The European archetype of the dying swan need not be excluded from the context of the poem ‘Death-dream’, for the imagery of a romantic poem operates, after all, like the aurora borealis, or a laser show, but then the Indian archetypes must surely not be excluded from the total picture either. Tapobrata Ghosh ridicules me for bringing in the gander of the Puranic story into my commentary, but the hamsa – ‘gander’, ‘swan’, call it what we will – is definitely a mighty Indian archetype; after all, Brahma, the god of creation, rides on one, and so does his consort, Saraswati, the goddess of learning and the arts. In some iconography she has twin hamsas by her. See the song ‘The moon’s laughter’s dam has burst’ in this collection, where I have translated a line as ‘and Saraswati’s swans have escaped’. A poet riding a swan in a cosmic flight is, at a certain level, almost an incarnation of Saraswati herself.
And we need not exclude from this laser display the image of the swan-maiden, the swan who can turn into a woman, and become a swan again. This legend is widespread and occurs in the Arabian Nights tale of Hasan of Basra. If we accept the swan-maiden as part of the laser display of images in ‘Death-dream’, then how does that affect our interpretation of the poem? Is the poet riding on a swan to meet Kadambari Devi in the land of the dead? Is the swan an embodiment of Kadambari herself, the Muse who has betrayed him by dying too soon? There is certainly an erotic tinge in the description of the ride in the fifth stanza of the poem. Eroticism is bolder in the description, in ‘The Victorious Woman’, of how the woman is caressing the she-swan’s feathers. Readers are requested to compare the two passages.
After all such suggestions have been taken into account, the experience of a cataclysmic dissolution of the universe, and a gentle awakening from that nightmare, remain the philosophical core of the poem ‘Death-dream’. Tagore’s lifelong preoccupation with death, his perception of death and life as twins, were already well developed by 1888. In my opinion, ‘Death-dream’ is organically related to early poems such as ‘Mahaswapna’ (The Great Dream), ‘Srishti Sthiti Pralay’ (Creation, Preservation, Destruction, translated by William Radice in a shortened version), ‘Ananta Jiban’ (Endless Life) and ‘Ananta Maran’ (translated by me in the present collection as ‘Endless Death’). All these early poems are from Prabhatsangit (1883). Anybody who reads ‘Mahaswapna’ (The Great Dream) with its climactic image of a cosmic dissolution will instantly see the thematic connection between it and ‘Death-dream’. This connection, I believe, is more powerful than any tangential connection between ‘Death-dream’ on the one hand and Shelley’s Epipsychidion and Plato’s Phaedo on the other. I have a great admiration for Jagadish Bhattacharya’s exegesis of the role of Kadambari Devi as an internalised Muse in Tagore’s life, – he has installed, with appropriate ceremony, her statue where it rightfully belongs, – but with due respect, I think that any influence of those two texts of Shelley and Plato on the swan-image of this particular poem of Tagore’s has been overstated. An essay by Prof. Taraknath Sen, who was one of my teachers at Presidency College, Calcutta, in the fifties, offers an appropriate caveat in such matters. ‘Western influence on Tagore,’ he says, ‘is too often treated with Fluellen’s logic: “There is a river in Macedon, and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth…” Parallels are cited between him and this or that western poet, and conclusions sought to be drawn accordingly. It is a common fallacy in criticism to take parallels for signs of indebtedness or influence. All that parallels really prove is the community of the poetic mind all the world over. Too much stress on parallels might lead to absurd conclusions.’ (Sen, ‘Western Influence on the Poetry of Tagore’, in A Centenary Volume: Rabindranath Tagore, 1861-1961, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 1961.) This essay remains worth reading; though it has a regrettable bias against the post-Tagore generation of modernist writers, it might answer some of the queries regarding Tagore’s writings that might spring up in the minds of those who are reading the present discussion. Tagore was, of course, steeped in Western literature, but he was, at the same time, firmly embedded in the details of his country’s literary, linguistic, artistic, and philosophical heritage, in its myths and symbols, folk traditions, and rural ways, just as he drew some of his strengths from his environment’s tropical luxuriance. That quality of having deep roots in one’s soil and yet maintaining a serious, ongoing interest in knowing and interacting with the bigger world, being capable of travelling abroad and remaining open to all meaningful foreign influences, of synthesising such influences with the home-grown elements through one’s powers of imagination and creative energies: that precisely was what the Bengal Renaissance at its best was all about, a phenomenon from which some of us are still trying to draw inspiration to this day.
90-92. The Amatory Conversation of a Young Bengali Couple (Manasi): One would guess that in this hilarious poem, a remarkable piece of social satire in the context of its time, Tagore was to some extent drawing on his own experiences as the groom of a child-bride.
92-96. I Won’t Let You Go (Sonar Tari, The Golden Boat): There’s no doubt that the scenes of family life in this celebrated poem are derived from Tagore’s own life. The little girl is modelled on his own eldest daughter, though in October 1892 she was actually six, not four.
After referring to the season as hemanta (autumn) in the second line of the poem, and mentioning specifically in the second stanza that Ashwin is gone and the Puja vacation has ended, Tagore slips into calling the season sharat (post-rains) twice later. The poem was written in mid-Kartik (end of October). The season of sharat ends formally with Ashwin and autumn proper begins with the month of Kartik. It is true that one season merges imperceptibly with the next one, and such an oscillation is quite natural in the context, but I have stuck to autumn throughout the poem to avoid possible confusion in the minds of readers not familiar with the tropical seasons.
‘Golden moong beans’: husked moong for making dal, not such an uncommon item in British shops nowadays.
‘fine mustard oil’: much prized as a cooking medium in Bengal and some other parts of the Indian subcontinent, as olive oil is in Mediterranean countries.
‘blocks/ of date-palm molasses’: made from the sap of date-palms, set and sold in block-form, eaten on its own as well as used as a sweetener in desserts.
‘dried mango’: amchur, which may be found as a powder even in some shops in Britain specialising in Indian groceries.
‘mango cakes’: amsattva, sun-dried mango pulp which can be cut into wedges and eaten as a sweet, in taste and texture resembling semi-dried apricots.
All the above food-references are in stanza 3. See the Glossary for areca, betel leaves, and seer in the same stanza.
97-103. Earth (Sonar Tari): ‘mythic cow of plenty’ (last section of the poem): a mythological cow of plenty yielding everything one could want. A letter written by Tagore from Shilaidaha on 9 December 1892 (included in Chhinnapatrabali) contains many of the central ideas of this poem.
104. On the Doctrine of Maya (Sonar Tari): Maya is an important technical term in Indian philosophy, referring to the illusory nature of phenomena, as contrasted with the nature of ultimate reality. For insights into the positive aspects of this complex concept in myth and art, consult Zimmer, using the index, but the concept has also had a certain amount of negative influence on Indian thinking and life, encouraging apathy, inaction, and wrong action in human affairs. This is what Tagore is attacking here. See also the poem ‘Renunciation’ from Chaitali.
104. Play (Sonar Tari): This is Tagore’s answer to the doctrine of maya. Maybe the world is an illusory play, but to join in the game with good humour is the only human option.
105-08. Farewell to Heaven (Chitra, She Who is Various): In this poem Tagore’s rejection of mythical heavenly worlds and his firm commitment to the earth are put into the mouth of a hero who had earned a temporary sojourn in Indra’s heaven, whose term in heaven is now over and who must now return to the earth. The hero may be modelled on Arjuna of the Sanskrit
epic Mahabharata, who spent five years in Indra’s heaven, learning the martial arts from Indra himself and dance and music from the Gandharva Chitrasena. During this residence Arjuna was courted by the heavenly nymph and dancer Urvashi, whose advances he rejected, bringing a curse upon himself, whereby he had to spend one year as a eunuch in his later earthly life. That Tagore was ruminating these stories at this time is shown by the fact that the day before he wrote this poem he wrote an ode to Urvashi (pronounced Urboshi in Bengali), which precedes this poem in Chitra.
In the third stanza the poem refers to the practice of finding out whether a wish will come true or not by floating a lighted lamp on a river and watching its progress. A dot of powdered vermilion (cinnabar or red crystalline mercuric sulphide) indicates that the woman is married.
