Triveni Journal

1927 | 11,233,916 words

Triveni is a journal dedicated to ancient Indian culture, history, philosophy, art, spirituality, music and all sorts of literature. Triveni was founded at Madras in 1927 and since that time various authors have donated their creativity in the form of articles, covering many aspects of public life....

Rabindranaths 'Red Oleanders'

By P. Guha-Thakurta

Rabindranath’s ‘Red Oleanders’ 1

BY P. GUHA-THAKURTA, M.A., Ph.D.

Rakta Karabi (Red Oleanders) represents, more than any of his plays of the symbolical type, Rabindranath Tagore's dramatic genius in its fullest maturity. It has all the lyrical beauty of the earlier plays and dramatic sketches and also the spiritual depth of his developed thought. It has for its main theme the conflict between the true spirit of man and a materialistic and mechanical order of society. It is only natural that a play with such an avowed purpose by a man who has always held very independent ideas on most things, social or political, and has frequently expressed himself strongly on the problems of modern civilisation, should have a genuine present-day interest.

Let us first see how the play is presented to an audience. It opens in front of a royal palace in Yaksha-Puri where the bulk of the population slaves in the gold mines. The King is hidden from public gaze behind a net-work screen, before which the whole action of the play takes place. The affairs of the town are administered by his officials and he himself never appears among his people but busies himself in piling up the gold-nuggets that are being dug from the mines. None of the workmen can escape from their bondage except by death. They remind one of the Robots of Karel Capek's play ‘R.U.R’, mere machines, with numbers instead of names, completely under the mercy of a greedy super-capitalist. There is a Professor who also lives behind a net-work of scholarship and pedantry. He discusses philosophy and aesthetics with Nandini, the heroine of the play–a woman so beautiful that even the King is enamoured of her. Nandini has a lover, Ranjan by name, whom she adores and loves and waits for his coming to liberate the people. Ranjan calls her his ‘Red Oleander’ because the colour of his love is red like the oleanders she wears on her neck, on her breast, and on her arms. The red of the oleanders is intended to suggest not only beauty and love but a foreboding of the strange and fearful things that are about to happen. Kisor, a boy-slave, worships Nandini and brings her red oleanders even at the risk of his own life. Nandini goes to have an audience with the King but she can only speak to a voice that comes from behind the net-work curtain. She bids him come out of his seclusion and tells him, however much she may admire his strength, he ought to be ashamed of his cruelty to the workers and of his greed in grabbing at the dead wealth which they dig up for him out of the bowels of the earth. The King says he is weary of his strength and covets her love. But she cannot give him love in return, for she loves Ranjan and is eagerly awaiting his coming to Yaksha-Puri. Workers, some of them in rebellious mood, pass before the palace, discussing their sorry plight and trying in vain to devise ways of escape from this hell of slavery. Bisu, a vagrant wanderer whom the Government had wanted to use as a spy, is the real friend of the workman. Bisu is an enigmatical character who sings songs and really serves as a mouthpiece of the author's gentle satire upon the false political economy of Yaksha-Puri. He mocks the tyranny of the machine-made institutions of the place and expresses a passion for a world entirely free from ugliness and cruelty and greedy, acquisitive passion. Nandini is his idol and the symbol of all his noblest aspirations. But the wives of the workmen tell him that some day "that girl with her noose of red oleanders will drag him to perdition". Later in the play, Nandini tells Bisu that she does not fear the King any more, for she has seen him face to face. He is hungry for love and wants desperately to live; for when she told him that she could give up her life for the love of Ranjan, fie got frightfully angry and drove her away. Bisu becomes a little apprehensive for her safety. In a third interview between Nandini and the King, the King threatens to kill Ranjan, if he ever gets hold of him. Nandini says: "Those whom you have scared all along, will one day feel ashamed to be afraid. If my Ranjan were here, he would have snapped his fingers in your face and not been afraid even if he died for it." She goes off and waits for Ranjan by the wayside. Meanwhile, Bisu has been arrested on a charge of inciting the workmen to insubordination. Ranjan comes at last, evading the watchfulness of the King's officials, but he is not seen upon the stage until he has been killed by the King himself, because he had challenged him to fight. The King does not know whom he has killed, and when he learns that it is Ranjan, he cries out –"I have killed youth. Yes, I have, indeed, killed youth–all these years, with all my strength. The curse of youth, dead, is upon me." He realises that all his life has been a mistake and calls on Nandini to help him to destroy the system that has been built up around him:

NANDINI

What would you have me do?

KING

To fight against me, but with your hand in mine.

That fight has already begun. There is my flag. First I break the flag staff–thus: Next it's for you to tear its banner. Let your hand unite with mine to kill me, utterly kill me. That will be my emancipation.

GUARDS (rushing up)

What are you doing, Your Majesty?

You dare break the flag-staff, the holiest symbol of our divinity–the flag-staff which has its one point piercing the heart of the earth and the other that of heaven; What a terrible sin–on the very day of the flag-worship:

Comrades, let us go and inform our Governor. (They run off)

KING

A great deal of breaking still remains to be done. You will come with me, Nandini?

NANDINI

I will.2

All that we hear now is that Nandini has "dyed her garland the colour of oleanders with her heart's blood" and "gone in advance of us all to the last freedom"; the King has just gone off to his death, hearing Nandini's call and, according to the Professor, "has at last had tidings of the secret of life". Ranjan has left behind "in death his conquering call–he will live again and cannot die"; the workmen have broken into the prison and released Bisu, and the net-work before the palace has been torn to shreds. Bisu comes out and calls on his comrades to come on to the fight and as we hear the shouts of Victory to Nandini!’ the curtain falls. A song dies away in the distance:

‘Hark it's autumn calling–
Come, O come away!’

The rather severe satire in the play on the tyranny of a materialistic order of society with all its ugliness and inhumanity is, however, relieved by an exquisitely delicate sensibility and imaginative beauty. If the author has lashed materialism and worldly greed, it is with a silken whip. If he has rebuked tyranny, cruelty and falsehood, it is with a gentle and benevolent kindliness. His satire does not sting–it only awakens pity and understanding. The character of Nandini stands out very clearly as a type of the grandeur and pathos of love, which runs as a red thread through the tapestry of human bondage and slavery. She has "for her mantle", as the Professor says in one place in the play, "the green joy of the earth–That is our Nandini–In this Yaksha town, there are governors, foremen, headmen, tunnel diggers, scholars like myself: there are policemen, executioners, undertakers–and they all fit in perfectly into the scheme of the place. She alone seems out of place, here. "Midst the clamour of the market-place she is like a lute in perfect tune". The author has used his extremest skill and imagination in the painting of the portrait of this lovely, warm hearted and brave woman, and we cannot help feeling sad when she passes out of our sight like a bird of passage, like a figure made, as it were, of pure abstraction, passing out into nothingness, leaving nothing behind but her bracelet of red oleanders. The denouement exactly suits the Poet's temperament. It seems strange that she who had made so vivid an impression upon us as a human being, as a physical reality, should come to such an end. As Rabindranath himself explains: "She is not an abstraction, but is pursued by an abstraction, like one tormented by a ghost. Nandini is a real woman who knows that wealth and power are maya and that the highest expression of life is in love which she manifests in the play in her love for Ranjan. But love-ties are ruthlessly molested by a megalomaniac ambition, while an acquisitive intellect plies its psychological curiosity, probing into the elusive mystery of love through vivisection . . . I have a stronger faith in the simple personality of man than in the prolific brood of machinery that wants to crowd it out. This personality–the divine essence of the infinite in the vessel of the finite, has its last treasure-house in woman's heart . . . The joy of this faith has inspired me to pour all my heart into painting against the ground of black shadows . . the portrait of Nandini as the saviour of the message of reality, the saviour through death."3

It will be quite evident that what the Poet has attempted in this play is not the exposition of a new idea but the clothing of his most vital thought on the problems of life and religion in a new outward attire. We have the same fruitlessness of idle curiosity and covetousness as in Raja (The King of the Dark Chamber), we have the self-same futility of a machine-made order of life as in Achalayatan, (The Immovable Sancutary), we have the same redeeming potency of love as a restorative as in Prakrtir Pratisodh (Nature's Revenge), we have also the same note of the eternal craving of the human spirit for the distant and the unknown as in Dak Ghar (Post Office) and Phalguni(The Cycle of Spring), only in a slightly different dress. All these ideas again form coherent parts of the leading idea –the cruelty and stupidity of a mechanical and soul-less civilisation. This idea is also closely bound up with the Poet's favourite doctrine that each individual is enslaved or freed by something within himself and that if he breaks the outward chains of authority, this is only the revelation of the freedom which he has achieved within himself. There is no need to hide the fact that by means of a dramatic parable Rabindranath quite frankly attempts a criticism of the political machinery of modern times and of the consequences of the commercialised civilisation of the present-day. In a recent article in the ‘Visvabharati Quarterly’4 the Poet has said that the purpose of the play is to show what a menace to humanity is contained in the ‘organised avarice’ which has captured the imagination of the western races and threatens to "trample down life's true harvest" throughout the world. He says of this ‘grim apparition’: "It is intensely real; its hot breath is upon us; its touch is all over our shrinking souls. It is the principal hero today in the drama of human history; and I trust I have the right to invoke it in my own play, not in the spirit of a politician but of a poet, possibly a lyrical poet."5

There is a vast amount of abstract truth expressed through the different personages of the drama and wrought into a richness of imagery and delicacy of rhetoric and metaphor by a master of beautiful words. The individuals of the play have not perhaps come to life exactly in the way we might have expected, but they are much more than mere types. They are entities, and one and all succeed in conveying the Poet's thought and feeling and have an universal appeal to human emotion. There could never be a mathematical measure of art, for all art in its essence must be universal. By universality we do not mean that all people will share an author's ideas or feelings; in point of fact, they will not. Rabindranath's true universality of emotional appeal in this play consists in his exquisite rendering of the subtle beauty of human life and nature, in giving everlasting vitality to a flashing moment of joy or pain, and thus widening our sphere of understanding and sympathy. He enables us to grasp reality, not so much through a process of reasoning, as through feeling and this end he achieves again and again with unmistakable success. Herein lies perhaps the real greatness of his art in rhyme or prose.

1 The play first appeared in 1924 in the Bengali original in "Prabasi" a Calcutta literary monthly. The English version came out later in the year in the September number of the "Visvabharati Quarterly".

2 ‘Red Oleanders’ (Visvabharati Quarterly, Sept., 1924) p. 82.

3 See ‘Red Oleanders: Author's Interpretation.’ (‘Visvabharati Quarterly’ October, 1925) p. 285.

4 See October Number, 1925, pp. 283-286.

5 See ‘Visvabharati Quarterly,’ October 1925, p. 284.

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