Letters From a Young Poet 1887 1895

by Rabindranath Tagore

  75

  Shilaidaha

  18 December 1892

  Just as you hear thunder only after it has fallen, so too we don’t hear anything at the right time if we’re some distance apart; we can only discuss the event in a letter well after it’s all over! Have you only just come to know about the pain in my teeth and ears? When I had obscured my head in layers of soft cotton to nurse it with the utmost tender care—covering and enclosing my face on every side like a sick child is wrapped up and protected—there were people in this world blithely assuming I was both healthy and happy. And now, when all that’s left is only the faintest memory and the tiniest bit of inflammation of the molar tooth, one hears all sorts of expressions of fear, worry and advice! Now I feel like slapping that godforsaken forehead of mine and saying, ‘You’ve wasted that precious pain of yours on Jadu-babu! Such a big calamity gone to “neither the gods nor religion”!’ … There’s no ‘fun’ in falling ill these days, that’s why nowadays I try to pay special attention to my health. But the mysteries of the body are exactly like the mysteries of the mind. I’ve made a sort of acquaintance with this wretched body of mine over the last thirty years—I’ve developed some understanding of what results in what and what doesn’t. And after all that experience, I had just begun to function accordingly. Now suddenly at thirty-one I see that when I do something, what didn’t happen before happens when I do it—once again there are new lessons to be learnt, new introductions to be made. And then again just when I’ve spent another thirty or thirty-five years stumbling around—figuring out these new discoveries of when I must wear flannel, when I must keep the doors and windows closed, when I must bathe in hot water, when to use hot bandages and when the poultice, when to have over-boiled soft rice and when to have morolā fish curry—there won’t be too many days left to put that valuable experience gained over so many days to much use…. I ask you, this toothache, earache, throat ache—where was all of it all these days? If I’d been given some prior notice, why should such terrible things have happened in Natore, of all places? Man’s mind, after all, is unreasonable enough and, if you think about it, the body is right after. Tell me, Bob, where is the thing called reason? Only in Sully’s psychology?* Today after reading your letter I’ve been thinking about many such serious problems of this sort.

  76

  … We’re ready to put up with mental torture, but cannot accept that the mind become inert. From this we may conclude that man does not want happiness but progress—he doesn’t mind unhappiness as much as he does decline.

  77

  Cuttack

  February 1893

  In the first place, you know I can’t stand the sight of these Englishmen in India. They habitually look down on us, they don’t have an iota of sympathy for us, and, on top of that, to have to exhibit one’s self to them is truly painful for me. So much so that I don’t have the slightest inclination to enter even their theatres or shops (except for Thacker’s†). Even a great big cow born in an English home feels he’s superior to every person in our country—that always hits me hard. Until they concede that we have something in us, we have to approach them with servility every time or be humiliated. Sometimes I feel so unbearably angry with the people of our country! Not because they aren’t getting rid of these Englishmen here, but because they don’t do a thing about anything at all—they can’t demonstrate their superiority in any field. They don’t even have that aim in mind—all they do is pick up the peacock feathers the English have plucked and tuck them into their tails and keep dancing around in this strange fashion—they don’t feel the slightest shame or humiliation in doing so. They don’t want to teach our countrymen anything, they look down on our country’s language, they’re indifferent to anything that the Englishman doesn’t pay attention to—they think they’re going to become important people if they form the Congress and raise their folded hands in supplication to the government. My personal opinion is that until we can do something for ourselves it is better for us to remain in exile. After all, since we really do deserve such indignity, in the name of what do we plead for self-respect in front of others? Will it suffice only to learn how to shake our tails exactly like them? Only when we establish ourselves in the world, when we can contribute to the work of the world, shall we be able to smile and talk with them. Until then it’s better to hide away and shut up and keep doing our own work. The people of our country think just the opposite—whatever work is done out of sight, whatever has to be done privately, they dismiss as unimportant, and that which is completely short-lived and impermanent, mere gesture and ornament, that’s what they lean towards. Ours is the most wretched country. It’s very difficult here to keep one’s strength of mind so one can work. There’s no one to really help you. You cannot find a single person within ten or twenty miles with whom you can exchange a few words and feel alive—nobody thinks, nobody feels, nobody works; nobody has any experience of a great undertaking or a life worth living; you will not be able to find an instance of mature humanity anywhere. All these people seem to be wandering around like ghosts. They eat, go to office, sleep, smoke, and chatter and chatter like complete idiots. When they speak of feeling they become sentimental, and when they speak of reason they become childish. Man thirsts to be in the company of real men, one longs for a give and take, an argumentation and quarrel of thoughts and ideas. But there are no real flesh-and-blood solid men to be found—all are phantoms, floating like vapour in a disconnected way in this world. I don’t think there’s anybody lonelier and more isolated in this country than the man who has one or two ideas in his head. I don’t know how this train of thought has got going—but this is my most heartfelt complaint. Much of the disenchantment of life stems from this lack of real people.

