I Won't Let You Go (40 page)

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.

The story which is the source of ‘The Repayment’ is one of a group which tries to explain incidents in the life of the Buddha by means of references to his past incarnations. This particular story purports to explain why the Buddha left his wife Yashodhara. In the following extract from Mitra, taken from the 1971 reprint published by Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, Calcutta, the spellings of names have been slightly edited to avoid the use of diacritical marks:

‘There was in times of yore a horse-dealer at Takshashila, named Vajrasena; on his way to the fair at Varanasi, his horses were stolen, and he was severely wounded. As he slept in a deserted house in the suburbs of Varanasi, he was caught by policemen as a thief. He was ordered to the place of execution. But his manly beauty attracted the attention of Shyama, the first public woman in Varanasi. She grew enamoured of the man, and requested one of her handmaids to rescue the criminal at any hazard. By offering large sums of money, she
succeeded
in inducing the executioners to set Vajrasena free, and execute the orders of the king on another, a banker’s son, who was an admirer of Shyama. The latter, not knowing his fate, approached the place of execution with victuals for the criminal, and was severed in two by the executioners.

‘The woman was devotedly attached to Vajrasena. But her inhuman
conduct
to the banker’s son made a deep impression on his mind. He could not
reconcile himself to the idea of being in love with the perpetrator of such a crime. On an occasion when they both set on a pluvial excursion, Vajrasena plied her with wine, and when she was almost senseless, smothered and
drowned
her. When he thought she was quite dead, he dragged her to the steps of the ghat and fled, leaving her in that helpless condition. Her mother, who was at hand, came to her rescue, and by great assiduity resuscitated her. Shyama’s first measure, after recovery, was to find out a Bhikshuni of Takshashila, and to send through her a message to Vajrasena, inviting him to her loving embrace. Buddha was that Vajrasena, and Shyama, Yashodhara.’

The essential part of this gruesome tale reads quite like a plausible, realistic story, such as we might read in the newspapers even today, emerging from a criminal court case. The banker’s son
is not persuaded
to offer himself as a
sacrifice
to please the woman he loves, but is quite simply murdered. Bribery and assassination secure the release of the condemned man. Tagore lifted the story out of its crude, sordid ambit, gave it a psychological twist, and turned it into a romantic-tragic narrative poem of considerable power and beauty. That Tagore was intrigued by the story is shown by the fact that he returned to it in his old age, making a musical play and then a dance-drama out of it in the last years of his life. In the dance-drama,
Shyama
(1939), the story reaches its height of psychological sophistication. Uttiya is not even
persuaded
to sacrifice himself: he offers to do so completely of his own accord. It is his idea. Shyama does accept his sacrifice, but also makes an unsuccessful last-minute attempt to save him. The inclusion of a few details ensures that even the Police Chief seems quite respectable. Bajrasen is arrested on reasonable grounds – because he
refuses
to open his case. And he refuses to do so because it contains a jewelled necklace brought by him from Subarna-dwip (‘the golden island’ of antiquity, usually identified with Sumatra), which he does not wish to surrender. When Uttiya pleads guilty to the charge of theft from the royal treasury, he shows the Police Chief a ring that Shyama had just given him as an ambivalent last gift, a royal ring which Shyama had herself had as a present from the king. This is accepted as evidence of his guilt. In these little subtle ways and with the help of powerful and moving songs, Tagore lifts the whole story onto a dizzy height of operatic tragedy (Tagore’s dance-dramas incorporate both
operatic
and balletic elements) where a love-infatuated teenager’s entirely
spontaneous
and voluntary act of self-sacrifice becomes the linchpin of action, miles removed from the original Buddhist story where the unsuspecting victim is persuaded to take food to the condemned man and is cut down by the
executioners
.
Shyama
is recognised by critics to be one of the highest of Tagore’s artistic achievements, taking into consideration the many genres in which he worked, and ‘The Repayment’, also regarded as one of the most remarkable poems of the early years, is, as it were, its first incarnation.

See the notes on the lotus and the goddess Lakshmi in the Glossary and also the information on the symbolism of the lotus in the note on ‘True
Meditation
’ above to appreciate the ironies implicit in the third stanza.

The ‘trident-peak’ of the temple in the last stanza indicates that it is a Shiva temple, the trident being one of his weapons.

128-29.
The Realisation of Value
(
Katha
): Mitra’s
The Sanskrit Buddhist
Literature
of Nepal
(see above) is also the source of this poem. In this case it is one of a group of stories illustrating miracles performed by the Buddha. In the following quotation from the 1971 edition, diacritical marks have been
omitted
and the punctuation has been emended in a few places:

‘Before the advent of Buddha, Raja Prasenajit used to worship the Tirthikas, but after the appearance of that great preacher, he bowed to none but the great Lord. When the Lord was dwelling in the Jeta grove, a gardener of Sravasti brought a big lotus flower as a present for the king.

‘A worshipper of the Tirthikas asked its price. At this time Anathapindada came and doubled its value. They bade against each other with emulous pride till the price rose to a hundredfold. Thereupon the gardener enquired about the whereabouts of Buddha, and hearing of his great power from
Anathapindada
, presented the flower to the Lord. Instantly the lotus swelled out to the size of a carriage wheel and stood over Buddha’s head. The gardener, astonished at this, asked instruction in supreme knowledge. The Lord said to Ananda, ‘‘This man is to become a great Buddha, Padmodbhava by name.”’

129-35.
Dialogue between Karna and Kunti
(
Kahini
, Tales): Translated from the text in the
Rabindra-rachanabali,
vol. 5, the older Visvabharati edition, this is a dramatic poem based on an episode in the
Mahabharata
. During the middle period of his life, Tagore was much preoccupied with claiming and reworking old stories from the
Mahabharata
or from Buddhist lore, offering reinterpretations which would resonate in his own times and act as bridges between tradition and modernity. He had been specially requested by his friend, the scientist Jagadishchandra Bose, to write a poem based on Karna’s story. Tagore takes details from two contiguous sections of the ‘Udyogaparva’ of the
Mahabharata
, a dialogue between Krishna and Karna, and a dialogue between Karna and Kunti, to make a new composite story of an encounter between a fostered son and a long-lost natural mother, set against the
backdrop
of the preparations for the great war between the rival collateral houses of the Pandavas and the Kauravas. Kunti is the mother of the five Pandavas – the natural mother of the three elder brothers, Yudhisthira, Bhima, and Arjuna, and the stepmother of the two younger ones. Karna is Kunti’s eldest child, born before her marriage, whom she had carefully packed and consigned to the mercy of a river, just as Moses had been consigned in the Jewish story. Karna was found and reared by foster-parents of the charioteer caste,
eventually
becoming a warrior, a man noted for his generosity, and an ally of the Kauravas, led by Duryodhana. On the eve of the war of Kurukshetra there is an attempt to woo Karna over to the side of the Pandavas, first by Krishna, who is an ally of the Pandavas, then by Kunti. Karna refuses to change sides.

In the
Mahabharata
, Kunti meets her first-born son when he is finishing his late morning prayers by the Ganges. She waits in the scorching sun till he finishes his prayers at noon. Tagore transfers the meeting to the glow of
twilight
deepening into a starlit night. The softer setting is more appropriate for Tagore’s purpose of highlighting the human emotions. Also in the epic, Karna does not really learn about his birth for the first time from Kunti. Krishna has already told him the details before Kunti has had a chance to do so, and in any case, Karna seems to know the essential facts already, what Krishna says being merely a confirmation. Tagore, interested in making a different kind of audience impact, makes Karna hear about who his natural mother is from her own mouth, thus making the encounter much more meaningfully dramatic. At the same time, Tagore’s Kunti, more of a Victorian aristocratic matron, is too embarrassed to reveal the actual details of how she had
conceived
Karna out of wedlock, whereas in the
Mahabharata
, both Krishna and
Kunti relate them to Karna in a matter-of-fact manner in keeping with the
mores
of the old epics. In the
Mahabharata
, Karna is much sterner with his mother, more outspoken, acerbic, and unambiguous in his condemnation of her actions, past and present, more sharply Hindu in his understanding of right action and caste ethics. He actually offers Kunti the consolation that he will not kill all her sons: he will either kill Arjuna or be killed by him, so that she will still remain the mother of five sons! He is, of course, eventually killed by Arjuna. Tagore’s treatment is more psychological: Karna is humanised to suit the tastes of Tagore’s own times. Tagore’s Karna berates his mother indirectly, rhetorically, through questions, with a mixture of sentiment and irony. He wavers, is flooded with nostalgia and filial affection, then retreats to a noble resolve.

Jahnavi and Bhagirathi are names for the Ganges. Kripa is a martial
instructor
. In the transliterations of proper names within the poem I have given slight tilts towards the way they would be pronounced in Bengali. Thus I have written Adhirath, not Adhiratha; Bhim, not Bhima; Arjun, not Arjuna; Durjodhan and Judhisthir instead of Duryodhana and Yudhisthira; Pandab and Kaurab instead of Pandava and Kaurava. These details are in consonance with my practice in the rest of this book.

135-36.
A Stressful Time
(
Kalpana
, Imagination): In its MS. draft this poem had a different title, meaning ‘On the Road to Heaven’, the present title
appearing
when the poem was first published a year later in the magazine
Bharati
(Pal, vol. 4, p. 137). Interestingly, this new title, ‘Duhsamay’ (A Bad Time/ A Stressful Time) is also the title of a poem of
Chitra
, written just three years ago on 17 April 1894, which is likely to have some connection with the tenth anniversary of Kadambari Devi’s death (Pal, vol. 4, p. 1). These facts may help us to understand the striking images of this poem. The bird, originally
imagined
as on its way to heaven, is now imagined as pursuing a strenuous flight over an ocean. The poet feels a strong identification with its plight. The
difficult
time is as much the bird’s as the sympathising poet’s. Does the bird
embody
both Kadambari’s agony and the poet’s grief? It would be hard to explain the intensity of the poem unless we assume some such anchorage for it in
private
grief. Compare this poem also with ‘Death-dream’ of
Manasi
, written on 28 April 1888, where the poet, dreaming that he is riding on the back of a swan, experiences the dissolution of the entire cosmos within himself. The similarity is striking. The fact that all these poems were written in the month of April, the month of Kadambari’s death, seems to be a clue to the similarity of moods in them.

136-39.
Dream
(
Kalpana
): The background to this poem is Tagore’s
fascination
with the period of the Sanskrit poet and dramatist Kalidasa (
circa
the 5th century A.D.: he is supposed to have lived some time between the middle of the 4th century and the end of the 5th). Kalidasa is thought to have pursued his literary career under the patronage of the Gupta emperors as one of the ‘nine jewels’ at the flourishing court of Ujjain. Elsewhere too Tagore has said that he wished he could have belonged to that time and that milieu. In this poetical fantasy, the details of the scenario are essentially derived from Kalidasa, especially the poem
Meghaduta
, a favourite of Tagore’s, where an exile in the highlands of central India sends a message to his wife in Alaka in the far north by means of a wandering raincloud. The cloud is asked to make a slight detour to pass over Ujjain. Though the imagined woman of Tagore’s poem lives in
Ujjain on the Shipra, she is also partly drawn in the model of the exile’s wife in the Sanskrit poem, who lives in the city of Alaka. Accordingly there is an amalgam of details culled from the two sections of the Sanskrit poem, the
Purva-megha
and the
Uttaramegha
. Ujjain, Shipra, lodhra-pollen, dalliance-lotus, kunda-buds, kurubaks on the hair, evening service at the Shiva-temple,
conchshell
on the door, a young tree growing like a son by the door, pet doves or pigeons, pet peacock, incensed hair: all these minutiae are taken from the
Meghaduta
. But though the circumstantial details are Kalidasian, the human mood created is authentically Tagorean.