In the transliteration of Bengali names and words I have adopted a working compromise. Without considerable modification, the Roman script is not suitable for the representation of most Indian languages, because it simply does not have enough characters to cope with the needs of these languages. To mention just a few problems, it cannot readily distinguish between the short a and the long a, it cannot aspirate except by the addition of a whole character (h), and it cannot distinguish between dentals and cerebrals. Thus Bengali has a separate character for each of the following: dental t and d, cerebral t and d, and an aspirated version of each of these, eight characters in all. If we use the resources of the Roman script in the way as it is used in English, we have just t, d, th, dh, and no way to distinguish between the dentals and cerebrals at all, a distinction which is vital to Bengali and other Indian languages. To counteract these and other problems, an elaborate system with many additional diacritical marks has been developed by Sanskritists for the romanisation of Sanskrit. This system, however, is not really very appropriate for Bengali, where orthography and pronunciation are not in the same accord as in Sanskrit, and apart from the inconvenience that non-specialists do not know how to interpret its signals, the system constantly gives rise to distorted ideas about the pronunciation of Bengali names and words. One could develop a new system altogether, which would do more justice to the sound of Bengali, but it would leave us with the following problem. A certain convention about the romanisation of Indian names and words has already grown up over the years, not the complicated system used by Sanskritists, but for general use, without diacritical marks, but still rather spelling-oriented. Introducing a new system for Bengali all of a sudden would be a source of confusion, disorienting readers, both Westerners and non-Bengali Indians, who have become familiar with certain transliterations. Drastic changes in the spellings of names of authors or book-titles would present problems of recognition in bibliography. So unless Bengali studies came into vogue in English in a big way, a new system would be a pointless exercise. I have therefore adopted the system in general use as the basis of my transliterations, adding slight tilts, wherever I have felt it to be necessary, to the real Bengali sound-values. This means that there are inconsistencies in the way I have done things, but I reckon it is the lesser evil. I have tended to leave certain conventional spellings well alone, to avoid problems of recognition, but have felt freer to adapt to Bengali pronunciation in other cases, such as the names of trees and flowers within poems. I have also refrained from italicising such names in the poems, to avoid giving them a false exotic air. They are not aliens in the contexts of the poems, so should not stand out when one is reading the poems. The place where they should stand out is the Glossary. I would like to point out to readers the Bengali pronunciation of two important names: Rabindranath is pronounced ‘Robindronath’, with the d soft, as in French and Spanish, and Santiniketan is pronounced ‘Shantiniketon’, with the t soft, as in French and Spanish.
Wherever possible, I have tried to supply, immediately after each piece, the place and date of composition. Tagore sometimes recorded his dates according to the Bengali calendar, and in such cases exact conversions to the Western calendar can be done by consulting old almanacs or reference works that collate calendars. One such work collating several calendars in very fine print was shown to me at the Rabindra Bhavana; I took one look at it and realised that I could not trust myself to recover the right dates from it. I could have pestered others to help me and then worried about their accuracy as well. In the end I decided that I would not turn a translation project into a full-scale research project. Some relevant dates in Anno Domini could be retrieved from the meticulous volumes of Prasantakumar Pal’s new biography of Tagore which have come out so far. Where this was not possible, I have given the Bengali date and an approximation in A.D. The months and seasons of the Bengali calendar are as follows:
1. Baishakh, summer (mid-April to mid-May).
2. Jyaishtha, summer (mid-May to mid-June).
3. Ashadh, monsoon (mid-June to mid-July).
4. Srabon, monsoon (mid-July to mid-August).
5. Bhadra, post-rains (mid-August to mid-September).
6. Ashwin, post-rains (mid-September to mid-October).
7. Kartik, autumn (mid-October to mid-November).
8. Agrahayan, autumn (mid-November to mid-December).
9. Poush, winter (mid-December to mid-January).
10. Magh, winter (mid-January to mid-February).
11. Phalgun, spring (mid-February to mid-March).
12. Chaitra, spring (mid-March to mid-April).
From Baishakh to Agrahayan, one adds 593 to the Bengali year to get the A.D; in the case of Poush one would have to add 593 or 594, depending on the date; from Magh to Chaitra one adds 594 to get the A.D. Except a few borderline dates in the month of Poush, retrieving the Western year presents no problem. In many dates the corresponding Western months can be easily given; where the date falls in a borderland, at least the season can be given. If a poem was written on 26 Ashadh 1335, I know at once by the above method that it was written in July and in 1335+593 = 1928 A.D. If a poem was written on 13 Agrahayan 1322, I can at least point to autumn 1915. That is what I have done.
It is, in any case, a good idea for readers to get used to the names of the Bengali months and to the six seasons of the year, because they are very important to the poetry. Tagore refers to them constantly. The Tropic of Cancer runs right through the middle of Bengal, so one should not expect the seasons to behave exactly as in the northern latitudes. They have a different pattern and slightly different connotations and associations for poetry. Summer burns: it is not the season when one sits out in the garden. (Winter may be more appropriate for that.) If one is far away from one’s loved one, he or she is missed more if it is the rainy season. The rains heighten the longing. The first month when the monsoon is supposed to be retreating can still have a lot of rain and be hot and humid, but the second month of the post-rains is usually pleasant and temperate with blue skies. There is fog in autumn and winter, but never any snow except in the northernmost Himalayan part of Bengal. Spring is more voluptuous than in the temperate zone. In agriculture there is, naturally, more than one growing season.
In the two sections entitled Notes and Glossary I have provided as much of a critical apparatus as is appropriate in an edition like this. Both sections should be consulted, because it was easier to give some kinds of information in the Notes, while it was easier to enter other items in the Glossary. Cross-references from one section to the other are also provided where appropriate. Readers are urged to consult this critical apparatus for anything that may seem opaque at first sight. Plant-names with which readers are likely to be familiar have not been included in the Glossary, except where a tree’s product may be known, but not the tree, and where it is necessary to have some idea about the tree to appreciate the poetry fully. Providing information on the tropical flora was a major task of annotation for me, and investigating the botanical identities of the names was certainly very educative. I am very grateful to those who helped me to chase the mutating names, prepared a list of current names for me, and wrote down for me on a piece of paper the magic name Index Kewensis. The Index Kewensis with its many volumes of supplements is a fascinating book, an index to human tenacity, a textbook of magic, with “found poems” on every page. Unfortunately the Index by itself cannot enable the lay person to navigate in the troubled waters of botanical taxonomy. Decisions to modify old names are taken at conferences or announced in journals. And as in every subject, there are sometimes differences of opinion amongst experts. I have done my best in such difficult circumstances and have decided to postpone becoming a professional botanist (and a professional reader of collated calendars) until my next incarnation.
Clearly, as with poetry from any part of the world, the more detailed knowledge one has of the physical and cultural habitat of these poems – the geography, the seasons, the landscape, the flor
a and fauna, the architecture, the clothes, the “manners and customs of the people” which the old travellers always like to talk about, the religious and philosophical concepts, the mythological allusions and so on – the more one will enter into the poetry. Some of this kind of knowledge had some dissemination in this country during the period of imperial connection, and some of the words I have had to gloss can indeed be found in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary or the celebrated Hobson-Jobson,12 but these days no part of that body of knowledge can be taken for granted, while the clichés about India in the media are likely to be a hindrance rather than a help. I must emphasise, however, that there is nothing esoteric or inaccessible in these poems, nothing that cannot be understood with a little work.
It is not so much the mythological references or religious or philosophical concepts that present problems in the study of literature from a different land, for such things can, after all, be looked up in a work of reference if one is really curious, but those details about the environment which one is most unlikely to find explained in any book and which can be illuminated by direct experience alone. I remember the effort of imagination I required as a child growing up in the Bengali countryside, reading a Bengali translation of some Western book, to appreciate the description of a young woman walking over a frozen river. I had never seen snow or a frozen river. But I was even more intrigued to find a man described as poor because he had no hat on his head and no shoes on his feet. I could appreciate that a man who had nothing to eat was poor, but hatlessness or shoelessness did not seem such terrible mishaps at all. I was myself hatless and frequently shoeless as I wandered around, and certainly did not consider myself to be a sorry sight on account of that. I remember my father explaining to me that in a very cold climate those conditions would be much more uncomfortable and could even make one ill.
Because of its natural habitat, Bengali poetry is poetry of ‘the warm South’, and its images may therefore have a slightly different feel from those of the poetry of northern climates, especially when, as in the English poetry of our times, literary influences from the Mediterranean region have waned and the northernness has been deliberately accentuated.
Tagore’s images often refer to an item of clothing like a loose wrap which is worn on the upper part of the body by men. He often refers to the end of the sari, the part that goes over the shoulder and hangs from there, or is brought round to the front again and tucked into the waist. This is an important part of the sari, perhaps heavily embroidered if it is an expensive one, but a part with which many jobs can be done if the sari is homely. Then it is like a Western woman’s apron. The busy housewife may mop her wet hands on it or dust something with it; a young girl can gather fruit or flowers in it; a child can cling to it. It is also the mobile and unpredictable part of a woman’s attire, which can slip or get blown in the wind. Note that Tagore may also refer simply to a cloth rather than to a sari, because that is exactly what a sari or its masculine equivalent, a dhoti, is – a piece of cloth.
Tagore refers a great deal to the horizon; this is because most of the Bengali country is flat, and the green fringe of a wooded horizon encircles the flat landscape. He talks about the moon with a great deal of ardour; when above the horizon, the moon looks very big, and a full moon on a clear night is quite something to see, like a golden platter which one could almost touch if one could stretch one’s hand just a little further. He often describes the moon very precisely with reference to the stage of the lunar cycle in which it is; this shows a strong connection with the country and with those days when almanacs were consulted every day. An urban poet of today is less likely to describe the moon quite in that way.
