AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Seamless narrative
ROSINKA CHAUDHURI
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A reliable and honest guide to Rabindranath's life in his own words as could ever be attempted.
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My Life In My Words; Rabindranath Tagore, Selected and edited with an introduction by Uma Das Gupta, Penguin Viking India, Rs. 495.
REMARKING on the constitutional inability of Indians to be autobiographical about their deepest and most private moments, Dipesh Chakrabarty has pointed out that the novels, diaries, letters and autobiographies written since the 19th century by Indians very seldom yield pictures of an "endlessly interiorised subject" (Provincialising Europe, 2001).
Autobiographies in the confessional mode, it has to be admitted, are remarkable in their absence from the landscape of the Indian modern.
Excellent edition
Uma Dasgupta, in this excellent edition of Rabindranath Tagore's writings, has tried to make up for this by arranging a seamless interweaving of reminiscence, memoirs, letters and public lectures in a narrative attempt to present us with an account of Rabindranath's life in his own words. However, while Rabindranath's writings on his own life do contain, on occasion, delightful vignettes full of humour and extraordinary descriptive power, an elusiveness about the personal is also at work, denying the reader an insight into the inner recesses of his experience.
Even so, it is possible, in this book, to glean a sheaf of luminous moments especially from the years of his childhood and youth. . One of the most important revelations that this book makes to the uninformed reader concerns Rabindranath's closeness to his wife, Mrinalini Debi (whom he addresses as `chhoto bou' or `youngest wife' of the family), evident in letters to her that speak of the quotidian and the caring in the same breath. From the ship at Aden,
While Rabindranath's love for his elder brother's wife, Kadambari Debi, has been the subject of endless speculation and debate, this side of his life, where he is bound to Mrinalini Debi in a relationship of tenderness and warmth is not as commonly discussed, and is well documented in this book. Of his agony at the death of the former we may only guess at from his own songs and poems, his reminiscences of the days they spent together as teenagers on the roof of the old ancestral house or by the banks of the Ganga in the monsoon.
Landmark events
This was at the age of 24. Subsequently, many landmark events follow one upon the other. The years that came immediately after, 1883-90, are labelled in this book, "Restless Years"; these were succeeded by the relative tranquillity of the 1890s, which he spent writing some of the most accomplished short stories the world has seen while living as a landowner in the rivers and houses of beautiful East Bengal, where he first came into close contact with the poor on his own estates. The Swadeshi Movement of 1905-11 drew him into its fold and first revealed him as a charismatic leader of men, and then as a thinker who withdrew from the crudities of political compulsions to question the motives of nationalism. Following his Nobel Prize in 1913, he became, increasingly, a public figure, and the book reflects this in reproducing faithfully his endless lectures, essays, speeches and talks in every part of the world from Argentina to Japan, from China to Europe.
While there is much of significance in these writings, there is also much that is repetitive and boring, as the reader begins to tire, as he himself did, of the endless posturing. But the historian or the scholar will still find valuable here the exchanges with Gandhi and the brush with Mussolini, his thoughts on nationalism and his definition of religion and society.
Reservations
If there are any qualifications to be expressed about this book at all, one of these would be to do with Rabindranth's infamous difficulty with the foreignness of the English language itself. Not only is the English, as Uma Dasgupta herself mentions, "old-fashioned" and "long-winded", but he was also not overly punctilious about punctuation or grammar either, faults that appear more glaringly in the prose than, for instance, in the rapturous shorter lyric form of the Geetanjali poems. This book contains material in the original English of Rabindranath wherever possible (almost 40 per cent of the book), supplemented by capable translations by contemporary translators, including Dasgupta herself. Apart from this, and the minor issue that it would have been more convenient to the reader to have the sources of the texts mentioned at the start of the extracts rather than having to excavate them every time from the footnotes, there can be no other reservations for what is, in the end, as reliable and honest a guide to Rabindranath's life in his own words as could ever be attempted.
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