Letters From a Young Poet 1887 1895 Read online

  The ‘three gas lamps and a roomful of people’ in presumably a drawing room also serve to remind us of the colonial appurtenances that were inevitably a part of his life at this time. This is a tennis-playing young man; as a journalist visiting Shilaidaha and Shahjadpur in 2010 said when he found the tennis racquet used by Rabindranath kept carefully in the Shahjadpur bungalow in Bangladesh: ‘In this one department, he would have effortlessly beaten every one of his successors, from Jibanananda to Shakti Chattopadhyay to Joy Goswami. The only tennis-player poet in Bengali literature!’8 Tennis was not the only colonial accomplishment in his life—listening to the piano being played, often by Indira, was also a large part of his life at the time. Writing from Shahjadpur in June 1891, he says to her:

  Nowadays the nights here are full of such marvellous moonlight, what can I say! Of course, I don’t mean to say that you too don’t have moonlit nights at your place—it has to be admitted that at your place the moonlight slowly spreads its silent authority over the meadow you have, that church spire, the silent trees and bushes. But you have many other things besides the moonlight—you have your harmony and discord, your tennis, your marble tables, the song and music sessions in the drawing room—but I have nothing except this silent night.

  This feeling of distance from the colonial presence and the public was one that he expressed in a letter from Shilaidaha as well, when he wrote: ‘I was walking as if I was the one and only last-remaining pulse of a dying world. And all of you were on another shore, on the banks of life—where there’s the British government and the nineteenth century and tea and cheroots.’ The words in the original English here gesture at the English presence in India and, inevitably, at his life in these years as a member of the elite, almost aristocratic, class—a conjunction from which he self-consciously drew away in his later years.

  If a partly English way of life was inevitable for someone of his class, the harshness with which the colonial presence in his native countryside grated on his nerves must also have been felt by his compatriots, but few others have expressed themselves so urgently or vividly or humorously on the subject as he has in these letters. A classic in the genre is the letter in which he is forced to first interact with, and then give shelter to, the young English district magistrate in Shahjadpur in 1890:

  Exchanged a vast amount of felicitations with the saheb; said to him, ‘Come and have dinner with me tomorrow evening.’ He said, ‘I’m leaving for somewhere else today itself to arrange for pig-sticking’ (I was secretly pleased). Said I’m very sorry to hear that. The saheb said, ‘I return on Monday’ (which made me very gloomy). I said, ‘Then make it on Monday.’ He was instantly agreeable. Anyway, I sighed and reminded myself that Monday was still some distance away, and reached home.

  A hilarious sequence follows: the description of an imminent storm, an invitation to the saheb to shelter on dry land, that is, at his home, the discovery that the guest room in the house is fit for a slum, of its eventual temporary renovation and, in conclusion, his fervent hope that cockroaches wouldn’t tickle the soles of his guest’s feet at night.

  The brown man’s burden—how to be hospitable to the white man in India—animates more than one letter. In one such (Letter 37), he laments:

  Just a short while ago, the engineer from Pabna turned up with his mem and kids. You know, Bob, I don’t find it easy to be a host—my head gets completely muddled—besides which, I never knew he was going to bring a couple of kids along. This time I was supposed to be living on my own, so I haven’t even brought too many provisions. Anyway, I’m trying to shut my eyes and ears and get through this somehow. Additionally, the mem drinks tea, and I don’t have any tea; the mem can’t stand dal right from her childhood, and due to the absence of other food, I have ordered for dal to be made; the mem doesn’t touch fish from year’s end to year’s end, and I have quite happily ordered catfish curry to be cooked.

  He concludes: ‘If I can bid goodbye to them tomorrow morning then I might just survive; if they say they’re going to stay one more day then I’m going to die, Bob.’

  Not all the portrayals of the English in India are humorous—most, in fact, sting with a bitter sharpness, describing a deliberate insult or unfair affront, as when an Englishwoman at a railway station tries to occupy the compartment he is trying to board, sniggering at him spitefully, or when in Puri the English magistrate’s wife, Mrs Walsh, refuses his calling card because he is an unknown ‘native’. His complaint is heartfelt:

  In the first place, you know I can’t stand the sight of these Englishmen in India. They habitually look down on us, they don’t have an iota of sympathy for us, and, on top of that, to have to exhibit one’s self to them is truly painful for me. So much so that I don’t have the slightest inclination to enter even their theatres or shops (except for Thacker’s). Even a great big cow born in an English home feels he’s superior to every person in our country—that always hits me hard.

