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Unit 10: Once There was a King by Rabindranath Tagore

10.2.3 Theatre Notes

At sixteen, Tagore led his brother Jyotirindranath’s adaptation of Molière’s Le Bourgeois
Gentilhomme. At twenty he wrote his first drama-opera: Valmiki Pratibha (The Genius of
Valmiki). In it the pandit Valmiki overcomes his sins, is blessed by Saraswati, and compiles the
Râmâyana. Through it Tagore explores a wide range of dramatic styles and emotions, including
usage of revamped kirtans and adaptation of traditional English and Irish folk melodies as
drinking songs. Another play, Dak Ghar (The Post Office), describes the child Amal defying his
stuffy and puerile confines by ultimately “falling asleep”, hinting his physical death. A story
with borderless appeal—gleaning rave reviews in Europe—Dak Ghar dealt with death as, in
Tagore’s words, “spiritual freedom” from “the world of hoarded wealth and certified creeds”. In
the Nazi-besieged Warsaw Ghetto, Polish doctor-educator Janusz Korczak had orphans in his
care stage The Post Office in July 1942. In The King of Children, biographer Betty Jean Lifton
suspected that Korczak, agonising over whether one should determine when and how to die,
was easing the children into accepting death. In mid-October, the Nazis sent them to Treblinka.
His other works fuse lyrical flow and emotional rhythm into a tight focus on a core idea, a break
from prior Bengali drama. Tagore sought “the play of feeling and not of action”. In 1890 he
released what is regarded as his finest drama: Visarjan (Sacrifice). It is an adaptation of Rajarshi,
an earlier novella of his. “A forthright denunciation of a meaningless [and] cruel superstitious
rite[s]”, the Bengali originals feature intricate subplots and prolonged monologues that give
play to historical events in seventeenth-century Udaipur. The devout Maharaja of Tripura is
pitted against the wicked head priest Raghupati. His latter dramas were more philosophical and
allegorical in nature; these included Dak Ghar. Another is Tagore’s Chandalika (Untouchable
Girl), which was modelled on an ancient Buddhist legend describing how Ananda, the Gautama
Buddha’s disciple, asks a tribal girl for water.

In Raktakarabi (“Red” or “Blood Oleanders”), a kleptocrat rules over the residents of Yaksha
puri. He and his retainers exploit his subjects—who are benumbed by alcohol and numbered
like inventory—by forcing them to mine gold for him. The naive maiden-heroine Nandini
rallies her subject-compatriots to defeat the greed of the realm’s sardar class—with the morally
roused king’s belated help. Skirting the “good-vs.-evil” trope, the work pits a vital and joyous
lèse majesté against the monotonous fealty of the king’s varletry, giving rise to an allegorical
struggle akin to that found in Animal Farm or Gulliver’s Travels. The original, though prized in
Bengal, long failed to spawn a “free and comprehensible” translation, and its archaic and sonorous
didacticism failed to attract interest from abroad. Chitrangada, Chandalika, and Shyama are
other key plays that have dance-drama adaptations, which together are known as Rabindra
Nritya Natya.

10.2.4 Novels

Tagore wrote eight novels and four novellas, among them Chaturanga, Shesher Kobita, Char
Odhay, and Noukadubi. Ghare Baire (The Home and the World)—through the lens of the idealistic
zamindar protagonist Nikhil—excoriates rising Indian nationalism, terrorism, and religious
zeal in the Swadeshi movement; a frank expression of Tagore’s conflicted sentiments, it emerged
from a 1914 bout of depression. The novel ends in Hindu-Muslim violence and Nikhil’s—likely
mortal—wounding.
Gora raises controversial questions regarding the Indian identity. As with Ghare Baire, matters
of self-identity (jâti), personal freedom, and religion are developed in the context of a family
story and love triangle. In it an Irish boy orphaned in the Sepoy Mutiny is raised by Hindus as
the titular gora—”whitey”. Ignorant of his foreign origins, he chastises Hindu religious
backsliders out of love for the indigenous Indians and solidarity with them against his hegemon-

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