These two letters, written at almost the same time of year as we celebrate Durga puja this year, speak of Rabindranath’s feeling for the festival in the year 1894 as he spends some time in Calcutta after his return from the family estates at Boalia and a week before he leaves again for Bolpur. The Sarat season he describes preceding the commencement of the festival, and then again after the festival is concluded, matches ours outside our windows, notwithstanding the passage of more than a century, as does the corresponding anticipation and anticlimax of the festivities themselves.

Letter 159

Calcutta

5 October [1894]

20.6.1301

All the rain and storm were finished by yesterday. This morning, a beautiful sun is out. The morning breeze today has the slightest feeling of winter in it, just enough to make you shiver. Tomorrow the Durgapuja starts, so this is a beautiful preamble to it. When all the people of the country are experiencing a wave of joy in every home, then, even if you’re separated from them societally, that joy touches your heart. Day before yesterday on the way to Suresh Samajpati’s house, I was looking at the images of Durga, ten hands aloft, that were being built on the dalaans of almost every mansion — and all around them, all the boys of the house had become very restive. Watching this, I thought how both the young and the old in the country become like children for a few days and begin to all play with dolls on a very large scale together. If you think hard about it, all the higher pleasures are comparable to doll-playing, in the sense that there is no ambition or profit in it — if you look at it from the outside it seems like a sheer waste of time. But something that brings a feeling of joy to the people of the entire country, a huge enthusiasm, can never be entirely barren or insignificant. There are so many people in society who are hard and dried up and worldly, to whom poetry and song is all completely meaningless, yet even they are affected by the feeling of anticipation for the festival all around and become one with everybody else. Surely this deluge of feeling every year humanizes men to a large extent; for a few days it engenders a feeling of such empathy and softness in the mind that love, affection, and pity can easily germinate there — agomoni, the songs of bijoya, the meeting of friends, the melody of the nahabat, the Sarat sun and the transparent sky, all of it together composes a joyful poem of beauty within the mind. In the article this time on “Meyeli Chhara [Womanly Rhymes]”, I have said in part that the joyfulness of boys is the ideal of pure joy. They are able to take an insignificant opportunity and imbue it with the fullness of their mind’s feelings — children make an ordinary ugly incomplete doll come alive with their own life force and their own joys and sorrows. The person who is able to preserve that power until he’s older is the one we call capable of thought. To him, surrounding things are not merely things, not just visible or audible, but full of inner significance as well — their narrowness and incompleteness made complete by a song. You can’t ever expect that sort of capacity for thought in all the people in the country, but at a time of festivity such as this, most people’s minds are overflowing with a stream of feeling. Then, that which we see from afar hard-heartedly as a mere doll, is dressed by the imagination and sheds its doll-form; and such a vast essence and life moves through it that every person in the country, whether appreciative or not, is anointed with that holy stream of bliss. Then once again when the doll becomes a doll again, they throw it into the water. All things in the world are like that doll. Those whom we love may only be a person of a particular appearance or form to others, but to me they may be lit from within by an amazing light; to me they may seem endless and eternal. Those who lack a ear may think of song as merely sound, but to me, that same sound is song. To those who cannot see its beauty, the earth is a lump of mud encircled by water. But that same lump of mud encircled by water for me is the world. So if you look at it one way, all things are dolls; but if you look at it from the heart, through your imagination, then you recognize them as gods — you cannot find a limit to them. And so, if I were to think of as a mere clay doll what all Bengal is now seized by love and devotion for, it’s I who would be wanting in feeling.

Satara

9 October 1894

Letter 162

Calcutta

Wednesday [Thursday] 11 October [1894]

26.6.1301

I’ve spent this beautiful Sarat morning lying quietly on a couch — the plants and shrubs in my flowerpots were trembling in a lovely breeze that came and touched the body. I was really feeling like just lying there while somebody in the next room played some pieces on the piano one after another as they pleased. That Chopin of mine should also be included among them. When a desire of this sort is born in the mind, then, even if that desire remains unfulfilled, there’s a sort of beauty within it. The worst situation is when you don’t even feel that desire and the mind becomes inert and heavy. There’s a continuous music being played in nature that composes music within our minds in the form of a strange anguished desire — those desires have a beautiful ragini of their own, like a very soft melodious morning song — and that ragini then makes even those unfulfilled desires peaceful and charming. It is when nature’s music resounds desolately in the far distant shadows of the mind and finds no echo back that the mind really becomes joyless, inactive, and inert. Then, even if there’s no particular sorrow within, the weight of it presses down immovably on you…

The veena was played quite wonderfully. Somewhat like that Badri — the melody seemed to be wrung out of it, bent and squeezed out of it, and occasionally the jhankar [resonance] of all the strings, from the thin to the thick, being struck all at the same time, created a rapid sequence of waves that played upon the mind from one side of it to the other, and then again after a while, a very slow, tender, faint rustle seemed to smooth out those waves with a pair of soft hands right up to the extreme corners of the mind and leave. Who will comprehend all the various sorts of things the instrument was speaking of — it was as if it nestled up to your breast and unburdened itself of all it wanted to say — at times, when the manly deep tones of the bass strings created a generous pity that broke upon one in waves, it seemed that the world was completely false and that it was so full of an endless sorrow and limitless beauty exactly because it was false, and that is why it contains so many raginis, such modulations…

After staying up last night, this morning I was lying on the couch, tiredness in my limbs — that’s why to my half-shut eyes, the sun and the trembling of the plants and the breeze upon my tired body were feeling so sweet. The Sarat morning today seemed brimful of the quivering memories of the immersion of the idols and the festivities; as if all those melodies of the nahabat that had stopped playing had silently spread themselves across the clear sky, and the vacant, sighing tiredness and lassitude engendered by the ending of the festival has today therefore melted into the Sarat sun and spread itself out over the entirety of the land, water, and sky, wrapping it in a silent melancholy.

Satara

15 October 1894