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....

A Repository of Songs and Stories

‘An Observer’

A Repository of Songs and Stories–

Srimathi Indira Devi Chaudhurani

BY “AN OBSERVER”

When Love and Literature become bed-fellows in the blended life of a pair of persons, the latter is both a beacon as well as a blessing. This has been illustrated amply, once again, in the case of two of the most eminent litterateurs of modern Bengal: Sri Pramatha Chaudhuri and Srimathi Indira Devi Chaudhurani. About the achievements of the former, who passed away some time ago, the people, outside Bengal, have heard enough in recent months. But very few are acquainted with the accomplishments or his noble helpmate for the last four decades or more.

Srimathi Indira Devi is a replica of the fast-disappearing Victorian type of the nineteenth century. Everything about her has the atmosphere of the drawing-room, adorned with paintings and piano, flowers and fancy appointments. In other words, she is self-cultivated; and cultured, too, to that minutest details of her daily life. And the first impression that she gives to a stranger is of a lady vibrant with the luminous vitality of leisure, as if Eternity itself were waiting at her window-sill!

Her supreme interest, of course, is Music, which is the best and most beautiful medium for expressing the aspirations and intuitions of the human soul. And her study of the subject has a ring, and the rare sweep, of synthesis. For she knows equally well the music of the East as of the West. But what is of special importance in her attainment of the heights of that finest of all arts is the fact that, like the late Dinendranath Tagore, she, too, is a repository of the songs–with their themes and tunes and their autobiographical, emotional or spiritual environs,–of the Poet Rabindranath Tagore. And what a marvelous memory is hers! She still remembers accurately the style of singing of almost every song of his, not excluding those she first, heard from the lips of the poet, nearly half a century or so .

She is, however, not only a repository of songs but also of stories. For it is true of everything that she talks of, or on, that “thereby hangs a tale”! She does not make a bee-line to what she desires to drive home to you,–that is well-night impossible for her. As Srimathi Sarojini Naidu once observed humorously, “Indira goes to Calcutta from Bolpur after touching Bombay!” However, the conversation, though diffused, is quite dazzling. And often visitor after visitor to her has wished that there were an invisible automatic, ‘dictaphone’ lying in a corner of her room, so that whatever she says were recorded immediately. And such a record would run, indeed, into volumes. For during her long span of life she has met most of the great men and women of our country as well as of other countries and also been a witness to the passing of the old regime and ushering in of the new. Therefore every page of the book of her life is written over with recollection, sweet or sad, of some incident or individual.

Srimathi Indira Devi is a devoted student of Bengali, English and French literatures. She has written many a story and song, essay and argument, in her own mother-tongue, and translated into it some of the best things in English and French literatures. But where she has scored as none else, perhaps, has done, is in the field of rendering faithfully and felicitously into English a number of the writings of Rabindranath, specially the chapters of his masterpiece in prose, Panchabhut, or “The Diary of the Five Elements”.

But she has not been only an inmate of the ivory tower of the art-for-art’s sake artist. For she has been deeply interested in several of the social and educational projects in her Province. And this is easy to understand, because she believes that Life is indissolubly entwined with literature; hence priority of claim over a person.

Srimathi Indira Devi is dignity incarnate. There is nothing of the intellectual’s proverbial pride in her. She has the calm and courage of the mountains, which can defy the tyranny of torrential rains and of the scorching sun. It is said that even on the day her dear husband departed, she lived her own life as if nothing untoward or unusual had happened–undeterred by the claims and cries of death. Her palm-like tall stature–she is over six feet!–is a little poem on probity of intention and proficiency of action. In age she is now a companion of the Biblical psalmist, but she may well follow in the foot-steps of the Tagores,–she is a niece of Rabindranath,–and live many more years of further fulfillment in her twin-passion the music of literature and for the literature of music.

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