In mid-June, at the time of the auction of a dozen works of art by Rabindranath Tagore, their owners, the Dartington Hall Trust, said that a substantial collection of ephemera pertaining to Tagore’s relationship with the Elmhirst family that set up the trust is available. A friendship of the pre-email and digital camera days meant that the relationship was surely sustained by lengthy hand-written letters, exchange of photographs and other memorabilia. However, little attention was paid to this bit of information as ephemera are rarely granted the importance that they should be in an understanding of people’s lives.

Though the useful term ‘multi-tasking’ has entered our lexicon only recently, the fact that individuals live many lives and play several roles during one lifetime is nothing new. It is just that in the case of icons, some roles get highlighted, are talked and written about, and the others are forgotten or little-known. By painstakingly unearthing and arranging ephemera and other material associated with Rabindranath, the Calcutta-based photographer, Abhik Kumar Dey (Rabindranath Tagore — Portrayal of Memories), leads us on a fascinating trail of the poet’s early years as traveller, concerned husband, devoted father and keeper of accounts. The volume consists of letters, advertisements for Tagore’s plays, visuals of pages from the 19th-century magazines, Tattvabodhini Patrika and Abodh Bandhu, as well as many rare photographs and black and white reproductions of Gaganendranath Tagore’s delicate water colours, several of which illustrated Rabindranath’s Jeevansmriti. Entries are well annotated, often embellished with quotes from Rabindranath, and each one has a date, most useful in a venture that is located in a virtually uncharted terrain.

Of particular value are visuals of the many homes and places of significance to Tagore. There is a photograph of Chhatubabu’s riverside villa to which the young Rabi was evacuated when there was an outbreak of dengue in 1871-72 in Calcutta. Ashutosh Deb (Chhatubabu), an aristocratic patron of the arts, leased his baganbari (garden house) to the Tagores at Rs 125 a month. Rabi revelled in the fresh air, feeling every morning that “the day coming to me [is] like a gilt-edged letter”. He was the youngest of Debendranath and Sharada Devi’s 13 surviving children, and when he was merely 12 years old, his father took him to Dalhousie via Amritsar and the Golden Temple. The pair trekked widely — “every morning we would make a start after our bread and milk and before sunset take shelter for the night at the next staging bungalow”. An early initiation into the wonders of travel sustained Rabindranath all his life, a vibrant spatio-temporal sensitivity evident in much of his writings.

When he was younger, many of these trips were family holidays, images and people finding a space in Rabindranath’s receptive mind to be used at a suitable time. A reproduction of Gaganendranath’s view of Karwar on the western sea coast where Rabindranath’s brother, Satyendranath, was posted as district judge is captured later by Rabindranath: “the crescent-shaped beach was one that throws out its arms to the shoreless sea like the very image of an eager [sic] striving to embrace the infinite.” And at night, “the ever-troubled murmur of the casuarinas were at rest”. A few years later, in 1887, Jyotirindranath and Rabindranath visited their father, who was recuperating in a rented house on the banks of the Ganga at Chinsurah; if the building rising sharply from the seashore looks forbidding, the long shot of the deep veranda overlooking the river clearly provided an ideal context for creativity — on this trip, the poet composed several hymns for the Brahmo Samaj.

