The Lover of God

by Rabindranath Tagore

  In the late fifteenth century, Kṛṣṇa is understood to have appeared once again, this time in Bengal, in Nadiyā, just adjacent to the location of the Tagore family estates some several centuries later. His form was that of a Bengali Brahmin who took the religious name of Kṛṣṇa Caitanya (1486–1533), and it is this man who inspired the devotees to celebrate in song this extraordinary love of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa. Caitanya was, so they believed, an androgyne, Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa fused into a single body. Emotionally and in coloration he was Rādhā, in physical form he was Kṛṣṇa: both lovers forever in union, forever in separation. The permutations of these conditions provide the emotional highs and lows of every love affair, and Caitanya taught that they constitute the very stuff of devotion. To experience the varied emotions of love is to be transformed, to be transported into the presence of the divine, as his devotees were by loving him. But human love pales when compared to a god’s love, so the best most devotees can hope to do is to try to approximate what they cannot provide directly. For Vaiṣṇava devotees that approximation does not mean that they should envision themselves as gopīs; the gopīs provide an object of empathy. Through poetry and song, through meditation, the devotee befriends the gopīs, especially hoping to serve Rādhā, love’s perfect embodiment. In the early stages of this devotion, the work is in the imagination; later this love is cultivated through disciplined meditation that transports the devotee into the mythical land of Braj. To aid and abet Rādhā’s affairs with Kṛṣṇa the devotee must follow Caitanya’s lead and become a woman in this emotional world. Because the devotee cannot presume “herself” worthy of Kṛṣṇa’s amorous advances, a secondary and instrumental persona must be adopted. The devotee enters the cosmic drama either as a teenage, even preadolescent, girl who acts as handmaiden, or as a duenna who advises and consoles. Bhānu of Rabindranath’s poetry is the latter.

  3. About the Poems

  After writing the initial batch of Bhānu songs, Rabindranath very neatly copied them and presented them to the editor, a friend of the family, of the literary journal Bhāratī. When asked about their provenance, Rabindranath led the editor to believe that he had found an old manuscript in the Brahmo Samaj’s library, and after studying the songs realized that they were by an author he was fairly certain no literary historian had yet discovered. It was during this period that literary historians had begun the task of compiling, editing, and publishing many of the ancient texts of Bengal, which had even then a documentable literary history of more than six hundred years—some would say considerably longer—certainly the most prolific among the vernaculars of the subcontinent. The editor, so the story goes, was nonplussed that an author who had produced so many poems was unknown to him, yet excited at the prospect of the new discovery. The first batch was published in the journal in 1875, and by 1883 a total of thirteen poems had seen print there (songs 8–11, 13–19, 21, 22). The first edition of the Bhānusiṃha Ṭhākurer Padāvalī would appear a year later in 1884, and to that original set Rabindranath would add another eight songs (songs 1–7, 12). The last to be added would not appear until 1886 (song 20). Later, when his works were collected as Rabīndra Racanāvalī in 1939, some two years before his death, only twenty were included; Tagore chose to eliminate songs 21 and 22.10 But the full set now circulates in the single-volume edition that bears the original name of their collection.11

  For a number of years he refused to acknowledge their authorship. No doubt family members (and, probably long before the ruse ended, the editor of Bhāratī as well) must have enjoyed the joke. When the first edition of the collected Bhānusiṃha was released, the fictional biography of the author simultaneously appeared in the journal Navajīvana, hinting in the text who the real author might be. It was a scathing indictment of the academic community that dripped with a special sarcasm regarding the practice of positivist history that was all the rage. (The full text of this fictional biography can be found in the Appendix). That he chose to reveal his authorship in this roundabout way not only reveals a wonderfully wicked sense of humor (something, incidentally, completely lost to English readers of Tagore), but suggests that another impulse may have driven him. From the very beginnings of this literary adventure, Rabindranath seems to have toyed with his readership, tantalizing them with the songs, drawing readers’ attention and then just as quickly pushing the songs offstage. The deflections were too numerous: the twenty-first-century reader must consider that these songs held a special meaning for Rabindranath.

  In choosing this medium, Rabindranath followed the lead of the most prominent poets of early and mid-nineteenth-century Bengal. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Michael Madhusudan Dutt had composed poetry about Kṛṣṇa and his love affairs, perhaps as a kind of rite de passage for young poets. While those poets tended to write in a version of old Bengali, Rabindranath, ever the polyglot, chose its ancient and artificial literary relative called Brajabuli, the language that was favored by the religious poets themselves. Those other nineteenth-century poets wrote in their own names, while the young Rabindranath wrote under a pseudonym, but for years denied it. When the press finally discovered that he was responsible for these songs, they quickly compared him to Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770), another child prodigy, whose “The Ryse of Peyncteynge yn Englande, wroten bie T. Rowleie. 1469 for Mastre Canynge” (March 1769) caused just such a controversy as a prank pulled on the scholarly community.12 It would, of course, prove to be a face-saving strategy, shifting the focus to his precociousness and away from their own gullibility. Rabindranath seems to have liked that, for it allowed him to acknowledge the songs but to invite their dismissal as juvenilia. Rabindranath himself even bragged at one point that a young Bengali, Niśikānta Caṭṭopādhyāya, wrote a thesis that included an analysis of Bhānusiṃha’s work. But that unproved allegation came much later, perhaps as a way of demonstrating that it was the Western style of scholarship that was suspect, one of Rabindranath’s continuing complaints (a dissatisfaction that led to the creation of his experimental university at Santiniketan).13 Again the reader was distracted, persuaded that the real value of these poems lay in their continued novelty, not in their personal perspective.

