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

was more than a children’s book.
     
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    This emergence from the confines of certified ‘children’s literature’ is instanced at several other points of the story. Not only does Rabindranath face up to his modernist critics, but there is evidence that he comes to a conscious understanding with himself. No doubt he wished his words to reflect his whims, to lose himself in ‘play without meaning’, as he writes in the dedicatory poem. He meant to step away ‘directionless/In baul’s dress’, to bloom as ‘a worthless flower among weeds’, to fill his work with laughter unrestrained by reason. But is he entirely successful in all this? The question is not the reader’s alone. It comes, indeed, from the self-conscious writer. When the story-character He draws the narrator aside and asks, ‘Aren’t you in need of a little improvement yourself? … Stop being so old. Here you are, ageing, but you’re yet to mature in childishness,’ we are witness to an act of self-judgement on the author’s part. It is clear that the pieces of advice proffered by He of the story,‘If you imagine you can make Pupu-didi laugh with these stories, you’d better think again!’ or ‘Leave off your scientific humour and try to be a little more childish if you can’, are really Rabindranath’s counsels to himself.
    Equally evident is the writer’s uncertainty as to how this perfect pitch of childishness is to be reached. He recognizes that the story he has created is, in certain places, written ‘purely in jest, out of the cockiness of [his] advanced years’. The stories Pupu-didi wants to hear, however,‘are funny without poking fun at anything’. But the presence of satire is not the only problem; Dadamashai distinguishes between two kinds of smiles, one dental and the other cerebral, and says,‘It’s the cerebral kind that fell to me—what one calls wit in English.’ Simultaneously, it is driven home to him that ‘if you can’t stop being so clever, you’d better give up telling stories.’ His self-admonition, ‘The pungency of your intelligence has dried up all the fun in you’, precedes his quest for ‘pure laughter without any alloy of intelligence’, in other words, the journey towards a new story.Yet even after this, the disbelief in ‘Well, then, nitwit, could you make her laugh?’, or ‘The laughter you win by a cheap joke like that is of no worth’, or ‘I don’t claim that even this story belongs to the highest order of humour’, betrays the same self-deprecating hesitation.
    The story begins to move away from fantasy towards social satire when, in the tale about the tiger, even Pupe declares she knows how choosy the caste-conscious tiger can be about what he will eat or touch. If a tiger pollutes himself by drinking unholy ‘vegetarian blood’, the puritanical tiger community demands he perform a penance.And if he refuses? The hapless father of no less than five girl-tigers will be ruined. His five keen-clawed daughters are all old enough to be given away in marriage, but even if he offers twenty-eight buffaloes as dowry, the ritually unclean tiger will fail to procure a suitor for even one of them. A greater punishment awaits him when he dies—no priest will consent to perform the funeral rites, and seven generations of his descendants will bow their heads in shame.What penance, then, can absolve him? He must remain in the south-west corner of the square where the shrine of the tiger-goddess stands, from the beginning of the dark lunar fortnight to the middle of its last moonless night, feeding only on a shoulder of jackal and using only his right hind-paw to tear off the flesh. Reading all this may remind us of Rabindranath’s play Achalayatan (1912) and its ridicule of absurd rites and conventions.The desire to play truant from society is possibly thwarted by such recurring allusions to the all-too-real world of men.
     
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    The gradual progress from the world of children to the