Page 9 - DENG104_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_I

Elective English–I

Notes The chronology of loss prior to Tagore’s writing of The Post Office was astounding: his wife
died in 1902; his eldest daughter died in 1918, Satischandra Ray, his assistant at Santiniketan
died in 1904; his father died in 1905; his younger son, Samindra, died in 1907. He wrote The
Post Office in Bengali in 1911 and he gave a description of how he came to do so. In the
middle of the night, while lying under the stars on the roof of his house in Santiniketan
(Abode of Peace), he had a strange experience. “My mind took wing. Fly! Fly! –I felt an
anguish... There was a call to go somewhere and a premonition of death, together with an
intense emotion. This feeling of restlessness I expressed in writing Dak Ghar (The Post Office.)
He explains:
“When I wrote Dak Ghar, my soul was besotted by an ocean of feeling. It was a very strong wave.
Come, venture outside, before you leave you will have to traverse this world. You have to feel the
sorrow and joy and thrill and excitement of the human heart. At the time I was deeply involved in
establishing the university [Shantiniketan] but suddenly I don’t know how it happened that early one
morning between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. my heart stood on the rooftop and sprouted wings. I felt a great
premonition of a momentous event, perhaps Death. I felt as if I had to jump onto the platform of a train
station, as if I were leaving immediately. I was saved. When the call was so strong, how could I resist.
The call to go somewhere and the mystery of death is what I expressed in Dak Ghar. ” [Translated by
Julie Mehta].
“I remember at the time when I wrote the play, my own feeling which inspired me to write it. Amal
represents the man whose soul has received the call of the open road... But there is the post office in
front of his window and Amal waits for the King’s letter to come to him direct from the King, bringing
him the message of emancipation. At last the closed gate is opened by the King’s own physician, and
that which is death’ to the world of hoarded wealth and certified creeds brings him awakening in the
world of spiritual freedom. The only thing that accompanies him in his awakening is the flower of love
given to him by Sudha.”

He was inspired to write this magnificent play about the “death” of a child, Amal, which is in
fact the boy’s liberation, and the beginning of a great voyage toward the Outside. Through the
child’s demise, Tagore expresses his conviction that the full meaning of life can only be grasped
in death. Yet he does this with such a light, elegant and poetic touch that The Post Office has
found its way into the hearts of audiences everywhere and in many different languages.
The following verse, with its six contradictory propositions, from The Upani ads, which Tagore
used a great deal in his lectures, sums up so much of what makes The Post Office so complex,
and spiritual.
He moves, and he moves not. He is far, and likewise near.

He is within all, and he is outside all.
The Isa Upani ad

1.3 Analysis

This play in three acts was written in Bengali in 1911, not long after Tagore lost his son,
daughter and wife to disease. In 1940, the evening before Paris fell to the Nazis, Andre Gide’s
French translation of this play was read over the radio. Two years after, in a Warsaw ghetto,
a Polish version was the last play performed in the orphanage of Janusz Korczak who, when
asked why he chose the play, said: “eventually one had to learn to accept serenely the angel
of death.” Within a month, he and his children were taken away and gassed. Mahatma Gandhi
liked this play a lot, saying it has a soothing effect upon his nerves. W.B. Yeats praised it as
“perfectly constructed and conveys to the right audience an emotion of gentleness and peace.”

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