Fathers and sons

A sensitive portrayal of Rabindranath Tagore vis-à-vis his eldest son was the highlight of the play, Rabi O Rathi. By Utpal K Banerjee

In the perennial tussle between parental connects with the child, it is the mother who is clearly a winner. Beginning from the umbilical cord and  nurturing the infant, the mother has a built-in advantage bequeathed by nature. Motherhood is a “fact”, as they say, while fatherhood is an “accident”, occasionally — one may quip — to be confirmed by the mother. The father comes into the child’s life by building his relationship almost through a step-by-step process. For a son, perhaps the father has some gender advantage: of being held up as a model. This comes most dramatically in focus from the gory annals of India’s Mughal dynasty, where every ruler without exception,  since Humayun’s time, ascended the royal throne by unleashing a blood-thirsty sword and ruthlessly eliminating or imprisoning the closest relatives, duly following their father’s violent footsteps.

Looking at our political history, one gets a mixed message. There is the case of Motilal Nehru, the noted lawyer from Allahabad, an activist of the Indian national movement and an important leader of the Indian National Congress — serving as its president twice — whose only son Jawaharlal was also duly called to the Bar and rose to his full national stature in the Congress. The rest, of course, is history. But take the less fortunate case of Mahatma Gandhi, whose eldest son Harilal, too, wanted to go to England for higher studies and hoped to become a barrister as his father had once been. But Gandhi firmly opposed this, believing that a Western-style education would not be helpful in the struggle against British rule over India. Eventually, rebelling against his father’s decision, Harilal renounced all family ties in 1911 when he was barely 23. He became detached even from his five children after his wife Gulab’s death in a flu epidemic. The story with his three siblings — Manila, Ramdas and Devdas — was not too edifying either. Or take the really unfortunate case of “Deshbandhu” Chitaranjan Das, who was an advocate of communal harmony and Hindu-Muslim unity, a champion of national education and the vernacular medium, and a believer in women’s emancipation and widow re-marriage. Great as a jurist, and dynamic as a leader of Bengal, Chittaranjan was an apostle of Indian nationalism. However, all that is known about his only son Chiraranjan is that the latter was a spoilt brat and was finally found dead in a gutter, following a particularly profligate night.

Before one turns to the Tagores as a father-son duo, our case in point, one may take a quick peek at the entertainment world as well. Prithviraj Kapoor, for one, was a pioneer of Indian theatre and of the Hindi film industry, who started his career as an actor in the silent era of Hindi cinema, yet was associated with IPTA as one of its founding members.  He went on to establish the Prithvi Theatres that made an early all-India mark in realistic depiction of characters. All three of his sons — Raj Kapoor,  Shammi Kapoor and Shashi Kapoor — made illustrious careers in the Hindi film industry. The eldest, Raj Kapoor, also known as “the greatest showman of Indian cinema”, was not merely a noted Indian film actor but also a producer and a director of Hindi cinema.

Rabi ‘O’ Rathi, presented recently by the Advertisers Club of Kolkata, was a sensitive portrayal of Rabindranath Tagore vis-à-vis his eldest son, Rathindranath, his second child. In an aristocratic household, long marked by passion for excellence — from commerce to cuisine to couture, from literary arts to fine arts to indigenous arts — Tagore’s new-born evoked considerable interest from one and all. The elder Satyendranath, India’s first civilian, maintained in his sophisticated downtown bungalow a “family diary” for random comments, which immediately attracted speculations about the infant’s assured longevity, or, grave doubts if this would ever happen. Regardless, the child “Rathi” grew and, as is usual with a youngster, was full of pranks.  Tagore wrote endearing “nonsense rhymes” on Khoka’s innocent wonder — confided in his mother — about his pre-occupied writer-father as to whether he (the Dad) was up to any good.

Conceived by Chaitali Dasgupta and fleshed out by painstaking research by Sujoyprasad Chattopadyay, this and other gems from their private life were culled and conveyed. The pen portraits of the duo were punctuated by dramatised reading of anecdotes and scholarly comments; recitation of poetry and exquisite period songs rendered by Sasha Ghoshal and Suchhanda Ghosh.

There were the happy days of the adolescent “Rathi” in the ancestral estate at Selaidah (where the fun-loving father would think nothing of throwing the boy into turbulent river waters and then retrieving him by swimming along). We came to know of the travails of Rathi  as one of the first five students at the austere Brahmacharya Ashram in 1901 — bare-footed, clad with only a cloth-piece to wrap  the upper torso and eating frugal vegetarian meals.  

Rathi was devastated when his mother, Mrinalini, succumbed to her ailments in 1903. Soon after, in 1906, he went to the Illinois University, USA, to graduate in Agricultural Sciences   (so as to “benefit” Santiniketan on his return). In 1909, the 21-year-old youth married a comely 16-year-old widow, Pratima, the first-ever widow re-marriage in the conservative household. The couple were blissful and Rathindranath found some stability as they lived all by themselves, looking after the Selaidah estate. He beautified Santiniketan’s rugged terrain along with artist Nandalal Bose and may well have been our first landscape artist. All of these milestones were etched with consummate compassion in the narrative web.

What came through gradually was the elder Tagore’s overwhelming concerns for Santiniketan’s manifold welfare and repeatedly urging “Rathi” to forego his own personal predilections. Tagore had even asked him to accompany him for foreign tours and develop contacts. The father urged the son to take over the ashram’s work as secretary in cooperation with PC Mahalanabis. He especially asked Rathindranath to return to Santiniketan, when, as a young scientist-alumnus of Illinois University, the latter had secured an appointment there, bought a house and, together with his wife, procured even the household goods and kitchenware. He came back unquestioningly and devoted himself later — as the central institution’s first-ever Vice Chancellor — to his new responsibilities in the face of stringent financial constraints. If he had any personal regrets, he kept them under complete wraps.

The amply-illustrated narrative brought out how things were made increasingly difficult for him to continue as VC once Tagore passed away in 1941. Matters came to a head by 1948 and he decided to leave — he was literally “hounded out” — Santiniketan in 1953. He moved to Dehra Dun where he found a niche in his own dwelling called Mitaali, engaging himself in gardenscape, paintings, handicrafts and occasionally making perfumes. He obviously felt very lonely and disappointed, seldom venting his disillusionment except to a good friend Elmhurst — now at Darlington, back from Santiniketan — once in a while. When Tagore’s birth centenary came up in May 1961, he was completely ignored and he died later in the same year, perhaps a broken man.

By the end of the evening, it was amply evident that Rathindranath was a multi-talented and essentially a good-hearted person, perhaps protected a lot by his celebrity father but unable to cope with machinations of a scheming world alone. His initial aspirations, growing disillusionments and the ultimate tragedy strangely resembled those of Gandhi’s eldest son, Harilal, like whom — strikingly enough — he, too, was born in 1888.