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Unit 10: Once There was a King by Rabindranath Tagore

(1890), among his best-known work. As Zamindar Babu, Tagore criss-crossed the riverine holdings Notes
in command of the Padma, the luxurious family barge. He collected mostly token rents and
blessed villagers who in turn honoured him with banquets—occasionally of dried rice and sour
milk. He met Gagan Harkara, through whom he became familiar with Baul Lalon Shah, whose
folk songs greatly influenced Tagore. Tagore worked to popularise Lalon’s songs. The period
1891–1895, Tagore’s Sadhana period, named after one of Tagore’s magazines, was his most
productive; in these years he wrote more than half the stories of the three-volume, 84-story
Galpaguchchha. It’s ironic and grave tales examined the voluptuous poverty of an idealised
rural Bengal.

Did u know? because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with
consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a
part of the literature of the Wes.
10.1.3 Middle Years of Rabindranath Tagore: 1901–1932

In 1901 Tagore moved to Santiniketan to find an ashram with a marble-floored prayer hall—The
Mandir—an experimental school, groves of trees, gardens, a library. There his wife and two of
his children died. His father died in 1905. He received monthly payments as part of his inheritance
and income from the Maharaja of Tripura, sales of his family’s jewellery, his seaside bungalow
in Puri, and a derisory 2,000 rupees in book royalties. He gained Bengali and foreign readers
alike; he published Naivedya (1901) and Kheya (1906) and translated poems into free verse.

In November 1913, Tagore learned he had won that year’s Nobel Prize in Literature: the Swedish
Academy appreciated the idealistic—and for Westerners—accessible nature of a small body of
his translated material focussed on the 1912 Gitanjali: Song Offerings. In 1915, the British Crown
granted Tagore a knighthood. He renounced it after the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
In 1921, Tagore and agricultural economist Leonard Elmhirst set up the “Institute for Rural
Reconstruction”, later renamed Shriniketan or “Abode of Welfare”, in Surul, a village near the
ashram. With it, Tagore sought to moderate Gandhi’s Swaraj protests, which he occasionally
blamed for British India’s perceived mental—and thus ultimately colonial—decline. He sought
aid from donors, officials, and scholars worldwide to “free village from the shackles of
helplessness and ignorance” by “vitalis[ing] knowledge”. In the early 1930s he targeted ambient
“abnormal caste consciousness” and untouchability. He lectured against these, he penned Dalit
heroes for his poems and his dramas, and he campaigned—successfully—to open Guruvayoor
Temple to Dalits.

Notes Tagore was a practitioner of psychological and social realism. His stories depict
poignant human relationships within a simple, relatively uneventful plots. In “Postmaster,”
a young orphaned girl employed by the postmaster in a remote village regards him as a
surrogate father; when he returns to his home and family in Calcutta she is devastated at
being left behind. Failing to appreciate the depth of her longing for family, the postmaster
laughs at her request to be taken home with him. The story “Kabuliwalla” concerns a man
who appears brusque, crude, and violent—to the extent that he is in prison—but is so
sentimental about his faraway daughter that he cherishes a crumpled piece of paper because
it is smudged with her fingerprints. “The Return of Khokababu” is about a servant who
while caring for the infant of a wealthy couple briefly looks away from the child during
which time it drowns and is never found. The servant moves away, marries, and has a son
Contd...

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