“Whoever feels thirsty will of himself come to the river,” was his reply. “But then, do you find it so? Are they coming?” The man gave a gentle smile, and with an assurance which had not the least tinge of impatience or anxiety, he said, “They must come, one and all.” ’ The sudden, unexpected discovery that one must go to the river, whether one likes it or not, can be traumatic and humiliating – hence the terror and storminess of Tagore’s poem. One of its most remarkable coups is the way it moves to general statement in the last verse: here the speaker is not the ‘one or two’ of the previous verses, but the converted soul itself. Low-grade imperatives and pronouns are used, emphasizing the humbling of the self.
16 k
a
e kae cetan kari: ‘becoming spasmodically conscious’.
30 ‘celebration’ – abhyarthan: ‘reception, greeting, welcome’.
31 ‘lowly’ is my addition. The conch, for all its divine and epic associations, is used in ordinary, simple, domestic worship. See Conch in the Glossary.
32 ‘King of Night’ – ādhār gharer rājā: ‘king of the dark house’.
Highest Price (p. 72)
caram mūlya from gītimālya (String of Songs), 1914
Ancient India, in which kings or rich men could keep slaves, lies behind the symbolism of this poem. The hawker who is speaking does not ask ‘Who will buy my wares?’ but quite clearly ‘Who will buy me?’, i.e. who will buy me into slavery, so that I no longer have to fend for myself. At the symbolic level the slavery that is being asked for is the complete self-surrender required for the liberation of the soul through love. In S115 Tagore writes: ‘It is not that we desire freedom alone, we want thraldom as well. It is the high function of love to welcome all limitations and to transcend them. For nothing is more independent than love, and where else, again, shall we find so much of dependence? In love, thraldom is as glorious as freedom.’ Love can only be bought by love: the king cannot buy it with power, the rich man cannot buy it with gold, the woman cannot buy it with seduction. Only the child, with his wholly disinterested ‘playful face’ (khelār mukhe, 1.30), secures it, releasing the speaker from the burden of self (I have interpolated ‘cares’ in 11.1 and 28, to bring out this meaning). The ability that children have to find joy in the simplest things is the ‘chief lesson’ that they have for us (R17). In 1.18 the speaker walks on anya-manā, ‘with his mind elsewhere’. This implies not just absent-mindedness but the ‘crying for the across’ (S162) that makes the self ever restless. But the child shows that release from the burden of the self can be found near, not far. Writing in R242 of the ‘closeness of attention even to trifling things’ in his youthful book chabi o gān (Pictures and Songs, 1884), Tagore says: ‘Whatever my eyes fell upon found a response within me. Like children who can play with sand or stones or shells or whatever they can get (for the spirit of play is within them), so also we, when filled with the song of youth, become aware that the harp of the universe has its variously tuned strings everywhere stretched, and the nearest may serve as well as any other for our accompaniment, there is no need to seek afar.’
‘Highest Price’ was written in Urbana, U.S.A. Tagore’s son Rathindranath, who had just graduated in agricultural science at the University of Illinois and was working on a doctorate, persuaded his father to join him there in October 1912. A month later the English Gitanjali was published, and a year later, soon after his return to India, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize.
3–5 lit., ‘Alas, my days pass in this way – the load on my head becomes an unbearable responsibility, encumbrance’.
9–12 lit., ‘Grasping me by the hand he says, “I’ll buy you by force.”
After struggling, the force he had comes to an end.’
12 I have had to omit ‘crown on his head’ from this line.
1914–1936
The Conch (p. 77)
śa
kha from balākā (Wild Geese), 1916
The numbing series of bereavements, from his wife’s death in 1902 to the death of his youngest son Samindra of cholera in 1907, had left Tagore almost entirely alone, as his two surviving daughters were married and Rathindranath was in America. Loneliness and austerity mark the songs and poems of the gītānjali period. In balākā, Tagore’s creative energies revived, and the book is regarded by many as his finest. ‘The Conch’ sets the tone: a revived willpower, a determination not to be defeated either by personal suffering or the anguish that the outbreak of the First World War caused Tagore. A new avant-garde magazine, sabuj patra (Green Leaves), started in 1914 by Tagore’s friend Pramatha Chaudhuri, was also a stimulus: Tagore poured out poems, stories, essays and novels for it.
The conch of Tagore’s poem can be identified with the Pāñcajanya, Krsna’s conch in the Mahābhārata, since the poem is full of the call to spiritual fight that we find in the Bhagavad Gītā, Krsna’s great song of encouragement to Arjuna inserted into Book VI of the epic. The poem is a call to a self, a people or even a world that have ignored K
’s words, have let his conch – the symbol of the ‘ideal of fight’ (RM85), since heroes in Indian epic rally their troops by blowing conches – lie neglected in the dust. Longing for serenity and longing for action were equal impulses in Tagore, and in keeping with the teachings of the Gītā he aimed to reconcile the two. He saw heroic action as ‘the best ideal in the West, the great truth of fight’(RM65), whereas ‘the life of inner peace and perfection’ was associated with India.
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