The Cosmic Relevance of Tagore's Symbolic Play

THE COSMIC RELEVANCE OF TAGORE’S
SYMBOLIC PLAYS

Life, viewed as a comprehensive whole, is the most perfect and greatest of all arts and the aim of every great writer, consciously or unconsciously, is to acquire a point of view which is, as it were, God’s view, so that he can create a world of harmony and synthesis.

Tagore is one of those very few artists, who could recognise the holy and sublime purpose of art and who could very successfully and totally apprehend that the greatest of all works of art is life itself, being the creative work of God, in all its manifold forms. In his book The Meaning of Art he directly connects the process of art to the process of creation of the Universe. He quotes from the scriptures about the origin of the Universe.

“The Universe has come out of Ananda.” “God made penance and with the heat generated from that penance, He created all that is there.”

Tagore points out that the freedom of joy and the restraint of Tapasya, both, are equally true in the creative expression of Brahman. God, where He dispenses the inner necessities of existence, is the poet, the lord of mind, the sovereign power, and the self-creator. He accepts the limits of his own law, and the play goes on which in this world. The world as an art is the play of the Supreme person reveling in image-making.

Art is the “response of man’s creative soul to the call of the Real.” It belongs to the procession of life, making constant adjustment with surprises, exploring unknown shrines of reality along its path of pilgrimage to a future which is as different from the past as the tree is from the seed. In other words, Man, the paragon of all the animal kingdom, alone is given the power of aesthetic excellence which is quite similar to that of God, in being self-creative, self-ruled, and self-supreme. It is in a circle that man travels, from life to death and from death to life; from divinity to humanity and from humanity to divinity, acknowledging constant surprises unconsciously created by his own self from a region of ultimate Reality. The vocation of art is to take a creative part in the festival of life, the festival that is to give expression to the Infinite in man. It is because of this God’s point of view, rooted in his theory of art, that Tagore’s symbolism acquires a mystic significance. But the importance of Tagore’s complete apprehension of life lies not in universal sympathy, understanding and profound detachment as in Shakespeare, but in the cosmic relevance he discovers even in the ordinary things of life. Human life is at once a perfect entity by itself and also a part of the whole process of the Universe.

Before we discuss the symbolism in Tagore, it is necessary that we should know something about Tagore’s philosophy since the former is greatly influenced by and based upon the latter. He is one of the staunchest exponents of Indian mysticism, embodied in the Upanishads. He harmonises the essential view that whatever is apparent is unreal with a poet’s emphasis on the play of the senses and the experiences of the phenomenal world. Besides, Tagore had also studied, and to some extent imbibed, the main tenets of Buddhism.

Tagore’s attitude towards life was that of acceptance, appreciation and thankfulness, and not of doubt, disgust and protest. In a way, he represents the very height of Indian spiritual optimism, strongly supported by a rich heritage of mystical thinkers of ancient India. In his poetry the individual and his world (life) are given enormous importance in regard to his relation with Godhead. He formulates a religion of his own–the religion of life–in which the individual ego or Ahamand the super-ego are co-eternal. Through the former, the latter is moving towards finality–from death to birth and from birth to death. It is a mistake to conclude that by this finality, Tagore meant anything like spiritual perfection or emancipation or Nirvana. It is a movement that impels the Universe–life included–to endless expansion in itself. The significance of Tagore’s philosophy is essentially based on the reconciliation he had established between the conflicting forces of love and duty by achieving a mellowness of the heart.

According to Tagore, man’s real enjoyment consists in, answering himself the perennial and mysterious question “Who I am?” The easiest way of answering the question is the search by the self for permanence in love. In fact, the entire philosophy of Tagore rests on three pillars, viz., unity, beauty, and love.

“The revelation of unity in its passive perfection, which we find in nature, is beauty; the revelation of unit in its active perfection, which we find in the spiritual world, is love.

Tagore’s symbolism is a source of endless joy for those who search for the inner meanings. It is not restricted to a drama or a story or a poem or a play or a situation but it runs through every sentence and phrase. Without this symbolism much of his poetry would have been mere abstract philosophy and most of his dramas, not so rewarding, In fact, this symbolism of a divine nature is the very basis of Indian art. His plays and poems are the sparks of the great flame of his self-realisation, The key of his plays, especially the philosophical aspect of them, is provided in his Reminiscences, where he says: “The subject matter with which all my writings have dealt is the joy of attaining the infinite within the finite.”

Even in his boyhood days he found that the unmeaning fragments lost their individual isolation, and his mind revelled in the unity of a vision when he came under the influence of a “collection of old lyrical poems composed by the poets of the Vaishnava sect.” When these fell accidentally into his hand, he says, “I became aware of some underlying idea that lay in the meaning of these love poems….”

They sang of a love that ever flows through numerous obstacles between men and Man the Divine, the eternal relation which has no relationship of mutual dependence for a fulfilment that needs the perfect union of the individual and the universal.” When he was eighteen, while observing the early dawn (the dawn of wisdom), he suddenly came under a new religious experience. The veil of ordinariness was lifted and he began to discover a new meaning in men and things around. He records this experience of sudden expansion of his consciousness in the allegory named The Awakening of the Waterfall, “The waterfall, whose spirit lay dormant in its icebound isolation, was touched by the sun, and bursting in a cataract of freedom, it found its finality, in an unending sacrifice, in a continual union with the sea.” The allegory here, of course, is clear. The waterfall is the poet’s soul, and the sun represents the esemplastic wisdom, and the sea the Ultimate Reality. Thus symbolism m Tagore is based on personal experience which he had even from his adolescence.

In the play Sanyasithe dramatic interest is in the clash of deep emotion, superior wisdom, and unattached and wide view of life against blind orthodoxy, a narrow conception of duty and mistaken notions of justice. The Sanyasinreverences everything in search of the Ultimate Reality. Overpowered with the dignity of renunciation, he majestically says, “For me the stream of time has stopped….In this dark cave I am alone merged in myself.” He comments on the littleness of earthly existence, and the futility of simple human loves, and the limitations of the human mind. When he sees misery around him, the Sanyasifeels that he should never return to it. Vasanti was a forsaken flower-girl, whose father did not accept the usual. She was considered an outcaste and the Sanyasigives her shelter because he is above social ethics and orthodoxy. But the Sanyasi, in spite of himself, is drawn into the fold of Samsaraby the innocent pure aspects of the flower-girl.

What Tagore dramatises in the play is not the downfall of a weak-minded Sanyasinfrom a superior order of spiritual status, but the awareness of an underlying truth or principle that is common to both humanity and divinity. He dramatises the idea that the escapism of the ascetic offers no enduring solution, and the real success in life of man is allured to the spirit of nature. Man’s second and divine birth is in love. The dualism of life and nature is a dualism of unity and love and not one of hostility and exclusion. Man is not a feeding animal but a free personality realising the infinite in love. Self-consciousness begins with a feeling of separateness and is perfected in the feeling of unity with all. “The whole object of man,” according to Tagore, “is to free his personality of self into the personality of the soul, to turn his inward forces into the forward movement towards the infinite, from the contraction of self in desire into the expansion of soul in love.” Here Tagore is not merely pointing out the metamorphosis of Man into Divinity, but he discovers a perfection is man and life, as they exist. Rabindranath, like most significant poets in India, looking into ancient Indian literature, has found that soul and matter are both good, both real, and that the highest life consists in the welding together of the two, in the enjoyment of their fruit here and now.”

In fact, human life is a phase or a face of the Universal consciousness or Brahman and it is a part essential for the enjoyment of the whole. The part (life) and the whole (Brahman) are not so much distinct as they may appear. In the play Vasanti represents mayaor prakritiand the Sanyasisymbolises Ultimate Reality or purusha. The whole universe, cosmos and chaos, sat and maya, life and divinity, self and super-self, finite and infinite, unity and diversity–are all their eternal game of hide and seek. The experience they derive out of the game is pleasure, which is beyond our conception of pain and pleasure. It is Tagore’s belief that God sought joy in creating this universe, in establishing ‘duality’ for His realisation. He split himself into self and non-self, into Eswaraand maya, for “It is the joy that creates the separation in order to realise through obstacles the Union.” A summation of Tagore’s mysticism is that God fulfils Himself through His creation. This asserts once for all, the significance of life or the creative force, the annihilation of which is a negation of the existence of God Himself.

The Post Office is the best known of the symbolic plays by Tagore. Judged as a play it is not as much dramatic as it is narrative and there is not much of a story to tell. Amal, the adopted child of Mahadev, is sick. The village doctor orders that the child should not be allowed to go outside, and all the windows of the boy’s room should be kept shut. The boy always dreams of the beauties of nature outside, and likes to be entertained by an infinite variety of people, like the dairyman, watchman, Goffer, and the headman. The boy, out of simple vanity and pride, desires that the Royal Physician should take care of him. At last the Royal Physician does indeed come to him.

