Bliss of Affirmation

- Ujjwal Bhattacharya

It is now time to conclude this series. There were quite a few remarks, most of them were made with appreciation, my thanks are due to them. None of them was really negative, but one could see a certain trace of disappointment in some of them: they found some points interesting, yet so much was missing. It could not be otherwise.

It has often been said that Tagore was ahead of his time, a claim, that can be made about a number of reformer personalities of the 19th century. For India, this was a time, when the society came into direct contact with modernity, had to develop a strategy to transform itself and confront the alien interference.

And Tagore family embraced modernity like only a few of that time. His grandfather Dwarakanath Tagore was one of the early Indian entrepreneurs. He was addressed as prince by Queen Victoria. But the family had to pay a big price for competing with the British, and all their property was lost except Zamindaris. His father Devendranath Tagore was a reformer and a stalwart of Brahmo Samaj, which was founded by Raja Rammohan Roy. Though the family was discriminated on religious grounds, it remained a part of the elite in Bengal. Devendranath often took his youngest son Rabindranath with him to Himalayan hill stations, and taught him, among other things, the Upanishadic thought. These thoughts and the beauty of nature left a lasting impact on the poet.

Of course, the genius that Tagore was, makes it difficult to find out his motivations. But beyond that, the family background and the time he lived in might have played an important role. There were two elements of devotion from the very beginning, the God and the Nation. And his entire pursuit was to develop a perception of both. His biography, it seems to me, was a process of unfolding of such a perception. There is another interesting aspect: his striving to correlate his self with that which was beyond, to combine the limited with the unlimited. Hence the refusal to accept the boundaries of Nation, of Gender, class and ultimately also of theological orders.

At one point he differs from the dominant trait of Upanishadic thought: He did not negate this life, its earthliness. Consequently he was involved in the discourse of national struggle, and yet, deeply rooted in the universalism of Upanishads, he could not accept the blatant glorification of nation. He could not accept the orthodox attitude of rejecting the science that came from the west, but his notion was not characterised by the western perception of knowledge as an instrument of domination.

His conflict with Gandhi came basically from a rejection of objectification of the people, who were thrown into non cooperation movement at the call of the leaders, instead of creating an alternative consciousness of the people against the colonial power. He gave a great importance to education, and perhaps one can say that Viswa Bharati was his Taj Mahal dedicated to India.

Perhaps no other Indian writer has written such an amount of fiction, that deals with Gender discourse. His women are not burnt, killed or raped. He tried to present the agony of their life in the so called normalcy. In this way, he took up the case of their emancipation (instead of welfare) at a time, when it was not in the social and political agenda of the mainstream. This attitude was not based on a theoretical understanding, it was his perception of the human being, human society, and the self, which is a part of that. He did not try to discipline the woman like Gandhi (who thought that women are themselves to be blamed, if they are raped), rather we see that his women dare revolting against the conventions of family and patriarchal society.

A few words about the poems written in the last 10-15 years of his life. After the phase of devotional poems he declared in Balaka that his poetic journey would now usher to unknown horizon. It will be a journey full of turbulence. Instead of that we find a romantic interlude in the poems of Purabi, Mohua and Beethika, though they are free of the sentimentality that one often finds in the romantic poems of his pre-devotional phase. But after that, with the poems of the collection Parishesh he takes up the social and political issues. In his famous poem Prashna (Question), he laments that he has turned back the messengers of God with futile politeness, who preached love and forgiveness. That is the dilemma of the social man, but what about the God? Does he forgive and love those, who dealt brutally with such messengers? Another development of this phase was the use of the form of prose-poems, which found its climax in the collection Punascha (Postscript).

In 1937, Tagore was seriously ill and he was unconscious for a few days. It was facing the death, which would be now his main theme. He knew that his time was coming to end and he started contemplating about his life, about his place in his environment, in the universe. Prantk (Marginal) was the first collection, then came Senjuti and Nabajatak. With another romantic interlude of Sanai, it was continued through his last collections: Rogshajyay (At the Sick Bed), Arogya (Convalescence), Janmadine (On Birthday) and Shesh Lekha (Last Writings), which was to be published after his death. I would like to sum up this series with his last poem (from Himself a True Poem, Hiren Mukherjee), which he dictated a week before his death.

You have covered the course of your creation

With the nets of varied beguilement,

O Lady Guile.

With expert hands you have spread the trap of fake beliefs

In the life of the simple.

You have stigmatized greatness with this deception,

You left for him no secret night.

The path that your star

Shows him

Is indeed his heart’s own way.

It is ever clear,

With spontaneous faith he keeps it

Ever so bright.

Even if he looks twisted, in his heart he is straight,

This is his glory.

Though men call him cheated,

He receives the Truth

In the heart of his heart washed clear with its own light;

Nothing can cheat him, He goes carrying the last reward,

To add to his own collection.

Only he who has withstood with care your guile

Can receive from your hands

The inexhaustible right to peace.