Rabindranath Tagore: The singer and his song By Reba Som, Viking, Rs 599

Reba Som describes her book as “a biography of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore … with music as its leitmotif”. She suggests that her work is unique because “most of Tagore’s biographies in English are rather sketchy on his music … a pity considering that music was the fount from which all his creative energies flowed”. Sadly, Som’s book is at best a compendium of critical responses to Tagore’s music translated from Bengali into insipid English. At worst, the book reads like a confused babble, leaping from one half-baked idea to the next, dropping names out of context, and using existing research with reckless abandon.

Take, for instance, Som’s claim that “one can detect musical resonances” in Tagore’s paintings. In the chapter, “Fresh Creative Vitality: Art and Dance”, she undertakes a survey of Tagore’s art in the light of this statement by making puzzling references to synaesthesia defined as “a state of mind where more than one sense combined to transmit colour”. She jumps to Tagore’s colour-blindness, then wonders about its impact on his music. This amounts to little more than paraphrasing the work of scholars like Ketaki Kushari Dyson in a few inchoate sentences. At her most adventurous, Som leaves one groping for some sort of a thread through the labyrinth of jumbled responses. The exquisite melancholy of “Kandale tumi more bhalobashari ghaye” makes Som reflect on the universal coexistence of joy and sorrow. This, in turn, makes her recall, first, Shelley, then Wordsworth, followed by “the brilliant baroque Italian sculptor Bernini”, and finally, “Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk”. (Som’s bedazzlement with the Nobel is rather embarrassing.)

Thankfully, such inspired musings occur only occasionally. In her default mode, Som is happiest summarizing critics and historians. Sometimes she does not even do that. With Tagore’s dance-dramas, for instance, she seems to have run out of even borrowed ideas, deciding (quite sensibly) not to venture beyond bland plot summaries and facts. When Som writes on the musicological aspects of Rabindrasangeet, on its links with classical and folk traditions, ragas and talas, she is in better control of her material (if one overlooks her description of taans as “complicated warbling of musical phrases”).

But, in charting the growth of Tagore’s musical genius, Som gets lost in cataloguing the songs composed during different periods of his life, drawing upon excellent existing chronologies of the songs. When she tries to read the lyrics in a biographical context, she ends up sounding either trite (“A certain androgynous quality in Tagore enabled him to hear the inner cry of women”) or complicatedly vague (“Viewing life through the prism of death, his songs often displayed raw emotion but in these sentimental and emotional outbursts he tried to find spiritual meaning”). The traces of historical analysis that one finds in the book are the contribution of historians like Tapan Raychaudhuri, Rajat Kanta Ray, Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar, rather than the result of Som’s original research.

The most alarming aspect of the book is neither its formless prose nor its derivativeness, but the generally appalling quality of Som’s translations. Depending on the difficulty of the passage, perhaps, Som either simply inserts her own translation without mentioning the original or leaves the Bengali untranslated, without any consistency of practice. Sakhi bhabona kahare bole becomes “Friend, what is worry?” and Bhalo manush noi re mora bhalo manush noi is “We are not a goody goody lot”. Tagore would have been better off without this unwieldy mix of confusion and high-mindedness.