In December 1883, shortly after the family holiday in Karwar, Rabindranath was married to nine-year-old Bhabatarini from Jessore. The simple marriage ceremony was held not in the bride’s home but at the Jorasanko residence of the Tagores. In keeping with the dominant upper-class patriarchal tradition of renaming a bride (in effect effacing her earlier identity), Bhabatarini was named Mrinalini and, within a month of her marriage, was sent to live with the wife of Rabindranath’s older brother Satyendranath, Jnanadanandini, in her home in central Calcutta. By February 1884, Debendranath was instructing his son on appropriate education for the new bride: in a letter from Chinsurah he wrote, “To learn English, send chhotobau (youngest daughter-in-law) to Loreto House.” However, for other subjects, home tuition was ideal and “instead of mixing with other students in a large class, a good arrangement for independent study has been worked out”. The expenses for clothes for school as well as fees amounted to Rs 15. The little girl went to school from her sister-in-law’s home and after she came home was trained in various other social and housewifely skills by the much older, sophisticated Jnanadanandini.When his first child, Madhurilata (Bela) was born in 1886, an overjoyed Rabindranath wrote that “she was fair and lovely like the white Indian jasmine”. There is a charming photograph of Tagore sitting at the feet of his wife who holds the infant in her lap. As there is no backdrop, it is not easy to say whether the photograph was taken in a studio or whether a photographer was called to the house. The father looks intently at the new-born child, his profile showing off several ringlets to advantage.

Rabindranath’s yen for travel meant that after his marriage, he took his wife and young daughter with him; often, other family members visited as guests of the young couple who were clearly evolving a new tradition in nuclear conjugality. A trip to Darjeeling was followed by one to Gazipur, where he stayed with Mrinalini and Bela for several months, the proximity to the Ganga a great attraction. Photographs memorialize many holidays as the Tagores were enthusiastic users of the new medium. Apart from on-location shots, formal family portraiture was clearly a must, commemorating not only significant events but also the mundane. Rabindranath obviously enjoyed being photographed with his family. This montage that Dey has imaginatively created uses the excerpt of a letter from five-year-old Bela with a photograph of father and daughter. Bela wrote that as her mother had been reading all day, it was not possible for her to write to her husband. Mrinalini could have been engrossed in a new story by her sister-in-law, Swarna Kumari Devi (one of the earliest Bengali women novelists), a Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay novel — or perhaps an edited version of Jane Eyre...

Rabindranath was deeply attached to Bela, fascinated by her development as a bright, articulate and caring child; she is clearly the Mini of “Kabuliwala” and also appears in other poems that emphasize the bond between the child and the father. Bela was home-tutored under Tagore’s guidance as was her brother Rathindranath, born in 1889. In 1918, when she died prematurely, a grieving Rabindranath wrote to his friend, William Rothenstein, of her as “young and beautiful... and had a deep love for flowers, animals, children and beauties of nature”.

In the 1890s, Rabindranath had to combine his peregrinations and writing with the onerous task of being involved with the family estate in Shilaidaha. There is a photograph of him sitting at a roll-top desk at the estate, surrounded by books and papers; this was in 1892, and he wrote, “I am partly engaged in the work of the estate and partly in writing for Sadhana [a short-lived Tagore family magazine supported financially by Rabindranath and his nephew Gaganendranath]. I try to find some time in between to write but I cannot do it because like all women, poetry claims absolute authority.” Account-keeping was not new to him. When he was secretary of the Adi Brahmo Samaj, at the beginning of the month he had to read out the accounts to his father; he wrote of those two days in the month that they were “of great anxiety for me”. Debendranath would tolerate no shortcuts and no elisions: “At first he used to hear the main figures and added and subtracted them mentally.” Any lapses were immediately identified as “he drew in his mind the general structure of the accounts and could detect wherever there was a flaw”. This exercise took place in Debendranath’s home in Park Street where he lived between 1887 and 1898 and the volume has a period photograph of the house with its arched veranda clearly in view — the site perhaps of Rabindranath’s monthly inquisitions.

Such admissions of stress are part of the rich autobiographical material that the poet has left behind; when, in Portrayal of Memories, these are combined with the odd page from an account book or the snippet of a letter and, of course, photographs, the reader feels a comfortable familiarity — if not a sense of déjà vu. Ephemera, as the term suggests, are not meant to last; but if imaginatively juxtaposed with printed material, works of art, photographs and so on, they add a fullness to the lives of celebrity protagonists like Rabindranath Tagore who now appear like friendly neighbours — and not merely the targets of hagiography.