RabindranathTagor as a dramatist

Paper – 4 Indian Writing in English

Prepared by – Shubhda parmar

Roll no - 35

Sem - 1

Email id –shubhadaparmar10@gmail.com

Submitted by – Smt.S.B gardi

                          Department of English

                           Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji

                           Bhavnagar University

                           Gujarat

                Introduction:

                        Rabindranath Tagore is the majority exceptional name in modern literature. Tagore was the one writer who first gained intended for modern India a place on the world literary outlook .The award of the Nobel Prize for literature to him was other than the foundation of a drama of respect on a global scale to which there cannot be many parallels in literary history. Tagore wrote primarily Bengali, but had also mastery of English. He translated many of his poems and plays into English, frequently changing, transforming the originals .alongside, he lectured in English to audiences outside India or outside Bengal, and he moreover wrote many letters in English. His active literary career extensive over a period of 65 years. He wrote probably very attractive drama in his career. Tagore also believe in god so his memories,

        “I felt in him the presence of a great soul, and even today the recollection of it seems to  give me passport into the silent seclusion of the temple of God. ”

                       Rabindranath as dramatist he wrote numerous dramas and his well-known work like, ‘Chitra’, ‘The post Office ’ , ‘The cycle of Spring ’ , ‘ Sacrifice’ , ‘ Red Oleanders’,  and ‘Stray Birds ’ , etc .

             Here Dr. Edward Thompson‘s words,

  “Not a man only but an age had made its way at last Into history he had summed up in himself a whole age, In which India had moved into the modern world”.

                        ‘Sanyasi ’ is Tagore ’s  first characteristic play .There has been a lengthy and fruitful dramatic tradition in India , and Tagore was recognizable with it He would try his hand at drama like them so far it could not be rather like them . Later than Tagore wrote many differ types of drama.As usual with Tagore, the English version of Sacrifice is less elaborate than the original Bengali and gains in dramatic restraint and concentration . Tagore himself seems to have played the role of Raghupati, who in some respects recalls poly ed in Sir Aurobindo’s   Perseus the Deliverer .In his play of Tagore he engines of ideas, and men and women are immovable just when they are possessed by, and have become the vehicles of, certain thoughts.

                 In sacrifice moral in sensitiveness  indifference to others pain, assertion of ones own ego these are at the root of folly, which is but another word for crime. I Malini ,again ,as in Sacrifice , a new ethic challenges an outmoded old ethic, beauty and revelation clash with fear and fanaticism ,and once more it is a tale told by an idiot ,full of sound and fury but also signifying a good deal .Malini the king’ s daughter has Buddhist leaning ,and her heresy .Most of them are dazzled by her beauty of holiness and are converted to the new faith and hill her as Goddess and other and the “ divine soul of this world ”.

Only Kemankar and Supriya stand apart, but the letter is not quite sure that what he has seen is mere illusion. Kemankar is captured , and the King is full of gratitude to Supriya . But Supriya, although he has done what he has done Willingly ,knows also that he has played the traitor.The friends talk at cross purposes , and vain is Supriya’ s  appeal to his former friends ,

      

     “ My friend ,is not this world wide enough to hold me whose natures are widely different? Those countless starts of the sky, do they fight for the mastery of the one cannot faiths hold their separate lights in peace for the separate for the separate worlds of minds that need Them? ”.

 In this play Malini , Supriya are both moving on the blessed eternal feminine , and both plays testify to Tagore’ s  attraction to Buddhism as an ethic and the Buddha as a spiritual power and personality .

          In ‘Chandalika’ , the untouchable girl ,Prakriti ,falls in impulsive love with Ananda , the Buddha ’ s  youngest and best loved believer , when  he  ability to meet her near a well .some type understanding words set aflame her self respect , and she is now his slave , while he has gone far away . The spell drags Ananda with appealing force to the Chandalika ’ s  hut ,but it works at the same time a ugly change on his expression ,which is no more than the index of the critical passion of the storm within his own heart and soul. At that time she face of beauty and holiness and she cries in anguish and implores her mother again;

        

“ Mother, Mother, stop! Undo the spell now – at Once undo it! What have you done? O wicked deed! – Better have died. What a sight to see ! Where is the light and   radiance , the shining purity , the heavenly glow, how worn , how faded , has he come to  my door! Bearing his self’s defeat as a heavy burdon , he comes with  drooping head…….”

             

        So in these two plays Malini and Chandalika the stress is on the religious action in symbolic terms behind the physical action in human terms .Here Prakriti and her mother, all feel the transforming power.

           And the play concludes with the choral song of the festival of spring- 

                 April is awake.

                 Life’s shoreless sea

                   Is heving in the sun before you .

                  All the losses are lost ,

                  And death is drowned in its waves…..

         One more unclassified play is ‘Red Oleanders’. The English translation of the play is not included in the volume composed Poems and Plays. There is the predictable king again, while there the Governor, Assistant Governor, Deputy Governor, Doctor, Professor, Wrestler, etc. The king is regularly referred to which bated, but not seen, there is the hidden voice which is heard however speaker is not seen till the King appears at last and we identify the voice to be his.  The soul of the play, however, is the girl Nadine .Here is the challenge of virgin beauty to the world of the male .The professor rhapsodic ally says,

   “She has for her mantle the green joy of the earth. That is our Nadine .In this Yaksha Town there are governors,     Foremen, headmen, tunnel- diggers, scholars like   myself there are policeman, executioners, and undertakers , altogether a beautiful assortment!  Only she is out of element. Midst the clamor of the market place she is a tuned up lyre…. ”.

          Other play among a political slant ,Mukta-Dhara ,is sometimes referred to as Tagore’ s best play .The date is ,perhaps ,significant .while Tagore did not share Gandhi’s  belief in the spinning wheel while the wonder solvent of India’s economic maladies ,he also automatically shark since machinery and a into the human personality ,and unkind technological power frightened him .Tagore articulated in Mukta-Dhara ;

      ‘an eloquent protest against the onslaught of

       machinery on the ancient ramparts of man’s

        individual freedom’ .

      At a moment while steel plants and hydel schemes are being inscribed as the New Temple of India’s beginning nationhood, it would be a useful experience to remember that, for a time, human values are being sacrificed with casual indifference and indecent quickness. Tagore never wrote extra powerful play, or one richer in idea, than Mukta-Dhara.

In Tagore’s play, ‘Chitra’ first appears as Atlanta, but when she sees Arjun the ascetic, the fighter becomes a woman. She must win his love, yet on false pretences .Arjuna forgets his vows and surrenders to love. Chitra’s beauty is however borrowed beauty is all physical beauty ,by us for a term ,other than one day sure to be  and Arjuna’s is a damaged  that has surged as a result of this excessive attack of falseness .Neither is silently happy not well at relieve ,because he senses that there is something wrong somewhere and he is ,at the side of ,secretly drawn to the Chitra of rumour ,the arms bearer, the scourge of her country’s enemies . Now love is born of deep understanding ,agonies experienced and shared  and the vision of the forthcoming fruit of their past discarded selves .What the God of Spring prophesied comes true-

 “A time comes of itself when the heat-cloyed bloom of the body will droop and Arjuna will gladly accept the abiding fruitful truth in thee."  

       

  ‘Chitra’ is  the quintessence of romance .The speeches burn with passion and light up the way from truth to illusion and again the arduous climb from illusion to truth . Arjuna says,

    “I never seem to know you right ….Illusion is the First appearance of truth. She advances towards her love in disguise .I grope for that ultimate you, that bare simplicity of truth ”.

                The reality is that Chitra is no goddess to be worshiped, nor yet the object of common pity to be brushed aside likes a moth with indifference. Tagore was held by this idea, and he incarnated in Chitra the development of human love from the physical to the spiritual. The supernatural machinery- Vasanta, Madana, and their causation. The full point of the play in that early life itself is a hasty spring time miracle, it is suddenly there and later on it fades missing as rapidly as without explanation Tagore rejected both negations the ascetic’s denial of life as well as the sensualist’s denial of the strength .The blinding annoying of the physical union is not rejection Chitra but its transience is also familiar.

                Gandhari’s Prayer is a learn of a mother and her son, the great and generous mother of the Kurus and her eldest ill-fated son, Duryodhan .Both Dhritarashtra the father and Gandhari the mother identified that Duryodhan is wrong but the father compromises, as Gandhari will not .She is a great character .She has clear idea of the end and she talk as the Mother of sorrows-

      “Woman, bow your head down to the dust! And as a Sacrifices fling your heart under wheels! Darknes will rend the air. Then will shroud the sky, earth will Tremble, wailing will rend the air, then comes the Cruel end that terrible peace, that great forgetting and awful extinction of hatred the supreme deliverance rising from the fire of death. ”

                   

                     In Karna and Kunti, Tagore snaps one more pair, a different mother and another ill-fated son, Kunti the mother of Pandavas and her eldest son Karna, whom she had cast absent as a first born baby on the waters. It is a lacerating soul sweltering scene .Kunti also is the Mother of sadness, she too is great since she has suffered while only some have ever suffered, and spread him for a cruelly difficult task but now mother and son try to save what still at this late hour is possible since the general remains .Karna’s finishing words show his humanity and magnanimity;

      

      “Mother, have no fear! I know for certain that victory Awaits the Pandavas. Peaceful and still though this night be, my heart is full of the music of a hopeless and still though this night is, my heart is full of the music of a hopeless venture and baffled end ask me not to leave those who are doomed to To defeat. Let the Pandavas win the throne since they must, I remain with the desperate and forlorn. On the night of my birth you left me naked and unnamed of disgrace, leave me once again without pity to the calm expectation of defeat and death! ”

         The theme of Tagore’s drama is man in relation to God, The King of the Dark Chamber’ was the first of these attempts to invade the invisible. The king of the Dark Chamber is tighter than the original and consequently more effective. Its theme is somb “erly impressive , says Edward Thompson ,

      “  a magnificent attempt to dramatist the secret dealing of God with the human heart ”.

