Letters from a Young Poet (4 page)

Unlike the character he went on to create in that novel, however, the persona in these letters is always vigilant against excess. Self-aware and sharp, his wry consciousness never allows him to ride the tidal waves of feeling in him to absurd or extreme levels. Following the section from the second letter quoted above, he observes:

Someone who has dressed up as an Englishman and been allowed to sit briefly at one side of an English table doesn't care an iota about winning the hearts of his countrymen any more! This is entirely natural. But we need to be extra careful exactly because it's natural. I know that if the Governor saheb spends two days on the second floor of our house reclining upon that easy chair of mine and calls me ‘my dear' while puffing on his cheroot, then this Rabi that I am, who has assumed an aspect like a ball
of fire in the mid-afternoon sun, I too may be swallowed up whole in a single ring of smoke expelled from those outcaste lips of Lansdowne. What a satisfied smile would spread over my entire face then, and what sticky sweetness drip from my speech! That's the chief worry! That's why the second-floor terrace needs to be locked (just in case our Governor saheb comes by to smoke a cheroot with his dearest friend
Tagore
under that tin roof!)!

The dangers of proximity to power assume a humorous aspect, and he laughs at the thought of himself curling up to bask in the glow of English approbation. This laughter—following upon the high seriousness with which he speaks of serving his country, to work among the people in secret and without acknowledgement, without ‘the luxury of fame and honour' and without constantly thinking ‘how do I get the English to read my book, how to get a slap on the back from the English'—is made piquant by the reader's knowledge of the great ‘fame and honour' that was to come to him from them in the following years, and explains why it was so easy for him to repudiate those honours on behalf of his countrymen in situations such as those that followed the horrific events of 1919 at Jallianwala Bagh.

An undercutting of his own flights of fancy or imaginative and emotional excess is to be found again and again in these letters. Bathos inevitably follows pathos when he finds himself in the grip of sentiment or intense feeling; so much so that it would seem to be an intrinsic aspect of his character. As a poet he was both known and criticized for his aestheticization of feeling and of beauty, but as a man he is vehemently against the poeticism, the leaping sentiment, the flight of fancy. Immersed in his own thoughts in these riverine locations of eastern Bengal, he is often ardent, passionate about his thoughts and feelings. In a letter from Shilaidaha in 1892 he speaks of how beauty, for him, ‘is a real drug! It really and truly drives me mad', describing
the addiction of moonlit nights and the essential wildness of unbound nature, which makes him wonder why he wastes his life in polite conversation with neatly dressed gentlemen, for he is ‘truly uncivilized, impolite', searching for ‘beautiful anarchy' and for ‘a festival of joy with a handful of madmen'. This is immediately followed, however, with: ‘But what's all this poeticism I'm engaging in—this is the sort of thing that heroes of poems say—pronouncing their opinions on
conventionality
over the course of three or four pages, thinking they are bigger than the rest of human society. Really, it's quite embarrassing to say such things.' A year later, again from Shilaidaha, he describes the exquisite joy of composing songs by himself in that sun-drenched landscape and the list of groceries brought in the same breath:

Here, I sing alone, with an entranced and liberated heart, my eyes half shut, and the world and this life appear to me touched by the sun's bright hands, swathed in the finest layer of tears, coloured like a seven-layered rainbow—one can translate everyday truths into eternal beauty, and sorrow and suffering too become radiant. In no time at all, the khājāñci appears with the accounts for two eggs, one sliver of butter, a quarter litre of ghī and six paisa's worth mustard oil. My history here is like this.

The history of the life in these letters, thus, is never far from the quotidian, the banal and the everyday. If the Multān
rāginī
is expressive of the afternoon with its tender high notes that evoke ‘neither happiness nor unhappiness, only the melancholy of inertia and its inner secret sorrow' in the ‘shining afternoon light' upon the river, then the thought is interrupted by ‘another big problem—lots of mosquitoes'. ‘It's impossible to preserve the sweetness of a feeling or the depth of a thought if you're constantly slapping your hands and legs and body', he sagely continues, going on to make an observation of even greater import: ‘These sorts of small irritations—the mosquito's bite,
the helpful literary review, sand in the
mohanbhog
—do not teach men to be brave in any way'. That he is an entirely secular man who demands perfection in his food as much as in his art is clear in the next sentence: ‘I can say it especially because there was sand in my mohanbhog today—and I can clearly recall how I felt then—such feelings were unworthy of a Christian or a Brahmo … or of a good Muslim too.'

Sometimes in the letters he speaks of himself in the third person. This was an enduring habit, a technique he deployed even in one of the last essays of his life,
S
ā
hitye aitih
ā
sikat
ā (Historicality in Literature), and in his usage it has none of the pretension that attaches to such use more generally. Rather, the distancing effect created is often humorous, as we know from the famous instance of his wedding invitation to a close friend, Priyanath Sen: ‘Priyababu—/At an auspicious time and day on Sunday next, on the 24th of Agrahāẏaṇ, my close relative Srimān Rabindranath Thakur will be married. My relatives and I will be obliged if you could be present on that occasion in the evening that day at Debendranath Tagore's house at No. 6 Jorasanko to observe the wedding & c. Yours/Gratefully/Sri Rabindranath Thakur.' In another letter (4 August 1894), he describes how ‘in a boat by an open window, at the head of a
camp-table
upon a cane chair is the chief protagonist, Sri Rabindranath'. If here he is a character in a story, elsewhere he speaks almost of the existence of a double, as in Henry James's famous story, ‘The Private Life': ‘It's very surprising, but nowadays when I hear my poems being praised, I don't feel as happy as I should. Actually, that's because I don't entirely grasp that the person who is being praised by people is the same person who writes the poems.'

Occasionally, the letters afford a fascinating glimpse of his own notion of his character. Repeatedly, here, he describes a side of himself as ‘wild', ‘uncivilized', even ‘crazy', someone who writes poetry when ‘restless with joy, heedless and thirsty like an inebriated, plaintive and self-forgetful madman'. He wishes to be as nomadic
as an Arab ‘Bedouin' rather than a fussy Bengali. (‘But I'm not a Bedouin, I'm a Bengali. I will sit in a corner and nitpick, I will judge, argue, turn my mind over once this way and then the other way—in the way one fries fish—you let one side splutter and sizzle in the boiling oil, and then you turn it over to let the other side sputter.') Over and over again, he rails against ‘civilized society', polite company and the compunction of manners. On one occasion, he writes to Indira about this desire for freedom: ‘Remember Satya had said to me, “There's a real air of luxury about you, like the Muslim nababs”? That's not entirely true; in the sense that my nabābi is a mental nabābi—there, in my own kingdom, I don't want any restrictions on me, I want an unchecked right in my domain.' This luxury of mind, therefore, is premised on the exact opposite of material luxury, a mentality that took as a mantra Goethe's injunction to ‘do without'; a temperament that spontaneously exclaims on a February afternoon in Shilaidaha: ‘There's such a particular feeling of renunciation in the Indian sunlight that nobody has the power to evade it.' He continues again a few months later: ‘You know how I cite the breezes of India as an excuse for rebellion against undertaking my duties? There's a deeper significance to that, Bob.' Doing nothing is serious business; it is what facilitates poetry; it is the foundation upon which poetry can be about ‘the unnecessary'.

The woman who receives these letters, affectionately called ‘Bob' in some of them, is a silent but considerable presence in this book, an equal as an interlocutor, and not one to be written out of the narrative of its history. This is corroborated by Rabindranath himself repeatedly. As he said to Indira on 7 October 1894, he feels his letters achieve completion because they are addressed to her, and are expressive not only of his own inner essence but also of hers—just as Byron's letters to Thomas Moore express not just Byron's personality but Moore's as well:

Both the person who listens and the person who speaks are together responsible for the composition—

‘
taṭer buke lāge jaler dheu,

tabe se kalatānu uṭhe
.

btse banasabh ihari kape,

tabe se marmar phuá¹­e.
'

(The waves beat upon the shore's breast,

Only then does its murmur rise.

The assembled woods tremble in the wind,

Only then does that rustle materialize.)

The letter had begun with a passage that was subsequently used as a preface for the
Chinnapatrābalī
:

I too know, Bob, that the letters I've written to you express the many-hued feelings of my heart in a way that hasn't been possible in any of my other writings…. When I write to you it never crosses my mind that you might not understand something I may say, or may misunderstand it, or disbelieve it, or think of those things which are the deepest truths to me as merely well-composed poeticisms. That's why I can say exactly what I'm thinking quite easily to you…. It's not just because you've known me for a very long time that I'm able to express my feelings to you; you have such a genuine nature, such a simple love for the truth, that the truth expresses itself spontaneously to you. That's by your particular talent. If the best writings of any writer are to be found in his letters alone then we must surmise that the person to whom they are written also has a letter-writing ability. I have written letters to so many others, but nobody else has attracted my entire self to themselves in writing.

Her ‘genuine nature' and simple honesty have been attested to by others apart from her favourite uncle, coming up unselfconsciously
in the letters exchanged between her and her fiancé before their marriage. ‘You are such a very good girl, Bee—I wish I were like you,' she reports her friend ‘Lil' (Lilian Palit, daughter of Loken Palit, family friend of the Tagores) saying to her in English one evening during an intense conversation around the news of her engagement. The person she's engaged to has no doubts in this regard, ruminating more than once on what a really good person she is—‘
Tumi satyi bhāri lakshmi meẏe
' (You really are such a very good girl).
⁹
As Chitra Deb has commented, ‘Nobody else could attract the poet's entire self to themselves in writing. But Indira's identity does not end with this; rather, this is where it begins.'
¹⁰
Rabindranath's young, talented and beautiful niece was also an accomplished woman in her own right, only the thirteenth Bengali woman graduate, and the first Tagore from the male lineage (her cousin Sarala, daughter of Rabindranath's eldest sister, preceded her in this) to graduate. She read French and English honours, obtaining a BA degree in 1892, and was ranked first in her year and awarded the Padmavati gold medal. Both she and her husband were French scholars, and she called him ‘
Mon ami
' in her letters for lack of an appropriate Bengali equivalent (although, in the first instance, she did address him as ‘
suhṛdbar
' (friend/well-wisher), and then said defensively, ‘
Sambodhan dekhe hāňscho?
' (Are you smiling at the form of address?). Her Bengali is alive and clear, sparkling and strong; her uncle described her language as ‘lustrous'. Her tangible contribution to the culture of her time lay not only in the elusive arena of her influence and presence but also substantially in the fields of music (she notated a great many of Rabindranath's songs) and music theory, autobiography and memoir and, notably, in the domain of the essay form, at which she excelled, and in translations from English and French into Bengali.

Born in 1873, Indira Debi was twelve years younger than her uncle, the youngest brother of her father, the distinguished Satyendranath Tagore, the first Indian to enter the Indian Civil
Service. Satyendranath's family—his wife, Jnanadanandini Debi (an influential, educated and independent woman, a pioneering symbol of women's emancipation and creator of the modern Indian sari), son, Surendranath, and daughter, Indira—were very close to Rabindranath who often stayed with them in their home throughout his life. In his teenage years, preceding his voyage out to England, Rabindranath stayed with his brother in Ahmedabad, acquiring English customs and the English language. Subsequently, he spent time with them during Satyendranath's postings at Satara and Bombay, and even in the city of Calcutta, where he would escape the family home at Jorasanko to their quiet nuclear home in Park Street for long periods. His friendship with the children—Indira (five) and Suren (six)—began in England, when he went for the first time in 1878 to their home in Brighton as a seventeen-year-old.

Rabindranath had a lifelong attachment to children—he loved them and they loved him to a fault—and here he had the first opportunity in his life to give his heart to two children who would remain among the closest relations he would have amid so many in his family. In Brighton, they were amused by the strange Bengali accent in which he spoke English, but they got along famously. Indira wrote later that one of his tricks then with children was to sing songs in funny ways; so ‘he would start singing the song ā
ju moraṇ ban bole
in a medium tempo and then go faster and faster, until towards the end, when his lips would seem to keep trembling and shaking, we would be in splits, simply helpless with laughter'.