Though from a literary point of view, the play is not dramatic, from a religio-historical point of view, the play dramatises what happened in both the western and eastern countries for the past two thousand years in regard to religion. It is obvious that the severe self-sacrificing fervour of the ancient ages of India and of the middle ages in Europe, has been quite softened gradually to humanism, as the tendency of the so-called cultured man is more of pleasure-loving and comfort-seeking. But anyway, the final consummation is still uncertain, as it is in the play.

Symbolically Amal represents the spiritual quest of the individual soul. Just like the village doctor, narrow dogma and traditional orthodoxy maintain that man should close the doors of his senses in order to realise the soul within. Of course, it is one way of seeing the truth, and Tagore prefers a less difficult but more subtle one. He maintains, like Bridges and Wordsworth, that spiritual elevation consists in man’s loving response to the beauties of nature. Anyway, death is inevitable, as it is in the case of Amal, and death, according to Tagore, is not a negative fact but a means of fresh creation. But, as Yeats remarks, deliverance comes only at the moment, when the “I”, seeking no longer for gains that “cannot be assimilated with its spirit,” is able to say “All my work is thine.”

The King of the Dark Chamber is the first really symbolic drama by Tagore. Here the symbolism is more clear than in his other plays. The story is purely allegorical and simple. Nobody in the kingdom had ever seen the king. Even the queen did not see him and the king meets her always in a dark chamber. Still there was order and peace in the kingdom. The queen Sudarshana is somewhat egoistic and she is very anxious to see her husband in the daylight. The maid Suranguma, whom the king puts in charge of the Dark Chamber, knew the king well, though she also had never seen him. There were citizens like the grandfather who believed the king to be all powerful and there were citizens also like Virupaksha who did not believe even in the king’s existence. But all were given a place in the kingdom.

However, Queen Sudarshana insists to see the king, in spite of admonitions of the latter and of Suranguma. As a result on the day of a festival, she mistakes one pretender to be the king, and sends a garland. The impostor king encouraged by the conspirators–the kings of Koshala, Kanchi and Avanti–accepts the garland and sends her another one. But soon, unable to hide his own pretensions, the false king reveals himself. The queen, after the recognition, feels wounded with shame and pride and forsakes the king and goes to her father’s kingdom. Meanwhile, the conspirators wage war against her father to seize her. But the King of the Dark Chamber conquers them all, in time, and the conspirators, and the queen, feel repentant and bow at his feet in humiliation.

The allegory in this drama is quite clear. The King stands for God or ultimate Reality, and the Queen, for Maya, and his Dark Chamber represents death. Like the citizens in the play, we are all living in the world created by God. Yet we have never seen Him. Among us there are wise people, who have faith in God, like the grandfather in the play. Also there are tyrants, and atheists, in this world, like Virupaksha. Also there are orthodox hypocrites, like Bhavadatta and Kaundilya, who deceive themselves, because of their own pride in their so-called wisdom. There are rebels like the kings of Kanchi, Koshala and Avanti. Also there are power seeking politicians like the “impostor king.”  

On a still higher level, Sudarshana stands for human intellect, reason or knowledge, and Suranguma stands for faith, patience and perseverance. It is not by the power of intellect or reasoning that man can apprehend God, but by faith alone. Intellect may be very closely related to wisdom as the queen is to the king. But man’s wisdom which excludes faith, can never apprehend God. The message of the play is almost a warning to the man of science.
The impostor king represents the ignorance and self-deceptive tendencies in man’s mind, and the conspirators, the evil forces in it. However, as the grandfather in the song points out, 

“We struggle and dig our own path, thus reach His path at the end.” Thus the drama answers how and why there is evil in life while God is all goodness and perfection. Villains, traitors, and impostors, in this world, are given freedom to do whatever they like and yet they are saved by repentance and are forgiven either in this birth or in a birth to come.

The song of the grandfather is not only a summary of the play, but also an assertion of man’s free existence in the kingdom of God.

“We are all kings in the kingdom of our King.
Were it not so, how could we hope in our heart to meet him?
We do what we like, yet we do what he likes.
We are not bound with the chain of fear at the feet of a slave-owning king.
Were it not so, how could we hope in our heart to meet him?
Our King honours each one of us thus honours his own very self
We struggle and dig our own path thus reach His path at the end
We can never lost in the abyss of dark night
Were itnot so, how could we hope in our heart to meet him?”

