Letters from a Young Poet (3 page)

I rest my head upon the window—like the affectionate hand of nature, the breeze slowly runs its fingers through my hair, the water flows past with a rippling sound, the moonlight shimmers, and sometimes ‘the eyes spontaneously overflow with tears'. Often when you're deeply hurt inside, tears well up as soon as you hear the sound of an affectionate voice. The lifelong hurt that we feel against nature for this unfulfilled life turns into tears and flows silently the moment nature turns sweetly affectionate. Then nature caresses you all the more and you hide your face in her breast with even more fervour, and you attain a sort of melancholic peace that comes from ‘disinterested wisdom'. Such are my evenings.

The sentence preceding this declares: ‘There is one lot that becomes restless thinking, “Why can't I know everything about the world?” and there is another lot that is frustrated wondering, “Why can't we say everything that's on our minds?”—in between, what the world has to say stays within the world and the inner thought stays within …' The ellipsis that marks the elision in the text at this point are portions in Indira's notebooks that she did not copy down, marking the break with three asterisks instead. The deeply personal nature of the words that are left on the page here make it obvious why whatever was expressed in the missing section would
have been censored. What is important about what remains is not the obvious shallow speculation on the cause or object of intimacy and pain but, rather, the startling sensuality expressed by the feeling, suffering correspondent, and the utter physicality of the sensory experience in the body.

The body is also felt as encumbrance and pain—the second letter describes a bad back, a condition that leads him to rue: ‘Never again shall I think of the back as merely a place to tuck in the ends of one's
dhuti
—man's humanity is sheltered in his back'—but it is also, entertainingly, the primary locus in relation to his children. In the latter instance, the tactility of the infant body—its softness and chubbiness, its sharpness in infant scratches or bites, its funniness of movement and gesture—is recorded with incredible warmth of humour and affection. At the end of a long train journey, he delights in his six-month-old son at home, who appears to him ‘an absolute simpleton [
nitānta hāňdā
]', ‘quite dark', with ‘chubby cheeks', ‘plump hands curled into fat fists' and a ‘constantly wavering look on his face and eyes … of complete brainlessness' which are the ‘
general characteristics
' common to the young of humankind. Three years later, we have a vignette of the three children—elder daughter Bela, elder son Khoka, and second daughter Renu—in Bolpur:

The other evening, Bela and Khoka got into an argument on a subject that's worth citing. Khoka said, ‘Bela, I'm feeling hungry for water' [
Jal kshide peẏeche
]. Bela said, ‘Nonsense, gap-tooth [
dhūr, phoklā
]! You don't say hungry for water! Thirsty for water.' Khoka, very firmly—‘No, hungry for water.' Bela—‘
Āyei
, Khoka, I'm three years older than you, you are two years younger than me, do you know that? I know so much more than you!' Khoka, suspiciously, ‘You're that old?' Bela—‘Okay, why don't you ask Baba?' Khoka, suddenly excited, ‘And what about the fact that I drink milk and you don't?' Bela, scornfully, ‘So what? Ma doesn't drink milk—does that mean she isn't bigger than you?'
Khoka, completely silent, with head on pillow, thinking. Then Bela began to say, ‘
O father
, I have a tremendous, tremendous
friendship
with somebody! She's mad, she's so sweet!
Oh I can eat her up!
' Saying this, she runs to Renu and hugs and kisses her till she starts to cry.

The italicized portions, spoken originally in English by the child, show how fundamentally bilingual the family was at this time even in—perhaps especially in—moments of intimacy. Seeing his third daughter, Meera, his ‘youngest hatchling' in July 1894, he finds that ‘the thing is almost exactly as it was before', and attempts to start up an acquaintance, an attempt that proceeds uproariously rapidly as, ‘in no time at all, she began to lay her soft fat hands with their sharp nails upon my nose, face, eyes, hair, moustache and beard … and not only that, she then began to roar and try to put my nose and eyes into her mouth to eat it all up'. And again in another letter: ‘Her fat little hands feel so sweet on my body!' The utter joy in children that Rabindranath was known for in his lifetime is manifest here in the fun and physicality of play and in the mocking, loving tone so typical even today in Indian attitudes to little children.

Physicality is not only present in the domain of the romantically sensuous in relation to the landscape or the rumbustiously comical in relation to children—with his own body he is constantly uncomfortable and dissatisfied. In relation to women, he is awkward and shy, even at the age of thirty-two:

I don't think I'd be able to conduct a conversation with the weaker sex with such absolute ease and sweetness and confidence even now that I'm almost thirty-two years old. I stumble when I walk, stutter when I must speak, can't decide where to keep my hands, feel it's my duty to arrange my long legs somehow, but always fail to do anything about them—by the time I've decided whether to keep them tucked away under me, or in
front, or behind, I'm unable to match the correct answers to the appropriate questions. In the presence of three gas lamps and a roomful of people, to establish one's self solidly by the side of some young woman in an instant, without hesitation, like a piece of iron attracted to a magnet, is impossible for timid, anxious creatures such as myself.

The ‘three gas lamps and a roomful of people' in presumably a drawing room also serve to remind us of the colonial appurtenances that were inevitably a part of his life at this time. This is a tennis-playing young man; as a journalist visiting Shilaidaha and Shahjadpur in 2010 said when he found the tennis racquet used by Rabindranath kept carefully in the Shahjadpur bungalow in Bangladesh: ‘In this one department, he would have effortlessly beaten every one of his successors, from Jibanananda to Shakti Chattopadhyay to Joy Goswami. The only tennis-player poet in Bengali literature!'
⁸
Tennis was not the only colonial accomplishment in his life—listening to the piano being played, often by Indira, was also a large part of his life at the time. Writing from Shahjadpur in June 1891, he says to her:

Nowadays the nights here are full of such marvellous moonlight, what can I say! Of course, I don't mean to say that you too don't have moonlit nights at your place—it has to be admitted that at your place the moonlight slowly spreads its silent authority over the meadow you have, that church spire, the silent trees and bushes. But you have many other things besides the moonlight—you have your
harmony
and
discord
, your
tennis
, your
marble tables
, the song and music sessions in the
drawing room
—but I have nothing except this silent night.

This feeling of distance from the colonial presence and the public was one that he expressed in a letter from Shilaidaha as well, when he wrote: ‘I was walking as if I was the one and only last-
remaining pulse of a dying world. And all of you were on another shore, on the banks of life—where there's the
British government
and the nineteenth century and tea and
cheroots
.' The words in the original English here gesture at the English presence in India and, inevitably, at his life in these years as a member of the elite, almost aristocratic, class—a conjunction from which he self-consciously drew away in his later years.

If a partly English way of life was inevitable for someone of his class, the harshness with which the colonial presence in his native countryside grated on his nerves must also have been felt by his compatriots, but few others have expressed themselves so urgently or vividly or humorously on the subject as he has in these letters. A classic in the genre is the letter in which he is forced to first interact with, and then give shelter to, the young English district magistrate in Shahjadpur in 1890:

Exchanged a vast amount of felicitations with the saheb; said to him, ‘Come and have dinner with me tomorrow evening.' He said, ‘I'm leaving for somewhere else today itself to arrange for
pig-sticking
' (I was secretly pleased). Said I'm very sorry to hear that. The saheb said, ‘I return on Monday' (which made me very gloomy). I said, ‘Then make it on Monday.' He was instantly agreeable. Anyway, I sighed and reminded myself that Monday was still some distance away, and reached home.

A hilarious sequence follows: the description of an imminent storm, an invitation to the saheb to shelter on dry land, that is, at his home, the discovery that the guest room in the house is fit for a slum, of its eventual temporary renovation and, in conclusion, his fervent hope that cockroaches wouldn't tickle the soles of his guest's feet at night.