  78

  Baliya

  Tuesday, 7 February 1893

  I don’t feel like travelling any more—I really feel like creating a den in a corner so I can be alone. India has two sides to it—one of domesticity, the other of renunciation; there are some who don’t move from the corner of the house, while some are absolutely homeless. I have both these sides of India in me. The corner of the home is attractive to me, and the outside too calls to me. I really feel like travelling and seeing, but then again the tired, frantic mind craves a nest. Like a bird, you know. A small nest to stay in and a vast sky to fly in. I love the corner only to give my mind a rest. My mind wants to keep working relentlessly in its interiority, but its enthusiasm for work keeps stumbling upon crowds of people at every step and is thwarted until it becomes frantic—then it seems to keep hurting me from within its cage. The moment it gets a little solitude it’s able to quench its desires, to think, to look around on every side, to express its feelings in the most elaborately detailed way possible. It goes too far sometimes—it seems unable to even put up with the fact that … has accompanied me here. Day and night it wants complete, un-fragmented free time. It is happy only when I don’t exchange a word with anybody the entire day. It wants to reign over its own kingdom of thoughts and feelings in the same way that the creator is alone amidst his creations. Otherwise it’s as if all its power, all its being is frustrated…. Is this what is called misanthropy? Not exactly. It’s not as if I want to stay at a distance from people because I don’t like them, it’s just that my mind wants a lot of space to move about and do its work.

  79

  Cuttack

  10 February 1893

  It is the lame man who finds the ditch. As it is I can’t stand these Anglo-Indians, and on top of that yesterday at the dinner table I had occasion once more to observe their crude behaviour. The Principal of the college here is an uncouth Englishman—huge nose, crafty eyes, one and a half foot of a jaw, clean-shaven, bass voice, a strangulated pronunciation that cannot articulate the letter ‘r’—all in all a most complete and mature John Bull. He really had it in for the people of our country. You know, I think, of the intense objections everywhere against the government’s attempt to change the jury syst
em in our country. This man forced the subject upon us and began to argue with Bo——babu. Said the moral standard in this country was low, people here did not have enough belief in the sacredness of life, so they’re not fit to be in a jury. How do I describe to you what I was feeling! My blood boiled, but I couldn’t find any words. So many things came to my mind as I lay in bed, but at that time I seemed to have become completely mute. Just think of it, Bob, to be invited to a Bengali’s house, to sit among Bengalis and not to feel embarrassed to speak in this manner—what sort of opinion do they have of us! And why! Forget about sympathy, these are people who don’t even think it necessary to behave politely with us—why do we even go anywhere near them—to smile and smile, and brush against them, and sacrifice our honour for a love affair with them, Bob? At the slightest handshake of favour on their part, why are our entire bodies and souls immediately transformed into a mass of jelly, trembling and wobbling from top to toe? Ooh, how proud they are, how scornful! And as for us, what poverty, what lowliness! It’s bad enough to swallow the insults and keep quiet, but on top of that to go and sidle up to them and ask for their affection—I feel that’s the lowest point one can reach. Let us draw this wretched, insulted, scorned Bhāratbarsha of ours to our hearts, let us try carefully to mend and to forgive all her faults, all her weaknesses, all her deficiency—let us not push her away from our hearts because all her thoughts and ways are not in tune with our minds! If our own country keeps us at a distance because of some mistaken orthodoxy, why do we instantly move away without a word, but when the sahebs openly beat us with brooms and kick us a hundred times, the diehards will still refuse to be evicted from under their feet or from their doorways. Where they do not allow us to wear shoes we take off our shoes and go, where they do not allow us to raise our heads high we bow our heads in salaam and enter, where our fellow people are not allowed entry we turn up disguised as sahebs. They don’t want us to go and sit in their meetings, to participate in their amusements, to interfere in their work—but still we try, we hawk our wares, we find an opportunity, we flatter them, we keep our own people at a distance and join in when our race is criticized, we digest every insult to our country—we feel vindicated if we can just be near them in any way possible. I don’t want to dress up as an exception, but if you have no respect at all for our race, I don’t want to act civilized and be your pet. I will stay among my own people and do my duty with all the love in my heart—you will never hear of it or notice it. I don’t have the slightest expectation for the scraps of your leftovers, for the fragments of your affection—I kick them away. Your affection is to me what the pig is to the Muslim. It makes me lose caste—really lose it—the degradation of the self is what really makes you lose caste—it destroys your standing in a moment—what pride can I retain after that! Let us not have any respect at all for those who buy outer pomp and ceremony after having destroyed their true worth within. I will not be ashamed to call the most miserable farmer in the most ramshackle hut in our country one of my own people, but if I ever feel tempted to keep the company of those who dress in tip-top style and go about in dogcarts and call us niggers, however civilized or high-up they may be, let me be beaten soundly on the head with a shoe. Yesterday my head and my heart were hurting so much that I could not sleep all night—I kept tossing and turning in my bed. When I had gone and sat down in one corner of that drawing room, it all appeared like a shadow in front of my eyes—it was as if I could see all of this great country spread out before me, as if I was sitting by the head of this humble, unhappy and wretched motherland—such a vast, disconsolate feeling overwhelmed my whole heart—what can I say? Yet in front of me were memsahebs in evening dress and the murmur of English conversation and laughter was in my ear—all together such discordance! How true our eternal Bhāratbarsha was to me, and this dinner table, with its sugary English smiles and polite English conversation, how empty, how false, how deeply untrue! When the mems were talking in their low, sweet, cultivated voices, I was thinking of you all, oh wealth of my country. After all, you are of this Bhāratbarsha.

