On page 139 of this novel, Rabindranath thinks to himself in anguish, Would his family never give him any peaceIJ And this is what the reader will agonise over as one makes one’s way through this really poignant writing by Aruna Chakravarti, a sequel to her much celebrated Jorasanko.
With a habitual distrust for sequels, initially I was doubtful as to whether I would like Daughters of Jorasanko as much as I had enjoyed Jorasanko. I was delighted to find my fears vanish. Every page is like a piece of polished poetry, just right, not overdone, not sentimental and almost certainly unputdownable. That Aruna Chakravarti is a skilled storyteller is now an established fact but what one can observe is how much more sculpted her writing has become over time; every word seems to lance through the heart and not a single line is without meaning. And it is stark. In keeping with the profoundly tragic nature of the subject.
This is a novel that makes it clear that Rabindranath may be regarded by the Tagores as ‘a scion of the Tagore family’ and by the people of Bengal to be their most ‘illustrious son’, but as a father, he was the unhappiest of souls. We see a Gurudeb who is vulnerable, extremely good in intent but who repeatedly makes the wrong decisions for his children and other family members, indeed for those he loves most. Decisions that destroy their lives and haunt him. These are his twilight years etched out and it’s fitting that with age comes wisdom and new insights.
We find him often reflecting on his judgments and these introspective moments take on the nature of confessionals almost. Two of these most stirring moments were one, when he speaks about his wife to Moitrayee and expresses his deep regret in being unable to give her the love she so yearned for. How tormented he sounds when he says, “She gave me everything she had. Mind, heart, soul and body. Yet I didn’t love her as a man loves a woman. Or so I thought. Till the night I lost her. It was then that I understood how much I needed her. How dark and empty my life would be without her. There was another realisation. There was a wealth of feeling for her lying dormant within me, waiting to be fanned into flame. But neither of us knew it. Neither of us tried to rouse it form its slumber. She, poor girl, died believing I did not love her.’
The other is earlier in the novel when we see him despair at what Beli has to undergo, directly or indirectly, due to his inability to be firm. He is torn between his rage at Nagen attempting to molest her and the subsequent trauma which leads to her miscarriage and his attempts at self-restraint at the thought of the other daughter, Meera, to whom Nagen was married. Chakravarti describes his state from, ‘He fought the fierce stinging in his eyes and the acrid tightening of his throat for a while, then tried to rationalise the situation. He thought of different ways of handling it…’ to ‘Rabindranath poured out his anguish in one last fervent burst of appeal’ and moving on to ‘Rabindranath was devastated, but took the estrangement with his customary stoicism’.
This is a tale not just of mental suffering but also of the physiological. There is bronchitis, consumption (tuberculosis), influenza, cancer, prostrate issues, kidney failure, botched operations, failed treatments and what not. But all of these are incomparable to the depression, melancholia and desolation that stems from a life unfulfilled in many ways that almost all the individuals are afflicted with. Jorasanko’s daughters are certainly not happy women but nor are the men. In fact, I found not a soul in the novel content or happy except momentarily. Reminiscent of Thomas Hardy’s take on happiness being just an occasional episode in the general drama of pain.
Perhaps the only light moments in the novel occur when Rabindranath is in a playful mood. When he teases his loved ones and is indulgent towards them or humours them, he is at his lovable best. And those are the rare times when the darkness clears for a brief while.
Another distinctive trait of the poet that emerges is that he is a stubborn man. Once he makes up his mind, he is rarely moved. Recognising this, Protima does not ever try to change his mind about a course of action that she sees her father in law determined to follow. He can also be relentless and scathing, he does not spare those he feels deserve to be berated. As he does when he is felicitated for the award of the Nobel Prize. Perceiving the fake adulation of many of his critics, Rabindranth’s acerbic words are so piercing that the entire gathering walks out on him. And like Rhett Butler, he does not give a damn!
There are many powerful descriptions and of these two are like paintings come to life. One is the picture of a young Nagen whom Rabindranath compares to a veritable Aphrodite and the other is the image of Ranu the first time that Rabindranath sets his eyes upon her, without any clothes and dripping with bath water. The sheer physicality of these descriptions is quite breathtaking. The question that arose in my head when I had read Jorasanko was how cerebral was loveIJ Where do romance and sexual desires meet or are the two inseparableIJ Or to put it more sharply, are love and lust two sides of the same coinIJ These questions arose in my head again as I read Rabindranath’s reactions, to Ranu in particular. That he too may have been troubled by these questions becomes evident when Nagen’s words ‘I don’t expect anyone else to believe me. But I thought you would’ jolt his dormant memories and remind him of his own response to Natun Bouthan, his sister in law, many years ago.
The rape or attempted rape of Beli by Nagen is another bold and dramatic section of the narrative which Chakravarti has written with an edge of the seat finesse. It is so well crafted that one really gets caught by the intensity of the writing and it takes some time for the horrifying aspect of the situation to sink in. What menace lurks in those silk folds of the bhadralok’s dhuti, how many hapless victims must there have been, like Beli, trapped in her cloistered existence…these are thoughts that spring to mind as one reads on.
There is a sense of the poet’s heightened aesthetic sensibility. He is drawn to the beautiful, in form and spirit. He is repelled by the ugly. And it is this aesthetic sense that makes him an artist for he cannot bear to see the page he writes on defiled by cuts and crosses. So he doodles to give them shapes. And those shapes then become the origin of his paintings. These are not pictures of the beautiful; the shapes are anything but attractive. Yet there is something strangely fascinating about them. This for me is a trope for the novel; it is not a pretty picture of life but is fascinating in the way that Chakravarti unfolds the complexities of an individual’s life.
The political backdrop is retained by Chakravarti as just that, a backdrop, and the focus is on Tagore as the Father rather than on Tagore as an important political leader or idol. Yet, there are some aspects that drive home the fact that the times in which Rabindranath lived were full of turmoil. The sharply divided reactions to his receiving the Nobel Prize especially by the English Press, some of whom were downright rude and dismissive; the equally harsh reactions of both, Indians and Europeans (although in different modes, the one being shock and the other being mockery) at his surrendering his knighthood when the Dyer incident took place at Amritsar; the cold reactions he got in both England and America when he went there to generate funds for Visva Bharati; all remind one that those were not easy times for people in India. But perhaps in times of great unease, the best of art blossoms.
One more word, Chakravarti is a brilliant translator as evidenced by her body of translations. In this novel too, we get a fine sense of her translating prowess for she deftly weaves her translations of the poet’s exquisite songs into the story.
The book is about the daughters of Jorasanko but Rabindranath is such a towering figure in real time as well as in the time represented in the novel, that it is only natural for a reader to moved by his story. As an ill fated father. I think the only quarrel I have with the novel is that towards the end, I found it moving too fast. I wanted the pace to remain as it had done in the initial pages. But maybe, this is more a reflection of my greed to carry on reading rather than a comment on the author’s storytelling!
The reviewer is the Officiating Principal of Janki Devi Memorial College, Delhi University, where she teaches in the Department of English