I Won't Let You Go: Selected Poems Read online

  Tagore does, of course, address a paternal God as well, and it was mainly a group of poems in that mode through the medium of the English Gitanjali that won him the acclaim of the West. Many religious and philosophical strands went into the making of Tagore’s world, and he absorbed the different influences and mingled them in the characteristically eclectic Hindu fashion. Such strands include the Upanishadic concept of the seamless unity of the universe, the Baishnab view of the world as the play between Krishna and Radha, the Shaiva image of the cosmos as Shiva’s dance, and the images of the Sufi-influenced Baul sect of Bengal, on which a note has been provided in the Notes section. None of these influences is mutually exclusive, and while acknowledging this rich and complex tapestry of ideas, it is at the same time essential to remember that the poetry itself is without labels.

  Tagore with his young wife Mrinalini Devi shortly after their wedding, 1883.

  Tagore’s poems and songs do not belong to any closed cult; they record an authentic spiritual autobiography which can be shared by others. It is an open-ended poetic corpus that oscillates in a human fashion between a faith that sustains the spirit in times of crisis, or fills it with energy and joy in times of happiness, and a deep questioning that can find no enduring answers. It is religious, not in a sectarian sense, but in the deepest sense. Tagore moves with effortless ease from the literal to the symbolic, from the part to the whole, from a tiny detail to the cosmos. This movement is natural to the Indian mind, and Tagore displays it magnificently. I would like to emphasise that I have chosen poems as poems, not because they exemplify this or that attitude.

  Tagore was somewhat lonely as a young boy, being the last surviving child of a mother exhausted by fifteen pregnancies. Under the care of family servants, he was often on his own for long hours, daydreaming and amusing himself as best as he could. This initial loneliness did leave a permanent mark on him. When he lost his mother at the age of fourteen, quite a bit of mothering came to him from his sister-in-law Kadambari Devi, the wife of his brother Jyotirindranath. Kadambari had entered the Tagore household as a daughter-in-law at the tender age of nine, when Rabindranath was seven, and the two had grown up together like siblings. As I have said, she took a keen interest in contemporary Bengali writing, and took an active part in the family’s cultural activities. She was an important formative influence on the budding poet.

  The adolescent Rabindranath is known to have been stirred by an accomplished young Maratha woman three years older than himself, named Annapurna Turkhud. Vivacious, sophisticated, and fluent in several languages, Annapurna (also known as Anna or Annabai) was the daughter of Atmaram Pandurang Turkhud, an eminent Bombay doctor with remarkably progressive views, and had completed her education in Britain. Rabindranath stayed with the family prior to his first voyage to Britain and had lessons in spoken English from Annapurna. There is evidence that the two were attracted to each other, though Rabindranath was very shy. He gave her the nickname of Nalini, which she afterwards used as a pen-name when she wrote, and she inspired some of his early poetic effusions. She married a Briton named Harold Littledale and died at Edinburgh at an early age in 1891.16 Tagore never forgot her and reminisced about her in his old age.

  Flutters were also caused in Rabindranath’s heart by the friendly daughters of the Scott family, with whom he stayed in London during his first visit to Britain. Of the three sisters, he seems to have been particularly friendly with the second and the third. The third Miss Scott sang and played on the piano, and taught him English and Irish songs. Possibly it was she who expressed a wish to learn Bengali and had lessons from him. It is likely to have been his goodbye to these sisters which was recalled in a tenderly romantic poem in Sandhyasangit entitled ‘Dui Din’ (Two Days). I was tempted to translate this poem, but in the end did not attempt it.

  After his return from England in 1880 the young Rabindranath enjoyed a period when his creative spirit received notable stimulation from the friendship and company of his sister-in-law Kadambari Devi. He then accepted a marriage that his family arranged for him. The choice was limited, because a girl had to be found from the brahmin sub-caste of demoted rank to which the Tagores belonged: other brahmin families would not give their daughters to the Tagores. The girl chosen was Bhabatarini, the daughter of Benimadhab Raychaudhuri from a village in the district of Jessore, a minor official who worked for the Tagore family. The marriage took place on 9 December 1883, when the bride was approximately three months away from her tenth birthday. After the marriage, her old-fashioned name was changed to Mrinalini.

  In April 1884, four months after Rabindranath’s wedding, Kadambari Devi, still two-and-a-half months away from her twenty-fifth birthday, committed suicide. She is thought to have taken opium and did not die immediately. For two days doctors battled to save her life, but failed. She died on either 20 or 21 April, just a few days before Rabindranath’s twenty-third birthday. The postmortem examination was conducted in the Jorasanko house and the Tagore family paid money to stop the news of her suicide from appearing in the newspapers.17

  Silence was maintained by the family and clues were destroyed in such a way that it is nearly impossible to get at the real story behind the tragedy. Beneath the brilliant surface of the family life of the Tagores there were hidden tensions, some caused directly by the uneven process of modernisation which such families were undergoing. Young men were being given all the psycho-sexual stimuli of a vigorous arts education and were being exposed to romantic Western literature with its assumptions of free mixing between the sexes, but were nevertheless being paired off, while at the height of their sexual development, with immature child-brides. All a young man could do in such a situation would be to wait for his bride to reach puberty so that the marriage could be consummated and in the meantime continue to flirt with the wife of an older brother, who might be a young woman closer to him in age. The young women were also being encouraged to educate and develop themselves up to a point, and the pursuit of literature and music would nurture romantic egos in them as well. Kadambari was artistic, sensitive, and childless. She had married at the age of nine. Jyotirindranath was ten years older than her and is known to have liked the company of his older brother Satyendranath’s wife, the smart Jnanadanandini Devi. There are rumours that Kadambari found letters from another woman, perhaps an actress, in the pocket of a tunic of her husband which she was sending to the laundry. There are also rumours that she had made a previous unsuccessful attempt to kill herself. Such rumours cannot be authenticated, though clearly some hurt, some loneliness must have been gnawing her. She had suffered from some prolonged illness in the latter half of 1883, shortly after the arrangement of the match for Rabindranath, in which she participated along with others. In a chapter of one of my Bengali books I have tried to present a retrospective analysis, in the light of the psychiatric insights of our times, of the kind of depression that might have driven Kadambari to suicide.18

  Mrinalini Devi in her days as a mature matron.

  Jyotirindranath never married again. Rabindranath’s long story ‘Nashtanid’ (The Broken Nest) portrays a situation which was probably modelled on the triangular relationship between Jyotirindranath, Kadambari, and himself. There is no suicide. The story was adapted by the director Satyajit Ray for his successful film Charulata. It seems highly likely that Kadambari’s suicide was one of those events which provoked Tagore to explore the situation of women within the traditional Hindu family in several stories.

  Tagore’s writings show that he suffered horribly at first, undergoing an inner orphaning, but then began to recover, thanks to his youth and the normal healing processes of nature. At the hour of his devastating grief he could not have received much support from his ten-year-old child-bride, with whom his marriage would not as yet have been consummated, but she reached puberty soon enough and the first child arrived when Rabindranath was twenty-five-and-a-half and his wife not quite thirteen.

  Some have wondered how a young man like Rabindra
nath, who was both wildly romantic in his temperament and rebellious in his social ideas, as evinced by his adolescent writings, could have accepted an arranged marriage with a child-bride, but these contradictions were part of the times and mores. His father wished him to get married, and he did not go against that wish, doing just what his other brothers had done before him. As long as the patriarch Debendranath was alive, Rabindranath’s actual social behaviour remained fairly conservative. He even hurried the weddings of his own first two daughters so that his father could see his granddaughters wedded before he died. But it is interesting to note that after his father’s death he arranged his son Rathindranath’s marriage with Pratima Devi, who was a young widowed girl from a collateral branch of the Tagore family. This was the first instance of widow remarriage in the Tagore family. And Rathindranath was strenuously exhorted by his father to allow Pratima to develop herself fully as a person.19

  Tagore’s favourite niece, Indira Devi.

  The proud father: Tagore with his two eldest children, Bela and Rathi, in 1890.

  Four of Tagore’s five children (left to right): Shomi, Rani, Bela (seated) and Mira.

  Tagore with daughter-in-law Pratima Devi in Persia, 1932.

  As a bride, then, Mrinalini Devi was not essentially all that different from other daughters-in-law who had joined the Tagore family as children. She had already received some primary education in her village, and the Tagore family sent her to school and gave her a reasonable education. She learned English as well as Sanskrit, and is known to have read the original Ramayana with a teacher in order to prepare, at her husband’s insistence, an abridged Bengali version suitable for the use of children. This seems like one of her husband’s educational experiments, a part of his plans for the education of both his wife and his children. The unfinished manuscript has not survived, but her son Rathindranath has recorded that he and his siblings used to read it with great eagerness.20 Her face, on the photographs that have come down to us, looks a little homely, but is not unattractive, and by all accounts she seems to have given her husband the quiet nest he needed to mature as a writer. Gentle, affectionate, and devoted to her husband and children, she is known to have been a good cook and an expert manager of household affairs. She supported her husband’s efforts to found a school at Santiniketan and parted with nearly all her jewellery to finance the venture. The few letters from Rabindranath to her which have survived, written during temporary stretches of separation, show how solid the foundation of mutual respect and tenderness between the two was, and how anxious he was to remove her and their children from the politics of the extended family and bring them over to a spot where he could share with them the delights and responsibilities of living as a nuclear family. She bore him five children. There can be no doubt that the serene splendour of much of Tagore’s poetry written while Mrinalini was alive and active owes something to the stability she gave him.

  Tagore was forty-one-and-a-half when Mrinalini, still a few months away from her twenty-ninth birthday, died of an undiagnosed illness on 23 November 1902. He nursed her himself, but could not save her. Rathindranath speculated in later life that his mother might have died of appendicitis, a condition not very well understood in those days.21 There is every reason to think that Mrinalini would have developed her personality further had fate permitted her to be at her husband’s side for a longer period.

  In 1903, nine months after her mother’s death, Tagore’s second daughter, Renuka (Rani), died of tuberculosis. Again, Tagore tried desperately to save her, but could not. In 1907, Tagore’s younger son Shamindranath (Shomi) fell a victim to cholera while on holiday in Bihar. These shattering griefs deepened the religious strain in Tagore’s temperament, consolidating a profoundly religious phase in his development. Basically, it was poems from this phase which won him acclaim in the West. With the death of his firstborn child and eldest daughter, Madhurilata (Bela), in 1918, also from tuberculosis, only two of Tagore’s five children were left alive.

  Tagore never remarried and nurtured a core of loneliness within him for the rest of his life. His poems suggest that the wound left in his mind by Kadambari’s death had to some extent healed over when the death of his young wife opened it again. Both deaths left him with a sense of guilt and remorse. Kadambari’s death shook him profoundly, making him suddenly realise how lonely and unhappy she must have been, much more than he had realised. Clearly he had not done enough to help her. Nor had he been able to tell her how much he owed her, as a young man and a young poet. It was then too late to make amends. Mrinalini’s death left him feeling guilty too, because he felt he had not shown enough appreciation, while she had been alive, of her quiet devotion and sacrifices for his sake. The two deaths merged into one profound sense of loss, creating the composite ghost of a dead beloved which began to haunt his poetry and songs, investing many of them with a mood of bitter-sweet nostalgia and unconsummated longing. As readers will see, Tagore’s poetry is full of the “unfinished business” of grieving. He often evokes the image of a woman who has gone away, leaving him with the pain of an incomplete communication, of things left unsaid.

  Tagore’s need for a feminine touch in his daily life as well as his deeper artistic need to be inspired by a woman remained with him, to be filled, from time to time, more or less, by various women of the family and later by other attractive women who clustered round him, drawn by his personality and fame. From an early period, from before Mrinalini’s death, his niece Indira Devi, the daughter of Satyendranath and Jnanadanandini, was very close to him. Just a couple of months older than Mrinalini, Indira was the recipient of some of Tagore’s most brilliant letters (Chhinnapatrabali, 1960). After the death of his daughter Bela, Tagore found comfort in the company of the young Ranu Adhikari, later the noted arts patron of Calcutta, Lady Ranu Mookerjee. She inspired the character of Nandini in the play Raktakarabi (1926) and was the recipient of the letters of Bhanusimher Patrabali (1930).

  Tagore outside the villa Miralrío, San Isidro, Argentina, 1924.

  Tagore with Victoria Ocampo in Argentina, 1924.

  In 1924 in Argentina Tagore met Victoria Ocampo (1890-1979), a young Argentine woman who was an ardent admirer of his works, and who later became a distinguished woman of letters and the founder and director of Sur, which has been called the most important literary magazine to emerge from Latin America in the present century, and of the publishing house of the same name. For two months Tagore and his honorary secretary and travelling companion Leonard Elmhirst were her personal guests. Tagore was stirred by this encounter, and a triangular friendship sprang up between himself, Victoria, and Leonard Elmhirst. Victoria was the dedicatee of Purabi (1925) and continued to be a distant Muse for Tagore in the last years of his life, playing a role also in his development as a visual artist. Tagore cherished hopes that she might visit him at Santiniketan, but although they met once more, in France in 1930, when she managed to organise his first art exhibition, she never made it to India. References in Tagore’s later poetry to the pain of separation and the enigmatic image of a woman who had failed him in some way may be linked to this experience.22

  In 1926, disappointed in his hopes of meeting Victoria in Europe, Tagore took consolation in the company of the attractive Nirmalkumari (Rani) Mahalanobis. Mrs Mahalanobis and her husband were Tagore’s travelling companions for the major part of his European travels in 1926, and she was the recipient of the letters of Pathe o Pather Prante (1938). Tagore also received substantial companionship from Rathindranath’s wife Pratima Devi, who was encouraged to develop her artistic talents and was a very supportive daughter-in-law to him in his later years. And there were other women from whom he received emotional support in his long life as a widower, as well as other bereavements of those close to him, besides the ones I have enumerated.

  After a life of incessant creative activity, Tagore died, at the age of eighty years and three months, on 7 August 1941, in the family house in Calcutta where he had been born. The quality
and quantity of his achievements seem all the more astonishing when placed against the amount of grief he had to cope with in his personal life. Much of his poetry is necessarily about love and suffering, about how one copes with loss, and can be called passional in the radical sense. Yet he is at the same time one of the most affirmative and celebrative poets of all times. I hope readers of this volume will see for themselves that he was neither ‘a hoaxer of good faith’ nor ‘a Swedish invention’, but a genuine poet who still speaks to us.

  NOTES

  1. Ghulam Murshid, Reluctant Debutante: Response of Bengali Women to Modernization, 1849-1905 (Sahitya Samsad, Rajshahi University, 2nd impression, 1983), pp. 49-50.

  2. Krishna Kripalani, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (Visvabharati, Calcutta, 2nd edition, 1980), p. 16.

  3. Kripalani, pp. 14-15.

  4. Kripalani, p. 89.

  5. Vera Brittain, ‘Tagore’s Relations with England’, A Centenary Volume, Rabindranath Tagore, 1861-1961 (Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 1961), p. 118.

  6. Kripalani, p. 235.

  7. Tagore’s influence on Jiménez is discussed in Sisirkumar Das & Shyama-prasad Gangopadhyay, Sasvata Mauchak: Rabindranath o Spain (Papyrus, Calcutta, 1987).

  8. For more information, see my book In Your Blossoming Flower-Garden: Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria Ocampo (Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 1988), pp. 65-66 and 347; further references are provided in the notes. Borges’ comment can be found in Jean de Milleret, Entretiens avec Jorge Luis Borges (Editions Pierre Belfond, Paris, 1967), p. 240. Victoria Ocampo showed how absurd the comment was in her article ‘Fe de erratas (Entrevistas Borges-Milleret)’, Testimonios, vol. 9 (Sur, Buenos Aires, 1975), pp. 240-47.