In memory of Sujata Chaudhuri (1913-2003) and the victims of the Gujarat riots.

[ Note: About 500 people attended the function at which I gave this lecture. It was held on the terrace at the back of the Shahjahan’s palace at Shahibaug, where Tagore’s elder brother lived when he was District Judge in Ahmedabad. Rabindranath stayed for four months at the palace in 1878, when he was seventeen, and later recalled in Jibansmriti and Chelebela how it inspired his story Kshudita Pashan (‘The Hungry Stones’, 1895). The function was organised in collaboration with the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Rashtriya Smarak (which is based at the palace) and the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad, and on 22 February a lecture was given at the Parishad by Professor Bholabhai Patel on Gujarat’s longstanding interest in Tagore and in Bengali literature generally, and the numerous translations from Bengali to Gujarati that have been done. I was present on that occasion too, and my entire five-day stay in Ahmedabad was rich in delightful new experiences. I was the guest of Mr Shailesh Parekh, who has translated Tagore into both Gujarati and English (two of his books, Naibedya and Shesh Lekha, are available from Writers Workshop, Kolkata), and I received equal kindness from Professor Niranjan Bhagat. Professor Bhagat is the editor of Tagore in Ahmedabad (Image Publications, Mumbai and Ahmedabad: see www.imagepublications.com), a bilingual publication that was released at the Shahibaug function. Other speakers included Professor Bhagat, Mr Parekh, Shri Prakash Shah (Secretary of the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad) and the eminent Gujarati poet and translator of Tagore, Shri Ramanlal Soni, who presided. Two songs composed by Tagore during his stay in Ahmedabad - Golap Bala and Nirab Rajani - were sung by Ms Sucheta Roy. My lecture was followed by a screening of Tapan Sinha’s classic film of Kshudita Pashan.] 
 

Sujata Chaudhuri (Courtesy: Ananda Bazar Patrika)

 After Partition she and her husband returned to Kolkata, and she soon went back to teaching (despite having two small children), first at Ashutosh College again, then from 1952 at Lady Brabourne and Bethune Colleges, where she remained for twenty years, becoming a full Professor, and finally Principal of Lady Brabourne College from 1969 to 1971.

 Sujatadi was such a modest, self-disciplined person, who wore her learning and brilliance so quietly, that she would certainly not have wanted me to devote this lecture to her memory. But her tastes and values, her sensibility and sensitivity, her kindness and humanity will be implicit in it, and closely related to its theme. For if Tagore by his poetic greatness represents Bengali culture at its best, so did Sujatadi, and her family too, from her father, the renowned Professor at Cotton College, Praphulla Chandra Ray, to her equally gifted son and daughter-in-law - and many other family members too.

 Because she died yesterday, quietly and at home, her family at her bedside, after a three month illness, a great poem by Rabindranath comes to my mind in which Death also comes quietly. Like all the poems I shall cite in this lecture, it is included in my Selected Poems of Tagore, which I have been looking at closely again for the first time in many years. I should like, if I may, to read the whole poem to you.
 
 

Maran-milan (‘Death-wedding’, 1902)

 Why do you speak so softly, Death, Death,
Creep upon me, watch me so stealthily?
This is not how a lover should behave.
When evening flowers droop upon their tired
Stems, when cattle are brought in from the fields
After a whole day’s grazing, you, Death,
Death, approach me with such gentle steps,
Settle yourself immovably by my side.
I cannot understand the things you say.

Alas, will this be how you will take me, Death,
Death? Like a thief, laying heavy sleep
On my eyes as you descend to my heart?
Will you thus let your tread be a slow beat
In my sleep-numbed blood, your jingling ankle-bells
A drowsy rumble in my ear? Will you, Death,
Death, wrap me, finally, in your cold
Arms and carry me away while I dream?
I do not know why you thus come and go.

Tell me, is this the way you wed, Death,
Death? Unceremonially, with no
Weight of sacrament or blessing or prayer?
Will you come with your massy tawny hair
Unkempt, unbound into a bright coil-crown?
Will no one bear your victory-flag before
Or after, will no torches glow like red
Eyes along the river, Death, Death?
Will earth not quake in terror at your step?

When fierce-eyed Siva came to take his bride,
Remember all the pomp and trappings, Death,
Death: the flapping tiger-skins he wore;
His roaring bull; the serpents hissing round
His hair; the bom-bom sound as he slapped his cheeks;
The necklace of skulls swinging round his neck;
The sudden raucous music as he blew
His horn to announce his coming - was this not
A better way of wedding, Death, Death?

And as that deathly wedding-party’s din
Grew nearer, Death, Death, tears of joy
Filled Gauri’s eyes and the garments at her breast
Quivered; her left eye fluttered and her heart
Pounded; her body quailed with thrilled delight
And her mind ran away with itself, Death, Death;
Her mother wailed and smote her head at the thought
Of receiving so wild a groom; and in his mind
Her father agreed calamity had struck.

Why must you always come like a thief, Death,
Death, always silently, at night’s end,
Leaving only tears? Come to me festively,
Make the whole night ring with your triumph, blow
Your victory-conch, dress me in blood-red robes,
Grasp me by the hand and sweep me away!
Pay no heed to what others may think, Death,
Death, for I shall of my own free will
Resort to you if you but take me gloriously.

If I am immersed in work in my room
When you arrive, Death, Death, then break
My work, thrust my unreadiness aside.
If I am sleeping, sinking all desires
In the dreamy pleasure of my bed, or I lie
With apathy gripping my heart and my eyes
Flickering between sleep and waking, fill
Your conch with your destructive breath and blow,
Death, Death, and I shall run to you.

I shall go to where your boat is moored,
Death, Death, to the sea where the wind rolls
Darkness towards me from infinity.
I may see black clouds massing in the far
North-east corner of the sky; fiery snakes
Of lightning may rear up with their hoods raised,
But I shall not flinch in unfounded fear -
I shall pass silently, unswervingly
Across that red storm-sea, Death, Death.
 

‘Tagore’ and ‘greatness’ are very easily linked, because of his iconic status in Bengal and in India as a whole, not to mention other countries; because of his long life and vast influence; his central role in the formation of modern Indian nationhood; his noble appearance; his wide and human sympathies; and his profound spiritual insight. But I wonder if the prominence of his greatness in all these aspects has distracted us from his actual greatness as a poet. After all, it is possible to be wise, good, humane, brave and influential without being a poet. To be a great poet you need to write great poems, and that requires a number of purely literary gifts and qualities, some of which are quite technical.

 Let us consider some of the things in Maran-milan that makes it such a great poem. Firstly there is the astonishing technical control: the unerring use of metre, rhyme and verse structure to echo perfectly Death’s quiet footsteps. Listen to the first stanza in Bengali:
 
 

ata      cupi cupi kena katha kao 
           ogo       maran, he mor maran, 
ati       dhire ese kena ceye rao, 
           ogo       eki pranayer-i dharan! 
yabe    sandhyabelay phul-dal 
           pare     klanta brinte namiya, 
yabe    phire ase gothe gabhidal 
           sara     din-man mathe bhramiya, 
tumi     pase asi basa acapal 
           ogo      ati mridugati-caran. 
ami      bujhi na ye ki ye katha kao 
           ogo      maran, he mor maran. 

In the Bengali, the regular (lines 2 and 12) placing of the refrain - ogo maran, he mor maran - is one of the most mesmeric things about this poem. I decided that this might not work so well in English: ‘O my Death’ is not a happy phrase, and doesn’t in itself have that quiet, creeping quality the poem requires. So instead I have the simple, quiet spondee ‘Death, Death’; and I let it move around in the stanza. I felt that this would express the steady, yet unpredictable footsteps of Death more effectively than keeping it in a fixed position. 

As regards metre, I did not follow Tagore’s six foot/four foot alternating pattern, but I did pick up the trochaic character of the six foot lines, and the fact that the four foot lines are more ‘accentual’, with four main stresses, but with variation in the number of light syllables between them: 

ati      dhire ese kena ceye rao,
     ogo     eki pranayer-i dharan!

Make the whole night ring…
Grasp me by the hand…
Pay no heed to what…
 
 

 Then there is its energy and vitality of language: Tagore’s vastness of vocabulary, from the classicism of compound phrases such as bijayoddhat dhvajapat (for Death’s victory-flag) to colloquial Bengali reduplicative and onomatopoeic expressions such as kinkini-ranrani (for his jingling ankle-bells) and babam-babam (for Siva’s cheek-slapping). (Tagore called such expressions dhvanatmak-sabda, ‘sound-soul-words’, and compiled a comprehensive list of them.)

 Then there is the poem’s moral depth and sincerity. Here is a poet who is prepared to tackle the deepest, most cosmic, most universal themes: in the case of this poem, the mysterious power of Death, whose edicts we cannot resist and can never fully understand. 

Yet there is in this poem, solemn though it is, wit as well: Gauri’s reactions to Siva as bridegroom and of her parents too are comically reminiscent of an ordinary Bengali domestic scene (‘…and in his mind/Her father agreed calamity had struck’). For me, wit is an essential ingredient of great poetry. It is always there, because the skilful use of language in poetry involves word-play, which is by definition witty. Wit, too, is the handmaid of wisdom: a great poem needs to be many-sided, to be open to different points of view. A wise man is always humorous; a narrow-minded fanatic never is.

 All in all, these elements working together in concert - verse-form, rhythm, structure, language, feeling, imagery, moral depth, wit - embody that power of poetic mind that makes a great poet, distinguishes him from the second-rate. It was that quality of mind that I felt was lacking in earlier translations of Tagore, including his own, and which I was so anxious to capture.
 

I should like now to consider these elements in more detail, looking for illustrations in other poems in my Selected Poems of Tagore. 

Although my translations have generally been well received over the years, especially in India, and I am very grateful for that, readers have not always been aware of the novel and intricate technical devices that went into their making.

 So far as I know, no critic or reviewer of my translations has commented on their technical innovations. Yet for me, that is a particularly interesting aspect, because it demonstrates how in translating a great poet who possesses a whole range of techniques that are novel in English one can enhance English poetry’s technical resources.

 A few examples.
 
  (a) Gaps

Tagore was fond of including gaps in his lines, to bring out the rhythm clearly. (Notice his use of them in Maran-milan above.) I followed this practice in a number of my translations, and have also used it quite a lot in poems of my own. A colleague of mine at the School of Oriental and African Studies, who does excellent translations of Somali poetry, showed me a draft that I gathered was based on a traditional Somali verse-form that also has gaps in the lines. ‘Why don’t you keep the gaps in your translation?’ I suggested. He tried it, and was delighted with the result. So here we have an example of a verse technique entering English poetry from Tagore (though we have a precedent for it in Ango-Saxon poetry) and being passed on to translations from another language. This is indeed how poetry can evolve and be cross-fertilised.

 A few lines from Badhu (‘Bride’, 1890) will display the technique to you:

               Pitcher at my hip, the winding path -
   Nothing but fields to the left                       stretching into haze,
              To the right the slanting bamboo-grove.
    The evening sunlight shines                       on the blackness of the pool,
              The woods round its edge are sunk in shade.
    I let myself idly float                                  in the pool’s deep calm,
              The koel on the bank has sweetness in its song.
    Returning, I suddenly see                          above the dark trees.
              Painted on the sky, the moon.

(b) Tabla-rhythms
Looking at many of my translations again after several years, I am convinced that rhythms have entered them - whether consciously or not - that are Indian rather than English, and have therefore added to my own poetic resources. This could in turn - if my own poems eventually have influence - feed into English poetry and translation more generally. Listen to the opening of my translation of Tapobhanga (‘The Wakening of Siva’, 1925), which I regard as one of my best translations: 

My past days bulging with the sap of the turbulence of youth - 
O master of cyclic Time, are you indifferent to them now,
           O tranced ascetic?
Have they with kimsuk blossoms on gusty Caitra nights
Blown away, have they floated uncared-for off into infinite sky?
Have they on rafts of slim white rainless post-monsoon cloud
Drifted at the whim of arbitrary winds to moor on oblivion 
           Through harsh neglect?

Those days that once so colourfully decked your matted yellow locks
With white and red and blue and yellow flowers -
           Are they all forgotten?
In the end they laughingly stole your beggar’s tabor and horn
And gave you flute and anklets; they filled your drinking-bowl
With potent distillations of the heavy scents of spring;
They drowned the dense inertia of your trance 
           In an upsurge of sweetness.
 

bulging with the...
turbulence of...
drifted at the...
arbitrary...
colourfully...
distillations of the...
heavy scents of...
inertia of your...

Satanic machine, you enable man to fly. 
     Land and sea had fallen to his power:
         All that was left was the sky.

God has given as a gift a bird’s two wings.
     From the flash of feathery line and colour
         Spiritual joy springs…

The ABA rhyme scheme I use is familiar to us from terza rima; but notice that my lines decrease in length - first five feet, then four, then three. There are plenty of tabla-rhythms too. 

Or listen to Bir-purush (‘The Hero’, 1903):
 
 

Say we made a journey, mother,
Roaming far and wide together -
      You would have a palanquin,
      Doors kept open just a chink,
      I would ride a red horse, clip 
Clop-clip along beside you, lifting 
      Clouds of red dust with my clatter.

The four-foot trochaic lines may not seem particularly novel, but in each verse there is a rhythmic twist in line 6, which starts with an iamb, not a trochee (‘Clop-clip’ in this verse). I’ve also used an elaborate rhyme scheme which, as often in my translations and in my own poems, uses half-rhymes rather than full rhymes. (I tend to use half-rhyme in translations as it leads to fewer distortions of meaning for the sake of form; but having learnt the technique essentially from translation I’ve enjoyed using it in my own poems too.) In verse 1 above, lines 1, 2 and 7 are half-rhymed on ‘feminine’ endings: ‘mother’, ‘together’, ‘clatter’. Line 6 doesn’t have a rhyme, but it also has a feminine ending. Lines 3, 4, and 5 are ‘masculine’, and are half-rhymed on the vowel, not the consonant: 

…palanquin
…chink
…clip

I could go on and on, but nuts and bolts lose their interest after a while except to the person fixing them, so I shall restrain myself from offering you even more technicalities! The important point to stress is that Tagore would not be a great poet if he was not also such a brilliant technician; and a translator who wants to convey Tagore’s technical brilliance to the full has to command an equivalent range of techniques in his own language. 

Now for some of the other elements mentioned earlier. Of course all these elements overlap and interact; but for the purposes of analysis it is possible to distinguish them. 
 
  1. Language 

Like all truly great poets, Tagore is able to incorporate into his diction the whole history of his language with its roots in Sanskrit, and also take the language forward with his many innovations. The translator of Tagore has to aspire to a similar depth and range in his own use of language.

 I am not myself a good classical linguist, whether in Latin, Greek or Sanskrit. But my mother Betty Radice was a distinguished classical scholar and translator, and I must have acquired from her an early awareness of levels in the English language, from the classical through the poetic and romantic to the modern and colloquial. When I sense that Tagore is using richly classical words - and I particularly like those poems where he does - I try to use an equivalently classical (Latinate) vocabulary in English. Listen, for example, to part of Briksha-bandana (‘In Praise of Trees’, 1931), first in Bengali, then in my English translation.
 
 

                     he nistabdha, he mahagambhir, 
biryere bandhiya dhairye santirup dekhale saktir.
tai asi tomar asraye santidiksha labhibare,
sunite mauner mahabani; duscintar gurubhare,
natasirsha bilunthite syam-saumyacchayatale taba -
praner udar rup, ras-rup nitya naba naba,
bisvajayi bir-rup, dharanir banirup tar
labhite apan prane.

                     O profound, 
Silent tree, by restraining valour
With patience, you revealed creative
Power in its peaceful form. Thus we come
To your shade to learn the art of peace,
To hear the word of silence; weighed down 
With anxiety, we come to rest
In your tranquil blue-green shade, to take
Into our souls life rich, life ever
Juvenescent, life true to earth, life
Omni-victorious.

 At the other end of the spectrum there is the use by Tagore, especially in his gadya-kabita (vers libre), of the vocabulary and idioms of ordinary Bengali speech. A translator has to be alert to these too. Recently I read my translation of Phanki (‘Deception’, 1918) to an audience in London, and was pleased to find how natural and easy it was to read. I did not find it difficult to inject the right tones of humour and rapture and pathos into the reading, because the inflexions of Bengali seemed to have entered my English - despite all the cultural differences. Here is the young wife Binu, who is incurably ill, responding with delight to everything she sees when her husband takes her away from the city by train for a change of air:
 
 

     At Bilaspur station we had to change trains;
                We got down hurriedly.
Six hours to fill in the waiting-room:
     They seemed an age to me.
           But Binu said, ‘Why? It’s good to wait.’
     There seemed no limit to her delight.
           The journey was a flute that made her want to dance:
                Waiting, moving were made one by her happiness.
                     She opened the door of the waiting-room and said,
           ‘Look, look at those horse-carts passing -
     And can you see? That calf over there, how shiny and plump it is,
                What deep love in its mother’s eyes!
          And next to that steep-sided pond over there,
    That little fenced-in house under sisu-trees,
                     Near the railway-line,
Is it the station-master’s? What a lovely place to live.’

                   … ‘dekho dekho, ekkagari keman cale.
ar dekhecho? - bachurti oi, a mare yai, cikan nadhar deha,
                mayer cokhe ki sugabhir sneha!…’

 Let us consider one of his simplest, most celebrated poems, one that even now most Bengali schoolchildren learn by heart: Tal-gach (‘Palm-tree’, 1922). Here it is in my translation.
 
 

Palm-tree:      single-legged giant,
                        topping the other trees,
                               peering at the firmament -
It longs            to pierce the black cloud-ceiling
                        and fly away, away,
                                if only it had wings.

The tree          seems to express its wish             
                         in the tossing of its head:
                                its fronds heave and swish -
It thinks,           Maybe my leaves are feathers, 
                         and nothing stops me now
                                from rising on their flutter.

All day              the fronds on the windblown tree
                         soar and flap and shudder
                                as though it thinks it can fly,
As though        it wanders in the skies,
                         travelling who knows where,
                                wheeling past the stars -

And then           as soon as the wind dies down,
                          the fronds subside, subside:
                                the mind of the tree returns 
To earth,           recalls that earth is its mother:
                          and then it likes once more
                                its earthly corner.

The Post Office tr. by William Radice, and set as a play-within-a-play by Jill Parvin (The Tagore Centre, UK, 1996)

Take Pakshi-manab, which I earlier quoted for its verse-form in my translation, and which now I should like to read to you complete.
 

Satanic machine, you enable man to fly.
       Land and sea had fallen to his power: 
              All that was left was the sky. 

God has given as gift a bird’s two wings.
       From the flash of feathery line and colour
              Spiritual joy springs.

Birds are companions to the clouds: blue space
      And great winds and brightly-coloured birds
              Are all of the same race.

The rhythms in the life and play of birds belong
      To the wind; from the sky’s music comes
              Their energy and song.

Thus each dawn throughout the forests of the earth
      Light, when it wakes, unites with birdsong
              In one harmonious birth.

In the great peace beneath the immense sky,
      The dancing waves of birds quiver
              Like wavelets rippling by.

Age after age through birds the life-spirit speaks:
      It is carried by birds along tracks of air
              To far-flung forests and peaks.

Today what do we see? And what is its meaning?
      The banner of arrogance has taken wing,
             Proud and overweening.

This thing has not been blessed by the life-divinity.
      The sun disowns it, neither does the moon
            Feel any affinity.

In the brutal roaring of an aeroplane we hear
      Incompatibility with sky,
           Destruction of atmosphere.

High among the clouds, in the heavens, its din
      Adds new blasphemous grating laughter
           To man’s catalogue of sin.

I feel the age we live in is drawing to a close -
      Upheavals threaten, gather the pace
            Of a storm that nothing slows.

Hatred and envy swell to violent conflagration:
      Panic spreads down from the skies,
            From their growing devastation.

If nowhere in the sky there is left a space
      For gods to be seated, then, Indra,
            Thunderer, may you place

At the end of this history your direst instruction:
      A last full stop written in the fire
            Of furious total destruction.

Hear the prayer of an earth that is stricken with pain:
      In the green woods, O may the birds
            Sing supreme again.

In a humbler way, I gave voice to the same anxieties in a little poem of my own, published in The Retreat (University Press Limited, Dhaka, 1995). Quite possibly Tagore’s poem, which I had translated ten years earlier, lay behind it:
 
 

I’m painting a fence, 
Listening to a bird. 
Plane flies over: 
Bird can’t be heard. 

If all the planes in the world 
Shared the same space, 
And all the birds in the world 
Were in the same place, 

Which would be louder? 
The singing or the roar?
It should be the birds, 
But I’m not quite sure. 

I myself have only gradually discovered the wit of Tagore’s writing, and it may show more in Particles, Jottings, Sparks - especially Particles (Kanika) - than in Selected Poems. But wit can be found in that volume too. Think of the sparrow in The Sick-bed 6 (1940):

O my day-break sparrow - 
In my last moments of sleepiness,
While there is still some darkness,
Here you are tapping on the window-pane,
Asking for news
And then dancing and twittering
Just as your whim takes you.
Your pluckily bobbing tail
Cocks a snook at all restrictions.
When magpie-robins chirrup at dawn,
Poets tip them.
When a hidden koel-bird hoots all day
Its same unvarying fifth,
So high is its rating
It gets the applause of Kalidasa
Ahead of all other birds.
You couldn’t care less -
You never keep to the scale -
To enter Kalidasa’s room
And chatter
And mess up his metres
Amuses you greatly….*

Suddenly I hear a voice - 
    ‘Grandfather, are you writing?’ 
       Someone else has come - not a peacock this time 
          But Sunayan?, as she is called in the house, 
       But whom I call ?un?yan? because she listens so well.
    She has the right to hear my poems before anyone else.
       I reply, ‘This won’t appeal to your sensitive ears:
          It’s vers libre.’

  See how the Siddha women languishing on a cloud-blue rock 
  Revel in the cloud’s looming coolness; but at the sudden onset of its storm 
  Cower, rush back to their caves 
  Clutching their clothes and crying, ‘Help, 
  Help, it’ll blow the mountains down!’

… ‘Ma go, giri-sringa uraila bujhi!’I could go on picking out favourite lines and passages for some time, but if these have been enough to make you smile, then my point has been made. It takes a great poet to write poetry that makes us smile, for second-rate poetry that tries to be funny is not witty at all - merely irritating.
 

By now you have evidence, I hope, for Tagore’s greatness as a poet, which may not be quite what people instantly think of when his greatness is mentioned, but which to my mind demonstrates his true poetic greatness, whatever his other attributes of greatness as a man.

 But the question remains, is there a connection between his purely poetic greatness and those other attributes? Could he have been a bad man, and still have been a great poet? 

We know very well from the history of art and literature that there have been many poets, novelists, painters or composers who have been pretty flawed as human beings, and there is no reason at all why a poet should be a saint. But I would, nonetheless, argue that Tagore’s poetic genius was special in character in a way that was closely connected to his qualities as a man. 

I am not so much thinking of what he was admired for in the West: a spiritual, sacramental quality in Gitanjali that was matched by his sacerdotal demeanour and appearance; a quality highlighted by W. B. Yeats in his famous - and perhaps dangerously influential - Introduction to that book, and which in Germany caused Count Hermann Keyserling and other somewhat hysterical admirers to liken Tagore to Jesus Christ.

 Rather, I am thinking of a lucidity in his writing that was intimately linked to his sincerity and moral depth; a goodness that was part and parcel with his compassionate intensity of feeling. Since all the elements I have discussed combined to form his power of poetic mind, one word that I have not thought of before - and which seems to have summative qualities appropriate to Rabindranath - occurs to me now: mindfulness. To be mindful is to have a wise and strong mind, to be sure; but it also implies consideration, tact, decorum, reverence and sympathy. Tagore was not perfect. I can think of occasions when he did lose his patience, speak out angrily against his better judgement, round bitterly on his critics. But he did always try to be mindful, to keep all points of view in mind, the whole complexity of an issue in mind, all people’s feelings in mind. And generally he succeeded.

 This brings me back to Sujata Chaudhuri, who also had an extraordinary, quiet, radiant quality of mindfulness. I never saw her show anything other than consideration and kindness. I never heard her utter anything petty or uncharitable. She had that reverence for children and animals that we find in the wisest souls. (I can hear her now, calling the birds to come each morning to be fed: ‘Ay pakhi ay, ay pakhi ay…’). Yet there was nothing piously goody-goody about her. She was witty. I can remember her laughing till tears streamed down her face.

 I have often said to people: ‘How lucky I am to have chosen Bengali to learn and study. Bengalis, at their best, are such nice people. They have never done any real harm in the world. And their culture, in modern times, has produced a number of outstanding geniuses.’ I have also wondered if the qualities I admire in Bengalis can in part be attributed to the influence of those geniuses, especially Tagore. Was Sujata Chaudhuri an example of someone who was moulded, in part, by Tagore’s genius?

 My Bengali friends might well point to injustices, inefficiency and squalor in much of Kolkata or Dhaka, and vehemently dismiss my theory. But Bengalis are proud as well as wittily self-mocking; in their hearts they know they have some virtues from which the world can learn.

 I have certainly learnt a lot from them, and especially from friends such as Sujata Chaudhuri. The day on which she died, her son Sukanta told me that she had left instructions that there should be no sraddha, no religious rituals after her death. When I asked her daughter-in-law Supriya whether this stemmed from her Brahmo upbringing, she said that she did not think this was so, as Brahmos go in for plenty of ritual of their own. Rather, it may have derived from the radical step she took by her marriage, which took both her and her (Brahmin) husband away from their respective religious backgrounds to a common ground of understanding that was completely inclusive of all good-hearted people, whatever their caste, religion or class. It was a ground on which I could certainly always feel completely at home.

 I think this common ground is what Tagore wanted. He wasn’t interested in any kind of narrow, exclusive religious goal:
 
 

pather prante amar tirtha nay,
    pather du dhare ache mor debalay.

The lecture was first published in pamphlet form on the day it was delivered by Rabindra Bhavan in Ahmedabad. Published in Parabaas May 7, 2003.