Scatter and flow: selections from Chhinnapatra

AVEEK SEN

Patishar

Sunday, 19 February 1894

The side on which I have tied my boat is entirely desolate – no village, no dwellings, only ploughed land stretching endlessly; along the riverbank there are some patches of dry grass, which are being torn out by a few buffaloes as they graze about. And we have two elephants that also come here to graze. Watching them is quite a bit of fun. Lifting a leg, they give a few light kicks at the base of the grass; then, with just a tug of their trunks, large clumps of grass come out together with the earth. They keep swinging these clumps about with their trunks and shaking them, so that the earth falls out in showers, and then they put them in their mouths and eat them up. Sometimes, on a whim, they take some dust into their trunks and blow it out in a gust on their own backs and bellies and everywhere else – such is the elephant’s toilette. Huge body, immense strength, graceless bulk, and exceedingly harmless – I quite like looking at this huge creature. As if it were precisely for his hugeness and ugliness that a special kind of affection is aroused – from the awkwardness in his entire person, I think he is like an enormous baby [– one is moved to a little more compassion for these animals than for the cat, dog and horse.] Besides, the creature is ever so large-hearted by nature, like Shib Bholanath – when he goes wild he goes really wild, when he cools down there is profound calm. [I was even thinking, at times, that these tenderness-bedewed feelings of mine for the elephant are perhaps a lot like what women feel towards the race of men.] A certain lack of grace that comes with being big does not make one inwardly turn away from it, rather it draws one to itself. That picture of Beethoven in my room – compared with many beautiful faces, it might not be thought worth looking at, but when I turn my gaze towards it, it pulls me to itself very much – inside that tousled head, what an immense soundless universe of sound! And what an immeasurable pain, like a storm shut in, whirled about inside that man. [When I look at B__, too, a similar revering pity is aroused in me – in every instance of his untidy abstractedness, an unquiet, unfinished genius, full of suffering, reveals itself. All men are not Beethoven or B__, or it is not even that women tend to love Beethoven and B__ – but I can see in both a great beauty. Usually, in men, strength is mixed with an awkward helplessness, and intelligence with huge quantities of imbecility, and that is why they arouse in women just a small measure of respect with a large measure of maternal love. I think, compared to the amount of maternal love men arouse, women cannot manage as much. Anyway, much of all this talk is conjecture – founded on whatever little hint I get from the womanly part of my own nature.]

 

*

19 February 1894, was actually a Monday. But being on the river in early spring for several days does something to the human sense of time. Writing to his niece, Indira Debi, Rabindranath Tagore does not stop to think before putting down the wrong day. He does this quite often in the letters to Indira, and a sense of infinite leisure – which these letters celebrate as well as regard with irony – must have made those days and nights in the boat feel quite outside time. But never entirely so.

For the river itself, with its endless flow and with the myriad forms of human and animal life along its banks, becomes a living symbol of the passing of time. It runs alongside that other living flow, the poet’s consciousness: the drift of his mind, his empathy, his memory, his gaze, his reading, his letters, essays, stories, songs and poems, compulsively written throughout that leisurely time on the water.

There was also his work on the family estates, involving tenants, farmers, villagers and boatmen. It was that zamindari, after all, which gave him the excuse to be away on the boat for days. His father was still alive, and his fourth child, Meera, was born just a little more than a month ago. And around this burgeoning yet death-haunted, aristocratic, feudal-modern home, there was always the nation, a fin-de-siècle Empire, and the world. Tagore was going to be 33 when he wrote this letter to Indira, then an accomplished and sophisticated 21 year old. Her ‘simple love of truth’ made her the ideal recipient of letters that contained some of their writer’s most profound and candid moments of self-revelation. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, the greatest Bengali novelist before Tagore, was on his deathbed in February, 1894, and Tagore already well into his early fame – if only in Bengal – as a poet, dramatist, essayist, novelist and writer of short stories. This fame and his own sense of vocation as a writer, together with the demands of domesticity, were placing before him an increasingly difficult need for time and solitude. A private universe had to be created and watched over for the ‘work’ of inwardness, in which Indolence, at its most delicious, would become a kind of diligence.

It was the 23 year old. Keats who had written of ‘delicious diligent Indolence’ in a letter of 1818. Yet, both Tagore and Keats were keenly aware that this inwardness could never afford to lose its critical connection with what the latter had called ‘a world of Circumstances’ – the mind’s vital, restless and playful empathy with everything that was not itself. Besides, this is a sense of the private that is already anxiously mindful of its public destiny in the republic of letters. Waiting, and lingering, in the wings of greatness is the stuff of these letters to Indira.

Written between 1887-95, most of them were copied out by Indira into two undated volumes, leaving out the more personal and domestic bits. She presented these volumes to Rabindranath, who used a few of the letters, duly worked over, for some of his early autobiographical nonfiction. Then, around 1911, he started preparing a selection from Indira’s volumes – this time, revised and edited more extensively – as a companion volume to his memoirs, Jibansmriti.

This selection became Chhinnapatra (‘torn letters’/‘scattered leaves’), published in 1912, leather-bound and with Nandalal Bose’s drawing, on the title-page, of a bee perched on the stem of a lotus flower with only one of its petals left. Bose’s image of a flower’s most secret part revealed was no unapt emblem for a privacy lost in the very process of its discovery. This was just after the public celebration of his 50th birthday at the Town Hall in Calcutta – Tagore had come out of the wings into the limelight. Gitanjali had been published, and his lecture-tours to England and America would follow soon after. Then the Nobel in 1913.

Almost five decades later, Kanai Samanta went back to Indira’s volumes and re-edited her selection, calling it Chhinnapatrabali (1963), adding more than a hundred to the Chhinnapatra letters, and giving fuller versions of Tagore’s published extracts. In my translation above, I have put box-brackets around the sections left out by Tagore in 1912, and restored by Samanta in 1963. Tagore’s deletions show how he was not only tidying up the prose, but was also taking out certain kinds of personal material – for instance, the bit about his much-loved, immensely talented and mentally unstable nephew, Balendranath (‘B__ ’), who died in 1899, aged 29. He again appears as ‘Bolu’ in the first of the letters below.

The forging of an inward and private self, and then going back, at a later stage, to an almost daily record of this process in order to make this earlier self part of a self-consciously constructed public persona – this is the story that informs the textual history of these early letters to Indira. Their many editorial layers are a combination of authorial self-fashioning and posthumous myth-making – the stringing together of ‘a garland of many Rabindranaths’, as Tagore had put it in a late poem. In Chhinnapatra, what is allowed to remain and what is edited out, what is left behind and what returned to, are part of the transformation of a private man into a great writer, and then into an icon. In this, the writer himself and his subsequent archivists collaborate, with shared as well as conflicting intentions.

I chose to open this selection from my own translation of Chhinnapatra with this letter because of its extraordinary movements and expansions of sympathy and reflection. It shifts from elephants to the god Shiva to women to men to Beethoven to Balendranath to his own androgyny, from the grotesque to the comic to the tragic – through apparently arbitrary, but delicately controlled, associations – as Keats’s great letters and verseepistles often do. It is difficult to convey in English the paradox in Tagore’s description of Beethoven’s musical universe – shabdaheen shabdajagat – because shabda is both sound and word . Tagore is referring not only to Beethoven’s deafness, the paradoxical silence inside a head full of music, but also to the wordlessness of most of Beethoven’s music, and hence to the relationship between language and music, writer and composer. The soundless universe of sound is also a wordless world of words.

What follow are three more letters from Chhinnapatra. Each opens up an extraordinary range of sympathies and sensibilities. They achieve an effect of expanding space that is physical, experienced through the actual presence of the surrounding landscape, as well as profoundly subjective – the creation of a unique gaze and of the inscrutable hinterland from which it emanates.

In the first letter below, the word desolation occurs in English, and poitry caricatures the mispronunciation of poetry in a certain kind of Bengali spoken in Calcutta.

 

*

Shilaidaha

November 1889

Across the river from Shilaidaha, our boat is anchored in front of a sandbank. An immense bank – utterly empty – its end nowhere in sight – only here and there sometimes the line of the river can be seen – then again, the sand could be mistaken often for the river – no village, no people, no tree, no grass – for variety, there is, in some places, the wet black soil full of cracks and, in other places, dry white sand – turning eastwards, one can see the endless blueness above and endless stretches of pale yellowness below, the sky empty and the earth empty too, a meagre dry hard emptiness below and a formless wide-open emptiness above. Such desolation cannot be seen anywhere else. Suddenly turning westwards, one can see the bend in the current-less little river; on its other side, the high bank, trees, houses, like a strange dream in the light of the evening sun. Exactly like creation on one side and destruction on the other. I say the light of the evening sun because we go out for our walks in the evening and that is the picture that remains etched on the mind. One forgets in Calcutta how astonishingly beautiful the Earth actually is. That the sun sets every day into the peaceful trees beside the little river, and that hundreds of thousands of stars silently appear every night above this endless faded-grey deserted silent bank, it is only when one stays here that one understands how astonishingly great a happening this is for the affairs of the world. In the east, the sun gradually opens the pages of an immense book at dawn, and in the evening from the west, it slowly turns an immense page across the sky, and what an astonishing form of writing that is too – this river of feeble breadth and this bank stretching to the horizon and like a picture the neglected margins of the other shore – what a vast silent secret school for learning to read this is! Anyway. These words would sound a lot like ‘poitry’ in the capital, but they are not at all inappropriate for this place. Set free into these immense shores in the evening, the children go one way with their attendants, Bolu goes the other way, I go another way, and the two women [Tagore’s wife, Mrinalini, and her maid] go yet another. Meanwhile, the sun sets completely, the golden glow of the sky fades, the darkness makes everything unclear, and I gradually make out from the faint shadow at my side that the thin bent moon has begun to give out a little bit of light – this pale yellow moonlight on the pale yellow sand creates more of a sort of confusion in the eye – where the sand is and where the water, where the Earth and where the sky, one is left to guess for oneself. So, wrapped around it all, there seems to be an unreal mirage-world.

Yesterday, after walking about for a long time along these shores of illusion, I went back to the boat to find that no one from our set other than the children had returned – I sat still in an armchair and began to read a book called Animal Magnetism on an extremely obscure subject in the obscure light of a lamp. But no one returned. I went out, leaving the book face down on the bed. Climbing up to look all around, I caught no glimpse of any dark heads – it was all pale and utterly empty. I cried out ‘Bolu!’ once with all my strength – the voice rushed off in gusts of sound in every direction, but nobody answered. Then my heart suddenly shrank from all sides, like the sudden folding of a large open umbrella. Gofur went out with a light, so did Prasanna and the boatmen, we all went out in various directions – I was shouting ‘Bolu! Bolu!’ on one side – Prasanna was calling out ‘Chhoto Ma!’ on the other – sometimes the boatmen were heard crying out ‘Babu! Babu!’ Many stricken voices began to rise up into the silent night in the midst of that desert. But there were no answers from anybody. Once or twice Gofur shouted from a great distance, ‘There they are!’ and corrected himself immediately, ‘No, no!’ – try to imagine the state of my mind. If you must imagine the scene, then the silent night, the feeble moonlight, the unpeopled bare silent riverbank, the light from Gofur’s single lantern moving in the distance – frantic voices calling sometimes from one side and their indifferent echoes from all sides – sometimes, the dawning of hope and, the next moment, profound hopelessness – all of this you must conjure up for yourself. Many improbable fears began to rise up in my mind. Sometimes I thought they must have fallen into a quicksand, or that Bolu must have had a fit or something, sometimes the horror of different kinds of wild animal began to haunt in my imagination. I kept saying to myself, ‘Those who are incapable of self-protection calmly put others in peril.’ [A quotation from his own recent play, Raja o Rani.] I became firmly resolved against women’s independence – then about an hour later a cry was raised that they had climbed the steeps to find themselves on the other side, and were not being able to come back. The boat went over to the other side, and the Lakshmi of the boat returned to her vessel – Bolu kept saying, ‘I am never going out with you again.’ All were contrite, exhausted and anguished, so the fine sentences of delicious rebuke that had formed in my heart had to remain in there – even after waking up the next morning, I could not at all manage to be angry.

