Selected Short Stories Read online

  jal-pathe (by water)

  This is another of the headings under which Tagore printed his brief and early selection of his letters to Indira Devi: evocative of his splendid houseboat, or the small ‘jolly-boat’ which can be seen today in the Kuthibari Museum. It has been said by some critics that his characteristic view of East Bengal was, as it were, ‘through a window’ of his houseboat: the life of the people passed before his eyes like the banks of the Padma. Distanced by his status as zamindar, his aristocratic lineage and demeanour, his refinement and education, Tagore could never really know the ordinary people, and his stories are unrealistic as a result. Again, this is a charge that he vigorously denied. In a speech at a felicitation ceremony in 1940 he said:

  People have often ganged up against me to say: ‘He’s a rich man’s son. He was born – as the English put it – “with a silver spoon in his mouth”. How can he know about villages?’ But I can honestly say that those who say that know less than I do. How can they know anything? Conventional wisdom isn’t true knowledge. In true knowledge there is love: the heartfelt love with which I have observed village life has opened the door for me. It might sound like boasting, but I would say that very few writers in Bengal have looked at their country with as much feeling as I have.1

  Just as in understanding Tagore’s realism we have to go beyond naturalism to something deeper, so we have to probe into the exact nature of the knowledge from which his realism derived. It did, no doubt, include a quite detailed knowledge of the customs, agriculture, dialect and religion of the villagers who were his tenants, and he started to take a special interest in folk-literature at this time.2 But this was not exactly the knowledge that impelled his short stories or poems. We do not find in them the technical rural terms, or the ear for dialect that we find in more recent Bengali writers. Islam, the faith of most of his tenants, is almost completely absent.3 In many ways Tagore’s rural characters are generalized rather than specific, and the language they speak is standard Bengali: only rarely does he attempt to give his dialogue a truly peasant flavour. So in what way did his knowledge actually run deep?

  In Tagore’s art – even in his most realistic, prosaic, ironic or sceptical art – we are never far from the transcendental Spirit that Indians through the ages have attempted to know and articulate. The sages who wrote the Upanisads in the seclusion of their forest hermitages realized there must be a supreme cosmic force behind the samsāra (world) of mortal existence, the māyā (illusion) of sense-perception, or the svargaloka (heaven) of the Vedic and Hindu gods; and Tagore’s spiritual endeavours were in direct descent from theirs. He took it for granted that higher levels of human consciousness are made of this Spirit. The aim of spiritual life was to unite human with cosmic consciousness. As a romantic artist, Tagore strove to do this through art rather than through meditation or mysticism: but in this he was extending the central Indian tradition, not diverging from it.

  Tagore’s love and knowledge of riverine Bengal sprang from a deeply religious response to its natural beauties and human simplicity. He needed to keep his distance, watch the rural scene through the windows of his boat, because his response was essentially idealistic, springing from his own religious needs rather than from practical or scientific observation. When he writes of his love for the Padma river itself, in letters or poems, he is writing not as a fisherman or scientist but as a poet. His letters to Indira Devi are a kind of continuous song of praise – padmār mahākābya, ‘an epic of the Padma’, as Pramathanath Bisi puts it in his important study of Tagore’s short stories.1 In its movement, peace and isolation, he found the freedom, solitude and solace that city life and literary fame could never give him:

  I’m now in the boat. It’s my own private home. Here I am my own master: here no one else has any claim on me or my time. This boat is like an old dressing-gown: whenever I enter it I feel relaxed and at leisure. I can think what I like, read what I like, write what I like, and if I want I can put my feet on the table and sink myself in the wide, bright, lazy light of day… Even after only one day, how different my mood is from what it is in Calcutta! Yesterday afternoon sitting out on the roof I felt one way, and today sitting in the boat at noon I feel quite another way. What might seem sentimental and poetical in Calcutta here seems totally real and true…2

  Tagore is aware that there is an idealized aspect to his response to the Padma scene, which from the city point of view might seem sentimental or poetical; but for him the Ideal Spirit is just as real as the sukh and duḥkh of ordinary material existence. The river is a symbol of ‘the spirit that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things’ – through human life just as much as through the natural, non-human world. Indeed, it is hard for an English reader not to be reminded of Wordsworth. Mooring the boat at the small town of Pabna on the way to Sajadpur, he watches the people on the ghāṭ as the sun sets: he feels all the works, desires, hopes and conflicts of mankind as notes of a single melody whose mood is unbearably still and sad as darkness descends. This is the timeless Spirit that lies behind the sukh-duhkh of mortal life:

  The essence of the matter is this: that men are small and their lives are fleeting, yet the stream of life, with its good and bad and its happiness and sadness, flows and will eternally flow with its ancient solemn murmur. On the edge of the town and in the darkness of the evening that constant murmuring sound can be heard.1

