No More Learning

[_The light strengthens and gradually throughout the scene grows
to a culminating brilliance at the close. _]

Where?

_Minstrel_

Here.

He is coming out of the cave. --Some one is coming out of the
cave.

How wonderful.

_Chandra_

Why, it is you!

Our Leader!

Our Leader!

Our Leader!

Where is the Old Man?

_Leader_

He is nowhere.

Nowhere?

_Leader_

Yes, nowhere.

Then what is he?

_Leader_

He is a dream.

Then you are the real?

_Leader_

Yes.

And we are the real?

_Leader_

Yes.

Those who saw you from behind imagined you in all kinds of
shapes.

We didn't recognize you through the dust.

You seemed old.

And then you came out of the cave,--and now you look like a boy.

It seems just as if we had seen you for the first time.

_Chandra_

You are first every time. You are first over and over again.

_Leader_

Chandra! You must own your defeat. You couldn't catch the Old
Man.

_Chandra_

Let our festival begin. The sun is up.

Minstrel, if you keep so still, you will swoon away. Sing
something.

(_The Minstrel sings. _)

_I lose thee, to find thee back again and again,
My beloved.
Thou leavest me, that I may receive thee all the more, when thou
returnest.
Thou canst vanish behind the moment's screen
Only because thou art mine for evermore,
My beloved.
When I go in search of thee, my heart trembles, spreading ripples
across my love.
Thou smilest through thy disguise of utter absence, and my tears
sweeten thy smile. _

Do you hear the hum?

Yes.

They are not bees, but the people of the place.

Then Dada must be near at hand with his quatrains.

_Dada_

Is this the Leader?

Yes, Dada.

_Dada_

Oh, I am so glad you have come. I must read my collection of
quatrains.

No. No. Not the whole collection, but only one.

_Dada_

Very well. One will do.

The sun is at the gate of the East, his drum of victory sounding in
the sky.
The Night says I am blessed, my death is bliss.
He receives his alms of gold, filling his wallet,--and departs.

That is to say----

No. We don't want your that is to say.

_Dada_

It means----

Whatever it means, we are determined not to know it.

_Dada_

What makes you so desperate?

It is our festival day.

_Dada_

Ah! Is that so? Then let me go to all the neighbours----

No, you mustn't go there.

_Dada_

But is there any need for me here?

Yes.

Then my quatrains----

_Chandra_

We shall colour your quatrains with such a thick brush, that no
one will know whether they have any meaning at all.

And then you will be without any means.

The neighbourhood will desert you.

The Watchman will take you to be a fool.

And the Pundit will take you to be a blockhead.

And your own people will consider you to be useless.

And the outside people will consider you queer.

_Chandra_

But we shall crown you, Dada, with a crown of new leaves.

We shall put a garland of jasmine round your neck.

And there will be no one else except ourselves who will know your
true worth.


THE SONG OF THE FESTIVAL OF SPRING

[_In which all the persons of the drama, not excepting
Sruti-bhushan, unite on the main stage in the dance of Spring. _]

_Come and rejoice, for April is awake.
Fling yourselves into the flood of being, bursting the bondage of
the past.
April is awake.
Life's shoreless sea is heaving in the sun before you.
All the losses are lost, and death is drowned in its waves.
Plunge into the deep without fear, with the gladness of April in
your heart. _

* * * * *





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Title: Glimpses of Bengal

Author: Sir Rabindranath Tagore


Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7951]
This file was first posted on June 4, 2003
Last Updated: May 7, 2013

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GLIMPSES OF BENGAL ***




Produced by S. R. Ellison, Eric Eldred, and the Distributed
Proofreading Team








GLIMPSES OF BENGAL

SELECTED FROM THE LETTERS OF SIR RABINDRANATH TAGORE

1885 TO 1895

By Sir Rabindranath Tagore




INTRODUCTION


The letters translated in this book span the most productive period of my
literary life, when, owing to great good fortune, I was young and less
known.

Youth being exuberant and leisure ample, I felt the writing of letters
other than business ones to be a delightful necessity. This is a form of
literary extravagance only possible when a surplus of thought and emotion
accumulates. Other forms of literature remain the author's and are made
public for his good; letters that have been given to private individuals
once for all, are therefore characterised by the more generous
abandonment.

It so happened that selected extracts from a large number of such letters
found their way back to me years after they had been written. It had been
rightly conjectured that they would delight me by bringing to mind the
memory of days when, under the shelter of obscurity, I enjoyed the
greatest freedom my life has ever known.

Since these letters synchronise with a considerable part of my published
writings, I thought their parallel course would broaden my readers'
understanding of my poems as a track is widened by retreading the same
ground. Such was my justification for publishing them in a book for my
countrymen. Hoping that the descriptions of village scenes in Bengal
contained in these letters would also be of interest to English readers,
the translation of a selection of that selection has been entrusted to one
who, among all those whom I know, was best fitted to carry it out.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE.

_20th June 1920. _




BANDORA, BY THE SEA,

_October_ 1885.


The unsheltered sea heaves and heaves and blanches into foam. It sets me
thinking of some tied-up monster straining at its bonds, in front of whose
gaping jaws we build our homes on the shore and watch it lashing its tail.
What immense strength, with waves swelling like the muscles of a giant!

From the beginning of creation there has been this feud between land and
water: the dry earth slowly and silently adding to its domain and
spreading a broader and broader lap for its children; the ocean receding
step by step, heaving and sobbing and beating its breast in despair.
Remember the sea was once sole monarch, utterly free.

Land rose from its womb, usurped its throne, and ever since the maddened
old creature, with hoary crest of foam, wails and laments continually,
like King Lear exposed to the fury of the elements.


_July 1887. _

I am in my twenty-seventh year. This event keeps thrusting itself before
my mind--nothing else seems to have happened of late.

But to reach twenty-seven--is that a trifling thing? --to pass the meridian
of the twenties on one's progress towards thirty? --thirty--that is to say
maturity--the age at which people expect fruit rather than fresh foliage.
But, alas, where is the promise of fruit? As I shake my head, it still
feels brimful of luscious frivolity, with not a trace of philosophy.

Folk are beginning to complain: "Where is that which we expected of
you--that in hope of which we admired the soft green of the shoot? Are we
to put up with immaturity for ever? It is high time for us to know what we
shall gain from you. We want an estimate of the proportion of oil which
the blindfold, mill-turning, unbiased critic can squeeze out of you. "

It has ceased to be possible to delude these people into waiting
expectantly any longer. While I was under age they trustfully gave me
credit; it is sad to disappoint them now that I am on the verge of thirty.
But what am I to do? Words of wisdom will not come! I am utterly
incompetent to provide things that may profit the multitude. Beyond a
snatch of song, some tittle-tattle, a little merry fooling, I have been
unable to advance. And as the result, those who held high hopes will turn
their wrath on me; but did any one ever beg them to nurse these
expectations?

Such are the thoughts which assail me since one fine _Bysakh_ morning
I awoke amidst fresh breeze and light, new leaf and flower, to find that I
had stepped into my twenty-seventh year.




SHELIDAH, 1888.


Our house-boat is moored to a sandbank on the farther side of the river. A
vast expanse of sand stretches away out of sight on every side, with here
and there a streak, as of water, running across, though sometimes what
gleams like water is only sand.

Not a village, not a human being, not a tree, not a blade of grass--the
only breaks in the monotonous whiteness are gaping cracks which in places
show the layer of moist, black clay underneath.

Looking towards the East, there is endless blue above, endless white
beneath. Sky empty, earth empty too--the emptiness below hard and barren,
that overhead arched and ethereal--one could hardly find elsewhere such a
picture of stark desolation.

But on turning to the West, there is water, the currentless bend of the
river, fringed with its high bank, up to which spread the village groves
with cottages peeping through--all like an enchanting dream in the evening
light. I say "the evening light," because in the evening we wander out,
and so that aspect is impressed on my mind.




SHAZADPUR, 1890.


The magistrate was sitting in the verandah of his tent dispensing justice
to the crowd awaiting their turns under the shade of a tree. They set my
palanquin down right under his nose, and the young Englishman received me
courteously. He had very light hair, with darker patches here and there,
and a moustache just beginning to show. One might have taken him for a
white-haired old man but for his extremely youthful face. I asked him over
to dinner, but he said he was due elsewhere to arrange for a pig-sticking
party.

As I returned home, great black clouds came up and there was a terrific
storm with torrents of rain. I could not touch a book, it was impossible
to write, so in the I-know-not-what mood I wandered about from room to
room. It had become quite dark, the thunder was continually pealing, the
lightning gleaming flash after flash, and every now and then sudden gusts
of wind would get hold of the big _lichi_ tree by the neck and give
its shaggy top a thorough shaking. The hollow in front of the house soon
filled with water, and as I paced about, it suddenly struck me that I
ought to offer the shelter of the house to the magistrate.

I sent off an invitation; then after investigation I found the only spare
room encumbered with a platform of planks hanging from the beams, piled
with dirty old quilts and bolsters. Servants' belongings, an excessively
grimy mat, hubble-bubble pipes, tobacco, tinder, and two wooden chests
littered the floor, besides sundry packing-cases full of useless odds and
ends, such as a rusty kettle lid, a bottomless iron stove, a discoloured
old nickel teapot, a soup-plate full of treacle blackened with dust. In a
corner was a tub for washing dishes, and from nails in the wall hung moist
dish-clouts and the cook's livery and skull-cap. The only piece of
furniture was a rickety dressing-table with water stains, oil stains, milk
stains, black, brown, and white stains, and all kinds of mixed stains. The
mirror, detached from it, rested against another wall, and the drawers
were receptacles for a miscellaneous assortment of articles from soiled
napkins down to bottle wires and dust.

For a moment I was overwhelmed with dismay; then it was a case of--send
for the manager, send for the storekeeper, call up all the servants, get
hold of extra men, fetch water, put up ladders, unfasten ropes, pull down
planks, take away bedding, pick up broken glass bit by bit, wrench nails
from the wall one by one. --The chandelier falls and its pieces strew the
floor; pick them up again piece by piece. --I myself whisk the dirty mat
off the floor and out of the window, dislodging a horde of cockroaches,
messmates, who dine off my bread, my treacle, and the polish on my shoes.

The magistrate's reply is brought back; his tent is in an awful state and
he is coming at once. Hurry up! Hurry up! Presently comes the shout: "The
sahib has arrived. " All in a flurry I brush the dust off hair, beard, and
the rest of myself, and as I go to receive him in the drawing-room, I try
to look as respectable as if I had been reposing there comfortably all the
afternoon.

I went through the shaking of hands and conversed with the magistrate
outwardly serene; still, misgivings about his accommodation would now and
then well up within. When at length I had to show my guest to his room, I
found it passable, and if the homeless cockroaches do not tickle the soles
of his feet, he may manage to get a night's rest.




KALIGRAM, 1891.


I am feeling listlessly comfortable and delightfully irresponsible.

This is the prevailing mood all round here. There is a river but it has no
current to speak of, and, lying snugly tucked up in its coverlet of
floating weeds, seems to think--"Since it is possible to get on without
getting along, why should I bestir myself to stir? " So the sedge which
lines the banks knows hardly any disturbance until the fishermen come with
their nets.

Four or five large-sized boats are moored near by, alongside each other.
On the upper deck of one the boatman is fast asleep, rolled up in a sheet
from head to foot. On another, the boatman--also basking in the
sun--leisurely twists some yarn into rope. On the lower deck in a third,
an oldish-looking, bare-bodied fellow is leaning over an oar, staring
vacantly at our boat.

Along the bank there are various other people, but why they come or go,
with the slowest of idle steps, or remain seated on their haunches
embracing their knees, or keep on gazing at nothing in particular, no one
can guess.

The only signs of activity are to be seen amongst the ducks, who, quacking
clamorously, thrust their heads under and bob up again to shake off the
water with equal energy, as if they repeatedly tried to explore the
mysteries below the surface, and every time, shaking their heads, had to
report, "Nothing there! Nothing there! "

The days here drowse all their twelve hours in the sun, and silently sleep
away the other twelve, wrapped in the mantle of darkness. The only thing
you want to do in a place like this is to gaze and gaze on the landscape,
swinging your fancies to and fro, alternately humming a tune and nodding
dreamily, as the mother on a winter's noonday, her back to the sun, rocks
and croons her baby to sleep.




KALIGRAM, 1891.


Yesterday, while I was giving audience to my tenants, five or six boys
made their appearance and stood in a primly proper row before me. Before I
could put any question their spokesman, in the choicest of high-flown
language, started: "Sire! the grace of the Almighty and the good fortune
of your benighted children have once more brought about your lordship's
auspicious arrival into this locality. " He went on in this strain for
nearly half an hour. Here and there he would get his lesson wrong, pause,
look up at the sky, correct himself, and then go on again. I gathered that
their school was short of benches and stools. "For want of these
wood-built seats," as he put it, "we know not where to sit ourselves,
where to seat our revered teachers, or what to offer our most respected
inspector when he comes on a visit. "

I could hardly repress a smile at this torrent of eloquence gushing from
such a bit of a fellow, which sounded specially out of place here, where
the ryots are given to stating their profoundly vital wants in plain and
direct vernacular, of which even the more unusual words get sadly twisted
out of shape. The clerks and ryots, however, seemed duly impressed, and
likewise envious, as though deploring their parents' omission to endow
them with so splendid a means of appealing to the _Zamindar_.

I interrupted the young orator before he had done, promising to arrange
for the necessary number of benches and stools.