from the letters so as to present a public face to the curious reader; all that remained in them—‘just the experiences of beauty’—seemed to belong largely to the domain of the scenic and the spiritual. Even so, because the letters were so irrevocably grounded in the local, the particular and the everyday, some element of the original impulse filtered through in the letters that spoke specifically of the countryside, the river landscapes and the people in it. An English translation of Chinnapatra appeared under the title Glimpses of Bengal in 1921 and, in the short introduction to it, Rabindranath spoke of his own reasons for putting these letters before the public: ‘Since these letters synchronise with a large part of my published writings, I thought their parallel course would broaden my readers’ understanding of my poems as a track is widened by retreading the same ground.’4

  The Chinnapatrābalī is a different edition from the Chinnapatra and its English translation, Glimpses of Bengal, and was first compiled and published in October 1960, almost twenty years after Rabindranath’s death, as part of the centenary-year publications; its editor was Kanai Samanta, and he was helped in this work by Subimal Lahiri. Here we have only the letters to Indira Debi in their fullest form, with an additional 107 letters to her that were left out of the earlier edition—thus, this publication was faithful to the original exercise books to the maximum extent possible. As the editor said at the time: ‘In the present day, there can be no conceivable reason for us to discard any part of Rabindranath’s own writings at all.’5

  The English title, Glimpses of Bengal, was an apt one for Chinnapatra: the subject matter of these edited letters was Bengal—riverine, beautiful, green and vast—and the trope of seeing, or ‘glimpsing’, some of the wonder that was Rabindranath’s Bengal came through exactly in that choice of title. It had, as it happens, no relation at all to the Bengali title, Chinnapatra, which is a compound word, a neologism made up of two words—chinna, or torn, and patra, or leaves. Characteristically, the words could also legitimately denote ‘scattered’ or ‘fragmented’ for the first word and ‘letters’, denoting correspondence, for the second. Torn leaves, scattered letters, pieces of a whole, falling leaves—a plethora of images jostle the imagination in the context of the volume of letters published under this Bengali title. The inconsistent and the fragmentary are the predominant metaphors here, and the word itself is a non-word, impossible to translate or to replicate in another language. To this compound word, the editor of the 1960 edition added a suffix, so that the last part of the word became patrābalī from the original patra. Now ‘ābalī’ is a suffix that denotes collectivity—so patrābalī would mean collected letters, padābalī collected verse, granthābalī collected works, etc. So this title, Chinnapatrābalī, may be translated as ‘collected fragments of letters’, once again a neologistic compound word, adding, with that suffix, a notion of narrativity and flow, a sense of substance and collection, except that the word does not exist in the Bengali language. This was not exceptional as far as Rabindranath was concerned; the Bengali title he gave his Selected Poems, Saňcaitā, or his collected songs, Gīt;abitān, were grammatically legitimate but simply not extant words in the language. So, a narrative told in fragments of letters or a collection of torn letters or, again, stories in a collection of scattered letters—the title Chinnapatrābalī would signify all of these things unconsciously to the lay Bengali reader, well versed, by 1960, in the indeterminacy of the Tagorean trope.

  The two exercise books, of which the contents of the Chinnapatrābalī are an exact replica, are currently in the Rabindra-Bhavana library in Santiniketan. They are hardbound copies with ochre and red covers of about A4-size length, ruled, with Indira Debi’s neat, somewhat schoolgirlish handwriting running inexhaustibly across the pages. The letters copied out in the exercise books are by no means complete in themselves, with the beginning and end lopped off, and the remaining matter edited according to the recipient’s (and later perhaps her uncle’s) discretion. Sometimes, intriguingly, a blue or red pencil has deleted or bracketed off portions of the text, marking subtle changes made perhaps by Rabindranath when he was revising them for publication. Comparing the notebooks to the two editions, we see that the portions cordoned off within square brackets had been edited out of the Chinnapatra completely; these have been restored in the text of Chinnapatrābalī, while the dates and places the letters were sent from and received at have been inserted at the top and bottom of the individual letters.* Looking at the first letter alone, we observe an understandable impulse to screen anything that might be hurtful to any constituency, whether public or private—so, from ‘and Sarala is unhappy that Rabi-mama didn’t get to see it, although Rabi-mama is quite unrepentant’, the last bit (‘although Rabi-mama is quite unrepentant’) has been edited out, while, following this, an entire sentence disappears from this letter written in Darjeeling: ‘Forests, hilltops, mountains, streams, clouds, and a vast number of flat noses and slant eyes began to be seen.’ This emaciates the text, taking out the angularities, the opinions or prejudices, the exasperation and, above all, the humour of the original. Once we have seen all of it, it is impossible to be satisfied with the anodyne quality of what was deemed fit for consumption and therefore left on the page in Chinnapatra.

  What happened to the original letters themselves? Were they written on long sheets or short ones, ruled sheets or plain ones, white or blue? What colour ink was used, what did they physically look like, what sort of envelopes enclosed them? To these questions I could find no answer, as I put them repeatedly to the descendants of the family as well as to researchers, teachers and historians. The exercise books are heavily edited, sometimes with a pencil or ink-black line running through the lines, mostly with each word individually covered over with squiggles of black ink, and, sometimes, running across an entire page or two, a thin sheet of fine white muslin fabric has been pasted over the cut-out lines to further obscure their original content. It was suggested that technology could now be used to see through all these layers—somehow that invasiveness seemed undesirable for the purposes of this translation, and will have to remain for future generations to do if they so desire.

  The Young Man

  The first thing that strikes you about these letters is the youth of the person writing them;
as Rabindranath put it himself, the period when these letters were written was one ‘when, owing to great good fortune, I was young and less known’.6 ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ would have been a good title for the volume, indicative of the shift in focus from the motifs of seeing or glimpsing, or of fragmentation and narrativity, to the man himself, and, even more particularly, to a young man at a formative age, in mature adulthood as a man and a writer, a poet in full possession of his voice.

  Rabindranath was twenty-six years old at the time of writing the first letter of the Chinnapatrābalī dated September 1887 to Indira from Darjeeling. Almost exactly a year before, his first child, daughter Madhurilata (Bela or Beli), was born, on 25 October 1886. In that year of her birth he had published a collection of poems, Kaṛi o komal (Sharps and Flats), which, he later said in his memoir Jībansmṛti, marked that point in his life from when ‘the harvest grain had begun to be reaped’, when he had left the mist-laden vicissitudes of adolescence behind and begun to do business with the ‘real world’. He had also published a novel (his third), Rājarshī, apart from editing a selection of medieval Vaishnava poetry, Bidyāpatir padābalī, composing innumerable songs of astonishing accomplishment, as well as writing reviews, articles, dramatizations and prose pieces in the family-run journals.

  At twenty-six, when we first encounter him in these letters, he is little more than a youth, even if we take into account the fact that in the nineteenth century you were older at that age than you are now. Nevertheless, the letter writer here is a young man, a youthful husband, younger brother, father of infant children, maturing poet and growing literary sensation. The tone in the early letters is somewhat hesitant, slightly diffident, often embarrassed, and, equally, hugely amused and often quite wicked. This is the young man he was before he won the biggest literary prize in the world, before he was knighted, before he had established himself in the social and literary world; in short, this was, figuratively speaking, Rabindranath before he became ‘Tagore’.

  He was a good-looking man all his life, but at this age, his striking handsomeness awed friends and family alike. Pramatha Chaudhuri, later to be Indira’s husband, has left a record of the first time he met him in 1886, saying, ‘I had never seen a man as good-looking as Rabindranath before. He was fair and tall, with black shoulder-length hair, a muscular body, a smooth, glowing complexion, and very beautiful eyes and nose … In those days Rabindranath went about bare-bodied. He used to wear a dhuti and chādar … He was full of life; his body and his face would brim with life. He was like a living picture. If beauty can be incarnate, his body was living proof that it was.’ Another description by contemporary poet Dineshcharan Basu corroborates this evidence. Going to see Rabindranath at Jorasanko on 27 April 1886, he ‘met him at the foot of the first-floor stairs…. Tall and graceful, very fair, with a lean face and beautiful nose, eyes and eyebrows, as if painted with a brush. Bunches of curls flowed upon his shoulders. Attire: dhuti.’7

  Attire, however, was not always the dhoti alone, of course. Written from the boat at Baliya in 1893, we have a wonderful description of a dishevelled and sleepy young man in a state of absolute and relaxed lassitude:

  Today neither the winter nor civilization has any purchase with me—the cāpkān and cogā [outer garment] hang from the hook in an extreme embrace—I’m blithely spending the morning in a blue-and-red striped jin night suit, the bell isn’t ringing, the uniformed khansama isn’t coming in to salaam—I’m enjoying the untidy, relaxed state of the half-civilized. The birds are calling, and on the shore the two big banyan trees’ leaves make a shivering sound in the breeze, the sun on the surface of the trembling water flashes and shines when it comes inside our boat, and the morning proceeds in this loose sort of way.*

  Rabindranath in denim! Almost but not exactly: the material available in colonial Calcutta, which is being referred to, is described in Subal Mitra’s Saral bṅgālā abhidhān (Easy Bengali Dictionary, 1906), as a ‘thick material of closely woven thread’. Strikingly, this description also takes us to the physical sensuality of the youth writing these letters. Although he never actually speaks of physical contact with another, nor dwells upon any intimacy with a loved one, there are moments in the letters that make you wonder. In a letter from Shahjadpur written on a night flooded with moonlight, he writes:

  I rest my head upon the window—like the affectionate hand of nature, the breeze slowly runs its fingers through my hair, the water flows past with a rippling sound, the moonlight shimmers, and sometimes ‘the eyes spontaneously overflow with tears’. Often when you’re deeply hurt inside, tears well up as soon as you hear the sound of an affectionate voice. The lifelong hurt that we feel against nature for this unfulfilled life turns into tears and flows silently the moment nature turns sweetly affectionate. Then nature caresses you all the more and you hide your face in her breast with even more fervour, and you attain a sort of melancholic peace that comes from ‘disinterested wisdom’. Such are my evenings.

  The sentence preceding this declares: ‘There is one lot that becomes restless thinking, “Why can’t I know everything about the world?” and there is another lot that is frustrated wondering, “Why can’t we say everything that’s on our minds?”—in between, what the world has to say stays within the world and the inner thought stays within …’ The ellipsis that marks the elision in the text at this point are portions in Indira’s notebooks that she did not copy down, marking the break with three asterisks instead. The deeply personal nature of the words that are left on the page here make it obvious why whatever was expressed in the missing section would have been censored. What is important about what remains is not the obvious shallow speculation on the cause or object of intimacy and pain but, rather, the startling sensuality expressed by the feeling, suffering correspondent, and the utter physicality of the sensory experience in the body.

  The body is also felt as encumbrance and pain—the second letter describes a bad back, a condition that leads him to rue: ‘Never again shall I think of the back as merely a place to tuck in the ends of one’s dhuti—man’s humanity is sheltered in his back’—but it is also, entertainingly, the primary locus in relation to his children. In the latter instance, the tactility of the infant body—its softness and chubbiness, its sharpness in infant scratches or bites, its funniness of movement and gesture—is recorded with incredible warmth of humour and affection. At the end of a long train journey, he delights in his six-month-old son at home, who appears to him ‘an absolute simpleton [nitānta hāňdā]’, ‘quite dark’, with ‘chubby cheeks’, ‘plump hands curled into fat fists’ and a ‘constantly wavering look on his face and eyes … of complete brainlessness’ which are the ‘general characteristics’ common to the young of humankind. Three years later, we have a vignette of the three children—elder daughter Bela, elder son Khoka, and second daughter Renu—in Bolpur:

  The other evening, Bela and Khoka got into an argument on a subject that’s worth citing. Khoka said, ‘Bela, I’m feeling hungry for water’ [Jal kshide peẏeche]. Bela said, ‘Nonsense, gap-tooth [dhūr, phoklā]! You don’t say hungry for water! Thirsty for water.’ Khoka, very firmly—‘No, hungry for water.’ Bela—‘Āyei, Khoka, I’m three years older than you, you are two years younger than me, do you know that? I know so much more than you!’ Khoka, suspiciously, ‘You’re that old?’ Bela—‘Okay, why don’t you ask Baba?’ Khoka, suddenly excited, ‘And what about the fact that I drink milk and you don’t?’ Bela, scornfully, ‘So what? Ma doesn’t drink milk—does that mean she isn’t bigger than you?’ Khoka, completely silent, with head on pillow, thinking. Then Bela began to say, ‘O father, I have a tremendous, tremendous friendship with somebody! She’s mad, she’s so sweet! Oh I can eat her up!’ Saying this, she runs to Renu and hugs and kisses her till she starts to cry.

  The italicized portions, spoken originally in English by the child, show how fundamentally bilingual the family was at this time even in—perhaps especially in—moments of i
ntimacy. Seeing his third daughter, Meera, his ‘youngest hatchling’ in July 1894, he finds that ‘the thing is almost exactly as it was before’, and attempts to start up an acquaintance, an attempt that proceeds uproariously rapidly as, ‘in no time at all, she began to lay her soft fat hands with their sharp nails upon my nose, face, eyes, hair, moustache and beard … and not only that, she then began to roar and try to put my nose and eyes into her mouth to eat it all up’. And again in another letter: ‘Her fat little hands feel so sweet on my body!’ The utter joy in children that Rabindranath was known for in his lifetime is manifest here in the fun and physicality of play and in the mocking, loving tone so typical even today in Indian attitudes to little children.

  Physicality is not only present in the domain of the romantically sensuous in relation to the landscape or the rumbustiously comical in relation to children—with his own body he is constantly uncomfortable and dissatisfied. In relation to women, he is awkward and shy, even at the age of thirty-two:

  I don’t think I’d be able to conduct a conversation with the weaker sex with such absolute ease and sweetness and confidence even now that I’m almost thirty-two years old. I stumble when I walk, stutter when I must speak, can’t decide where to keep my hands, feel it’s my duty to arrange my long legs somehow, but always fail to do anything about them—by the time I’ve decided whether to keep them tucked away under me, or in front, or behind, I’m unable to match the correct answers to the appropriate questions. In the presence of three gas lamps and a roomful of people, to establish one’s self solidly by the side of some young woman in an instant, without hesitation, like a piece of iron attracted to a magnet, is impossible for timid, anxious creatures such as myself.