Letters From a Young Poet 1887 1895

by Rabindranath Tagore

  Born in 1873, Indira Debi was twelve years younger than her uncle, the youngest brother of her father, the distinguished Satyendranath Tagore, the first Indian to enter the Indian Civil Service. Satyendranath’s family—his wife, Jnanadanandini Debi (an influential, educated and independent woman, a pioneering symbol of women’s emancipation and creator of the modern Indian sari), son, Surendranath, and daughter, Indira—were very close to Rabindranath who often stayed with them in their home throughout his life. In his teenage years, preceding his voyage out to England, Rabindranath stayed with his brother in Ahmedabad, acquiring English customs and the English language. Subsequently, he spent time with them during Satyendranath’s postings at Satara and Bombay, and even in the city of Calcutta, where he would escape the family home at Jorasanko to their quiet nuclear home in Park Street for long periods. His friendship with the children—Indira (five) and Suren (six)—began in England, when he went for the first time in 1878 to their home in Brighton as a seventeen-year-old.

  Rabindranath had a lifelong attachment to children—he loved them and they loved him to a fault—and here he had the first opportunity in his life to give his heart to two children who would remain among the closest relations he would have amid so many in his family. In Brighton, they were amused by the strange Bengali accent in which he spoke English, but they got along famously. Indira wrote later that one of his tricks then with children was to sing songs in funny ways; so ‘he would start singing the song āju moraṇ ban bole in a medium tempo and then go faster and faster, until towards the end, when his lips would seem to keep trembling and shaking, we would be in splits, simply helpless with laughter’.

  At the time that these letters are being written to her, Indira is between the ages of fourteen and twenty-two, an eminently marriageable age, and it would be a dozen years after 1887 (when the first letter here is received) that she married the distinguished writer, editor and literary critic Pramatha Chaudhuri in 1899, unusually late for a woman of her times. In 1886, Rabindranath had dedicated three ‘Letter-Poems’ to her in Kaṛi o komal; all three were titled ‘Patra’ (Letter), and all of them were dedicated to ‘Srimatī Indirā, Prāṇādhikāsu. Nāsik’ or ‘Miss Indira, Dearer than Life. Nasik’. In a letter-poem Rabindranath wrote to Suren, in Nasik at this time, published in Bhāratī, we have a riotous depiction of their relationship, written in a mix of Hindi and Bengali, where, addressing Suren, he says of Indira:

  Merā upar julum kartā terā bahin bāi,

  kī karṇegā kothāẏ gāṇyā bhebe nāhi pāi!

  bahut jorse gāl ṭiptā dono āṅgli deke,

  bilātī ek paini bājnā bājātā theke theke,

  kabhī kabhī nikaṭ āke ṭhoňṭme cimṭi kāṭtā,

  kāňci le kar koňkṛā koňkṛā culgulo sab chaňṭta, …

  This woman, your sister, is torturing me so,

  I can’t think of what to do or where to go!

  She pinches my cheek hard between her two fingers,

  And keeps playing now and then upon some English piano thing;

  Sometimes she comes up very close and pinches me on my lips,

  Takes a scissor and begins to trim all my curly hair …11

  Uncle and niece and nephew had many names for each other; among these, the most consistent nickname for her at home was Bibi, and he was their ‘Robika’ (a diminutive of Rabi-kaka; ‘kaka’ being one’s father’s younger brother). Here, in these letters, however, he frequently addresses her as ‘Bob’. The strange Englishness of the endearing nickname paradoxically seems typical of him, the committed Bengali man of letters. It could be speculated that this was an affectionate reference to the anglicized lifestyle of his brother’s household. Indira’s cousin Sarala has left an account of these children upon their return to Calcutta, already well travelled abroad, attending Loreto and St Xavier’s schools respectively, going out in smart English clothes every evening in a carriage with a dog to take the air while the other children of the house gaped. Indira herself has remarked ruefully that she learnt to call her older brother by his name in England as a child, a habit she retained, never using the Bengali ‘dada’ for him as custom demanded. ‘Bob’ might have been a mocking variation on Bibi on account of all of this. It was also private—in the notebooks, the name was scratched out in blue pencil—as in ‘It’s quite a lovely day today, Bob’—so that the first edition, the Chinnapatra, or its translation, Glimpses of Bengal, had no trace of it in them. Yet the use of it is so affectionate, so engaging and particular in tone that its presence in the letters adds an incalculable element that exactly captures the relation between these two as nothing else could have done.

