THE SHAKTI BEHIND TAGORE
~~Aruna Chakravarti
Sunday, 05 January 2014: If Kadambari tapped Rabindranath Tagore’s poetic potential and Jananda helped him acquire a world vision, it was Mrinalini who created the educator — the founder of Visva Bharati. Without her active help and support his dream of reviving the ancient ashramik system of education would not have been realized
The Tagore family is one of the few in Bengal that can trace its roots from the genesis of Kolkata itself. The first contractors and stevedores of the new port city that was being built 350 years ago, by aligning the villages of Sutanuti, Gobindopur and Kolikata, they attained wealth and power by working closely with the British. Constructing a grand mansion in the fashionable Pathurighata locality of Calcutta, they set up the family that commands honour and respect to this day.
A few generations later, there was a family rift and the house of Jorasanko was born. Over the years both lines flourished but the Jorasanko branch towered above the other and, under Dwarkanath Tagore, rose to dizzying heights. Dwarkanath was not only a wealthy zamindar but also an astute businessman with interests in shipping, banking, insurance, silk, jute, indigo and coal. His wealth and the opulence of his living style were such that he inspired awe and adulation even in British royalty who dignified him with the title of a Prince.
Dwarkanath’s son Debendranath was unlike his princely father. Austere and high-principled, he founded the Adi Brahmo Samaj proving that the Tagores were not only interested in self-enhancement but were deeply sensitised to the need of the hour. The Brahmo dharma was in essence a cleaner, renovated form of Hinduism which had become ridden, over the centuries, with dogmas, superstitions, biases and corrupt practices. The Samaj was set up with the ideal of restoring Hinduism to its original pristine form. Later the Tagores of Jorasanko became the face of an enlightened, cultured, modern Bengal. It was at the forefront of the Bengal Renaissance, that its members took an active part in the movement and even the women came forward to play a pivotal role.
Who were these women and where did they come from? Unequal marriages seemed to be the norm in the house of Jorasanko. The girls who came to it as daughters-in-law were almost invariably from families that lacked the wealth, education and cultural superiority of the Tagores. Illiterate and unexposed to the outside world, they were intimidated by the glories of their new-found family and had to struggle hard to find their feet. Eventually, guided and supported by their husbands, they acquired education and poise and gained confidence and growth.
But why were such mismatched unions formed in the first place? The Tagore family was ostracised by the elite Brahmins of Bengal for two reasons. One was the Pirali stigma which they carried from the 16th century onwards when two of their ancestors converted to Islam. The second was the fact of Debendranath being a Brahmo. Debendranath’s insistence on seeking matches for his children only from Brahmin families reduced his options, and his choices were restricted to those branches of the stigmatised clan who didn’t mind forming alliances with Brahmos. The daughters of the house enjoyed a more privileged position. The same Pirali stigma that forced the Tagores to wed their sons to girls from a less privileged section of the Brahmin society led to a tradition of luring Kulin (the highest strata) youths with lucrative offers, marrying them to sisters and daughters and keeping them as live-in sons-in-law or ghar jamais. This was a distinguishing feature of the Pirali clan and it persisted for centuries. Even two of Rabindranath’s own sons-in-law were ghar jamais.
Of the Tagore girls the best known are Swarna Kumari Debi, universally acknowledged as the pioneer of women’s writing in India, her daughter Sarala Debi who led a youth movement against British rule, and writer and musicologist Indira Debi Choudhurani. But the daughters-in-law, Jnanadanandini Debi, Kadambari Debi and Mrinalini Debi left a more significant mark on the times they lived in. Even more importantly, it was these three women who impacted the life and work of the jewel in the crown of the Tagore clan, Rabindranath, in an astonishing way.
In 1859 Debendranath married his second son Satyendranath to seven-year-old Jnanadanandini — a thin, sickly girl from an obscure village of Jessore. To use her own words, in her memoirs, she spent her first few months in her husband’s house sitting on the floor of the room allotted to her weeping behind her ghumta (veil). Gradually, through the efforts of her husband and her own agency, she educated and groomed herself into a fitting wife of the first ICS of India.
The first to step out of the women’s wing of Jorasanko and join her husband in Ahmedabad, where he was posted as an Assistant Collector and a Magistrate, Jnanadanandini was a dynamic woman with many other firsts to her credit. She was the first Bengali lady to attend the Governor’s reception, that too without her husband, who was confined to bed with a severe backache. At 27, a pregnant Jnanadanandini travelled alone to England with three small children and set up a home for Satyendranath, who followed her three months later with his youngest brother Rabindranath. Jnanada loved Rabindranath with an almost maternal instinct. She had helped rear him in infancy when his own mother was incapacitated by ill health and numerous childbirths. She had great plans for him. He would study in a British school, she decided, and then take a degree at the Bar. That he returned without even completing his schooling seems, in hindsight, a blessing. Had he fulfilled Jnanada’s ambitions, India may have had a brilliant barrister but the world would have lost a poet.
When Jnanada’s own children were old enough to go to school, she and her husband took a momentous decision. Jnanada would return to Kolkata since educational facilities were far superior in the capital than in the districts where Satyendranath had his postings and thus between the two they initiated the concept of ‘long distance marriage’. They came together only occasionally, during his furloughs and the children’s vacations, but they shared such a great understanding and mutual respect that their marriage was perhaps stronger and happier than any other in the Tagore family.
Once in Kolkata Jnanada did not return to her room in the ancestral mansion. Moving out of the extended household, she set up a nuclear establishment of her own at the Lower Circular Road — another first in the social history of Bengal — and started living in great style and luxury. But she didn’t cut off ties with her husband’s family. She had come to it as a child and it was the only one she knew. And having an extremely responsible, if somewhat possessive and dominating nature, she involved herself generously in each one’s life. She started a journal called Balak, in which all the children of the extended family were encouraged to contribute. It was she who first discovered the 10-year-old Abanindranath’s talent and persuaded his father to arrange for special painting lessons for him.
The generous and bountiful Jnanada loved being surrounded by people and, to use her daughter Indira Debi’s words in her Smriti Samput, she was always the focal point in the company she kept. Celebrated as one of the most brilliant hostesses of Kolkata, she threw lavish parties in which art, music, literature, politics and the new craze, photography, were discussed with her playing a leading role. Rabindranath, who was a frequent visitor, got his first exposure to Western art, science, literature and cultural nuances from his sister-in-law. It had started prior to his visit to England. Before leaving, Jnanada had instructed her young brother-in-law to improve his English and pick up the niceties of European etiquettes before his voyage. Satyendranath had a large collection of books and Rabindranath, whose knowledge of English was pitifully inadequate at the time, read them slowly, painstakingly, with the help of dictionaries and lexicons. He read everything he could lay his hands on being specially drawn to the poetry of Dante and Petrarch. This interest increased over the years, growing in depth and volume, till he came to be considered one of the most erudite scholars of European literature.
Jnanada could easily be dignified with the title of ‘the first modern woman of Bengal’. By her encouragement and example she changed women’s lives in a dynamic way. But perhaps her greatest practical contribution was her reinvention of the wearing of the sari — a sartorial style followed to this day by all Indian women. In doing so she gave the women of Bengal not only a civilised dress but a new posture. Used to wrapping a single length of cloth around their heads and bodies they had been constrained to keep their backs bowed from fear of the veils slipping off their heads or their backs being exposed. Now they could stand straight and look people in the eye.
Jnanada’s contribution to Rabindranath’s growth is undoubted. But if she provided the cultural window through which he got his first glimpse of the outer world, which deepened over the years into an expansive vision that was his hallmark as a myriad-minded genius, it was his sister-in-law Kadambari who discovered his potential as a poet. Jnanada helped him become the nationalist and internationalist he eventually became, but it was Kadambari who released the poetry trapped within him. She was his muse and Rabindranath has acknowledged the fact himself.
Kadambari came to Jorasanko as bride to Jyotindranath, the handsome, brilliantly versatile fifth son of Debendranath Tagore. The slight, dark, nine-year-old Kadambari was the daughter of Shamlal Ganguly, a penurious distant relative dependent on the Tagores for support. Thus she began her married life on a note of self-unworthiness which dogged her all her life. A decade or more of age difference between the bride and bridegroom was the norm in Tagore alliances. In consequence, the daughters-in-law of the house sought and found companionship in their young brothers-in-law. As Jnanada had found a friend in Jyotirindra, so Kadambari did in Rabindranath.
Rabindranath was seven-and-a-half at the time and, being highly imaginative, he saw the young bride as a fairy tale princess imprisoned in a tower and himself as the prince who had to rescue her. In practical terms, the only way he could do so was by being with her, telling her stories and wiping away her tears. But, as Kadambari grew older, the roles reversed. Maturing early, she turned herself into a little mother to him, looking after his needs as his own mother had never done. The old image of the weeping princess was now subsumed in the new one of sympathetic nurturer but never completely lost. It was from this time onwards that the two discovered a common love for poetry and Kadambari started recognising his genius. Possessing an extraordinary poetic sensibility, of which everyone around her was unaware, she made him show her everything he wrote and was encouraging but also sternly critical of his failings, thus continually urging him to a greater, more stringent effort. Kadambari had a streak of melancholia and suffered from depressions brought on by her husband’s neglect of her and her inability to bear children. She blamed herself for everything and in her extremely vulnerable state clung tenaciously to Rabindranath for companionship and comfort.
Kadambari took her own life at the age of 23, four months after Rabindranath’s marriage to Mrinalini. The timing was unfortunate. It led to speculations about her relationship with the poet and made the incident out to be an expression of despair at his supposed betrayal. The fact is that she had suicidal tendencies; she had tried taking her life earlier too. But the triggering point, according to Indira Debi Choudhurani in her Smriti Samput, was her disappointment at her husband’s breach of promise. He had bought a ship and was hosting a grand party on the deck the night before the vessel’s maiden voyage. He had promised to come and fetch her from Jorasanko himself but couldn’t keep his word owing to the turning of the tide. In her highly overwrought, vulnerable condition, Kadambari couldn’t take this breach of promise and killed herself. Rabindranath may have contributed to her unhappiness, but in another way. As he became busier and famous he had less time for her and she may have felt that she had lost her last friend and support.
There is no reason to doubt Indira’s Debi’s version. Rabindranath’s so-called betrayal could not have sparked off the suicide for a few simple reasons. First, given the context of the times in which they lived, a woman, however much she cared for her brother-in-law, couldn’t expect him to remain a bachelor all his life for her sake. Second, Kadambari had chosen the bride herself, together with Jnanada. This fact, too, is documented in Indira Debi’s book. Third and more importantly, the bride was only 10 years old, thin, plain and illiterate. Why would Kadambari see her as a threat?
Rabindranath showed no interest in Mrinalini to begin with. Treating her as a sweet, silly child, he felt that he owed her his protection and a bit of affection — nothing more. There was no question of seeking her companionship or looking on her as an equal. Later, in the natural course of things (and this was well after Kadambari’s death), they came together physically and had five children. He also started recognising her sterling qualities of service and self-sacrifice. Her nurturing nature, her housewifely skills and the comforts she brought to his day-to-day life cushioned him from the buffets of the practical world. Mrinalini, though considered by many to be an unworthy wife of one of the greatest sons of India, was in fact the best wife for him.
Mrinalini Debi, though less known than her two other sisters-in-law, influenced the times in which she lived in her own way. The grudging respect that Rabindranath had started giving her in his latter years became truly overwhelming after the role she played in helping him set up Santiniketan. She sold her jewels to finance Rabindranath’s dream project and also took on a lot of the practical work of running it. If Kadambari tapped his poetic potential and mined it and Jananda helped him acquire a world vision, it was Mrinalini who created the educator — the founder of Visva Bharati. Without her active help and support Rabindranath’s dream of reviving the ancient ashramik system of education would not have been realised.
The writer is the author of Jorasanko, The Inheritors and Secret Spaces.
Courtesy:
The Pioneer
