Tagore Village and World

The Village and the World: A Political Reading of Rabindranath Tagores Prose Fiction
Christine Marsh, BSc, BA (Hons.)
The Village and the World: A Political Reading of Rabindranath Tagores Prose Fiction
Christine Marsh, BSc, BA (Hons.)
chris_e_marsh@hotmail.com September 2006.
The Village and the World SYNOPSIS
This essay is the end product of research into the prose fiction of the Bengali writer, Rabindranath Tagore, who is best known for his poetry. The works chosen for analysis are short stories and novels in English translation, written between 1890 and 1915. The study involved a political reading of these texts in order to explore how, in the 1920s, Tagore came to establish a centre for rural reconstruction and an international university, as his practical contribution to bringing into reality his vision of a world of cooperation and community. Recognising Tagores identity as Poet and Reformer is crucial to interpreting his stories and longer fiction, and leads to questioning criticism of the work according to established Western models. The Introduction puts the chosen texts in the context of Tagores life and the historical background, in particular looking at how the British Empire disrupted village life, and created an urban middle class of landlords and administrators, who became Westernised due to their having benefited from the Raj. The first main chapter is focused on the Village, and the short stories Tagore wrote during the 1890s whilst he was managing the family estates. One particular short story, Punishment, is examined closely to reveal the layers of meaning underlying Tagores method of story-writing. The study revealed Tagores particular interest in the role of women in traditional domestic and village life, and introduced the idea of dharma as the duty of a wife towards her husband and her family. The second main chapter is focused on the World and how the novel form brought from the West developed in India. Three of Tagores novels are examined: The Wreck (1906), Gora (1909) and The Home and the World (1915). Tagore employed the technique of allegory to challenge urban values and social divisions, and to show that the individual has a responsibility to shun group identity and embrace universal understanding, tolerance and cooperation. The novels take the Western reader further into the Indian concept of dharma, as the means by which the individual in relationship with others can become a practical reality. The concluding chapter summarises how the study has demonstrated the need to question Western assumptions, in literature studies, and in the dominant model of world economics and politics, in order that Tagores alternative vision may be appreciated by the wider world.
The Village and the World
CONTENTS:
1. INTRODUCTION: RABINDRANATH TAGORE, HIS PROSE FICTION IN CONTEXT 2. THE VILLAGE: TAGORES SHORT STORIES 3. THE WORLD: TAGORES NOVELS 4. CONCLUSION: THE VILLAGE AND THE WORLD BIBLIOGRAPHY 6 11 22 36 40
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To Dr Barbara Morden and Dr Kitty Scoular Datta for advice, encouragement and supervision; to Angie St.John Palmer and Yvonne Widger for permission and assistance in carrying out research at the Dartington Hall Trust Archive; to John Sanford for assistance with books by Rabindranath Tagore from the Dartington College of Arts Library; and to David Gearing for proofreading.
Remembering Marjorie Sykes (1905-1995), who wrote on my copy of her book, Gandhi: His Gift of the Fight:
1. INTRODUCTION: RABINDRANATH TAGORE, HIS PROSE FICTION IN CONTEXT

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution. (Karl Marx, June 25, 1853)1 I look back on the stretch of past years and see the crumbling ruins of a proud civilization lying heaped as garbage out of history! And yet I shall not commit the grievous sin of losing faith in Man, accepting his present defeat as final. I shall look forward to a turning in history after the cataclysm is over and the sky is again unburdened and passionless. Perhaps the new dawn will come from this horizon, from the East where the sun rises; and then, unvanquished Man will retrace his path of conquest, despite all barriers, to win back his lost heritage. (Rabindranath Tagore, April 14, 1941)2 Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) saw himself primarily as a poet, 3 and as a poet he is still well-known and highly regarded in historic Bengal (approximately Indian West Bengal and Bangladesh) and in the Indian subcontinent. From early boyhood almost to his dying day, Tagore composed poetry constantly, as if he was afflicted with a form of synaesthesia, whereby his mind turned all his observations and experiences into poetry. In anniversary and commemorative volumes, Tagore is described as also being a short story writer,4 and a novelist,5 but it is more true to say he was a poet who turned to short stories and novels during particular periods of his life. Unsurprisingly, therefore, his prose writing is idiosyncratic and resists categorisation and comparison. Tagores various translators, including himself, have struggled with the fundamental differences between the Bengali language and English, and it becomes clear that Tagores prose in the original is more poetic, with more word-play, including punning,6 and more humour, than it has in translation. Tagore was not only a poet but also a visionary and a reformer. The focal point of this study of Tagores life and work is the 1920s, when he established at
1
Karl Marx, The British Rule in India, in The First Indian War of Independence 1857-1859, by K. Marx and F. Engels (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, [n.d.]), pp.14-21, (p.20). (Originally published in the New-York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853) 2 Rabindranath Tagore, Crisis in Civilization in Towards Universal Man (London: Asia Publishing House, 1961), pp.353-9 (p.359). 3 Amartya Sen, Foreword, in Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore, ed. by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.xvii-xxv (p.xvii). 4 Diwan Chand Sharma, The Short Stories of Rabindranath Tagore, in Tagore Birthday Number, Visva-Bharati Quarterly, ed. by Krishna Kripalani ([Santiniketan], Bengal: 1941), pp.137-42 (p.138). 5 Ghulam Murshid, Tagores Novels, in Rabindranath Tagore: A Celebration of his Life and Work (Oxford: Rabindranath Tagore festival Committee, 1986), pp.42-43 (p.42). 6 P.K. Saha, Translating Indian Literary Texts into English, in Literary India: Comparative Studies in Aesthetics, Colonialism and Culture, ed. by Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp.175-87 (p.177).
Santiniketan (abode of peace, formerly his fathers ashram), a centre for rural reconstruction, Sriniketan (abode of plenty),7 and an international university, Visva-Bharati (from the Sanskrit for universe and the name of a Hindu goddess of learning)8. After this he travelled the world propagating his vision. Tagores prose fiction provides insights into how and why the village and the world became Tagores lifes work. The texts which are the subjects of this study are a selection from the short stories which Tagore wrote during the 1890s, 9 and three of Tagores novels which he wrote between 1906 and 1915.10 This study has involved a political reading of these works partly to contrast Tagores vision of a future world with the Marxist conception of a progression through stages of the economic basis of society, their class divisions and superstructure, towards the ultimate classless, property-less society. It has not become a Marxist reading, reflecting the concern postcolonial theorists have expressed as Marxism being Eurocentric,11 and not a good model of the progression which took place in the colonised regions of the world. The quotation heading this Introduction comes from an article Marx wrote for publication in an American newspaper, one of a series later published in book form as The First Indian War of Independence 1857-1859. Marxs analysis of the Revolt shows it to be a product of socioeconomic conditions and the resistance of an oppressed people, 12 leading to the period which followed, the Crown Raj and Tagores lifetime. Tagores practical projects to bring his vision into reality can be linked to a well-known saying of Marx: The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. 13 But writing can change the world. JeanPaul Sartre asserts that the prose-writer is a man who has chosen a certain method of secondary action which we may call action by disclosure, and he proposes asking such a writer the question: What aspect of the world do you want to disclose? What change do you want to bring into the world by this disclosure? 14 Tagore was a committed writer in Sartres sense, in that his prose fiction discloses a different way of living in the world, of potential benefit to people of the East and the West. However, Tagore was not addressing readers in the West in this literature, and so the message, if we can all it that, has to be decoded, picked out from what he is saying more directly to his own intended audience. Tagore is political in the sense that he had a vision of how people could and should live in the world, a vision that he worked to bring into reality, but seldom political in the sense of engaging with the systems of government, and he was not a nationalist and not anti-British, whilst he
7 8
Santiniketan and Sriniketan are sometimes spelt Shantiniketan and Shriniketan. Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, eds., Purabi: A Miscellany in Memory of Rabindranath Tagore 1941-1991 (London: Tagore Centre, 1991), p.220 9 Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Short Stories, trans. by William Radice (London: Penguin, 2005). 10 Rabindranath Tagore, The Wreck, [trans. by J.G. Drummond] (London: Macmillan, 1944) first published 1906; Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World, trans. by Surendranath Tagore (London: Penguin, 1985) first published 1915; and two editions of the novel: Rabindranath Tagore, Gora, [trans. by W.W. Pearson] (London: Macmillan, 1924) first published in Bengali, 1909, and Rabindranath Tagore, Gora, trans. by Sujit Mukherjee (New Delhi: Sahita Akademi, 2003). 11 Crystal Bartolovich, Introduction, in Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies, ed. by Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp.1-17 (p.1). 12 Pranav Jani, Karl Marx, Eurocentrism, and the 1857 Revolt in British India, in Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies, pp.81-97 (p.90). 13 Karl Marx, Theses On Feuerbach, (1845) http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm [accessed 25 July 2006] 14 Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. by Bernard Frechtman (London: Methuen, 1950), p.13.
loved his country and desired its freedom from oppression. One can sum up the different way of life he advocated as culture and community, which lies between individualistic and competitive materialism, of which Tagore was critical, and the individual spiritual search, which he saw as not incompatible with engaging with ones culture and taking an active part in ones community. A set of difficulties comes with studying a writer and writing from a foreign country. Tagore wrote most of his work in Bengali, but the texts in English translation come with special paratexts,15 introductions and translators notes, which are helpful for making sense of the translated works, and bring them part of the way towards the Western reader, but one has to be alert to them going too far such that some of the original meaning is lost. Putting Tagores stories and novels in historical context led to further difficulties. Context matters for most approaches to serious literature studies, perhaps least for studies such as those carried out by F.R. Leavis, the pioneer in literature studies as an academic subject, where he is concerned with form, originality, and the identification of genius in literary art.16 Even here, context matters, and we find Leavis saying of Jane Austen, Without her intense moral preoccupation she wouldnt have been a great novelist, and that greatness and matters of aesthetics are closely tied to an unusually developed interest in life and a vital capacity for experience. 17 Another important literary critic, Dorothy Van Ghent, makes a different, but equally crucial, link between life and art, when she expresses her two convictions: First, that novels have their primary interest in the illumination they cast upon life, not life somewhere else and at another time, but immediately here, immediately now. And second, that novels are able to cast illumination upon life only insofar as they are coherent works of art.18 Fictional works from another country, not written to be read here, bring a further dimension to the life and art connection, in that the culture and the environment may not be described in the texts as fully as one needs in order to understand the characters and situations depicted. One is very dependent on material such as biographies, histories, and contemporary writing about the author or his works, but that material brings with it a host of contradictions and disagreements, and a labyrinth of paths one could pursue to try to resolve them. A key question is helpful here: Was the British Raj good or bad for India?, which links back to the quotation by Marx above, and leads on to the summary below of key points in the historical background to Tagores writing. Marx is saying, not that the Raj was good, indeed he says it was vile and stupid, but that it was necessary to India and the world, since it forced a backward, feudal country through its bourgeois revolution into capitalism and the modern world. Tagores biographer, Krishna Kripalani, says that [t]he (Tagore) family fortunes were from the beginning linked with the rise of the British power in India, and that Rabindranaths grandfather, Dwarkanath Tagore, amongst many impressive entrepreneurial and charitable achievements, founded the first modern bank with Indian capital.19 One could categorise Kripalanis position as the Raj was good.
15
Grard Genette, Introduction to the Paratext, New Literary History, Vol. 22, No. 2, (Spring, 1991), 261-272. 16 F.R.Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (London: Penguin, 1962), p.17. 17 Leavis, pp.16-18. 18 Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), p.vii. 19 Krishna Kripalani, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp.17-20.
Jawaharlal Nehru, who became the first Prime Minister of India, argues the opposite. In his extraordinary book, The Discovery of India, written with the help of eleven erudite companions over five months in 1944 while they were incarcerated in Ahmadnagar Fort prison, Nehru shows how India was, up until the eighteenth century, a highly developed country. There were business and financial houses, and powerful merchant and manufacturing classes, engaged in trade in Asia and in Europe. The middle classes, however, had no political power, and in that sense the bourgeois revolution had not happened in India.20 For this study, one needs to understand the makeup of the classes in Britain and the West, and in India, from which came Tagores readership, but this is a huge subject. An idea of Nehrus provides a useful starting point. He wrote of there being Two Englands in the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth: the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie at home who brought in the industrial revolution at Indias expense, and the feudal rump who went to India and ran the Raj. 21 To these one may add a third England, made up of traditional intellectuals, 22 the English scholars and sympathisers who participated in an equal exchange of cultural and religious ideas, with such great Indian intellectuals as Rammohan Roy and Tagore. Nehru described how Indias thriving indigenous economy was destroyed by the Raj.23 As Marx put it, The devastating effects of English industry [on] India, a country as vast as Europe are palpable and confounding. 24 But the devastation really began at village level. Throughout Nehrus journey of discovery of the cultural and material aspects and stages in Indias culture and development, and his account of the waves of conquest and assimilation, there are repeated mentions of Indias self-governing village systems, which were treated with respect by all new rulers until the British utterly destroyed them.25 Many writers on Indian history, including Marx in the article from which I quoted above, 26 identify the 1793 Act of Permanent Settlement, when the British East India Company acquired the right to tax the revenue from the peasantry collected by the zamindars, as the turning point for the village system. Romesh Chunder Dutt, a distinguished lawyer, writing in 1874 about the peasantry of Bengal, said that: zemindars (sic)27 still (since moves to reform the system) possess to an indefinite extent the power to oppress, harass and ruin their ryots (peasants) in a variety of ways against which the law offers no redress, and that therefore in most places ryots are still held in a sort of moral servitude, and comply, without thinking of resistance, with the most unjust demands and orders of their masters [and] make it simply impossible for ryots to save anything, or to learn to be prudent, provident, thinking beings, or better their condition.28 The Tagore family were zamindars, their income deriving from family estates, remnants of the once colossal wealth of Rabindranaths grandfather, Dwarkanath
20 21
Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (London: Meridian, 1951), pp.262-3. Nehru, pp.261-6 22 Antonio Gramsci, The Intellectuals, in Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, http://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/prison_notebooks/problems/intellectuals.htm [accessed 27 August 2006], The Formation of the Intellectuals, para. 3 of 20 23 Nehru, pp.276-8 24 Marx, p.38. 25 Nehru, pp. 120, 125, 292, 297-8. 26 Marx, pp.33, 216. 27 Note: In this essay I have generally standardised the spelling of this term as zamindar, but the word can also be spelt zemindar, as here. 28 Romesh Chunder Dutt, The Peasantry of Bengal: being a View of their Condition under the Hindu, the Mahomedan, and the English Rule, and a Consideration of the Means Calculated to Improve their Future Prospects (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1874), p.x.
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Tagore, put in trust for their security shortly before his fortune collapsed. 29 In 1889 Rabindranath took over the management of the family estates,30 and it was a lifechanging experience for him and he came to see that in village culture was an ideal for the whole of India, 31 which was the unique political vision which he sought to bring to the world through his rural university. During the 1890s he wrote many short stories about the humble people whose lives he witnessed in rural Bengal, which leads on the first set of texts which are the subject of this study.
29 30
Kripalani, p.28. Selected Letters, p.15. 31 Tagore, City and Village, in Towards Universal Man, pp.302-22 (p.322).
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2. THE VILLAGE: TAGORES SHORT STORIES

I belong to the class who by various devices deprive the working people of necessities, and who by these devices have provided a magic purse for themselves which enables me, without ever doing any work, to compel hundreds and thousands of people to work for meas I am doing, and I imagine that I pity people and wish to help them. I sit on a mans back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means except by getting off his back. (Leo Tolstoy, 1886)32 Around December 1890 his father had sent him, then twenty-nine years of age, to live on and to manage the Tagore family properties in East Bengal. There he had made two important discoveries: first, that the villagers seemed to have lost all ability to help themselves; secondly, that both research and technical assistance would be needed if they were ever to learn how to rescue themselves from their creeping decay. (Leonard Elmhirst, 1975)33 According to Rabindranath Tagores biographer, Krishna Kripalani, the Tagore family estates were fairly large and spread over a vast area, at the time when Tagores father, the Maharshi, determined that his youngest son should accept his responsibilities and take full charge of their management, and see to the welfare of the tenants.34 It would appear that, despite Prince Dwarkanath Tagores enormous wealth having dwindled,35 the family still possessed a magic purse, in Tolstoys terms, enabling them to live, if not in idleness since they were all occupied with their various creative pursuits at least not needing to earn their living. With some reluctance, but obliged to obey his father, Tagore made arrangements to tour the estates by houseboat. As a result he gained an intimacy with the lives of the common people: their daily drudgery and constant struggle against the indifference of nature and the worse indifference of a rigid social orthodoxy and of an alien political rule. 36 Over the years, Tagore embarked on many experiments to rectify the problems he saw. Uma Das Gupta writes of some of these efforts during 1905-15, specifically a Welfare Fund and a Welfare Society to take care of medical treatment, primary education, digging wells and other public works, and tackling indebtedness and quarrels.37 Later he established a rural reconstruction centre, Sriniketan, with his English friend and colleague, Leonard Elmhirst. By this time, the magic purse was exhausted, and Tagore had to raise money for his projects by going on lecture tours, and he even resorted to applying for an Imperial grant for agricultural research. In a letter to His Excellency, The Viceroy, dated 28th February 1930, concerning his application, Tagore refers to
32
Leo Tolstoy, What Then Must We Do?, trans. by Aylmer Maude (Bideford: Green Books, 1991), pp.62-3. 33 Leonard Elmhirst, Personal Reminiscences, in Poet and Plowman (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1975), pp.15-31 (pp.15-16). 34 Kripalani, 1962, pp.136-7 35 Kripalani, p.28 36 Kripalani, p.137. 37 Uma Das Gupta, Rabindranath Tagore on Rural Reconstruction: The Shriniketan Programme, 1921-41, in Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson, eds., Purabi: A Miscellany in Memory of Rabindranath Tagore 1941-1991 (London: Tagore Centre, 1991), pp.127-41 (p.127).
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village reconstruction as what has been my lifes work.38 Tagore was twenty-nine years old when he first took on responsibility for the estates. His life before that could hardly have been more different, and one wonders how a young man with such a background could become so practically-minded. The much admired short stories which Tagore wrote: fifty-nine of them during the 1890s, including the thirty stories in a selection translated and introduced by William Radice, which I discuss below,39 form a bridge or a synthesis between Tagores two lives, as poet and seer an intermediary between the human and the divine,40 and as the reformer who made it his lifes work, not only to get off the backs of poor villagers, but to re-build their lives and their communities. Kripalani describes the years of Tagores youth as culminating in a profound spiritual experience, when Tagore saw the ultimate significance of all things and all men,41 a realisation Tagore himself saw as having a profound impact on his work in the villages.42 One needs to be aware of the spiritual foundation to Tagores personality, including his knowledge of Indias cultural traditions, to appreciate his compassionate understanding of how village people might live, and also to make sense of the stories he wrote and to see the motive behind the practical work he subsequently became so passionate about. An appropriate starting point for a political reading of Indian prose fiction is to question the presumption that the short stories, as well as the novels, must have derived from a Western literary tradition. T.W. Clark, in his study of Indian fiction in vernacular languages, identifies a point in 1862 when a Bengali writer, curiously named Hutom the Owl, achieved organic unity between narrative and descriptive writing and showed that contemporary life can supply ample material for fiction writers, and this led to a tradition embracing some of Bengals greatest names including Tagores.43 Mary Lago, a translator of Tagores work, writes: There was no indigenous Bengali tradition, at that time (the 1890s), of the modern short story. Tagore seems to have known the stories of Poe and Hawthorne[, also French and Russian writers.]44 In his introduction to his study of the modern short story in the West, Frank Myszor identifies the same writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) and Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), together with Nikolai Gogol (18091852), as writers of [t]he earliest good examples of the form.45 So the publishing of short stories may have been new in India in the nineteenth century, but it was new in the West too. Story telling in India needed no Western model or origin. Stories were already present in narrative tradition, most obviously in the Ramayana and Mahabharata.46
38
The Dartington Hall Trust Archive, Papers of Leonard Knight Elmhirst, LKE India, LKE/IN/25 Folder A, Visva-Bharati correspondence 39 William Radice, Introduction, in Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Short Stories, trans. by William Radice (London: Penguin, 2005), pp.1-28 (p.1). 40 Kripalani, pp.2-3. 41 Kripalani, p.101. 42 Rabindranath Tagore, The Vision, in The Religion of Man: Being the Hibbert Lectures for 1930 (Boston: Beacon, 1961), pp.90-108 (pp.94-5). 43 T. W. Clark, Bengali Prose Fiction up to Bankimcandra, in The Novel in India: Its Birth and Development, ed. by T. W. Clark (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970), pp.21-74 (pp.42-7). 44 Mary Lago, Tagores Short Fiction, in Rabindranath Tagore: A Celebration of his Life and Work (Oxford: Rabindranath Tagore Festival Committee, 1986), pp.44-5 (p.44). 45 Frank Myszor, The Modern Short Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.8. 46 These stories have found there way to the West too, in very reduced form in versions like: William Buck, Ramayana: King Ramas Way: Valmikis Ramayana told in English Prose (California: California University Press, 1978); C. Rajagopalachari, Mahabharata (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1979).
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Tagores recollections in My Boyhood Days are riddled with stories: those he was told by relatives, servants and visiting players, stories which arose from his own imagination and the atmosphere of dark corners of his old rambling family home, and simply in his own way of relating episodes in his life. 47 Myszor mentions Dickens Sketches by Boz (1835-6),48 and many of Tagores stories are more like sketches, with fictionalised elements, but closely resembling anecdotes he relates in his letters, especially those published as Glimpses of Bengal.49 One of Tagores most anthologised stories is Punishment, which is available in at least three different translations.50 A key aspect to the process of exploring Tagores stories or perhaps any work of his is that layers of meaning gradually emerge if one is open to linguistic subtleties and differences of cultural background, and the various translations are helpful here. Rather surprisingly, this is the only story in the Radice selection which is actually about village cultivators. As Radice observes: many of the characters in the stories are not simple village people, but of the middle class or gentry class [and s]ome are more urban than rural.51 On first reading, Punishment is a cruel and brutal story, not showing Tagores sympathy with simple village people, rather the reverse. Radice makes only one mention of the story in his introduction, saying that it illustrates dehumanizing poverty,52 and certainly the absolute poverty of the main characters rather than disparities of wealth and status, or struggles over money, as in other stories is a crucial element. The story is about two brothers, Dukhiram Rui and Chidam Rui and their wives, Radha and Chandara. The brothers are landless labourers, and the four (plus Radhas baby son) share a house as subtenants of the village know-all about legal matters, Ramlochan Chakrabarti. The layering of tenancy, fragmentation of landholdings and landlessness were endemic in rural life in Colonial India, and in Bengal in particular became progressively worse from the Permanent Settlement of 1793 onwards, as detailed in a report on the progress of land reforms in Bengal following Independence.53 It was not only impoverished cultivators and tenants who suffered from Bengals land problems, since the majority of landlords or zamindars had tiny landholdings, and struggled to realise their due rent. 54 So in Tagores stories featuring zamindars or the gentry class concerned about their wealth, matters of inheritance, and so on, he is nevertheless often writing about rural problems. The basic plot of Punishment is as follows. The two brothers return from a long day working on the zamindars office-building, having been forcibly withdrawn from cutting paddy by the bailiff (and Ranajit Guha describes how forced labour was a feature of rural life in Colonial India 55) to find their wives idling at home. Dukhiram, the elder brother, demands food from his wife, and when she
47 48
Rabindranath Tagore, My Boyhood Days (New Delhi: Rupa, 2005) Myszor, pp.17-18. 49 Rabindranath Tagore, Glimpses of Bengal: Selected from the Letters of Sir Rabindranath Tagore 1885-1895 (London: Macmillan, 1945) 50 Rabindranath Tagore, Punishment, in Radice, pp.125-33; in Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Short Stories, ed. by Sukanita Chaudhuri (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 110-20; in Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Short Stories, trans. by Krishna Dutta and Mary Lago (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp.67-79. 51 Radice, p.6. 52 Radice, p.13. 53 Karunamoy Mukerji, Progress of Land Reforms in West Bengal, Rabindrabharati Journal, Vol.I (July 1968), pp.58-76 (pp.58-9). 54 Sachin Sen, The Permanent Settlement in Bengal (A Study on its Economic Implications) (Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar & Sons, 1933) [Dartington Hall Trust Archive, LKE/IN/43]