108-11. The Victorious Woman (Chitra): The inspiration for this poem came to Tagore from an episode in the Sanskrit prose classic of the seventh century, Kadambari, begun by Banabhatta, left unfinished at his death, and completed by his son Bhushanabhatta. Historians of literature have usually called this work a prose romance, attempting to distinguish it from a novel in the modern sense, but ironically the evolution of the novel in our times has blurred the distinction. I would not hesitate to call Kadambari a seventh-century novel: story-within-story is now a common fictional technique and the spanning of an individual’s successive lives through incarnations gives the same feel of time as the spanning of generations in a modern novel.
But Tagore’s poem bears a rather interesting relation to his source of inspiration. The bathing woman is in a sense modelled on the Gandharva princess Mahashweta in Kadambari, who, coming to bathe in Lake Achchhoda with her mother and female friends on a glorious day of spring, falls in love with a young hermit named Pundarika, who also falls in love with her. But whereas in the Sanskrit story Mahashweta falls desperately in love, in Tagore’s poem the bathing woman does not fall in love with anyone: instead, she seems to score a victory over the god of love himself. In the Sanskrit story no god of love appears in person; the woman and the man are simply vanquished by love. In Tagore’s poem the mischievous god of love appears in person, ready to shoot his floral arrow at the woman’s breast, but is then so overwhelmed by her that he lays all the tools of his trade at her feet as an admission of defeat. In this the poem is a completely new creation.
The twist Tagore gives to the story may owe something to the evolution of Mahashweta in Kadambari. Pundarika dies suddenly even as Mahashweta is rushing to meet him, and is carried off to the lunar regions by a celestial being who assures Mahashweta that she will be united to her beloved in a future time. Mahashweta begins her long wait by becoming a Shiva-worshipping female ascetic herself. In fact it is the ascetic Mahashweta that we meet first in the Kadambari story, the bathe in Achchhoda being a flashback account of the past given by her to Chandrapida. Tagore seems to have bathed his bathing woman with something of the ascetic Mahashweta’s spiritual radiance and majesty. It is these qualities that ensure her victory over the god of love.
Tagore most probably derived the idea of the defeat of the god of love from the story of the destruction of the god of love by Shiva, on which Kalidasa (circa the 5th century A.D.) based his Kumarasambhava, a long narrative poem in several cantos and another of Tagore’s firm favourites among the Sanskrit classics. Gods in Hindu mythology are periodically tormented by demons; during one such crisis caused by a powerful demon, it becomes necessary to wake Shiva out of deep meditation so that he can fall in love with and marry Parvati, for only a son of Shiva and Parvati can destroy that demon. The god of love is entrusted with this delicate task. In Kalidasa’s poem he goes to the spot where Shiva is in meditation, and his friend the god of spring engineers a sudden season of spring. Taking a brief rest from intense meditation, Shiva receives Parvati, who has come to pay him homage. The god of love aims a powerful arrow. He does not even have to release it fully: the aiming is enough. Shiva notices that he is affected, glances around, spies the cause, and immensely annoyed, burns the poor love-god to ashes with the fire of the third eye on his forehead. (This is why one of the love-god’s names is Ananga, one without a body.) Parvati embarks on an intense course of asceticism and meditation to win Shiva and succeeds. Needless to say, Ananga is also resurrected.
Tagore was fond of this story and a year and a half after writing ‘The Victorious Woman’, wrote two poems entitled ‘Before the Burning of the Love-god’ and ‘After the Burning of the Love-god’, both included in Kalpana, which show his obsession with the myth. He was specially intrigued by the suggestion implicit in the myth that by burning the god of erotic attraction, Shiva had dispersed his ashes throughout creation and thereby increased the dominion of eros over all.
In Tagore’s imagination Parvati and Mahashweta in their ascetical aspects seem to have merged together to form a composite, who is the real model of his own victorious woman. She is victorious over the god of love because she does not need his help. She can win her beloved by means of her spiritual power, the power of her asceticism, not through the power of erotic attraction. The god of sexual love realises this when he gazes at her face and surrenders to the superior power she represents.
