Write a note on Tagore as a dramatist

Name :-Aneri R.Thakar

Roll no:-1

Paper no:-4

Topic :-5

Year:-2012/13

Sem.:-1

Submitted To:-DR.Dilip Barad

Department of English

Bhavanagar University

            

     Introduction:-

                         It is said that Tagore wrote his first characteristic play, “sanyasi” or the Ascetic,while holidaying at karwar on the west cost of India.There has been a long and fruitful dramatic tradition in India,and Tagore was familiar with it.He was a gifted actor himself,and he was eager to give a new tone to the Bengali’s stage.He admired Shakespeare probably he admired Ibsen,probably also matter link;and he knew his Kalidas very well.He would try his hand at drama like them- yet it  could not be quite like them. HE was a poet he trafficked imagery and symbolism.He invariably saw the universal behind particulars.A pray needs a plot,even as a house needs a firm structure.But how about a house that is no house,the shelter of a tree or a bush?how about the logic of the dream sequences?how about floating clouds-they unaccountably come together they assume the look of a camel or of a continent,then they scatter and de-solve and leave not a rack behind! A play doubtless needs a plot,characters,dialogue,sentiments: but if all were to become symbols,word that?there are the ‘no’ and Kabuki,plays in Japan,which can seldom be studied as a Shakespearean play can be;but in their own works they are effective on the stage and cause a dull – harming in the mind long after one has left the stage there certain traditional national attitudes there are unshakable obscure racial memory,there are quite a few Derennially recurrent archetypal human patterns-and these are the stuff out of a which the dramatist creates his dreams.Tagore could take many things for granted:for example,and intimate knowledge of our epics and our main cultural tradition generally certain attitudes too he could take for a granted.Idolatry in India is as old as the hills,and condemnation of idolatry also is as old as “Buddha”,if not even more ancient. Asceticism and the failure of asceticism, Casticism and the exceeding of Casticism,the spectacle of husband being redeemed by wife or wife by husband or both by children,Fanaticism striving with a tolrence,pittiness striving with magnanimity-all are old,old themes .Tagore could start the play,strike the opening Chords ,named the characters,-and memory and imagination would do the rest.Not the logic of careful plotting but the music of ideas and symbols is the  ‘soul’ of this drama.Not the apparent meaning but it’s echoing,cadence of suggestion-Dhwani,as the Sanskrit rhetoricians called it;in other words,the weakness of the under tones-is what matters,for these alone candles the sluggish soul to a new awareness life’s “deep magics”.

“Sanyasi” written by Tagore:-

             Sanyasi is a study of the failure of what Sri Aurobindo would call the “Reusal of the Ascetic”.In the Vishnupurana we learn that Jada Bharata,although he readily gives up the cares and pomp of kingship and retires to the forest,is unable to resist the play of pity which presently flames up into immaculate love.The sanyasi,by with drawing from the world as he thinks,he merely developed a negative virtue.Salvation comes,however ,not from negation but from wise acceptance,purification,and inner transformation.When the sanyasi boastfully declares-

  “The division of days and nights is not for me ,or that of months and years….I sit chanting the incantation of nothingness…..I am free,I am the great solitary one”

              He symbolizes non-engagement, and cares not for victory in battle the first stir and rustle of actuality disturbs him not a little ,the emphasize is still his line of defense.-

     “The earth breathes hot sighs and the whirling sands dance by what sites of man have I seen ! can I ever gain shrink back into the smallness of these creatures,and become one of them? No I am free…

  The girl Vasanti disturbs him even more,but at first he tries to be Stern “I have deserted both God and men”.She asks for bread,but in his obtuseness he gives her a stone instead!yet the springs of humanity not being dried up completely,assert them-selves at last .There are vogue stirrings within.Vasanti’s little trusting hand seems to touch his soul” with the want of eternal”,she is to him like the “moth of the day light”.Even so he makes one more attempt to reject  humanity and love;he blows furiously hot and icy cold in panic he runs away from her.But where ever he may go ,life and the claims of life and the lure of the  beauty and love pursue him.ANOTHER CHILD MEETS HIM AND COMPLETES THE EDUCATION VASANTI HAD BEGUN.He decides he will break the staff of negation and lean on the tree of life-

     “Let my wows of sanyasi go…oh the fool who wanted to sick safety in swimming alone and gave up the light of the sun and stars.To pick his way with his glow –warms lamp!...I am free,I am free from the bodiless chain of the nay…the finite is the true infinite and love knows it truth”.

       Let mu in a sense it is too late,for Vasanti is death yet can the giver of new life to the Sanyasi be really dead? The Sanyasi has learned the lesson of love and life,and there is now no danger of his returning to the desert of mere ascetic negation.Tagore himself in his Reminiscences,has underlined the ‘moral’ of the play’

………..The great is to be found in the small,the infinite within the bounce of form and the eternal freedom of soul in love… on the one side the wayfarers and villagers content with their home made triviality  and unconscious of any thing beyond;on the other the Sanyasi…when love bridged the gulf between the two the seeming triviality o the finite and the seeming emptiness of the infinite like a disappeared.

        The Sanyasi,trying to feel from illusion,had been trapped in a new illusion he has awaken from that night mere and gone through the baptism regeneration as a human being thanks to the chesty tears he has shed-

  O My child the sorrow of your little heart has field,forever all the nights of my life with its sadness ….YOUR sob that perused me,when I  Fled away have clung to my heart.I shall carry them to my Death

    The sanyasi is indeed redeemed.It is not like that it is the enemy of man,but the wrong kind of egoistic possessiveness that de bases and slaves body,mind and soul.True love far from binding, anticipated and en large.Love is the ever lasting yea that liberates,purifies and intensifies human understanding and reveals infinite in a grain of a sand,and heaven in a flower.

Chitra written by Tagore :-

       Chitra is a succinctness  Tagorean version of Kalidas’s Shankuntala;In the course of a perceptive an introduction of Shakuntala wrote in truth there are two unions in Shakuntala and the motif of the ,play is the  progress of frm the earlier union of the first with its earthly unstable beauty and romance,to the higher union heavenly -Hermitage of eternal bliss described in the last act…..translating the whole subject from one world to another-to elevate love from the sphere of physical beauty to the eternal heavens of moral beauty.In Tagore’s play,Chitra first appears as an Atlanta,but when she sees Arjuna the ascetic,the warrior becomes a woman.she must win his love,even on false pretenses .The GOD of love and the GOD of spring give her celestial beauty for the space of one year .Arjuna forgets hos vows and surrender,but each love else?only the falsity in the other and what has become false.Chitra’s is beauty is borrowed beauty.And so indeed it’s all physical beauty with us for a team,but one day sure tobe drawn,)and Arjuna is a flaws  ardour-ardour that has surged as a result of these unfair attack of falsity.Neither is in wordily happy she is unhappy he doesn't really love her ,and he is unhappy,ill at ease,because he senses that there is something wrong somewhere-and he is,besides, secretly drawn to the Chitra of romour,the arms-bearer,the scourge of her countries enemies.Yet in the end,when the truth is forced out,real lover flares up from ashes of the flash love that has gone up in a blaze. Now love in born of deep understanding, agonies experienced and shared and the vision of the fourth coming their past discarded selves what the God of spring prophesied comes true.

    “A Time will come of its self when the heat-cloyed bloom of the body will droop and Arjuna will gladly accept the abiding fruitful in thee.”

     Chitra is 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 “vaguely glimpsing  the truth but greatly confused still-

    I never seem to know you right ….Illusion is the first appearance of Truth she advances towards her lover in disguise but a time comes when she throws off her ornaments and veils and stands clothed in naked dignity. I grope for that ultimate you that bare simplicity of truth.

    The truth is that  Chitra is  “No goodness to be worshiped  nor yet the object of common pity to be brushed aside like a moth with indifference.”she is a woman and a mother,and Arjuna is content ;he says simply “Beloved ,my life is full !”

  What do they know of the body that only the body know and what they know mind or the soul that haven’t known or loved the body?Tagore was seized  by this idea and incarnated in Chitra the evolution of the human love from the physical to the spiritual .The supernatural machinery – Vasanti,Madana the end their ‘gifts’ to Chitra-is strictly superfluous to the play’s inner causation.The wall point of the play in that youth itself cits freshness,strength and beauty is a sudden spring time miracle;it is suddenly there and,later it fades away ,as suddenly,as uncountable. It is “Nature’s trick” to bring about certain results.But,then men has learnt through the ages of his civilized existence to improve upon or too upon transcend this mere trick and make it the means of more integral and durable union that may last a whole life me and beyond it  too.Because a men and women have evolved  subtle methods of seduction,there is also the risk of greater disappointment,revulsion and disgust.What is easily won may be even more easily lost .Knowing full well that there is the longer surer way –the way of devotion,tapasaya –Chitra chooses the quicker way of borrowed beauty to make the assault on Arjuna senses,rather than achieve the contrast of the whole men.Arjuna too is like wise ready ,all though he is know nothing about her expect that she is physically alluring,to give up  his vow and surrender to the moment.No wonder she is inly discontented and soon he is discontented as well.It is natural enough that beauty or glamour should attract in the first instance men to woman,or woman to men ;but this attraction has still to pass other tests before it can acquire the name and true nature of love.With men and women the attraction,the coming together is not the end,but only the beginning.It has to survive shared trials ,shared sorrows,the shared grateful gradual failure of the bodily functions,culminating in a shared old age.Hence the impedi-ments that religion,ethics,custom and wordily wisdom raise between the first fine rapture and the sanctified final acceptance in marriage. The union of man and woman is  the marriage of true minds,a whole spectrum ranging from the sensual to the spiritual .It is not to be striven for through tapasya,to be won and continually deserved as mutual self giving at all levels of experience.Youth and beauty are transient and death is unavoidable;yet marriage achieves the miracle of beyonding youth and beauty;and motherhood and fatherhood to achieve the miracle of continuity ,the beyonding of death itself .Before the God score simply,before the glow of youth although they may be transience are yet a part of our experience wisdom lies neither looking upon the body and it ‘s beauty as ends in themselves nor in imagining that our life could be holy separated from the physical base.Tagore rejected both “negations”-the ascetic’s denial of life as well as the sensualist’s denial of the spirit.The blinding maddening ecstasy of the physical union is not denied in Chitra,but its transience is also recognized. Even as illusion is but “the first appearance of truth ,the fever and throb of the senses are but a prelude to the less evanescent more subdued joy of “holy wedded love”.