Page 179 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Elective English—IV

Notes Tagore largely avoided classroom schooling and preferred to roam the manor or nearby Bolpur
and Panihati, idylls which the family visited. His brother Hemendranath tutored and physically
conditioned him—by having him swim the Ganges or trek through hills, by gymnastics, and by
practising judo and wrestling. He learned drawing, anatomy, geography and history, literature,
mathematics, Sanskrit, and English—his least favourite subject. Tagore loathed formal
education—his scholarly travails at the local Presidency College spanned a single day. Years
later he held that proper teaching does not explain things; proper teaching stokes curiosity.
After he underwent an Upanayan initiation at age eleven, he and his father left Calcutta in
February 1873 for a months-long tour of the Raj. They visited his father’s Santiniketan estate and
rested in Amritsar en route to the Himalayan Dhauladhars, their destination being the remote
hill station at Dalhousie. Along the way, Tagore read biographies; his father tutored him in
history, astronomy, and Sanskrit declensions. He read biographies of Benjamin Franklin among
other figures; they discussed Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire; and they examined the poetry of Kâlidâsa. In mid-April they reached the station, and at
2,300 metres (7,546 ft) they settled into a house that sat atop Bakrota Hill. Tagore was taken aback
by the region’s deep green gorges, alpine forests, and mossy streams and waterfalls. They
stayed there for several months and adopted a regime of study and privation that included daily
twilight baths taken in icy water.
He returned to Jorosanko and completed a set of major works by 1877, one of them a long poem
in the Maithili style of Vidyapati; they were published pseudonymously. Regional experts
accepted them as the lost works of Bhânusimha, a newly discovered 17th-century Vaishnava
poet. He debuted the short-story genre in Bengali with “Bhikharini” (“The Beggar Woman”),
and his Sandhya Sangit (1882) includes the famous poem “Nirjharer Swapnabhanga” (“The
Rousing of the Waterfall”). Servants subjected him to an almost ludicrous regimentation in a
phase he dryly reviled as the “servocracy”. His head was water-dunked—to quiet him. He irked
his servants by refusing food; he was confined to chalk circles in parody of Sita’s forest trial in
the Ramayana; and he was regaled with the heroic criminal exploits of Bengal’s outlaw-dacoits.
Because the Jorasanko manor was in an area of north Calcutta rife with poverty and prostitution,
he was forbidden to leave it for any purpose other than travelling to school. He thus became
preoccupied with the world outside and with nature. Of his 1873 visit to Santiniketan, he wrote:
“What I could not see did not take me long to get over—what I did see was quite enough. There
was no servant rule, and the only ring which encircled me was the blue of the horizon, drawn
around these solitudes by their presiding goddess. Within this I was free to move about as I
chose.”

10.1.2 Shelaidaha: 1878–1901

Because Debendranath wanted his son to become a barrister, Tagore enrolled at a public school
in Brighton, East Sussex, England in 1878. He stayed for several months at a house that the
Tagore family owned near Brighton and Hove, in Medina Villas; in 1877 his nephew and niece—
Suren and Indira Devi, the children of Tagore’s brother Satyendranath—were sent together with
their mother, Tagore’s sister-in-law, to live with him. He briefly read law at University College
London, but again left school. He opted instead for independent study of Shakespeare, Religio
Medici, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra. Lively English, Irish, and Scottish folk tunes
impressed Tagore, whose own tradition of Nidhubabu-authored kirtans and tappas and Brahmo
hymnody was subdued. In 1880 he returned to Bengal degree-less, resolving to reconcile
European novelty with Brahmo traditions, taking the best from each. In 1883 he married Mrinalini
Devi, born Bhabatarini, 1873–1902; they had five children, two of whom died in childhood.

In 1890 Tagore began managing his vast ancestral estates in Shelaidaha (today a region of
Bangladesh); he was joined by his wife and children in 1898. Tagore released his Manasi poems

174 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY