Rabindranath Tagore’s The Waterfall is an anticolonial allegorical theater production and satirical drama of the post apartheid hegemony and post colonial imperialism. Founding father of the nation’s swadeshi movement through non-violence resistance is brought into critical lenses of the playwright’s craftsmanship. Asceticism of the prophetic sage Dhananjay Boiragi is epiphanic of messianic and visionary revolutionary rebellion. This dramatis personae is of paramount credibility when dialogic imagination of contemporary freedom struggle and mass upsurge are critiqued through universal language. Dhananjoy Boiragi wants to abolish the mammoth of gigantic machinery since these technological machinations are impending large scale deracination of colonial subalterns and mass proletariat, serfs or working class humanity. Bibhuti the royal engineer is commissioned to undertake an infrastructural dam building estate development project imperiling the lives of the working class to death trap. His engineering and architectural milestones are assigned by the royal throne to sustain the legacy of colonialist culture.
Tagore, ironically aristocratic gentry class, is dissociative of colonial exploitation by his anticolonial activism in proselytizing the dramaturgical performativity of Muktodhara. In the pinnacle of non-violence resistance dystopian anarchy shouldn’t proliferate, so Tagore, breaches the taboos of class and status quo to resurrect a utopian secularism by the sacrificial bravery of Abhijit. Abhijit condescendingly stoops before the royal heirloom to atone for the injustices and sufferings inflicted by the stone-hearted throne. Amba’s elusive and mystical lament for the darling of the apple of her eyes is foreshadowing of Abhijit’s knightley death, crusading for the motherland by the demolishing of the cosmopolitan denaturalization to build a sanctuary reservoir for the flow of waterfall amidst canyons of mountainous cliffs Bhairavi. Tagore’s reception of America is the aftermath in 1922 zeitgeist contextualizing the discourse of nationalism as a diabolical force of the one goblin dread trembling nations of the world inciting generational breeding towards addictive and intoxicative radicalism. Extremism deteriorates and mutilates the sense and sensibility of both individuals and nations as re echoed in Tagore’s letters and memoirs documenting: “Formalism in religions is like nationalism in politics: it breeds sectarian arrogance, mutual misunderstanding and a spirit of persecution.”
Tagore’s dramatis persona Dhananjoy merges the gulf of existential crises between the ethnic tribal clans by relinquishment of antipathy harboured by Shiv Tarai and Chitrakoot. “If you avoid being hurt, either you hurt others or else you run away, Both are same. Both are for brute beasts. […] That’s why your eyes are still red with passion and your voice lacks music.” […]Tagore’s disavowal of frenzied nationalism is implicated of Dhananjoy’s admonitions to the denizens and locales: “The more you try to cling to me while trying to swim, the more you forget your lessons in swimming, and also keep dragging me down. I must take leave of you and go where nobody follows me. […] You rejoice to think, that you gain me and take no heed that you lose yourself! I cannot make good that loss! You put me to shame! […] its better to love you and keep you free, than to love you and smother you by my love.”
Tagore is vindictive of the symbolic allegory and satirical lampooning of the drama by his explication to the letter addressed immediately after publishing the manuscript: “I have tried to revise the play a bit… The entire play is about the path…it is about the openings and closures of paths…in between the travel and the conversation, the message of time arrives intermittently. The entire play talks about the lure of the path and the events and the pain located beyond it. Those who have not understood this have tried to locate within this play the presence of Mahatma Gandhi and the strings of the chakra.” The tragedy of Abhijit is the denoument of the climax to the play as manifested by Tagorean critique of psychoanalysis: “[…] the crowned prince Abhijit […] a foundling picked up near the source of the Muktodhara. The unexpected revelation profoundly affects his mind, making him believe that he has a spiritual relationship with this waterfall; that its voice was the first voice which greeted him with a message when he came to the world. From that moment the fulfillment of that message becomes the sole aim of his life; which is to open out paths for the adventurous spirit of man …he comes out of the object of emancipating the prisoned water and his life at the same time. He achieves this with a supreme act of renunciation.”
“Tagore’s philosophical and spiritual thoughts transcends all limits of language, culture and nationality.”
Gitanjali Song Offerings is poignantly immemorial literature by the oriental mystic visionary avatar laureate Rabindranath Tagore. This anthology is phenomenally devotional poetry indulging in the poetic aesthetics in order to chant and showcase the recital and versification for the passion of the love of God. The choruses musings evokes invocation as relatable to intense emotionalism associated with motifs and symbolisms excerpted from devotional tradition such as mysticism and / or spirituality blended to finest transcreation of pristine purity in the Bengali vernacular transcendentally sung throughout the Bengal presidency bridging the gulf between the western and the oriental poetry —bejewelled with ornamental adorations, crowned with priceless stones and precious metals, especially effulgent in efflorescence of sensual imageries, subtleties embodied within intricacies and obscurities of the Westerners/ Europeans like dewy crystals and still water, the most crystalline and most perfect medium of thought associations and word imageries whether diaphanous texture, musical quality, plasticity, glamour as if “unites the mellifluousness of Italian with the power posses by German of rendering complex ideas” unravelling the veil of maya and dispelling the illusions of the world. Gitanjali is bereft of polarities, binaries and antitheses in the trajectories of constraints and restraints, animosities and hostilities, conventionalities and disparities, dichotomies and dogmas. The bittersweet pastorales of the Georgian poets are substituted by the revelations in the lyrics of Gitanjali as contemporary blank verse of translation literature within the sprawl frowning “London bridge is falling down falling down falling down.” Emergence of evolutionary poetics superimposes the metamorphoses of Indianization in the Whitmanian whispers of the Heavenly Death enshrine the recluse mystique Tagore by transfiguration and /or transvaluation towards attainment of charismatic angelicism and divine evangelicalism.
Rabindranath Tagore embellishes the grandiose affair of literary craftsmanship in Gitanjali through figurative speeches as evidenced by symbolic imageries which tend to be illustrative, emotive, evocative, decorative and ornamental. “I simply felt an urge to recapture, through the medium of another language, the feelings and sentiments which had created such a feast of joy within me in present days”. Tagore wanted to recapture the aesthetic poetic mood of the native tongue[Bengali vernacular] in the English tongue with all the splendour and beauty of that recollection or memorialization. Tagore distinguishes translation to be word for word transference from one language to another while rewriting to be sense for sense transference that leads to rebirth or reincarnation of the original in the target language interwoven by the “essential substance” of the unfathomable, mysterious and poetic core of the original. Jacques Derrida’s translation theory restitutes translation to be original creative work: “It is a productive writing called forth by the original text” that leaves the reader as much alone as is possible and moves the author towards him. Buddhadev Bose is so moved by its ‘miraculous transformation’ in the English language that he calls it as “the work of a great English poet.” Rabindranath Tagore explains transliteration in the Evening Post in New York on 9 December 1916: “The English versions of my poems are not literal translations. When poems are changed from one language to another, they acquire a new quality and a new spirit, ideas get a new birth and are reincarnated.” Tagore produced effortlessly and endlessly words and melodies at the same time through poetic talent and musical erudition and knowledge of the vernacular [mother tongue and native language] as a cosmopolitan internationalist aficionado and pastoral visionary mystique have endowed incarnation of life giving deity. In other words, mystical universal serenity of life-giving force has been recreated by retranslation of Gitanjali’s verses dismantling and disgruntling preconceptions, misconceptions, misrepresentations, misunderstandings, dust and cobwebs.
“Light, oh where is the light! Kindle with the burning fire of desire! It thunders and the wind rushes screaming through the void. The night is black as a black stone. Let not the hours pass by in the dark. Kindle the lamp of love with thy life.” [Gitanjali verses 27]
“In the early morning thou wouldst call me from my sleep like my own comrade and lead me running from glade to glade. Only my voice took up the tunes, and my heart danced in their cadence. The world with eyes bent upon thy feet stands in awe with all its silent stars.” [Gitanjali verses 97]
Further Reading
Further Reading
https://www.thedailystar.net/news-detail-197335
http://sesquicentinnial.blogspot.com/2012/06/rabindranath-and-muktadhara-contd-2.html
May Sinclair’s The “Gitanjali” : Or Song-Offerings of Rabindranath Tagore, The North American Review, May 1983, Volume 197, No. 390, pp. 659-676, University of Northern Iowa
Mary M. Lago’s [University of Missouri] Tagore in Translation: A Case Study in Literary Exchange, Books Abroad, Summer 1972, Volume 46, No. 3, pp. 416-421, Board of the Regents of the University of Oklahoma
Radhey L. Varshney’s Tagore’s Imagery, indian Literature, May-June 1979, Volume 22, No. 3, Aspects of Modern Poetry, pp. 86-96, Sahitya Akademi
Subhas Dasgupta’s Tagore’s Concept of Translation: A Critical Study, Indian Literature, May-June 2012, pp. 132-144, Sahitya Akademi
Viktore Ivubulis’s Reviewed Works: Rabindranath Tagore: Reclaiming a Cultural Icon By Kathleen M. O’ Connell and Joseph T. O’ Connell, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2010, Volume 17, No. 2, pp. 326-328, University of Cambridge Press on behalf of School of Oriental and African Studies
Hanne-Ruth Thompson’s Reviewed Work: Gitanjali, A New Translation with an Introduction by William Radice by Rabindranath Tagore, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2012, Volume 75, No. 1, pp. 183-185, Cambridge University Press on behalf of the School of Oriental and African Studies