In landscapes the important formative influences on Tagore were environments where nature was in close proximity to humanity. Tagore’s attitude to nature was shaped essentially by peasants’ India. The villas overlooking the Ganges in Chandernagore in western Bengal, where he spent holidays with Jyotirindranath and Kadambari Devi, the bungalow in Ghazipur by the Ganges, in the heart of the northern Indian Gangetic plain, where he spent some time with his young wife and growing family, the riverine landscape of rural eastern Bengal, now in Bangladesh, where, as a young man in charge of the family’s landed estates, with their headquarters in Shilaidaha, Potisar, and Shahjadpur, he went up and down the rivers by boat, often living in houseboats, and the drier plain of Birbhum in western Bengal, where he founded his school, university, and centre for rural reconstruction, and where he finally made his home: all have left their mark on him and were areas where working humanity mingled with the natural environment.
During his river voyages in eastern Bengal, Tagore moved through densely populated and highly cultivated areas. A description of one such district may be regarded as fairly representative: ‘a vast alluvial plain, dotted with villages and clusters of trees, intersected by several fine rivers, with numerous channels, backwaters, minor streams, and swamps’.13 These areas also afforded him marvellous opportunities to observe the rural people, the fruits of which can be seen in both his poems and short stories.
Santiniketan was located in a drier country, but a “greening” process was started under the patronage of Tagore and his son, which gradually converted the place into a garden. The later poems are dotted with references to the trees and flowers of Santiniketan. In this area he had opportunities to observe the Santhals, a tribal people who made a large contribution to the rural workforce.
If it is true that a part of the function of poetry is to remind us, magically, what our relationship to the earth is,14 then Tagore’s poetry fulfils that role most admirably. Directly and indirectly he reminds us constantly of our bond with the earth, and nature is for him both a direct and proper subject and a perennial fountainhead of imagery. That is why, of course, I had to wrestle with all those names of plants. In this he is solidly rooted in the Indian poetic tradition.
The passion with which Tagore addresses the earth as a mother, in whose womb he once was and whose milk he has drunk, may strike the Western reader with its cultural difference. It was born of the close connection between the earth and the peasantry in his milieu, reinforced by a religious tradition which had not repudiated goddesses. The earth, by definition, is no remote, abstract goddess in heaven. She is the here and the now, the cradle where we are all necessarily rocked, and is as vulnerable as a human mother.
Ah, mother,
pauperised, afflicted, tearful, tarnished earth,
after so many days at last today my heart
stirs with weeping for your sake, alas!
(‘Farewell to Heaven’)
It is sobering to realise that these powerful lines, which are likely to rouse sympathetic vibrations in contemporary ears, were written in 1895, the urgency in the poet’s voice deriving at least in part from his perception of the colonial exploitation of his motherland.
The earth is a mother who is often powerless, unable, in years of drought, to feed her hungry children. Her hands hold not ‘infinite riches’ but ‘unfinished pleasures’. She is a mother who clings to all her offspring, saying ‘I won’t let you go’ to the tiniest blade of grass that springs from her womb, and she is as powerless to prevent their departure as Tagore’s young daughter is to prevent her father’s going away to his place of work. In these respects she is analogous to the ‘mater dolorosa’ of the Christian tradition.
Annapurna Turkhud, teacher of spoken English to the adolescent poet (prior to his first voyage to England) and inspirer of some of his early poems.
Kadambari Devi.
Tagore in the leading role of Valmiki in his musical play Valmiki-pratibha, 1881.
Rabindranath and Jyotirindranath composing at the keyboard.
But the Hindu universe is not unlike David Bohm’s ‘implicate order’, where everything is enfolded into everything and the whole is enfolded into every part.15 Accordingly, Tagore is just as much aware of the vast universe and its stars as he is of the planet earth and its flora, and read
ers should be prepared for the vulnerable, girlish earth-mother’s apotheosis and radiant supremacy. She is the earth, she is all Nature, she is the cosmic maya whose ultimate authority we cannot escape.
Ah, greater than great,
you are above, showing your billions of stars,
your moons, planets! Should you suddenly frown
hideously, and lift your thunder-fist,
where would I be, so puny, such a weakling?
So, she-devil, let me decoy you to be a mother!
(‘Hope Against Hope’)
Your creation’s path you’ve spread with a magical net
of tricks, enchantress…
(No. 15 of Shesh Lekha)
These poetic utterances spring from a tradition which is not unused to addressing and worshipping God as Mother. I am not anthropologist enough to make a definitive statement on this, but the Bengali Hindus could be among the last “sophisticated” people left on earth whose tradition endorses such an attitude at the highest level. In Christianity, the madonna represents the point where the Church has had to yield to the old goddesses, and she has effectively performed the function of a divine mother, but theology has formally denied her full status, holding her to be the Mother of God, but not God Herself. In the calendar of the Bengali Hindus, however, the most important annual festival is that of Durga, who is worshipped as a Supreme Mother. This small but significant difference gives a certain tilt to their culture, introducing a tension between a social reality which is largely patriarchal and a cosmic principle which is perceived as feminine, which in turn puts its unique mark on their art and poetry.
I Won't Let You Go: Selected Poems Page 6