Rabindranath Tagore as the Intimate “Other”

ERASURElines of poemsscratched out, erased to ink in —new shapes —art revealed

SELF-PORTRAITgouache shade’s matt-blur —an outline of the psyche —subtle peek into soul’s eye

SONGrabindra sangeet’snasal baritone —honey-tinged, monotonic

—Sudeep Sen, “Tagore: Haiku Triptych”

My emotional and aural response to Tagore’s poetry was slow in coming—especially his own English translations of the 1913 Nobel prize-winning Gitanjali/Song Offerings—in spite of being buoyed by a glowing introduction by W. B. Yeats, whose pitch-perfect sardonic English poetry I admired. Tagore’s nectar-dripping “over-floweth-the-cup” nasal-lyrical style, seemed anachronistic and uncool (albeit perhaps misplaced), especially growing up in the cosmopolitan 1970s and 1980s.

Intellectually, I was always engaged with Tagore’s wider art—particularly the fine arts, theatre, dance-drama, and short fiction. I was attracted to his “erasures,” the way he made unique artworks out of erasing and inking-out sections from his poems-drafts, as part of his editing and image-making process. It is said that “Tagore—who likely exhibited protanopia (colour blindness), or partial lack of (red-green, in Tagore’s case) colour discernment—painted in a style characterised by peculiarities in aesthetics and colouring schemes.” His sketches, pen & inks, oils, watercolours, and gouaches of a certain period—and more significantly, works by Tagore’s relatives, Girindranath, Gaganendranath and Abanindranath—fascinated me.

Rabindranath’s songs/dance-dramas were omnipresent during the yearly Durga Puja and other festivals. A certain kind of Bengali doesn’t need any excuse to stage Tagore’s works—and I was surrounded by many of them. And by a lot of Tagore paraphernalia too—beautiful editions of Rabindra Rachanabali and Gitabitan on my parents’s bookshelves, his official sage-like sepia-photograph, his artworks and reproductions on their walls; and stacks of Rabindra Sangeet EPs, LPs, and audio cassettes by the finest exponents of this field. But my prized possession always remains the original “erasure” tear-sheet from one of his workbooks, framed on my library wall. My mother, in her younger days, was a dancer-actress in Tagore productions. As children, we learnt Tagore verses for recitation.

Growing up in Delhi’s Chittaranjan Park probashi-Bangla diasporic neighbourhood, one couldn’t possibly avoid Tagore. He was everywhere—his music; his poetry; local shops and houses bearing his symbol and name; his bronze busts; his demi-god-like status; and more. As a child, I had the task of fetching milk from Mother Dairy every evening. And as I walked past the neighbourhood houses carrying my large aluminium pail almost grazing the tarmac, sonorous sounds of children practising Rabindra Sangeet and their footsteps learning Tagore’s folk-dance were audible. I didn’t think much of all that beyond the fact that they were part of an everyday ritual. Of those days, I have provocatively said, “Tagore was pouring out of every orifice.” This wasn’t appreciated by hardcore Bengalis who, missing the irony, sought to misguidedly reprimand me. As a fashionable act of adolescent rebellion, I even shunned Tagore. But what is obvious now, as a practising poet/translator, how much Bengali culture—and by extension Tagoreiana—influenced me through cultural osmosis.

This isn’t to say that the other languages, literatures, political ideas and philosophies weren’t discussed in my home and amongst my circles—they variously infected and informed me. Also, I grew up with three mother-tongues—Bengali, Hindi and English—like many other Indians of my generation. So my loyalties were not necessarily monolithically fixed to the idea of Bengaliness, albeit a very important and significant strand in my tissue-system.

In my younger days, I was an admirer of Jibanananda Das and Kazi Nazrul Islam’s poetry over Tagore’s (admitting that was sacrilegious). I found their precise tactility, un-Victorian-Augustan phrase-making, use of contemporary idiom, the power of their oral structure, and in general, the best aspects of Modernism, much more appealing at the time. But equally, I also loved and worshipped Milton and Shakespeare, Pushkin and Tolstoy, Ghalib and Faiz, Neruda and Paz, Verlaine-Baudelaire...