by
Dr Bina Biswas and
Dr Koshy AV
Abstract: The paper studies Tagore’s contribution in his seminal
leanings to Modernism, post colonialism, socialism, communism, Marxism,
feminism, religious and casteist dissent, ecumenism and spiritual revolution
which make him still relevant.
Key words: class, caste, religion, feminism, Marxism, post-colonialism,
Modernism, prose poetry, short fiction, poetry, India, Bengali etc.
Tagore’s life is too well-known to
us and amply documented to need much reiteration but the salient fact is that
in winning the Nobel he has graced the Bengali language spoken in two countries
primarily, in India and Bangladesh, with world status in literature and
writing. This includes having enriched the realms of prose, the novel, short
story as well as poetry, song lyrics, journalism etc.
What
about now and here, what can we say or think of him that makes him pertinent or
rather brings out his relevance to our present age? In his introduction to Gurudev, Rabindranath Tagore’s Nobel
Prize winning anthology of verses, Gitanjali [Song
Offerings], W B Yeats wrote ecstatically:
These prose translations have stirred my blood
as nothing has for years. . . . These lyrics
display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life
long. The work of a supreme culture, they appear as much the growth of
the common soil the grass and rushes . . . Rabindranath like Chaucer’s
forerunners writes music for his words and one understands in every moment that
he is so abundant, so spontaneous, so daring in his passion, so full of
surprise because he is doing something which has never seemed strange, unnatural
or in need of defense. 1
Tagore is one of the supreme lyric poets of the world. Honesty of
feeling along with his radiance of imagery unite with the music of his verse,
giving us poems that continue to haunt
us long after the actual words are forgotten.
The new Bengali poetry was only some twenty years old, if one dates its
start from Rangalal Bandyopadhyay’s, Padmini Upakhyan [The
Story of Padmini], 1858,2
declaredly composed according to a pure English technique. This work was
narrative in nature, like the major writings of Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay, Nabinchandra
Sen, and above of all Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Tagore too adopted
narrative as his chief poetic vehicle at an early stage; but he did not draw
his material from mythology or history. Tagore’s fable concerned a poet.
The aim of this study is a modest attempt to critically examine the prose poems
of Tagore, other than the songs of Gitanjali [Song Offerings], in the light of his
creative genius, his mastery over the story telling technique through the media
of poems and songs. The English Gitanjali [Song Offerings], (1912) has set up a narrow stereotyped
image of the poet, a kind of oriental sage, in the minds of the Western
readers. The present research work aims to establish Rabindranath as a
poet, a musician, a composer, a dramatist, a lyricist, a painter, a nationalist
and a politician – all through the media of narrative poetry, poems and
songs. This is a searching attempt to place literary criticism of
Tagore’s prose poems within a definable context of living human beings, of
classes and creeds, nations and races…Raja Rammohun Roy wrote and spoke English
with mastery years before Macaulay wrote his Minutes. As far as English
education was concerned the Indo-Anglican writers of verse and prose – the
Cavalry Brothers, Derozio, Kashiporsad Ghose, Hasan Ali, P Rajagopaul, Mohan Lal – belonged to the
pre-Macaulay period. This was an exciting time for literature in Bengal:
English (and to some extent Continental) literature had at last penetrated the
hearts and minds of Bengali writers. This began to transform the idealized
images, simple poetic metres and Sanskrtitized diction of centuries. The
period 1850–1880 saw the creation of the first blank-verse epic in Bengali by
Michael Madhusudan Dutt, based on an episode in the epic Ramayana and much
indebted to Milton and Homer. He was an extremely gifted writer and poet.
In his initial years as an author he tried his hand at English prose, verse and
even drama. His lyrical ballad, The
Captive Ladie3
showed the strong influence of the English romantics. Some bold
experiments were carried out with colloquial Bengali, such as a classic Bengali
lampoon published in the early 1860s, Hutom Pyanchar Naksha
[What the Screech-Owl Saw];4 and the triumphal arrival of the Bengali novel, with the
work of Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the so-called ‘Scott of Bengal,’ the most
famous nineteenth-century Bengali writer.
The first Bengali woman
novelist was Rabindranath’s elder sister Swarnakumari. At the same time,
essayists such as scholar and reformer Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, revered by
Rabindranath – second only to Rammohun Roy, wrote on social matters in
powerful precise language that
harmonized the classical and the vernacular.