  80

  Cuttack

  15 February 1893

  Then we read a few more of his poems. I find it impossible to praise falsely just in order to be polite, but, on the other hand, to quickly suppress the thorn of criticism and talk coherently is very difficult. One has to constantly hum and haw like an idiot. When he asked me, ‘Should I continue to write poems?’ I said, ‘Why not? Poems are not written only for other people to hear them. They have a joy of their own. If other people don’t appreciate them, I feel that that joy is enough reward in itself.’ I don’t think he was too excited by these encouraging words of mine. It’s not that his poems are really bad, they’re just okay, that’s all. Some people pass in the first division, and others fail in the first division. But it’s only those who pass who get sectioned into various divisions; we don’t find it necessary to give those who fail different divisions—they all fall into the same group. If I had said to him, among all those unknown, unpublished writers of poetry who have failed, you are in the first or second division, would he have derived the slightest satisfaction from that? It’s better to remain silent than to issue certificates. There are so many good students in the university who fail in maths; similarly, those who fail in poetry generally fail in music. They have feeling, they have words, they have a manner, there’s no dearth of preparation, but they just don’t have the music that would, in a moment, turn all of it into poetry. It’s very difficult to show them that. There is wood, and there is the breath to kindle it, just the spark to make the whole thing catch fire is missing. You may have worked hard to bring that load of wood from many other places, but that tiny spark of flame is within your self—if that little bit is not there, then a pile as high as a mountain fails to accomplish anything. This is what I had said about Kamini Sen’s poetry as well. There may be quite a lot in her writing that has a great deal of feeling and even a lot of new feeling, but none of it has caught fire. If somebody protests, ‘No, no, it’s very poetic,’ who’s going to argue with that? That’s why I don’t like to discuss poetry unless I can praise it. But, Bob, I’ve still not forgotten the audacity of that Englishman yesterday. He blithely said that we have no idea about the sacredness of life! These are the people who exterminated the Red Indians of America, who had no qualms in shooting down even helpless, weak Australian women like hunted animals for no reason and no fault of their own, who cannot be tried by one of our countrymen if they murder one of us; they come to the timid, pitiful Hindu and preach sacredness of life and high standard of morals? Anyway, what’s the point of lamenting something of this sort?

  81

  Puri

  14 February 1893

  Some people have minds like the wet plate of a photograph. The picture you take has to be printed immediately on paper, or it spoils. My mind is of that kind. Whenever I see something picturesque, I think, I must write to Bob about this properly. After that, before I even realize it, new impressions keep getting stamped on it until it fades away. I travelled from Cuttack to Puri—there’s so much to describe of this journey! If I had the time to write down what I’d seen on the day that I saw it, the picture could have come through much better—but a few days of confusion have gone by in between, and in the meantime the finer details of the images have been obscured. One of the main reasons for this is that ever since we’ve reached Puri I’ve spent every moment looking at the sea in front of us, it’s captured my mind completely—I don’t have the time to turn around and look back at our long journey. But I don’t want to entirely leave out those few days from my letter to you. Instead of suddenly creating a gap in my daily descriptions, let me write down a brief history of the last few days for you.