It was also in this same year of 1890 that his father sent him unprepared to manage the estates in eastern Bengal and Orissa, a fortuitous move that opened a new world of nature and peasantry to the city-dwelling aristocrat. Living on his grandfather’s elegantly appointed houseboat, which he dubbed Padmā, the name of the river on which she was originally moored, he wandered up and down the rivers that crisscrossed the estates. On these long sojourns sometimes lasting weeks on end, he discovered the intensity of the seasons, the vastness of rice paddies, the rhythms of rural life, and the alternating threat and serenity provided by the sweeping rivers of eastern Bengal. That landscape would imprint itself on Tagore’s emotional world.
The business of management and the reverie of the land proved to be a salutary combination during the next decade. Although Bengali prose had been developing dramatically during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, in the 1890s Rabindranath essentially invented a new prose style for his short stories and novels. He incorporated numerous Sanskritic terms and roots to coin a new Bengali lexicon, while constantly experimenting with syntax and grammar. But it was the rhythm and music of his prose that captured the imagination as much as the microscopic gaze into this rural backwater, which land composed the bulk of the family estates. His was prose meant to be heard as much as read. In a span of five years he produced forty-four short stories, many published initially in the journal Sādhanā, which he was editing; six volumes of short stories would emerge by the turn of the century.3 In these tales, the country not only presented itself metaphorically as emotion, it came to represent a nostalgia, for ancient India stumbling its way to a modernity forced onto it by the colonial domination of the British empire. By contrast, the city often invoked the hustle and bustle of that empire, a distinctly different way of life. He dragged his readers back and forth between them almost as much as he did his own family with his constant movement between Calcutta and Shelidah, his zamandari.
Tagore’s poetry of the same period seemed to reach a maturity that broke free of convention, perhaps not coincidentally at the same time that his love affair with the folk music of Bengal took a definitive shape. Although familiar with the folk idiom in Calcutta, Tagore frequently encountered local boatmen and itinerant bards, their vast repertoire of traditional ballads reflecting the distinct regions of the Bengali-speaking world; and he was also entertained by the Bāuls and other religious mendicants, who wandered the countryside singing their special brand of mystical experience. The newly formed Baṅgīya Sāhitya Pariṣad, or Bengali Literary Academy, in Calcutta, had begun in earnest to collect folk songs, ballads, local plays, while at the same time collecting and standardizing the editing of poetic, epic and semi-epic, and religious manuscripts from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Tagore supported and inspired many to pay close attention to these little-studied genres that he was encountering firsthand. His own musical talents were spurred by this close contact with rural musical forms particularly, and it was during this period that his distinctive musical style would be shaped into what today is considered a quintessentially Bengali genre that bears his name, Rabīndrasaṅgīt. The music was simple, the lyrics perhaps more so, but the performance was dominated by virtuosity of vocalized emotion, which standard was set by Tagore himself, whose voice was legendary. The corpus today contains hundreds of songs and can be heard on every public occasion and in nearly every household.
During the Shelidah residency his poetry manifested a lyric quality that paralleled the musical shift in his prose of this period. But this poetry spoke with a searching inner voice that resonated with the rustic Bāul, who followed maner mānuṣ, “the man within the heart.”4 Outward ritual was rejected in favor of personal cultivation of direct connection with the divine, divinity that is found in nature and, perhaps most profoundly, in the emotional drama of human love. It is an old theme in Bengal, one that had earlier compelled the Vaiṣṇava poets who had been inspired by the sixteenth-century Bengali god-man Kṛṣṇa Caitanya. For Tagore, who began his literary career as an erstwhile Vaiṣṇava poet named Bhānu, allegorizing the soul’s search for God in the love play of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa, the mature version of this human-divine connection would inform his remaining poetry, much of it a meditation on his jīvan devatā, the “the living God within,” his muse.
Leading up to his fateful trip to the United Kingdom and the United States in 1912 and ’13, Tagore’s stature finally began to catch up to his astonishing literary output. His plays, which were musicals or lyric dramas that included many songs, often spurred his poetry, perhaps not consciously, by giving him the opportunity to test their aural mettle. While furiously editing three different literary journals, he expanded the song repertoire that began life in his plays into volumes of poetry that would soon make him famous outside of India—most notable among them, Gītāñjali (Song Offerings). The English version of Gitanjali (written without diacritics) was translated and edited by Tagore himself, and arranged with minor emendations by W. B. Yeats.5 Yeats nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he won in 1913. Tagore’s idealism seemed to appeal to the selection committee, but it was his mystical strain that produced such a strong response in Yeats and the reading public in Europe, the United States, and South America.
What was circulated as Gitanjali in the West was a selection from three different volumes of poetry from the years leading up to his trip: Naivedya, or Leavings (referring to the food offerings returned to devotees after being presented to the Lord), Kheyā, or Ferry (the ferry a common Bengali trope for navigating the rivers of life), and Gītāñjali, or Song Offerings (añjali, offering, is usually flower petals in cupped hands to the deity; the offering here being gīta, or song). Ironically, the selection of 103 prose poems is only a fraction of what was in the original Gītāñjali itself, because Tagore did not feel that English speakers would be capable of understanding the imagery native to Bengal. He edited heavily, not only in his selection, but in his translation, in effect creating an entirely new poetry in English that emphasized his spiritual, mystical side, the universal dimension of his very Bengali world. Rabindranath’s decision to turn the familiar landscape of Bengal into something foreign—for instance the flat fields of paddy became rolling meadows—left Bengali readers wanting for what they had come to recognize as a Tagore trademark, and it skewed dramatically the impression of his poetry among English readers; Western audiences never saw the unique coupling of the Bengali landscape to his emotional world. It was a choice that would haunt him. Because of this overly mystical emphasis, he gained celebrity as a guru as well as a poet, feeding the banal dichotomy of material West and spiritual East, while inadvertently playing to European fascination with the ancient rishi, the seer.6
Soon after that publication came two more volumes in Bengali in the same vein as Gītāñjali, but which should not be seen as simple extensions of the first: Gītimālya (Garland of Songs) and Gītālī (Lyrics). As was becoming evident in Gītāñjali, the songs of the boatmen of eastern Bengal and the wandering Bāuls shaped the music and the idiom of these poems. In these several volumes the reader became intimately familiar with Rabindranath’s antaryāmī, or “indweller,” as he accompanied this guide through the brooding skies and swelling waters of the monsoon floods. Following the lead of the Bāuls, the language of these poems is rife with the terms adopted by esoteric country mystics, an individualistic communion with a divinity immanent in the world and within every human being. All of these paths express a desire for liberation, described as “dead while alive” (jyānte morā); Rabindranath, too, articulated a wistful desire for such a state. To express this liberating sense he addressed Death personified. One is left to wonder about the increasing frequency of such references, for in the previous decade he had endured the death of his father Debendranath, his wife Mrinalini, his daughter Renuka, and his son Samindranath. These deaths weighed heavily. Considering Rabindranath’s already well-developed fascination with mortality, the desire
for a liberation of life from its worldly constraints, though never morbid, comes through clearly in the English version of Gitanjali.
From this point forward Tagore’s poetic voice was, especially for his English readers, more or less fixed, and many feel the next period is rather poetically uninventive. He became much more of a public figure and in 1915 received a knighthood, which he would try unsuccessfully to renounce in political protest some four years later. This public life, which placed him on a world stage with Gandhi and other leaders of the nationalist movement, gave him the profile sufficient to generate funds to create a university at one of his family estates in Santiniketan (Abode of Peace), near Bolpur outside of Calcutta. Although not as experimental and fragile as it was during Tagore’s lifetime, today this university ranks as one of the finest private institutions in the subcontinent. As he toured the world to raise money for his world university, Visva Bharati, and its companion technical school at Sriniketan (Abode of Abundance), which was dedicated to agrarian reform, peripatetic cannot even begin to describe his restless movement. In the next twenty-five years he would visit more than thirty different countries; many of them, especially the United States and Britain, he would visit repeatedly. After a long lull of moderate poetic activity—though he did manage a number of major novels and novellas, numerous essays, and published letters—his trip to Argentina in 1924, where he stayed in the home of Victoria Ocampo, seemed to have reawakened the muse. He would persist in all genres for the remainder of his life, writing poetry up to the end. The very last of his poems he dictated on his deathbed. Unadorned and direct, they were posthumously published as his Śeṣa Lekhā (Final Compositions). Somehow, in the urgent movement from continent to continent, Rabindranath managed to return time and again to those little poems that began his publishing career, for they held a fascination for him like nothing else in his oeuvre. He would revise the Rādhā–Kṛṣṇa episodes of Bhānusiṃha for the last time within a few months of his death in 1941.
2. About Kṛṣṇa, Rādhā, and the Gopīs: Bengali Vaiṣṇava Poetry
The songs of Bhānu speak of the love of Kṛṣṇa, the Dark Lord, the cowherd lover of the young and guileless women of Braj. It is an old mythology, whose most prominent source is the tenth book of the Sanskrit Bhāgavata Purāṇa, which might have been compiled as early as the eighth or ninth centuries, but probably later; old Sanskrit texts are notoriously difficult to date because they are understood to be anonymous revelations of Truth rather than books with historical authors. The proper subject matter for this and other Purāṇas is the play of the gods. It is an activity whose point is often hidden from humans, who can only behold it as marvelous and awesome, in the old senses of those words. This activity is styled līlā, or play, a word that evokes the licking of flames, endlessly moving and brilliant, though unpredictable. The god most closely associated with this idea is Kṛṣṇa, the Dark One. He is Śyāma, that blackish emerald-blue-green color whose beauty and grace stagger anyone lucky enough to behold it. Those lucky ones today are his worshipers called Vaiṣṇavas, after one of his most ancient forms as Viṣṇu.
As far back as the Bhagavad Gītā, Hindu tradition has it that Kṛṣṇa descends to earth whenever the world languishes under the burden of sinful action, when humans lose sight of dharma, that is, of what is proper and good. The descent is called avatāra, an ancient Sanskrit word that is often wrongly construed as “incarnation,” when it simply means to cross down from heaven to earth, to appear or be manifest. The flesh is not involved, so there is no carnal tinge. But in one of the great ironies of this tradition, Kṛṣṇa’s actions as an adolescent are all about love—not some abstract or Platonic form, but the fleshy, lustful sort.
When he came to earth, Kṛṣṇa grew up in the region of Braj, in a village called Vṛndāvana, not far from the modern Indian city of Agra. He was raised by foster parents, Nanda and Yaśodā, who were affectionately indulgent. His early life was a giant frolic between cowherding duties and domestic chores; he and his brother played endless games with his cowherd friends and teased mercilessly the cowherd girls, called gopīs. His affairs with these girls speak to the pulsing heat of adolescence, bodies coming together in secret trysts, liaisons that risk for these young women a lifetime of opprobrium for the irresistible thrill of the moment.
The rainy season is the time for lovers, when the brooding landscape is suddenly fecund, reinvigorated from its desiccation brought on by the relentless heat of summer. It is especially during this season, when regular activity comes to a halt, that Kṛṣṇa calls the cowherd girls into the forest with the enchanting sound of his flute. The milkmaids can no more resist the temptation of Kṛṣṇa’s beckoning flute than they can follow him, when he leaves Braj, to the man’s world of the ancient capital city of Mathurā, there to embark on the next phase of his martial work as avatāra, the slaying of the demon king Kaṃsa. The gopīs are driven to distraction, willing to forfeit their honor, their names, their standing in the world for but a glimpse of this young paramour. In trysts on the banks of the river, in the tamāla groves, in stands of jungly wildflowers, he satisfies them all, inasmuch as it is possible to satisfy the insatiable. The young women feign resistance, but they always secretly thrill when Kṛṣṇa steals their clothes and makes them stand before him to beg, or when he multiplies himself so that each gopī imagines she alone is dancing with Kṛṣṇa in the famous round dance under the full moon. Though he loves them all, there is one he favors: the golden-complexioned Rādhā.
Rādhā has many rivals among these young women and is the envy of all: her love for Kṛṣṇa is so complete that he is as irresistibly attracted to her as she to him. She, in her selflessness, affords Kṛṣṇa the greatest pleasure, and so becomes the model for all lovers and all devotees of this fickle god. Rādhā’s love is most deeply satisfying because it is complete, unpredictable to the point of being distractedly contrary or “crooked,” ever-fresh. It is by the standards of this tradition perfect. She alone is truly worthy. Yet inherent in Rādhā’s distracted and all-consuming love lies the inevitable immolation of emotion that results from burning too hot, too fast.
This heartache takes the form of a burning desire to possess the beloved, a longing that is like no other, yet colored with the knowledge that the object of desire can be only fleetingly embraced. Each of these girls, and Rādhā most of all, suffers through this torment when she cannot be with her lord; it is the elixir of love mixed with a dose of agony, much as the Greeks envisioned eros as glukupikron, the “sweet-bitter.”7 It is their common plight and binds them uniquely; it becomes their permanent ontological condition. The Vaiṣṇava poets who relive this ancient activity as part of their devotional calling pronounce this agony viraha, the pain of separation, the true condition of any lover, of any devotee. And through the heat of this agony, known vicariously through song and meditation, the devotee experiences a salvific transformation, using the intense quality of the aesthetic experience as a vehicle to encounter God. The ancient aestheticians described explicitly, though not graphically, the occasional and fleeting love-in-union, but they favored as the dominant trope its opposite, love-in-separation. The agonizing want, the viraha, that ensues from this separation, becomes the prevailing mood. Eventually Kṛṣṇa will leave these young women for the capital city of Mathurā and set about the business of his avatāra, slaying evil kings and demons, leading the forces of good to victory on the battlefield of the great civil war that was rendered in the epic Mahābhārata.
For centuries Vaiṣṇavas all over India have tended to focus on one or another aspect of their lord’s life: his childhood exploits, his preadolescent play with his brother and other companions, or his warring days as Arjuna’s charioteer in the great civil war. But Kṛṣṇa’s Bengali devotees have always favored the erotic mode of his adolescence in the sleepy little town of Vṛndāvana on the banks of the Yamunā River. And it is this poetry of trysting unions and impatient longing that the adole
scent Rabindranath first wrote. Many see the Vaiṣṇava sensibility as the foundation of Rabindranath’s emotional landscapes, and the imagery certainly bears this out. Just how this aesthetic works is worth examining.
Bengali Vaiṣṇava poems are based on a concept called rasa. Rasa means variously “juice” or “sap,” the life-giving force of something, which extends to include the notion of “essence,” especially in relation to emotions. The point is not to experience the emotion directly, but to “savor” it, to “taste” its rasa, its essential core stripped of any contingencies that might diminish its force. It is a vicarious emotional practice, best experienced through idealized dramatic presentation in poetry, drama, and song, and, for the adept, in meditation. The skilled poet will manipulate the stories the audience knows so well, and in that process call forth a variety of emotions with which the devotee will learn to identify until they become part of his or her own nature. In a purely literary context, the manipulation will produce sensations of pleasure and pain, or joy and sorrow, but in this religious context the aesthetic experience—always one of love—becomes itself the vehicle for transcendence. The most powerfully transcendent experience, according to Bengali Vaiṣṇavas, is the love of Kṛṣṇa. It is this love that becomes the traditional focal point of poetic exploration, the poetry a living witness to that love.
Love of course is anything but monolithic. The great Vaiṣṇava theologian Rūpa Gosvāmī, writing in Sanskrit in the sixteenth century, discriminates five fundamentally different types of love, each of which is worthy as an approach to Kṛṣṇa, but which are not equal in satisfying him.8 The different types might be understood by looking at particular roles people play in relation to the object of their love. A subject of a king will, for instance, love the king with awe and respect, while a servant might love that same king with a more intimate, personal devotion. Yet both remain vertically distant. Friends, too, have special privileges that only companionship affords: joking relations, physical contact, a special brand of honesty and sharing. There is a different and greater kind of intimacy that occurs between the king and his son. It is a love that allows the child to transgress boundaries impossible for others, for the child will be indulged to crawl in his lap, to pull his beard, to revel in his touch. But it is lovers who experience the most complete forms of love. The erotic is considered the most complete because, in its full form, it subsumes the other types, standing atop the hierarchy of love not as different but encompassing, and it is driven ultimately by an unparalleled passion.9 By being complete, it is the most satisfying to Kṛṣṇa.