In Kabi-kahini (The Tale of a Poet, 1878), Tagore’s first work published in book-form, a very romantic, nature-loving poet leaves his beloved Nalini, who is almost Nature herself personified as a young girl, to travel abroad; when he returns, he finds her dead. The grieving poet is, however, allowed to reach a ripe old age and become a mellowed philosopher, compassionate to all creation. The plot of Bana-phul (Forest-flower, 1880) is more disturbing. Although published as a book after Kabi-kahini, Bana-phul was written earlier, begun when he was only fourteen and published serially in a magazine in 1876, when he was fifteen. It is Tagore’s first completed poetic opus and described in the title-page as a verse-novel. In it Kamala, a Miranda-like figure, is given shelter by Bijoy after she is left an orphan at the death of her father. Kamala, however, falls in love with Bijoy’s friend Nirad who has shoulder-length hair, while a maiden named Niraja seems enamoured of Kamala’s Bijoy. It could have been a prankish story like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it changes course and moves towards Romeo and Juliet. Nirad says he has been told by Bijoy to leave, and he is on his way, but he suddenly falls to the ground, injured, with a knife stuck on his back, while Bijoy is seen slinking off with bloody hands. There is a terrific scene in which Nirad is consumed in a funeral pyre, and at one point we wonder if Kamala is going to throw herself on the flames too, but she doesn’t. She chooses to hurl herself from a snowy mountain peak, falling into a foaming stream which carries her off.
So the young Tagore was quite capable of imagining hopeless love-tangles, conflicts between love and friendship and between old loyalties and new attractions, sexual jealousy and murderous impulses, suicides driven by hurt feelings or love’s despair. In Bana-phul we see him indulging in an extremely risqué tragicomic pun involving his own name (Rabi) and that of his elder brother (Jyoti). Kamala’s suicidal fall from the top of a mountain is described as ‘the fall of a bright star from the sky’. This clinched it for me: I decided that should there be a new edition of my translations, I would change the gender of the star in ‘The Suicide of a Star’ to a she.
In the book in which my research colleagues and myself gave the results of our investigations into the effects of Tagore’s protanopic vision on his literature and art, I indicated en passant that I was moving away from the position that the poem ‘The Suicide of a Star’ had nothing to do with Jyotirindranath and Kadambari (Dyson, Adhikary et al., Ronger Rabindranath, Ananda, Calcutta, 1997, p. 15).
What is intriguing is the freedom with which the young Tagore could openly publish his angst-ridden, erotically charged adolescent texts. The value of the freedom of expression was indeed very much in the air, and perhaps his guardians thought that it was better that he should get his obsessive preoccupations out of his system. Attention could be deflected from risky details by delaying publication, re-arranging the sequence in which a series of poems had been written, and by editing. ‘The Suicide of a Star’ was first published in Bharati in the summer of 1881. That is to say, if Kadambari had really tried to kill herself the previous year, a decent length of time had elapsed and the matter had been hushed up. The poem could now be understood symbolically. And the following year the poet could happily include it in Sandhyasangit, acknowledged as his first adult collection. But some anxiety did keep him editing the text of the poem between different editions of this collection, perhaps in an effort to erase the traces of any reference to a real incident and to emphasise the poem’s symbolical nature. Dr Sumana Das of the Bengali Department of Rabindrabharati University, Calcutta, has drawn my attention to an edition of Sandhyasangit which collates the variant readings of the poems in the collection (Visvabharati, revised reprinting of 1993). Looking at the variant readings of ‘The Suicide of a Star’ here, one realises that Tagore was indeed trying to cover some traces, de-emphasise some aspects of the poem and re-emphasise others. In an article recently published in the departmental journal of her university, Dr Sumana Das has written how surprised she had been to find that in my translation I had rendered the star as a he, for she had always imagined this star as a she (‘“Tomar srishtir path…” Rabindranather kabitar anubad ebong prasangik kichhu bhabona’, Rabindrabharati Visvavidyalay: Bangla Bibhagiya Patrika, vol. 25, June 2008).
81-83. Invocation to Sorrow (Sandhyasangit): This poem may have been written in Kartik 1287 (mid-October to mid-November of 1880 A.D.) when Jyotirindranath and Kadambari were away in western India on a long holiday and Rabindranath was living in their rooms adjoining the second floor terrace of the Jorasanko house, devoting himself to writing poetry (Pal, vol. 2, 2nd edition, p. 89). One suspects this long holiday was meant to be therapeutic, for curing Kadambari’s depression. Whether or not she had tried to kill herself, she might have had a bout of depression, and in those days ‘a change of air’ would be the enlightened remedy for such a condition, as indeed for many other maladies. Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay seems to have supported such a hypothesis. Pal does not commit himself on the health issue, but thinks that Jyotirindranath and Kadambari were away in the hilly regions of western India (Pal, vol. 2, 2nd edition, pp. 69-70, where there is also a relevant quotation from Mukhopadhyay). I am inclined to think that both ‘The Suicide of a Star’ and ‘Invocation to Sorrow’ spring from the same emotional turmoil in roughly the same period. If the first one was directly triggered by a suicide attempt on the part of Kadambari (or her depression), in the second one the agitation is increased by the departure of Jyotirindranath and Kadambari to western India for a long period. The variant readings for the second poem, collated in the edition of Sandhyasangit referred to before (Visvabharati, 1993), show the same anxiety to edit material. Some 52 lines which existed in the poem once were cut out and never restored. Four such discarded lines can be translated thus: ‘Having fun has fatigued me exceedingly,/ I can no longer smile a skeleton’s smile,/ fleshless, just teeth and bones!/ Just laughter, just laughter, nothing else!’ Readers can see for themselves the strong echo of ‘The Suicide of a Star’.
83-84. Endless Death (Prabhatsangit, Morning Music): This is an interesting example of the young poet trying to understand the meaning of life and death in a cosmic context. The poem immediately preceding this one in Prabhatsangit is called ‘Endless Life’.
85. Breasts No. 2 and The Kiss (Kadi o Komal, Sharps and Flats): These poems undoubtedly reflect the consummation of the young poet’s marriage and his delight in the sexual discovery of his adolescent wife. The period when he first got to know her intimately was probably in the post-rains of 1885 at Sholapur (Pal, vol. 3, pp. 19 & 64).
86-87. Desire (Manasi, She Who is in the Mind): Written on 20 Baishakh 1295, this poem undoubtedly remembers Kadambari who died in the month of Baishakh four years ago. I knew I had to translate the third person singular here as she.
87-89. Death-dream (Manasi): This poem, which may also be haunted by the memory of the dead Kadambari, was actually written on 17 Baishakh 1295, but was placed in Manasi after ‘Desire’, with two other poems, written on 13 and 15 Baishakh, in between. In the arrangement of poems in this part of Manasi there seems to have been a deliberate blurring of their chronological sequence. It does not serve any thematic purpose, but perhaps served a psychological need of the poet (Pal, vol. 3, p. 89). It is possible that Tagore was trying to blur the connection between some of the poems and Kadambari.
‘the cosmic collapse’ (stanza 12): I was very tempted to write ‘the big crunch’ or at least ‘the cosmic crunch’, but these proposals were firmly vetoed by members of my family, who thought that any introduction of the scientific jargon of our own times, and especially the use of the word crunch, would be inappropriate! Tagore’s scenario is, of course, derived from the Puranic lore of his heritage. In Hindu mythology both creation and destruction are cyclic: see Zimmer for an elucidation of the relevant myths. Even the swan on whose back the poet rides in his death-dream is likely to be derived from the Hindu symbol of the cosmic gander (Zimmer, pp. 35 & 47-50). But the similarity of Tagore’s language to what modern
physicists tell us about the collapse of stars, black holes, the big crunch, etc. is striking.
