Three novellas by the master Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) have been published in English recently. The translator is Sukhendu Ray, a Fellow of the Institute Of Chartered Accountants, England and Wales. He is said to have retired as managing director of Kean Williams Limited. Whatever happened to Guest, the first member of the firm, one wonders? Ray has translated stories from Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar’s childrens’ classic Thakurmar Jhuli — published in 1997 by OUP as the Winged Horse. The three Tagore novellas under review are Nashtanir, Dui Bon and Malancha.
These three tales are about the position of women in upper class Bengali society from the late 1890s to the mid-1930s. Nashtanir translated as The Broken Home, the first in the collection, is a story of a bright, inquisitive woman Charulata who is extremely lonely. Her husband Bhupati is a man of high education and devoted to social causes including the publication of a small Bengali newspaper with progressive ideas, and so is unable to spend much time with her. The advent of Amal, a cousin, a dabbler and an alleged poet, widens the gulf between Charu and her husband. Her falling in love with Amal is disastrous
because he is, for one, not a man of substance nor is she a woman capable of breaking with the past without a sense of guilt. She is also the inadvertent cause of her husband’s financial depletion, if not ruin. The story ends on a deeply pessimistic note. Satyajit Ray made a cinematic masterpiece Charulata, out of it in 1964. The translation here is just about serviceable and misses out on the musicality of Tagore’s language. He was indeed the first true master of modern Bengali.
The second story Dui Bon (1933), Two Sisters in English, is again a triangular love story. This time Sharmila, a rich, ‘enlightened’ man’s daughter, happily married to a civil engineer Shashanka, finds her younger sister Urmimala in love with her husband. Sharmila can do little as she is gravely ill, and her upper class breeding prevents her from taking drastic action. It is one of the earliest and most penetrative psychological novellas, in Bengali and all Indian literature of the 20th century, as is Malancha, published the next year in 1934.
Tagore was in his seventies when he wrote the two novellas and had seen many tragedies in his personal life including the deaths of his children and others close to him. He had also returned his Knighthood following the senseless murder of hundreds of civilians at Jallianwala Bagh,
Amritsar in 1919, by Indian troops under the command of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer. Tagore had seen at close quarters the hypocrisy that governed the relationship between the sexes, and its unequal nature, with the dice being loaded heavily in favour of men even among the so-called educated upper class.
Tagore’s own life had given him the opportunity to befriend and understand women in considerable depth. He also understood that they behaved at times in an inexplicable manner, completely at variance with the norm, determined by the male, of course! He did not attempt to fathom the feminine psyche using Freudian tools, although he was aware of the Viennese master’s teachings. Instead he tried to understand women as a creative phenomenon in nature and representative of the nurturing as well as the destructive part of the life-force.
Malancha, The Garden and the Gardener, is the third novella in this collection. It is a story of the ill Neeraja and her husband Aditya who grow flowers for the market, and into whose life enters Sarala, a distant cousin. Neeraja having lost her child at childbirth becomes increasingly neurotic as Sarala is brought in to hold the fort, in more than one sense. The havoc that is wreaked leaves in its aftermath a Neeraja dying dramatically as Sarala bends down to touch her feet in farewell.
Tagore’s grasp of the feminine mind was echoed by the precocious Manik Bandhopadhyay, who at 21 wrote Dibaratrir Kavya, a novel with startling insights into the relationship between men and woman. Tagore, of course, was aware of the Ardh Narishwar concept in Indian aesthetics but what is amazing is that he managed to absorb it so thoroughly in his literary art. And that is what makes him unique not only in the annals of 20th century Indian but world literature.
— parthafm@gmail.com