Swami Vivekananda arrived on the scene after the death of the Messiah
Ramakrishna Paramahansa, his spiritual Guru, to conquer the world. He
spoke with knowledge and conviction. He wrote verses in English. His
writings are spread over many volumes.
Toru Dutt was the next poet to come onto the scene to write poems mainly
of the ancient tales and carried forward the romantic tradition. Romesh
Chander Dutt and Manmohan Ghose (the elder brother of Sri Aurobindo) were both
Bengalis but their literary activities were not restricted to Bengal alone.
One finds the quintessence of Indian romantic poetry, expressed in the English
language in their works.
The second half of the nineteenth century of the English literature made
a great impact on Indian writing. In English, prose works were attempted
in newer forms like lyrics, novels and short stories and they began to appear
in different Indian languages. By the end of the century short stories in
English itself began to be written by the Indian writer. It is seen that though
English prose was being developed by some writers, prose in lyric form was
tried by Tagore and was taken to a new height. Here it is too tempting to
define the meaning of prose poems and it is a prose work that has poetic
characteristics such as vivid imagery and concentrated expressions. Here
is the definition in Britannica
Encyclopaedia.
Work in prose that has some of the technical or
literary qualities like poetry, such as regular rhythm, definitely patterned
structure or emotional and imaginative heightening but that is set on a page as
prose.5
The form took its
name from Charles Baudelaire’s Little
Poems in Prose (1869). Other writers of prose poems include in the
19th Century St├йphane Mallarm├й,
Arthur Rimbaud,
Friedrich H├╢lderlin, Novalis and
Rainer Maria Rilke and in the 20th Century Amy Lowell in her “Polyphonic Prose”
and such contemporary poets as John Ashbery.
The Literary Dictionary defines prose poems
as:
A short composition
employing the rhythmic cadences and other devices of free verse, such poetic
imagery and figures and printed wholly or partly in the form of prose, i.e.
with a right hand margin instead of regular line breaks.6
The form took its name from Charles Baudelaire’s “Little Poems in Prose”
(1869).6 Other writers of prose poems include in the 19th
Century Stephane Mallarme, Arthur Rimbaud, Friedrich Holderlin, Novalis and
Rainer Maria Rilke and in the 20th Century Amy Lowell in her “Polyphonic Prose”
and such contemporary poets as John Ashbery.
The Literary Dictionary7 defines
prose poems as:
A short composition employing the rhythmic
cadences and other devices of free verse, such poetic imagery and figures and
printed wholly or partly in the format of prose i.e. with a right hand margin
instead of regular line breaks. The genre emerged in France in the 19th
Century, notably in Charles Baudelaire’s “Spleen de Paris”(1869) and Arthur
Rimbaud’s “Les Illuminations”(1886); a significant sequence of English prose
poems is Geoffrey Hill’s “Merican Hymns” (1971) and a prose poem is self-contained
work usually similar to lyric, whereas poetic prose may occur intermittently within
a longer prose work.( Literary Dictionary)
The French Literature Companion8
defines prose poems as:
A prose piece whose brevity produces rhythmic
poise and acoustic structuring, expressive elisions and condensed imagery
normally associated with verse. Among the possible sources of prose poem
might be mentioned poetic prose from Fenelon to Chateaubriand, prose renderings
of foreign lyrics and biblical prose; as the site of contradictory forces, it
relates to Romanticism’s melange des genres. Among the possible sources of prose poem might be
mentioned poetic prose from Fenelon to Chateaubriand, prose renderings of
foreign lyrics and biblical prose; as
the site of contradictory forces, it relates to Romanticism’s melange des
genres.
It is noted that Tagore developed a peculiar liking towards this genre
and took it forward more in his later poetry. In the early years the
poet, it is seen, was almost in love with rhythmic lyrics and verses. He has
produced beautiful sonorous poetry that has no parallels in Bengali
Poetry. It is difficult to translate the poems in the same rhythmic
structures in English and therefore, they are all rendered in prose.
This
is one of the major limitations in the translated forms of poetry. Here,
in this thesis Tagore’s poems are explored on the basis of their themes and not
on their patterns due to the difficulty cited above. Yet Tagore used prose
poems as the chief poetic medium in his later poems of life from Punascha [Post Script]9 to Sesh Lekha [No Last
Words].10
They opened a new genre for the next generation poets in Bengali
Literature. As regards experiments in technique, the period begins with
free verse and prose poems and ends with hieroglyphics of Sesh Lekha/No Last
Words.