  Very rarely does politics enter any of these letters, but in Letter 79, he comes up against an abrasive Englishman, ‘the Principal of the college here’ in Cuttack, whose opinions on the prospect of Indians being a part of the jury system in India render him speechless. This man’s views leave him sleepless that night, and his head and heart hurt so much that he is helpless as he describes how, unable to make a fitting reply, when he had gone and sat down in a corner of that drawing room, it had all appeared like a shadow in front of his eyes:

  Yet in front of me were memsahebs in evening dress and the murmur of English conversation and laughter was in my ear—all together such discordance! How true our eternal Bhāratbarsha was to me, and this dinner table, with its sugary English smiles and polite English conversation, how empty, how false, how deeply untrue! When the mems were talking in their low, sweet, cultivated voices, I was thinking of you all, oh wealth of my country. After all, you are of this Bhāratbarsha.

  A day later, he is still smarting from the experience.

  But, Bob, I’ve still not forgotten the audacity of that Englishman yesterday. He blithely said that we have no idea about the sacredness of life! These are the people who exterminated the Red Indians of America, who had no qualms in shooting down even helpless, weak Australian women like hunted animals for no reason and no fault of their own, who cannot be tried by one of our countrymen if they murder one of us; they come to the timid, pitiful Hindu and preach sacredness of life and high standard of morals?

  This is an early and eloquent expression of an outrage familiar, of course, to many colonized peoples the world over as they’ve confronted the yawning gap between liberal preaching and violent practice in colonial and neo-colonial situations.

  Yet, if anything is even more contemptible than the racist English men and women in India, it is Indians without self-respect. Against this class of men he is unforgivingly harsh—men in dinner jackets who flaunt their proximity to the English, speak in English and always fawn on the ruling class. He summarizes the politics of the period with acuity: ‘All those patriots who make good speeches in English, how they look down on Bengali language and literature! And the temporary benefit from that one good English speech is so slight in comparison with all that is lost because of that scorn!’ Rabindranath had pressed for putting a stop to the practice of making political speeches in English, as is well known, and his fierce fight for the heart and soul of his country—which he likens to the Pandavas in exile, preparing for war—is in evidence in some of these letters, which startlingly display a hot-headed youth (who addresses the English presence in India and says, ‘Your affection is to me what the pig is to the Muslim. It makes me lose caste—really lose it’), not unlike his own future protagonist, Gora, in the eponymous novel written a decade later.

  Unlike the character he went on to create in that novel, however, the persona in these letters is always vigilant against excess. Self-aware and sharp, his wry consciousness never allows him to ride the tidal waves of feeling in him to absurd or extreme levels. Followi
ng the section from the second letter quoted above, he observes:

  Someone who has dressed up as an Englishman and been allowed to sit briefly at one side of an English table doesn’t care an iota about winning the hearts of his countrymen any more! This is entirely natural. But we need to be extra careful exactly because it’s natural. I know that if the Governor saheb spends two days on the second floor of our house reclining upon that easy chair of mine and calls me ‘my dear’ while puffing on his cheroot, then this Rabi that I am, who has assumed an aspect like a ball of fire in the mid-afternoon sun, I too may be swallowed up whole in a single ring of smoke expelled from those outcaste lips of Lansdowne. What a satisfied smile would spread over my entire face then, and what sticky sweetness drip from my speech! That’s the chief worry! That’s why the second-floor terrace needs to be locked (just in case our Governor saheb comes by to smoke a cheroot with his dearest friend Tagore under that tin roof!)!

  The dangers of proximity to power assume a humorous aspect, and he laughs at the thought of himself curling up to bask in the glow of English approbation. This laughter—following upon the high seriousness with which he speaks of serving his country, to work among the people in secret and without acknowledgement, without ‘the luxury of fame and honour’ and without constantly thinking ‘how do I get the English to read my book, how to get a slap on the back from the English’—is made piquant by the reader’s knowledge of the great ‘fame and honour’ that was to come to him from them in the following years, and explains why it was so easy for him to repudiate those honours on behalf of his countrymen in situations such as those that followed the horrific events of 1919 at Jallianwala Bagh.

  An undercutting of his own flights of fancy or imaginative and emotional excess is to be found again and again in these letters. Bathos inevitably follows pathos when he finds himself in the grip of sentiment or intense feeling; so much so that it would seem to be an intrinsic aspect of his character. As a poet he was both known and criticized for his aestheticization of feeling and of beauty, but as a man he is vehemently against the poeticism, the leaping sentiment, the flight of fancy. Immersed in his own thoughts in these riverine locations of eastern Bengal, he is often ardent, passionate about his thoughts and feelings. In a letter from Shilaidaha in 1892 he speaks of how beauty, for him, ‘is a real drug! It really and truly drives me mad’, describing the addiction of moonlit nights and the essential wildness of unbound nature, which makes him wonder why he wastes his life in polite conversation with neatly dressed gentlemen, for he is ‘truly uncivilized, impolite’, searching for ‘beautiful anarchy’ and for ‘a festival of joy with a handful of madmen’. This is immediately followed, however, with: ‘But what’s all this poeticism I’m engaging in—this is the sort of thing that heroes of poems say—pronouncing their opinions on conventionality over the course of three or four pages, thinking they are bigger than the rest of human society. Really, it’s quite embarrassing to say such things.’ A year later, again from Shilaidaha, he describes the exquisite joy of composing songs by himself in that sun-drenched landscape and the list of groceries brought in the same breath:

  Here, I sing alone, with an entranced and liberated heart, my eyes half shut, and the world and this life appear to me touched by the sun’s bright hands, swathed in the finest layer of tears, coloured like a seven-layered rainbow—one can translate everyday truths into eternal beauty, and sorrow and suffering too become radiant. In no time at all, the khājāñci appears with the accounts for two eggs, one sliver of butter, a quarter litre of ghī and six paisa’s worth mustard oil. My history here is like this.

  The history of the life in these letters, thus, is never far from the quotidian, the banal and the everyday. If the Multān rāginī is expressive of the afternoon with its tender high notes that evoke ‘neither happiness nor unhappiness, only the melancholy of inertia and its inner secret sorrow’ in the ‘shining afternoon light’ upon the river, then the thought is interrupted by ‘another big problem—lots of mosquitoes’. ‘It’s impossible to preserve the sweetness of a feeling or the depth of a thought if you’re constantly slapping your hands and legs and body’, he sagely continues, going on to make an observation of even greater import: ‘These sorts of small irritations—the mosquito’s bite, the helpful literary review, sand in the mohanbhog—do not teach men to be brave in any way’. That he is an entirely secular man who demands perfection in his food as much as in his art is clear in the next sentence: ‘I can say it especially because there was sand in my mohanbhog today—and I can clearly recall how I felt then—such feelings were unworthy of a Christian or a Brahmo … or of a good Muslim too.’

  Sometimes in the letters he speaks of himself in the third person. This was an enduring habit, a technique he deployed even in one of the last essays of his life, Sāhitye aitihāsikatā (Historicality in Literature), and in his usage it has none of the pretension that attaches to such use more generally. Rather, the distancing effect created is often humorous, as we know from the famous instance of his wedding invitation to a close friend, Priyanath Sen: ‘Priyababu—/At an auspicious time and day on Sunday next, on the 24th of Agrahāẏaṇ, my close relative Srimān Rabindranath Thakur will be married. My relatives and I will be obliged if you could be present on that occasion in the evening that day at Debendranath Tagore’s house at No. 6 Jorasanko to observe the wedding & c. Yours/Gratefully/Sri Rabindranath Thakur.’ In another letter (4 August 1894), he describes how ‘in a boat by an open window, at the head of a camp-table upon a cane chair is the chief protagonist, Sri Rabindranath’. If here he is a character in a story, elsewhere he speaks almost of the existence of a double, as in Henry James’s famous story, ‘The Private Life’: ‘It’s very surprising, but nowadays when I hear my poems being praised, I don’t feel as happy as I should. Actually, that’s because I don’t entirely grasp that the person who is being praised by people is the same person who writes the poems.’

