RABINDRANATH TAGORE

MY LIFE IN MY WORDS Selected & Edited: Uma Das Gupta Review: Satyendra Nath Dwivedi

Introduction Lifes memories are not lifes history. Memories are the original work of an unseen artist. The variegated colours are not reflections of outside lights, but belong to the painter himself, and come passion-tinged from his heart. It is not easy to know oneself. It is difficult to organize lifes various experiences into a unified whole. That words have meanings is just the difficulty. That is why the poet has to turn and twist them in metre and verse, so that the meaning may be held somewhat in check, and the feeling allowed a chance to express itself. This utterance of feeling is not a statement of fundamental truth, or a scientific fact, or a useful moral precept. Like a tear or a smile a poem is but a picture of what is taking place within. If Science or Philosophy may gain anything from it they are welcome, but that is not the reason of its being. We have to tread every single moment of the way we go on living our life, but when taken as a whole it is such a very small thing, two hours uninterrupted thought can hold all of it. But then, will not this peaceful day, on the desolate sands by the placid river, leave nevertheless a distinct little gold mark even upon the scroll of my eternal past and eternal future?

PART ONE MY LIFE People who cling to an ancient past have their pride in the antiquity of their accumulations, and in the sublimity of their high-walled surroundings. They grow nervous and angry when some lover of truth breaks open their enclosure and floods it with sunshine of thought and life. Ideas cause movements, but they consider all forward movements to be a menace against their warehouse security. Our self-expression must find its freedom not only in spiritual ideas but in literary manifestations. We cannot create foundations, but we can build a super-structure. These two must go together, the giving of expression to new life and the seeking of foundations which must be in the heart of the people themselves. Those who believe that life consists of change because change implies movement should remember that there must be an underlying unity or the change, being unmeaning, will cause conflict and clash. This thread of unity must not be outside, but in our own soul. My father drew from our ancient scriptures, from the Upanishads, truths which had universal significance, and not anything that were exclusive to any particular age or any particular people. We were ostracized by society and this liberated us from the responsibility of conforming to all those conventions that had not the value of truth. The world of facts pleasant or unpleasant has its restricted range, but freedom is given to us by the world of reality, the reality which is truth made living, which has to be the same assurance of its entity as I myself have to my own self. My mind seemed to touch the eternal realm of truth at the picture of the pattering rain upon the trembling leaves of the forest; and at that moment I was no longer a mere student with his mind muffled by a spelling lesson, enclosed by classroom walls, but one who suddenly realized for himself the unobstructed perspective in which the division between the subject and object vanished in a large harmony of existence. My father cherished a synthesis of Hafiz and Upanishads in his heart. The creation of beauty inspires such a mission of opposite elements. The creator must be conscious of both the male and the female principles without which there can be no creation.

To the end of his life, I have observed, my father never stood in the way of our independence. A passive acceptance by us of the correct and the proper did not satisfy him; he wanted us to love truth with our own hearts; he knew that mere acquiescence without love is empty. He also knew that truth, if you strayed from, can be found again, but a forced or blind acceptance of it from the outside effectively bars the way in. As he allowed me to wander about the mountains at my will, so in the quest for truth he left me free to select my path. He was not deterred by the danger of my making mistakes; he was not alarmed at the prospect of my encountering sorrow. He held up a standard, not a disciplinary rod. When in later life, I wandered about like a madcap, at the first coming of spring, with a handful of jasmines tied in a corner of my muslin scarf, and as I stroked my forehead with the soft, rounded, tapering buds, the touch of my mothers fingers would come back to me; and I clearly realized that the tenderness which dwelt in the tips of those lovely fingers was the very same as that which blossoms every day in the purity of these jasmine buds; and that whether we know it or not, this tenderness is on the earth in boundless measure. In this great world we pass by the rooms where Mother sits. The storeroom is open when we want our food; our bed is ready when we must sleep. Only that touch and that voice are wanting. We are moving about, but never coming close to the personal presence, to be held by the hand and greeted: You have come. In infancy the loving care of woman is to be had without asking, and, being as much a necessity as light and air, is simply accepted without any conscious response; rather does the growing child often display an eagerness to free itself from the encircling web of womens solicitude. But the unfortunate creature who is deprived of this its proper season is a beggared indeed. This had been my plight. My sister-in-law (Jyotidadas wife) was a great lover of literature. She did not read simply to kill time, but the Bengali books she read filled her whole mind. She was greatly taken with the sweetness of Biharilal Chakravartis lyrical poem Sharada Mangal. Most of them she knew by heart. Poet Biharilal was a great admirer of Valmiki and Kalidasa. I remember how once after reciting a description of the Himalayas from Kalidasa with the full strength of his voice, he said: The succession of long a sounds here is not an accident. The poet has deliberately repeated this sound all the way from Devatatma to Nagadhiraja as an assistance in realizing the glorious expanse of the Himalayas. The Ganga shores had then not yet lost caste of the defiling touches of English commerce. Both shores alike were still the undisturbed haunt of birds, and the

mechanized dragons of industry did not darken the light of heaven with the black breath of their upreared snouts. In all the insolence of my youthful vanity, I had written a criticism of Michael Madhusudan Dutts epic Meghnadbadh. As acidity is the characteristic of unripe mango so is abuse of the immature critic. When other powers are lacking, the power of pricking seems to be at its sharpest. I had thus sought immortality by leaving my scratches on that immortal epic. With my father away in the Himalayas, my brothers were my guardians. Of them I knew Jyotidada best. He never put restrictions on me. I argued with him and discussed things like an equal. He knew how to respect even a young lad like me. The mental freedom he gave me was of great help in my growth. He was one of the chief helpers in my literary and emotional training. He was an enthusiast himself, and loved to evoke enthusiasm in others. The great boon of freedom which he allowed me, none else would have dared to give. His companionship made it possible for me to shake off my shrinking sensitiveness. It was as necessary for my soul after its rigorous repression during my infancy as are the monsoon clouds after a fiery summer. Those in authority are never tired of holding forth the possibility of the abuse of freedom as a reason for withholding it, but without that possibility freedom would not be really free. And the only way of learning how to use a thing properly is through its misuse. My brother Jyotirindra unreservedly let me go my own way to self-knowledge, and only since then could my nature prepare to put forth its thorns, it may be, but likewise its flowers. This experience has led to me to dread not so much evil itself, as tyrannical attempts to create goodness. Of punitive police, political or moral, I have a wholesome horror. The state of slavery, which is thus brought on is the worst form of cancer to which human society is subject. It is an insult of his humanity if man fails to invoke in his mind a definite image of his own ideal self, of his ideal environment which it is his mission externally to produce. It is the highest privilege of man to be able to live in his own creation. His country is not his by the mere accident of birth, he must richly and intimately transform it into his own, make it a personal reality. And what is more, man is not truly himself if his personality has not been fashioned by him according to some mental picture of the perfection which he has within. I believe that the capacity to love and respect is Gods greatest gift to man.

There is something so persuasive about Gladstone and his words inevitably go straight to your heart. He spoke a lot but everything he said was completely balanced. There was nothing incomplete in what he said. He is forceful but does not ever shout; he gives the feeling that he believes every word he utters. One thing struck me living with Scott family that human nature is the same everywhere. We are fond of saying, and I also believed, that the devotion of an Indian wife to her husband is unique, and is not to be found in Europe. But I at least was unable to discern any difference between Mrs. Scott and an ideal Indian wife. She was entirely wrapped up in her husband. The non-civilized in me was sensitive; it had great thirst for colour, for music, for movement of life. Our city-built education took no heed of that living fact. The relative proportion of the non-civilized and civilized in man should be in the proportion of water and land in our globe, the former predominating. But the school had for its subject a continual reclamation of the non-civilized. Such a drain of the fluid element caused an aridity which may not be considered under city conditions. But my nature got accustomed to those conditions, to the callous decency of the pavement. The tastiest dainty may not be relished when thrown at ones head. To employ an epic to teach language is like using a sword to shave with sad for the sword, bad for the chin. The artist who fashions us takes every opportunity to mingle new elements in his creation. When I began to write Bhagna Hriday (Broken Heart) I was eighteen neither in my childhood nor in my youth. This borderland age is not illuminated with the direct rays of Truth; - its reflection is seen here and there, and the rest is shadow. And like twilight shades its imaginings are long-drawn and vague, making the real world seem like a world of phantasy. Freedom first breaks the law and then makes laws which bring it under selfrule. The strength gained by working, freed from the trammels of tradition, led me to discover that I had been searching in impossible places for something which was actually within myself. Nothing but want of self-confidence had stood in the way of my coming into my own. I felt like rising from a dream of bondage to find myself unshackled. It was morning. I was watching the sunrise from Free School Lane. A veil was suddenly withdrawn and everything became luminous. The whole scene was one

of perfect music one marvelous rhythm. The houses in the street, the men moving below, the little children playing, all seemed parts of one luminous whole inexpressibly glorious That morning in Free School Lane was one of the first things that gave me inner vision, and I have tried to explain it in my poems. I have felt, ever since, that this was my goal: to express the fullness of life, in its beauty, as perfection if only the veil were withdrawn'. All my energies and my rejoicing were given to the immediate effort of producing a particular piece, whenever that happened, as if only the immediate mattered in obtaining the result. But I did come to realize that the end product is merely an occasion, a pretext; it is the Creator within oneself who is continuously and unrelentingly providing for future arrivals, without an end in view but with a perpetual meaning for posterity. I set out to write what was straightforward and simply, something just for myself, but it is Gods melody which transformed its meaning from the personal to the universal. It is I who put a first stroke on the canvas but it is He who filled it with colours I did not possess. It is He who has broken down the limits within which my nature and self had confined me. Cutting across the path of pain and loss, He has connected my life to that which is vast and great. It is this poet who knows everything about me, my good and my bad, who knows what is right for me and what is not, who steers my life through the propitious and adverse, whom I call my Jiban-debata, Lord of my life. Anyone who loves to learn will always gain from learning. Those who are calculating about learning have so little faith in it that they do not reach the spreading branches; they have to stick out their own arm to get at the fruit. But being too short they remain like dwarfs in the world of knowledge. Those who have innate faith are courageous and generous and enthusiastic. Mans prime strength is in religion. Mans prime humanity is spiritual. The physical and material in man is dependent on time and space, but not so the spiritual which is eternal. The realization that we are a part of the eternal, that we are not just scattered little beings, is what makes for spirituality. The individual who feels this from within cannot manipulate and deviate from his ideal. Emptiness is a thing man cannot bring himself to believe in; that which is not, is untrue; that which is untrue, is not. So our efforts to find something, where we see nothing are unceasing. I realized gradually that life must be seen through the window of death in order to reach the truth.

On that morning in the village, the facts of my life suddenly appeared to me in luminous unity of truth. All things that had seemed like vagrant waves were revealed to my mind in a relation to a boundless sea. I felt sure that some Being who comprehended me and my world was seeking his best expression in all my experiences, uniting them into an ever-widening individuality which is a spiritual work of art. To this Being I was responsible; for the creation in me is his as well as mine. I felt that I had found my religion at last, the Religion of Man in which the infinite became defined in humanity and came close to me so as to need my love and cooperation. Not everything can be in ones control. We have to make do with what comes our way and dutifully do the best we can under the circumstances. That is all that is humanly possible. The joy of living separately is in writing letters to one another. It can be more rewarding than being together. When we write letters we can come closer to each other with only a few words. What we say to each other when we meet can fade away in the instant excitement of meeting each other. Really and truly, writing letters can become a deeper and more intimate experience of knowing ourselves than just seeing each other. I do constantly try not to worry about our children. It is our duty to see to it that they are well-behaved and they get a good education. Beyond that it is a mistake to dwell upon them. They grow up to their lifes work in their own way be it good, bad or indifferent. It is, of course, true that they are our children, but they are also individuals in their own right. We will not have much control over the way they live their lives. It is in Gods hands how they turn out as human beings. The future is uncertain no matter how we live. Therefore, it is only sensible that we should simply do our duty and not think of the outcome. We have to forever learn to take both good and bad and we must restrain ourselves every time there is an urge to deviate from that path. We have to understand that we do not belong only to this life of ours. We have our past, and we can have no prior knowledge about our future. Therefore, all that is possible is to do our work diligently, wherever we are and whatever the work is. We must also try to be happy and make others happy. If after that we fail it should not matter to us. We must accept and remember that the results are in Gods hands once we have done our part. We must at least try to free our minds from expectations. It is important for a newly married girl to be away from her parents so that she gets time and space to feel comfortable in her new home. The proximity of parents can hinder this process because the two families are inevitably different

in habit and taste. Even in little ways. With parents around, it is difficult for a girl to forget her earlier life. We must forget our own joy and sorrow where our children are concerned. They are not in the world merely for our happiness. We must make room for them so that they can mould their lives in their own way. [To continue] Review: Satyendra Nath Dwivedi