Recently the critic Tapobrata Ghosh has taken me to task for not seeing that the image of the dying swan in this poem is likely to be derived ultimately from Plato’s Phaedo, mediated, perhaps, by Shelley’s Epipsychidion (Rabindra-jijnasur Diary, Bharabi, Calcutta 2009, pp. 121-126). He directs me to an essay by his late mentor, the noted Tagore exegete Jagadish Bhattacharya, in which the issue is mooted (Bhattacharya, Rabindrakabitashatak, tritiya dashak, Kabi o Kabita Prakashan, Calcutta, 1983, ‘Maranswapna’, pp. 32-49). It is not possible to deal with every detail in this discourse within the space of a note, but a few salient points need to be made.
In his essay Prof. Bhattacharya says that Tagore’s swan-image in this poem ‘reminds him’ of Shelley’s Epipsychidion, after which he quotes five relevant lines. Let me quote them from my personal copy of Shelley’s Complete Poetical Works (Oxford University Press, London, 1935): ‘I am not thine: I am a part of thee.// Sweet Lamp! my moth-like Muse has burned its wings/ Or, like a dying swan who soars and sings,/ Young Love should teach Time, in his own gray style,/ All that thou art.’ He also says that he has learnt from The Platonism of Shelley by James A. Notopoulos that Shelley got the image of the dying swan from Plato’s Phaedo.
Shelley was of course very familiar with Plato’s writings, reading them in the original Greek, and was deeply influenced by them. His translation of The Symposium is still being discussed. Likewise Tagore, by virtue of when and where he was born, was immersed in Western literature, and he read widely. He was familiar with Shelley’s poetry right from his days as a teenager, and even translated a section of Epipsychidion while in his early twenties (Bhattacharya, Kabimanasi, Vol. 2, 2nd ed., Bharabi, Calcutta, 2000, pp. 263-5). It is also very likely that by the time he was writing ‘Death-dream’ he was reasonably familiar with some of the Platonic Dialogues in English translation. Some of his prose writings suggest that he had learnt something from the dialogic method. But I doubt if it makes much sense to claim that either Shelley or Tagore would be indebted solely to Phaedo for the image of the dying swan. The fact is that the myth of the swan that is mute in life but sings sweetly when dying was widespread throughout Europe from ancient times, and references to this myth are scattered throughout European literature. It can be found in Aesop and Ovid and Chaucer and Spenser. Tagore could have just as well picked it up from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice or Othello, or indeed from Tennyson’s early poem ‘The Dying Swan’, which enjoyed a great vogue in the Victorian period. Indeed this poem was so popular even in the beginning of the twentieth century that it inspired the creation of the ballet The Dying Swan in 1905. Anna Pavlova knew Tennyson’s poem and it was at her request that Michel Fokine, who had also read the poem, choreographed this solo ballet for her.
The swan in Tagore’s ‘Death-dream’ dies, but does not sing. Any connection between that swan and the dying swan ‘who soars and sings’ in the lines from Epipsychidion quoted above, seems at best peripheral to me. To me the two poems are very different in spirit. Shelley refers to the fable of the dying swan’s song en passant in a long, ebullient poem which is a highly animated discourse on love, especially in support of free love, and is directly addressed to Emilia Viviani. Tagore’s poem does not address or mention any particular woman at all (though it may be haunted by the ghost of one), and its focus is very much on the central episode of the dream-experience, the dissolution of the universe, of which the death of the swan the poet is riding in his dream is only a part. There is also an emphasis on the actual fall of the swan, and as many of us can attest, and as analysts of dreams will surely know, the sensation of falling is a pretty common component of nightmares. What I take away from Tagore’s poem is first the image of a cosmic flight, then the vision of cosmic annihilation, and at the end of the dream, the gentle restoration of what is simultaneously the earth’s familiar reality and Maya in the cosmic perspective. That is how I read the poem, and have accordingly alerted Western readers (who will, in any case, be only too familiar with the myth of the dying swan who sings) to the Indian moorings that underpin the imagery of Tagore’s poem and which may not be so obvious to them. The idea that the universe is periodically dissolved and regenerated is central to Hinduism, and these myths have their curious resonances in modern science. The poem is really an experience of the cosmic cycle in miniature. I have referred readers to Heinrich Zimmer, as he offers to the lay reader the most lucid (and poetic) exegeses known to me of the relevant Hindu myths. He comments that the myths and symbols of India are of a more archaic type than those in Greek literature. The poet’s experience in ‘Death-dream’ has a remarkable affinity with the experience of the sage Markandeya in one of the Puranic stories, and readers are urged to read the story in Zimmer. Like Markandeya in the Puranic story, the poet literally falls out of existence as he knows it, into the waters of nothingness, and is brought back to the reality he knows. And that reality itself is dreamlike, like a dream inside the sleeping godhead, resting between his tasks of destruction and creation.
