He: (Shey) (Modern Classics (Penguin)) Read Free Page A

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