Tagore was deeply impressed by one of his elder siblings Dwijendranath
Tagore who,
. . . was the most intellectual and the least
worldly of the Tagore siblings. Deeply immersed in the study of Indian
philosophy, mathematics and geometry, he also revelled in folding complex paper
boxes. Dwijendranath was responsible for inventing the first Bengali shorthand
and musical notations.
Into this culturally charged atmosphere, both Eastern and Western,
Rabindranath grew up in the Jorasanko house, which was always vibrant with the
sounds of people who were busy singing songs and writing verses, enacting and
designing outfits or discussing theological, philosophical and literary
problems, where he passed his boyhood. It was here the future Nobel laureate
and his makers constantly worked together towards that goal.
In
today’s world of various kinds of media Tagore’s prose poems are the first point
to be noted when speaking of his relevance to our present day world. Ignorant
of French poetry where Baudelaire and Rimbaud and Mallarme where writing prose
poems of a very different sort, or of Whitman in America who was attempting Leaves of Grass, or Eliot who had to
learn from French poetry. his greatness
lies in reaching out to such a form almost alone and single-handedly in India
as both a part of and yet different from such a zeitgeist mixing prose and
poetry. He actually showed a forward looking and independent spirit
while not deserting in his themes – what was ever living in Indian or our oriental
soil either. In today’s advanced technological art realms that have introduced
form like the mash up and making use of found footage, what we admire in Tagore
is this prescience. His unique ability was to look ahead in what can be termed
as experimental modernism– to such developments in India even much earlier.
We know about the major post
colonialist theoretician Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybridity. “Hybridity
demonstrates how cultures come to be represented by processes of iteration and
translation through which their meanings are vicariously addressed to – through
– an Other.” (from Wikipedia)11
The interesting thing is that long before him, Tagore recognized the
space of liminality, and moved not in the way in which a Bhabha would think,
meaning not necessarily outwardly in a post-colonial way. Yet in another
perhaps more interesting way, which was to counter the influence of the
“English book” that had led to the Bengali renaissance in a limited manner of
putting it, he did move counter to colonialism by negotiating cultural
difference in his own way in forming the hybrid of the prose poem, among other
things, which is very much in contrast in its form to the content of his Gitanjali, to quote only one obvious
example. This intrinsic or implicit tension in writing prose poems on subjects
that lend itself to traditional verse iterations is only one of the interesting
strands in Tagore’s work that makes it imperative that he be looked at anew in
the light of the latest critical theories and as an experimental modernist at
the same time, even as his work is Indian or considered by many to be –
stereotyping him – as typically classicist, spiritual etc.
We
probably need to proof text this a little more. Let us briefly remember that the
Occidental or Western world came to know of Tagore first through his own translations
of his Song Offerings. We have often heard it said the translations are not up
to the mark, are poor, in other words,
and that Tagore himself is ill-represented by the work he chose to show to the
world outside. However, while these facts are self-evident, the other fact that
he chose to show himself to the world as the author of Song Offerings first and
that he chose to show them his own prose translations of the same is something
which offsets this, and should not be forgotten. It was these prose poems that
moved Yeats so strongly and made him write a foreword that was definitely
partly instrumental in his being considered as a worthy contender for the
Nobel.
There
are two points to be noted here.
1.
In writing the translations in prose – more or less – Tagore neatly sidestepped
the
anxiety of influence that many of his
contemporaries were labouring under or fighting
against which was the fear of being
unfairly compared with the Romantic and the
Victorian metrical poets.
2. In ensuring that
he spoke from a tradition that had been unsullied by the Western
Enlightenment’s principles of reason, science and knowledge
to some extent, he also
startled his readers from the other side of the globe by at
the same time touching on
thoughts that could only be termed parallels of Blakean, Biblical
and Marxist notions. This effectively
undercut any notion of a colonial discourse that tried to frame the colonized
in an inferior space by pitting it against its own spiritual counter arguments
including its antithesis that was coming about from its own working class as
also seen in the works of Charles Dickens.
We take for instance his
translation:
Leave this chanting and singing and
telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple
with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!
He is there where the tiller is tilling the
hard ground and where the path maker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun
and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put of thy holy mantle and
even like him come down on the dusty soil!
Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found? Our master himself has
joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation; he is bound with us all forever.
Come
out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense! What harm is
there if thy clothes become tattered and stained? Meet him and stand by him in
toil and in sweat of thy brow.12
This is so definitely not the way a post-colonialist would go about
attacking an invader. For one thing, Tagore seems to be criticizing his own
religion, but the attack is not just towards the Brahminical priestly class as
he tells of beads and song/hymns/mantras
and chants, common to all three religious traditions he was familiar with
meaning the Hindu, Christian and Islamic traditions. We see the move towards
Brahmo and Arya Samaj here, in the implicit critique.
Yet what is more interesting is when we juxtapose what he is saying
with Marx on religion and the working class. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a
heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”13 Marx’s most blinding insight was that of alienation – “labor
appears as loss of realization for the workers;
objectification as loss of the object and bondage to
it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.” It is ,amazingly, this alienation, that
Tagore challenges the oppressor to face by coming down to the same level as the
worker to find that it is there that God, his God, dwells or is found, if only the
oppressor will open his eyes to see it. Why this is interesting is precisely
because this opens up in Tagore’s text what one can with hindsight call
post-modernism, meaning a discourse that is not exactly religious or
nationalist or colonial but refuses not to be political or economic or anti
religious or anti caste and class. Therefore, it predicts a peaceful communism
partly and also standing for a decentreing and universalism to counter global
forms of oppression like colonialism and empire. It also includes national forms of oppression
against the poor through the Hindu Brahmanical religion and casteism by poetry,
prose and translation as well as a subtle subversion that also has a spiritual
edge even in its satiric ability as it is also non-violent in its gentle thrust
and questioning of several different status quos.
It is this strange or not so strange but well remarked ability to
have in his work angles of perception
opened that, when perceived, make him look as if he is addressing us even
today. This makes Tagore ever more relevant in a world where more writers are
one book wonders or of increasing irrelevance despite their output, whether
deservedly or not.
To turn to his approach to women in
comparison to feminism and its theories, the
book on “Tagore’s Heroines” by Bina Biswas (co-author of the present paper) is a study
on all the women characters in his works with special stress on the main
characters or protagonists. We would like to briefly sum up feminism and its
main thrust first. If Hybridity therefore is a subversion of single, unified, purist
notions of identity, in favour of multiple cultural positions . . . also an
answer to the dangers of cultural binarisms of ‘us/them’ and the fundamentalist
urge for purist cultural forms.” Tagore
brings this in, in his own way –
fulfilling some of the norms of the post-colonial discourse, inimitably and not
pre-conceivable in his style and also slightly different from the more extremist
or radical views of many thinkers like Ranajit Guha, Spivak or the upper caste Bhabha
himself. Verily he is in a way their forerunner without their having claimed
him yet through appropriation, which is what I am trying to do here. Even in
terms of feminism he is a very interesting bridge figure. “Feminism is a range
of political movements, ideologies, and social movements. It shares common
goals – to define, establish and achieve political, economic, personal, and
social rights for women. This includes the determination to establish equal
opportunities for women in education and employment. (from Wikipedia)
There are also spin off movements that are part of
it like feminisms, womanism, black feminism, antifeminism, post feminisms,
besides the academic concept of three waves of it. As in the earlier example I
quoted, Tagore seemingly skirts this issue in a take like his on Upagupta. Yet
this oblique acknowledgement that has been viewed as traditionalism to show he
was more interested in a non-patriarchal approach but not in a full-fledged
attack on patriarchy or the rights of women conceals in it the seeds of his
subversion and can also be read as his
aesthetic impeccability in tackling the issues of rights of women etc. Not
always directly and head on to a collision course but subtly, thus giving it
actually far more insidiousness and weight – in fact, even the power to
penetrate places it otherwise would not have: including British
Judaeo-Christian, Islamic and Hindu versions of hidebound patriarchy. To
discover both his solitary path of going slightly away from the mainstream
while at the same time addressing it, we need to explore Tagore as a writer
aware that he had to address all. We can see his ability to find an audience
among all like Shakespeare and Dickens. We need to go to his tale of Upagupta and the Chandala woman in his
poem Abhisar.14 This tale is taken
from Buddhist legend and that is the first point to be noticed about it.
Upagupta, the disciple of Buddha, lay asleep in
the
dust by the city wall of Mathura.
The lamps were
all out, the doors were all shut, and
stars were all
hidden by the murky sky of August.
Whose feet were
those tinkling with anklets,
touching his
breast of a sudden?
He woke up
startled, and a light from a woman’s
lamp fell on
his forgiving eyes.
It was a
dancing girl, starred with jewels,
Wearing a pale
blue mantle, drunk with the wine
of her youth.
She lowered her
lamp and saw a young face
austerely
beautiful.
“Forgive me,
young ascetic,” said the woman,
“Graciously
come to my house. The dusty earth
is not fit bed
for you.”
The young
ascetic answered, “Woman,
go on your way;
When the time
is ripe I will come to you.”
Suddenly the
black night showed its teeth
in a flash of
lightning.
The storm
growled from the corner of the sky, and
The woman
trembled in fear of some unknown danger
A year has not yet passed.
It
was evening of a day in April,
in spring
season.
The branches of
the way side trees were full of blossom.
Gay notes of a
flute came floating in the
warm spring air
from a far.
The citizens
had gone to the woods for the
festival of
flowers.
From the mid
sky gazed the full moon on the
shadows of the
silent town.
The young
ascetic was walking along the lonely street,
While overhead
the love-sick koels uttered from the
mango branches
their sleepless plaint.
Upagupta passed
through the city gates, and
stood at the
base of the rampart.
Was that a
woman lying at his feet in the
shadow of the
mango grove?
Struck with
black pestilence, her body
spotted with
sores of small-pox,
She had been
hurriedly removed from the town
To avoid her
poisonous contagion.
The ascetic sat
by her side, took her head
on his knees,
And moistened
her lips with water, and
smeared her
body with sandal balm.
“Who are you,
merciful one?” asked the woman.
“The time, at
last, has come to visit you, and
I am here,”
replied the young ascetic
This story is a
typical one about spirituality and the man being shown as superior to us in
having overcome lust so that he can become a vessel of mercy, also having
intuitive or prophetic powers yet there is a subtext that is not picked up on
by readers that I would like to point out. One is about the setting, Mathura,
the place where Krishna came from which is shown to have been entered by the
Buddhist presence in having Upagupta there combating its decay silently. Degeneration
that has set in regarding how women are treated shown in the woman being
allowed to ply her trade for money but being thrown out when ill, and, perhaps,
casteism. This interests readers immensely as it suggests that while Tagore
understood the need to fight the British or violence or the need to be
political, economically and socially progressive etc., he also understood to
look at reform in his own tradition as the one to use. This tradition could be,
to put it for want of a better way of doing so, subverted by his rewriting it –
to bring about these changes. In these he is aligned more to the styles of a
Michael Madhusudhan Dutt and a Rokkeya Begum, who were openly fighting against
injustice to women. He preferred them as forebears – than a Bankim Chandra
Chatterjee, with his idealized notion of a nation as ideal mother etc.,--
perhaps
What interests
me is the silence in Tagore, a silence that has been read till now as non-feminist,
if nothing else but, which suggests probably an artistic procedure worth re-examination
to see how it is more than relevant for our times in his indirectness.
To quote from
the preface to Tagore’s
Heroines:
Like Shakespeare, Tagore also has no
heroes but only heroines in his stories and they suffer the brunt of the
society and emancipate in a new role. They are rebels and they are even ready
to flee the society to achieve the enlightenment of the soul, to fulfill the
emotional quest and for them material needs are not predominant.
The heroines of Tagore are
always curious, sensitive, emotionally strong and modern with a vengeance. An
attempt is made to compare Tagore’s heroines to the heroines in the plays of
Henrik Ibsen and Tennessee Williams, to the stories of Anton Chekov and et al.
Finally, the book upholds the
vision of the great storyteller Tagore as it establishes that the heroines of
Tagore stand against time as they emerge stronger facing their challenges and
confrontations of their society.
From his
autobiography, we know of his marriage to a girl who was only ten years old.
