‘The Devotee’

It is one of the whims of life, that the reputation in one walk of life overshadows the versatility of a genius. People know very well that Tagore wrote short-stories of no mean calibre. They do not hesitate to rank him among the best short-story writers of the world. But this is not because of their knowledge of his short-stories. All his short-stories are not read. Cabuliwallahand Hungry Stones are read; and then no more. Alas, Tagore, the poet, stole much of the show. No doubt, Tagore is primarily a poet. His poetry is tinged with lyrical beauties. “Yet the superb richness that is strewn in almost reckless profusion in the great volume of his verse is also to be found in his short-stories. That is understandable. There is a kinship between the verse and the short-story as literary forms. The short-story was intrinsically suited to Tagore’s temperament and it could carry the strongest echoes of his essentially poetic genius” (Bhabani Bhattacharya). The present writer’s main intention is to draw the attention of the common reader towards a less known short-story of Tagore. It is less known but not less well-written. But how to describe a diamond with a single phrase, while it dazzles the spectator with its brilliance! Well, the short-story is The Devotee.

The short-story as a literary genre has developed to such an extent that nobody, now, doubts its validity. It has come to stay. Now we don’t ask ‘why’. We only ask ‘how’. But this is a question with regard to any literary form, with regard to all literature. Yet, it is this question and the answer to it that lead us to the unencountered treasures of the literature.

The plot of The Devotee is very simple. The narrator in one his visits to the country meets a devotee belonging to the Vishnava cult. This is not a pre-planned meeting. While he is enjoying the beauty of nature, a middle-aged woman comes, and prostrates herself before him, touching the ground with her forehead. She offers him a flower and then goes away. “The whole incident was entirely simple, but it left a deep impression on my mind; as I turned once more to look at the cattle field, the zest of life in the cow, who was munching the lash grass with deep breaths, while she whisked off the flies, appeared to me fraught with mystery.” The next year when he is in the village he meets her again; this time not in natural surroundings but in his own lodge and he observes her more closely. “The most remarkable of her features were her two eyes. They seemed to have penetrating power which could make distance near.” This time he also has a long conversation with her. The most remarkable comment by her during the conversation is: “God speaks to me, not only with His mouth, but with His whole body.” These visits of the devotee to the narrator, thereafter occur very frequently. When everybody in the village is against meeting him, she, undauntedly goes to him to have a darshan. Her view is “I seek Him where I can find him.” “What she meant to say was really this. A mere doctrine of God’s omnipresence does not help us. That God is all-pervading–this truth may be a mere intangible abstraction, and therefore, unreal to ourselves. Where I can see Him, there is His reality in his soul.” While talking, coming, and going, on all these occasions she showers her devotion on him, “she did it to me not as an individual. I was simply a vehicle of her divine worship. It was not mine, but God’s.”

On one of these visits she narrates her story. She was married very early; at the age of fifteen, she gave birth to a boy. Then she was so young that she did not know how to take care of the child. The boy was the joy of his father’s life. One day when she went to the bathing ghat, the boy also accompanied her and then slipped into the river. The death of the child made her mad with grief. Then Guru Thakur, the friend and guru of her husband arrived. Her husband asked him to try to give her some consolation. The Guru used to read scriptures. One day while she was returning from the bath with wet clothes clinging all about her, Guru Thakur saw her and expressed the view that she was very beautiful. It made her realise the insignificance of this world and to crave for truth and truth alone. Thence she departed from her family only to live the life of a sanyasin.

This, in short, is the story of The Devotee. Any, short-story does not, and cannot, stand on the merit of the plot itself. We have to take into account the significance of the plot, the inner meaning of it, if there is any, the technique adopted in the narration of the plot and the characterisation. As we have already seen, the plot of The Devotee is very simple. Its significance rests on this very simplicity. This simplicity is onlya seeming one. It is only a symbol. A writer uses a symbol only to explain a complex and abstract thing. That is where the slight difference of the use of symbolism and that of allegory is to be seen. Symbolism is the mode of explaining complex and abstract things with the help of very simple and known things, whereas allegory is the mode of explaining simple and known things with the help of very complex and abstract things. More often symbolism deals with the spiritual; allegory with the moral. In The Devotee a spiritual experience, not that of a Yogi, but that of a devotee following the bhakti marga, is described. To describe a spiritual experience, it needs a superb gift. Verily, the spiritual experience is a simple one; but only one who has that experience can talk of it in such a vivid manner.

