Rabindranath, The Dramatic Artist

RABINDRANATH TAGORE is a poet as well as a dramatist and therein lies the clue to his whole dramatic career. For, the emergence of Rabindranath the poet as Rabindranath the dramatist is one of the most remarkable phenomena in Bengal’s literary history, in so far as the emergence occurred at a time when Rabindranath as a poet was seeking new avenues of expression and experience. It was in the last quarter of the 19th century that Tagore felt a peculiar welling up in his heart and was torn asunder by what he called an intense lyric impulse. Along with this was the difficulty of the new Bengali language which could not then express intense moments of lyric rapture as efficiently as it can do today. The proverbial ‘chalkline’ around him also disappeared while his highly receptive mind wandered about, beyond natural beauty, into the region of man and experienced in this a conflict that could not easily resolve itself in the lyric.

This conflict was bound, to produce the poetic drama of which Rabindranath is an accredited master, because poetic drama in its perfection is the consummation of the creative potency which exists embryo in every act of poetic expression. The basis and root of poetry is the spontaneous utterance of the undivided being. It is not the utterance of thought; neither is it the utterance of emotion; it is the utterance of these before the faculties are differentiated. And once it is so, the minor intensities are prefigurative in the great dramatic poet of an all-comprehensive intensity: when the intensity of working out the conceits has expanded into the intensity of the working out of a drama.

The lyrics of Rabindranath preceding his dramas contain not only some elements that are dramatic but they provided him with what the aestheticians term the ‘impulsive experience’ for the writing of his plays. While his lyrics provided him with the working out of a minor passion, the drama sees the gathering up of these passions to be can trolled by the imaginative passion of the drama itself. Prof. Trilling has discovered behind the plays of Matthew Arnold a similar process at work, but the intensity was subdued by the highly classical form which Arnold chose and his own pessimistic temper. In his plays Rabindranath never limited himself to a particular type of expression; his experience with a new medium was ever of as much interest to him as the subjective-objective conflict. In the dramas particularly, the minor passion has very much to be counteracted by a sustained passion of self-obliteration, and if we catch glimpses of the lyric poet in his plays, we have no other alternative but to say that Rabindranath’s identification with the creatures of his imagination was not complete.

The poet can be seen lurking behind as in the Cycle of Spring and Spring, while his experiment with the problem plays at a time when he was writing poetic ones was due to his desire to submit now and then to the necessities of creating the fiction of his own imagination. Even the earliest play, the Genius of Valmiki, is a musical play and enshrines dramatically the conflict between the robber Valmiki and the poet that he became. It may be even symbolic of the conflict in Rabindranath himself.

The urge that moved Tagore to take to the drama, and then to music, dancing, and painting, was therefore deeply psychological and compares with an almost similar process that occurred in the lives of Yeats and Ibsen. The contemporary Bengali theatre had of course its influence in so far as the theatre in Tagore’s household gave the boy a chance to be acquainted with the rudiments of theatrical art. In the subsequent experimentation with stage-technique, setting, and lighting, can be discovered the trends of this early influence–an influence, which again, as Tagore’s preface to Tapati reveals, contributed to that conflict in Tagore’s mind which impelled him to re-write plays. It is a mistake to say that compared to Sisir Bhadury he had no sense of the stage. On the contrary, like Shakespeare, Tagore’s acquaintance was early and direct, though it did not produce, as Buddhadeva Bose has regretted, play which were remarkably successful on the public stage. The reasons for this are that the Bengali stage has not yet shown any of the developments which Huntley Carter found in the European theatre, and that genuine dramatic criticism is almost absent in Bengal. The fact that Rabindranath’s Sacrifice and one of his social comedies had captured the attention of the theatre-going public reveals that the modern theatre-goer in Bengal has not been able to travel much beyond Shakespeare or the domestic drama, while the later plays of Tagore, particularly what have been called the ‘symbolic dramas’ transcended the crudeness, vulgarity, and violence of the commercial stage. It is a mistake to say that Rabindranath has only increased the hiatus between the author and the stage and created the so-called ‘reading’ drama. For, it is indeed difficult to name another man in Bengal who had as much opportunity to see the best of theatres as Tagore had, or one who introduced so many innovations in the theatre.

After the first few musical plays, the influence that operated most on Tagorean drama was that of Shakespeare. The imposition of the Shakespearean form prevented Tagore from developing in his own way the conception of Tragedy he had outlined in Nature’s Revenge, while the structure of his plots not only accepted anticipation as its key-note–which meant disguise, mistaken identity, deception, overhearing, and unnecessary deaths–but the employment of the narrative method involving contrast between scene and scene, interlocking of the incidents, and interweaving of the threads of the story. Of course, compared with Shakespeare, the dramatic resources of Tagore at this period were definitely meagre, and though he brought the incalculable resources of poetry to bear on his plays, they have hardly the intensity and efficiency of characterisation which say, Macbeth or Hamlet has. But the contrast becomes abundantly clear when the earlier plays of Tagore are compared with the later ones, where the excited expectation of Sacrifice or the King and the Queen make room for the sombre gravity of the Post Office or the silence of the House Entry.