 Here is theory about the king all the time, and each in the play is concerned in the tangle of idea, feeling and theorizing. His Queen Sudarshana   , hasn’t seen him, in fact, nobody has seen him! Sudarshana the maid the honour believes in the King’s truth, although she too hasn’t seen him .There is a false King, a candidate, and even the Queen takes him to be the real King.  The King is with her, however the very memory of a mere instant’s view of him makes her trembling more.

“Terrible – oh, it was terrible! ….the  blaze of the Fire fell on your features you looked like the awful Night when a comet swings fear fully into our ken oh then I closed my eyes I could not look on you any more. Black as the threatening storm cloud Black as the shoreless sea with the spectral red tint of twilight on its tumultuous waves! ”

 So now with Sudarshan , she flees to her father’s place not capable to bear the King’s love .Sudarshan  learns the hard way of suffering and surrender of herself and is combined with her King at last. cause has received into itself the soul of trust and true affection Sudarshana has established into the dark Chamber of her Heart the king of the Dark Chamber . Here he is all over, he is everything, therefore he is nowhere, and no one , in particular . Some try to believe his name and take his functions, as the Queen has her doubts, the mere Maid of Honor is securely stationed in trust.

           While the drama is as regard the soul’s adventure in its attempts to know God, several of the contributory symbols fall into the suitable place to turn into intelligible the progress of the soul towards the point of no return .As the two main actors in the drama are the King and his Queen, God should be seen as aids or impediments that help or delay Sudarshana in her soul’s search for positively .Surangama is the psychic soul. So The King of Dark Chamber is intense as drama and satisfying in its spiritual insights.

                 ‘The Post Office’ has a tighter structural union and its meaning comes to us like a deep dream of peace.  A  post Office is beginning  in a little village. Amal the invalid child, who is controlled to remain inside doors has a limitless hunger for life ,and the Post Office greatly exercises his mind .He sits at the window and makes friends with the passers by imparting to all a new zest for life . There are two acts in this drama and the movement in the second Act reverses, like in the hour glass pattern, the movement in the first Act .Every simple words he speaks wholly within the group of a child’s natural vocabulary yet also in the background charged with insightful intimations .one by one the people Amal had talked to from the window the previous day now come into the room to meet him .Sudha the curd seller is the last and she places flowers in Amal’s hands.   At the end of the drama Amal’s death. Thus at that movement Tagore explain very enthusiastic  . But this drama’s end is something different it is also touch of our heart. So here Tagore uses fantastic ideas about this drama. 

      "But the meaning is less intellectual, more emotional and simple. The deliverance sought and won by the dying child is the same deliverance which rose before his imagination, when once in the early dawn he heard, amid the noise of a crowd returning from some festival, this line out of an old village song, "Ferryman, take me to the other shore of the river." It may come at any moment of life, though the child discovers it in death, for it always comes at the moment when the "I", seeking no longer for gains that cannot be "assimilated with its spirit", is able to say, "All my work is thine"           

                                                - W.B. Yeats, The post Office.

      So comparision of Tagor’s these two dramas like ,The King Of The Dark Chamber  and another is A Post Office here The King Of The Dark Chamber  is about a woman with a sick soul , A Post Office is about a child a sick boy .The King visits the Dark Chamber of the Queen’s heart and all is well the king visits the sick chamber of the little boy , and  all is well again . The physical death of Amal is thus not logically necessary to the story . On the other hand ,it is more natural to assume that, as in the earlier play ,in A Post Office too the adventure with the Divine leaves man cured in soul as well as body .Amal’s aspiration and the Divine response meet and the result is new birth not physical death. The Divine has come to the parched human heart ,and there will now ensue the burst of a new spring of life and joy .

Conclusion:

             Rabindranath Tagore developed his great personality, frequently in literature. His mastery in the Bengali language, but he also write work in English language. With work of Tagore, he always convince to readers .Because in the Indian writing he present reality of India as well as fact about it. Tagore ‘s achievement whether in Bengali writing or his musical compositions was fusion ,very much a product of the colonial situation ,the result of borrowings change and of influence ranging from English literature ,western music ,vaishnavite literature , Baul songs , Kabir dohas , Kalidas to the Upanishads .Tagore’s intellectual conditions consist of both western culture ,thus and a new Indian traditional that was being collated it . In his dramas we can find simplicity   , directioness, fully related with Indian culture .Tagore could start of his play, strike the opening chords, name the characters, and memory and imagination would do the have a rest. Not reason of careful plotting but the music of thoughts and symbols is the soul of his drama.