Page 132 - DENG202_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_III

Unit 10: Beggarly Heart by Rabindranath Tagore

kings of old went forth to conquest; and I, never stirring from my little corner in Kolkata, would Notes
let my mind wander over the whole world. At the very name of another country, my heart
would go out to it [...] I would fall to weaving a network of dreams: the mountains, the glens, the
forest [...].”
The Golpoguchchho (Bunch of Stories) was written in Tagore’s Sabuj Patraperiod, which lasted
from 1914 to 1917 and named for another of his magazines. These yarns are celebrated fare in
Bengali fiction and are commonly used as plot fodder by Bengali film and theatre. The Ray film
Charulata echoed the controversial Tagore novella Nastanirh (The Broken Nest). In Atithi,
which was made into another film, the little Brahmin boy Tarapada shares a boat ride with a
village zamindar. The boy relates his flight from home and his subsequent wanderings. Taking
pity, the elder adopts him; he fixes the boy to marry his own daughter. The night before his
wedding, Tarapada runs off—again. Strir Patra (The Wife’s Letter) is an early treatise in female
emancipation. Mrinal is wife to a Bengali middle class man: prissy, preening, and patriarchal.
Travelling alone she writes a letter, which comprehends the story? She details the pettiness of a
life spent entreating his viraginous virility; she ultimately gives up married life, proclaiming,
Amio bachbo. Ei bachlum: “And I shall live. Here, I live.”
Haimanti assails Hindu arranged marriage and spotlights their often dismal domesticity, the
hypocrisies plaguing the Indian middle classes, and how Haimanti, a young woman, due to her
insufferable sensitivity and free spirit, foredid herself. In the last passage, Tagore blasts the
reification of Sita’s self-immolation attempt; she had meant to appease her consort Rama’s
doubts of her chastity. Musalmani Didi eyes recrudescent Hindu-Muslim tensions and, in many
ways, embodies the essence of Tagore’s humanism. The somewhat auto-referential Darpaharan
describes a fey young man who harbours literary ambitions. Though he loves his wife, he
wishes to stifle her literary career, deeming it unfeminine. In youth, Tagore likely agreed with
him. Darpaharan depicts the final humbling of the man as he ultimately acknowledges his
wife’s talents. As do many other Tagore stories, Jibito o Mrito equips Bengalis with a ubiquitous
epigram: Kadombini moriya proman korilo she more nai—”Kadombini died, thereby proving
that she hadn’t.”

10.5 Poetry

Tagore’s poetic style, which proceeds from a lineage established by 15th and 16th century
Vaishnava poets, ranges from classical formalism to the comic, visionary and ecstatic. He was
influenced by the atavistic mysticism of Vyasa and other rishi-authors of the Upanishads, the
Bhakti-Sufi mystic Kabir, and Ramprasad Sen. Tagore’s most innovative and mature poetry
embodies his exposure to Bengali rural folk music, which included mystic Baulballads such as
those of the bard Lalon, which were rediscovered and popularised again by Tagore. They resemble
19th century Kartâbhajâ hymns that emphasise inward divinity and rebellion against bourgeois
bhadralok religious and social orthodoxy. During his Shelaidaha years, his poems took on a
lyrical voice of the moner manush, the Bâuls’ “man within the heart” and Tagore’s “life force of
his deep recesses”, or meditating upon the jeevan devata—the demiurge or the “living God
within”. This figure connected with divinity through appeal to nature and the emotional interplay
of human drama. Such tools saw use in his Bhânusimha poems chronicling the
Radha-Krishnaromance, which were repeatedly revised over the course of seventy years.
Tagore reacted to the half-hearted uptake of modernist and realist techniques in Bengali literature

by writing matching experimental works in the 1930s. These include Africaand Camalia, among
the better known of his latter poems. He occasionally wrote poems using Shadhu Bhasha,
a Sanskritised dialect of Bengali; he later adopted a more popular dialect known as Cholti
Bhasha. Other works include Manasi, Sonar Tori (Golden Boat), Balaka (Wild Geese, a name
redolent of migrating souls), and Purobi. Sonar Tori’s most famous poem, dealing with the
fleeting endurance of life and achievement, goes by the same name; hauntingly it ends: Shunno

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