ENGLISH

(PROJECT REPORT)

TOPIC: Character sketch of AMAL

( Play- The Post Office by Rabindranath Tagore)

Submitted To: Submitted By:

Mr. Vijay Kumar Charu Lata
UILS Roll no. 204/20
PU Chandigarh Sem : 3rd , Sec D
B.COM LLB. (HONS.)
UILS , PU CHD.

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
In the accomplishment of this project successfully, many people
have best owned upon me their blessings and the heart pledged
support, this time I am utilizing to thank all the people who have
been concerned with this project.
Primarily I would thank god for being able to complete this
project with success. Then I would like to pay my sincere gratitude
to my teacher MR. VIJAY KUMAR , University Institute of Legal
Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh , whose guidance has been
the ones that helped me patch this project and make it full proof
success. Her suggestions and instructions have served as the major
contributor towards the completion of the project.
Then I would like to thank the entire faculty of University
Institute of Legal Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh , for
always motivating to give the best.
Lastly I would like to thank all my classmates and my family
who helped me a lot.
Charu Lata
Roll no. 204/20
Sec D Sem 1

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 CONTENT
1.About: Rabindranath Tagore 4

2.About Play: The Post Office 5

3.About: Amal 6-9

4.My Review About Amal 10-11

5.Bibliography 12

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 About Rabindranath tagore

Rabindranath Thakur was a man of various talents.

Rabindranath Tagore's father's name is Debendranath
Tagore, and his mother’s name is Sarada Devi.
Rabindranath Tagore's birthday is on the 7th of May,
1861, and he was born in Calcutta, Bengal Presidency
then. He was recognised by people all over the globe for
his literary works - poetry, philosophies, plays and
especially his songwriting. Rabindranath Tagore was the
man who gave India, it’s National Anthem. He was one of
the greatest entities of all time and the only Indian to
receive a Nobel Prize.
Rabindranath Tagore is primarily remember for his
beautifully lyrical songs and poems. Yet his dramatic
achievement is no less great. His place are chiefly
remember for their unique structural design, memorable,
also psychological plots and very well conceived
characters. Symbolism of a play like The Post Office is
brilliant in the sense that Tagore could artistically include
in it one of the most nobel well-thought out characters
portraits. A part from several other characters in the
play, Amal deserves to be mentioned particularly.

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 About Play :The Post Office
The Post Office is a wonderful expression of the totality
of experiences of Tagore’s own childhood and the
childhoods of Amal, Phatik, Subha and Tarapada. When
the call of the Mother Universe comes, the child-hero who
is confined within the rigid walls of sanction becomes
restless to answer that call.
Amal, like Tarapada, the hero of Atithi, is born under a
star that makes him restless to go out in quest of the
unseen and unknown. Tarapada slips away silently into
the dark night spread out against the cloudy sky never to
return ever to the human fold.
In that sense, The Post Office registers Tagore’s
complaint against the regimentation of the natural life; it
also makes a plea for greater interaction with nature. In
his own childhood, Tagore did not like to be confined to
the four walls of the house, with caring servants doing his
errands; he did not want to become learned; instead, he
craved to ‘go out and see everything that there is.’
Likewise, the yearning to go out, to be a part of the vast
festival of life, whose sounds are conveyed on the soft
breeze that caresses every leaf and flower in the early
hours of dawn or when the sun sets, makes Amal
‘restless’, ‘athirst for faraway things.

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 Amal, the central character of
The Post Office

Amal, the central character of The Post Office has, like

Phatik and Tarapada, a limitless zest for life. The sight of
boats arriving from faraway places makes Tarapada
restless; a wandering mendicant excites his curiosity; a
band of gypsies infuses into him a desire to travel far
away from familiar surroundings towards the great
unknown. Amal differs from Tarapada in that he cannot
run away physically from the familiar; sickness has
confined him indoors, and he feels dissociated from
everything beautiful and romantic in life. It seems to
lacerate his ligature with the unseen and the faraway. He
feels that because the earth cannot speak, it raises its hill-
like hands to beckon human beings to go to the hills, to go
beyond the hills towards ‘the Great Unknown’.

The child-hero who sits by the window sees the signal and
feels a strong urge to go out. Again, when Amal says,
‘Wish I were a squirrel,’ he expresses in general terms the
very dream that almost every child-hero in Tagore has
dearly nursed in the depth of his heart. However,
endowed as Amal is with the ability to abnegate the self,
he easily becomes part of the existence of all that appears
before him. At one moment, he is the prospective

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bridegroom of the Curd seller’s niece; the nest moment,
he is either a little fakir begging for alms or a beggar-boy
pushing Chidam’s pushcart, or even one of the Champa
brothers blooming on the end of the thinnest branch of a
champa tree and calling out to his sister Parul.

