Looking back at the intertwined legacies of Tagore and Ray

May is an auspicious month in the literary calendar of Bengal. Two of the greatest Bengalis who ever lived, both polymaths extraordinaire, were born this month. Rabindranath Tagore (born 7 May 1861), predated Satyajit Ray (born 2 May 1921) by 60 years but their legacies remain oddly intertwined, Tagore's writing enabling some of the best cinema Ray made in his career. In 1940, a year before Tagore died, Ray went up to Visva-Bharati University, founded by the poet in Santiniketan, to study the fine arts. Initially unwilling to give up the pleasures of urban life in Calcutta (now Kolkata), Ray conceded to his mother's wish that he spend some time in Santiniketan. That he took the difficult decision to move to the rural serenity of Bolpur, in Birbhum district of Bengal, was a testimony to his immense respect for the poet. Years later, Ray would go on to make several iconic films inspired by Tagore's works, and one based on his life, at former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's insistence, to mark the birth centenary of the poet in 1961.
It is fitting, therefore, to have
Broken Nest
and Other Stories
, a slim collection of Tagore's short fiction in Sharmistha Mohanty's translation, out this month from Westland, especially since the title story of the volume inspired one of Ray's most famous movies,
Charulata
(1964), known as
The Lonely Wife
in English. The volume, which was first published in 2008, has been reprinted with a beautiful new cover, a foreword by acclaimed Bengali poet Joy Goswami, and an introduction by Mohanty. Between 1884 and the early years of 1910 when Tagore wrote these pieces, the short story as a form was being moulded into shape by some of the great stylists of the genre in Britain—James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield, among others.
To read Tagore's work as part of the same arc of literary revolution is to reckon with his exceptionally modernist genius—a literary giant, who always remained ahead of his time, as well as his contemporaries in Bengal. It is also a salutary reminder of the power of understatement, the special alchemy of 'show not tell", over the more expressive idioms of love and loss. Although Ray considered
Charulata
to be one of his most perfect films, it caused some consternation among purists. Instead of faithfully following Tagore's novella
Nastanirh
(1901, literally 'ruined nest"), on which the movie is based, Ray exercised his creative licence to intervene with the plot.
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In the process of his adaptation, he seemed to have afforded more agency, as well as dignity, to Charulata, his eponymous heroine, whose affectionate friendship with her brother-in-law Amal ends up putting her heart in peril. To his credit, Ray did preserve the undercurrent of emotional turmoil that is at the heart of the original. The dynamic between Charu (Madhabi Mukherjee) and Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee) is never not palpable. And yet, it never crosses a line. As Mohanty writes in the Preface,
Broken Nest
marks a critical moment in the development of 'Tagore's mastery over what cannot be said". The ineffable push and pull between the central characters was deftly translated by Ray on the screen, supported by Mukherjee and Chatterjee's exceptional performance.
It is not easy for a non-Indian audience to appreciate the economy with which Ray depicts the tension between his characters. Critic Kenneth Tynan was exasperated that Charu and Amal don't even share a kiss on screen, despite their conflicted mutual attraction. When told about Tynan's reaction, Ray dismissed the possibility of such an act as unthinkable with the moral compass of upper-class Bengali families at the turn of the century, when the story is set.
Indeed, rereading
Broken Nest
, nearly 125 years after it was first published, is to be reminded of the unseen and unheard forces that give great writing its propulsive power. For a translator, a text like
Broken Nest
can become a lesson in reading between the lines, understanding emotions that are, literally and figuratively, untranslatable, and finding a strategy to make these feelings viscerally real to a reader, placed far away, temporally as well as culturally.
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Mohanty remains acutely sensitive to several peculiar abstractions in Bengali that do not have any equivalent in English. One such word, as she points out in the Preface, is
abhimaan
. 'This translates as a feeling of hurt which a person does not directly acknowledge," she explains, 'and it occurs only in a relationship of great intimacy and tenderness, between lovers, parents and children, or very close friends." A fine thread of abhimaan runs through the other three stories in the volume, too, all with women at their centre. These protagonists never get the acknowledgement they crave from their loved ones, their pain compounded by unspoken grief, precipitated by a sense of injustice. Their inability to articulate the fullness of their sorrow, or confront the systems that perpetuate it, makes it especially challenging for the translator to get to the core of their sentiments.
The challenge is most aggravated, perhaps, in
Postmaster
, which, once again, inspired the first story of Ray's
Teen Kanya
(1961). Ratan, an orphaned teenager who works for the postmaster of her village, dissolves into helpless grief on learning about her employer's imminent departure. At their parting, she falls at his feet when he offers her money, and begs him not to worry about her. Her one wish—to accompany the postmaster to the city—has already been denied by the man she adores as an older brother. She doesn't need words to express what she feels—her gesture says it all.
In
The Ghat's Tale
(1884), the first short story Tagore wrote and the earliest of its kind in the history of Bengali literature, a widow falls in thrall to a handsome sanyasi, a holy man, who lives on the banks of the Ganga, which flows through her village. Expressing her feelings to him is out of the question, so she continues to serve him devotedly—until one day she cannot stand it anymore. The penalty for speaking the truth turns out to be severe.
In
Notebook
(1913), the fourth story in the collection, the protagonist, Uma, is desperate to pour her feelings into the pages of her precious notebook. But two men in her life—her older brother and her husband—are intolerant of such indulgences. Her incurable addiction to writing leads to a humiliating finale. Tagore condenses a ball of suppressed rage, shame and agony into the ending of this story. That he is able to stir a such primal outrage in the reader is not only proof of his peerless gift of storytelling, but also the persistence of the injustices he observed so many decades ago.
A monthly column on backlisted books that have much to offer in contemporary times.
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