These and analogous ideas can be found in several other poems of Chitra and are recurrent throughout the corpus of Tagore’s poetry. They receive additional strength from the facts of his personal life – indeed, they could be said to have been synthesised through the interaction of the facts of his personal life and the myths of his heritage – and become part of his total attitude to the female principle. The victorious woman is victorious not only over the god of love but also over the poet himself. She is victorious not by virtue of her sexual power over him but because of her power over his spirit. She is his Muse, internalised, manasi or ‘of the mind’, and can sometimes be identified with his jiban-debata or the deity of his life. She can inspire him even when she is dead or distant. At this stage in his life Kadambari was already a woman who had won such a victory over him. Much later, when he encountered a woman who was actually called Victoria, he gave her the name Vijaya (pronounced Bijoya in Bengali), which means roughly the same thing as the title of the poem we are discussing: ‘Vijayini’, pronounced Bijoyini in Bengali, meaning a victorious person, in the feminine gender. (Both words are derived from the Sanskrit root ji, to conquer, with the prefix vi which in this case intensifies the meaning.)
113. Renunciation (Chaitali, Chaitra Harvest): The title of this collection refers to winter crops which are harvested in late spring. A large number of poems in the collection were actually written in the month of Chaitra. Connect this poem with ‘On the Doctrine of Maya’ and ‘Play’ from Sonar Tari.
114-15. The Worker (Chaitali): A number of the Chaitali poems I have translated are clearly based on personal observation. This particular poem was based on a real experience of the poet in Shahjadpur several months before the date of composition. The servant was probably a Muslim named Momin Miya. The incident brought home to Tagore with a sudden shock how, beneath the relationship of master and servant, he shared with this man the common identity of a father. (Rabindra-rachanabali, vol. 5, Granthaparichay section; Kripalani, p. 177; Pal, vol. 4, p. 96.) The poem gains additional poignancy when one remembers the bereavements that fate was storing for Tagore.
116. On the Nature of Love (Chaitali): The idea of this poem first came to Tagore some months previous to the date of composition, when he was travelling in a steam-drawn tramcar in Calcutta in a dark evening (Pal, vol. 4, p. 97).
116-17. Putu (Chaitali): For a full appreciation of the mingling of ‘gentle tears’ and ‘smiles’ in this moving vignette, the English-speaking reader needs to know that Putu or Puturani (the first u is nasalised) is a homely pet name for a girl. The suffix rani, meaning ‘queen’, adds endearment, like the addition of -y or -ie to an English name. Imagine an English-speaking farm-worker wanting to bath a cow and calling: ‘Come, Annie, come,’ or ‘Come, Kathy, come,’ and you get close to the pic
ture. Buffaloes like staying in muddy water to stay cool in hot weather. They are very important dairy animals in India, where the rural people are, of course, very close to their animals, thinking of each animal as an individual, a person. Connect with ‘The Mediatrix’ and ‘The Companion’, both from Chaitali.
118. True Meditation (Chaitali): The entire weight of a complex tradition sits on the image of the lotus here. The lotus is one of the most powerful symbols in both Hinduism and Buddhism. It also occupies an important place in iconography. See Zimmer; a glance at the index alone will give an idea of the complexity of the symbolism. ‘Lotus’ is there entered under 12 separate sub-headings; there is also a separate entry for ‘Lotus Goddess’ under several sub-headings and an entry for the epithet ‘Lotus-in-Hand’.
119. Hope Against Hope (Chaitali): Connect this poem with the immediately preceding ‘Drought’, written on the same day, and the context will become clear.
120-21. The short, pithy poems from Kanika (Particles) are in the style of Sanskrit epigrammatic verses, with which Tagore was familiar.
121-27. The Repayment (Katha, Stories): Brian Houghton Hodgson was one of those remarkable scholar-administrators that Britain lent to the Indian subcontinent in the 19th century. He served for many years in Nepal in a diplomatic capacity, then lived on in Darjeeling for some more years, engaged in literary and scientific pursuits. During his long service in Nepal he collected a large number of Sanskrit Buddhist texts, which he subsequently distributed among six famous libraries of the world. A substantial collection went to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta and supplied the materials for Rajendralal Mitra’s classic work, The Sanskrit Buddhist Literature of Nepal (The Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta, 1882), which was widely used as a source-book in both India and the West. Tagore used it as a source-book too. The book accompanied him on his travels and river-voyages, and the material for several poems of Katha was gleaned from here. It also provided him with the plots of some of his plays.