How old would you say the speaker is in the poetry hero by rabindra tagore
Answers
Though Tagore was influenced by Western dramatic techniques and his plays, as Mohan Lal Sharma pointed out in a Modern Drama essay, “have close affinity with the poetic or symbolist European drama of the present century typified in the works of such writers as Maurice Maeterlinck,” he upheld the classical Indian tradition of drama as the depiction of emotion or rasa rather than of action. He blended this classical element with the folk tradition of Bengali Jatra performance—a combination of group singing, dancing, and acting induced by a trance-like state—to achieve a synthesis of music, poetry, dance, drama, and costume. Consequently, most of Tagore’s plays are interspersed with songs and are either lyrical or symbolic with subtle emotional and metaphysical overtones. The main principle of his plays, as he said himself, was “the play of feeling and not of action.” Judged by the standards of Western drama, therefore, they seem static, ill-constructed, and unsuitable for commercial production.
Tagore’s experiments in dramatic forms extended from his earliest musical and verse dramas in the 1880s, through rollicking social comedies and symbolic plays in prose, to the highly imaginative and colorful dance dramas of the 1930s. Well known in the first category are Valmiki Pratibha (1881), Kal-Mrigaya (1882), Prakritir Pratisodh (1884; published in English as Sanyasi in 1917), Mayar Khela (1888), Raja O Rani (1889; The King and the Queen, 1917), Visarjan (1890; Sacrifice, 1917), Chitrangada (1892; published in English as Chitra in 1913), and Malini (1896; English translation, 1917). All of these, except Malini, are in blank verse, and most of them could be described in Tagore’s own words as “a series of dramatic situations ... strung on a thread of melody.” The social comedies include Goday Galad (1892), Vaikunther Khata (1897), and Chirakumar Sabha (1926); and the notable symbolic plays in prose are Raja (1910; The King of the Dark Chamber, 1914), Dak-Ghar (1912; The Post Office, 1914), Phalguni (1916; The Cycle of Spring, 1917), Mukta-dhara (1922; The Waterfall, 1922), and Rakta-karavi (1924; Red Oleanders, 1925). Among the famous dance dramas are Chandalika (1933), Nrityanatya Chitrangada (1936), Chandalika Nrityanarya (1938), and Syama (1939).
Thematically, Prakritir Pratisodh —which means “nature’s revenge” and which was published in English under the title Sanyasi—was Tagore’s first important play. “This Nature’s Revenge,” he wrote in Reminiscences, “may be looked upon as an introduction to the whole of my future literary work; or, rather this has been the subject on which all my writings have dwelt—the joy of attaining the Infinite within the finite.” In his own words, “the hero was a Sanyasi (hermit) who had been striving to gain a victory over Nature by cutting away the bonds of all desires and affections and thus to arrive at a true and profound knowledge of self. A little girl, however, brought him back from his communion with the infinite to the world and into the bondage of human affection. On coming back the Sanyasi realised that the great is to be found in the small, the infinite within the bounds of form, and the eternal freedom of the soul in love. It is only in the light of love that all limits are merged in the limitless.” Allegorically, the play represented the turning point in the poet’s own life. “This was to put in a slightly different form,” he confessed, “the story of my own experience, of the entrancing ray of light which found its way into the depths of the cave into which I had retired away from all touch of the outer world, and made me more fully one with Nature again.” By 1884, the year of the play’s first publication, Rabindranath had married his child-bride, Mrinalini Devi. He was then 22 and she only 10.
Of these earliest plays, however, Visarjan (Sacrifice) is the best as a drama of conflict and ideas, as Chitrangada (Chitra) is the loveliest as poetry. Sacrifice is a powerful denunciation of violence, bigotry, and superstition. It expresses Tagore’s abhorrence of the popular Bengali cult of Kali-worship involving animal sacrifice. The characters of the play, as Thompson observed, are “swayed by the strong wind of their creator’s emotions—puppets in the grip of a fiercely felt idea.” “The theme of Sacrifice,” Thompson added, “had been implicit in many an obscure page of Indian religious thought. But Rabindranath’s play first gave its protest a reasoned and deliberate place in art.” Chitra is a fascinating poetic play