In his early life Tagore came into contact with Nature. Nature is an integrated entity; it has a pervasive character. Tagore fell in love with this pervasive entity. Slowly, his love discovered a God in this Nature. His soul, having discovered a pantheistic spirit in nature, yearned for personal contact with Him. His yearning, his sense of separation from Him and his union with Him, formed the complex theme that dominated a considerable part of his work. But his realisation, that the Life Spirit is pervading all nature and more so in all the human beings, turned him from Nature and God, to humanity. He thought that one can serve God best by serving humanity. All these realisations are quite manifest in his verse. Yet, in his short-stories also, in spite of their prosaic nature, Tagore’s ideas creep in. The Devotee is the best illustration.

The devotee, in the story, is not a particular devotee. She may be any one. For that matter she is all devotees. Her yearning for God is the craving of the human soul for the Eternal Soul. She found her God in the narrator. Thus we see, the narrator of the story is symbolic of the God-element in human beings. So all the while she is worshipping him, offering flowers to him and thinking that she is worshipping God. She sought God and found him.

“A short-story, no less than a long novel, must create characters, and situations that grip and live in the reader’s mind,” wrote Prof. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar in his recently published The Adventure of Criticism. In The Devotee we have such a story. The characters are not too many. In fact, the devotee is the only character that dominates the action; her husband and Guru Thakur are only distant shadows. The story is divided into two parts. In the first part we are introduced to the devotee and her personality is as much a puzzle as it is to the narrator himself. Then, in the second part, the devotee’s past history is given as told by the devotee herself to the narrator. The story reaches a climax in the second part and then we have a sudden denouement. “In the world of mine there were only two who loved me best– my boy and my husband. That love was my God, and therefore it could brook no falsehood. One of these two left me, and I left the other. Now I must have truth and truth alone.” The situations of the story are very gripping and even the dialogue runs on an interesting note:

The devotee said “Now you see for yourself how little their hearts are worth. They are full of poison and this will cure you of your greed.”

“When a man,” I answered, “has greed in his heart, he is always on the verge of being beaten. The greed itself supplies his enemies with poison.”

“Our merciful God,” she replied, “beats us with His own hand, and drives away all the poison. He who endures God’s beating to the end is saved.”

The technique adopted by Tagore in the narration is very unique. Normally, there are two broad types of narration; the personal and the objective. In the first type because of the ‘I’ and the personal touch it brings, the reader, necessarily, feels that he is in the company of one of his comrades. In the second type, the author assumes a sort of omniscient-spectator role. At times, he is at liberty to describe the action and comment on it. In The Devotee, Tagore adopts the first type, the personal, the autobiographical. Even thispersonal method is made use of in two ways. An ordinary character whose part in the action is very little may narrate the story, or an important character of the story, may narrate. In The Devotee Tagore has amalgamated both the methods. In the first part the narrator is Tagore himself, whose interest in the action of the story is more or less like that of the reader. But in the second part the narrator is the devotee herself and she is the main prop of the plot. Fora common reader there may not be much difference between both the parts. But for the more thoughtful and literary auditors there is much significance: “All their value for me lay in the voice that uttered them. God makes the draught of divine life deepest in the heart for man to drink, through the human voice. He has no better vessel in His hand than that; and He Himself drinks His divine draught out of the same vessel.”

In every short-story the writer tries to achieve unity. This is the “unity of motive, of purpose, of action and in addition (in regard to results) unity of impression.” It is this unity of impression that is very important, not only to the short-story writer but to all types of writers. The best literary test of any work is this unity. The Devotee can easily stand this test. But to enjoy a literary work the greatest qualification required is taste. But then de gustibus non disputandum.