The multiplication of incidents is one of the most important features of this second phase, and they come unexpectedly in the King and the Queen or Malini. Suspense of plot which has to do with the disclosure of fact comes in Sacrifice with she startling discovery of the fact that Jayasimha had royal blood in his veins or, in Malini when we know that Kshemankar had conveyed the news of Supriya’s conspiracy to the King. It is rarely that the suspense of plot becomes the suspense of form resulting in the rounding out of a harmony as in the Post Office. The suspense of plot naturally creates an excitement when we find Sumitra entering the stage with the severed head of her brother, though in the King and the Queen the suspense is perhaps too much employed in the mighty trepidations of the vengeful Vikram.

And it is this anticipation that has made some of his earlier plays very successful with the common theatre-goer. The action may not always be derived very strictly from character, but the curiosity that this suspense develops produces a sense of sympathy with the vanquished Raghupati or the murdered Kumarsen, though in the later plays Tagore relies not on the sympathy of his audience but on its complete absorption in the theme.

The position then is that to gain such effects Tagore had to rely plentifully on imaginative and emotional interrelations, while irony, comic relief, multiplicity of material help him tighten the fabric. The Trivedi episode in the King and the Queen, Devadatta’s talks in its beginning, and the Dhruva sub-plot in Sacrifice point to this technique. The King and the Queen thus verged, as Tagore himself realised, on the melodrama while the speeches of Vikramdev do not keep as much to the dramatic texture as to the expression of excess passion. It may be that the play is the tragedy of the excess passion, but when compared with Tapati it is patent that Vikramdev had too much of abundance in himself.

In Sacrifice, however, the abundance receives a check though the two sets of motivation, and the feebleness of the king prevent our knowing if in the end of the play the conflict is between Govindyamanikya and Raghupati, or between Raghupati and Jayasimha. It was here that Rabindranath realised how difficult it was to imitate the Shakespearean structure where all the points are held by logical, causal, or psychological co-relation. The Dhruva episode, as Dr. Thompson said, does not precipitate the action. What Tagore really wanted was not the extensive action and the temporary triumph of the Romantic drama (which meant, as Dr. Stoll believes, external and crowded action). He realised that the key to his success lay elsewhere. It was natural therefore that in Malini Rabindranath should adopt an almost Greek rigidity of form and rely no more on the Shakespearean technique of prodigality and imaginative exuberance. The next cycle of Rabindranath’s plays are therefore remarkable, not for their mechanism of character and structure of plot, but for their elusiveness of rhythm and attenuated action.

The third phase of Tagore’s dramatic career begins, according to his own admission, with the Autumn Festival and ends with The Cycle of spring. The emphasis in these tragedies–though they are more plays bordering or tragedy than tragedies themselves–is not on the conflict of passions as in the earlier group but on the clash of moods shown to us as harmoniously developing and varying with a peculiar clairvoyance. Tagore expressed the tragic element in his plays thus: “The soul’s expression is joy for which he (man) can accept sorrow or death; he who avoids the path of sorrow in fear, or in laziness, or doubt is denied the joy in the world.” In human life the denial of joy may not be as pitiful as an overwhelming grief and pain; for, the denial results not in a whole series of infinitely painful experiences but only moments when the soul realises that it is not expressing itself in the proper sphere. At least the negative approach to the concept of life cannot be as insurmountable a tragedy as man’s playing with the stars or God’s playing with us for sport.

The tragedies of this period are thus tragedies of moods, making up the finer substance of the play in their fluctuations and relations, in their contrast and harmony. The structure must invariably be musical while characters like Dada Thakur, Thakurdada, Dhananjaya, or the Kavi, arouse these moods in the other characters till they, with ever increasing consciousness, assert themselves in clear, positive outlines. The conflicts in Rabindranath’s tragedies then grow to be conflict between the narrow world of selfhood that man has created for himself and the joy in the universal soul which is his birth-right, but which un-fortunately he avoids because of the small eddies of fears, doubts, and hatreds which he creates sound himself. The conflict of passions and personalities naturally recedes into the ground, though it is the human conflict which these conflicts in mood seek to enshrine.

