On Sunday morning, with nothing much to do, I decided to go to the Academy of Fine Arts and watch Bratya Basu’s dramatized version of Tagore’s Chaturanga. I had been warned by friends that it was a terrible production. But exactly contemporary to Joyce’s Portrait, Lawrence’s Rainbow, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Woolf’s Voyage Out, Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, to the Dada manifesto and to the best years of American jazz, Chaturanga (1914-16) has never ceased to fascinate me. I keep wondering how that bottomlessly Freudian episode in the cave — in which Damini gets her fatal (and cherished) kick from Sachish — could be done as theatre or cinema. I had heard that a film version was being made, and that the Tollywood actor playing Damini had taken a day off from shooting in Santiniketan to come and watch the first Knight Riders match in Calcutta. So I was curious to see what Basu, marked now by post-Nandigram persecution, had made of this novel. I must also admit that having just reviewed an appalling English translation of Tagore’s songs, there was something ghoulishly thrilling about waiting to see just how bad it could get. Especially now, while Tagore’s birthday celebrations were going merrily on all along that vital stretch of the city between the Planetarium and the Lower Circular Road Haldiram’s.

I got every bit of my sixty rupees’ worth. All the sculpture in its garden painted a cheap lemony green, and in a sea of junk food enisled, the Academy, with its air of thronging dereliction, was the perfect setting for the mix of numbness and mirth with which I emerged from the play. With rising and increasingly perverse merriment, I had sat through an absurd phantasmagoria. In it, sub-amateur hamming, small-town melodrama and K-serial kitschery came together in a mélange of stunning intellectual nullity. Damini was like one of Tennessee Williams’s lesser coquettes, and Sachish like a round-cheeked schoolboy, not too bright, trying furiously hard to make sense of sex, religion and history. The scene in the cave was ‘stylized’ into a Shankar-family dance number, but played like Malayali soft-porn, the sort that gets billed as “Hundrrred-per-cent Hot”. There were three withered ladies sitting behind me, who were fascinated by Damini’s apparent blouselessness. Was she wearing a strapless bra? Were there little safety pins keeping her widow’s weeds in place? How could men’s clothes of that period have plastic buttons? Such were the questions they pondered audibly throughout the play. These were punctuated by calls home to find out whether Bubai’s diarrhoea had stopped, by loud burps signalling the slow digestion of fish rolls consumed before they took their seats, and by equally loud hummings-along with the vintage recordings of Rabindrasangeet that came on, from time to time, as background music.

The remarkable thing was that most of the nearly-full house clapped, giggled and cheered their way through the play. There was an infectious glee in the hall as the audience recognized their favourite TV stars and tut-tutted through the moments of tragic passion. It was like the Italians watching Rossini after Lent. This made it truly difficult to hold oneself apart from the Sunday-morning festiveness — as if it would be snooty and life-denying to turn one’s nose up at Tagore made so wonderfully accessible, contemporary and entertaining, freed at last from the copyright yoke and the elitist straitjacket.

There was something compelling about this atmosphere. I went back again in the evening to the open-air recitals outside Rabindra Sadan and Nandan. It was pure Bartholomew Fair. There were alarmingly obese families, encased in georgette and glitter, steadily chomping their way through chowmein, burgers, fries and candyfloss. There were stalls selling paan masala arranged in garish pyramids, and brightly coloured hair-clasps, bangles and Tagorean knick-knacks. There were self-publishing singers and writers selling their ware, a look of infinite patience on their faces; and crazed, old bearded ladies in faded tangail sarees, looking like retired professors of philosophy, who spent all day there, busily rootling in their old plastic bags for heaven knows what. There was a lanky madman looking tragically educated and undernourished, pacing about and stopping at random to look deep into the eyes of startled strangers with a glittering, Kafkaesque intensity. There were made-up young men looking at other made-up young men, and there were policemen sitting with their legs open, looking at the made-up young men. There were dandies in batik looking superior, and sad young lovers looking out of it all, like Paolo and Francesca in Hell, surreally lit by the little lights in the bushes. And above this sea of humanity, and above the carnival of noise and colour and feelings and movement it kept afloat, rose the distinguished and never-ending wail of the songs, beautiful and quite meaningless, lending to everything one felt part of, or not part of, a dimension of sublime, yet irresistibly hilarious irony: Baaje koruno shure… Pather shesh kothay, shesh kothay, ki achhe sheshe?

Some of the crowd had wandered into the Information Centre to see an exhibition on the Tagore family’s travels in India and abroad. And again, in the old photographs being shown there, and rising above the sea of our faces looking at them, floated the brilliant and exquisite Tagores in their robes and shawls and jackets, looking like exotic but faded hothouse blooms, with their ringlets, monocles and chiselled features, their earnest, tragic faces. The strangeness of these faces, from everybody and everything around them now, conjures up a sense of pathos and of comedy that perhaps only a Proust, a Visconti or a Ray would have been able to do justice to.

It is the lot of all icons to live on in a bizarre twilight zone between the transcendent and the vulgar, between high and low, pure and impure, worship and neglect, classics and trash. Think of Goethe in Germany, Mozart in Austria and Shakespeare in England. But these are all tiny countries that are socially, culturally and linguistically tidy and homogeneous in a way that is unimaginable in India, or even just in Bengal. The vast range of social and cultural identities and practices claiming Tagore as its own, simply within the Bengali-speaking world, would produce a chaos of registers that would be impossible to regulate by the most fascist of establishments. Yet, in all these other cultures, and with all these other icons, there are traditions of performance and interpretation, of creativity and criticism, and hence of the production of knowledge, that exist both with the assistance of the State and independently of it. These traditions might range from the stodgily classical to the wildly experimental, the fruits of which may be sometimes regrettable and sometimes excellent. But through all this, they nourish the continuing life of the icon in the modern world, sustaining his existence beyond the merely iconic.

In Tagore’s case, it is this vital and various nourishment — from sources that are both classical and critical, old and new — that is in a state of profound crisis. Between the free market and the Establishment, the prodigality and the poverty, the surreal carnival and the plundered archive, between the esoteric reticence of a Sankha Ghosh and the levelling garrulity of a Bratya Basu, something invaluable and irreplaceable is turning into something else, about which nobody seems to be anything other than clueless or, at best, hopeless.

The gift of genius is always double-edged — both for the person who embodies it (the supremely gifted man) and for those who must, or are meant to, receive it. Looking at this painting by Tagore of a woman with a large face and a little hand, I find it impossible to decide whether she has just received or is about to give the flower that she is holding against the void. Her heavy-lidded eye and the set of her lips are unillusioned and unhoping. Left with the ambivalence of the gift, they give nothing away.