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Unit 10: Once There was a King by Rabindranath Tagore

emancipation. Mrinal is wife to a Bengali middle class man: prissy, preening, and patriarchal. Notes
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.”

10.2.6 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 Baul ballads such as
those of the bard Lalon. These, rediscovered and repopularised by Tagore, 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 BhânusiCha poems chronicling the Radha-Krishna romance,
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 Africa and 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 nodir tire rohinu poºi
/ Jaha chhilo loe gêlo shonar tori—”all I had achieved was carried off on the golden boat—only I was
left behind.” Gitanjali (xhrkatfy) is Tagore’s best-known collection internationally, earning him
his Nobel.

10.2.7 Politics

Tagore opposed imperialism and supported Indian nationalists, and these views were first
revealed in Manast, which was mostly composed in his twenties. Evidence produced during the
Hindu–German Conspiracy Trial and latter accounts affirm his awareness of the Ghadarites, and
stated that he sought the support of Japanese Prime Minister Terauchi Masatake and former
Premier Ôkuma Shigenobu. Yet he lampooned the Swadeshi movement; he rebuked it in “The
Cult of the Charka”, an acrid 1925 essay. He urged the masses to avoid victimology and instead

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