Letters from a Young Poet (2 page)

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself',
Leaves of Grass
, 1855

In transliterating Bengali words the Bengali Romanization table from the Library of Congress (
http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/bengali.pdf
) has been used, with the exception of content within quotation marks, where the original spellings within the quote have been retained, and, of course, most proper nouns. The only departure has been that the implicit vowel
a
that is mandatory after all consonants and consonant clusters in transliteration has generally not been used at the end of a word unless pronounced. Titles of Sanskrit works have been represented in their Bengali pronunciation. Bracketed Bengali words have also been inserted on occasion to both clarify particular terms difficult to translate and sometimes to instantly remind the reader of well-known lines from Tagore.

In preparing the pronunciation guide, examples have been provided where possible: these are arbitrary and merely indicative. The words provided as examples are sometimes taken from proper nouns that make it comprehensible to the South Asian reader. Similarly, the examples given for aspirated sounds that are routinely not
aspirated in this region (such as the ‘t' in
table
) make it a guide only for those familiar with English pronunciation here—which the Western reader will have to have a knowledge of in order to comprehend the key.

(With the exception of two vowels, pronounced
rhi
and
li
, which have not been used here)

The Bengali year begins on the first of Baiśākh or Paẏlā Baiśākh, which corresponds to 15 April. The months that follow are:

Baiśākh

mid-April to mid-May

Jaiẏshṭha

mid-May to mid-June

Āshāṛh

mid-June to mid-July

Śrābaṇ

mid-July to mid-August

Bh
ā
dra

mid-August to mid-September

Āśvin

mid-September to mid-October

K
ā
rtik

mid-October to mid-November

Agrahāẏaṇ

mid-November to mid-December

Paush

mid-December to mid-January

M
ā
gh

mid-January to mid-February

Ph
ā
lgun

mid-February to mid-March

Caitra

mid-March to mid-April

There are six seasons in the Bengali calendar:

grīshma

summer

barsha

rainy season

Ä«ara
t

end of rains, roughly autumn

hemanta

autumn leading to winter

śīt

winter

basanta

spring

Of all of Rabindranath's prose, I have read
Chinnapatra
the most frequently throughout my life. When I first went abroad, I was very careful to keep it with me always—so that, from a distance of twelve thousand miles, I could sometimes touch the heart of Bengal—Buddhadeva Bose
¹

The letters collected in
Chinnapatrābalī
were written by Rabindranath Tagore to his niece, his brother's daughter Indira, between September 1887 and December 1895, from when he was twenty-six to the age of thirty-four, a period he later described as being ‘the most productive period of my literary life'.
²
At first they were put together in Indira's own hardbound exercise books (there were two), into which she copied out all the letters written to her by him in this period. These were a present from her to the uncle who was, by then, a well-known literary figure, soon to be Nobel laureate and knight of the realm. The idea of copying the letters into exercise books is one he expressed himself in these letters:

Give me your letters once, Bob, and I'll copy out just the experiences of beauty from them into an exercise book. Because
if I live for a long time then I'm sure to grow old; then all these days will become things of remembrance and consolation…. Then this Padma's sandbank of today and the soft, peaceful, spring moonlight will return to me afresh in exactly the same way. My days and nights of joy and sorrow are not woven together like this anywhere else in my poetry or prose.
^*

When a selection of these letters was first published in 1912 as
Chinnapatra
, they had been revised and edited by Rabindranath himself from the version that existed in the exercise books at the time, giving them a ‘literary' shape, and arguably turning them into a distinct fictional narrative of his own.
³
In that collection, the first eight letters were written to his friend Srishchandra Majumdar, and the rest to Indira Debi. The volume could almost be thought of as a prose companion to the English
Gitanjali
that had been published exactly in the same year, 1912. In it, every element of the personal, the angular, the obstreperous and the banal was carefully pruned from the letters so as to present a public face to the curious reader; all that remained in them—‘just the experiences of beauty'—seemed to belong largely to the domain of the scenic and the spiritual. Even so, because the letters were so irrevocably grounded in the local, the particular and the everyday, some element of the original impulse filtered through in the letters that spoke specifically of the countryside, the river landscapes and the people in it. An English translation of
Chinnapatra
appeared under the title
Glimpses of Bengal
in 1921 and, in the short introduction to it, Rabindranath spoke of his own reasons for putting these letters before the public: ‘Since these letters synchronise with a large part of my published writings, I thought their parallel course would broaden my readers' understanding of my poems as a track is widened by retreading the same ground.'
⁴

The
Chinnapatrābalī
is a different edition from the
Chinnapatra
and its English translation,
Glimpses of Bengal
, and was first compiled and published in October 1960, almost twenty years after Rabindranath's death, as part of the centenary-year publications; its editor was Kanai Samanta, and he was helped in this work by Subimal Lahiri. Here we have only the letters to Indira Debi in their fullest form, with an additional 107 letters to her that were left out of the earlier edition—thus, this publication was faithful to the original exercise books to the maximum extent possible. As the editor said at the time: ‘In the present day, there can be no conceivable reason for us to discard any part of Rabindranath's own writings at all.'
⁵

The English title,
Glimpses of Bengal
, was an apt one for
Chinnapatra
: the subject matter of these edited letters was Bengal—riverine, beautiful, green and vast—and the trope of seeing, or ‘glimpsing', some of the wonder that was Rabindranath's Bengal came through exactly in that choice of title. It had, as it happens, no relation at all to the Bengali title,
Chinnapatra
, which is a compound word, a neologism made up of two words—
chinna
, or torn, and
patra
, or leaves. Characteristically, the words could also legitimately denote ‘scattered' or ‘fragmented' for the first word and ‘letters', denoting correspondence, for the second. Torn leaves, scattered letters, pieces of a whole, falling leaves—a plethora of images jostle the imagination in the context of the volume of letters published under this Bengali title. The inconsistent and the fragmentary are the predominant metaphors here, and the word itself is a non-word, impossible to translate or to replicate in another language. To this compound word, the editor of the 1960 edition added a suffix, so that the last part of the word became
patr
ā
balī
from the original
patra
. Now ‘ā
balī'
is a suffix that denotes collectivity—so
patr
ā
balī
would mean collected letters,
pad
ā
balī
collected verse,
granth
ā
balī
collected works, etc. So this title,
Chinnapatr
ā
balī
, may be translated as ‘collected fragments of letters', once again a neologistic compound word, adding, with that suffix, a notion of narrativity and flow, a sense of substance and collection, except
that the word does not exist in the Bengali language. This was not exceptional as far as Rabindranath was concerned; the Bengali title he gave his
Selected Poems
,
Saňcaitā
, or his collected songs,
Gīt;abitān
, were grammatically legitimate but simply not extant words in the language. So, a narrative told in fragments of letters or a collection of torn letters or, again, stories in a collection of scattered letters—the title
Chinnapatrābalī
would signify all of these things unconsciously to the lay Bengali reader, well versed, by 1960, in the indeterminacy of the Tagorean trope.

The two exercise books, of which the contents of the
Chinnapatrābalī
are an exact replica, are currently in the Rabindra-Bhavana library in Santiniketan. They are hardbound copies with ochre and red covers of about A4-size length, ruled, with Indira Debi's neat, somewhat schoolgirlish handwriting running inexhaustibly across the pages. The letters copied out in the exercise books are by no means complete in themselves, with the beginning and end lopped off, and the remaining matter edited according to the recipient's (and later perhaps her uncle's) discretion. Sometimes, intriguingly, a blue or red pencil has deleted or bracketed off portions of the text, marking subtle changes made perhaps by Rabindranath when he was revising them for publication. Comparing the notebooks to the two editions, we see that the portions cordoned off within square brackets had been edited out of the
Chinnapatra
completely; these have been restored in the text of
Chinnapatrābalī
, while the dates and places the letters were sent from and received at have been inserted at the top and bottom of the individual letters.
^*
Looking at the first letter alone, we observe an understandable impulse to screen
anything that might be hurtful to any constituency, whether public or private—so, from ‘and Sarala is unhappy that Rabi-mama didn't get to see it, although Rabi-mama is quite unrepentant', the last bit (‘although Rabi-mama is quite unrepentant') has been edited out, while, following this, an entire sentence disappears from this letter written in Darjeeling: ‘Forests, hilltops, mountains, streams, clouds, and a vast number of flat noses and slant eyes began to be seen.' This emaciates the text, taking out the angularities, the opinions or prejudices, the exasperation and, above all, the humour of the original. Once we have seen all of it, it is impossible to be satisfied with the anodyne quality of what was deemed fit for consumption and therefore left on the page in
Chinnapatra
.

What happened to the original letters themselves? Were they written on long sheets or short ones, ruled sheets or plain ones, white or blue? What colour ink was used, what did they physically look like, what sort of envelopes enclosed them? To these questions I could find no answer, as I put them repeatedly to the descendants of the family as well as to researchers, teachers and historians. The exercise books are heavily edited, sometimes with a pencil or ink-black line running through the lines, mostly with each word individually covered over with squiggles of black ink, and, sometimes, running across an entire page or two, a thin sheet of fine white muslin fabric has been pasted over the cut-out lines to further obscure their original content. It was suggested that technology could now be used to see through all these layers—somehow that invasiveness seemed undesirable for the purposes of this translation, and will have to remain for future generations to do if they so desire.

The first thing that strikes you about these letters is the youth of the person writing them; as Rabindranath put it himself, the period when these letters were written was one ‘when, owing to great good fortune, I was young and less known'.
⁶
‘A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man' would have been a good title for the volume, indicative of the shift in focus from the motifs of seeing or glimpsing, or of fragmentation and narrativity, to the man himself, and, even more particularly, to a young man at a formative age, in mature adulthood as a man and a writer, a poet in full possession of his voice.

Rabindranath was twenty-six years old at the time of writing the first letter of the
Chinnapatrābalī
dated September 1887 to Indira from Darjeeling. Almost exactly a year before, his first child, daughter Madhurilata (Bela or Beli), was born, on 25 October 1886. In that year of her birth he had published a collection of poems,
Kaṛi o komal
(Sharps and Flats), which, he later said in his memoir
Jībansmṛti
, marked that point in his life from when ‘the harvest grain had begun to be reaped', when he had left the mist-laden vicissitudes of adolescence behind and begun to do business with the ‘real world'. He had also published a novel (his third),
Rājarshī
, apart from editing a selection of medieval Vaishnava poetry,
Bidyāpatir padābalī
, composing innumerable songs of astonishing accomplishment, as well as writing reviews, articles, dramatizations and prose pieces in the family-run journals.

At twenty-six, when we first encounter him in these letters, he is little more than a youth, even if we take into account the fact that in the nineteenth century you were older at that age than you are now. Nevertheless, the letter writer here is a young man, a youthful husband, younger brother, father of infant children, maturing poet and growing literary sensation. The tone in the early letters is somewhat hesitant, slightly diffident, often embarrassed, and, equally, hugely amused and often quite wicked. This is the young man he was before he won the biggest literary prize in the world, before he was knighted, before he had established himself in the social and literary world; in short, this was, figuratively speaking, Rabindranath before he became ‘Tagore'.

He was a good-looking man all his life, but at this age, his striking handsomeness awed friends and family alike. Pramatha
Chaudhuri, later to be Indira's husband, has left a record of the first time he met him in 1886, saying, ‘I had never seen a man as good-looking as Rabindranath before. He was fair and tall, with black shoulder-length hair, a muscular body, a smooth, glowing complexion, and very beautiful eyes and nose … In those days Rabindranath went about bare-bodied. He used to wear a
dhuti
and
ch
ā
dar
… He was full of life; his body and his face would brim with life. He was like a living picture. If beauty can be incarnate, his body was living proof that it was.' Another description by contemporary poet Dineshcharan Basu corroborates this evidence. Going to see Rabindranath at Jorasanko on 27 April 1886, he ‘met him at the foot of the first-floor stairs…. Tall and graceful, very fair, with a lean face and beautiful nose, eyes and eyebrows, as if painted with a brush. Bunches of curls flowed upon his shoulders. Attire: dhuti.'
⁷

Attire, however, was not always the dhoti alone, of course. Written from the boat at Baliya in 1893, we have a wonderful description of a dishevelled and sleepy young man in a state of absolute and relaxed lassitude:

Today neither the winter nor civilization has any purchase with me—the cāpkān and
cog
ā [outer garment] hang from the hook in an extreme embrace—I'm blithely spending the morning in a blue-and-red striped
jin
night suit, the bell isn't ringing, the uniformed khansama isn't coming in to salaam—I'm enjoying the untidy, relaxed state of the half-civilized. The birds are calling, and on the shore the two big banyan trees' leaves make a shivering sound in the breeze, the sun on the surface of the trembling water flashes and shines when it comes inside our
boat
, and the morning proceeds in this loose sort of way.
^*

Rabindranath in denim! Almost but not exactly: the material available in colonial Calcutta, which is being referred to, is described in Subal Mitra's
Saral bṅgālā abhidhān
(Easy Bengali Dictionary, 1906), as a ‘thick material of closely woven thread'. Strikingly, this description also takes us to the physical sensuality of the youth writing these letters. Although he never actually speaks of physical contact with another, nor dwells upon any intimacy with a loved one, there are moments in the letters that make you wonder. In a letter from Shahjadpur written on a night flooded with moonlight, he writes: