He: (Shey) (Modern Classics (Penguin)) (2 page)

Language is not a very important part of this more-than-real, which, paradoxically, makes it difficult to translate. Words are essential to it, but not in their strictly functional capacity of conveying meaning. They become important in themselves—because of how they sound, an inner rhythm or associated image. It is impossible to find a word in a different language identical to the first in meaning, effect and association. At least one of the three factors had to be sacrificed, to avoid every second word being in italics. I faced the greatest difficulty in the twelfth chapter, in which entire poems grow out of just such single, central words.

The part of
Shey
I most enjoyed reading was the poetry. It was also the part I most enjoyed translating. There are two chief sets of poems (not counting stray verses embedded in the text): the ‘tiger poems’ and the ‘tuneless poems’. Each set consists of several poems, on the same theme but varying entertainingly in character and content. The story of the soap-seeking tiger that Tagore alludes to in
The Religion of Man
appears as the first of the ‘tiger poems’, while the three ‘tuneless poems’ form a sequence representing a gradual escape from the bondage of metre and scansion to a freer sphere of unstructured expression.

I have always pictured Tagore telling Pupe
Shey
in instalments, as a sort of serial story. Its sudden changes in tone reflect the changes in Tagore’s moods and Pupe’s demands. As the story progresses, Pupe grows older. When she enters adolescence, the story ends, in a mellow, almost sentimental vein. Sukumar, Pupe’s childhood rival and adolescent love, seems to benefit by entering the story towards its close. Pupe fares badly in comparison—in the later chapters at least, she is shown as rather unimaginative, as well as jealous of Sukumar, a representation against which she herself protests.

Interestingly, He disappears from the story in the twelfth chapter: the last two are about Pupe and Sukumar alone. These final chapters were simpler to translate. The story falls into a more natural, human course as Pupe begins to find her own world, the world of people and relationships, both perplexing and fascinating.

It is difficult to discuss
Shey
without doing it a certain injustice. Most critics who wrote about
Shey
when it was first published annoyed Tagore by labelling it a children’s book. That he had meant it no less for adults is evident in his reply to a letter from the writer Balaichand Mukhopadhyay (Banaphul): ‘Your praise of
Shey
struck me as novel. The book has been consigned to the ranks of children’s literature by readers who have looked at it with patronizing eyes. They do not realize how the story has grown like its author—from
aush
to
aman
, from
aman
to
chaitali
.’
²
The translation will, I hope, allow an even larger audience to share in the fun.

*

A few acknowledgements must be made. My parents introduced me to
Shey
and made sure, by their constant support, that the translation progressed beyond the first page and a half, while my brother Pico’s brilliant use of reverse psychology helped ensure its completion. My friends Shriya and Pramita provided encouragement, as always. I sincerely thank Shri Sankha Ghosh, who kindly consented to write the Introduction.

Though there is no formal dedication, this translation is for my grandmother Sujata Chaudhuri. She was more excited than anyone else when I began it, and would have been delighted to see it published.

¹
By the rules of transliteration followed in the book,Tagore’s Bengali title should be rendered as
Se
. We have spelt it as
Shey
instead, as being easier on a reader approaching the book for the first time.

²
Aush
is the monsoon crop of rice,
aman
the winter crop, and
chaitali
the spring, the richest crop at the end of the harvesting year.

On one of his journeys abroad, Rabindranath Tagore wrote, in a letter to his nine-year-old granddaughter (3 May 1930):‘Nowadays, I have a great many visitors. Everyone has come to know that I am here. I’d be happy to escape.Why didn’t you hide me away in your doll’s house?’ Childish words, addressed to a child. But is it just childishness? Or is there something else in these words to set us thinking?

In the lives of famous writers, there may sometimes come moments when they wish to hide themselves away—when, suddenly, they feel too exposed to the gaze of the world, too close to its restless strife. Out of this turmoil comes a natural desire to escape to some carefree realm.At these moments the writer may seek refuge in a child-world, approaching as close as possible the sanctuary of that very doll’s house.

Rabindranath had earlier expressed the same desire to his niece Indira Debi Choudhurani in a letter dated 10 May 1922. Speaking of his book of children’s poems,
Shishu Bholanath
(The Child Bholanath), he confessed,‘There is a great weariness in my mind; I can’t easily will myself to take on new cares.A few days ago, I wrote a number of poems for children.The only urge behind them was to remove—if only for a moment—the consciousness of my responsible adulthood from my mind. This sick sense of duty makes a person hard and stiff with maturity. He then begins to despise play, and having eternally sundered play and work, feels pride in having done his duty.’ But such freedom deserves to be regarded with something better than contempt; Rabindranath seeks freedom in absorbing that play into his work.

In the relentless creative exercise that occupied his whole life, Rabindranath provided himself with spaces in which to indulge in different forms of play.The book he titled
Shey
is one such creative, carefree space.The dedicatory poem at the beginning of the book says:

Lost to society, the truant scapegrace

Finds his freedom in an unknown place.

The desire to escape from obligation—the obligation to be responsible, the obligation to think, even the obligations imposed by fame—makes this a very different kind of creative interlude.

On the pretext of spinning incredible tales for the nine-year-old granddaughter mentioned earlier, Rabindranath creates a rich and diverse fantasy, openly declaring his desire to ‘throw…into disarray’ the world of reason and logic. Another creative genius of the Tagore clan, Abanindranath, while making up impossible stories, used the term ‘hysteria of the imagination’ to describe the process. Rabindranath too, weaving fantasies with his granddaughter, seems to allow his imagination to drift towards the same state of hysteria. Here, a man’s pigtail can vigorously grow longer and longer like an endless worm; another wears a broken bucket on his head in lieu of a hat; one might, if hungry, lick the Ochterlony Monument up to its very top; a shovel is employed to clear the eye of coal dust; a brass-bound cudgel is a serviceable toothbrush; and if one’s mouth is polluted, the rites of purification are easily looked up in Webster’s Dictionary. Creating a commotion with every word,‘kintinabu meriunathu’,‘kangchuto-sangchani’ and ‘iktikutir bhiktimai’ announce their presence.The animals found here are strange compounds of humans and cows and lions, which the people of Tasmania have named ‘Gandishandung’. Here, if you pull too hard on someone’s hair-tuft, his body might well ‘slither off him like a loose sock and fall to the ground with a thump’, and it is entirely permissible to yell for someone to come and inhabit that cast-off frame.

The little girl who listens to these tales sometimes claps her hands in delight. And sometimes she asks, wide-eyed, ‘Is all this true, Dadamashai?’

*

A fantasy in fourteen chapters,
Shey
was published as a whole in 1937, but its component parts had been composed over a long time. Says the storyteller as he begins his story,‘The person who listens to these stories is nine years old.’ The young listener—Pupe, or Nandini— was actually ten when some of the parts were first published. By the time they were all brought together as a book, she was sixteen. In one way, though, these story-conversations between grandfather and granddaughter had begun long before Pupe reached the age of nine. She was much younger when, in his diary of that time, Rabindranath wrote (15 February 1925):

Last night, I had finished dinner and was sitting in my cabin. I was

commanded: ‘Dadamashai, tell me a story about tigers.’ . . . So I began—

A tiger of the stripy kind

A mirror chanced to view,

And seeing the black upon his coat

Into a temper flew.

He thought the matter urgent—

So to find a good detergent,

Bade Jhagru post to Prague

Or else Hazaribagh.

Gradually growing and changing, this rhyme about a tiger would finally come to feature in
Shey.
By then, the artist’s strokes and the poet’s words had merged to give it a completely different character.

Another being would come to stand between grandfather and granddaughter—his identity left open under the pronoun ‘he’, unconfined by any definite shape or form, free to wander anywhere and everywhere whenever the fancy takes him. Constantly being born anew, he can say whatever he likes, crossing the bounds between truth and fiction. He can do anything—even write tiger-poems.

In fact, ‘He’ wanders beyond the confines of the written tale. In letters to the real Pupe at various points in the year 1931, the real grandfather frequently reports,‘He came…He said, “Send me to Darjeeling”’ or ‘He has gone to Java’ or, indeed, ‘He went off, saying “Pupu-didi is away, I won’t stay here either”’ or ‘He has gone off wearing my quilted wrap. His own tattered shawl had got soaked in the rain and he’s left it behind. I’m thinking of putting it to use as a fruit-juice strainer’.

The telling of tiger-tales to a young listener is a subject Rabindranath returns to in his lecture series
The Religion of Man
(1931)
,
and in discussions of literary theory written in 1933.There he proves how real even the most fantastic tales can be to the child-mind, observing, ‘Whatever impresses itself upon the mind in a distinct form or shape is real.’ It does not rely upon reason or logic; it may have no functional meaning or factual basis; it may lie far beyond the limits of possibility. Still,‘it presents an image before the mind, awakens an interest in it, fills up an emptiness: it is real.’

Here the word ‘real’ obviously carries a special significance. To understand what that is, we must consider the literary context of the time.The post-Tagore era of literary activity is about to begin; the young writers of the new age have begun to criticize Rabindranath for ignoring contemporary reality. His works, they allege, are romantic from beginning to end, showing little awareness of the real or existent. Instead, he continues to create a world of illusion, consistently avoiding the harshness of daily life in the real world. At different points in the course of theoretical debate Rabindranath tries to counter such attacks, presenting his own justification. Such debate does not remain confined to theory, but often spills over into his fiction and poetry. Sometimes driven to distraction by the tangles of theory, Rabindranath confesses, ‘When these policemen guarding realist literature chase after me, I seek refuge in my songs...and in my painting.’ In a letter to Amiya Chakrabarti (24 February 1939) we find, together with those thoughts, expressions of concern at the setting of a market-price on literature, his dislike of ‘literary inspectors’, and his seeking a sanctuary away from this hostile environment. Again he declares, ‘In this precarious situation I still have two stable retreats—my songs and my painting.’

To the two sanctuaries provided by music and art we may add a third—the world of children. Having just experienced the materialism of America, Rabindranath felt compelled to write the poems in
Shishu Bholanath
‘to calm the mind, to make it pure and free’. Similarly, to escape from the agitation and distaste described above, he had to write, one after the other, the verses in
Khapchhara
(Oddities, 1937),
Chharar Chhabi
(Rhyme-Pictures, 1937) and
Chhara
(Rhymes, 1941), and, along with them, the stories in
Galpa-Shalpa
(Stories and So On, 1941) and
Shey
(He, 1937).These works undoubtedly express a wish to escape, an effort to create a world of the imagination fit for young boys and girls.Yet, even here, the same inner trouble, the same conflict with modernity occasionally comes to the surface.

While writing the tiger-poems or the tuneless poems in
Shey
, in moving from one rhythmic form to another, Rabindranath makes it quite clear that he is exchanging thrusts with his modernist detractors. The ‘He’ of the story tells Pupe’s Dadamashai,‘Your honeyed words have trapped you in a stupor, Dada—the harsh truth doesn’t please your palate’, and informs him,‘The modern age is growing hard and dry.’ When Dadamashai asks,‘Why didn’t Creation stop once it reached that smooth rhythm?’, He replies by recounting the triumph of the hideous over the beautiful, the discordant over the melodious.‘Today Ganesh’s trunk has taken the shape of a chimney and is trumpeting over the temples of manufacture in the West,’ says He. ‘Isn’t it the loud tunelessness of that song that’s bringing his devotees success?’ Hence his prayer:‘Toss my brains with your trunk; let an earthquake engulf my mother tongue; let a turbid force erupt from my pen; let the sons of Bengal wake to its harsh discordance!’

The violence does not end there—we continue to find commands to break out of ‘that gentlemanly cut of poetry’, ‘to beat out the backbones of verses with clubs’. We may even be reminded of the novel
Shesher Kabita
(1929), and the appeal of the poems by Nibaran Chakrabarti, otherwise the novel’s hero Amit Ray. Having thrown the ordered world into disarray, stripped the meaning from words and reduced them to senseless explosions of sound, he wants to create a new poetic model. But when, at the end of
Shey
, we hear Dadamashai remark that the discordant and the evil ‘pretend to be powerful only to the extent that man is cowardly’, or when he tells Pupe,‘Wait another ten years before you venture to judge whether he writes better than I do’, we know we are hearing Rabindranath’s distinctive voice. It is then that we clearly perceive the nature of the battle between modern tastes and his own. Only then do we understand his pleasure when Banaphul, one of the young writers of the day, observed that
Shey
was more than a children’s book.