Selected Short Stories
Page 38
1. In English.
2. abhimān: see p. 131, n. 1.
1. mānbhañjan (the title of the story). See Krishna in the Glossary.
1. Traditionally gentlemen in Bengal wear the dhoti long, reaching to their ankles. To ‘wear it short’ is a metaphor for miserliness or ill-breeding.
1. Fish is eaten much less in North India than in Bengal.
1. There is a traditional belief in India that deer are musical. In Rajput paintings, deer are shown dumbstruck before a musician.
1. A title rather than a name, often given to Brahmin widows.
1. āmsattva; a great delicacy, made by drying mango-juice in the sun.
1. subal means ‘strong’ and suśīl means ‘gracious’, ‘polite’.
1. Icchāṭhākrun: a made-up deity, not a traditional Hindu goddess.
1. Progressive-minded products of English education in nineteenth-century Calcutta were known collectively as ‘Young Bengal’.
1. The Indian Mutiny of 1857 was sparked off by the use of animal fat in cartridges which had to be ‘bitten off’ before use. Hindus suspected cow-fat; Muslims suspected pig-fat (taboo in each case).
1. See Glossary.
1. There is a large area of overlap between Hindi and Urdu. Hindi uses the devanāgari script and draws from Sanskrit for its higher vocabulary. Urdu uses the Persian script and a more Perso-Arabic vocabulary. In British India ‘Hindusthani’ was the name given to the colloquial language common to Hindi and Urdu; but the Princess’s Hindusthani is clearly a highly refined hybrid, i.e. Urdu.
1. The moment of śubhadṛṣṭi in Hindu weddings, when the bride is unveiled for the first time in front of her husband.
1. This is the yajña of the story’s title putrayajña, a rite (sacrifice) performed in order to acquire a son.
1. ‘Clear water.’
1. Nārāyaṇa, a name for Vishnu as Protector, ironically doubling here as an epithet for the police.
1. See p. 229, n. 1.
1. Brother-in-law; sister’s husband. Because of the sisterly relationship between the two women, Hemangini’s husband will be a brother-in-law rather than a brother (Dādā) to Kusum.
1. Welcoming Hemangini, the new bride, into the house.
1. Mallār and Deś rāgas. See Glossary.
1. bideśī: ‘foreign’, but almost certainly English.
1. Tagore’s niece. See Introduction, p. 8, and Family Tree, p. 324.
2. The English word is used.
1. The party consisted of Mrinalini Devi and a maid (‘the ladies’), Bela and Rathindranath (‘the children’, only three and one year old at the time), and Balendranath Tagore. See Family Tree, p. 324. Gofur was the cook, and Prasanna a crewman on the boat.
1. A quotation from Tagore’s own play rājā o rānī (1889), Act II, Scene 2.
2. See Introduction, p. 8.
3. A parody of lines in Act I, Scene 2 of rājā o rānī.
1. i.e., Rathindranath Tagore. See Family Tree, p. 324.
1. Tagore did not keep a regular diary. He was working on the second volume of his yurop-yātrir ḍāyāri (‘Diary of a Journey to Europe’, 1893) at the time.
1. Pramatha Chaudhuri (1868–1946) was a distinguished editor and essayist, and was married to Indira Devi. See Introduction, pp. 2, 8.
1. Probably Shaileshchandra Majumdar, whose ‘Majumdar Agency’ published the first collected edition of Tagore’s short stories. See Bibliographical Notes, p. 295. He was the younger brother of Shrishchandra Majumdar (see p. 18, n. 1).
1. Tagore omitted this sentence when he printed the letter in chinnapatra, perhaps because he felt that the thought-connection was not clear. He may have wished to imply that the great Rammohan Roy (1772–1833) showed how it was possible to be Indian to the full, yet was as much an activist as any European.
1. Loken Palit (1865–1915) was a close friend. Tagore met him on his first visit to England (1878–9). His father, Taraknath Palit, who qualified as a barrister in 1871, was a friend of Satyendranath Tagore. In 1879 Taraknath brought Loken to England to enter London University and study for the Indian Civil Service. In 1900 Tagore dedicated his book of poems kṣaṇikā to him.