 

Kaligram

January 1891

Yesterday when I was working in the office, some five or six boys suddenly came in and stood before me in the most restrained manner – before I could ask them anything, one of them started saying in the purest Bengali, ‘O father, it is owing to the good fortune of these unfortunate children that the Creator of the Universe has been kind enough to grace this place again with their master’s auspicious arrival.’ The oration went on in this vein for half an hour; sometimes he was forgetting the memorized speech and looking up at the sky to correct himself. The topic was the dearth of stools and benches in their school – given this scarcity in ligneous resources, ‘where indeed are we going to seat ourselves, and where will our honourable teacher be seated, and when the respected inspector comes how are we going to offer him a seat?’ Hearing this profuse oratory issuing forth suddenly from a little boy, I so felt like laughing, especially inside this office of the landlord, where illiterate farmers manage to communicate the sorrows of their poverty in their entirely rustic language – where one hears during famine or flood that even after the selling of cow, calf and plough, there is not enough rice to fill the belly, where the word raharaha is used instead of aharaha, or otikroy instead of otikram. So, an oration in Sanskrit about the shortage of stools and benches sounded most bizarre in such a place. The other clerks and tenants lost their speech when they heard the extent of this lad’s mastery of language – they were rueing to themselves, ‘Our parents have not taken enough care with our education, otherwise we could also have stood in front of the landlord and appealed to him in such pure language.’ I could hear one of them nudging another and saying a little contemptuously, ‘Someone’s taught him what to say.’ I stopped the boy before he could finish his speech and said, ‘Alright, I’ll arrange for your stools and benches.’ Even that did not subdue him. He resumed from where he had been interrupted – even though it wasn’t necessary, he delivered his speech to the last word, touched my feet and went back home. The poor thing had learnt it by heart with great difficulty; he would not have been offended if I hadn’t given him his stools and benches, but he would have found it unbearable, perhaps, if I had snatched his speech away from him. So, in spite of having a lot of urgent work, I listened very solemnly from beginning to end.

 

Kaligram

January 1891

That enormous Earth lying silently out there, I love it so – its trees, rivers and fields, its quietness and bustle, mornings and evenings, I wish to hold it all together in my two arms. I wonder, the earthly riches that we have got from the Earth, could we ever have got them from any heaven? I do not know what else a heaven would have given us, but from where could it have given us to cherish as our own these people so tender and full of weakness, so pitifully anxious and immature. This earthen mother of ours, our very own Earth, has carried in her own arms to her golden fields of corn, to the banks of her rivers flowing with affection, to her human habitations of love full of their own joys and sorrows, the riches that all these poor earthly hearts guard with their tears. We hapless creatures cannot keep them for ourselves, cannot save them, for many invisible and powerful forces keep wrenching them away from our breasts. But the poor Earth has done her utmost. I love this Earth very much. Such a far-reaching melancholy lingers on her face – as if she thinks to herself, I am the daughter of a god, but I do not have the power of the gods. I love but cannot protect, begin but cannot complete, give birth but cannot save from the hands of death. That is why, after breaking off my friendship with Heaven, I love my poor mother’s house even more – precisely because of this helplessness, so incapable and stricken perpetually with love’s countless anxieties.