As for Phaedo, Tagore may well have read it by 1888 and been fascinated by it, especially as it is a discourse on death and the after-life, and the immortality of the soul (a concept with which Tagore would have been already very familiar from his Indian background and Upanishadic education); besides, it has a discussion on the lawfulness of suicide, and even shows us vividly how Socrates drank the poisoned drink and slowly succumbed to its effects. If it is true that Kadambari Devi had died from taking an overdose of opium, then such details might well have lingered in Tagore’s mind. To some extent one can read Kadambari’s death in the description of the swan’s plunge to death in Tagore’s poem. But I don’t really recognise in Tagore’s dying bird the dying swans of Socrates’s discourse, who sing more sweetly than ever before because they know they are going to meet their master Apollo.
On the other hand, I do think that readers of Tagore’s poem need to be aware of the archetype of the cosmic gander, to whose melody Markandeya listens in the Puranic story. This is the cosmic gander’s song, as Zimmer articulates it (pp. 47-48): ‘Many forms do I assume. And when the sun and moon have disappeared, I float and swim with slow movements on the boundless expanse of the waters. I am the Gander. I am the Lord. I bring forth the universe from my essence and I abide in the cycle of time that dissolves it.’ This is connected to the philosophical core of the poem as I understand it. The generic Sanskrit word for ‘gander’, hamsa, if repeated as hamsa, hamsa, can be interpreted as sa-’ham, sa-’ham, meaning ‘This is me’ or ‘I am He’. This is lore familiar to me from my childhood, but let Zimmer vocalise it (p. 50): ‘I, the human individual, of limited consciousness, steeped in delusion, spellbound by Maya, actually and fundamentally am This, or He, namely, the Atman, the Self, the Highest Being, of unlimited consciousness and existence.’
The hamsa is regarded as a wise bird, who proverbially knows the distinction between milk and water, and a yogi of the highest order is known as a parama-hamsa or supreme hamsa. Tagore does use the word hamsa in his poetry, often in the context of migratory birds. It occurs in that great poem, no. 36 of Balaka, which I have translated in this collection. Another pertinent example would be song no. 148 of the Bengali Gitanjali, where the hamsa returning home to Lake Manas – near Mount Kailas in the Himalayas – becomes a metaphor for the poet’s self-surrendering salutation to his Lord and the flight of his whole being ‘to the shore of great death’ (maha-maran-paare). The vernal flight of homing raj-hamsas (royal ganders, i.e., swans) to Kailas, where the snows have melted, is referred to in the poem ‘The Victorious Woman’, included in this collection. Another well-known use of the word hamsa occurs in the song ‘Mon mor megher sangi’ (My mind is a companion of the clouds): there the poet’s mind rides on (or flies with) the wings of a flock of hamsas. In all these examples we see the magical pull of the actual word hamsa dictating poetic meaning; we also see the great admiration tha
t this poet feels for a bird’s capacity for long-distance flight. It is this particular capacity that makes a bird’s journey an appropriate metaphor for a spiritual adventure that dares to unlock the mysteries of the universe. I would draw the reader’s attention to another great poem of Tagore’s, translated in this collection as ‘A Stressful Time’, in which the bird, though not identified as a hamsa, is nevertheless making a supremely difficult crossing over a roaring sea.