Just Rabindranath

At the back of the new Everyman edition titled The Best of Tagore is an endorsement extracted from the Guardian that reads: “One of the most remarkable poets and thinkers produced by India, or indeed the world. Even that grand description does not do him justice”. This is, as most readers of Tagore know already, neither exaggeration nor excessive praise. It also brings to mind two regrets: that the world still does not really know Tagore’s work, despite repeated injunctions in the form of new editions from the best publishing houses to refresh our perception; and that we do not remember anymore that he was “one of the most remarkable poets … produced by India”.

Born in Calcutta in 1861, Tagore began publishing his work while in his teens and went on publishing prolifically, in several genres, until his death at the age of eighty in 1941. That he was a poet first and foremost, both in his own mind and in the minds of his readers, with all the implications such a belief might have (irrespective, with regard to how he saw himself, of whether it does justice to the heterogeneity of his work), is sadly almost forgotten today, and not only outside India.

At the same time, as Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s introduction to the Everyman edition rightly points out, although this is a writer known as Tagore to speakers without Bengali, “[t]o almost all educated Bengalis he is just Rabindranath”. In Bengal today, not just the educated but the uneducated know Rabindranath from the many, mostly hideous statues of a bearded man in long robes that adorn intersections, junctions, parks, libraries and even the airport. The first recipient of a Nobel prize the country ever had (in 1913), long before it became a nation, he has been a cultural-nationalist icon to Indians for a very long time.

Just as an icon is represented by the formal features of its construction and placement, however, Tagore has in time become no more than an outline to his countrymen in general. They may know that he was unique in having composed the national anthems of two countries (Indians traditionally being keen on general knowledge), India’s “Jana Gana Mana” and Bangladesh’s “Amar Shonar Bangla”, and they may be aware of his poem “Where the Mind Is Without Fear”, much anthologized in school textbooks – but it would be fair to say they know little else. And they certainly don’t know the poetry. (Matters may stand otherwise in Bangladesh.)

The world of scholarship has had its own preoccupations. The select bibliography in The Best of Tagore is a good indicator of what they are. It provides several references to Tagore and Gandhi – their debates, interactions, letters – to Tagore and the Nation, to his friendships with the missionary Charles Freer Andrews and Gandhi (again), to a history of the university he founded (Visva-Bharati, established at Santiniketan, north of Calcutta, in 1921), even to his appearance in Amartya Sen’s essay collection The Argumentative Indian (2005). If we are to believe the select bibliography, no worthwhile discussions of Tagore’s poetry exist in English, and there are no essays or books on the songs and poems that deserve mention. It is as if nothing has been said about the poetry of this great poet.

This, however, is a form of amnesia common to educated Indians in a country where the social sciences, history and Stem subjects have dominated the discourse; poetic criticism has been relegated to a nowhere land of no use-value. This underlying context, as well as some idea of a “universal” Tagore (a Tagore who, ironically, can never be properly accessed), informs the way this book comes to us, marginalizing in the process Tagore’s longstanding debate with history. Railing against the “pedantic historian” at the end of his life in the last essay he dictated from his deathbed, Sāhitye Aitihāsikatā (“Historicality in Literature”, 1941), Rabindranath had asserted movingly that he was a poet above all else; that in his own field of creativity he was tied to no public by history. In Ranajit Guha’s translation, the essay began: “I have heard it said again and again that we are guided altogether by history, and I have energetically nodded, so to say, in my mind whenever I have heard it. I have settled this debate in my own heart where I am nothing but a poet”.

The world that was animated by nothing but poetry, however, passed within a few decades of Tagore’s death, leaving us with a denuded, deadening landscape of prose and the prosaic alone. Correspondingly, the positioning of the poems in the volume constitutes – unintentionally perhaps, but all the more tellingly for that – an afterthought, placed as they are right at the end, with all the translations other than Tagore’s own taken principally from two standard resources (the Oxford Tagore Translations of 2011 and the Penguin Selected Poems from 1985, translated by William Radice). For some reason there is nothing here from Ketaki Kushari Dyson’s translations, not least the poems in free verse – gadya kabita – that she rendered so beautifully. The other works available here include the whole of Tagore’s most well-known novel, The Home and the World (1916), and his highly regarded play, Red Oleanders (1924). Excellent and generous as The Best of Tagore is when it comes to the author’s works of fiction, drama, non-fiction and songs, one has to wonder if a poet as subversive and original as he was doesn’t, at this moment, require a more subversive and original approach to anthologizing.

The translation into English of Rabindranath’s Bengali poetry has, in the past, usually failed on many levels; inevitably it struggles to capture most of the repetition of the words and the rhythm of the lines as they are spoken aloud. He once said that he had misremembered a line he had read as a child in a school primer as “jal pa e, pātā na e” (“water falls, the leaves move”), but that it constituted, for him, the substance of all poetry. In their original spoken Bengali rhythm, these words, and indeed the words in all of Rabindranath’s poetry, suffused as it is with the natural world above all else, work to constitute what Roland Barthes called “the rustle of language”: “to rustle is to make audible the very evaporation of noise: the tenuous, the blurred, the tremulous are received as the signs of an auditory annulation”. The reader of poetry, especially the poetry of Rabindranath, must feel akin to the ancient Greek, as described by Hegel, with whom Barthes ends his brief essay: “he interrogated, Hegel says, passionately, uninterruptedly, the rustle of branches, of springs, of winds, in short, the shudder of Nature, in order to perceive in it the design of an intelligence”. That shudder of nature, and of the human, is what Tagore explored ceaselessly in his poems and stories, in a language that actively resists translation, so that few have been successful in reimagining his particular genius through the sounds English makes. This may be the primary reason why the particularity of his contribution to world literature remains unknown.

Given his overwhelming legacy for all of the Bengali literature that followed him, it is perhaps unsurprising that The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories begins with Tagore’s short story “Dead or Alive”. The same story is also included in The Best of Tagore, which usefully provides, in its notes, details of the original title (Bengali title, that is: “Jibita o Mrita”) and date of publication (“July–August 1892”). The bulk of Arunava Sinha’s introduction provides a potted history of the social and political developments in Bengal over the twentieth century, making sure to address both the partition of Bengal (1905) and the partition of India (1947), as well as the shifting of the British capital from Calcutta to Delhi (1911), deindustrialization and the enormous impact of socialist ideals in Bengal from the 1940s onward. Sinha also touches faithfully on the most pressing issues of today – gender discrimination, patriarchy, the caste system – in this overview. Nevertheless, he astutely notes at the end of it that “of course, the stories here are far more than history … as with any literature, they are individual dialogues between the writers and the world they perceived, the world they dreamt of and even the world they abhorred”.

All anthologists face the difficult task of selecting what they wish to include in a volume, and the greater the richness of literary production in a language, the more difficult the job may appear to be. It is best, therefore, not to succumb to the pressures of being representative; to understand straightaway that these stories “don’t represent Bengal, they only represent these particular writers’ work at the time that they were written”. Sinha has no compunction in declaring that “there is no science to the choice here, no cast-iron logical framework, no effort to be representative, no literary justification”. His is a “personal choice” (as indeed all selections are in the end) and, echoing T. S. Eliot, he believes the collection to be “worthy of full-bodied reading – with mind, heart, muscles, organs, imagination, ecstasy, melancholy, love …”. Notwithstanding a certain degree of predictability, Sinha’s selection is careful, politically alive and sensitive to social change.

The modern short story, like the short poem, the sonnet, blank verse and the novel, was a direct and very early import into nineteenth-century Bengali literature from English literary convention. While some critics decried “foreign influence”, Bengali writers themselves, right from the start, have been unapologetic about the borrowing, anticipating Jorge Luis Borges’s argument in “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” in claiming all of European tradition as their own, “with a right to this tradition, greater than that which the inhabitants of one or another Western nation might have”. It was undoubtedly the explosion in print culture that facilitated the development of these new forms in the myriad journals, literary magazines, periodicals and newspapers that flourished in this period. The short story in Bengali was birthed in the pages of famous literary journals such as the Baṅgadarśan and the Bhāratī with a story by Purnachandra Chattopadhyay in the first and Rabindranath in the latter in 1873 and 1877 respectively; Svarṇakumārī Debī (Rabindranath’s elder sister and long-time editor of Bhāratī) and Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay likewise published short stories in the following years. Tagore, characteristically, went on to forge a corpus of more than 100 short stories in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, published together as Galpaguchhain 1900. Written mostly from the rural districts of east Bengal he had been sent to manage, these remarkable stories distilled in their pages not only the beauty of the landscape and the river, and the lives of the men and women on its banks, but also what he called “that history of the weal and woe of human life which, with its everyday contentment and misery, has always been there”.

The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories contains stories by some of the most notable Bengali writers in a grand march down the history of the form – Rabindranath, Saratchandra, Parashuram, Bibhutibhusan, Banaphool, Jibanananda – with each name signifying an immensity of achievement of which few outside the language have any awareness. (If readers here have canonized and read Chekhov, Tolstoy or Turgenev’s short stories, what stopped them from reading these?) Representing the caste question or religious minorities is not what comes to mind with the stories included here by Syed Mustafa or Akhtaruzzaman Elias or Manoranjan Byapari; giants in their fields, they need no political excuse to be present. Sinha ensures that we have a rich range of work by women, beginning expectedly with Ashapurna Debi and including Mahasweta Devi, Nabaneeta Dev Sen and Selina Hossain, until, towards the end of the volume, we have only women writers present, with four bringing up the rear of the volume: Anita Agnihotri, Shaheen Akhtar, Kaberi Roychoudhury and Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay.

By turns satirical, social realistic, polemical and moving, these stories are all freshly translated by Arunava Sinha, one of the most prolific and best-known of translators from Bengali. Any literature in any world language must translate new writing as well as retranslate the same works in new editions, both to introduce readers to the corpus and to admit fresh perspectives: this volume is a step towards acknowledging the urgency of this continuing, all-important task.

Rosinka Chaudhuri’s books include The Literary Thing, 2014, and Freedom and Beef Steaks: Colonial Calcutta culture, 2012

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

The post Just Rabindranath appeared first on TLS.