Tagore as a Dramatist

Tagore as a Dramatist

Name- Ranjan Velari

Class- M.A. Sem. - I

Roll No. – 25

Email Id- ranjanvelari@gmail.com

Year- 2014-16

Paper No. – 4

Topic- Tagore as a Dramatist

Submitted To- Smt.S.B. Gardi Department of English& M.K.Bhavnagar University

vIntroduction

       Rabindranath Tagore, son of Maharishi Devendranath Tagore, was born on 6^th may, 1861. Tagore is the most outstanding name in modern Bengali literature. He was a great poet and a great man, and he has left behind him a great man, and a great institution the Visvabharati at Shantiniketan.

       Tagore wrote primarily in Bengali, but had a mastery of English also. He translated many of his poems and plays into English, often changing, telescoping, and transforming the originals. He was a poet, dramatist, actor, producer; he was a musician and a painter; he was an educationist, a practical idealist who turned his dreams into reality at Shantiniketan; he was a reformer, philosopher, prophet; he was a novelist and short- story writer, and a critic of life and literature; he even made occasional incursions into nationalist politics, although he was essentially an internationalist.

       He wrote many plays like, ‘Chitra’, ‘The Post Office’, ‘Sacrifice’, ‘Red Oleanders’, ‘Chandalika’, ‘Mukta Dhara’, ‘Natir Puja’, and ‘The king of the Dark Chamber’.

So let’s have a look on one by one on his plays and dramas.

   Sanyasi or the Ascetic

Tagore’s first important play was ‘Sanyasi or the Ascetic’. This play deals with the conflict between truth and beauty: between reason and love, between rejection and acceptance. The protagonist in this play turns a ‘Sanyasi’ or an ascetic who renounces the world and its mundane activities and interests. However, soon afterwards he feels disturbed by the stir and bustle of actual life. Then he feels even more disturbed by coming into contact with a little outcast girl. His attachment to the girl is against the principles of his ascetic morality because he claims to have deserted both gods and men. Then, thinking that there would be a danger of his yielding to human emotions, he goes away for a long time and returns, only to find that the girl is dead.

         He now awakens to a deeper morality or realization. He meets another child who completes the education which the first had begun in him. Then he decides to break the staff of negation and lean on the tree of life. The ‘Sanyasi’ has learnt the lessons of love and life, and he would not now return to arid region of mere ascetic negation.

         Thus the ‘Sanyasi’ achieves his redemption. He had discovered that it is not life which is the enemy of man but the wrong kind of egotism which degrades and enslaves the body, the mind, and the soul of a man. True love, far from enslaving a man, can liberate and enlarge him. Such is the message of the play.

v  Natir Puja

‘Natir puja’ is one of Tagore’s most famous plays. This play depicts a conflict between the temporal power of a king and the spiritual power of Lord Buddha. Srimati is the court-dancer who is murdered by the royal guard under the orders of the king when in the course of her dance; she discards, one by one, her ornaments and even her garments till she stands pure and naked in a nun’s wrap. She is evidently triumphant even in her death because now even Queen Lokesvari, and even the elder princes Ratnavali, fall under the spell of the court- dancer’s self- sacrifice and touch the dead Srimati’s feet in token of their convention to Buddhism. It is a deeply moving play depicting a rare act of religious martyrdom by a person who was least expected to rise to such great heights of self-sacrifice.

  Chandalika

The word ‘Chandalika’ means a person belonging to the lowest class of society, the class known as the untouchables. The protagonist here is Prakriti, a girl belonging to the untouchable class. She falls desperately in love with a Buddhist Bhikshu by the name of Ananda.

     The Bhikshu is, of course, under a vow of celibacy, and is therefore absolutely indifferent to women. But Prakriti is feeling so obsessed by her passion for Ananda that she compels her mother, who knows the art of black magic, to work a spell by means of which Ananda can be brought to her door and seek her love. Prakriti’s mother begins to work a spell; and the spell begins to take effect even as the worker of the spell herself begins to suffer the effects of the devilish act which she is performing to please her daughter. Eventually, Ananda comes and stands at Prakriti’s door, a humble suppliant for her love, but the passion of love has robbed him completely of his spiritual radiance, and his face now looks most repulsive and abhorrent because it has been distorted and twisted by his lust for Prakriti. Seeing this tremendous change in Ananda’s physical appearance, and feeling deeply touched by her remorse at having caused the Bhikshu’s spiritual downfall and degradation, Prakriti appeals to her mother to undo the spell. The mother, though now on the point of death because of her devilry, does unto the spell, with the result that Ananda is able to realize his predicament and goes back, a redeemed man, while Prakriti’s mother breathes her last. This play too is deeply moving, and it makes an enormous impact upon our sensibilities.

       The conflict between the desires of the flesh and the aspirations of the soul has most effectively been conveyed to us through this play.

