Tagore... and Woman

... Memory carried the young Tagore back to his bygone years, to his orphanhood and his solitude in the bosom of nature, to his hopes and wishes which the years had worn away; life grew narrow for him, and he lamented the loneliness of his rebellious soul and wearied of its constant constriction, and so he set out searching for a soul that would harmonize with it, keep it company, and let it come to rest.

The poet came to know the girl of his dreams — a slender maiden, fresh with youth. He admired her freshness and her intelligence, and found in her nearness a boundless tranquility. Love stirred his heart and inspired in him more than one song. And perhaps his play "Chitra," whose idea he adapted from the legends of the Sanskrit tongue, was the first field in which he gave free rein to this feeling.

This Chitra is a woman in whom the sense of womanhood had been suppressed; she was raised as men are raised, so that she might recover her father's kingdom. But human nature was not long in reclaiming its right: no sooner had Chitra met Arjuna, the first man she had known in her life, than her mannishness collapsed under the weight of a stormy love, and her fertile femininity burst open as the buds of spring burst open, and she sent forth this frank confession:

"I felt that I was truly a woman, so I cast off the garb of men and lived with my heart for the man."

Our poet remained in Calcutta, composing verse and sending forth melodies that held no small measure of love's anguish, until his father summoned him to the countryside to look after his estates there, which he did.

And there, in a mute isolation, Tagore lived lonely of heart, a stranger, finding no rest, feeling that the woman he had known in Calcutta still played upon his imagination and stirred longing in him. There came a new attachment, and there came a marriage — he was then on the threshold of twenty-three — and the name of his life's companion was Mrinalini Devi.

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Woman had her great influence upon his literary life, and he devoted much of his output to her, above all in his novel "The Home and the World," where he studied her condition, her mission, and her highest ideal in life.

The heroine of this novel, whose name is Bimala, is plain of appearance and conscious of her plainness, melancholy; yet she loves without hope, and carries love to the point of worship.

Fate willed that the wishes of the Indian girl of lowly birth be fulfilled, and marriage was ordained for her to the young man of her dreams, the Raja Nikhil. Yet after the marriage she only grew more anxious, for she felt she was not worthy of him. He did his utmost to free her from her inferiority complex, for he did not wish to make of her a prisoner in his palace and a slave to him, but a comrade in struggle, sharing with him the good and the evil of life. If she said to him, for instance, "Women's thoughts are small and crooked," he would answer at once: "That is not woman's fault but the fault of the environment. Do you not see that Chinese women's feet are small because they were molded by pressure from earliest childhood?"

He believed: "Truth exists only in the heart of woman, for she knows how to be mighty in her anger, terrifying as a blind storm, and then to become beautiful and serene once the storm subsides, when clarity and forgetting shine upon her heart." He aspired to find in his wife "the woman who creates beauty in the heart of man even if she herself is not beautiful; who is capable of creation and invention, the source of rebellious inspiration; God created her as a painter-artist creates, so that she is a work of art, storing up beauty only to send it forth." He would have wished her to be "a pharmacy holding anesthetic enough to numb a man's nerves, so that he feels only as the drugged sleeper feels, and does not sense the pain of the wound until he wakes."

And he wanted her to know that "man loves the splendor of colors and prefers intoxication to nourishment; that she must distill the evil out of men so as to turn herself into an intoxicating drink; and that it is her duty to deceive man and beguile him, for nothing equals his pleasure in living with her forever deceived, in a world of wishes and dreams."

He asks of her that she not surrender to hesitation, and that she know how to say "I want," for she is the source of inspiration and mastery and the secret of strength in life. The daughter of Eve, even when still and calm, is only in the stillness of the deep lake: the tighter the confinement and the stronger the pressure upon her — by just so much draws nearer the hour of her tumult and her overflowing.

His exaltation of woman's worth goes so far as to consider man a "rough draft" of her, on which the Creator practiced His craft before fashioning her: "When God created man, He had not yet been trained in invention, so He created him as best He could. When woman's turn came, He had become an artist, and He created her as He wished."

But the wife Bimala remained, by force of Eastern tradition, inside the harem — meek, worshipping her lord with devotion, losing herself in prostration before her husband. She takes possession of the man's heart not by way of strength and suggestion but by way of weakness and surrender, as though she wished to remain forever dreaming in the calm of the entranced sleeper. And she stayed in that state, not keeping pace with her husband, until there appeared in the land of Bengal the principle of the national renaissance and the boycott of foreign goods; its idea coursed with the blood in her veins, and she left the veil that had separated her from man, and felt that she was no longer the fenced-in woman, the Raja's wife only, but the representative of all the women of Bengal, speaking in their name while they took her for their example. "Tagore wished to portray for us, in Bimala, a free wife, unfettered in feeling, in thought, and in reflection: if a man makes her his equal, he gains from her all tenderness; and if he tyrannizes over her, his lot is nothing but failure" — for woman is feeling before all else, and feeling is not wrested by force but coaxed step by step, or taken freely.

The great poet of India himself likewise saw in Eve an image of living beauty and a pure wellspring of inspiration. And so he surrendered to love, at peace.

"Love alone I await, to surrender to his arms. That is why the hour has grown late, and great has been my neglect."

"Out of their laws and statutes they wove fetters for me, but I escape them always, for I await nothing but love, to surrender to his arms.

They blamed me and reproached my negligence, and no doubt in their reproach they are right.

The markets have closed, the errands are all done, and those who came seeking me have gone back disappointed. Love alone I await, to surrender to his arms."

Woman caressed his heart with her magical fingertips and made the spring of music and poetry gush forth from him.

Yet woman was not, for him, an end in herself, but a means whose splendor he drew upon in order to create. That is with respect to her being the source of artistic inspiration. As for her social function, he saw her as man's equal, who must enjoy all her rights and develop all her gifts in an atmosphere of freedom and security.

Jamil Jabr
A chapter from the book "Tagore"