Letters from a Young Poet Read Online Free PDF

unselfconsciouslyin the letters exchanged between her and her fiancé before their marriage. ‘You are such a very good girl, Bee—I wish I were like you,’ she reports her friend ‘Lil’ (Lilian Palit, daughter of Loken Palit, family friend of the Tagores) saying to her in English one evening during an intense conversation around the news of her engagement. The person she’s engaged to has no doubts in this regard, ruminating more than once on what a really good person she is—‘
Tumi satyi bhāri lakshmi meẏe
’ (You really are such a very good girl). 9 As Chitra Deb has commented, ‘Nobody else could attract the poet’s entire self to themselves in writing. But Indira’s identity does not end with this; rather, this is where it begins.’ 10 Rabindranath’s young, talented and beautiful niece was also an accomplished woman in her own right, only the thirteenth Bengali woman graduate, and the first Tagore from the male lineage (her cousin Sarala, daughter of Rabindranath’s eldest sister, preceded her in this) to graduate. She read French and English honours, obtaining a BA degree in 1892, and was ranked first in her year and awarded the Padmavati gold medal. Both she and her husband were French scholars, and she called him ‘
Mon ami
’ in her letters for lack of an appropriate Bengali equivalent (although, in the first instance, she did address him as ‘
suhṛdbar
’ (friend/well-wisher), and then said defensively, ‘
Sambodhan dekhe hāňscho?
’ (Are you smiling at the form of address?). Her Bengali is alive and clear, sparkling and strong; her uncle described her language as ‘lustrous’. Her tangible contribution to the culture of her time lay not only in the elusive arena of her influence and presence but also substantially in the fields of music (she notated a great many of Rabindranath’s songs) and music theory, autobiography and memoir and, notably, in the domain of the essay form, at which she excelled, and in translations from English and French into Bengali.
    Born in 1873, Indira Debi was twelve years younger than her uncle, the youngest brother of her father, the distinguished Satyendranath Tagore, the first Indian to enter the Indian CivilService. Satyendranath’s family—his wife, Jnanadanandini Debi (an influential, educated and independent woman, a pioneering symbol of women’s emancipation and creator of the modern Indian sari), son, Surendranath, and daughter, Indira—were very close to Rabindranath who often stayed with them in their home throughout his life. In his teenage years, preceding his voyage out to England, Rabindranath stayed with his brother in Ahmedabad, acquiring English customs and the English language. Subsequently, he spent time with them during Satyendranath’s postings at Satara and Bombay, and even in the city of Calcutta, where he would escape the family home at Jorasanko to their quiet nuclear home in Park Street for long periods. His friendship with the children—Indira (five) and Suren (six)—began in England, when he went for the first time in 1878 to their home in Brighton as a seventeen-year-old.
    Rabindranath had a lifelong attachment to children—he loved them and they loved him to a fault—and here he had the first opportunity in his life to give his heart to two children who would remain among the closest relations he would have amid so many in his family. In Brighton, they were amused by the strange Bengali accent in which he spoke English, but they got along famously. Indira wrote later that one of his tricks then with children was to sing songs in funny ways; so ‘he would start singing the song ā
ju moraṇ ban bole
in a medium tempo and then go faster and faster, until towards the end, when his lips would seem to keep trembling and shaking, we would be in splits, simply helpless with laughter’.
    At the time that these letters are being written to her, Indira is between the ages of fourteen and twenty-two, an eminently