In the character of Amal we note the normal curiosity of a

sick boy about the world around him, and the stretch of
imagination that psychologists associate with prolonged
illness; but he also shows an awareness of a nimbus that
irradiates al that he hears and sees. Amal is in love with
green earth, and the hum of the work-a-day world is for
him the language of light; the confinement to a narrow
room whets his appetite. In addition, although he is too
young to know the reality of death, he has a strange
apprehension of the approaching end; but this has
absolutely no terror for him; he really looks forward to it.
It is for him the starting point of an exciting adventure.
His boyish imagination affects a kind of transposition; he
views his present stage as a waiting station, and the
repressed spirit of adventure of a physically incapacitated
boy becomes an adventure with the divine. Thus, Amal’s
death at the end of the play is a construction of the
skeptic’s ― he does not really die. The village doctor was
about to finish him off; but none can die when the Royal
Physician takes charge.

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Tagore’s handling of the character of Amal has been
delicate and full of feeling. The language that he uses is of
unsurpassable naturalness; the dialogue flows in even
unhurried streams. We understand and sympathize, as
everyone falls in love with Amal. Tagore does
successfully ‘what both Shakespeare and Kalidasa failed
to do, brings on to the stage a child who neither ‘shows
off’ nor is silly.’ To conclude, Amal represents the man
whose soul has received the call of the open road ― he
seeks freedom from the comfortable enclosure of habits
sanctioned by the prudent and from the walls of rigid
opinion built for him by the respectable. But Madhav, the
worldly wise, considers his restlessness to be the sign of a
fatal malady; and his adviser, the village doctor, the
custodian of conventional platitudes ― with his
quotations from prescribed text-books full of maxims ―
gravely nods his head and says that freedom is unsafe and
every care should be taken to keep the sick man within
the walls.

However, there is the Post Office in front of his window,

and Amal waits for the King’s letter to come to him direct
from the King, bringing to him the message of
emancipation. At last the closed gate is opened by the
King’s Royal Physician, and that which is death to the
world of hoarded wealth and certified creeds brings him
awakening in the world of spiritual freedom. Amal’s
aspiration and the Divine response meet, and the result is
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new birth, not physical death. The Divine has come to the
parched human heart, and there will now ensue the burst
of a new spring of life and joy. At the call of the Great
Beyond, Amal unlatches the window of his soul to let it
merge with the Soul of the Universe. He will now,
perhaps, somewhat like the hero of T.F. Powy’s Mr.
Weston’s Good Wine peddle the ‘wine’ of divine Grace
among his customers. Nevertheless, whatever its deeper
symbolism, the figure of Amal embodies the author’s own
reminiscent longing as a child for freedom from the
confines of his regimented home.

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 My review about AMAL’S character
AMAL depicts Tagore’s Concept of Childhood. Amal is
first of all highly imaginative. His imagination follows
that of his never ending curiosity, almost about
everything. His imagination forces him to think at one
time to be with the world of squirrels, at the other time he
imagines himself belonging to the land of parrots. It is
Amal, who represents the ever thirsty mind to cross its
mortal limitations, to go beyond the The horizon, to see
the unseen to know the unknown. Amal's mind is forever
fresh as dew on that 'dewy innocence' he feels himself
unstoppable limitless to feel the 'call of the wind'.

Not only that, Amal's friendly nature is also highly

worthy, enabling him to make friends with every
unknown personality every uncertain, unacknowledged
moods are modes of behaviour. His superb curiosity
strong sense of imagination, lovable, tender appearances
help him to make acquainted with the Diary man, the
Watch men, the Head man, the group of boys, the flower
Seller, Sadhu and many others.

Amal's character is extremely attractive in the sense that

he never allows himself to be bored with others. Each and
every time he keeps himself constantly busy, simply with
his own inner resources. Like other materialistic people
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how Amal needs no more the company of group
gathering or with relatives. His mind forever prepares
Amal to have a talk with the parallel reality of existence -
to see that the secret of nature, to feel the magical
abundance, to hanker after god's grace and finally to be
united with all encompassing force of the world.
This is Amal the most cutest creation penned by India's
greatest son of the soil the Nobel laureate Rabindranath
Tagore. He shines all over the play Amal grace spreads
thus a nameless charm through the entire drama.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

➢ BOOK
PROMISING PLEADERS BY DR. CHANCHAL
NARANG

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