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 background,
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 back 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.