The last and perhaps the most difficult of Tagore’s symbolic plays is The Red Oleanders. The characters, however, are full-blooded and human. The symbolism is fully articulated and boldly drawn up and the drama is powerful. The blinding greed of power and wealth, that is relentlessly controlling the destiny of the civilized mankind of today, and the forcing of masses to a life of indignity, ugliness; bestality and soullessness, is the theme of the play. The drama points out that the salvation of mankind is to be sought in a life where knowledge and power help each other in a simplicity of existence, that is harmonious with nature, both animate and inanimate.

The king works incessantly inside an iron-net-work. The governors of the kingdom engage all the masses to rigorously work in the mines for gold. Nandini, a charming (so called) mad girl, attracts the attention, not only of the ruling class, including the king, but many young men from the masses who work in the mines. Among them are Rajan, Bikihu and Kishore. Rajan presents her everyday with red oleanders. Bikshu neglects all work and authority for her sake and feels completely liberated in her presence. While Rajan was returning from his work, to meet Nandini, the governors mislead him to his doom by saying that Nandini was taken prisoner by the king. Rajan rushes into the iron-net-work of the king with a mad fury and meets with sudden death in his ruthless hands. That was also the day of the flagworship. The king comes out of his iron-net-work. Nandini finds, inside, the dead body of Rajan and the king feels repentant for his unconscious cruelty towards Nandini, and himself joins Nandini, and with the masses, to overthrow the government.

The story has a double allegory. As has been pointed out before the king represents the mechanised universe of the scientist and Nandini represents the simplicity, naturalessness and the sheer joy of life. At present all the progress of science seems to aim only at physical comfort and political power. But neither human ambition nor power nor material comfort is an end in itself and man will return ultimately to his own heart after wandering far away from it. At last it is in his own heart that he finds freedom and love to be more durable and perfect than power and material comfort. The king says to Nandini:

“I only want to know you” In these words we are reminded of the disastrous event of the fall of Man, as soon as he ate the fruit of knowledge. Also there is an implication that the objective study of science will be disastrous if the scientist applies it even, to those matters which belong to the subjective realities of man. Love is not a thing to be known, but in itself; it is an experience. Art is no necessity of life according to the scientist. But while the aim of science is to perpetuate the material comforts of life, the aim of art is to weld them into a rhythm of intellectual music which is quite akin to the music of the spheres, the exponent of which is God.

The dead frog in the hands of the king has also a symbolic meaning. The frog existed for three thousand years in its stone shelter and from that the king could discover the secret of immortal life. But later on, the king felt that merely to exist is not life. Life is dynamic and it is worthless without endless experiences, and ever new wonders. He felt bored of its immortality and smashed it to death. By this simple allegorical event Tagore ridicules the foolish desire of mankind to attain immortal life. All of us know immortality became a curse on the fallen angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost and as we all know, we are no better than those fallen angels in our desire for wealth and political power. We wish immortal life because we are never granted it. But when we are really bestowed with it, our immortal life becomes lifeless with the constant boredom of familiarities. The explanation may seem to be merely psychological, but it is also the truth.

In a still higher plane, the king in the play represents God, in the sense that God is anthrophomorphic. There is every possibility that the man of science may evolve his own conception of God, though he may try to exclude all those extraordinary qualities we normally attribute to God. But even that God of science is one day or other liable to enter into the ministry of love as seen in the metamorphosis of the king at the end of the play. In the physical existence of man, it is love alone, (represented in this play by Nandini) that is capable of connecting the individual with the universal-man with God. All other earthly desires entangle us in the cobwebs of utilitarianism which is not at all a means to the higher achievement of the spirit. The love between man and God is quite akin, and similar to love on the physical plane, which is a “messenger from the unsearchable shore of divinity. It is in this
context that Bikshu explains the sort of love he has for Nandini. “She reminds me that there are sorrows, to forget which is the greatest sorrow.” What he means is that the tumultuous, self-sacrificing nature of love may be tragic but its sorrows remind us of the greatest of all sorrows–the separation of map from God. “The pain of desire for the near belongs to the animal, the sorrow of aspiration for the far belongs to man.” What distinguishes man from the immediate animal world is not the desire for material comforts, but the aspiration for the higher orders of being which are quite beyond his physical necessities. But the love here referred to is not to be mistaken for simple futile love on the physical plane. It is like the difference between the love of Rajan and that of Bikshu for Nandini.

Thus Tagore’s symbolism is an art by itself in which “the person in us is sending its messages to the supreme person, who reveals himself to us in a world of endless beauty across the lightless world of facts.” The millions of admirers who have read in Tagore’s poetry, and drama, the hopes, the fears, the aspirations of their own inarticulate souls, know how potent, how vital those messages are, how in them the big and small of human wishes and desires have defined themselves in a pure and universal symbolism.