  The perspective is, of course, decidedly complex, because the poems must be read in the light of other Vaiṣṇava poems dedicated to Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa; but because they are not done by a Vaiṣṇava devotee, they cannot be read apart from their author. The Vaiṣṇava form, however, has always clouded their reading, essentially blotting out the consideration of their perpetrator. The full extent of this hermeneutical complexity comes through when we examine the circumstances of their production and circulation. In brief, the poems were written by a fourteen-year-old Bengali male, writing in the late nineteenth century, who revised the text repeatedly until he was nearly eighty years old—well into the twentieth. By adopting the Brajabuli Vaiṣṇava form, he pretended to be a devotee of the sixteenth or seventeenth century who would have, through devotion and meditation, transformed himself into a woman. The poetry focused on the emotional distress of Rādhā in her love for Kṛṣṇa, and the poet entered this miniature drama through the persona of her confidante and duenna, Bhānu. Unlike other Vaiṣṇava poets who used the names given them at initiation (that is, their “real” identities as devotees), Bhānu was a pseudonym in the Western sense; it did not at all reflect a religious commitment. The drama of the poetry into which Bhānu entered, however, took place in a mythical Urzeit before time itself, the cosmic play of Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā and the denizens of Braj. But unlike the more common form of authorial participation that tended to favor the image of a young eligible woman or even a preadolescent handmaiden of Rādhā and her friends, the fourteen-year-old Rabindranath entered the poems as a middle-aged woman, a woman who herself loved Kṛṣṇa but could only look on and commiserate. In this role, Bhānu proffers sage advice, the voice of a lifetime of experience.

  A formal move sets these poems apart from their Vaiṣṇava mod
els: Bhānu converses much more directly and frequently with Rādhā than is typical of the genre. The bulk of the content requires little explanation, for the situation emphasizes the univeral trauma of first love. How far should one go in reading them as Vaiṣṇava poems because of the form? A Vaiṣṇava would certainly read these poems as completely autobiographical, a revelation of the author’s personal experience; this Rabindranath disavowed, but perhaps disingenuously, distancing himself from any explicit autobiographical connection by dismissing their religious “authenticity.” In his English memoirs, titled My Reminiscences, he wrote:

  Whoever Bhanu Singha might have been, had his writ

  ings fallen into the hands of latter-day me, I swear I would

  not have been deceived. The language might have passed

  muster; for that which the old poets wrote in was not their

  mother tongue, but an artificial language varying in the

  hands of different poets. But there was nothing artificial

  about their sentiments. Any attempt to test Bhanu Singha’s

  poetry by its ring would have shown up the base metal. It

  had none of the ravishing melody of our ancient pipes, but

  only the tinkle of a modern, foreign barrel organ.14

  Underlying this alleged exercise in humility is an assumption that Rabindranath seems to have counted on to sway his readers: to be “authentic” the poetry had to have been written by a Vaiṣṇava, because the generation of poetic emotion is itself ontologically structured by the religious experience of the author. Rabindranath of course was no Vaiṣṇava, though Vaiṣṇava sensibilities regarding love certainly colored his emotional landscapes.

  While the poems in all of their twenty-seven published renditions kept to the common core of viraha, the bittersweet longing of separation from the beloved, the poems did change over the course of Tagore’s life. Originally they were specifically Vaiṣṇava in mood, with a strong emphasis on the erotic forms of love, though a love whose consummation the reader was left to imagine. Tracking the changes documented so lovingly by the editors of Visva Bharati Press in the last printed edition, one can chart a change taking place by degrees. There is a subtle increase in ambiguity, or, rather, less Vaiṣṇava specificity, a tendency to generalize and abstract from what was in earlier versions more precisely delineated. The dominant erotic mood subtly gives way to a humility in the face of unrequited love, especially when the focus of the poem shifts from Rādhā (the proper subject for a Vaiṣṇava lyric) to her confidante Bhānu (out of humility, the devotee ought never be the subject). From a Vaiṣṇava perspective, Tagore improperly mixes the devotional moods: servitude and humility, and even displays of awe and respect, sully the erotic. It is a shift that is consonant with Rabindranath’s mature religious sensibility, one that seemed nearly fully formed by the time of Gītāñjali, Gītimālya, and Gītālī. Kṛṣṇa does not remain the cowherding cad of Braj, but seems to be recognized as the Lord, immanent in all creation, and in the hearts of his devotees. One is reminded of Rabindranath’s attitude of reverence and submission to his jīvan devatā, his indwelling lord.