  The Artist

  Only two of the letters collected here in this book were written in 1887, after which we skip a year and find a couple more from 1889, to be followed by four more from 1890. The flow of letters picks up a more consistent speed from 1891 onward up to 1895. Those were also the years when Rabindranath wrote some of the best short stories in the Bengali language, published later in the collection called Galpaguccha (Cluster of Stories), penned in close contiguity to the Bengal countryside that gave them sustenance. The landscape, in fact, demands a certain sort of art—‘writing that is quite simple, beautiful, sweet and generous’—not like the ‘sickly’ ‘convoluted’ plots of Western novels such as Anna Karenina (an opinion he excised from the Chinnapatra). In ‘the calm current of this small summer-worn river, the flow of the indifferent breeze, the undivided expanse of the sky, the continuous peace of both shores and the silence all around’, the only reading that is appropriate are ‘the shorter verses of the Vaishnava poets’; and the only writing that is meaningful needs to be ‘quite easy, beautiful, free or generous, brightly tender, and rounded like a teardrop’.

  The letters of the Chinnapatrābalī also contain vignettes of many of the most memorable characters of his short stories. The postmaster on whom the story ‘Posṭmāsār’ was modelled makes an appearance more than once—his wry character and sense of the absurd are portrayed in satirical descriptions of the man and his relationship with the village people—we also find out that he was abashed and pleased at the same time about the story featuring him as the protagonist. The young village tomboy who features in another famous story, ‘Samāpti’ (The Ending), is also to be found here in the original as the poet looks on as she is forcibly parted from her natal family by the riverside and sent off to her distant in-laws by boat. (Both stories were eventually filmed by Satyajit Ray.) The process of a story being created around a character is described in another letter:

  One of the pleasures of writing stories is that those I write about completely occupy my entire free time; they are the companions of my solitary mind—during the rains they drive away the sorrow of separation in my closed room, and when it is sunny, they roam around in front of my eyes like the bright scene on the shores of the Padma. That is why I have managed to make a small, proud, wheat-complexioned girl called Giribala descend into the world of my imagination this morning.12

  If the characters in the stories are here, then so are their critics; more than once we find Rabindranath exasperated with opinions expressed by witless reviewers on the quality of his work. His comments on the culture of reviewing in India, unfortunately, have an even greater resonance today than they did then:

  The manner in which literary analysis is engaged with in our country is completely uneducated. There’s no point in hearing: ‘I liked it’ or ‘I didn’t like it’. That only gives you a particular person’s opinion; it doesn’t give you the truth of that opinion. If that opinion comes from somebody who is sufficiently capable of appreciation or experienced in literary affairs then even that might make you think a little. But just any person’s opinion has no value at all. Our country lacks good reviewing skills—and the primary reason is that the people of our country do not have an intimate acquaintance with literature.

  If reviewers are the bane of one’s life, then being forced to write review
s unwillingly is a situation that invites the greatest sympathy, and the plight of a young man in the ‘lonely leisure’ of a ‘tranquil Phalgun afternoon’ in 1895, sitting on his private boat ‘upon the still waters of the Padma, with the golden sunlight, blue skies and ashen sandbanks’ in front of him, having to ‘embark upon a review of Dewan gobindarām published by Sri Yogendranath Sadhu’ is even more pitiable. The perfect day will ‘be wasted’ for a book as well as a review that nobody will ever read. A wonderful digression on ‘a big, glossy, blue-coloured bee in a yellow cummerbund’ follows, along with a meditation on the role of the bee in Indian literature, and the letter concludes: ‘Just this moment another boat passed by mine. One of its Muslim oarsmen was lying flat on his back with a book on his chest and loudly and tunefully reciting from a poem. That man too has an appreciation for life—I’m sure you wouldn’t be able to sit him down to review Dewan gobindarām even if you beat him up.’

  The metaphoric beating he was taking at this time was in his bondage to the family-run journal Sādhanā; if the number of times he complains about editing, proofreading or writing for it in these letters is counted, it would come to no mean amount. The forced labour squeezed out of him in relation to the publication of this journal is time taken away not only from simply soaking in the beauty of the landscape—and Rabindranath has much to say about the virtue, even the indispensability, of leisure (‘the complete rasa of idleness’) here—but also from his most favoured vocation, that is, from writing his poems and songs, his real work.

  Delightfully, we have a picture here of the posture and manner in which he composed his poetry, and even a description of the advantages of composing a tune in the bathroom for the song Baṛa bedanār mata—quite a good song, he admits, and a favourite of his: ‘Firstly, the seclusion; secondly, no other duty may claim you—if you pour a tin of water over your head and spend the next five minutes humming, your sense of duty doesn’t suffer too much—and the greatest advantage is that since there’s no possibility of an audience one can freely contort one’s face as much as one wants.’* Contorting the face is common among Hindustani classical musicians, especially vocalists, and is indicative of the utter surrender to expression; fascinatingly, Rabindranath describes a similar abandon in the moment of composing poetry as well. Writing to Indira from Bolpur towards the end of May 1892, he says:

  This morning, getting out of bed a little late, I sat in the downstairs room leaning against a cushion with a slate on my chest and with my feet up, one on top of the other, and began to try and write a poem in the midst of the morning breeze and the call of the birds.

  ‘It was all just beginning to gel—pleased expression, eyes slightly closed, head swaying frequently, and a rhythmic humming recitation growing progressively clearer—when suddenly’, he is interrupted, but a brief period later, ‘with a renewed nodding of the head and an indistinct humming’, he resumes his ‘poetic occupation’.

  For Rabindranath here, there is ‘more joy to be obtained from the completion of a single poem than in the writing of a thousand pages of prose’. Prose is ‘an absolute specimen of a burden’, while in poetry, ‘one’s thoughts attain a completion, almost as if one can pick it up with one’s hands’. There’s even a time for poetry and a time for prose—his ‘short poems keep coming up spontaneously’ in the heat of summer, and he is helpless before their demand. It will be winter, possibly, before he can deal with certain ideas for plays in his head, and this leads him to the realization that ‘With the exception of Citrāṅgadā, all my other plays are written in the winter. That is the time when the passion of lyric poetry cools down a bit, and one can sit down calmly and quietly to write plays.’ An entire letter on 20 November 1894 is devoted to the difference between prose and verse, of how prose belongs clearly to work and poetry to an immense ease or leisure, which is why poetry, indispensably, encapsulates the unnecessary.

  Seeing (dekhā) is a trope that informs and illuminates the lines of these letters repeatedly, inexhaustibly and urgently. The mode in which his mind captures the images that fill these letters is one of stillness, of rest, of immobility and of meditation—‘Ei ye eklāṭi cup kare base ceẏe thākā’—‘this sitting quietly on one’s own and looking’ while the boat floats on in its journey to Goalundo. The rains, his favourite season always, transport him to another world. On the first day of the monsoon in Shilaidaha in 1892, thinking on the fact that a time will come when ‘there will not be a single day remaining in my life of this day of Kalidasa, this day of Meghdūt, this first day of the rains in India for all of time past’, all he wants to do is to look ‘once again at this world very carefully’. Looking is also something that is inextricably tied to the landscape he traverses on his favourite houseboat. ‘I am not yet satiated with what I have drunk of this sky,’ he says, which is so expansive precisely because ‘Bengal is on level ground’, giving one a vast ‘vista of its fields, [and] its riverbanks’. In short, ‘there’s no other place like this to keep looking and looking, and to fill up one’s heart by looking’.

  The seeing eye, however, is never far here from the inner eye of reflection and introspection, and the other theme of these letters is reminiscent of Rilke in more than one of his works. Although the more obvious correspondence may seem to be with Letters to a Young Poet, it differs from it in the immediacy and the affirmation of its own everydayness (the former, in comparison, more uniformly distant, lofty and advisory in tone). It is, rather, The Book of Hours’ revelations of a lowly god, where god is but the embodiment of the artist’s development and inspiration—‘God, the rhyme’—and the astonishing, trembling life of the moment in Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge that come simultaneously to mind in the context of Chinnapatrābalī. Like Rilke, Rabindranath was an exceptionally prolific letter writer, and again, like him, all his letters ‘are about himself, intimately, even when they are also about someone [or something] else’, as Robert Vilain observed in his introduction to Rilke’s Selected Poems. More than anything else, these letters of the Chinnapatrābalī are about the poet’s own inner life, his struggle towards comprehension and, above all, of his perils as a poet or as an artist. Repeatedly, in these letters, we come across a determination to elucidate his own apotheosis of art, to clarify to himself the artist’s role in society, to advocate that art and work are not dissociable, and to reiterate his belief in poetry’s superiority. These themes play themselves out in letters crucial to our understanding of Rabindranath’s writing.

  The language of these letters is direct and unencumbered; compared with some of the poetry of the early period, the prose is straight and lean, conversational and contemplative. As we immerse ourselves in this luminous Bengali prose, the particular intimacy of the epistolary form allows us, for a moment, to be alone in the man’s company. At the same time, it is worth remembering that the publication, in some part, of letters in conversational Bengali (calti or calit bhāshā) was first accomplished in Bengali literature in Rabindranath’s Europe prabāsīr patra (Letters of Exile from Europe, 1879–80; 1881) at least a decade before these were written, and that eventual publication might well have been lodged in the interstices of his mind even as he was writing some of these letters to Indira. Another innovation with regard to the letters here was the use of Bengali dates in the original (sometimes alongside the English, sometimes not)—a practice the Tagore family helped popularize among English-educated Bengalis.

  As we read, what is also worth remembering is that this is an unrevised manuscript published in full, with the exception of the censored sections. For someone who was famous for his endless and tireless revisions of his own writing—revisions whose shapes on the page acquired life to become artworks in time—the knowledge that the words here flow in an unselfconscious and unrestrained stream of thought (reminiscent of the term nityaprabāhita cetanār mājhe that he used in the context of children’s rhymes in an essay written in this period at Shahjadpur)13 is important, because the book does not merit a place in the world
as a volume of Collected Letters, but rather as a literary work in its own right.