2. Celebrated Sanskrit prose romance, written by Bana, poet in the court of the seventh-century Gupta emperor Harsha.
1. Probably the essay meyeli chaṛā (‘Women’s rhymes’) published in sādhanā in September–November 1894, and later in lok-sāhitya (‘Folk-literature’, 1907). For an extract from an essay on chaṛā see Appendix B of Selected Poems.
1. Town in north Bengal, in the Rajshahi District of present-day Bangladesh.
2. Perhaps because of the build-up of sandbanks.
1. Affectionate abbreviation for Choṭobau. See Glossary.
1. A quotation from the śānti parva of the Mahābhārata (12.168.30).
2. Pramatha Chaudhuri and Surendranath Tagore; the Gujarati friend has not been identified. The first Gujarati translation of Tagore did not appear till 1918, so it is hard to say if this friend had a specific interest in his writing.
3. Jagadish Chandra Bose (1859–1937) was a distinguished scientist, whose experiments on plant-reactions greatly interested Tagore. In August 1900 Bose represented India in an International Congress of Physicists in Paris. His theories about connections between organic and inorganic matter met with scepticism, and Tagore is responding here to a letter in which Bose described his determination to fight for his views. Tagore’s ironic predictions of the praise that would come to Bose from his countrymen if he won acclaim abroad is prophetic of his own experience after winning the Nobel Prize.
1. Frederick Sleigh Roberts, Earl (1832–1914). Field marshal who distinguished himself during the Indian Mutiny and the Second Afghan War; became commander-in-chief in India in 1885; and commanded the British forces during the South African War. He occupied Pretoria on 5 June 1900.
2. This is often quoted as the earliest indication of Tagore’s interest in painting. But according to an article in Desh (5 August 1989), he experimented with portrait-sketching as early as 1880. There are also rough doodles in his earliest manuscript of all, mālati pũthi, parts of which may go back to 1874.
1. Loken’s translation was published in bhāratī, April–May 1901.
2. Sarala (her full name was Saralata) was the wife of Satishranjan Das, J. C. Bose’s brother-in-law. Tagore’s use of the term āryā (‘Revered Lady’) may derive from a request that Bose made to him in a letter of April 1899 that he should think of a Bengali alternative for ‘Mrs’. In an article on ‘Names’ written in 1931, Tagore recalled this, saying that āryā was better than debī (devi), but had never caught on.
3. Shibadhan Bidyarnab, a Sanskrit pundit who also gave Tagore’s son Rathindranath his first Sanskrit lessons at Shelidah.
1. The Tagore family owned some pieces of land in Orissa (see Introduction, p. 9), but the plot mentioned here was bought by Rabindranath in March 1898. He wanted to give it to Bose, but eventually had to sell it to pay off debts incurred by his Santiniketan school.
1. Nitendranath, third son of Dwijendranath Tagore.
2. The ‘Majumdar Agency’ edition. See Bibliographical Notes, p. 295.
3. prabeśinī (1900), not included in the present volume.
4. Miriam S. Knight, translator of Bankim’s novels The Poison Tree and Krishna Kanta’s Will. In fact Sister Nivedita was the first person to translate a Tagore story. See p. 298, n. 1.
5. Radhakishore Manikya, Maharajah of Tripura, was a close friend of the Tagore family. Tagore had approached him for help with the cost of Bose’s stay and research in England. bisarjan (‘Sacrifice’) was staged in honour of the Maharajah in Calcutta on 16 December 1900.
6. See Glossary.
1. There are small gaps in the manuscript here. Kalidasa’s Meghadūta (‘Cloud-messenger’) was a text that Tagore constantly returned to. The essay here is nababarṣā (‘New Rain’), published in baṅgadarśan in July–August 1901 and included in bicitra prabandh
a (1907). Compare ‘The Meghadūta’, ‘New Rain’ and Appendix A in Selected Poems, and Appendix A in the present volume.
1. For Edward Thompson’s role in the translation of Tagore’s stories see E. P. Thompson, Alien Homage: Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore (OUP, New Delhi, 1993), pp. 17–25.
1. This was almost certainly the first translation of a Tagore story, earlier than the version in New India. In a letter from Sister Nivedita (the famous Irish-born disciple of Swami Vivekananda) to Mrs Ole Bull, 29 November 1900, we read that she had already ‘Englished’ Kabuliwallah by then. Jagadish Chandra Bose, who had helped her with the translation, made an unsuccessful attempt to have it published in Harper’s magazine in that same year.