Chokher Bali

Rabindranath Tagore

Description

The literature of the new age seeks not to narrate a sequence of events, but to reveal the secrets of the heart. Such is the narrative mode of Chokher Bali' - Rabindranath Tagore, Preface to Chokher BaliChokher Bali explores the forbidden emotions unleashed when a beautiful young widow enters the seemingly harmonious world of a newly married couple. This path-breaking novel by Rabindranath Tagore weaves a tangled web of relationships between the pampered and self-centred Mahendra, his innocent, childlike bride Asha, their staunch friend Bihari, and the wily, seductive Binodini, whose arrival transforms the lives of all concerned. Radha Chakravarty's translation brings the world of Tagore's fiction to life, in lucid, idiomatic prose.

Informations

• Publié par: Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
• Date de parution: 16 novembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184003635
• Langue: English

Extrait

RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Published by Random House India in 2012
Copyright Radha Chakravarty 2012
Random House Publishers India Private Limited
Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B
A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, U.P.
Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
United Kingdom
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law.Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author s and publisher s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184003635
To Ma and Baba
INTRODUCTION
T he literature of the new age seeks not to narrate a sequence of events, but to reveal the secrets of the heart. Such is the narrative mode of Chokher Bali. In these words from his Preface to Chokher Bali , Tagore announces the arrival of the modern Indian novel. Emphasizing psychology above plot and external action, Chokher Bali marks a radical break with literary tradition, a bold and self-conscious attempt at steering the novel form in new, uncharted directions.
Chokher Bali was serialized in the periodical Bangadarshan from 1902 to 1903. In 1903, it was published as a book. The novel was long in the making: Tagore had been working on it as early as in 1898 or 1899. He completed the draft version in his notebooks in 1901. Tagore s letters suggest that he had earlier used the working title Binodini , changing it to Chokher Bali shortly before its publication in Bangadarshan . When the novel first appeared as a book, Tagore deleted certain passages from the original serialized version. Several of these excised passages were restored, with Tagore s approval, in the first edition of Rabindra Rachanabali (1941) and some more in the independent Visva-Bharati edition of 1947.
The first English translation of Chokher Bali appeared in The Modern Review in 1914. Translated by Surendranath Tagore, this version was named Eyesore . In 1959, the Sahitya Akademi published Krishna Kripalani s translation, titled Binodini , which was based on the earlier book version with all its excisions. The present translation includes the restored passages of the revised Visva-Bharati edition. Of particular interest is the restored ending, which carries the narrative beyond the scene in which Rajalakshmi forgives her son and sees domestic harmony restored between Mahendra and Asha. Although Tagore s novels did not lend themselves readily to dramatization, Chokher Bali was recast as a play first performed at the Classic Theatre on November 26, 1904. The play was probably scripted by Amarendranath Dutta, who also enacted the role of Mahendra in the first performance. Subsequent stage and screen adaptations of the novel testify to the interest it continues to generate.
Though published in the early twentieth century, Chokher Bali is set in a slightly earlier time. From the details of female education provided in the novel, readers surmise that the action of the novel takes place somewhere between 1868-when it was still customary for Englishwomen to be engaged as teachers for female pupils-and 1883, when the university produced its first female graduate. This was also a period of sweeping economic changes that resulted in the emergence of a new middle class in Bengal. Between 1875 and 1941, the bhadralok or gentlemanly class, earlier rooted in the economics of the zamindari system, had begun to move from the country to the city in search of new professions such as medicine, law, engineering, education and government service. Mahendra in Chokher Bali studies medicine; Bihari joins him at medical college after dabbling briefly in engineering. They clearly belong to a social world where a professional qualification is desirable, but not financially necessary. Mahendra can combine his sporadic forays into the world of medical training with a dilettantish lifestyle in an affluent Kolkata household. Bihari gives up medical college to set up a charitable hospital in a garden estate acquired for the purpose.
While the male characters in Chokher Bali pursue a professional degree, the education of women remains a domestic matter. Binodini s father engages a mem or white woman to educate his daughter. The subjects taught would normally include some works of literature, mathematics, and the history of Bengal. Along with needlework, a basic knowledge of English was also considered desirable. Bengali remains the dominant language: although Binodini recognizes Bihari s name and address on a letter inside a glass display case at the railway station, her expertise lies in Bengali literature rather than in English. She leaves volumes of Bankimchandra and Dinabandhu in Bihari s room during their early acquaintance at Barasat. Asha, meanwhile, is virtually illiterate at the time of her marriage to Mahendra; even under her husband s tutelage, her education does not extend much beyond the primer Charupath . Yet, even this limited education invites the wrath of Asha s mother-in-law Rajalakshmi, who is clearly not highly educated herself, although she comes from a good family.
The complex forces of tradition and modernity, Hindu orthodoxy and British liberalism create a strangely contradictory social milieu. New systems of knowledge jostle with the old-when Rajalakshmi sends for the family astrologer to seek advice on Mahendra s predicament, her son, a man of science, feels exasperated at her blind faith in horoscopes and magic. In Chokher Bali , there are only passing references to caste, as in the mention of Kayet Thakrun, Rajalakshmi s friend and confidante; yet the novel conveys the sense of old hierarchies and attitudes that remain in place even as new socio-economic forces threaten to destabilize them. On these issues, Tagore s position remains ambivalent. The protagonists in Chokher Bali belong to a Hindu social framework, but the Brahmo element, traceable to Tagore s own upbringing, is evident in many contextual details.
Although Tagore was reared in a large family, he had sensed by the late 1890s that the joint family system was on the decline. Chokher Bali presents a small, compact family with a single male head. In Mahendra s household, Asha, the new bride, is expected to be subservient to her widowed mother-in-law Rajalakshmi; dependents, such as Annapurna or Binodini, remain short-term visitors. By 1911, nearly two-fifths of the urban population of Bengal lived in Kolkata and Howrah. In keeping with these changing demographic patterns, the city, too, was striving for a modern lifestyle. Chokher Bali presents an impressionistic image of life in Kolkata in this period of transition.
In this time of flux, the position of women was a hotly debated issue. Although Keshab Chandra Sen had presented his wife in public in 1862, it would take many years for women in larger numbers to shed the purdah, and participate actively in the Swadeshi and Non-cooperation movements. Chokher Bali is set in the interim period, when elite households still kept women segregated. The novel also refers to the oppressive effects of the dowry system. In part, the disastrous trajectory of Binodini s life is due to her lack of dowry, because her father spends too much on her education. It is significant, though, that Mahendra marries Asha, a dependent orphan, without any dowry: the Brahmo influence is clearly visible here. Orthodox society in Tagore s time still disapproved of widow remarriage, in spite of the Widow Remarriage Act, which legitimized it. Some readers feel that Chokher Bali should have ended with Binodini s marriage to Bihari. The novel, however, suggests another reason for Binodini s rejection of Bihari: knowing her reputation to be tainted by her association with Mahendra, she is unwilling to let the social stigma affect Bihari.
At the time of the novel s publication, notions of originality and individual authorship had not yet gained wide currency in the Indian literary establishment. Yet Sureshchandra Samajpati, a contemporary critic, accused Tagore of plagiarizing the work of Panchkori Bandyopadhyay whose novel Uma (1901) was about a promiscuous widow named Binodini. As modern commentators point out, however, Tagore s novel, unlike its alleged original, is neither self-consciously sensational, nor a cautionary tale trapped in a rigid morality, but a probing analysis of the inner psyche of its protagonists. In the characterization of Binodini, we see Tagore s attempt to question contemporary gender stereotypes, and his recognition of the conflict between women s need for freedom and the pressure of social constraints. The complexity of the character of Binodini is matched by the representation of Bihari in the novel. A landowner without materialist aspirations, a dabbler in different trades who is neither an idler nor a dilettante, Bihari is the product of a particular historical moment. Yet Tagore s handling of Bihari s character is distinctly modern in its psychological subtlety. Morally upright, with an acerbic tongue and a stringent sense of personal and social responsibility, Bihari could well have remained an uninspiring ethical emblem, but his fallibility, his inner torment and his susceptibility to love provide shades of gray that preclude conventional moral stereotyping.
While Chokher Bali demonstrates Tagore s familiarity with Bishabriksha (1873) and Krishnakanter Will (1878), novels by his Bengali literary predecessor, Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Tagore s nuanced writing also carries overtones of the nineteenth-century European novel. The historical moment, coupled with his own upbringing, enabled Tagore to straddle two literary worlds, synthesizing features of both to create a n