The result was that the structure of the plays underwent a radical change. There was none of the anticipation, plot-making and manipulation of incidents as in the earlier cycle of plays; the texture here is finer and more perceptible by a simplifying rhythmical repetition of important terms and phrases. Between the Autumn Festival and The Cycle of Spring, and then between the King of the Dark Chamber and thc Immovable Stronghold can be detected the recurrence of themes and ideas sometimes with much of the same phrasing. The associations with which these phrases are charged are dear to everybody, even to the protagonists, while the general effect is longitudal and definitely and substantively suggestive. Such a method inevitably tends to symbolism and secures a concentration and rhythm in the play which is not the same as in Shakespeare.

The symbolism then, as in Post Office, became of a form that was often beyond the competence of the common man who is unable to string up his sensibilites to the same tenor to which Tagore wanted him to do. With a method which was more institutional and less analytic, the symbolic effect which was created and intensified by the profusion of songs, and by the use of everyday speech carried to its perfection of utterance, soon developed an atmosphere of soul existence as contrasted with were physical being. In the Cycle of Spring which is the last play of this period, this use of symbolism was carried to its farthest point. In that play particularly, the pattern of the structure accepted enhancement of poetic expression, while in the subsequent machine dramas, the symbolism degenerated into allegory because of Tagore’s willing incorporation in the play of certain strands of contemporary thought.

What characterise this period of Tagore’s dramatic activity are his incessant search for new forms and his increased adaptation of the Eastern dramatic tradition. The continued action, the profusion of songs, the emphasis on one mood and the semi-religious effect are typically Indian. If in the machine-dramas he worked under the influence of the impressionistic school, in the season-plays and the dance-drama he sought to engraft the Indian tradition.

Red Oleanders and the Free Current objectify Tagore’s attempt to establish a harmony between the symbolical drama and the problem play. For, the two plays depend on their success not merely on an allegorical interpretation of the mighty dam or the red tassel of flowers but on an intellectual comprehension of a problem that had worried such dramatists as Capek and Toller and Rice. With these playwrights machinery had been an active agent that directly moulded the behaviour of the characters and the order of the society they lived in. But Tagore allegorised the machinery and instead of making it stand before us like a living being kept it at a distance, like an object of terror and hatred. The various scenes then present us with what Prof. Lesny calls kaleidoscopic pictures, and often as in the Free Current, the problem of machine was laid aside to consider other political problems. Of course, Nandini’s or Abhijit’s life-force suffers a smothering at the hands of the machine, but their moods are always shown projected against moods of the others. Strictly speaking, therefore, such a handling carries the play outside the conventional limits of the realistic drama and transports us immediately from the world of utter realism to one of imaginative fear. The moving force behind the machine is at best a force that only indirectly kills the soul-force.

It was interesting for Rabindranath to view struggling humanity in the light of the machine and then to go to the problem-play as it was practised by Ibsen. Sodh Bodh and Bansari typify Rabindrana veiled attack on the Anglo-Bengali society of Calcutta, while in arrangement of scenes and the development of the crisis foreign influences can easily be detected.

It is remarkable that the season-plays were written in between the problem plays and showed how divergent could be the dramatic ambitions of Rabindranath. Nature had always played a vital part in his earlier plays, and now he discovered in her certain deep-rooted affinities with humanity. The playlets of this period, therefore, have little ‘action’ in the accepted sense of the word and have rarely the catastrophe that belongs to tragedy. Yet the element of pain is there: a suffering that Rabindranath sees in the seasons when they change and sees in us as well. Basantotsav, Barshamangal, Seshbarshan, Nataraj, Nabin, and Sundar embody a mystical experience where the joy and suffering in Nature help to complete our life and make us regain the lost Bliss, Sal trees, bokul trees and flowers sing at the advent of the autumn while the clouds and the rains weep. Such is the pageant of the seasons which are shown to us with plentiful imagery, song, and dance. The prose dialogue was reduced to its barest minimum and the dance was employed to ease the emotional tension that the songs evoked. The tempo of the drama concentrated itself in song, to seek its outlet again in dance.

The development from the drama of the seasons to the dance dramas was therefore logical. In technique it asserted in a new way the importance of the drishyakavya and sought to make the plays genuine natakas of which, according to Prof. Levi, dance was the essential feature. The Worship of the Nati is perhaps the most important play from this point of view, because there the dance is a part of the dramatic incident itself and so becomes a crucial factor in the development of the theme. Dance here becomes a complete imaginative symbol of all that Nataraja symbolises. Later, in the dance dramas of Chitrangada, Chandalika, and Shyama, it was through dance movements that realistic action was sought to be portrayed, while the co-ordination of music, dance, colour, and setting established some of the highest standards of stage production in Bengal. Rabindranath’s contribution to the world’s dramatic technique will be remembered forever.