Kadambari’s suicide shortly after his poems dedicated to her or on her came out
when he was only 23. This left its shadow in his writing where many women were
shown to be childless and that his sympathies were with them. This brings us to
the crux of the matter, which is Tagore’s sensitivity in his stories to the
different situations and plight of the women of his time. It is apparent how he
tries to show us the facts as well as ameliorate their lot with the power of
his pen, which is not done in a jarring way Whether he is speaking against the
ills of dowry, an almost uniquely Indian phenomenon, or of mothers-in-law and
how they treat daughters-in-law, or of how husbands or lovers or even spiritual
men, and men-friends, and fathers and brothers – all are evenly shown to be towards women, in
their dealings, rather indifferent, careless and negligent or absent minded in
their behavior if not downright cruel and wicked,. His sensitivity is shown,
which in this matter resembles Shakespeare and Dickens, in its broad Indian and
universal sweep, in its psychological complexity of analysis whereby he creates
character after character to show us the various hardships women were put to
without forgetting to also show us their foibles and vices, but not forgetting
to often lay the blame for them at the door of the environment, upbringing and
patriarchy along with their own natal or conjugal families when they were
married.
In short in his ninety odd
stories he comes across as a master storyteller with a penchant for creating
women folk who stand out more colourfully than the men. It is possible to say
that Tagore the educationist and the one who took up the cause for women
indirectly in his writing did this due to being influenced by Brahmo Samaj and
Raja Ram Mohun Roy and others, including Kadambari, whose influence has also to
be taken into account and not discredited, but this is not true, Tagore by
himself had in him a fiery spark of the reformer and revolutionary and unlike
others, it was coupled not only with pragmatism but also with an idealism,
which is what retrospectively makes him far more powerful than many of the
other Bengali figures of his time who now seem one sided, thus not able to keep their grip on the hold
of the people’s imagination in India and abroad. The others in not being
pluralistic or open ended enough in their work to be able to give space for
different multi-faceted, multi layered, multi-hued, multiple interpretations to
their meanings so all may appropriate them or to put in older terminology
relate to them, they having something humanistic or universal or democratic in
them and not just something limited in time and place to one geography or
ideology alone.
To come back to Tagore and feminism, what
one has to look at is the fact that Tagore is unique in India as a writer who
breaks with the assumptions of his western feminist counterparts who came later
– in theory, who think that men do not write the stories of women. They say the
stories and it is ‘his story.’ This claim is debunked by Tagore neatly, even
before it was raised in the West or against him if it has been later, through
our being made aware that though he is a man and telling the stories he
constantly gives the women free rein and voice in them while through a possible
sheer stylistic analysis of them in our times, we could even prove that he was
more obsessed with the women than with the men in his stories. His narration of
not only them but their voices and their lives, thus made them the centre of
his work or at least the short stories. This decentreing is pleasing for us and
the recentreing even more so. It makes him deconstructive and modern as well as
post-modern by turns, even pro feminist, if not feminist.
In A Room of One’s Own
Virginia Woolf says: “The
history of men’s opposition to
women’s emancipation is more
interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”15
This
general statement, fully true, is where Tagore is different and if one has to
find out why one probably has to go all the way back to the fact that he takes
his techniques ultimately from the Puranas,
which is more representative in its narrative strategy as also ideational than
ideological in its main thrust. Tagore too, is first representative and second
ideational, in planting seeds of equality in the minds of the readers between
the sexes and genders through his stories rather than confrontational yet
clearly on the side of the women, not all of them, but of his many splendored
heroines.
Tagore’s mind was exercised over one
of the major evils of the society; the question of dowry and its tragic
consequences – the torture, distress and suffering inflicted on
the daughters of the indigent and insolvent fathers in their in-laws’ houses
often result
in their deaths. He wrote in “Probashi”: ‘I have seen . . . the unredeemed animosity of the mother
against the daughter-in-law. . . .’ The picture of the in-laws’ house with all
control vested in the father-in-law and the sharp-tongued mother-in-law left a
deep impression on his mind. “Sasurbari” (the conjugal home) is synonymous
with prison. Hence he draws a very shocking picture of torture and death in the
in-law’s house of a girl whose impoverished father fails
to provide sufficient dowry for the daughter. “Dena-Powna” [Dowry] is not an account of
Nirupama’s woes alone but of the thousands of such hapless and wretched
girls whose fathers fail to meet the avid demands of dowry of the in-laws.
The following extract from the story indicates the suffering and torment
inflicted on Nirupama or such helpless girls through the centuries.
Nobody cares even for the basic necessities of
the daughter-in-law, like food and clothing. If any kind-hearted neighbour
mentions some lapse, the mother says, ‘This is quite enough!’ In other words,
if her father paid in full, the daughter would have received cent per cent
care. Everybody behaves in a way as if the daughter-in-law has no right here,
as if she has entered the household through fraud. (Translated)
Yet
Nirupama’s sense of self-respect is aroused when her father brings money by
selling his house. Nirupama raises her voice of protest though she
dies:
Niru said, “If you make any payment of money,
it amounts to an insult (to me). Do you think your daughter has no dignity? Am
I a money-purse only, that as long as there is money, I have value! No father,
please don’t insult me by giving them the money. Moreover my husband doesn’t
want it.” (Translated)
The irony and sarcasm lies in the last lines of
the story where the mother writes to her son about his imminent
second marriage which will fetch a dowry of twenty thousand rupees and that too
in cash this time!”
Throughout his works, there
are many more such examples, of his raising a voice against men and for
women through writing in this effective and powerful style.
bel hooks says:
Emotional neglect lays the groundwork for the emotional
numbing that helps boys feel better about being cut off. Eruptions of rage in
boys are most often deemed normal, explained by the age-old justification for
adolescent patriarchal misbehaviour, “Boys will be boys.” Patriarchy both
creates the rage in boys and then contains it for later use, making it a
resource to exploit later on as boys become men. As a national product, this
rage can be garnered to further imperialism, hatred and oppression of women and
men globally. This rage is needed if boys are to become men willing to travel
around the world to fight wars without ever demanding that other ways of
solving
conflict can be found.16
Tagore as
educationist fought for a femininization whereby boys would not be turned into
killing or war machines and in his stories while he did not advocate at any
time a violent or strident feminism he
also constantly undercut patriarchy by stressing that both men and women are
equal and should be treated with respect and in fact women are if we read
between the lines in his works, superior
to men not on the basis of the stereotype that they are goddesses but on the
basis of the fact that they are in the modern situations of life able to show
more resilience, and power and mastery and to overcome the complexities of life
and be beneficial to the men in their life too, meanwhile.
To sum up, Tagore
is more relevant today than ever before and one finds in him startlingly, if
one has the patience to rethink him and not be biased, not only a post
colonialism that is more interesting a variety than the ones pointed out as
examples by a critic like Homi Bhabha and a feminism that can be seen as a
precursor of an approach that actually parries Western feminism and is home
grown in stressing the importance and centrality of women and their issues long
before it was known here that writing should not be ‘his story.’ The ultimate
take away is that Tagore is with Shakespeare, for all time, still, as in his
poems, dramas and novels, and in all his writing, he finally tells us
everybody’s story, mankind’s story as only the very greatest writers can and
also at the same time allows the voices of the
suffering and voiceless and marginalized to emerge powerfully, having
his own place thus secured in the niche of literature firmly with a Dickens and
a Shakespeare as if Shakespeare has a Viola or a Portia or a Juliet or a
Desdemona, Tagore has a Nirupama or a Kalyani or an Anila or a Haimanti to rival them.
Endnotes
1Yeats, W.B. (1912)
“Introduction” in Gitanjali by R. N. Tagore, London: Macmillian and
Company
2Bandyopadhyay, Rangalala
(1858) Padmini Upakhyan/“The Story of Padmini,”
3 Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1849) The Captive Ladie.
New York City: Oxford University Press.
4Kaliprasanna Singha (1862) Hutom
Pyanchar Naksha/What the Screech-Owl Saw
5 https://www.britannica.com/art/prose-poem
6 Baudelaire,
Charles (1919) The
Poems and Prose Poems, New
York:Brentano’s Publishers
7The Literary Dictionary
8The French Literature Companion
9Tagore, R.N. (1932) Punascha/Post Script
10Tagore R.N.(1925) Sesh Lekha/No Last Words
11Wikipedia
12Dickens, Charles (1859) The
Tale of Two Cities London: Chapman
and Hall
16 Hooks,
Bel (2000) Feminism Is for Everybody Southend
Press
Author bios:
Dr Bina Biswas is the CEO of Rubric
Publishing and the author of many books like “Tagore’s Heroines”, quoted in the
paper, being an authority on Tagore.
Dr Koshy AV is an Assistant
Professor at Jazan University, Department of English, Saudi Arabia, and the
author of many books. He is an authority on Samuel Beckett.
