- Ujjwal Bhattacharya
It is no wonder that women inspired Rabindranath from his early youth, and in a sonnet in one of his earlier works, Manasi, he proclaims that Woman is not only a creature of God, it is the man who conceived her out of his imagination. Yet it is far from Simone de Beauvoir’s contention that One is not born a woman, but becomes one.
It is mainly in his prose, that he engaged himself in Gender discourse. The tension between the sexual identity of the woman and her social role has always been in the centre of his attention in this regard. Whether in Gora (Sucorita, Lalita) or The Home and the world or Ghare Baire (Bimala) or Four Chapters or Char Adhyay (Ela ), we find this conflict in one or another form.
One can safely say that the Gender Discourse was hardly present in the poems of his devotional trilogy and also in Balaka, which was published just after that. Things changed with Palataka (Fugitive), which came just after Balaka. The first poem of this collection is not about women, and yet quite interesting in the discussion of his Gender Discourse. It narrates the story of a domesticated dog and his playmate, a pet deer:
One afternoon, when the light, like a tune from strings, thrilled forth from the Amlak leaves, and the air seemed in pain with the riot of perfumes, the deer began to run like a meteor that knew not its destination. Bounds of life and death grew dim to her and lost all dread of the unknown.
My dog ran up to me whinning, questioning me with his piteous eyes which seemed to say, ‘I do not understand.’
But who does ever understand?
The comparison with an earlier poem comes immediately to mind, written already in the last decades of the 19th century, Dui Pakhi (Two Birds). The wild bird speaks of the delight of flight but the bird in cage is captured in his domesticated world. But the possibility of flight to his women character was provided very soon. Tagore wrote his story Streer Patra (Letter of the Wife) around 1918. Later he said that in this story he supported the women’s cause for the first time. It is the metamorphosis of a housewife to her own self, which she describes in a letter to her husband, after she has left her.
Unfortunately, most of the poems of the collection Palataka have not been translated into English. The third poem of the collection Mukti (Freedom) is the narrative of a housewife, who is going to die. Here is an effort to translate a few lines of this poem. Looking back at her own life, she says:
For twenty two years
I knew I was captive in your family.
But I was not sad at that,
My heart was senseless, would have remained so had I lived yet longer.
….
Death calls me in his nuptial chamber,
He is my suitor, not the master,
He will never neglect me.
…
Sweet is the world, sweet I am the woman,
Sweet is the death, my suitor forever,
Open, open the door,
Onward to new shores away from these futile twenty two years.
The next two poems Phanki (Cheating) and Mayer Samman ( The Honour of the Mother) deals with men’s problems to come into terms with women’ psyche. Ultimately in the fifth poem we see the gradual development of a woman into a rebel. The main protagonist of the poem Nishkriti (Solution), Manjulika, is a young widow, who was married to a much older man, who dies his natural death. Manjulika comes back to her parental family. The patriarch father is an English educated, orthodox Brahmin. Manjulika and her mother lives under his tyranny until the mother dies. Manjulika has to run the household now, which she does without complaining. Hardly a year passed, the father decides to marry again. He goes to marry in a distant district in east Bengal. When he comes Manjulika is no more there. She has left the house with her suitor, to start a new life somewhere else. The patriarch is totally helpless in his rage.
There are more poems on women, the woman with dark complexion, i. e., ugly, the young girl of childhood, who writes a letter, and this letter with her address is lost, and so on. The poet tries to find out the woman, the other from the other world, with her manifold facets.
The poet was over 60 now. His sage like appearance with long white beard fascinated
everyone including many young ladies. A few years ago I had the chance to have a long talk with his famous biographer Prashanto Pal in Shantiniketan. He was convinced that Tagore never had extra marital relations after the death of his wife and lived the life of an asket. We take his word for that. Nevertheless, he was accompanied by many young ladies in the following years. He mixed with them and distributed compliments gracefully in his letters and poems, creating an impression of proximity, and yet maintaining distance. It was a case of celibacy based on the perception of Joy as A Thing of Beauty. And Beauty had its own strict parameters. Perhaps that is the reason that he did not have to “test” it, sleeping with naked young ladies. There was appreciation of beauty, but not an involvement, that creates a world of Two.
An exception was Victoria Ocampo. She was an intellectual lady from an aristrocratic Argentinian family. In 1924, Tagore was invited to the centennial of Peru’s independence. During the passage from France to South America, he fell ill, and had to break his journey in Buenos Aires. Mrs. Ocampo was a great admirer of the poet and Gitanjali moved her deeply. He requested Tagore and his secretary Elmhirst to be her guest in a villa, which they accepted. Here developed a relation between the poet, who was 63 now, and Victoria, who was 34. Many years later, Tagore wrote in 1939, “…Those unforgettable days, and her tender and compassionate care have been enshrined in my poems; they may well be among the best I have written.” Victoria said later that their relation had no physical aspects, which might be true, but it seems that she would not have been too indifferent to such a possibility. We don’t exactly know the details of this relation, but an armchair seemed to have played an important role in it. Tagore used this piece of furniture in the villa, and Victoria insisted that he takes it with him back home. On 5th January, 1925, on his way to Italy, Tagore wrote to Victoria in a letter:
“…under a grey sky my days are repeated in rhymes that are monotonous, like a perpetual telling of beads, I pass most part of my day and a great part of my night deeply buried in your armchair which, at last, has explained to me the lyrical meaning of the poem of Baudlaire that I read with you. I had hoped that I should be able to do some writing while crossing the interval between two shores – but the wind veered and my manuscript book lies idle, its virgin papers looking like the sandy beach of a distant island unexplored.”
In her response, Victoria wrote:
“…I hope that you may understand through the same piece of furniture what the lyrical meaning of my devotion is! “
The poem of Baudelaire in question is Invitation to the Voyage. Here are the first lines:
My child, my sister, Think of the rapture Of living together there! Of loving at will, Of loving till death, In the land that is like you!
Gleaming furniture, Polished by the years, Will ornament our bedroom;
The next major collection of Tagore was Purabi. He dedicated it to Bijaya, the Bengali translation of Victoria. Some critics say that the Intellectual, romantic female protagonist of his next novel Shesher Kabita (The Last Poem), Labanya, has traces of Victoria or Bijaya. It is the story of a romantic unconsummated love.
I agree with those critics, who say that the best romantic poems of Tagore came in the years to follow. In his collections Purabi, Mohua, Beethika and Sanai.
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen