Rabindranath Tagore

NOTES ON RABINDRANATH TAGORE

“Punishment”

This story begins as a male-dominated one, with brothers Dukhiram and Chidam Rui in charge of what happens.  The two wives' daily quarreling is hardly considered worth noticing, and one day Dukhiram commits a sudden crime against his wife Radha, who has upbraided him for demanding his dinner.  Dukhiram stabs Radha to death, and Chidam’s thoughtless but overdetermined lie to his Thakra, his landlord, pins the blame on his own young wife, Chandara.  I say overdetermined in the Freudian sense: the moment seems empty, but no doubt it's structured by an entire way of life, by a patriarchal ideology that informs Chidam and Dukhiram's whole lives.  Later, Chidam reasons out why he told such a terrible lie: he can get another wife, but a blood-brother?  That cannot be replaced. 

More and more, Chidam's lie haunts him -- desperate to save his wife, he even takes the blame upon himself, putting himself in the place of Dukhiram under the actual circumstances of the murder.  But it doesn't work: the judge determines that both brothers (for Dukhiram has also told his own truth) are simply lying to protect a woman from "the shame of the noose."  So much for the old proverb, "the truth shall set you free," at least in this case.  This phenomenon is a nineteenth-century prefiguration of the Rashomon effect because of the famous 1950 Akira Kurosawa movie's plot revolving around accounts of who killed a samurai in the woods: eyewitness recounting are notorious for their propensity to conflict.

But at the end of Part II, Chandara’s silence turns the tables on them: she won’t play by their rules -- it isn't that she tells the literal truth, but rather that she heaps all the blame on herself to follow up on her husband Chidam's vicious lie.  One wants to see the situation set right -- Chidam is repentant for what he has done, too -- but the trouble is, as we find out in Part III, there’s no escape from the patriarchal tyranny Tagore is describing.  Chandara's fidelity to her story convicts her.  Still, there’s nobility and even heroism in her final act of rejection: she says of her husband, “To hell with him” or "death to him," only she is clearly in deadly earnest.  There's an old saying that nothing concentrates a person's mind like the certainty of being hanged on the morrow.  Here, Chandara in her final thoughts rejects a husband who thoughtlessly rejected her and ruined her life, and in so doing she scorns the entire tradition of male domination that led him to do that.

"Kabuliwala"

What do you do with a story that's so straightforward?  You could make it out to be more complicated than it appears, or you could run with its simplicity.  I suggest that this simple quality is what has made the story so beloved ever since Tagore wrote it.  It was turned into a fine Bollywood movie in the early 1960s.  My personal reading centers on the power of memory in the story, and the possibility of innocence even in the midst of sorrow and sinfulness. 

While the little girl Mini grows up and more or less forgets or represses the innocent, genuine affection she and the old Afghan fruit vendor shared -- so much so that when he shows up (just released from prison for having killed a man who owed him money) to see her on her wedding day, she can't even bring herself to acknowledge his presence or speak to him -- an image of her prior self is preserved in the old Kabuliwala named Rahamat.  This image of her sustains him in his difficult new beginning, and it's linked to a similar image that he must have of his own once little daughter back in his home country.  He faces an uncertain future, but in his soul he preserves a vision of another's innocence that may well prove useful to him.

As for Mini's father, an educated Bengali writer like Tagore himself, when he sees the effect Mini has on Rahamat, memories of her are all the more powerful for him as well -- this is important because "losing" a child to marriage is in its way both a joyful and a traumatic event: it reminds parents of the passage of time, and the sense of loss is real.  This feeling about marriage is captured well in Genesis, Ch. 2, where Adam says that Eve was created from a rib in his body: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh."  A coming-together between the two is also a leave-taking from others; that's how life is.

The idea that innocence of a sort is always available even to adults sounds like the treatment of it we find in William Blake, especially in Songs of Innocence and of Experience: it's a romantic poet's idea that to grow up completely is in a sense to die into the world, to become more of a slave to the material world and its responsibilities than to remain a vital human being.  Those who see only the hardships in life and not the joys will be crushed, rendered all but soulless, but those who remain "innocent" in the midst of harsh experience have a chance.