 Mukta-Dhara

Mukta-Dhara is Tagore’s greatest play. In any case, it is his greatest symbolical play. Bibhuti, the royal engineer in the mountain-kingdom of Uttarakut, has performed a marvelous engineering feat by building a dam across the waters of Mukta-dhara with the help of his steel machine. The yuvaraja of uttarakut is however, opposed to the dam which has been built to stop the flow of the waters of Mukta-dhara into the plains below. The people living in the land of Shivatarai below the mountainous kingdom of Uttarakut would now be denied the use of the waters of Mukta-dhara for the irrigation of their fields; and the Yuvaraja of Uttarakut is on their side in this matter.

       Thus, a rivalry, and even an antagonism, begins between Bibhuti and the Yuvaraja whose name is Abhijit. Scientific technology has won a great triumph which is symbolized by the construction of the dam; but the Yuvaraja’s innate love of freedom and his innate humanitarian sympathies rebel against this inhuman dam which might even lead to the starvation of the people of Shiv-tarari. In the end, the Yuvaraja breaks Bibhuti’s dam at a weak point, thus releasing the waters of Mukt-dhara and restoring to the mountain-spring the freedom which it originally possessed. The Yuvraja loses his life in the act of breaking the dam; but his act; in breaking the dam and releasing the waters of Mukta-dhara from its grip, shows the triumph of the human spirit over the achievement of science and technology. Mukta-dhara is one of Tagore’s most moving and uplifting plays.

 Chitra

A few of the plays written by Tagore were inspired by the Hindu epic, ‘Mahabharata’. Three of these plays bear the titles ‘chitra’, ‘gandhari’s prayer’ and ‘karna and kunti’. Chitra may be regarded as Tagore’s version of Kalidasas’s famous Sanskrit drama, ‘sakuntala’. Chitra, a warrior-woman falls in love with Arjuna who is an ascetic. Chitra is a woman of extraordinary beauty; and she now forms a resolve to win Arjuna’s love even if she has to employ some unfair means. Arjuna, forgetting his vows of celibacy, surrenders to chitra’s love. However, this is not a case of true love only for a period of one year; and Arjuna’s passion for her is a flawed passion because it is based on Chitra’s harrowed, or false, beauty. Neither of the lovers feels inwardly happy. Chitra is not happy because Arjuna does not really love her but only her beauty which she knows to be false; and Arjuna is unhappy because he perceives that something is wrongs somewhere. Though he does not know what it is, inspite of this deception, when the truth comes out in the end, true love blazes forth from the ashes of the false love which has existed till now. New love is born of a deeper understanding. Arjuna, still not knowing the truth of the matter, does have a vague glimmering of it. The real truth is that Chitra is no goddess to be worshipped, nor yet does an object of common pity to be brushed aside like a moth. She is a woman; and Arjuna is therefore contented. Arjuna simply says to her: “beloved, my life is full”. In this play, Tagore has depicted the evolution of human love from the physical plane to the spiritual.

   The king of the Dark Chamber

In this play, as in the one which followed, Tagore deals with man in relation to god. The theme of this play is somberly impressive, says a critic who describes it as a magnificent attempt to dramatize the secret dealings of god with the human heart. The king of this play is not identifiable by any of the characters. There is much speculation about him, so that everyone gets involved in a tangle of thought, feeling and conjecture. Even the queen, Sudarshana, has not seen him. Infact, nobody has seen him. Surangama, a maid of Honour, believes in his reality, even though she too has not seen him. But these are a false king in the play, a Pretender whom most of the characters are deceived. Even the Queen takes this man to be the real king. When the false king is exposed, Sudarshana decides to put an end to her sense of shame and degradation by walking into a fire where she sees the real king. Subsequently she flees to her father’s place because she is unable to endure the true king’s love. With Surangama supporting her all the time, she learns, through her suffering, the lesson of self- surrender, and is at last united with the true king. Evidently, the king in this play symbolizes god who is everywhere and is everything but who is yet nowhere and is nobody in particular. Every human being, in his on her littleness or half- knowledge, makes of this king what they can. Some deny his very existence; some try to assure his name and usurp his functions; and some blindly accept him and are contented.

        While the queen has her doubts, a mere maid of Honour is firmly convinced of his existence. The maid knows that the king would not forsake his subjects. Thus the play is about the human soul’s adventures in its attempt to know god.

 The Post Office

‘The post office’ is about a child with a sick body. The king visits the dark chamber of the queen’s heart, and all is well; and in the same way the king visits the sick chamber of the little boy, and all is well again. ‘The post office’ too deals with the soul’s adventures with the divine; and the adventures leave the soul as well as the body cured. The divine spirit comes to the parched human heart; and there would now begin the burst of a new spring of vicinity and happiness.

       In 1913, he was awarded the Noble Prize for Literature on the basis of the English version of his ‘Gitanjali’. He had now become an international figure, and a celebrity.

Conclusion

       In short, Rabindranath Tagore was a man of a versatile genius who achieved eminence in almost all the literary genres. His literary works were rendered into English by diverse hands, with himself also contributing to this procedure to some extent.

      Tagore’s drama is realistic drama; but the realism in his plays is a realism of the mind, not so much of external physical action as of emotional or spiritual action. Infact, he achieves his most intense realism when his symbolism is most complex.