Finds his freedom in an unknown place.
The desire to escape from obligation—the obligation to be responsible, the obligation to think, even the obligations imposed by fame—makes this a very different kind of creative interlude.
On the pretext of spinning incredible tales for the nine-year-old granddaughter mentioned earlier, Rabindranath creates a rich and diverse fantasy, openly declaring his desire to ‘throw…into disarray’ the world of reason and logic. Another creative genius of the Tagore clan, Abanindranath, while making up impossible stories, used the term ‘hysteria of the imagination’ to describe the process. Rabindranath too, weaving fantasies with his granddaughter, seems to allow his imagination to drift towards the same state of hysteria. Here, a man’s pigtail can vigorously grow longer and longer like an endless worm; another wears a broken bucket on his head in lieu of a hat; one might, if hungry, lick the Ochterlony Monument up to its very top; a shovel is employed to clear the eye of coal dust; a brass-bound cudgel is a serviceable toothbrush; and if one’s mouth is polluted, the rites of purification are easily looked up in Webster’s Dictionary. Creating a commotion with every word,‘kintinabu meriunathu’,‘kangchuto-sangchani’ and ‘iktikutir bhiktimai’ announce their presence.The animals found here are strange compounds of humans and cows and lions, which the people of Tasmania have named ‘Gandishandung’. Here, if you pull too hard on someone’s hair-tuft, his body might well ‘slither off him like a loose sock and fall to the ground with a thump’, and it is entirely permissible to yell for someone to come and inhabit that cast-off frame.
The little girl who listens to these tales sometimes claps her hands in delight. And sometimes she asks, wide-eyed, ‘Is all this true, Dadamashai?’
*
A fantasy in fourteen chapters, Shey was published as a whole in 1937, but its component parts had been composed over a long time. Says the storyteller as he begins his story,‘The person who listens to these stories is nine years old.’ The young listener—Pupe, or Nandini— was actually ten when some of the parts were first published. By the time they were all brought together as a book, she was sixteen. In one way, though, these story-conversations between grandfather and granddaughter had begun long before Pupe reached the age of nine. She was much younger when, in his diary of that time, Rabindranath wrote (15 February 1925):
Last night, I had finished dinner and was sitting in my cabin. I was
commanded: ‘Dadamashai, tell me a story about tigers.’ . . . So I began—
A tiger of the stripy kind
A mirror chanced to view,
And seeing the black upon his coat
Into a temper flew.
He thought the matter urgent—
So to find a good detergent,
Bade Jhagru post to Prague
Or else Hazaribagh.
Gradually growing and changing, this rhyme about a tiger would finally come to feature in Shey. By then, the artist’s strokes and the poet’s words had merged to give it a completely different character.
Another being would come to stand between grandfather and granddaughter—his identity left open under the pronoun ‘he’, unconfined by any definite shape or form, free to wander anywhere and everywhere whenever the fancy takes him. Constantly being born anew, he can say whatever he likes, crossing the bounds between truth and fiction. He can do anything—even write tiger-poems.
In fact, ‘He’ wanders beyond the confines of the written tale. In letters to the real Pupe at various points in the year 1931, the real grandfather frequently reports,‘He came…He said, “Send me to Darjeeling”’ or ‘He has gone to Java’ or, indeed, ‘He went off, saying “Pupu-didi is away, I won’t stay here either”’ or ‘He has gone off wearing my quilted wrap. His own tattered shawl had got soaked in the rain and he’s left it behind. I’m thinking of putting it to use as a fruit-juice strainer’.
The telling of tiger-tales to a young listener is a subject Rabindranath returns to in his lecture series The Religion of Man (1931), and in discussions of literary theory written in 1933.There he proves how real even the most fantastic tales can be to the child-mind, observing, ‘Whatever impresses itself upon the mind in a distinct form or shape is real.’ It does not rely upon reason or logic; it may have no functional meaning or factual basis; it may lie far beyond the limits of possibility. Still,‘it presents an image before the mind, awakens an interest in it, fills up an emptiness: it is real.’
Here the word ‘real’ obviously carries a special significance. To understand what that is, we must consider the literary context of the time.The post-Tagore era of literary activity is about to begin; the young writers of the new age have begun to criticize Rabindranath for ignoring contemporary reality. His works, they allege, are romantic from beginning to end, showing little awareness of the real or existent. Instead, he continues to create a world of illusion, consistently avoiding the harshness of daily life in the real world. At different points in the course of theoretical debate Rabindranath tries to counter such attacks, presenting his own justification. Such debate does not remain confined to theory, but often spills over into his fiction and poetry. Sometimes driven to distraction by the tangles of theory, Rabindranath confesses, ‘When these policemen guarding realist literature chase after me, I seek refuge in my songs...and in my painting.’ In a letter to Amiya Chakrabarti (24 February 1939) we find, together with those thoughts, expressions of concern at the setting of a market-price on literature, his dislike of ‘literary inspectors’, and his seeking a sanctuary away from this hostile environment. Again he declares, ‘In this precarious situation I still have two stable retreats—my songs and my painting.’
To the two sanctuaries provided by music and art we may add a third—the world of children. Having just experienced the materialism of America, Rabindranath felt compelled to write the poems in Shishu Bholanath ‘to calm the mind, to make it pure and free’. Similarly, to escape from the agitation and distaste described above, he had to write, one after the other, the verses in Khapchhara (Oddities, 1937), Chharar Chhabi (Rhyme-Pictures, 1937) and Chhara (Rhymes, 1941), and, along with them, the stories in Galpa-Shalpa (Stories and So On, 1941) and Shey (He, 1937).These works undoubtedly express a wish to escape, an effort to create a world of the imagination fit for young boys and girls.Yet, even here, the same inner trouble, the same conflict with modernity occasionally comes to the surface.
While writing the tiger-poems or the tuneless poems in Shey, in moving from one rhythmic form to another, Rabindranath makes it quite clear that he is exchanging thrusts with his modernist detractors. The ‘He’ of the story tells Pupe’s Dadamashai,‘Your honeyed words have trapped you in a stupor, Dada—the harsh truth doesn’t please your palate’, and informs him,‘The modern age is growing hard and dry.’ When Dadamashai asks,‘Why didn’t Creation stop once it reached that smooth rhythm?’, He replies by recounting the triumph of the hideous over the beautiful, the discordant over the melodious.‘Today Ganesh’s trunk has taken the shape of a chimney and is trumpeting over the temples of manufacture in the West,’ says He. ‘Isn’t it the loud tunelessness of that song that’s bringing his devotees success?’ Hence his prayer:‘Toss my brains with your trunk; let an earthquake engulf my mother tongue; let a turbid force erupt from my pen; let the sons of Bengal wake to its harsh discordance!’
The violence does not end there—we continue to find commands to break out of ‘that gentlemanly cut of poetry’, ‘to beat out the backbones of verses with clubs’. We may even be reminded of the novel Shesher Kabita (1929), and the appeal of the poems by Nibaran Chakrabarti, otherwise the novel’s hero Amit Ray. Having thrown the ordered world into disarray, stripped the meaning from words and reduced them to senseless explosions of sound, he wants to create a new poetic model. But when, at the end of Shey, we hear Dadamashai remark that the discordant and the evil ‘pretend to be powerful only to the extent that man is cowardly’, or when he tells Pupe,‘Wait another ten years before you venture
to judge whether he writes better than I do’, we know we are hearing Rabindranath’s distinctive voice. It is then that we clearly perceive the nature of the battle between modern tastes and his own. Only then do we understand his pleasure when Banaphul, one of the young writers of the day, observed that Shey was more than a children’s book.
*
This emergence from the confines of certified ‘children’s literature’ is instanced at several other points of the story. Not only does Rabindranath face up to his modernist critics, but there is evidence that he comes to a conscious understanding with himself. No doubt he wished his words to reflect his whims, to lose himself in ‘play without meaning’, as he writes in the dedicatory poem. He meant to step away ‘directionless/In baul’s dress’, to bloom as ‘a worthless flower among weeds’, to fill his work with laughter unrestrained by reason. But is he entirely successful in all this? The question is not the reader’s alone. It comes, indeed, from the self-conscious writer. When the story-character He draws the narrator aside and asks, ‘Aren’t you in need of a little improvement yourself? … Stop being so old. Here you are, ageing, but you’re yet to mature in childishness,’ we are witness to an act of self-judgement on the author’s part. It is clear that the pieces of advice proffered by He of the story,‘If you imagine you can make Pupu-didi laugh with these stories, you’d better think again!’ or ‘Leave off your scientific humour and try to be a little more childish if you can’, are really Rabindranath’s counsels to himself.
Equally evident is the writer’s uncertainty as to how this perfect pitch of childishness is to be reached. He recognizes that the story he has created is, in certain places, written ‘purely in jest, out of the cockiness of [his] advanced years’. The stories Pupu-didi wants to hear, however,‘are funny without poking fun at anything’. But the presence of satire is not the only problem; Dadamashai distinguishes between two kinds of smiles, one dental and the other cerebral, and says,‘It’s the cerebral kind that fell to me—what one calls wit in English.’ Simultaneously, it is driven home to him that ‘if you can’t stop being so clever, you’d better give up telling stories.’ His self-admonition, ‘The pungency of your intelligence has dried up all the fun in you’, precedes his quest for ‘pure laughter without any alloy of intelligence’, in other words, the journey towards a new story.Yet even after this, the disbelief in ‘Well, then, nitwit, could you make her laugh?’, or ‘The laughter you win by a cheap joke like that is of no worth’, or ‘I don’t claim that even this story belongs to the highest order of humour’, betrays the same self-deprecating hesitation.
The story begins to move away from fantasy towards social satire when, in the tale about the tiger, even Pupe declares she knows how choosy the caste-conscious tiger can be about what he will eat or touch. If a tiger pollutes himself by drinking unholy ‘vegetarian blood’, the puritanical tiger community demands he perform a penance.And if he refuses? The hapless father of no less than five girl-tigers will be ruined. His five keen-clawed daughters are all old enough to be given away in marriage, but even if he offers twenty-eight buffaloes as dowry, the ritually unclean tiger will fail to procure a suitor for even one of them. A greater punishment awaits him when he dies—no priest will consent to perform the funeral rites, and seven generations of his descendants will bow their heads in shame.What penance, then, can absolve him? He must remain in the south-west corner of the square where the shrine of the tiger-goddess stands, from the beginning of the dark lunar fortnight to the middle of its last moonless night, feeding only on a shoulder of jackal and using only his right hind-paw to tear off the flesh. Reading all this may remind us of Rabindranath’s play Achalayatan (1912) and its ridicule of absurd rites and conventions.The desire to play truant from society is possibly thwarted by such recurring allusions to the all-too-real world of men.
*
The gradual progress from the world of children to the grown-up world manifests itself in another way as well. As the nine-year-old Pupe grows into a sixteen-year-old, subtle changes occur in the nature of the story, slowly transforming it.The Pupe who was once ready to believe any impossible thing—who, on hearing of a pen that could make any sum come out right, could clap her hands and cry,‘What fun that would be!’, who invented stories about regaling tigers with the dregs of tea in her father’s cup, and fretted over the possibility that an Englishman’s ghost might starve—is not the Pupe of the story’s close. In the tenth chapter, her grandfather tells her,‘Your wits are ripening rather precociously, so today I think I’ll remind you that at one time you too were young.’The new Pupe can challenge,‘Let the story be built on a tougher skeleton this time. If we can’t slurp it down, we’ll at least be able to chew on it. Perhaps I’ll like it better then.’ A little further on, she comments,‘The young always show signs of age.’Thus, Pupe grows up.The nameless He, who once stood before her fancy, grows older with her. She knows now that He is ‘made up’, and remarks on his growing up as ‘progressing on a line parallel to my own’.
That is not all: another change is now seen in the story. He slowly begins to disappear from it, and his place is taken by a fourth character, Sukumar. The story moves from anonymity towards names; the imagination abandons ‘hysteria’ for a spellbound, dreamlike state. At the very beginning, the narrator asks,‘Now who is this story about? Our He isn’t a prince, but a very ordinary man. He eats, sleeps, goes to the office and is fond of the cinema.’Yet, towards the end he is forced to admit,‘I think we’ll have to seek the help of a prince’, and that prince turns out to be Sukumar. Sukumar does not himself talk of fantastic things; instead, he wants to hear what the parrot of fairy tales tells his mate. Like the parrot, Sukumar yearns to be where to exist is only to fly, without even a destination to fly towards. Like the parrot’s mate, he thinks of the forest full of fruits, flowers and trailing vines, where ‘at night, fireflies cast a shimmering veil over that clump of kamranga bushes; and in the monsoon, when the rain comes down in steady torrents, the coconut palms sway and their fronds brush against each other’. Sukumar would like to try being a sal tree and can imagine the murmur of new leaves quivering through his body and drifting up into the clouds.All he wants is to live as one with nature: that is why Dadamashai, facing his audience of Pupe and Sukumar, can keep saying that the scientific mind can accept the coexistence of two opposites; it does not have to choose between ‘either this or that’. He can talk to them of the beginning of the world, of life’s first foray upon the earth.
Sukumar even hears the story of Dadamashai’s encounter with death. ‘You know how I used to love Dhiru,’ begins Dadamashai, and goes on to describe how he watched Dhiru’s death draw close, and how he came to terms with that grief:
There seemed to be a droning in the sky. I don’t quite know why I kept saying to myself,‘From the western sky comes peace, made manifest in night—cool, dark, still. Darkness comes at the end of each day, but today it seems to have a special form and touch.’ I closed my eyes, and let the slowly approaching darkness wash over my mind and body, saying inside me,‘O peace, O night, you are my Didi, my sister of ages without end. As you stand waiting at sunset’s door, draw my little brother Dhiru to your breast; relieve him of his suffering.’
Dadamashai knows his words will touch Sukumar’s understanding, for he is all feeling and imagination, with the creative mind of the true artist.To study painting under Nandalal-babu is Sukumar’s dearest wish. When his father refuses to allow it, he secretly escapes abroad, like the madcap Abhik of Rabindranath’s story Rabibar (Sunday, 1939). Abhik went as a ship’s stoker; Sukumar goes ‘to train as a pilot’. But both leave behind a few of their paintings.‘For ten whole years, I’ve practised painting,’ Sukumar writes in his diary. ‘I’ve never shown anyone my pictures.’ Moreover, he asks Pupe’s Dadamashai to show her the paintings and see if he can make her take back her first scornful laugh at his artistic ambitions. If he fails, the pictures should be torn up. As for Abhik, he writes to his left-behind sweetheart,
Bibha,‘Nowhere in Bengal will these pictures be valued at a higher price than torn-up paper’, but continues, ‘just as the thrust of a shovel sometimes reveals hidden treasure, I dare to boast that one day my pictures’ priceless radiance will suddenly come to light.Till then, laugh as you will—’
The painter Rabindranath discloses himself through Sukumar’s— or Abhik’s—preoccupation with art. The last decade of his life, in which he created these characters, was the time when Rabindranath himself turned to painting. It was also the time when he most doubted his claim upon this new creative form that he discovered only in his late years. ‘Many ignorant fools have wrongly praised my pictures. And the untruthful have resorted to artifice’—in these words of Abhik’s, Rabindranath’s own voice is clearly heard. But he did not give himself totally over to self-doubt: a profound inner self-belief was in evidence as well. In one of his affectionate letters to Nirmalkumari Mahalanobis (29 November 1928), he writes:‘Earlier, my mind had laid its listening ear against the sky, it heard the melodies of the breeze, its words; these days it has opened its eyes and exists in the realm of shapes, amidst a crowd of strokes and lines. I look at plants and trees, and see them more intensely—it is clear to me that the world is a great procession of forms.’
It must be remembered that the grotesque is part of this realm of forms.‘Whatever we see,’ says Rabindranath in the same letter,‘a bit of stone, a donkey, a thorn-bush, an old woman—anything’, if we can, with certainty, see it,‘we touch the infinite’. Just as he paints stroke after stroke in an effort to capture this world of shapes, he also attaches images to his words.This connection between words and pictures is evident not only in the fact that books like Shey are illustrated with just such strokes of the author’s brush, it exists also in his obvious preoccupation with forms and shapes throughout the story. Hence Dadamashai can tell Pupe, ‘I had wanted to be a bit of the landscape, stretched over a wide expanse.’To imagine oneself as an entire landscape seems outlandish to Pupe, but Sukumar’s mind stirs in response. He says, ‘It’s fun to think of you spreading over trees and streams and becoming part of them.’