Spring/Basanta/2015

One of the greatest benefits of being Bengali, is having Rabindranath lay out the parameters or provide frameworks for all significant emotion, viewing and feeling. Most Bengalis are raised within a tradition of Rabindrasangeet. Therefore, although, as I look out onto my verandah, typing in my room at 11.15 a.m., on a Sunday morning, and want to talk about Basantakal, the words and music from Rabindranath’s song ‘Basantibhuvanamohini’ ring through my ears, and the words provide a frame for my feelings.

One way of charting whether one grows or not emotionally, psychologically and also spiritually, is through the index of love of Nature, of the capacity to thrill to natural beauty. Rabindranath too at one point had said, that there was no lovelier sound than that of the musical human voice. I don’t know. I thought so too. But oh, the persistent call of the Kokil in spring! It drives me crazy. I feel I want to stop all my work, that work, which professional life imposes on all of us, and listen to the bird cry. Ki korbo, ingrejisahityadwara o je sensibility informed—taibhulteparina, Romantic kobirapakhikekiasadharonpradhhanyeinadieyecchilen.

Kokilerdakbaccha der hanshir moto. Abadh. Niyomjanena.nijerkhushite deke chole. Ektu them e abar-abar-abar. Ananda je shimahiny hoi—bisheshkore je anandeatmatustirknonjthakena.Shelley  proshnorekhechilen skylark erkache—‘ogotumikikoreetoanandegangao? Amaiektushekhaona.taholeamiamarmortyyo jammer koshtobhule jai?”

Bangla words shiktehoccheyi. As I write the kokila has called three times already—sa re gama  padhani. Have you noticed that it is a certain incredible musical scale that it follows?

Nature is not always happy. At least I don’t think so. When May comes, I curse the fact that I live in Kolkata. Rabindranath may have seen beauty in the ‘prokhorotapan o tape,’ but I don’t.

So as I look out from my verandah, upstairs, at 424 G Block, at eight in the morning, the sight is breathtaking. The kanchon is still in full bloom. That is one thing about Basanta. It is very, very temporary.

And yes, the fullness that one finds in Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Basantibhuvanamohini’ has the structured fullness of Art. Inspired bySavitri’s (great South Indian singer, living at Shantiniketan at that time)Meenakshivandana, set to raagBibhas, the reference to the ‘shyamalaprantere’,  ‘bonobonantare’ ‘pikosangeet e’ has something ornamental and studied about it, and that always happens when one tries to fit untrammelled Nature into the careful proportions of an art object. And, like Keats’s Grecian Urn, this is classical art. ‘BasantiBhuvanamohini’ does not have the unplanned excess of the Kokila, calling out ever so frequently, ever so obstreperously, ever so wildly and abundantly. Art cannot match Nature, although it is only through Art that Nature, may be memorialized in certain ways. 

The symphony of color, pale purple pink of the kanchan, with a crow gently roosting its eggs, the radhachuda, coming out with its tender green small leaves, the yellow bougainvillea and the profusion of the Kokila’s song, I wonder how to contain all this beauty within myself.

I request my friend Madhubani Ghosh to please put the Romanized Bengali words into Bangla type if possible, and I remember both Aniruddha Deb and she, great nature lovers, and the latter, a passionate bird lover!

Without human beings, how does one ever get to know the magical impact of Nature? So the human being, remains the ultimate reference point. As Rabindranath tells Einstein during his meeting with the great scientist in the 30’s of the last century, ‘the cosmos is a human view of the cosmos,’ and Einstein says in rejoinder, ‘that is purely a human view of the cosmos,’ Rabindranath says in reply, ‘there is nothing outside the human view/mind’. My quotations are approximate—if one wishes one could read Rabindranath’s ‘Religion of Man.’

Have to add a note on Vivekananda in this context. Rabindranath came much later to the view in Religion of Man, that God/Ultimate Spirit resided in the lowest of the low, and the humblest of the humble; ‘tiniachenjekhanechashachashkore.’ Swamiji was by no means anywhere even near Rabindranath in poetic or artistic talent, but his heart and his capacity to feel for the downtrodden, the deprived and the excluded, MUCH, MUCH, greater.

Once during a lecture tour of America, a black porter had come up to Swamiji, shaken his hand profusely and said that he was very happy that one of them had risen so high. Swamiji happily and robustly shook his hand. When an American friend/host who was with him at the hotel elevator point, asked him why he had not pointed out that he was not black, Swamiji said, ‘Rise at the expense of another? Vivekananda was not born to do that?!!!

These are golden moments that one has to treasure within oneself if one knows them. If Rabindranath set one kind of an absolute standard of beauty and poetic thought, Vivekananda set another! Let us be happy that we know about both of them.