Teesta Review: A
Journal of Poetry, Volume 4, Number 1. May 2021. ISSN: 2581-7094
In
Memoriam: Smaran and Palataka Rabindranath Tagore
In Memoriam: Smaran and Palataka: Sanjukta Dasgupta, Sahitya
Akademi, 2020. pp 82. ISBN: 978-93-90310-27-2, Price: Rs. 125
|
|
Sanjukta Dasgupta (Professor) has created a memorable translation
of Rabindranath Tagore’s Smaran (1902) and Palataka (1918)
in the volume In Memoriam published by Sahitya Akademi in
2020. Smaran (In Memory of) contains 27 death
meditations occasioned by the demise of the poet’s wife in 1902 and Palataka
( Fugitive) is also focused on death, suffering and loss as the
ontology that best describes the condition of women, even those
belonging to middle and upper middle class families. Dasgupta writes a helpful
introduction contextualizing Tagore’s poems within the actual events of loss
and separation in his life and she also underscores the systematic denial of
value to women that characterized societal mores of that time.
Not only did Tagore lose his wife Mrinalini in 1902, he had lost
his beloved sister-in-law Kadambari (considered to be his Muse ) in 1884, his
older daughter Bela in 1918 and middle daughter Renuka by 1907. Although this
period was also marked by the death of his son Shamindranath and father
Debendranath, it is the untimely deaths of young girls that is foregrounded in
poems like “Trick” or “Phanki” and “Getting Lost” or “Hariye
Jawaa” of Palataka, written around the time
Bela ( Madhurilata) died in 1918, where the cosmos itself
seems to send out a universal moan for these lost girls.
The English version of the Gitanjali contains
incredible death meditations by Tagore which had deeply moved Gide while he
translated from the English to French. For instance this song written in
1910, Ratri eshe jethai meshe diner parabare/ tomai amai dekha hobe
shei mohanar paare (where the night merges into the day/ You and I
will meet at that interweaving moment) is part of the Gitanjali collection.
The ‘You’ in this poem is however, God. Another song Orey
majhi orey amar manab janma torir majhi (1910) addresses
God as the mythical boatman and calls upon Him as the poet’s life draws to a
close.
Although a drive towards a cosmic understanding of death marks Smaran,
the poet’s existential agony over the death of his young wife is very evident.
The intensity of bereavement pierces the air through lines like ‘When she was
living/what she gave again and again/ I will not be able to reciprocate now’ (
poem 2) or ‘Love had arrived love left opening the door wide/ She will not
return again’ (poem 3). In poem 4 the poet quietly states:
It was the dead of night
then; you left your home
For a path you never
used that unknown path
While departing you did
not say a word..
…
In this vacant room if I
enter out of long habit
Searching for you, who
will I look at?
In poem 10 Tagore dwells
upon what remained unspoken in Mrinalini’s love for him, so habitual was her
shyness and silence, the internalization that stems from the patriarchal
injunction of silence on women:
You did not say
everything, you were unable to say it all-
You erased yourself so
bashfully..
However, Tagore’s continual effort to sublimate pain and seek the
universal in the personal eventually led him to say that by dying early,
Mrinalini prepared him for the ultimate ‘guest’ Death, and that now found her
in the universe instead of looking for her in his home. In a
brilliant feat of gendered self-imagining he claims in poem 12:
My male soul has
expanded so much
As a deathless woman has
become part of it.
In Palataka one of the most memorable poems is
“Phanki” or “Trick” where a young woman named Binu, aged 23, is taken on a
holiday by her husband as part of a doctor’s prescription against her wasting
illness. The poem describes Binu’s intense happiness over the
intimate presence of her husband which was denied to her in the large joint
family of her marital home. The imprisoned quality of women’s lives comes out
through the husband’s narration:
This gave Binu a chance
to ride a train
For the first time in
her life
This is the first time
she stepped out of her marital home.
The journey involved a change of trains at Bilaspur. Alighting
from the train Binu had been ecstatic at the sight of a young calf and
some shishu trees. On the journey forth from Calcutta, Binu’s
abundant happiness had been expressed in fulfilling the desires of all those
who asked for alms. At the waiting room at Bilaspur station, she promised the
woman sweeper a sum of 25 rupees for the latter’s daughter’s wedding. Binu’s
husband is askance at her request, privately scolds Rukmini, mentally
denigrating her as low caste and exploitative and dismissed her with only two
rupees.
Binu did not come back
to Calcutta. She spent the last two months of her life with her husband prizing
his nearness as the ultimate happiness of life. As she leaves him for ever she
says,
Whatever I may forget in
this life
I will remember these
two months for ever
The husband is torn with guilt over having lied to Binu, who did
not know that at an ultimate moral level, her husband’s lie diminished the high
premium she had set on the time spent with him. The husband’s guilt hounds him
as he alights at Bilaspur on the way back to Calcutta, desperately looks for
Rukmini, to redeem his guilt through a gift of money. Alas, Rukmini is not to
be found anywhere. The poem ends with the husband’s deep lament:
I bore my guilt all
along
My lie remained with me
forever.
In another poem “Release” (“Nishkriti”), a girl child named
Manjulika is married off to a Kulin (high caste )Brahmin five
times her age, by her father. She shortly becomes widowed and lives her life in
her father’s house, committing herself tirelessly to housework. She denies
herself love even though she was aware that her childhood playmate Pulin, loved
her. Eventually after the passing away of her mother who had not been able to
bear her grief over Manjulika’s life, the father decides to marry again. He
comes back home to find that Manjulika had left with Pulin to set up home in
Farakkabad. Once again in this poem, Tagore underscores the
tyrannies of the patriarchal system over women. As suggested by Dasgupta in the
Introduction, perhaps a residual guilt over his own early giving away of his
two older daughters, makes him probe the many deprivations of women’s lives
with such searching poignancy.
However, the most haunting of all the poems in Palataka is
“Getting Lost” or “Hariye Jawa” The traces of Tagore’s loss of his oldest
daughter Bela or Madhurilata, hang unmistakably over the poem. The cry, ‘I am
lost I am lost,’ of the little girl Bami whose light had gone out as she came
down the stairs, searching for her friends, envelops the cosmos in a heart
rending cry of all women who are ‘lost’ to themselves and lost in the
world.