  Occasionally, the letters afford a fascinating glimpse of his own notion of his character. Repeatedly, here, he describes a side of himself as ‘wild’, ‘uncivilized’, even ‘crazy’, someone who writes poetry when ‘restless with joy, heedless and thirsty like an inebriated, plaintive and self-forgetful madman’. He wishes to be as nomadic as an Arab ‘Bedouin’ rather than a fussy Bengali. (‘But I’m not a Bedouin, I’m a Bengali. I will sit in a corner and nitpick, I will judge, argue, turn my mind over once this way and then the other way—in the way one fries fish—you let one side splutter and sizzle in the boiling oil, and then you turn it over to let the other side sputter.’) Over and over again, he rails against ‘civilized society’, polite company and the compunction of manners. On one occasion, he writes to Indira about this desire for freedom: ‘Remember Satya had said to me, “There’s a real air of luxury about you, like the Muslim nababs”? That’s not entirely true; in the sense that my nabābi is a mental nabābi—there, in my own kingdom, I don’t want any restrictions on me, I want an unchecked right in my domain.’ This luxury of mind, therefore, is premised on the exact opposite of material luxury, a mentality that took as a mantra Goethe’s injunction to ‘do without’; a temperament that spontaneously exclaims on a February afternoon in Shilaidaha: ‘There’s such a particular feeling of renunciation in the Indian sunlight that nobody has the power to evade it.’ He continues again a few months later: ‘You know how I cite the breezes of India as an excuse for rebellion against undertaking my duties? There’s a deeper significance to that, Bob.’ Doing nothing is serious business; it is what facilitates poetry; it is the foundation upon which poetry can be about ‘the unnecessary’.

  The Young Woman

  The woman who receives these letters, affectionately called ‘Bob’ in some of them, is a silent but considerable presence in this book, an equal as an interlocutor, and not one to be written out of the narrative of its history. This is corroborated by Rabindranath himself repeatedly. As he said to Indira on 7 October 1894, he feels his letters achieve complet
ion because they are addressed to her, and are expressive not only of his own inner essence but also of hers—just as Byron’s letters to Thomas Moore express not just Byron’s personality but Moore’s as well:

  Both the person who listens and the person who speaks are together responsible for the composition—

  ‘taṭer buke lāge jaler dheu,

  tabe se kalatānu uṭhe.

  btse banasabh ihari kape,

  tabe se marmar phuṭe.’

  (The waves beat upon the shore’s breast,

  Only then does its murmur rise.

  The assembled woods tremble in the wind,

  Only then does that rustle materialize.)

  The letter had begun with a passage that was subsequently used as a preface for the Chinnapatrābalī:

  I too know, Bob, that the letters I’ve written to you express the many-hued feelings of my heart in a way that hasn’t been possible in any of my other writings…. When I write to you it never crosses my mind that you might not understand something I may say, or may misunderstand it, or disbelieve it, or think of those things which are the deepest truths to me as merely well-composed poeticisms. That’s why I can say exactly what I’m thinking quite easily to you…. It’s not just because you’ve known me for a very long time that I’m able to express my feelings to you; you have such a genuine nature, such a simple love for the truth, that the truth expresses itself spontaneously to you. That’s by your particular talent. If the best writings of any writer are to be found in his letters alone then we must surmise that the person to whom they are written also has a letter-writing ability. I have written letters to so many others, but nobody else has attracted my entire self to themselves in writing.

  Her ‘genuine nature’ and simple honesty have been attested to by others apart from her favourite uncle, coming up unselfconsciously in the letters exchanged between her and her fiancé before their marriage. ‘You are such a very good girl, Bee—I wish I were like you,’ she reports her friend ‘Lil’ (Lilian Palit, daughter of Loken Palit, family friend of the Tagores) saying to her in English one evening during an intense conversation around the news of her engagement. The person she’s engaged to has no doubts in this regard, ruminating more than once on what a really good person she is—‘Tumi satyi bhāri lakshmi meẏe’ (You really are such a very good girl).9 As Chitra Deb has commented, ‘Nobody else could attract the poet’s entire self to themselves in writing. But Indira’s identity does not end with this; rather, this is where it begins.’10 Rabindranath’s young, talented and beautiful niece was also an accomplished woman in her own right, only the thirteenth Bengali woman graduate, and the first Tagore from the male lineage (her cousin Sarala, daughter of Rabindranath’s eldest sister, preceded her in this) to graduate. She read French and English honours, obtaining a BA degree in 1892, and was ranked first in her year and awarded the Padmavati gold medal. Both she and her husband were French scholars, and she called him ‘Mon ami’ in her letters for lack of an appropriate Bengali equivalent (although, in the first instance, she did address him as ‘suhṛdbar’ (friend/well-wisher), and then said defensively, ‘Sambodhan dekhe hāňscho?’ (Are you smiling at the form of address?). Her Bengali is alive and clear, sparkling and strong; her uncle described her language as ‘lustrous’. Her tangible contribution to the culture of her time lay not only in the elusive arena of her influence and presence but also substantially in the fields of music (she notated a great many of Rabindranath’s songs) and music theory, autobiography and memoir and, notably, in the domain of the essay form, at which she excelled, and in translations from English and French into Bengali.