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protests mockingly that he hasnt provided any food for her to cook, he loses his temper, lashes out and kills her with his knife. Ramlochan arrives to collect his overdue rent and Chidam, the younger brother, tries to cover up his brothers deed by blaming it on his own wife. He then tells Chandara she is to admit to the murder, but to say it was in self-defence. Out of stubborn pride she simply tells the police and later the magistrate, Yes, I killed her, and denies there was any brawl or attack to provoke or excuse the crime, and she is condemned to death. Before the hanging she is asked if she will see her husband, who wants to see her, and she refuses. So, a nasty story, and not entirely consistent or plausible. The story is set out in three parts. In the first part all four characters appear weak and culpable in one way or another, even Chandara seems as quarrelsome and lazy as Radha. In the second part the younger couple are presented in a much more positive light. In contrast to the other couple, they are beautiful and graceful and even their mutual suspicions and possessiveness shows they are in love with each other. In that part, the characters might belong in a fairy story or folk tale, with the bad and therefore ugly older brother and the good and therefore handsome younger one. Chandaras self-destructive stance and the outcome is described in the third part of the story, and one wonders why she would act that way; is she just stupid? Anita Desai observes in her introduction to the selection of stories translated by Krishna Dutta and Mary Lago that much of Tagores fiction is didactic, with many of his stories ending according to the Victorian concept with a thumping moral.56 In an interview with Desai, Lalita Pandit makes a connection between Tagores representation of the isolation and entrapment of Indian women and Desais work on this theme. At this point Desai says she only discovered Tagore recently, in adulthood, and read him only in English. 57 Later Desai is asked about Tagores compromise endings, whereby his female protagonists are allowed a certain degree of freedom but return to the place they deviated from. In reply Desai says Tagore was a Victorian writer in a Victorian age, and that it would be unrealistic of him to show societies changing, to show individualism change society.58 In my view, that kind of modern feminist reading of Tagores stories, and the point about Victorian moralistic endings, have some validity, but fail to do Tagore justice, both as a feminist himself and as a world changer. Comparing three different translations of the story provides clues to a more satisfactory and challenging interpretation. I was alerted to the versions of this story being different by noticing that in Radices translation the two brothers go to work with their heavy farm-knives, in Chaudhuris they have choppers, and in Dutta and Lago they each have a billhook.59 Intriguingly, in Tagores My Boyhood Days there is a mention of a gypsy woman with a bill-hook, a tool or weapon which in the same paragraph is referred to as a sickle.60 Later in the book, there is a reference to the goddess Kalis heavy curved blade, 61 not unlike Death being depicted with a scythe in Western iconography. Although this may seem a trivial
55
Ranajit Guha describes the exploitation of begar or forced labour by every dominant group, including landlords. (Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp.26-30.) 56 Desai, Introduction, in Dutta and Lago, pp.1-17 (p.16). 57 Lalita Pandit, A Sense of Detail and a Sense of Order: Anita Desai Interviewed by Lalita Pandit, in Rabindranath Tagore: Universality and Tradition ed. by Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit, (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 2003), pp.153-172 (p.160). 58 Pandit, pp.166-7. 59 Radice, p.125, Chaudhur, p.110, Dutta and Lago, p.67. 60 Tagore, Boyhood, p.10. 61 Tagore, Boyhood, pp. 29-30.
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detail, it is significant. First of all, educated urban people, such as translators, are generally alienated from the land, and so will not be familiar with farm implements. Marjorie Sykes, who translated My Boyhood Days, had a farm in India many years later, but in 1941 she could confuse a bill-hook with a sickle. 62 This technical detail is a symptom of the decline of rural life, a subject which deeply concerned Tagore. Secondly, the symbolism of the image of this death-dealing implement, elevates the individual story to something universal, which is consistent with Tagores philosophy, as detailed in his essay The Relation of the Individual to the Universe.63 The final word in the original short is apparently maran, literally simply death, but both Radice and Chaudhuri add notes to indicate more potent meanings, which are linked to a more significant Bengali word, the untranslatable abhiman.64 Each of the three translators expresses the sense of abhiman differently: Radice gives: Such fierce, disastrous pride!, Chaudhuri: How terrible was this pride of hers!, and Dutta and Lago: What unrelenting resentment!. 65 Radice alone adds a footnote: abhiman: there is no single English word for this emotion. It includes hurt pride, bruised feelings, and rejection by someone we love. Chandara is abhiman incarnate.66 His footnote to maran at the close of the story mentions abhiman again: maran! Lit. death! a common ironic expression particularly among village-women. The complex implications here include Chandaras rejection of the husband she still loves, the abhiman that prevents her from backing down, and a shy reluctance to display her true marital feelings in public.67 Chaudhuris translation of the final line (Chandaras reply to being asked if she will see her husband) is Chandara said Death!68, with an endnote: Death!: a literal rendering of the Bengali interjection Maran!, of complex and untranslatable implications: anger, exasperation, hatred, but also (from its common use in ordinary amorous contexts) a suppressed eroticism.69 Radices own translation of the final line is weaker than this: To hell with him, said Chandara.70, and Dutta and Lago have: Id rather be dead! she replied.71 So what is the story meant to convey? Is this one of the didactic Tagore stories Desai refers to?, and if so, what could the moral lesson be? Is Chandara to be admired or condemned for her incarnation of abhiman? I have identified some ingredients towards solving this puzzle, and finding a satisfactory meaning for the story. It depicts dehumanizing poverty, issues of forced labour and fragmentation of land, the family and the husband and wife, the question of who matters more: a brother or a wife? In the drama we have murder, perjury, pride, love, society, law,
62
Martha Dart, Marjorie Sykes: Quaker Gandhian (York: Sessions, 1993), Santiniketan with Tagore 1939-41, pp.30-37, Rasulia 1979-88, pp.128-34. 63 Tagore, The Relation of the Individual to the Universe, in Sadhana (London: Macmillan, 1915), pp.3-22. 64 An internet search for the meaning of the Begali word abhiman (or abhimaan) brought up Antara Dev Sen saying that this is many peoples candidate for the most untranslatable word in Bengali, Pride and abhimaan, http://www.the-week.com/24sep05/columns_home.htm [accessed 23 May 2006] 65 Radice, p.131, Chaudhuri, p.118, Dutta and Lago, p.76. 66 Radice, p.131. 67 Radice, p.133. 68 Chaudhuri, p.120. 69 Chaudhuri, p.310. 70 Radice, p.133. 71 Dutta and Lago, p.79.
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judgement, punishment, death, the individual and the universal, untranslatable words and cultural differences. There is also a feminist interpretation suggested by Desai, who admires Chandaras unflinching determination, her pride and fury, and her being other than the long-suffering wife of Hindu tradition. 72 It is worth pointing out at this point that standard theoretic perspectives involving hidden and elusive meanings: Machereys ideology lurking in gaps and silences, deconstruction and The Death of the Author and so on73, do not apply here. This is about identifying a meaning and lesson that the author could have intended, and his contemporary readers would have recognised. There is another ingredient that must be added to the mix, which links to Desai and Pandits judgement of Tagores weak endings, and also Desais sense that Tagore was in a hurry when he wrote these stories, writing rapidly to fill issues of the family magazine Sadhana with stories, poems, plays and essays.74 A different kind of story is needed for publication in a monthly magazine from one to be published in a book as part of a collection. Tagore writes in My Boyhood Days about the excitement of receiving an issue of Bangadarsan, the magazine edited by Bankim Chandra Chatterji, in its heyday. 75 Punishment was written for, and first published in, Sadhana, July-August 1893,76 and one needs to bear that in mind while considering the meaning and purpose of the story. Just as readers were held in suspense waiting for the next episode of a serialised Bankim Chandra novel, and talked about it meanwhile, a short story would have been a topic for discussion. The ending, and the moral, could actually be more interesting to readers if unresolved or controversial. One can imaging contemporary readers taking positions on whether or not Chandara did the right thing. But for that to be interesting, there has to be a moral, not simply the depiction of a fallible human being. Instead of taking Desais reading of Chandara as a proud and angry individual, an assertive woman fighting back against a patriarchal society and the morally weak men in her life, suppose we give her the role of the long-suffering wife of Hindu tradition which Desai disparages; does that necessarily make Chandara a passive victim? Arguably, her strength and her anger can also make sense if she embodies Hindu dharma,77 acting according to principle, as the sadharmini of her husband.78 There is a strong clue to this being what Tagore intended in the three-part structure of the story. Part I is the initial drama focused on the home and the family. Part II is about the younger couple, giving them attributes of beauty, grace and love, thereby idealising them such that they become the universal husband and wife, faced with a difficult situation for which he requires self-sacrifice from his wife. Part III is about the world: the legal process and the outcome. Tagore spoke on the subject of Woman in one of his American lectures, published as Personality.79 He said: Woman is endowed with the passive qualities of chastity, modesty, devotion and power of self-sacrifice in a greater measure than
72 73
Desai, p.11. Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. by Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (London: Arnold, Hodder Headline, 2001), Macherey, pp.134-42, Barthes, pp.185-89. 74 Desai, p.10. 75 Rabindranath Tagore, Boyhood, p.72. 76 Radice, p.299. 77 The Sanskrit word transliterated as dharma appears un-italicised in the English dictionary, however I have used it in italics or not according to context and the usage of writers cited. 78 Patrick Colm Hogan, Orthodoxy and Universalism: Rabindranath Tagores Gora, in Colonialism and Cultural Identity: Crises of Tradition in the Anglophone Literatures of India, Africa, and the Caribbean (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp.213-55 (pp.214-5). 79 Rabindranath Tagore, Woman, in Personality: Lectures Delivered in America (London: Macmillan, 1919), pp.169-84.
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man is,80 the very attributes that feminists regard as imposed on women by patriarchal systems. But in his lecture, Tagore was not suggesting the attributes are weaknesses, rather that the world needs the stability that is inherent in womans nature. All her forces instinctively work to bring things to some shape of fulness (sic),for that is the law of life.81 The idea of the law of life links to Hogans understanding of dharma: It is the dharma of water to flow, of heavy objects to fall to earth . It is the nature of humankind to act according to principle. Hence, for men and women, dharma means duty, what I should donot only morally but in respect of every social link.82 It may seem incongruous to interpret Chandaras stubborn refusal to obey her husbands instructions and save herself, her pride and anger, and (by one translation anyway) resentment towards him, and her final rejection indeed punishment of him to embrace death, as an act of wifely duty, as spousal dharma. However, I believe this is a valid interpretation. Chandara does obey her husband to the extent of saying she killed Radha, thus exonerating Dukhiram, the head of the family. She refuses to perjure herself further for the sake of her husbands dharma, in the interest of their shared religious duty. If Hogan is right about dharma being human nature, as natural as the flow of water, the fall of heavy objects to earth, Chandara has no choice; no wonder then that she is furious. The concept of dharma is crucial to understanding traditional Indian society and culture, and for interpreting much of Tagores writing. From Hogans outline of the various forms of dharma one can see that there can be conflicts between an individuals birth or caste dharma, their stage of life dharma, such as wifely duty, and universal dharma relating to human ethical principles, which can override all others.83 Hence, one could interpret Chandaras situation as a conflict between her duty of obedience to her husband and the universal principle of telling the truth. But if her motive in refusing to tell the falsehoods her husband instructs her in to save herself, is actually to save him in a religious sense that would seem to be an instance of satidharma or sati. Sati is usually understood in the narrow sense of a widows self-immolation on her husbands funeral pyre. The prime initiator of the Indian renaissance, Raja Rammohan Roy, is credited with campaigning with the British for the banning of widow immolation, citing ancient scriptures in justification.84 Tagore followed Rammohan in seeking the best of both worlds in his relationship with the British, his disillusionment bringing great anguish, as we see in his last essay, Crisis in Civilisation. 85 The ideology of the supposed civilising mission of the British gave rise to a patronising arrogance towards the great men of the Indian renaissance, such as Rammohan and Tagore, which persists today, for example, in the assumption that Indian prose fiction is imitative and therefore inferior to Western literature. One way of opposing this tendency is to seek the complexity behind targets for moralising, such as sati. Esha Niyogi De refers to the ideal of satidharma in an essay on Tagores ideas on how harmony in the world could be brought about by social practices conducing freedom rather than enforcing power. Discussing two critical essays
