Tagore: Looking Beyond the Mirage of Appearances
Rajdeep Konar [Rajdeep Konar is pursuing his doctoral studies in Center for Theatre and Performance Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he is investigating Rabindranath Tagore’s ideas on aesthetics, especially in the domain of performance.] “No man loves life like him that’s growing old.” -Sophocles, Acrisius [fragment] It is a fact that in the life of Rabindranath Tagore there has indeed been numerous instances of de-constructing and creating anew. But equating all that with his act of beginning painting at the age of sixty with the others, I think, would not be justified. It is one thing to re-write a play nine times, to change one’s views on matters of political or social concern even if one has believed in it for the greater part of his life and it’s yet another for a sexagenarian poet in Rabindranath Tagore’s position, to say that words no longer fascinate him and it is in a completely different artistic language: painting that he finds his calling. It definitely indicates towards an intense commotion underneath- a storm, which shakes the world of the poet, shakes his faith in the words which once in Budhadeb Bosu’s terms seemed his owned loyal subjects. I would like to direct my investigation, in this essay, towards this sudden loss of interest in words. Therefore, I would be trying to find out exactly what sort of circumstances would oblige Tagore, a compulsive writer by the sheer volume of his works, form an utter revulsion towards the vocation of writing, in the final phase of his life. This as we shall see, will lay bare an interesting negotiation that the old poet was going through with himself, at the time and also enlighten us regarding how he was reacting to the arrival of modernity in Bengali literature. “People grow older with every passing year; but the first half is what can be named growing while the second is withering away.”[i]These are the exact words with which writer and critic and Tagore enthusiast Budhadeb Bosu (1908-1974) begins his book “Shongo: Nishongota / Rabindranath” (1963). Budhadeb, when he was writing these words was already in his fifties and thus we can rest assured that he was speaking from more than intuition. He goes on to speak in the rather longish paragraph that follows about the perils old age has brought to his life: the fast diminishing physical and mental strength, blurring eyesight, deteriorating memory, the doubts and anxieties plaguing the mind faced with the smallest of decisions. All of this, as Budhadeb writes, affects him as a writer and makes writing, what was earlier pleasurable for him, an irksome and tiring process. We have also heard writers express similar sentiments under such circumstances. “An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick”[ii] is what Yeats felt. American journalist and literary figure H. L. Mencken says “The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”[iii] Thus, age we find weakens the physical constitution and makes oneself vulnerable, especially artists. So does Tagore too was similarly distraught by his diminishing physical and mental abilities? It does not seem likely at the time he begins painting in the early 1920’s. While there indeed were occasional illnesses, recurring problems like the pain he had in his knee, it was not until his mid or late 70’s that we get to hear from Tagore expressions like- “I no longer want to carry on the garland of pains that I am having to carry in this life”. For confirmation we can go to another Tagore enthusiast and philosopher Abu Syed Ayub who identifies Tagore as the possessor of a “poetic health”, stressing that even in his periods of grave illness Tagore’s poetic abilities remained unaffected[iv]. An allegation which Budhadeb Bosu makes in his work Kobi Rabindranath against Tagore and which might come to our aid here is that: the drama which is found developing through Tagore’s poetry beginning from Manasi ends in Gitanjali and after that Tagore only repeats himself and has not been able to write anything worthy of its creation. According to Budhadeb, specimens of whatever Tagore would write in his later poetry, was already available in Gitanjali. Even though Abu Sayeed Ayub in his work Adhunikota O Rabindranath dedicated to Budhadeb presents a surgical analysis of Tagore’s later poetry to dismiss any such notion; Sankha Ghosh shows in his essay Budhadeber Rabindranath how Budhadeb himself has contradicted his own view on a number of occasions. For instance the collection of poems titled Adhunik Bangla Kobita edited by him begins with Tagore’s post Gitanjali poems. There are definitely instances of poets or writers reaching a certain age and feeling that they have nothing new to say: Sudhnidranath Datta, a poet from the Kollol Jug in Bengali literature, who was also close to Tagore; for one lamented in his poems much before he was old “whatever was there to say, has been said long ago” while Bishnu Dey among the modern Bengali poets became tragically repetitive in his later years. However, whatever he may be called, the Tagore who writes Sesher Kobita, Shyamali or Sisutirtha, can never be called repetitive. So we are yet to find the true nature of the problem. We might go back from Tagore’s own words on the matter for some light. To Rani Chanda, who by her own admission was the most rigorous witness to Tagore painting, he says- “The bearer of beauty (rasa) is language. That is why the danger, thus everything changes with the change of language…so it often seems to me that my paintings would never be rejected because even if the specialty of lines and forms change, there would never be any dearth in their beauty.”[v] So was Tagore anxious that unlike his writings which may lose their popularity and acceptance with the change in linguistic trends his paintings would be acceptable beyond contexts of time and