Glimpses of Bengal

Glimpses of Bengal

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Title: Glimpses of Bengal
Author: Sir Rabindranath Tagore
Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7951] [This file was first posted on
June 4, 2003]

Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO Latin-1
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, GLIMPSES
OF BENGAL ***

S.R.Ellison, Eric Eldred, and the Distributed Proofreading Team

GLIMPSES OF BENGAL
SELECTED FROM THE LETTERS OF
SIR RABINDRANATH TAGORE
1885 TO 1895

INTRODUCTION
The letters translated in this book span the most productive period of
my literary life, when, owing to great good fortune, I was young and
less known.
Youth being exuberant and leisure ample, I felt the writing of letters
other than business ones to be a delightful necessity. This is a form of
literary extravagance only possible when a surplus of thought and
emotion accumulates. Other forms of literature remain the author's and
are made public for his good; letters that have been given to private
individuals once for all, are therefore characterised by the more
generous abandonment.
It so happened that selected extracts from a large number of such letters

found their way back to me years after they had been written. It had
been rightly conjectured that they would delight me by bringing to
mind the memory of days when, under the shelter of obscurity, I
enjoyed the greatest freedom my life has ever known.
Since these letters synchronise with a considerable part of my
published writings, I thought their parallel course would broaden my
readers' understanding of my poems as a track is widened by retreading
the same ground. Such was my justification for publishing them in a
book for my countrymen. Hoping that the descriptions of village scenes
in Bengal contained in these letters would also be of interest to English
readers, the translation of a selection of that selection has been
entrusted to one who, among all those whom I know, was best fitted to
carry it out.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE.
20th June 1920.

BANDORA, BY THE SEA,
October 1885.
The unsheltered sea heaves and heaves and blanches into foam. It sets
me thinking of some tied-up monster straining at its bonds, in front of
whose gaping jaws we build our homes on the shore and watch it
lashing its tail. What immense strength, with waves swelling like the
muscles of a giant!
From the beginning of creation there has been this feud between land
and water: the dry earth slowly and silently adding to its domain and
spreading a broader and broader lap for its children; the ocean receding
step by step, heaving and sobbing and beating its breast in despair.
Remember the sea was once sole monarch, utterly free.
Land rose from its womb, usurped its throne, and ever since the
maddened old creature, with hoary crest of foam, wails and laments

continually, like King Lear exposed to the fury of the elements.
July 1887.
I am in my twenty-seventh year. This event keeps thrusting itself before
my mind--nothing else seems to have happened of late.
But to reach twenty-seven--is that a trifling thing?--to pass the meridian
of the twenties on one's progress towards thirty?--thirty--that is to say
maturity--the age at which people expect fruit rather than fresh foliage.
But, alas, where is the promise of fruit? As I shake my head, it still
feels brimful of luscious frivolity, with not a trace of philosophy.
Folk are beginning to complain: "Where is that which we expected of
you--that in hope of which we admired the soft green of the shoot? Are
we to put up with immaturity for ever? It is high time for us to know
what we shall gain from you. We want an estimate of the proportion of
oil which the blindfold, mill-turning, unbiased critic can squeeze out of
you."
It has ceased to be possible to delude these people into waiting
expectantly any longer.