Dilemma of Interregnum

- Ujjwal Bhattacharya

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

- Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

In the previous article (Seeking God in Pursuit of Self), moments from Tagore’s devotional trilogy were presented in juxtaposition. My intention was to detect his process of self-realization. Such a process has been acknowledged by many scholars, including Sukumar Sen, Abu Sayid Ayyub, Shankha Ghosh and Ranajit Guha. Nevertheless, it was not uniform. Without difficulty, we can find two poems, written on the same day, showing great discord; in one, he rejoices as he proclaims unity with his creator, and in the other falls into despair and doubt. It can be said that literature, in its sublime form, must be revealing, but not a revelation. Let the crisis face the Indian writer – demanded Bishnu Dey in 1961. Tagore’s devotional trilogy (Geetanjali, Geetimalya and Geetali) completed a cycle of crisis. His introspection no longer searched for unity as an abstract universal truth. Instead, he tried to see its manifestation in the life of the millions; in their beauty, frailty, and joy, but also in their sorrow, brutal exploitation and resistance.

Some poems of his new collection Balaka were written simultaneously with the later poems of Geetali. A certain distinction in his tone gradually became apparent. “We are going forward now, who will dare stop us” – he declares in the third poem of Balaka. Two poems later:

The Boatman is out crossing the wild sea at night.

The mast is aching because of its full sails filled with the violent wind.

Stung with the night’s fang the sky falls upon the sea, poisoned with black fear.

But at the end there is hope:

It will be long before the day breaks and he knocks at the door.

The drums will not be beaten and none will know.

Only light shall fill the house, blessed shall be the dust, and the heart glad.

All doubts shall vanish in silence when the Boatman comes to the shore.

Apropos Boatman. In one of his early poems, The Golden Boat, he wrote that the boat of eternal time takes away our harvest, leaving us behind at the shore. Contrarily, in Balaka, he pays tribute to the Moghul king Shahjahan: “You are greater than your creation/That’s why the chariot of your life/Leaves all your deeds behind/Time and again.” The subject is celebrated, in opposition to its creation. The themes broaden, sometimes at the cost of poetic temper. Gone are the days of the trilogy’s crystallized rhyme; he is in search of a new metaphor: it took nearly ten months to write poems 11 to 35 of Balaka. It is important to note their opposing directions, for example:

#12

Time after time I came to your gate with raised hands, asking for more and yet more.

…

Take, oh take – has now become my cry

#18

I leave this prison of decay.

I care not to haunt the mouldy stillness, for I go in search of everlasting youth; I throw away all that is not one with my life nor as light as my laughter.

#27

My king was unknown to me, therefore when he claimed his tribute I was bold to think I would hide myself leaving my debts unpaid.

I fled and fled behind my day’s work and my night’s dreams.

Poem #35, written in Srinagar, ends:

I am voice with voices,

I am song with songs,

I am life with lives,

I am radiating light

Exploding the darkness.

The quotation at the beginning of the article is not intended to explain this phase of Tagore’s writing with Benjamin’s thesis. Nevertheless, we see the contradictory forces in Angelus Novus; in Tagore’s writing they are centrifugal and centripetal, shrinking and expanding, creating the illusion of a pendulum. They are particularly evident in this phase of poems in Balaka, some of which we have quoted above. Poem 36, sometimes itself titled Balaka, which was also written in Srinagar, is longer and reflects on the flight of a flock of birds. In the concluding lines:

For me the flight of these birds has rent a veil of stillness, and reveals an immense flutter in this deep silence.

I see these hills and forests fly across time to the unknown, and darkness thrill into fire as the stars wing by.

I feel in my own being the rush of the sea-crossing bird, cleaving a way beyond the limits of life and death, while the migrant world cries with a myriad voices, ‘Not here, but somewhere else, in the bosom of the faraway.’

And in poem 37 there is a clarion call:

Do you hear the tumult of death afar?

The call midst the fire-floods and poisonous clouds.

The Captain’s call to the steersman to turn the ship to an unnamed shore,

For that time is over – the stagnant time in the port –

…

There is a wail of parting that rises to the sky,

And there is the Captain’s voice in the dark:

‘Come, sailors, for the time in the harbour is over!’

The last lines hint at the colonial space and time in which he wrote:

If the deathless dwell not in the heart of death,

If glad wisdom bloom not bursting the sheath of sorrow

If sin do not die of its own revealment,

If pride break not under its load of decorations,

Then whence comes the hope that drives men from their homes, like stars rushing to their death?

Shall the martyrs’ blood and mothers’ tears be lost in the dust of the earth, without earning heaven with their price?

And when man breaks his mortal bounds, is the boundless not revealed at that moment?

(The poet’s painting by Shubnum Gill)