80 81
Tagore, p.173. Tagore, p.171. 82 Hogan, p.214. 83 Hogan, pp.216-7. 84 Pranab Ranjan Ghosh, Raja Rammohan Roy, in The Modern Review, September, 1972, from The Dartington Hall Trust Archive, Leonard Knight Elmhirst Collection, LKE/IN/43, p.239. 85 Rabindranath Tagore, Crisis in Civilisation, p.355.
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Tagore wrote in 1902 about Shakuntala, a drama by the Sanskrit poet, Kalidasa, De writes: Rabindranaths essay uncritically celebrated Kalidass distillation of the defining features of Shakuntalas feminine humanity as constituted by the unchanging qualities (under adversity) of forbearance and forgiveness and, overall, by the ideal of satidharma, that is, the religion of self-sacrifice, obedience, and emotional/sexual devotion of the normative Hindu wife.86 This does seem to confirm that the wifely dharma of Chandara in Punishment can be called satidharma. In the essays De refers to, Tagore refers to the role of the wife in more positive terms, such as: Marriage is the prelude to everyday domestic life; it is part of the social order; [women] give birth to offspring, hence they are great of soul, objects of worship, and the shining light of the home; the love of man and woman cannot be lasting or beautiful if it is barren, if it remains constricted within itselfif it does not give birth to beneficence and spread itself across the world as a varied range among our children, guests, and fellow humans; In Indian scriptural edict, the manwoman relationship is restrained and confined by stern enjoinments; in Kalidasas poetry, it is fashioned from the ingredients of beauty radiant with the light of comeliness, modesty and beneficence fulfilled through renunciation, gratified through suffering.87 This is an important instance of the rich veins in Tagores body of literature which one is drawn to when studying him sympathetically. Returning to the short story, Punishment, as a whole, the drama about Chandaras admission of guilt for the murder of her sister-in-law draws the readers attention away from the real guilty parties, not only the murderer, Dukhiram, but what put him in the mood to kill. Every element counts in this careful plot. Dukhirams wife, Radha, may have been lazy and inclined to loud brawling, but she was a model wife in traditional terms because she had given her husband a son, which is necessary not only to provide the next generation of agricultural workers, but for the husbands spiritual salvation.88 Married to the elder brother, Radha was the mistress of the family, the highest status for a Hindu wife.89 The first paragraph of the story refers to the two wives in this kuri-caste household, and Radices glossary entry for kuri explains that, despite the Rui brothers in Punishment being landless labourers, they are of a high caste, traditionally suppliers of confectionery to Brahmins.90 In making Radha the murder victim, Tagore was signalling to the reader that something quite untoward had provoked Dukhirams fury. As I touched on earlier, the circumstances were his being ordered away from gathering rice to work for the zamindar, unpaid even with his share of the gathered rice. The fact that those circumstances are lightly drawn would not reduce their significance for the Bengali readership, and possibly the point needed to be downplayed in order for those involved in the periodical, Sadhana, not to be censured by the Government, whose British personnel were all
86
Esha Niyogi De, Decolonizing Universality: Postcolonial Theory and the Quandary of Ethical Agency, Diacritics, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Summer, 2002), 42-59 (p.49). 87 Rabindranath Tagore, Kumarasambhavan and Shakuntala in Selected Writings on Literature and Language, ed. by Sisir Kumar Das and Sukanta Chaudhuri (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp.226-36; Tagore, Shakuntala, in Selected Writings, pp.237-51. 88 Tapan Raychaudhuri, Love in a Colonial Climate: marriage, Sex and Romance in NineteenthCentury Bengal (Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2. (May, 2000), 349-378 (p.350). 89 Raychaudhuri, p.361. 90 Radice, p.313.
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instructed in the local vernacular.91 The zamindari system, and the disruption caused by the Permanent Zamindari Settlement of 1793, must have been sensitive subjects, and difficult for the Calcutta bhadralok or gentry class to discuss openly, not least because they had been its beneficiaries.92 A detailed study of this single short story, Punishment, demonstrates how one may discover layers of meaning and relevance if one is open-minded about Indian culture. Even the simplest story may have hidden depths, and one is tempted to guess at these. For example, in the Radice selection is a very simple short story entitled Housewife.93 This is about a small boy, Ashu, the goody-goody of the class, who is given a teasing nickname by his sadistic and sarcastic teacher, after the teacher saw him playing at a dolls wedding with his sister. Housewife may be equivalent to sissy in English playground banter, with its suggestion that the target is effeminate. A possible reading of the story is that it actually refers to the British colonisers attributing femininity and lack of martial prowess to Bengali men, who were keenly aware of their helplessness in the face of European power. This reputation was a very sore point with educated Bengali males, as Indira Chowdhury relates in her book about how this group tried to re-fashion and redeem itself from the slur of effeteness by claim[ing] an assertive and masculine history and putting on an annual festival, the Hindu Mela, which featured demonstrations of martial arts, physical strength and athletics.94 Shibanath, the horrible teacher in Housewife, expects the boys to revere him as a god, and the story contains references to Hindu gods, in particular to Yama, the god of death. The narrator, one of the pupils, says that human gods are more trouble than immortal gods, and if they fail they swoop, red-eyed with fury, not at all godlike to look at.95 Some research into the names and terms used may or may not confirm my reading of the story as being about Bengali male identity. The story may simply be based on Tagores own experiences of the schoolroom, which were so negative that, in 1901, he set up an alternative rural school for his own children and a few other boys.96 The story could equally well be an elaboration of an anecdote touched on in his memories of his boyhood days, in which he was the guest at a dolls wedding set up by a brothers child bride, 97 presumably, Kadambari, the wife of his elder brother, Jyotirindranath. She was a childhood companion, 98 and later encouraged the budding poet.99 Turning to other stories in the Radice selection, twenty stories out of the thirty have women: widows, wives, daughters, sisters, servant girls, as central characters, or as central to the situation of a male main protagonist. The first story Radice includes is a poignant and dark tale, The Living and the Dead, which tells of Kadambini, who poured out her frustrated widows love on a relatives son, and then suddenly went into a coma, was taken for cremation but revived, and had to die again to prove that she was not a ghost. 100 There is Exercise Book, about the child
91 92
Clark, p.9. Wolpert, Stanley, A New History of India, 7th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.196, 248. 93 Radice, pp.54-7. 94 Indira Chowdhury, The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and the Politics of Culture in Colonial Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp.151-3. 95 Radice, p.54. 96 Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), p.135. 97 Tagore, Boyhood, p.54. 98 Kripalani, p.55. 99 Dutta and Robinson, p.63. 100 Tagore, The Living and the Dead, in Radice, pp.31-41.
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bride, Uma, who was mocked by her sisters-in-law for writing in her treasured exercise book, which was confiscated by her husband, a writer of various subtly barbed essays.101 Other stories like these two illustrate Tagores concerns about certain traditional Hindu practices regarding women, but he was ambivalent in his views, according to a lecture he gave on Hindu marriage three years after his own marriage to a ten-year old bride.102 The predominance of womens stories is almost certainly not simply a reflection of Radices choice of theme. Tagore makes clear in an essay on the Indian epic, the Ramayana, how important the domestic stage of life is for Indian society. He defines the Ramayana as a tale of domestic matters on an immense scale, in which love and respect between father and son, brother and brother, and husband and wife are appropriate subjects for epic. Conquest of territories and conflicts between powerful antagonists provide excitement in an epic, but the greatness of the war between Rama and Ravana also glorifies the conjugal love between Rama and Sita, a sons obedience to his father, one brothers self-sacrifice for another, and the duty of a king towards his subjects. According to Tagore, no epic of any other country has taken up the domestic concerns of an individual as its subject matter, which shows how much the home means in India, where domestic life is not just for comfort and convenience, but underpins society and makes human beings truly human.103 In his two biographies of his early life, Tagore refers to hearing stories from the Ramayana.104 Tagore likens the Ramayana and the Mahabharata to the Iliad and the Aeneid of ancient Greece and Rome, and says that in her two epics India has withheld nothing of herself. Enduring for century after century, [t]hey are still read in every village, in every home. 105 In the first article in the Tagore Birthday Number of the Visva-Bharati Quarterly in honour of Tagores eightieth birthday, Ramananda Chatterjee describes in glowing terms the enormous scope and variety of Tagores writing. Then Chatterjee says, possibly with a touch of regret, that Tagore has not written any epic poem but then adds that [t]he age for epics is dead and gone, 106 which Tagore also says: They are now an extinct breed. 107 But if these epics are the ultimate source of stories, what are the modern short stories Tagore wrote meant to convey; what is their purpose? Tagore indicates a role for the modern short story in an essay he wrote in 1928 entitled City and Village.108 At the beginning of the essay, Tagore traces human development from the primitive age [when] men wandered alone predatory [and] unsocial, through the discovery of a secure food supply by tilling the alluvial soil, when men discovered the advantage and satisfaction of mutual aid, fellowship and festivity in the village. Then the town evolved as the centre for government, defence, trade, the pursuit of knowledge, and communication with the outside world, and town life favours competition and individualism. While the village and the town are in balance, all is well, but the town becomes the city and grows like a tumour: the enemy of the whole body on which it feeds as it swells upon the social organism
101 102
Tagore, Exercise Book, in Radice, pp.140-5. Dutta and Robinson, pp.95-6. 103 Rabindranath Tagore, The Ramayana, in Selected Writings, pp.252-57 (p.255). 104 Rabindranath Tagore, My Reminiscences (London: Macmillan, 1921), p.27, Boyhood, p.45. 105 The Ramayana, p.253. 106 Ramananda Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, in Tagore Birthday Number, ed. by Krishna Kripalani (Santiniketan, Bengal, India: 1941), pp.1-30 (p.2). 107 The Ramayana, p.253. 108 Rabindranath Tagore, City and Village, in Towards Universal Man (London: Asia Publishing House, 1961), pp.302-22.
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that runs through the villages.109 Tagore then says: Villages are like women provid[ing] people with their elemental needs, with food and joy, with the simple poetry of life.110 Tagore does not say in this essay that literature is capable of healing the rift between city and village, bringing the cultural life blood of the village back to alienated urban individuals, but his short stories could fulfil that role, each one a seed to re-grow the Ramayana ideal.
109 110
Tagore, City and Village, pp.302-4, 312. Tagore, City and Village, p.311.
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3. THE WORLD: TAGORES NOVELS

[T]he actual possibility of self-determination for all ethnic groups or otherwise defined nationalities is a utopia [E]thnic relics bear witness to the upheavals and intermixtures which characterised the march of historical development in the past. Even in his time, Marx maintained that these national survivals had no other function but to serve as bastions of the counter-revolution, until they should be completely swept from the face of the earth by the great hurricane of revolution or world war. (Rosa Luxemburg, 1909)111 Neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce selfidolatry of nation-worship, is the goal of human history. And India has been trying to accomplish her task through social regulation of differences, on the one hand, and the spiritual recognition of unity on the other. (Rabindranath Tagore, 1921)112 In the previous chapter, I questioned the assumption that prose writing being new in India in the first half of the nineteenth century means that the short story is a Western-derived genre.113 There is no such question mark over the Indian novel, which clearly did come from the West, more than a century later than the literary form began in Europe. The first Indian novelist was the Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterji, who wrote at least a dozen novels between 1865 and 1883, 114 and Tagore mentions in his autobiography his encounters with Bankim Babu. 115 This provenance gives the Indian novel an international dimension, and in this chapter on The World, I move on from Tagores short fiction and local concerns, to his novels and his global encounters. It can be useful as a starting point to apply Western critical models to Tagores novels, and to identify in them recognisable novelistic tropes, as long as it is recognised that Tagores writing has a poetic depth and fluidity, so that he uses prose in his own unique way which resists categorisation and analysis. A similar challenge arises when trying to link Tagores novels to his politics or philosophy. He denied being a scholar or a philosopher,116 and had a reputation for being inconsistent, a fault which was simultaneously a strength.117 The novels which are the subject of this chapter on The World are: Naukadubi (1906), translated into English by J.G. Drummond as The Wreck (1921);118 Ghare Baire (1915), translated by Surendranath Tagore as The Home and the World
111
Luxemburg, Rosa, the Right of Nations to Self-Determination, in The National Question, ed. by Horace B Davis ([n.p.]: Monthly Review Press, 1976) http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1909/national-question [accessed 11 July 2005], Part III, para. 8 of 22. 112 Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (London, Macmillan, 1921), p.5. 113 Clark, p.9. 114 Ghulam Murshid, Tagores Novels, in Rabindranath Tagore: A Celebration of his Life and Work, ed. by Alex Aronson (Oxford: Rabindranath Tagore Festival Committee and the Museum of Modern Art, 1986), pp.42-3 (p.42). 115 Reminiscences, pp.251-2. 116 Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man: Being the Hibbert Lectures for 1930 (Boston: Beacon, 1961), p.90. 117 Hogan, Patrick Colm, Orthodoxy and Universalism: Rabindranath Tagores Gora, in Colonialism and Cultural Identity: Crises of Tradition in the Anglophone Literatures of India, Africa, and the Caribbean (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp.213-55 (pp.224-5).
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(1919),119 and Gora (1909), in two translations: by W.W. Pearson (1924),120 and by Sujit Mukherjee (2003).121 According to S.K. Banerjee, Professor of English at Presidency College, Calcutta, Tagores early experiments with the novel, from 1884 to 1902, may have been hazy, awkward and fanciful, but he soon discovered a distinctive method. 122 Tagores generally most admired novel, Gora, has considerable depth and complexity and as such engages critical attention and is open to widely differing scholarly interpretation. Ashis Nandy sees Gora as engaging with the political struggles of the day, by focusing on the two conflicting forms of response to imperialism.123 Patrick Colm Hogan sees the novel, in one essay, as a corrective revision of Kiplings Kim and two Jane Austen novels,124 and in another essay as being about colonial identity conceived of as dharma.125 Several critics have read Gora and The Home and the World as being allegories of the nation,126 and this is an example of a Western trope being an interesting focus, but Tagores presumed adoption of it needing careful examination. During the time Tagore was known beyond India, his antipathy towards the idea of Nation: his word, capitalised, for the nation-state, 127 was as well known as the book of poems, Gitanjali, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Tagore first wrote about the idea of a Nation in 1901, questioning national identity and uniformity, and concluding that such an identity was imposed by the State, and that the idea was a Western import for which there was no Indian equivalent. 128 Twenty years later, he gave lectures in Japan and in the United States, published in Nationalism,129 which show his adamant and passionate hostility to the idea of the Nation. Given Tagores views, it seems mistaken for a critic to suggest that any Tagore novel is an allegory of the nation, comparable to the European nineteenth century novel in being the symbolic form of the nation state, let alone [having] to wrest [the nation] from other geographical matrices that were just as capable of generating narrative.130 This is an idea adopted by literature scholars from Benedict Andersons insights about imagined communities, and nations and nationalism being cultural artefacts of a particular kind.131 The unthinking way the word nation is used by almost everyone in the modern world indicates how successful
118
Rabindranath Tagore, The Wreck, trans. by J.G. Drummond (London: Macmillan, 1944) first published as Nauka-dubi 1906. 119 Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World, trans. by Surendranath Tagore (London: Penguin, 1985) first published as Ghare Baire 1915. 120 Rabindranath Tagore, Gora, [trans. by W.W. Pearson] (London: Macmillan, 1924) first published 1909. 121 Rabindranath Tagore, Gora, trans. by Sujit Mukherjee (New Delhi: Sahita Akademi, 2003). 122 S.K. Banerjee, The Novels and Short Stories of Rabindranath Tagore, in Tagore Birthday Number, pp.122-35 (pp.122-3). 123 Ashis Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self ((Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.36. 124 Patrick Colm Hogan, Gora, Jane Austen and the Slaves of Indigo, in Rabindranath Tagore: Universality and Tradition ed. by Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 2003), pp.175-98 (pp.176-81). 125 Patrick Colm Hogan, Orthodoxy and Universalism: Rabindranath Tagores Gora, in Colonialism and Cultural Identity, pp.213-55 (p.214) 126 Universality and Tradition, pp.119-122, 148, 200 127 Nandy, p.5. 128 Ray Monk, Tagore on Nationalism, in Celebration, pp.26-9 (p.26). 129 Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (London: Macmillan, 1921). 130 Jonathan Culler, Anderson and the Novel, Diacritics, Vol.29, No.4 (Winter, 1999), 19-39 (p.25). 131 Culler, p.20.
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this ideological imagining has been. In an essay entitled Culture, State, and the Rediscovery of Indian Politics, Nandy contrasts the nation-state-oriented society with a culture-oriented alternative, with the latter possibly regarding the state as a protector and internal critic, but not allowed to dictate terms.132 Nandy points out that the nation-stateoriented approach seems natural in modern times, and the culture-oriented unnatural, irrational, or primitive.133 He also explores how the statist model first came to India in the nineteenth century, and manifested as a reactive, self-defensive Hinduism.134 If we think of India as traditionally culture-oriented, with Tagore working to re-vitalise that form of society, then one can read Gora and The Home and the World, and also The Wreck, which is discussed next, as allegories of India as a potentially culture-oriented country. Scholarly and other comment has often ignored or disparaged Tagores novel, Nauka-dubi or The Wreck. Tagores biographer, Kripalani, says that Nauka-dubi was the only novel he wrote merely for entertaining the reader with an ingeniously constructed story, and then comments that no other book of Tagores, apart from Gitanjali, has been translated into so many languages. 135 Other commentators are less flattering, with his friend, and translator and critic of his poetry, Edward Thompson, finding it incredibly bad,136 and Ghulam Murshid, an associate professor of Bengali at the Rajshahi University in Bangladesh, judging it as a continuation of Tagores obsession with Bankim Chandras novels and their promotion of Hindu orthodoxy.137 Tagore himself seems not to have been very confident of its success as a complete novel. In a letter to the translator, J.G. Drummond, he explains that he wrote it for serialization as he went along, a method which has disadvantages.138 However, The Wreck can be read in a better light as being an allegory of India (or perhaps better still an allegory of Bharat) 139, and as articulating the same political dilemma as Tagore conveyed in the longer novels. What is more, The Wreck uses the technique of allegory in a more thorough form. Banerjee comments that, in The Wreck, the interest lies more in incidents than in character, but he then contradicts himself somewhat by saying that the plots basis of mistaken identity is kept up artificially to prolong the central character, Rameshs inner conflict. Banerjee would undoubtedly offend modern-day feminists when he says: Even the slightest dose of the inquisitiveness, natural to Eves daughters, would have cleared up the mystery about Kamala in no time and cut the central knot of the entanglement.140 According to Banerjee, the feature of the novel which excuses its lack of plausibility is those beautiful scenes of the river-voyage which are a very entertaining record of the uneasy struggles in Rameshs heart. Significantly, Banerjee continues: We cannot, however, afford to be too severe on a lapse which provides the very basis of the novel.141 The involved journeying by river undergone
132
Ashis Nandy, Culture, State, and the Rediscovery of Indian Politics, in Literary India: Comparative Studies in Aesthetics, Colonialism and Culture, ed. by Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) pp.255-74 (p.255-6). 133 Nandy, p.256. 134 Nandy, p.258. 135 Kripalani, 1962, pp.199-200. 136 Edward Thompson, 1991, p.194. 137 Murshid, p.42. 138 Tagore, Selected Letters, p.229. 139 The translator of Gora, 2003 uses the retained words Bharat rather than India and Bharatiya rather than Indian (Gora, 2003, p.480.) 140 Banerjee, p.125. 141 Banerjee, p.125.
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by Ramesh, and his dilemma of which of two women should be his wife, are the basic elements of The Wreck as an allegory. In the Preface to her series of studies of the English novel, Dorothy Van Ghent explains that to understand a novel as a work of art, the matter of technique is crucial, and each of her studies pays attention to a single dominant procedure. One of these studies is of The Pilgrims Progress, and its use of symbolism and allegory.142 Van Ghent gives the following definition of allegory from Coleridge: [A]llegory is the employment of a certain set of characters, actions, and circumstances in such a way that these convey to the mind, under the disguise of sense objects, certain moral qualities or conceptions, and so that all the parts combine to form a conscious whole.143 As she discusses Bunyans allegory of pilgrimage, Van Ghent emphasises the importance of place, in this work specifically the physical topography, for conveying moral meaning.144 In The Wreck as an allegory, the central character, Ramesh, personifies the people of India or perhaps one should say, the Bharatiya to avoid the concept of India as nation and the plot centres around which woman he should make his life with: the orthodox Hindu girl bride, Kamala, or the Brahmo student, Hemnalini. This is the same idea which Nandy finds in Gora: the two conflicting forms of response to imperialism, referred to above. What gives The Wreck its moral force is the journey Ramesh undertakes, from Calcutta, the city where he is studying law, and is courting Hemnalini, to his home village by train, then by river to the brides village for the marriage arranged by his father, back on the river, Padma, a tributary of the Ganges, where a storm wrecks the boat leaving Ramesh stranded alone on a sandy island with Kamala, and later to other towns in rural Bengal and also the holy city of Benares. This would seem to accord with Banerjees comment that Rameshs river-voyage is the very basis of the novel. Interestingly, Banerjee expressed a strong preference for the character of the Brahmo student, Hemnalini, saying: It is Hemnalini who is easily the most living character of the book, and, in the sweet perfume that is the breath of her life and her firm, unwavering allegiance to her ideal, is the prototype of the later heroines of Rabindranath.145 This perhaps reflects Banerjees inclination towards reformed Hinduism and the Brahmo Samaj. In dramatic terms, it is little Kamala, the orthodox Hindu bride, who is the truly heroic one, with her self-sacrificing determination not to bring shame to her husband by revealing that she has lived as the wife of another man, albeit, of course, having been entirely innocent and chaste. In Tagores letter to the translator, he refers to not knowing as he wrote the serialisation how the story would end, and in fact, although he pairs Kamala off with her orthodox doctor husband, the hero Rameshs future is left uncertain. A knowledge of Bengali would undoubtedly reveal symbolism and moral significance in the names of people and places. The name Ramesh is a case in point. 146 Whilst this is a common Indian name, it includes the name Rama, as in the Ramayana,
142
Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), p.viii. 143 Van Ghent, p.21. 144 Van Ghent, pp.23-5. 145 Banerjee, p.125. 146 Note: I have been informed by Dr Ketaki Dyson that the name of the hero in the Bengali original has been confusingly translated: It is not Raamesh with a long a, it is Ramesh with a short vowel (pronounced, in Bengali, as Rawmesh). A modern translator should probably spell the name Romesh to avoid confusion. (personal correspondence 25/10/06) I have however, left my tentative etymological points as in the version of the dissertation submitted for the MA.
