Tagore's Legacy

                                                    Lasting Legacy

Centuries go by and handprints of certain souls remain etched in the hearts of generations to come. They are those whose legacy was inherited by people of a region, and then, when it could not be contained in a narrow realm, it overflowed and spread to landscapes beyond boundaries irrespective of geography and rotation of the earth.

Italian is one of the most beautiful languages in the world. It resonates and resounds with rhythms of the mesmerising Florentine vernacular, embellished and personally affected by the great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri. Europe in the olden times was a confusion of varied Latin dialects which gradually morphed into English, French, Spanish, Portuguese.....organically.  The dialect of the most powerful city became the language of the whole country. But Italy was a different story altogether. It remained fragmented for a long time divided between different power structures, and it was only in 1861 that it was unified. Hence myriad dialects (mutually incomprehensible between cities) thrived within the population and only as late as the sixteenth century, a few intellectuals got together to sort out the absurd language dilemma. A brilliant stroke of insight and they decided to hark back to the fourteenth century Florence, wherein Dante when composing the Divine Comedy had irrefutably derided the elite Latin (privilege of the educated aristocratic) to write his tale of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven  in the vernacular Florentine  tongue of the streets and luminous contemporaries like Boccaccio and Petrarch.

The legacy of the Italian language spoken today is not Roman, Venetian, or even purely Florentine. It is  Dantean.  Perfectly ordained and embellished by one of Western civilization’s greatest poets, an artistic pedigree par excellence. “The Divine Comedy is in triple rhyme – a chain of rhymes with each rhyme repeating three times every five lines, imparting the Florentine vernacular a cascading rhythm which lives in the tumbling poetic cadences spoken by Italian cabdrivers, barbers, pedestrians, delivery boys and administrators even today,” says the writer Elizabeth Gilbert.  

Just as Dante’s legacy lives on in the very fabric of his land and globally, so does Rabindra Sangeet  sough through the green landscape of trees and reeds and rushes of Bengal, India and the rest of the world. Today as I write this piece, verses of Gitanjali and Rabindra Sangeet flow through valleys and hills of our undulating land and interweave the planetary revolution of the earth in the Milky Way to mark Rabindranath Tagore’s 154th anniversary. Calcutta, known for its bohemian tastes, artistry and music, culturally rests on a bedrock of the legacy of Shantiniketan  and Gurudev’s  music and poems sung and rejoiced by people in the streets, workhouses and shanties.

Readings of Tagore’s poems evoke flowers, mountains, the sky, sunrises and sunsets, boat rides and water and lead many to the verdict that he was a naturalist poet.  The latter per se would have the tenets of romantic poetry of Wordsworth and Shelley. But Tagore’s mission was beyond the mere rapture of earthly beauty. He was a seeker who felt the divine touch and omnipotent presence through creation and nature. Living life embroiled in its vicissitudes, his quest for God is a spiritual awakening strengthened by a humble yet determined resolve to see Him in all his glory. His playing field was the study of the Vedas and Upanishads, and his poems reflect the essence of his reflections and ruminations of these sacred texts. In the symphony being orchestrated by the elements of nature in praise of the divine force, paradoxically he himself is so meager and small.

For him, God is not in the reclusive haunts of a self-proclaimed saint. Rather, he seeks God in the stream of life, the toil of a farmer, the soil of the tiller

Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee! He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put of thy holy mantle and  like him, come down on the dusty soil!

The procrastination that besets us and enmeshes us, chaining us to our comfort zones and force of habit or belief, such that renewal ever lies postponed :

The song that I came to sing, remains unsung to this day.

I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument.

The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set; only there is the agony of wishing in my heart.

The blossom has not opened; only the wind is sighing by.

I have not seen his face, nor have I listened to his voice; only I have heard his gentle footsteps from the road before my house.

The livelong day has passed in spreading his seat on the floor; but the lamp has not been lit and I cannot ask him into my house.

I live in the hope of meeting with him; but this meeting is not yet.

In many a verse, he enunciates the bindings of our big egos and illusionary fears :

Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them.

Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed.

I came out alone on my way to my tryst. But who is this that follows me in the silent dark?

I move aside to avoid his presence but I escape him not.

He makes the dust rise from the earth with his swagger; he adds his loud voice to every word that I utter.

He is my own little self, my lord, he knows no shame; but I am ashamed to come to thy door in his company.

And over and over again, he pinpoints our human failings and illusions wrought by ‘maya’ :

`Prisoner, tell me, who was it that wrought this unbreakable chain?'

`It was I,' said the prisoner, `who forged this chain very carefully. I thought my invincible power would hold the world captive leaving me in a freedom undisturbed. Thus night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip.'

He also took upon himself the mammoth task of translating Kabir Vani,  titled Songs of Kabir :

Santan jât na pûcho nirguniyân

  It is needless to ask of a saint the caste to which he belongs;
  For the priest, the warrior. the tradesman, and all the
    thirty-six castes, alike are seeking for God.
  It is but folly to ask what the caste of a saint may be;
  The barber has sought God, the washerwoman, and the carpenter—
  Even Raidas was a seeker after God.
  The Rishi Swapacha was a tanner by caste.
  Hindus and Moslems alike have achieved that End, where remains no
    mark of distinction.

Footprints left on the sands of time to wring subtle but unparalleled changes in the history of mankind. 

Teres'a Man and other Stories from Goa

                           Regional to Universal: Teresa’s Man and Other Stories from Goa                                                                            or

                                                       Local Flavour Triumphs

                                                                          or

                                                  Damodar Mauzo’s Hour of Triumph

                                                                       Or

                                                     Konkani Flavour goes Global

"When you want something the whole universe will conspire together to help you get it,” said Paulo Coelo. 

Damodar Mauzo joins the league of great writers like  RabindranathTagore (who was unknown outside his home till he was translated), Ananthamurthy, Orhan Pamuk, Haruki Murakami ..........in making local flavour a universal song of humanness. His book of short stories Teresa’s Man and Other Stories from Goa has been long listed for the prestigious international Frank O’Connor’s Short Story Award.  ‘Translation’ (a target of dialectics at literary festivals) has yet again served the purpose of taking regional writings (Konkani in this case) to a wide readership on a global platform.

Goa’s most-loved man of letters, true to his repute, has brought together a gamut of Konkani & English writers and readers under one platform - a feat in itself.  Great credit goes to Xavier Cota the translator, instrumental in this phenomenal story of triumph.

Teresa’s Man and other stories is a potpourri of realism, poetic myth, sadness, perception and gaiety.  Bhai’s art is kind but unsentimental, mocking but uncynical, profoundly Goan but distinctively individual.  An innate sense of irony coupled with a complete absence of pomposity and pretence is what makes Bhai a wonderful writer. He creates thoughtful fiction centred on serious moral concerns rooted in the Goan experience, but a universal human dimension makes it encompass the entire human condition (reminiscent of Malgudi Days by RK Narayan).

A dichotomy of human emotion underlies the pieces Happy Birthday and Coinstav’s Cattle.  The former is an ironical portrayal of a range of emotions between parents and children. A feeling of pure unconditional love is hence mixed with shame, lack, self consciousness and defeat; a dark and true element of human shallowness in relationships.

Bhai understands that the highest satisfaction may come from the reader’s growing recognition and understanding of the characters and their situations. The presentation of human beings or of human situations and the revelation of truth inherent in that human situation leads to a “gradual and slow illumination” of facts which is more satisfying than a manipulated perfectly worked out plot.  His stories in the book like The Cynic, She’s Dead, From the Mouth of Babes and  Sand Castles largely embody this aesthetics.

 So important is a  character to fiction that one may approach the story by asking “Whose story is this ?”  Bhai’s domain of fiction is the world of credible human beings, amazingly diverse and varied.  Bhai essentially tends to reveal his characters indirectly through thought, dialogue and action folded into the drama itself.  He very convincingly makes his characters speak “in character”

Bhai’s lifelikeness in his writings is credible and original. He uses symbols and imagery to add atmospheric verisimilitude to situations.

 “It is high noon. The sun, like a ruthless foe, is literally branding her body.  Below, the baked earth and above, the unrelenting orb of fire. The whole earth is engulfed in heat like a pie being baked in the oven.”

“The idol , the chovoth, the basket of sweets, firecrackers- all started fleeing away one by one!”

There are stories here in the book which may be termed as comedies of manner.  Bhai shows us what the characters are doing in such a way that we can understand why they are doing it. Out of the details of what they do and say, Bhai builds up the conflict and tensions. Shanker in Vighnaharta  finds an  escape in a ritual thus bringing the comedy of manners  to an  ironical denouement.

The literary constructions have brevity and tautness, which lend unity and power to the writing. Dattaram, a bullet bike driver, gives vent to his feelings of anger and frustration.  Three powerful lines at the end of the story encompass the whole experience dramatically - “Dattaram’s eyes were bulging, he was speechless. Getting back on the bike, he started it. Finally finding his voice, he spat out: ‘This is our language! This is our culture!’ ”

A short story is, after all, not a transcription of life but a dramatization of it.  In the familiar and the real, a skilful writer weaves vivid and dramatic threads to transform the banal, clichéd and formulaic reality into a potent story.  Teresa’s Man then becomes a meaningful read, a ride through the unknown, yet known realms of human lives.

Book  born from the heartbelt of Konkani culture rides the wave to star power. Kudos!