The brown man's burden—how to be hospitable to the white man in India—animates more than one letter. In one such (Letter 37), he laments:

Just a short while ago, the engineer from Pabna turned up with his mem and kids. You know, Bob, I don't find it easy to be a host—my head gets completely muddled—besides which, I never knew he was going to bring a couple of kids along. This time I was supposed to be living on my own, so I haven't even brought too many provisions. Anyway, I'm trying to shut my eyes and ears and get through this somehow. Additionally, the mem drinks tea, and I don't have any tea; the mem can't stand dal right from her childhood, and due to the absence of other food, I have ordered for dal to be made; the mem doesn't touch fish from
year's end to year's end
, and I have quite happily ordered catfish curry to be cooked.

He concludes: ‘If I can bid goodbye to them tomorrow morning then I might just survive; if they say they're going to stay one more day then I'm going to die, Bob.'

Not all the portrayals of the English in India are humorous—most, in fact, sting with a bitter sharpness, describing a deliberate insult or unfair affront, as when an Englishwoman at a railway station tries to occupy the compartment he is trying to board, sniggering at him spitefully, or when in Puri the English magistrate's wife, Mrs Walsh, refuses his calling card because he is an unknown ‘native'. His complaint is heartfelt:

In the first place, you know I can't stand the sight of these Englishmen in India. They habitually look down on us, they don't have an iota of
sympathy
for us, and, on top of that, to have to
exhibit
one's self to them is truly painful for me. So much so that I don't have the slightest inclination to enter even their theatres or shops (except for Thacker's). Even a great big cow born in an English home feels he's superior to every person in our country—that always hits me hard.

Very rarely does politics enter any of these letters, but in Letter 79, he comes up against an abrasive Englishman, ‘the
Principal
of the
college
here' in Cuttack, whose opinions on the prospect of Indians being a part of the jury system in India render him speechless. This man's views leave him sleepless that night, and his head and heart hurt so much that he is helpless as he describes how, unable to make a fitting reply, when he had gone and sat down in a corner of that drawing room, it had all appeared like a shadow in front of his eyes:

Yet in front of me were memsahebs in
evening dress
and the murmur of English conversation and laughter was in my ear—all together such discordance! How true our eternal Bhāratbarsha was to me, and this
dinner table
, with its sugary English smiles and polite English conversation, how empty, how false, how deeply untrue! When the mems were talking in their low, sweet, cultivated voices, I was thinking of you all, oh wealth of my country. After all, you are of this Bhāratbarsha.

A day later, he is still smarting from the experience.

But, Bob, I've still not forgotten the audacity of that Englishman yesterday. He blithely said that we have no idea about the
sacredness of life
! These are the people who exterminated the
Red Indians
of
America
, who had no qualms in shooting down even helpless, weak
Australian
women like hunted animals for no reason and no fault of their own, who cannot be tried by one of our countrymen if they murder one of us; they come to the timid, pitiful Hindu and
preach sacredness of life
and
high standard of morals
?

This is an early and eloquent expression of an outrage familiar, of course, to many colonized peoples the world over as they've confronted the yawning gap between liberal preaching and violent practice in colonial and neo-colonial situations.

Yet, if anything is even more contemptible than the racist English men and women in India, it is Indians without self-respect. Against this class of men he is unforgivingly harsh—men in dinner jackets who flaunt their proximity to the English, speak in English and always fawn on the ruling class. He summarizes the politics of the period with acuity: ‘All those
patriots
who make good speeches in English, how they look down on Bengali language and literature! And the temporary benefit from that one good English speech is so slight in comparison with all that is lost because of that scorn!' Rabindranath had pressed for putting a stop to the practice of making political speeches in English, as is well known, and his fierce fight for the heart and soul of his country—which he likens to the Pandavas in exile, preparing for war—is in evidence in some of these letters, which startlingly display a hot-headed youth (who addresses the English presence in India and says, ‘Your affection is to me what the pig is to the Muslim. It makes me lose caste—really lose it'), not unlike his own future protagonist, Gora, in the eponymous novel written a decade later.