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coupled with Ishwar, the Sanscrit word for the Supreme Lord or God, 147 and so, as with the short stories, one can read this novel as part of a new, or re-written, epic of woman, domesticity and village, contrasted with the alienating city of Calcutta, where Ramesh can hide and is lost in the confusion of where his desires and his responsibilities lie. The next novel for consideration is The Home and the World, which cannot be ignored in any exploration of Tagores politics. It was poorly received, but is interesting for what various people said about it, as much as for its meaning or its narrative method. It is important to recognise that Tagores writing, in general, does not travel, because of problems of language and culture, which is a pity since his ideas are so fascinating and valuable. Alex Aronson, editor of a commemorative work on Tagore, includes an essay Tagore Through Western Eyes, which outlines the adjustment which Western readers had to make to an alien culture, when Tagore came to fame, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and a knighthood in 1915. There were patches of adulation and disparagement even early on, and a quite rapid falling away of interest later.148 The Home and the World had a mixed reception when it was published in Europe, in 1919. Anita Desai launches into this in her Introduction to the novel, where she mentions in the very first line the scathing review by Georg Lukcs in the Berlin periodical, Die rote Fahne,149 which may be explained by what Aronson says about Tagores reception in Germany, where the middle classes declared that Tagore had helped them to wake up the German soul150, which would not have appealed to the atheist Marxist Lukcs. Desai also quotes E.M. Forster saying that, the World proved to be a sphere for a boarding-house flirtation that masks itself in patriotic talk.151 The novel was disparaged in Bengal, when it was first published in 1915, due to its blatant criticism of the conduct of the Swadeshi political protests in the previous decade against the Partition of Bengal, which Tagore had led, and then withdrew from in disgust at the communitarian violence that it descended into. Kripalani writes that [t]he author was accused of being both immoral and unpatriotic. For three long years after its publication the critics continued to tear the novel to piecesa tribute to its impact on their minds.152 Murshid includes The Home and the World in a group of Tagores novels on the theme of the eternal triangle.153 The three central characters are: the benign and enlightened landlord Nikhilesh, or Nikhil; his wife, Bimala, whom Nikhil brings out of seclusion to be his helpmeet, thus making her vulnerable; and Nikhils friend, Sandip, Bimalas would be seducer, and a Swadeshi terrorist. In the story, Bimala is almost seduced, but her fascination fades and she returns to Nikhil in the end. Murshid comments that, as is usual with Tagore, the drama and intimacy is psychological, rather than physical, unlike in Satyajit Rays film, 154 which leaves
147
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesh [accessed 29 August 2006], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishwar [accessed 29 August 2006] 148 Alex Aronson, Tagore Through Western Eyes, in Celebration, pp.21-25. 149 Anita Desai, Introduction, in The Home and the World, pp.7-14 (p.7); George Lukcs, Tagores Gandhi Novel, in George Lukcs, Essays and Reviews, (London: Merlin Press, 1983) www.marxists.org/archive/lucaks/works/1922/tagore.htm [accessed 20 April 2006] 150 Aronson, p.23. 151 .Desai, p.7. 152 Kripalani, p.252. 153 Murshid, p.43. 154 Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World). Dir. Satyajit Ray. National Film Development Corporation of India. 1984.
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only Nikhils character as intended by Tagore (actually Ray has Nikhil die in the end, whereas the latters fate is left uncertain in the novel), and exaggerates Sandips villainy and Bimalas response. Murshids comment on the novel ends with the remark that, the nationalistic backdrop to the drama, the Swadeshi movement, takes a trouncing, earning Tagore a few more brickbats from his compatriots, some of whom ludicrously labelled him a British collaborator.155 Critics who have read the novel as an allegory of the nation see Bimala as representing the nation. Kathleen Koljian argues that in this novel Tagore questions worship of the nation as goddess, and also shows his ambivalence towards the womens liberation movement.156 Desai sees Nikhil as Tagores Tolstoyan hero a wealthy landowner who is altruistic, benevolent, rational and Westernized in his ideas, but draws back from progress as exemplified by Sandip, the revolutionary who stops at nothing neither robbery nor murder to achieve his ends. 157 Given Tagores hostility towards the Nation as nation-state, one could see Nikhil as representing Tagores ideal India, and Sandip, the seductive and ruthless urban terrorist, representing the Nation, in the sense Tagore deplored. Sandip can also represent the city, in the sense of the giant, dehumanizing machine of Tagores warning in City and Village.158 Murshids theme of the eternal triangle is an equally valid reading, which can coexist with the allegorical one, especially since allegory as a narrative technique does not dominate the plot. With Tagores characteristic focus on the domestic scene as central to the woman/ home/ village ideal, one can read The Home and the World as depicting a dysfunctional family, with Nikhil bringing Bimala out from the protective zenana, at risk from the dangerous intruder, Sandip. Tagores narrative voice adds a further element to this, with the three characters telling the identical story in turn, in a diary form, suggesting their alienation from each other. Nandy points to this device saying that there is no Roshomon effect (multiple versions of the same event), the aim being, Nandy says, to reveal differences in personality through differences in perspective, not the plural nature of reality itself.159 Nandys reference to the nature of reality leads to a crucial aspect of a political reading of Tagores prose fiction. A political reading of any writing, from what is termed a Marxist perspective, which means that it identifies and challenges ideology supportive of the capitalist system including imperialism as part of that system requires one to question some of the most firmly embedded assumptions. In literature studies, one such assumption is that nineteenth century prose fiction, and much fictional writing following that period, is realist, not in the sense of depicting life from the seamy side, but because it reflects philosophical realism, which is the basis of modern life. Ian Watt develops this idea in his book, The Rise of the Novel.160 Van Ghent provides her own version of the same conception, in terms borrowed from science, where she sees the novel as proceeding by hypothesis, saying, implicitly: Given such and such conditions, then such and such would take place. The novel presents, and at the same time challenges, the implied rule
155 156
Murshid, p.43. Kathleen Kolijian, Mythology, Nationalism, and Patriarchal Ambivalence in The Home and the World, in Universality and Tradition, pp.119-28 (p.119). 157 Desai, p.9. 158 Tagore, City and Village, pp.305-6. 159 Nandy, p.12. 160 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Pimlico, 2000), pp.11-24.
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governing society, so that the novel becomes a source of insight.161 However, Watts and Van Ghents analysis may not apply to Tagores novels, because Tagore was not a realist in that sense. Although he did not develop this aspect of his thought explicitly until some years later, in discussion with Einstein, Tagore was not a realist philosophically, he was a positivist, seeing the universe as an accumulation of human knowledge, not of an objective world out there, but manifesting as what some would see as a spiritual conception, when he referred to the universal mind, but which Ilya Prigogine (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1977) predicted would be the basis of a science of the future. 162 Tagores overall conception can be seen as his politics, his philosophy, his religion or his science according to what interests a particular disciple, which one tends to become when studying him. Tagores positivism underlies his nave-seeming declaration, I wrote from what I saw, what I felt in my heart my direct experience, 163 which is what he actually did, in his poetry, his essays and lectures, and also in his prose fiction; they are all based on individual concrete observations, they are not concepts. The distinction between collections of individual memories, grouped according to associated affective charge, and rational concepts derived from merged collections of thought, is explored in a study of cognition by David Gelernter, with a particular focus on trying to understand how poets think.164 Nandy describes Tagore as a political dissenter, who did not claim to be a systematic political thinker, but was articulating unspoken concerns of Indian consciousness at that time.165 A similar dissenting tendency is present in Tagores religious thought and his philosophy, although he claimed to be no scholar or philosopher.166 The more one studies Tagore, the more one encounters the necessity of setting aside Western assumptions. Tagores novel, Gora, is the subject of the remainder of this chapter, which takes this idea of questioning further. Language is the key to appreciating how far the Western reader can be from getting at the meaning of a novel like this. Nandy sees Gora as engaging with the political struggles of the day, by focusing on the two conflicting forms of response to imperialism. 167 The two forms of response he refers to are the moving towards the West of the Hindu Renaissance, and a reaction against this trend manifesting as a move to reclaim Hindu orthodoxy. These two are personified in the novel as a family belonging to the Brahmo Samaj, a reformed Hindu group, and a family of orthodox Hindus, adhering to some extreme codes of ritual purity with severe impacts on their lifestyle and relationships, as well as determining their politics. At one level, the story is a romance, rather like a double Romeo and Juliet, with two couples falling in love with the opposite sides, but the dnouement is different; there is a happy ending to the romance, but the eponymous hero has to drop his political and cultural identity, to engage authentically with his country:
161
Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), pp.3-4. 162 Appendix 1: Tagore and Einstein, in Selected Letters, pp.527-36 (p.534). 163 Radice, Selected Short Stories, p.13. 164 David Gelernter, The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1994) 165 Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism, p.vii. 166 Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man: Being the Hibbert Lectures for 1930 (Boston: Beacon, 1961), p.90. 167 Nandy, p.36.
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Ishwar did not grant me the imagined state I prayed forinstead he has startled me by suddenly putting his truth into my hands. I could have never dreamed that he would wipe off my soiled state so thoroughly. I am so pure now that I do not fear being defiled even in a low-caste household. Poresh Babu, I have taken birth this morning, with an utterly naked consciousness, in my own Bharatvarsha. After so long I have fully understood what a mothers lap means. (Gora, 2003, p.476) As a novel, Gora works for the general Western reader. The features of the novel form which Watt identifies in The Rise of the Novel are present in it.168 It has an original plot involving individual characters, and is not based on a traditional plot involving mythical heroes or archetypes, although some characters are typical members of sections of society, and as such undergo little development as the story unfolds. The characters have credible individual names, although knowledge of the Bengali language and traditional literature shows that some names contain some reference to the type of character. The episodes of the plot take place in everyday situations in simulated real time and actual locations. However, Gora was not written for us in the West, and this is crucial. The remainder of this chapter concentrates on two linked questions: What book is this, and who was it written for? and: Was Tagore writing back in the novel, and if so, to whom? A third question applies throughout this study, What does the novel tell us about Tagores politics? On What book is this, and who was it written for?, as with so much of Tagores writing, his poetry, his essays and his prose fiction, Gora was written for publication in a periodical. It was serialised in the Bengali monthly, Probasi between 1907 and 1909, and published as a Bengali book in 1909, having been substantially edited by the author, and in 1928, and again in 1941, the novel was republished in Bengali with some deletions restored. 169 The Gora which is the subject of this study is in two editions: a copy of the somewhat erratic translation into English published in 1924, which Tagore had disliked, and a copy of the 2003 paperback with a new translation first published in 1997 of the 1941 standard Bengali text.170 Obviously, Tagore never saw the 1997 translation. Possibly, in the last year of his life, he did approve the 1941 Bengali edition, or, aged and ill, made no objection to the bits and pieces from his cutting room floor being reverently reinstated. But the point is, neither of the translations is what Tagore wrote, and he did not write it for readers in the West, but for the Calcutta bhadralok, or gentry class, and it was their beliefs and attitudes he was holding up a mirror to. Meenakshi Mukherjee, in her Introduction to the 2003 edition of Gora, refers to the diverse readings and multiple interpretations in Bangla through these eight decades and more, and hopes that the new translation (first published in 1997) will result in more critical scrutiny, and that a different sector of readers might bring the theoretical and ideological perspectives of their own generation for opening out this old text to new readings. 171 The study by Ashis Nandy of Tagores three explicitly political novels: Ghare-Baire or The Home and the World; Gora; and Char Adhyay or Four Chapters, forms a bridge between two groups of critical reading.172 Written in English, Nandys essay is based on the authors studies of the
168 169
Watt, pp.12-30. Sujit Mukherjee, Translators Preface, in Gora, 2003, p.vii. 170 Sujit Mukherjee, p.vii. 171 Meenakshi Mukherjee, Introduction, in Gora, 2003, pp.ix-xxiv (p.xxiv). 172 Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism, pp.9-10.
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Bengali originals, as well as the novels in translation. The essay was published in 1995, so Nandy refers only to the 1924 translation of Gora, and comments that it has the worst English translation of the three (political novels) and almost invariably disappoints the English-speaking reader.173 Nandys judgement of the 1924 translation may depend on the readers country of origin and background. An English reader would relate more easily to: It was the rainy season in Calcutta; the morning clouds had scattered, and the sky overflowed with clear sunlight. (Gora, 1924, p.1) to The clouds had dispersed on this Shravan morning, leaving the Kolikata sky full of clear sunlight. ( Gora, 2003, p.1) With its retained Bengali terms, this is a particular example of the differences between the two translations. Elsewhere it is often the style of writing which differs. To take another example, in the 1924 translation, Chapter XXI begins: Gora, on leaving the house, did not walk at his usual pace, and instead of going straight home he absently sauntered down to the river. In those days the Ganges and its banks had not been invaded by the ugliness which commercial greed has since brought in its train. There was no railway beside it, and no bridge across it, and the sky on a winter evening was not obscured by the soot-laden breath of the crowded city. The river used then to bring its message of peace from the stainless peaks of the distant Himalayas into the midst of Calcuttas dusty bustle. (Gora, 1924, p.106) The corresponding paragraph in the 1997 translation reads: Gora walked homewards, not at his usual rapid pace but slowly and absentmindedly. Instead of the direct route, he took a more roundabout way along the river bank. In those days the Ganga at Kolikata and its two banks had not yet been affected by the profit-making and ugly enterprise of a merchant civilization. If (sic) did not yet wear the shackles of a bridge across the current and railway tracks on the sides. The black breath of the city did not, at that time, obscure the sky on winter evenings. The river still bore a message of peace from lonely Himalayan peaks down to the dusty bustle of Kolikata. (Gora, 2003, p.139) Some of the differences are insignificant: the first sentence of the early translation is not better expressed than the first two sentences of the later one. However, the ugliness [of] commercial greed, does seem to convey the same sense in a more elegant way than the profit-making and ugly enterprise of a merchant civilization. Taking the novel as a whole, I prefer the 1924 translation to the later one, but I can see that the latter may be preferred by an Indian English-speaker, for whom the novel may have quite a different set of meanings and relevance. 174 But the differences between the two have a deeper and more interesting significance, which begins with the story of how the novel came to be translated. Until the publication of a substantial selection of Tagores letters in 1997, the history of the 1924 English translation was uncertain, and questions remain. The translator is anonymous in the book, but he acknowledges revisions by the authors nephew, Surendranath Tagore.175 In the Elmhirst Archive in Dartington, there is correspondence between Tagore and the Macmillan publishing company on the matter of the American translation rights, which shows that it was W.W. Pearson,
173 174
Nandy, p.9. Barj B. Kachru English as an Asian Language (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1997), http://www.bib.uab.es/pub/linksandletters/11337397n5p89.pdf [accessed 26 July 2005], p.89. 175 Gora, 1924, p.v.
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who translated Gora.176 Pearson was an Englishman, a one-time Christian missionary who became a devotee and friend of Tagore. 177 In a letter to Thomas Sturge Moore, 20 May 1924, Tagore complains that Macmillan in their haste only had the half of the corrected version and the latter half remains untouched with its ludicrous mistakes and crudities. If you could read the Bengali book you would at once know how extremely unsatisfactory the translation is.178 It is hard to tell from comparing the two translations, which correspond very closely chapter by chapter, what crucial differences Tagore refers to. Possibly Tagores objection was more to do with his not having full editorial control, and the final say, on the wording of the only English translation of the novel made during his lifetime, than with any serious defects it may have. Studies of the 1924 translation have been carried out by critics with expert knowledge of Indian culture and belief; in particular, Hogan makes close reference to it to derive an analysis thoroughly sympathetic to Tagores views as expressed, in his own English, in lectures and essays.179 However, there is a distinction between the two translations that operates on the reader at another level from detailed mistakes, or differences in style of expression. In the Translators Notes at the back of the 2003 edition of Gora, three words or concepts in the Bangla language are mentioned as recurring items which are transliterated, despite there being satisfactory English equivalents. The first is Kolkata, which is retained instead of Calcutta, in the hope of conveying some flavour of the original text and place. The next is Ishwar, and also Bhagavan, rather than God because this word carries an unavoidably Christian connotation of godhood. That would be inappropriate in the Hindu or Brahmo contexts of the story. Lastly, Bharatvarsha and Bharat have been retained and not replaced by India, since the original terms more easily reflect the vision of his country or homeland as seen by Gora and others. Many of the page-referenced notes which follow have similar motives behind them, where Bangla words for historical, cultural or religious terms or practices have been retained. Some notes provide verbatim translations of the original, a few giving, without comment, the 1924 or old translation. The reader of the recent edition is constantly brought up short by these retained terms and translators notes, resulting in a Brechtian alienation effect, distancing the Western reader from becoming fully absorbed in the plot or identifying with the main characters. The two examples cited above both contain retained terms, and illustrate the distancing brought about by this device in the later translation, but the full effect is only apparent when one encounters it repeatedly. Another example, below, goes further by interfering with judgements the reader might make, and also illustrates how the ideas conveyed by the novel are conveyed differently in the two translations. In Hogans Orthodoxy and Universalism analysis, he identifies pairings of characters who represent the two opposed social groups in middle class Calcutta society: the orthodox Hindus and the Brahmo Samaj. One such pairing is a Brahmo woman, Baradasundari, called Mistress Baroda in the old translation, and an orthodox Hindu woman, Harimohini, an impoverished widow, aunt of Sucharita, the adopted daughter of Baradasundari, who had come to lodge with the Brahmo
176
Correspondence 1921-1959, Dartington Hall Trust Archive, Leonard Elmhirst Collection, LKE/TAG/1/A 177 Selected Letters, p.163. 178 Selected Letters, pp.310-11. 179 Hogan, Orthodoxy and Universalism, pp.213-255.
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family, and struggled to adhere to her orthodox practices. 180 The chapter numbering of the two editions are unsynchronised at various points, and the first paragraphs of Chapter 39 and Chapter XL in the recent and old editions respectively are as follows: Baradasundari began inviting home quite frequently Brahmo women who were her friends. Sometimes they would have their meeting on the terrace. Harimohini sought, out of her natural rural simplicity, to welcome these visitors, but it became clear to her soon that they were contemptuous of her. When Baradasundari would make critical comments about Hindu customs in her presence, some of the other women joined the discussion while looking pointedly at Harimohini. (Gora, 2003, p.242) Mistress Baroda often invited her Brahmo lady friends to the house, and sometimes they would all congregate on the terrace in front of Harimohinis room. On such occasions Harimohini, in the simplicity of her nature, would try to help in making them welcome, but they on their side hardly disguised their contempt. They would even look pointedly at her, while Baroda was making pungent comments on orthodox manners and customs, in which some of them would join. (Gora, 1924, p.195) We see here merely insignificant differences of style. A similar picture is presented: snobbish ladies looking down rudely on a social inferior, and our sympathies are with the latter. Further into the same episode, the following occurs: One day a Brahmo girl wanted to satisfy her curiosity and was about to step inside wearing her shoes when Sucharita barred the way, saying, Please dont go into that room. Why not? Her thakur is in that room. Her thakur is there! Do you worship him everyday (sic)181. Harimohini said, Yes, Little Mother, I worship him everyday. You have faith in your thakur? (Gora, 2003, p.242) One day one of the Brahmo visitors, just out of curiosity, was about to step into Harimohinis room with her shoes on, when Sucharita blocked the way, saying: Not into this room please! Why, whats the matter? My aunts family god is kept there. Ah, an idol! And so she worships idols? Yes, mother, of course I do, replied Harimohini. How can you have faith in idols? (Gora, 1924, p.195) There is a much more significant difference here. In the 2003 version, the word thakur is used where the earlier translation uses other terms, firstly, by Sucharita, family god, and then, by the Brahmo visitor, idol. There is no translators note in the 2003 version to thakur, but earlier in the book there is a note to Dada-thakur, indicating that Dada is elder brother and Thakur is idol or divine presence or at least revered person, both being terms of respect. ( Gora, 2003, p.487) Thakur is also Tagores family name in Bengali. There is a lesson contained in both versions of the passage. In the 2003 version
180 181
Hogan, Orthodoxy and Universalism, pp.230-33. Note: every day? would be more correct; slips like this are quite frequent in this translation.
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of this episode, there is the alienation effect of the retained word, thakur, signalling: there is something here you dont understand, plus, once one investigates the meaning of the word, there is the lesson that in the culture depicted in the book there is a tradition of regarding an idol as something worthy of respect and reverence. In the 1924 version, the lesson could seem to be simply about taking care to be courteous and tolerant, perhaps especially towards someone who has different cultural or religious practices. However, use of the word idol a pejorative term tends to shift the sympathies of a Western reader towards the Westernised Brahmos, despite their snobbery, and there are other situations in the novel which have the same potential bias. The question: what book is this? has revealed three main versions of the novel: the Bengali original (at various stages); a poor English translation, from a Bengali or Indian perspective; and a translation into English, as an Indian language. Considering those versions points to a variety of readership: Bengalis, Indian English-speakers, Bengali-speaking academics, and English speakers beyond India. However, knowing the forms the novel came to take, and who was then able to read it, does not answer the question: Who was Tagore originally writing for in the novel? and hence: Was he writing back, to whom and why? Frustratingly, there is no simple answer to those linked questions; one would have to go way beyond the scope of this study. I can only suggest where the answer could come from in order to keep the question open, particularly on the writing back issue. One could start with Nehrus Two Englands and the Third England scholars and the Hindu Renaissance intellectuals. Marxs book on the 1857-59 Revolt adds much that would be useful. An analysis by Gramsci of The Intellectuals in society, is also key.182 Several of the essays on Eurocentrism, the West, and the world in a collection addressing the disputes between Marxist and postcolonialist scholars are relevant too.183 Clearly, Tagore was not writing, in Bengali, for readers in the metropolitan centre in London. He could have been writing for the rising bourgeoisie in Calcutta, but they were few in number, since, according to Nehru, the growth of industry was still being severely restricted in the early twentieth century. 184 An Indian readership corresponding to the group in England which Watt identified, mainly women: the wives of the rising bourgeoisie, and their domestic servants, would be few in number too.185 Gramscis class of rural intellectuals, 186 responsible for local and state administration, including the professions, would seem to fit the Bengali middle classes in Calcutta, despite the fact that they were living in what was still the capital city of the Raj. Tagore reached them as a journalist, as contributor and editor of periodicals, but he would not have been consciously creating an imagined community, brought together only to be his readers; he wanted real communities of people who knew and related to each other. The first readers of Gora read it in the periodical where it was serialised between 1907 and 1909, and in the complete edited volume published in 1909. To the extent that Tagore was conscious that these readers had adopted, or else were challenging, Western ideas and aspirations, the novel could have been responding to those values and judgements which had been employed hegemonically with the aim of running the Raj unchallenged, and thus
182
Gramsci, Antonio, The Intellectuals, in Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, http://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/prison_notebooks/problems/intellectuals.htm [accessed 27 August 2006] 183 Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies, pp.21-97. 184 Nehru, p.309. 185 Watt, pp.35-47. 186 Gramsci, section entitled The Different Position of Urban and Rural Intellectuals, para. 2.
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Tagore would have been writing back. In one of his essays on Gora, Hogan describes the novel as a corrective revision of Kiplings Kim and of two Jane Austen novels, Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park.187 Meenakshi Mukherjee is dismissive of the various critical essays side-tracked, into comparing Gora with Kiplings Kim because both novels have orphan heroes of Irish origin growing up in India. 188 She cites an essay by Lalita Parry in this connection, but those by Nandy and Hogan are guilty of this too, and Mukherjee is surely right that the comparison is an obvious one to make, but trivial and not useful. The parallel Hogan draws between Gora and Mansfield Park is less obvious, but rather contrived. In any case, such a comparison is misleading because of Mansfield Park being the textbook condition of the nation (England) novel and, as I mentioned earlier, Tagore was highly critical of the concept of nation. However, the parallel between some characters and themes in Gora with Pride and Prejudice is very obvious, but is it writing back? Gora resembles Pride and Prejudice in that there is a family like the Bennets, with a likeable, easygoing father, Poresh Babu, and a rather absurd and embarrassing, social-climbing mother, Mistress Baroda or Baradasundari (depending on the translation), with their several daughters, including Sucharita and Lolita as the Elizabeth and Jane heroines, who endure various trials and lessons before marrying Gora and Binoy, the Darcy and Bingley equivalents, who are also put through the mill to earn their happy endings. Hogan refers to a form of indigenous response to metropolitan literature that is the result of seeing it as similar to an indigenous tradition, in this case romantic comedy. 189 One can see a more material variant of this, in that marrying off daughters is in reality a major preoccupation in Indian society, and one can imagine the Austen novel being greeted by English-educated Indians with great hilarity. A modern manifestation of this is the recent Anglo-Indian film called Bride & Prejudice,190 which adds an East meets the West twist by having an American Darcy disrupt Mrs Bakshis plans to find suitable matches for her four daughters, including the headstrong daughter, Lalita, who is determined to marry for love.191 Hogan draws a detailed comparison between the entire cast of Gora and that of Pride and Prejudice, some of which allow him to make interesting points, but they take ones attention away from ideas in the novel which are particular to India, ideas which Hogan himself explores in his other Gora essay focussed on dharma.192 Hogan remarks that Pareshthat is, Mr. Bhattacharyais more idealised than Mr. Bennet, later commenting that Tagore had no need to criticize the excesses of love marriage [t]hus there was no reason to stage a destructive elopement. 193 But Hogan fails to point out in this essay that Tagore may be saying that the sense of responsibility of Indian fathers, and the conventions regarding the protection and upbringing of daughters, which persist despite love marriage becoming accepted, means that a Lydia sub-plot would be out of place in an Indian Pride and Prejudice. This is surely a demonstration of how dharma, as right conduct, operates to avoid calamities in Indian society. So, there is no Lydia scandal in Tagores Pride and Prejudice novel, hence, surely, no Lydia character, with her impulsiveness and vulnerability. In the research
187 188
Patrick Colm Hogan, Gora, Jane Austen and the Slaves of Indigo, pp.176-81. Meenakshi Mukherjee, Introduction, in Gora, 2003, (p.xxiv). 189 Hogan, Gora, Jane Austen and the Slaves of Indigo, p.180. 190 Bride & Prejudice. Dir. Gurinder Chadha. Miramax. 2004. 191 http://www.miramax.com/bride/ [accessed 28 August 2006] 192 Patrick Colm Hogan, Orthodoxy and Universalism, p.214. 193 Hogan, Gora, Jane Austen and the Slaves of Indigo, pp.184-5.
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towards this dissertation, having followed all the avenues available to a nonBengali-speaker, who has no inside knowledge of Indian society, and no expert background in Indian literature and culture, this final point: there is no Lydia, sounds anticlimactic, but this is the nub of Tagores message, and the starting point for my conclusion.
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4. CONCLUSION: THE VILLAGE AND THE WORLD

In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among these smallholding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not form a class. They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name, whether through a parliament or through a convention. they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. (Karl Marx, 1852)194 [In Deleuze, t]wo senses of representation are being run together: representation as speaking for, as in politics, and representation as representation, as in art or philosophy. Since theory is also only action, the theoretician does not represent (speak for) the oppressed group. The banality of leftist intellectuals lists of self-knowing, politically canny subalterns stands revealed; representing them, the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent. (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 1988)195 To explain how the missing Lydia, in Tagores Pride and Prejudice novel, is a pointer to the conclusion of this dissertation, requires a slight digression not inappropriate with a study of the mercurial Tagore, whereby new aspects constantly open up which require going back over writings of his which one thought one had penetrated. In her study of Tagores friendship with the distinguished Argentinean, Victoria Ocampo, Ketaki Kushari Dyson reveals a surprisingly sensuous, or even erotic, side to Tagore.196 (Curiously, this helps one understand some of Tagores paintings: those with the strange animate armchairs enclosing human forms. 197) Tagores eroticism is present very clearly in one of his most admired short stories, The Hungry Stones,198 but looking back at the works studied for this essay, one sees that all Tagores heroines have what one might call a chaste erotic character: Chandara in Punishment, Kamala in The Wreck, Bimala in The Home and the World, and Sucharita in Gora. Looked at in that way, Lydia is present in Gora, as Sucharita who rejects the man she was supposed to marry in favour of her own choice, as Lolita who runs away to join Binoy on the ferry, causing a minor scandal. But all Tagores heroines are chaste, and in that sense, Lydia is missing. Tapan Raychaudhuris essay, Love in a Colonial Climate, shows how colonial rule disrupted the most private concerns of the Bengali Hindu bhadralok, and concludes with a poem by Tagore showing how [t]he family as haven acquired a new meaning in the colonial context.199 But for Tagore, the family was more than a real-life haven, it was a metaphor for all he believed in, together with woman and
194
Marx, Karl, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. by David McLellan (Oxford University Press, 1977), pp.318-326 (pp.319-20). 195 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?, in Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A Reader, ed. by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, (Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education, 1994), pp.66-111 (p.70). 196 Ketaki Kushari Dyson, In Your Blossoming Flower-Garden: Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria Ocampo (New Delhi: Sahita Akademi, 1988), p.20. 197 Dyson, Plate 32. 198 Radice, pp.233-43.
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village, and India-in-the-world as a culturist society of community and cooperation. In the India-in-the-world of Tagores vision, there would be no Lydia, because she represents the victim of the nation-state-oriented society of the modern world. She has needs and desires, and notional rights and freedoms, also protection and restrictions under the law one could see her as the proletarian, with the freedom to be exploited in the global job market but she lacks the security of belonging to a culturist society, based on well-understood duties and mutual responsibilities, or dharma. But perhaps that is taking a political reading too far for a literature studies dissertation. From a postcolonial literature studies perspective, the main conclusion to this dissertation is that Tagore did not represent the villager or ryot (peasant) in his prose fiction, as if anticipating Spivaks assertion: The subaltern cannot speak. 200 The short story, Punishment, is unusual in that the main characters are from a peasant family, but even here, the underlying meaning turns out to be a universal one, about wifely and domestic dharma. Tagore usually wrote from a middle-class perspective, sometimes privileged, more often humble, and given that this class was subservient to the British Raj, this was subaltern too. Even so, Tagore was communicating, through allegory, principles relating to a universal model of life. My exploration of Gora, in particular, has shown that one must question the idea that Tagore was writing back on behalf of the people of his country, in order to represent them artistically or philosophically, in Spivaks terms. As with Tagores short stories, so in Gora, this was real life, what the author saw, and what became his lifes work, his personal dharma, to turn around. Uma Das Gupta devotes her biography of Tagore to conveying the lesser known aspects of Tagores life, as an educator and rural reformer. This was work he began whilst managing the family estates, and turned his full attention to after withdrawing from the Swadeshi movement.201 As this work progressed, and as a result of his search for someone with expert knowledge to bring to the village reconstruction project, he recruited the Englishman, Leonard Elmhirst, who went on to establish a rural reconstruction project of his own in Dartington in Devon.202 Tagores international university was intended to be the seed of his ideas on the village and the world spreading everywhere. Tagores novel, The Home and the World, is a vehicle for his anti-politics, which is present in Gora too as a rejection of both of the two factions competing to take political power in India. What Tagore was against, politically, coincides with what Niall Ferguson in his book, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World believes India owes the Empire: Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world. Those empires that adopted alternative models the Russian and the Chinese imposed incalculable misery on their subject peoples. Without the influence of British imperial rule, it is hard to believe that the institutions of parliamentary democracy would have been adopted by the majority of states in the world,
199
Raychaudhuri, Tapan, Love in a Colonial Climate: marriage, Sex and Romance in NineteenthCentury Bengal (Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2. (May, 2000), 349-378 (pp.377-8). 200 Spivak, p.104. 201 Uma Das Gupta, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), p.16. 202 Michael Young, The English Experiment, in The Elmhirsts of Dartington (Totnes, Devon: Dartington Hall Trust, 1996), pp.103-29 (pp.127-8).
The Village and the World as they are today.203
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The assumption which Tagores political thought makes one question is that liberal capitalism plus parliamentary democracy, on the one hand, and the totalitarianism called communist, on the other, are the only two possible options together with the more subtle point that there have to be economies and states in the world with the power to choose between them. Tagore wrote about this organization of politics and commerce, whose other name is the Nation as follows: When it (society) allows itself to be turned into a perfect organization of power, then there are few crimes which it is unable to perpetrate. When this engine of organization begins to attain a vast size, and those who are mechanics are made into parts of the machine, then the personal man is eliminated to a phantom, everything becomes a revolution of policy carried out by the human parts of the machine, with no twinge of pity or moral responsibility.204 Nandy describes Tagore as a dissenter politically. 205 During the period when Tagore was writing the novels which are the subject of this study, right up to the time of his death, the Calcutta middle classes, whether belonging to the reactionary orthodox Hindu group, or to the Westernized tendency, whether Brahmo Samaj or secular like Nehru and his colleagues, were eager and impatient to get their hands on this organization of power. In 1917, Indian men with political ambitions were negotiating with the Government for a transition to responsible government in India, as an integral part of the British Empire.206 It was when they became disenchanted with the false promises from the authorities that Gandhi brought to their struggle his Gift of the Fight. 207 Gandhi shared Tagores aspiration for a culturist future for India, and believed that an independent India would re-claim its village-based traditions, but Gandhi did not share Tagores vision of international involvement in a modern India. Returning to what Tagore favoured, culturally and politically, his vision was not about representation in the alternative sense, which both Marx and Spivak refer to. If developed as a political model, Tagores village and world would involve cooperation at the local level, with a sharing of knowledge and skills internationally, rather than a hierarchy of power working through cities and nation-states, and so would involve participative or direct democracy, rather than representative democracy. The idea of dharma, which we have seen brought out in the short stories as a new Ramayana, with the focus on domesticity as village, home and the role of women, is crucial to re-creating the self-governing rural community which Nehru and Marx wrote of having been destroyed by the British Raj, in both its Company and its Crown incarnations. This study has shown how fascinating Tagores ideas and his ways of expressing them become, when one sets aside Western assumptions, and how potentially valuable is his vision. But that leaves us with a question about how
203 204
Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2004), pp.365-6. Tagore, Nationalism, p.12. 205 Nandy, p.vii. 206 A Joint Address from Europeans and Indians to His Excellency the Viceroy and GovernorGeneral and the Right Honourable the Secretary of State for India (Calcutta: C.H. Harvey, 1917), Dartington Hall Trust Archive, Leonard Knight Elmhirst Collection: LKE/IN/43. 207 Marjorie Sykes, Gandhi and Tagore: The Candid Friends, in Jehangir P. Patel and Marjorie Sykes, Gandhi: His Gift of the Fight (Rasulia, Hoshangabad, India: Friends Rural Centre, 1987), pp.9-29.
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Tagores ideas and vision could reach the West, given the barriers of language and general Western arrogance. According to Dyson, Tagore does not belong to the Bengalis or to the Indians only. He belongs to the whole world, if only the world would care to claim its rightful heritage.208 Later in her book, Dyson condemns excessive reliance on English [which] encourages a monoculture of the mind obliterating nuances that genuinely matter. Furthermore, Dyson argues, English is connected with Britains imperial past and the new power of the U.S.A., and brings with it many troublesome neo-colonial assumptions.209 In the closing days of editing this essay, I read two books: Tagores The Religion of Man (1931),210 which I had not been drawn to because its title is offputting to an atheist, and Upton Sinclairs The Jungle (1906).211 Tagores correspondence with Sinclair is referred to in Selected Letters, with the editors saying that Tagore could never have adopted socialism as a creed but shared Sinclairs repugnance for commercialism and the dehumanising effect of machines.212 Oddly enough, these two books by Tagore and Sinclair share a weakness, in that they are both rich, in their different ways, but uni-dimensional, so a reader must accept or reject them wholesale. In contrast, the power of Tagores prose fiction is its hidden depths, and insights one has sought out and found for oneself are life-changing, and have global implications.
208
209
Dyson, p.20. Dyson, p.353. 210 Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man: Being the Hibbert Lectures for 1930 (Boston: Beacon, 1961) 211 Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (London: Penguin, 1936) first published 1906. 212 Selected Letters, pp.304-5.
The Village and the World BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Texts: subjects of the study Tagore, Rabindranath, Selected Short Stories, ed. by Sukanita Chaudhuri (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000) Tagore, Rabindranath, Selected Short Stories, trans. by Krishna Dutta and Mary Lago (London: Macmillan, 1991) Tagore, Rabindranath, Gora, [trans. by W.W. Pearson] (London: Macmillan, 1924) first published in Bengali, 1909 Tagore, Rabindranath, Gora, trans. by Sujit Mukherjee (New Delhi: Sahita Akademi, 2003) Tagore, Rabindranath, The Home and the World, trans. by Surendranath Tagore (London: Penguin, 1985) first published 1915 Tagore, Rabindranath, Selected Short Stories, trans. by William Radice (London: Penguin, 2005) stories first published 1890s Tagore, Rabindranath, The Wreck, [trans. by J.G. Drummond] (London: Macmillan, 1944) first published 1906 Tagore, Rabindranath, Punishment,in Radice, pp.125-33in Chaudhuri, pp. 110-20;in Dutta and Lago, pp.67-79 Other Primary Texts Tagore, Rabindranath, My Boyhood Days (New Delhi: Rupa, 2005) Tagore, Rabindranath, The Broken Nest, trans. by Mary M. Lago and Supriya Bari (Delhi: Macmillan, 1973) first published, serialised, in Bengali, 1901 Tagore, Rabindranath, Broken Ties and other Stories (Macmillan, 1925) Tagore, Rabindranath, City and Village, in Towards Universal Man (London: Asia Publishing House, 1961), pp.302-22 Tagore, Rabindranath, Crisis in Civilization, in Towards Universal Man (London: Asia Publishing House, 1961), pp.35359 Tagore, Rabindranath, Farewell, My Friend, trans. by K.R. Kripalani (London: New India, [n.d.]) first published 1929 Tagore, Rabindranath, Gitanjali (London: The India Society, 1912) Tagore, Rabindranath, Glimpses of Bengal: Selected from the Letters of Sir Rabindranath Tagore 1885-1895 (London: Macmillan, 1945) Tagore, Rabindranath, I Wont Let You Go: Selected Poems, trans. by Ketaki Kushari Dyson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1991) Tagore, Rabindranath, Lectures & Addresses by Rabindranath Tagore, Selected from the Speeches of the Poet, ed. by Anthony X. Soares, M.A., LL.B. Professor of English Literature, The College, Baroda (London: Macmillan, 1928) Boyhood Chaudhuri
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Dutta and Lago Gora 1924 Gora 2003 Home and the World Radice Wreck Punishment
Broken Nest Broken Ties City and Village Crisis in Civilisation Farewell, My Friend Gitanjali Glimpses of Bengal I Wont Let You Go Lectures & Addresses
The Village and the World Tagore, Rabindranath, Selected Writings on Literature and Language ed. by Sisir Kumar Das and Sukanta Chaudhuri (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001) Tagore, Rabindranath, Nationalism (London: Macmillan, 1921) Tagore, Rabindranath, Personality: Lectures Delivered in America (London: Macmillan, 1919) Tagore, Rabindranath and Leonard Elmhirst, Rabindranath Tagore: Pioneer in Education: Essays and Exchanges between Rabindranath Tagore and L.K. Elmhirst (London: John Murray, 1961) Tagore, Rabindranath, Quartet, trans. by Kaiser Haq (Oxford: Heinemann, 1993) first published 1916 Tagore, Rabindranath, The Religion of Man: Being the Hibbert Lectures for 1930 (Boston: Beacon, 1961) first published 1931 Tagore, Rabindranath, My Reminiscences (London: Macmillan, 1921) Tagore, Rabindranath, Sadhana: The Realisation of Life (London: Macmillan, 1915) Tagore, Rabindranath, Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore, ed. by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Tagore, Rabindranath, Talks in China (Calcutta: Visvabharati, [1925]) Tagore, Rabindranath, Towards Universal Man (London: Asia Publishing House, 1961)
41 Literature and Language Nationalism Personality Pioneer in Education
Quartet Religion of Man Reminiscences Sadhana Selected Letters Talks in China Universal Man
The Village and the World Secondary Texts: Books and Articles
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The Village and the World: A Political Reading of Rabindranath Tagores Prose Fiction

Christine Marsh, BSc, BA (Hons.)

chris_e_marsh@hotmail.com September 2006.

The Village and the World SYNOPSIS

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

1. INTRODUCTION: RABINDRANATH TAGORE, HIS PROSE FICTION IN CONTEXT

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

2. THE VILLAGE: TAGORES SHORT STORIES

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

3. THE WORLD: TAGORES NOVELS

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

4. CONCLUSION: THE VILLAGE AND THE WORLD

The Village and the World

The Village and the World as they are today.203

The Village and the World

41 Literature and Language Nationalism Personality Pioneer in Education

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

The Village and the World

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