There was a large mast lying on the mud by the river. A bunch of naked little boys had, after much debate, realized that if they heaved and puffed and shouted they would be able to roll it along, and that this would be an exciting new game. They set to work to carry out this plan: ‘Heave ho! Watch her go! Heave ho!’ Each time they managed to roll it over, they all cheered. But there were a couple of girls among the boys, and their feelings were different. They were forced, because they had no friends of their own, to join in with the boys, but were obviously not enjoying such a violent, physical game. One of the girls, solemnly and coolly and without speaking, firmly sat herself down on the mast…2
But some of the passages often quoted as sources for the short stories do not seem to be sources at all. Tagore was friendly with a local postmaster: early on, a post office was actually situated in a ground-floor room of the family house at Sajadpur. But the real postmaster does not seem to correspond with the postmaster in Tagore’s famous story of that name: it is hard to imagine the dreamy, lonely postmaster of the story telling this amusing anecdote:
Yesterday he told me that the local people so revered the Ganges that if a relative died they would grind his bones into powder and keep it; then, if anyone came who had drunk the waters of the Ganges, they would mix the bone-powder with his drink and, by so doing, imagine that part of their dead relative had mingled with the Ganges. I laughed and said, ‘You’re making it up.’ He thought soberly for a while and then confessed, ‘Could be, sir, could be.’1
Moreover, many of the characters in the stories are not ‘simple village people’, but of the middle or gentry class. Some stories are more urban than rural; some are supernatural fantasies; and many of them contradict Tagore’s statement in the same English interview quoted above that he had ‘no social or political problems’ in mind when he wrote them. The thirty stories translated for the present volume convey, in fact, a complex and varied picture of a society in transition, and are far from being simple scenes of timeless peasant life. So what was the exact nature of the relationship between Tagore’s short stories and his experiences as a zamindar in East Bengal?
There is no doubt that the decade in which Tagore’s main address was ‘Kuthibari, Shelidah, Nadia District, East Bengal’ was crucial to his emotional, intellectual and spiritual development. His pantheism, his involvement with rural economic improvement, his dislike of the city, his calls for Hindu–Muslim unity, his interest in folk-literature and the songs of the wandering Bauls,2 were all rooted in these vital years away from the cultured yet oppressive atmosphere of Jorasanko, the Tagore house in Calcutta. The Tagore family owned three paraganas (estates) in the Padma river region, acquired by Tagore’s grandfather Dwarkanath: Birahimpur, Kaligram and Sajadpur (all now in Bangladesh). The kāchāri (estate office) for Birahimpur was at Shelidah; for Kaligram it was at Potisar; Sajadpur was named after the village where the Tagores owned a large (but little-used) zamindar’s house. In November 1889 Tagore’s father, Debendranath, transferred the management of the estates from Jyotirindranath (Rabindranath’s fifth eldest brother) to Rabindranath, with the clear understanding that he would be an active, resident landlord rather than the absentee that most Calcutta landowners had become. Debendranath had striven hard to pay off the debts incurred by the extravagant Dwarkanath, and had kept his share of the inheritance in his hands (the sons of his late brother Girindranath, on coming of age, received two-fifths). Because the estates had previously been in danger, and because Debendranath was a man of the highest moral principles, he believed that the tenants should have a resident landlord. Perhaps he also felt that practical experience would be good for his poetically inclined, formally unqualified youngest son.
Tagore had been to the Padma once as a child with his brother Jyotirindranath, and near the end of his life he recalled the trip in his book chelebelā (‘My Boyhood Days’, 1940). But he had no real acquaintance with the region. Immediately on taking charge of the estates, he took his wife, a maid, his daughter Bela, his son Rathindranath and his nephew Balendranath on an exploratory visit – vividly described in one of his first letters to his niece Indira Devi.1 Then as now the journey from Calcutta was quite complicated. Kusthia could be reached by rail via Ranaghat: from there Shelidah could either be reached by boat, north-west along the small Gorai river and then east along the Padma; or else the Gorai could be crossed and Shelidah reached by land from the south.
He took his family back to Calcutta, but immediately returned to Shelidah. His isolated jamidāri life now began in earnest. Shelidah was his headquarters, but he also stayed at Sajadpur, and spent many nights on the magnificent family houseboat – which his father and grandfather had kept on the Hooghly in Calcutta but which Rabindranath brought to Shelidah, naming it the ‘Padma’. It had two main bedrooms and a dining-room, and was handsomely fitted out in nineteenth-century aristocratic style; and in this boat Tagore could travel along the Ichamati and Baral rivers to Sajadpur, or the Atrai river to Kaligram.
Legend has it that the name ‘Shelidah’ derives from an English indigo-planter called Shelley, and the daha (whirlpool) formed by the confluence of the Padma and Gorai rivers.2 An older kuṭhibāṛi (indigo-factory house) had fallen into decay, and an attractive two-storey house was built by Jyotirindranath. It can still be visited today, and there are relics such as the pālki (palanquin) in which Tagore was carried round the villages. The Padma river has retreated a long way from the house, and in the dry season can barely be seen; but the peace and isolation of the place can still be appreciated.
Tagore felt lonely at first, missing his four-year-old daughter and two-year-old son; his early letters to his wife do not always describe the region in rhapsodic terms.1 His estate-duties, which he always carried out most conscientiously, were sometimes irksome and interfered with his writing and thought. His letters give glimpses – not always complimentary – of some of the staff with whom he had to work, including ‘Maulabi-saheb’, an Urdu-speaking non-Bengali Muslim who seems to have exhausted Tagore with his endless talking:
Maulabi-saheb follows me around all the time. He drives me mad with his constant chatter. He’s as hard to bear as the rheumatism in my shoulders that I suffered at Sajadpur… This morning he isn’t here, so I’m getting some relief.2
But irritations apart, Tagore quickly came to love the region profoundly. Its rivers, skies, fields, sandbanks and changing seasons pervade many of his stories, inspired numerous poems, and were above all celebrated in the magnificent letters that he wrote between 1888 and 1895 to his niece Indira Devi, daughter of Satyendranath Tagore. These letters are much more consciously literary than the letters he wrote to his wife or to friends such as the writer Pramatha Chaudhuri (who married Indira) or the scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose; and in March 1895 he asked her to copy them out. From the two khātā (exercise-books) that they filled, preserved in the Tagore archives at Santiniketan, he made an extensive selection of letters, calling them chinnapatra (‘Torn Leaves’, 1912).3
His restlessly itinerant life (the family also owned estates in Orissa which he visited from time to time), long absences from his wife and children, and a growing conviction that life and education away from the city would be healthier for them, made him decide to bring them to Shelidah. Moreover in February 1895 he and his nephews Surendranath and Balendranath had started a business venture, ‘Tagore & Co.’, dealing in grain, jute, and sugar-cane-crushing machines, and the office was at nearby Kusthia.1 So in August 1898 he brought his wife and five children to Kuthibari. His son Rathindranath in his memoir of his father recalls their life there affectionately: the houseboat trips in the winter, botanical expeditions with Jagadish Chandra Bose, the medieval ceremonials with which the village headmen would greet the arrival of Tagore the zamindar, and the unusual arrangements that were made for the children’s education:
Our teacher of English was an Englishman of a rather interesting type. He was given a bungalow in the compound. There he lived with thousand
s of silkworms in which he had become interested through Akshoy Kumar Maitra, the historian. On Sundays, discarding all clothes, Mr Lawrence would wrap himself in old newspapers and lie amongst the caterpillars, which delighted in crawling all over him. He was very fond of them and used to say they were his children.2
Reading between the lines of Tagore’s letters to his wife, however – before she came to live at Shelidah, and afterwards when she was visiting relatives in Calcutta – it is not hard to see that she never really shared his fondness for a remote and peaceful rural life far away from the city. This was but one of the many temperamental differences between them. Eleven years his junior (she was only eleven when he married her in 1883), she did not live long enough for him to understand fully that it is not fair for a poet to expect his wife to be a soul-mate. The attempt to live as a family at Shelidah lasted only two years. In the summer of 1901, arrangements for the marriage of his eldest daughter, Madhurilata (Bela), were put in train: Tagore’s wife was no doubt relieved to make this an excuse to stay on in Calcutta. But there were other factors weakening his ties with Shelidah. Three grandsons of Debendranath’s brother Girindranath were of age now and were entitled to a share of Dwarkanath’s bequest. After a court-case in 1897, the Sajadpur estate and some other lands were transferred to them, and Debendranath’s final will of 1899 laid down further divisions. Rabindranath kept the Birahimpur (Shelidah) estate until 1921, when it passed to Satyendranath’s son Surendranath; but long before then Tagore’s interests had shifted to Santiniketan, where his unique experiment in education and community living was inaugurated by the foundation of the Santiniketan ashram in 1901. His visits to the region he had loved so much became more and more infrequent. In a letter to his wife written towards the end of 1901, we sense the closing of a chapter:
I find it very poignant to be back here at Shelidah. It’s human nature always to find what we are about to leave more beautiful. I associate Shelidah with both happy and sad memories – but more of them are happy than sad. This is not, though, the best time to be here. Everything is soaked in dew, there is mist until eight o’clock in the morning, and in the evening there is fog. The water is very low in the well and the pond – malaria is widespread. We were right to leave Shelidah: the children would have fallen ill if we had stayed. Bolpur is much purer and healthier. But what masses of roses are in bloom! Huge, beautiful roses. And there’s a lovely smell of acacia-flowers all around. Your old friend Shelidah sends you a few acacia-flowers with this letter.1
Tagore is recalling here the realities of his life at Shelidah with and without his family, and he typically uses in his third sentence the Bengali words sukh (‘pleasure’, ‘happiness’) and duḥkh (‘sadness’, ‘trouble’). These are frequent words in Tagore’s writing, and the euphonious and rhythmic compound sukhe-dukhe (‘in happiness and sadness’) often trips off his tongue in poems and songs. It is sometimes tempting to translate this as ‘in joy and sorrow’, but the spiritual connotation that these English words have is probably not right for sukh and duḥkh, which always seem to refer to immediate, physical, material moods and feelings (‘joy’ would be ānanda).
In order to capture the exact nature of Tagore’s experience of riverine Bengal, and its relationship with his stories, let us begin on land, as it were, with immediate day-to-day reality, using one of the headings that Tagore gave to a brief three-part selection of his letters to Indira Devi that he included in bicitra prabandha (‘Miscellaneous Essays’, 1907).
sthale (on land)
Because the beauties of the Padma region inspired Tagore to such rhapsodies and ecstasies – in his letters to Indira Devi and in many of his poems – it is tempting to see this as the dominant mood. But romantic though he was, he always kept his feet on the ground. If we take the totality of his life at Shelidah, including his practical work as a zamindar and businessman, his domestic life, and his editorial work, as well as the whole range of his poetry and stories, we find that realism is just as much present as lyricism, romanticism or pantheism. Perhaps the most moving of his poems of the 1890s are to be found in citrā and caitāli (1896); and it is worth looking at them in order to understand that even in his lyric poetry the note of realism is strong. The best modern critics of Tagore – especially Abu Sayeed Ayyub1 in his celebrated book ādhunikatā o rabīndranāth (‘Modernism and Rabindranath’, 1968) – have rightly associated this realism with the strain of uncertainty, foreboding, despair or agnosticism that runs right through Tagore’s work, in his youthful writing as well as in the stark poetry of his old age. Ayyub rightly quotes sandhyā (‘Evening’) from citrā as a touchstone for this realistic, doubting mood. The beautiful rural evening is exquisitely described, but at the end of the poem this is what the earth seems to draw to her breast as darkness falls:
… such sadness, such torment,
So many wars, so many deaths:
No end! The darkness gradually thickens
As it falls; silence deepens; the world’s
Consciousness sleeps. From the lonely
Earth’s huge heart arises a solemn
Painful question, an agonized weary
Melody flung at the empty sky:
‘Where now? How much further?’
Most of the poems in caitāli are sonnet-like poems of fourteen lines rhymed in delicately precise couplets. They cover many moods. Some are pen-portraits of rural people – a girl looking after her little brother by the riverside, or a herd-boy coaxing a cow into the river for a bath; and sometimes what Tagore observes and feels is bleak. In karuṇā (‘Tragedy’) a child is run over by a cart and his mother rolls on the ground, her clothes coming adrift in grief. In mauna (‘Silence’) the poet himself succumbs to despair: ‘Today, everything I have said seems pointless… In the depth of the night, nothing but the cry of dumb, idiotic silence seems to speak out of the dark.’ In anābṛṣṭi (‘Drought’), we have a world deserted by the gods:
I have heard that in a former time the gods
Used to come from heaven to earth
Out of love for womankind. That time has gone.
By the dried-up, burnt-up river and fields
Of this Baiśākh day, a peasant-girl
Pitifully entreats, ‘Come, send rain!’
She keeps on looking at the sky
With sad eyes, in pathetic expectation.
But rain does not come; the deaf wind
Impatiently drives away all clouds;
The sun licks up all moisture from the sky
With his fierce tongue. In the age of Kali,
Alas, the gods have grown old. A girl’s
Plea can only be directed, now, at man.
Moving from this poem to the short stories in the present volume, can even the most cursory reader deny that the world and age they describe is the same kali-yuga (age of Kali1) in which the gods have grown old? Story after story is tragic, often unbearably so. What consolation is there for Raicharan in ‘Little Master’s Return’? Or for Ratan at the end of ‘The Postmaster’? Or for Banamali in ‘The Divide’? What salvation is there for Yajnanath in ‘Wealth Surrendered’? Or for Kadambini in ‘The Living and the Dead’? What future is there for the princess in ‘False Hope’? What reassurance for the dog at the end of ‘Unwanted’? No wonder Tagore was stung when critics accused him of writing unrealistic, poeticized stories! At the very end of his life, in May 1941, in a conversation with Buddhadeva Bose, one of the leading Bengali critics and poets of the 1930s, he stressed with some pain that his stories were true to life:
I have written innumerable short lyrics – maybe no other poet in the world has written so many – but I feel surprised when you say that my stories are over poetical. At one time I used to rove down Bengal’s rivers, and I observed the wonderful way of life of Bengal’s villages… I would say there is no lack of realism in my stories. I wrote from what I saw, what I felt in my heart – my direct experience… Those who say that my stories are fanciful are wrong. Maybe one could say
that in stories such as ‘Skeleton’ or ‘The Hungry Stones’ imagination predominates, but not completely even in those.1
Defenders of Tagore have taken pains to point out the close observation that does indeed lie behind many of the characters, scenes and situations in his stories – the vivid picture of Bengal that is found in them. Buddhadeva Bose himself, for example, in a fine essay on Tagore’s stories, wrote:
All of Bengal can be found here. Not only facts, but her living soul: we feel her pulse as we turn the pages of galpaguccha. Her changing seasons, the vital flow of her rivers, her plains, her bamboo-groves, her festival canopies and chariots; her cool, moist, richly fertile fragrance; her mischievous, noisy, lively boys and girls; her kind, skilled, intelligent women…2
His patriotic list goes on for several more lines, and other Bengali critics have repeated or extended it; or they have pointed to the accuracy of the stories as social documents. We find in Tagore’s stories ample evidence of his reflections on child-marriage and the dowry-system (‘Profit and Loss’); bigoted orthodoxy or casteism (‘Son-sacrifice’); changing landlord–tenant relations (‘A Problem Solved’); the political frustrations of a rising educated class (‘A Single Night’); the growing gulf between town and country (‘The Postmaster’); ruinous litigation (‘The Divide’); dehumanizing poverty (‘Punishment’); cruel and corrupt officialdom (‘Thoughtlessness’). But to find elements of naturalism in Tagore’s stories does not seem to get to the heart of his realism, which was essentially the realism of feeling. This is what Tagore clearly felt he had achieved, and this was why he was not prepared to dismiss as unrealistic even the supernatural stories – ‘Skeleton’, ‘In the Middle of the Night’, ‘The Hungry Stones’, and several others not included in the present selection. Such stories are just as full of pathos, grief, anguish and terror as the more naturalistic tales. They are also full of humour and irony – and this is another aspect of Tagore’s realism that is found in both ‘supernatural’ and ‘natural’ stories. In many the narrator of the story is a shallow, jaunty, self-regarding individual, who is changed and deepened by the events of the story, or by a story told to him by someone else. This ‘Ancient Mariner’ technique is particularly characteristic of the supernatural tales, as if Tagore was concerned to place the fantastic and other-worldly within an ordinary, realistic frame. But the same tone is found in the ‘natural’ stories like ‘Kabuliwallah’, ‘The Editor’ or ‘hākurdā’; and Tagore’s capacity for scepticism, mockery and hard-headed rationality contributes just as much to his realism as does his awareness of grief and suffering.