  At these moments the reader is invited to follow the narrative into allegory, Rādhā and the gopīs but personifications of the soul longing for union with an elusive God. The move is familiar in mystical circles, reminiscent of Rumi, Meister Eckhart, and Donne. Read this way, Rabindranath’s Bhānusiṃha poetry becomes what much of his poetry is understood to be, especially in the West: a culturally rooted statement of the more universal experiences of mystical union and separation. The allegorical interpretation blunts any suggestion that these poems could be construed as literally autobiographical; that is, in the sense of young Rabindranath desperately in love with his Kadambari. Though Rabindranath claimed in his memoirs that the songs were not Vaiṣṇava, the Vaiṣṇava assumption that the poetry must reveal the true nature of the author’s personal experience of love might ironically prove to be right: the poetry reveals a spiritual bent that is unmistakably Tagore’s. And nowhere can this be seen more than in Rabindranath’s romanticizing and personification of death, and his longing for the release that death promises.

  Death is a topic that is atypical of Vaiṣṇava poetry. But the Bhānu poems are arranged in a sequence that ends with Bhānu and Rādhā both growing old, looking back on what was and what might have been. Death certainly enters the drama at the point when life is spent but unfulfilled, Death alone seeming to offer a much-anticipated prospect of the Lord’s embrace. This desire of achieving liberation through death permeates Gitanjali and much of his last poems. The sensibility and imagery at the end of the Bhānu cycle is very reminiscent of his talk with Death-as-the-groom in Gītāñjali (song 116), translated and heavily edited by Tagore in the English edition (song 91):

  O thou the last fulfilment of life, Death, my death, come

  and whisper to me!

  Day after day have I kept watch for thee; for thee have I

  borne the joys and pangs of life.

  All that I am, that I have, that I hope and all my love have

  ever flowed towards thee in depth of secrecy. One final

  glance from thine eyes and my life will be ever thine

  own.

  The flowers have been woven and the garland is ready for

  the bridegroom. After the wedding the bride shall leave

  her home and meet her lord alone in the solitude of

  night.

  This same wistful yearning and resignation that closed the cycle of Bhānu, seems to have closed his own life. On 27 July 1941, just eleven days before he died, he dictated the following poem, which, recalling his indwelling Lord, seems to echo Bhānu’s probing query in poem 20: “Who are You, who keeps my heart awake?” Like Bhānu and Rādhā, Rabindranath waited a lifetime for this tryst:

  The sun of the first day

  Put the question

  To the new manifestation of life—

  Who are you?

  There was no answer.

  Years passed by.

  The last sun of the day

  Uttered the question on the shore of the western sea,

  In the hush of the evening—

  Who are you!

  No answer came.15

  Tagore’s lifelong fascination with the Bhānu songs suggests that they were anything but juvenilia; they stand apart in his vast corpus as his most frequently revised works. The mythical setting of the songs is one familiar to any Bengali speaker, yet their content—especially the looming presence of death in the latter poems—violates the Vaiṣṇava expectations on which they depend. That interruption should give the reader pause, for it signals the works are more than the Vaiṣṇava songs they appear to be. Of a piece with Rabindranath’s self-appointed search, they subtly explore the myriad complexities of human and divine love. In the end, this small set of songs yields a superfluity of interpretation, quietly probing what this great poet fervently believed was an uncommon, but universal, experience.

  2. For this background, the reader is directed to several sources. A highly laudatory literary biography of Tagore is Krishna Kripalani’s Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1962). For a somewhat less worshipful presentation, see E. J. Thompson, Rabindranath: Poet and Dramatist, 2d revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948). For a more recent controversial political biography, see Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). For a brief overview of the life and works, see Prabhat Kumar Mukherji, Life of Tagore, trans. Sisir Kumar Ghosh (Delhi: Hind Paper Pocket Books, 1975). Mukherji’s Bengali biography is the chronotopical standard: Rabīndrajīvanī o Rabīndrasāhitya Pravesika, 4 vols. (Calcutta: Viśvabhārati Granthālaya, 1353–1371 B.S. [1946–1964]). For an early look at Tagore’s life as he first appeared on the European literary scene, see Ernest Rhys, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biographical Study (New York: The Macmillan Company, 191
5).

  3. William Radice’s introduction to the short stories is highly informative of this critical decade, the 1890s, and his translations capture much of the rhythms of this new style of prose; see Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Short Stories, trans. with an introduction by William Radice, revised edition (London: Penguin Books, 1994).

  4. For a look at the impact of the Bāuls on Tagore’s personal theology and poetry, see Edward C. Dimock Jr., “Rabindranath Tagore: ‘The Greatest of the Bāuls of Bengal,’” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 19, no. 1 (Nov. 1959), reprinted in Edward C. Dimock Jr., The Sound of Silent Guns and Other Essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989).