  Furthermore, this prabāha (stream) is intimately bound up with Tagore’s own creative life as well as with the laws of Nature and humanity. It was in the 1890s that he began to express his profound sense of a jīban-debatā (life-god) guiding, impelling and harmonizing all his creative and practical endeavours. His book citrā (1896) includes a poem called jīban-debatā, but the most thorough-going exposition of the concept is found in an essay on his poetic development that he published in 1904 in a collection of essays by various authors called baṅgabhāṣār lekhak (‘Writers in the Bengali Language’). The essay – which quotes two of his letters to Indira Devi2 – is an extreme statement of an inspirational, deterministic theory of artistic creativity: the poet impelled by a God who is himself a poet:

  To this Poet, who fashions my life out of all my good and bad, strong and weak points, I have given the name of jīban-debatā in my poetry. I do not just think that he forms all the separate fragments of my being into a unity, so as to bring it into consonance with the universe; I also believe he has brought me to this present life from some previous existence, via a strange stage of forgetfulness; and that a strong memory (derived from his power) of my flowing journey through the universe continues to remain subtly within me. That is why I feel so ancient a harmony with the trees and animals and birds of this world; that is why I do not find the vastness and mystery of the world either alien or terrifying.3

  Such notions can be dangerous, giving the poet a ‘divine right’ beyond criticism or self-criticism; perhaps it is a weakness in Tagore’s artistic philosophy that he could never quite abandon them – though his relationship with his jīban-debatā grew steadily more bewildered and humble. The essay was criticized for its dambha o ahamikā (‘arrogance and egotism’) by the poet and playwright Dvijendralal Ray (1863–1913), and Tagore felt obliged to write a reply in the periodical baṅgadarśan.1

  How does Tagore’s spiritual sense relate to the short stories? In what way is the guiding hand of his jīban-debatā present in them? Stories as rational and ironic as ‘Forbidden Entry’ or ‘A Problem Solved’ cannot obviously or superficially be attributed to the motion of the Padma, or ‘the milk of paradise’.

  For Tagore the Spirit has two main facets. On the one hand it is enormously rich and ever-changing; it is powerful, frightening and awesome as well as beautiful; and it manifests itself in the abundance and creativity of Nature and the endless variety and complexity of human life. On the other hand the Spirit is something very still, quiet and simple. If we look at the poems of the 1890s we find both dimensions.
We find the first in energetic and elaborate poems such as basundharā (‘Earth’); or Ūrbaśī – a paean to the courtesan of the gods; or mānasundarī (‘Lady of the Mind’), in which the jīban-debatā is identified with the Spirit of Poetry and is given the female form that Tagore always henceforth preferred. The whole of his book kṣanikā (‘The Flitting One’, 1900) is devoted throughout to the evanescent, uncatchable nature of the Spirit, expressed in a brilliant range of novel verse forms. But the other, quieter side is conveyed in a poem such as acal sṃrti (‘Unmoving Memory’) in sonār tari (1894), in which he speaks of a ‘still silence’ that never leaves him, ‘a silent mountain peak’ ever present in his mind; or dhyān (‘Meditation’) in caitāli, in which the same inner stillness is seen as a single lotus floating on a calm sea. In other poems, and in chinnapatra, beauty and happiness are seen as ultimately very simple. The famous poem sukh in citrā describes a serene afternoon scene on the Padma and concludes: mane hala sukh ati sahaj saral (‘I feel that Happiness is very simple and easy’). In a letter, the refreshing beauty of the weather after rain gives him the same feeling:

  All my work and all my dealings with people feel very easy. Actually, everything is simple. There is one straight road – if you open your eyes you can go along it. I don’t see the need to search for all sorts of clever short cuts. Happiness and sadness are both on the road – there is no road that avoids them – but peace is found only on this road, nowhere else.1

  These two facets of the Spirit, the complex and the simple, are found in the short stories just as they are in the poems and letters. In terms of content, we find the former in rich descriptions of Nature – sometimes beautiful, as in ‘The Postmaster’ or ‘Guest’, or when the adolescent Nilkanta in ‘Unwanted’ awakens to the beauty of the river; sometimes awesome – like the storm in ‘The Living and the Dead’, the brooding valley in ‘The Hungry Stones’, the sandbanks at night at the end of ‘In the Middle of the Night’, or Giribala’s sense of her own physical beauty in ‘Fury Appeased’. There is especially significant symbolism at the end of ‘A Single Night’: in the same way that the narrator is able to rise above his humdrum existence in a moment of mystical communion with the woman he should have married, so also the divisions of the land are overwhelmed by the unity of the water, sthal by jal, world by Spirit. Morality is transcended: indeed the Spirit in its complex form lies beyond good and evil – it is a creative, evolutionary power, ‘the force which through the green fuse drives the flower’. The Spirit in its simple form, however, shows itself in qualities of human goodness: kindness, sensitivity, simplicity, innocence, humility and love. The reader of the stories in the present volume will find many characters with this simple, spiritual quality of goodness, and this is how the Spirit enters the content of even the most realistic and ironic stories. The subtlety of Tagore’s perceptions and the depth of his sympathy is shown in the way he discovers good qualities even in foolish or vain characters like Baidyanath in ‘Fool’s Gold’, Taraprasanna in ‘Taraprasanna’s Fame’, or hākurdā in the story of that name.

  We need, however, to look further than the content of the stories, for they are linked to Tagore’s perceptions of the Spirit at the deepest levels of style and expression. In Tagore’s Bengali prose we find both complexity and simplicity. On the one hand we have, in passages of heightened description or feeling, long and elaborate sentences unprecedented in Bengali prose; on the other hand we have a startlingly direct, simple, sometimes almost bald manner of narration. It is the latter quality that will probably strike the reader of my translations most forcibly, as the music of Tagore’s long sentences, with their relatives and correlatives, strings of participles, and parallelism of phrasing – at their best, broad and grand as a Bengali river – requires its original orchestration, whereas in the translation of his simple mode probably less is lost. But perhaps an overall vitality and energy will be sensed, running through all the stories; and perhaps their countervailing simplicity will be felt, even in translation, not only as an aspect of their realism, but of their poetry.

  We have here the essence of the way in which Tagore expressed in his stories the deep spiritual bond that he felt with rural Bengal. His realism operated at the level of feeling rather than naturalism; his idealism at the level of style and expression as well as content. When he writes with such eloquence of the river, landscape and sky in his letters, we recall not merely comparable descriptions in his stories but – in Bengali at least – a general quality of rhythm, breadth and complexity in his prose style. Similarly it is not so much the touching goodness of particular characters as a general quality of honesty, directness and innocence in the writing that is associated with accounts in his letters such as this:

  Sometimes one or two old, simple, devoted tenants come: their devotion is so unaffected, they seem to love me so truly that tears come to my eyes. Recently an old tenant came to me with his son: he took the dust of my feet with, so it seemed, all the simple tenderness of his heart. In the Bhagavata Krishna says, ‘My devotees are greater than I am.’ I can understand that idea a little now. Truly in his beautiful simplicity and heartfelt devotion this man is much larger than I am.1

  Maybe, as Tagore himself admitted, from the city standpoint this does seem sentimental, but it is something that those who know Bengali villages can still find – a quality that Tagore felt in the Padma region and tried to convey in stories that were, as he put it, ‘full of the temperament of the rural people’. After all, many of his characters are neither rural nor innocent; yet simplicity and innocence in the writing is nearly always present.

  ghāṭe (at the ghāṭ)

  Why did the goodness of the old tenant described above bring tears to Tagore’s eyes? And why are so many tears shed in the stories? Or why, even if the tears are not described, do we know that they are being shed – by Raicharan at the end of ‘Little Master’s Return’; by the narrator in ‘The Editor’; by Nilkanta at the end of ‘Unwanted’?

  ghāte is the third of the headings that Tagore used for his selection of letters in bicitra prabandha. A ghāṭ can be the steps down to a tank or pond, not necessarily a river, but in the context of riverine Bengal the ghāṭ is more than just a place where people bathe, wash clothes and utensils and gossip; it is also a mooring-place, a place of arrival and departure, of welcome and farewell. In Tagore’s letters, stories and poems, the ghāt usually has poignant associations. Many examples could be given. In one of Tagore’s earliest short stories, ghāter kathā (‘The ghāt’s Story’), published in the journal bhāratī in 1884 when he was twenty-three, the ghāt itself narrates the sad history of Kusum, a girl who often comes to the ghāt to gossip with friends. She goes away to get married, and returns as a young widow. An attractive sannyāsī (holy man) comes and stays in the village, gathering a circle of devotees: Kusum attends to him. She has a dream in which he is transformed into her lover. She tells him about the dream. Gently – and with a hint that the feelings between them are mutual – the sannyāsī tells her he must go, and she must forget him. After he has gone, Kusum descends the steps slowly saying, ‘He has told me to forget him’, and drowns herself. In chinnapatra, there is a letter describing a young bride standing at the ghāt and trying to bring herself to leave:

  At last when it was time to leave I saw them trying to coax that girl, with her cropped hair and big round armlets and bright and innocent beauty, to get on to the boat; but she didn’t want to go. Eventually they managed, with great difficulty, to pull her aboard. I realized that the poor girl was probably going from her father’s house to her husband’s. When the boat set sail, the other women stood watching from the bank: one or two of them were gently wiping tears away from their noses with the ends of their saris…1

  It was an incident that obviously made a special impression on Tagore: in interviews on the stories he cited it as a source for samāpti (‘The Conclusion’ – not included in the present volume).2 Of all the stories it is perhaps ‘The Postmaster’ that m
akes the most haunting connection between the ghāṭ and poignant leave-taking; but here there is a difference between the grief of Ratan and the melancholy reflections of the postmaster himself. Hers is real, live, human loss and rejection – duḥkh – but his is more metaphysical: the current as it carries him away makes him udāsīn, detached; and it is this kind of mood – alienation rather than grief – that many passages in the letters seem to link with the ghāṭ, with its meeting yet separation of land and water, world and Spirit. There is a letter, for example, that Tagore included under the ghāte heading in bicitra prabandha and whose mood was likened by his biographer Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee to his most famous single poem of the 1890s, sonār tarī (‘The Golden Boat’).3 Tagore describes the scene at the Sajadpur ghāṭ in the heat of midday in June, with a market on one side and crowds of boats on the other; he notices the way the day’s work and movement is subdued by the heat but still goes on, and then writes: