Letters from a Young Poet (6 page)

The language of these letters is direct and unencumbered; compared with some of the poetry of the early period, the prose is straight and lean, conversational and contemplative. As we immerse ourselves in this luminous Bengali prose, the particular intimacy of the epistolary form allows us, for a moment, to be alone in the man's company. At the same time, it is worth remembering that the publication, in some part, of letters in conversational Bengali (
calti
or
calit bh
ā
sh
ā) was first accomplished in Bengali literature in Rabindranath's
Europe prab
āsīr patra
(Letters of Exile from Europe, 1879–80; 1881) at least a decade before these were written, and that eventual publication might well have been lodged in the interstices of his mind even as he was writing some of these letters to Indira. Another innovation with regard to the letters here was the use of Bengali dates in the original (sometimes alongside the English,
sometimes not)—a practice the Tagore family helped popularize among English-educated Bengalis.

As we read, what is also worth remembering is that this is an unrevised manuscript published in full, with the exception of the censored sections. For someone who was famous for his endless and tireless revisions of his own writing—revisions whose shapes on the page acquired life to become artworks in time—the knowledge that the words here flow in an unselfconscious and unrestrained stream of thought (reminiscent of the term
nityaprab
ā
hita cetan
ā
r m
ā
jhe
that he used in the context of children's rhymes in an essay written in this period at Shahjadpur)
¹³
is important, because the book does not merit a place in the world as a volume of Collected Letters, but rather as a literary work in its own right.

Often the sentences in these letters are very long, unbroken except for the successive commas or dashes,
^*
continuing in their meandering way as they follow the thread of a thought:

The ferries cross the river, travellers with umbrellas in hand walk by the road next to the canal, women immerse their wicker baskets and wash rice, the farmers come to market with bundles of tied jute on their heads—two men have flung a tree trunk on the ground and are splitting its wood with an axe, making a
á¹­hak-á¹­hak
sound, a carpenter works upon an upturned fisherman's boat under an
aśvattha
tree, repairing it with a chisel in hand, the village dog roams around aimlessly by the canal, a few cows lie lazily on the ground in the sun, swishing away flies with a languid movement of their ears and tails before they feed upon excessive amounts of fresh grass, and when the crows sitting on their backs irritate them beyond endurance, they shake their heads at them and express their annoyance.

The cinematic image has a predecessor in such a paragraph, and the correspondences with the slow-panning camera movement in Satyajit Ray's visualization of village life in the
Apu Trilogy
cannot be coincidental. Along with the beauty of the camera's movement across this scene is the accompanying soundtrack that records, exactly and mesmerizingly, the incandescent nature of background sounds in the Bengal countryside; again something that Ray did path-breaking work on in his films. In a letter from Shahjadpur in 1893 Rabindranath records:

The few monotonous
ṭhak-ṭhak ṭhuk-ṭhāk
sounds of this place, the cries of the naked children playing, the high-pitched tender songs of the cowherds, the
jhup-jh
ā
p
noise of the oars, the sharp, sad sound of the oil mill hitting the
nikh
ā
d
note, all of these sounds work together and are in a sort of proportion to the bird call and the sound of the leaves—all of it seems to be some part of a long dreamlike
sonata
full of peace and enveloped in pity, somewhat in the mould of Chopin, but composed and bound to a very vast, spread-out, yet restrained metre.

The sensory is a source of delight, always. Again and again, he gives his thanks for being able to absorb with his senses the marvel of just being in the world; as he put it in a song many years later:
k
ā
n petechi, cokh melechi, dharār buke prāṇ ḍhelechi/jānār mājhe ajānāre karechi sandhān,/bismaẏe tāi jāge āmār gān
. (I hear, I see, I pour out my heart upon the breast of this earth/I have searched for the unknown in the midst of the known,/That is why my song awakens to wonder).

Repeatedly, he mentions the rustle of nature: ‘This light and this air, this half-melancholy, half-happy feeling, this continuous trembling in the leaves of trees and fields of grain—', the ‘shivering sound' of coconut fronds, or of the leaves of the
śisu
trees in the south garden. On a Bolpur October day, when ‘the endless cooing of the pigeons from within the dense mango orchards turns the
entire field and sky and wind and dreamlike long hours of the dappled afternoon into a song of separation's sorrow', he feels that ‘even the sound of the clock on my table seems to have merged with the tender melancholy of the afternoon's rustle of sound'. That feeling comes to him with special intensity in the afternoons (‘These afternoons have made me fervent with feeling from my very childhood'), like a drone that resembles the buzzing of bees, bearing memories of his life, which have travelled to him ‘borne upon a curious mixed rustle of sound' from very far away. The ancient Greek described by Hegel with which Barthes ends his brief essay ‘The Rustle of Language' might well be a description of the poet Rabindranth: ‘He interrogated, Hegel says, passionately, uninterruptedly, the rustle of branches, of springs, of winds, in short, the shudder of Nature, in order to perceive in it the design of an intelligence.'
¹⁴

The responsiveness of this man to the sensory does not need the idylls of the countryside to find expression. In a letter from Calcutta in March 1895, he speaks of a morning spent in utter idleness, and of how, yet, he feels ‘no regret at all for this laziness'—for ‘this basanta morning breeze really wastes me'. He continues:

Just letting this generous warm wind caress the whole body seems like a duty worth doing—it seems as though the flow of this sweet breeze is a conversation that nature holds with me. That I was born in this world, that the spring breeze came and touched me, that the smell of the
kanakcāňpā
flower filled my head, that occasionally a morning such as this came to me in obeisance like a message from the gods—in the brief life of a man, how can this be insignificant!

Ruminating on the fact that ‘all these forgotten unconscious moments too are an important part of a successful life', he has no regrets about the idle enjoyment of the morning, and also thinks, ‘If this time had been spent in listening to a good song one would not have regretted that either.'

Songs are woven into this tapestry of letters like a recurrent motif; we see him write, compose, sing and reflect upon music repeatedly. Music and painting are two fields analogous to Rabindranath's poetic vocation that benefit from Theodor Adorno's remarks on the expressionism of Paul Klee, Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky and the music of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern in ‘On the Relationship between Painting and Music Today'. ‘A rebellion against reification' was how Adorno described the impulse of refusing any ‘compartmentalization of the objective spirit's zones' in these artists, and while Rabindranath's creative accomplishments in these fields still await such inspired theorization, the fact that he forged an idiom in his painted work which, likewise, considered ‘the material, indeed the sphere of aesthetic objectification itself, insignificant alongside the pure self-articulation of the subject' is evident to any viewer of his artwork. But that was much later. Now, in the years these letters are being written, he had not yet launched his career as an artist, although he reveals that, secretly, he wants to be a painter too, even though he is ‘well known' as a ‘colour-blind person':

And then again, if one swallows one's pride and tells the absolute truth, then I have to admit that that thing called painting—I'm always looking towards it with the lustful glances of unrequited love—but there's no hope of winning it, the age for wooing it is past me now. Unlike the other knowledges, one cannot hope to acquire it easily—to attain it is like breaking the mythical bow; you cannot win its favour until you exhaust yourself with repeated strokes of the paintbrush.

The ‘repeated strokes of the paintbrush' he mentions are with regard to the sort of painting being done at the time by Ravi Verma, whose paintings are mentioned in these letters, or, indeed, by his nephew Abanindranath Tagore. His subsequent discovery of the work of the Bauhaus painters—Klee and Kandinsky among them—that
he was then instrumental in bringing to Calcutta in an exhibition in 1922 perhaps set him free from his own conventional notions, allowing him to refashion ‘similarity to the object' in visual art.

Written from a variety of locations, as he travelled on work or on holiday, with family or on his own, the letters contained in this book are intensely visual, recording a landscape and countryside that contain, for the young man who writes of them, a narrative of discovery and belonging; and if he had been like Nehru in temperament, he too might well have called this very different book
The Discovery of India
. Even though a few of these letters were posted from London or Calcutta, the vast majority of them were from the towns and villages and even rivers of Bengal, and the litany of place names mentioned at the head of the letters may be said to constitute a poem in itself—from his boat on the Ichamoti or from Shahjadpur or Shilaidaha, from Boalia, Bolpur or Baliya to Cuttack, Dighapatia, Patishar or Natore.

The road or path so beloved of him, used so often as a metaphor in his poems and songs, here becomes incarnate; thus we have letters written ‘On the way to Kushtia', ‘On the road to Goalundo' or ‘On the waterway to Dighapatia'. These place names now belong to Bangladesh, and that country has found new ways to reinvent the poetry of this text. In a play created from Rabindranath's letters in the
Chinnapatrābalī titled Bāṇglār māṭi bāṇglār jal
(Bengal's Land, Bengal's Water), itself a phrase from one of Rabindranath's best-known patriotic songs, Sayyed Shamsul Haq has devised a drama with Rabindranath as the main character but, more crucially, with all the ordinary people he wrote of in these letters—Gofur Mian, Gagan Harkara, the members of the Sunītisancāriṇ Sabhā, the village postmaster, the boatmen, the revenue collectors—as the other characters who speak in their own distinctive dialects.
¹⁵
The ordinary women of village Bengal, especially, are a source of constant wonder—not just their shyness or their beauty but also their strength and combativeness, as he observes how, although ‘hidden behind her veil', one woman has a ‘voice like bell metal' that emerges without a ‘trace of fear or anxiety', and that in this she is representative of most of the others of her sex and class. The rich complexity of these letters resides also, then, as the playwright has seen, in the range of people who make an appearance in them and in the involvement of the writer observing them go about their daily lives.

The presence of water has an overwhelming charisma in the countryside described in these letters. Writing on the East Bengal landscape of his youth—the early twentieth century—in
Bāṇgālī jībane ramaṇī
, Nirad Chaudhuri comments that its beauty has a certain ‘vastness, glory and majesty' about it that he puts down to Bengal's waters. Eight of Rabindranath's ‘greatest' short stories, according to him, are written in close proximity to Bengal's waters at this time, and the writing here, he feels, is as ‘generous and tender' as the teardrop Rabindranath had envisaged as a metaphor for literary creativity in these environs. The life of the Bengali, according to Chaudhuri, resided in that landscape of ‘river, water, a free, generous and blue sky, in clouds as dark as kohl or as white as the swan, in rice fields stretching up to the horizon and dense green forests'.
¹⁶
With Partition, that landscape has been lost, and with it the Indian Bengali has lost not only his natural wealth but also his heartbeat. For Rabindranath in these letters, however, that heartbeat of the water and the land in close conjunction with each other still resonates as he traverses ‘this shadowy Bengal, encircled by the embrace of its affectionate rivers'. Smaller rivers, huge awe-inspiring rivers, rivers that wind their way through the sleepy countryside, rivers made dangerous by strong currents or stupefied by the lack of any, quite still and without movement—the Ichamoti, the Gorai, the Yamuna, the Padma—make repeated
appearances here. The river Padma is eulogized again and again—she is a beloved presence, a living presence, sometimes calm, as in the winter, but often angry and swollen and magnificent in the poet's favourite season, the monsoon. The scenes on the shores of these rivers of domestic rituals, children's play, women's chatter, farmer's work, ferries plying, all find a mention as Rabindranath's boat moves through their everyday lives and practices, forward on a journey called life.

Nature is a living presence here; it is vibrant and perceptible, a third who walks beside him. While strolling along the moonlit sandbanks of the Padma by night, he resents the company of two acquaintances:

The three of us are walking together, but for a while I am not in their presence as they walk. My serious, silent, moonlight-drowned world suddenly lets me know in the momentary break of conversation,' ‘Don't think you have only two companions, we too are by your side today as we have always been before—'