Rabindranath Tagores World of Childrens

11
OF BROKEN UMBRELLAS AND

WINGED STEEDS
Rabindranath Tagore’s World of Children’s
Literature and His Philosophy of Education
Dipankar Roy
In the world of children’s literature at the present time, books are

written that embrace a process of large-scale dilution of literary
qualities and in which children are treated as mere infants. Children
are seldom respected in these books as individuals in their own
right. There should be a rule somewhere that children will under-
stand the meanings of the books meant for them only partially, and
the rest of it should remain incomprehensible to them.
(Tagore, Jivansmriti 71)1
The number of textbooks and children’s books that he [Tagore]

wrote himself and had [been] written by his colleagues, as also the
series of books published by Visva-Bharati, known as ‘Lok-Siksha
Granthamala’ and ‘Visvavidyasamgraha’ clearly testify to the
importance that Tagore attached to books and their study.
(Mukherjee, Education for Fullness 352)
Copyright © 2022. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.
BOREDOM!!! SHOOTING!!! SHELLING!!! PEOPLE BEING

KILLED!!! DESPAIR!!! HUNGER!!! MISERY!!! FEAR!!! That’s
my life! The life of an innocent eleven-year-old schoolgirl!! A
schoolgirl without a school, without the fun and excitement of
school. A child without games, without friends, without the sun,
without birds, without nature, without fruit, without chocolate or
sweets, with just a little powdered milk. In short, a child without a
childhood.
(Filipovic, Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in
Sarajevo, qtd. in Cunningham 1)
232 DOI: 10.4324/9781003157762-14
Rabindranath Tagore's Journey As an Educator : Critical Perspectives on His Poetics and Praxis, edited by Mohammad A. Quayum,
Taylor & Francis Group, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/flinders/detail.action?docID=7121524.
Created from flinders on 2022-12-07 01:09:06.
OF BROKEN UMBRELLAS AND WINGED STEEDS
Introduction
In “Chhelebhulano Chharha,” collected in the book of essays, Lokashahitya,
published in 1907, Rabindranath Tagore wrote:
If one thinks deeply, one must arrive at the realisation that there is
nothing as ancient as the child. The adults of the world in differ-
ent countries and in different ages have undergone many changes
according to changes in customs and education systems. But, the
child-figure has remained the same as it was thousands of years
ago. The same ancient infant continues to be born in people’s
homes time and again, and yet it has remained as young, innocent,
guileless and sweet today as it was during the dawn of human
history.
(Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, vol. III: 750)
Tagore’s other observations can counterpoint this view about the child
and childhood. In the “Foreword” to Dakkhinaranjan Mitra Majumdar’s
anthology of traditional Bangla fairy tales, Thakurmar Jhuli, published in
the same year, Tagore, for example, wrote,
Therefore, when a Bengali child listens to the fairy tale, it does not
merely become happy in its enjoyment, but it is as if the music of
Bengal’s eternal fondness enters into its young mind and saturates
the child with the very spirit of Bengal.
(B. Ghosh, Rabindra-rachito Bhumika 22)
Thus, one can form a working idea about Tagore’s schema during the
first decade of the twentieth century (Tagore was in his fifties then) about
the quintessence of childhood and the kind of literature most suitable
for its organic development. Critics have often opined that this schema
reflects the Rousseauistic, liberal-humanist, romantic idea of the child as
a part of nature on the one hand and, on the other, a spirit of cultural
patriotism if one considers the immediate colonial contexts. They have
also drawn our attention in this context to the fact that the swadeshi
movement of 1903–19082 was in full swing in Bengal when the observa-
tions were made.
Hence, a kind of Blakean innocence and the neverland world of rhymes
and fairy tales are often used as essential tropes when Tagore’s contribution
to Bangla children’s literature is assessed.3 The trajectory of such analyses
often hinges on the lines composed by Tagore in the introductory poem of
Sishu, published in 1903:
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On the seashore of endless worlds, children meet.

The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water
is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet
with shouts and dances …
On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams
in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is
abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the
great meeting of children.
(Tagore, The English Writings, vol. I: 129–30)
The discourse of childhood with its prelapsarian innocence and its gift of
wonderment and the need for a pedagogical practice required for the full
flowering of the child-figure into an ideal individual dovetail perfectly with
the romantic idyllic temper of much of Tagore’s writings for children of
this period. This temper sometimes encourages an attitude that would seek
to find children in Tagore’s literary texts who are involved in the act of
an engaged play veering on spirituality (Leela) and who are driven by an
irrepressible wanderlust (“call of the open road”). Characters like Fatik in
“Chhuti” (1892), Tarapada in “Atithi” (1895), Rakhaal in “Debotar Graas”
(1904) and Amol in Dak Ghar (1912) are representatives of such a temper.
However, in this chapter, I shall attempt to locate a different curve in
Tagore’s writings for children and young adults. The educational philoso-
phy of Tagore has taught us that one major drawback of the conventional
education system is that children are treated as mere “children,” and adults
are considered nothing less than “know-alls” in this system. While in real
life, human beings, in the course of their lives, never inhabit a perfectly
“childish” world and never reach a stage of “complete knowledge.” On
the one hand, childhood never leaves us altogether, and, on the other, total
maturity almost always eludes us. Hence, any education system’s ideal
objective should be to encourage young learners to reach adulthood, keep-
ing their child-like curiosity alive all along in their attempts to comprehend
life. In this context, I quote two observations made in two lectures by Tagore
with a gap of eight years (in 1925 and 1933, respectively), identically titled
“My School.” I hope his comments will show Tagore’s steadfast mission to
establish a just and holistic form of education system for children—a system
that he believed would help them know the world through a continuous
learning process. In the first lecture delivered in Japan, Tagore comments,
“Children’s minds are sensitive to the influence of the great world to which
they have been born. Their subconscious mind is active, always imbibing
some lesson, and with it realising the joy of knowing” (Tagore, The English
Writings, vol. IV: 518). In the second lecture delivered in America, which
was subsequently included in his book Personality, Tagore observes:
The young mind should be saturated with the idea that it has been
born in a human world which is in harmony with the world around
234
it. And this is what our regular type of school ignores with an air
of superior wisdom, severe and disdainful .… I believe that the
real object of education is the freedom of mind which can only be
achieved through the path of freedom—though the freedom has its
risk and responsibility as life itself has.
(Tagore, Personality 122, 160; italics mine)
If one studies the curriculum followed in Tagore’s school in Santiniketan

during the poet’s time, one would realise that the school’s academic council
never treated children as learners with yet-to-be-fully-formed intellect. In
Tagore’s institution, the prescribed textbooks in the Bengali courses for
the lower classes could easily figure in the syllabi of courses taught in col-
leges.4 Tagore himself would often teach Keats’s “To Autumn” or Shelley’s
“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” to very young learners. Sometimes the other
teachers of the institution would attend these classes and listen to Tagore’s
discourse. The point to be noted here is that great importance was given to
one particular idea in the pedagogical system in Tagore’s educational phi-
losophy. The idea pertains to the fact that opportunities should be given to
young learners to make attempts to comprehend texts, even if the works are
most likely to remain partially incomprehensible in the end. This possibility
was especially true in the case of literary texts. In the Tagorean education
system, no attempt would ever be made to curb young boys’ and girls’
imaginative horizon by prescribing textbooks with an overt interpellative
approach, offering lessons in morality and ethics only. On the contrary,
the system would be geared towards introducing the learners to the gems
from the world of literature, even if the approach would involve the risk
of students struggling to appreciate the works’ literary qualities fully. That
is probably why Tagore, in his role as a teacher in his school, would often
read out his own poems, sing his songs and recite India’s ancient epics. He
would also write plays celebrating nature’s seasonal cycles and encourage
the students to perform these plays. None of such texts could be categorised
as “works meant only for children” to teach them lessons in morality.
That only follows the point that Tagore would hold similar views vis-
à-vis the literary culture that writers should create for children and young
adults. For him, writers should always strive towards producing literature
for children that could be accepted as classics of literature, not merely as
successful experiments in the field of children’s literature. Tagore himself
wrote many books for children that have spectacularly expanded the hori-
zon of Bengali children’s literature.
Thus, in my chapter, I shall try to chart the trajectory of the different
phases of Tagore’s long career as a writer of children’s literature. My pre-
sent study will focus on tracing the relationship between Tagore’s views as a
philosopher of education, the founder of a school with an alternative system
of education, and a creative writer who was determined to overhaul the
existing tradition of works meant for children. I shall try to trace this both
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in the fields of primers and textbooks and the significant branches of imagi-
native literature: fiction, poetry, drama and the like that Tagore wrote. In
my understanding, scholars who have worked on Tagore’s educational phi-
losophy have not given adequate importance to his career in creative writing
for children. On the other hand, critics who have tried to evaluate Tagore’s
contribution to Bengali children’s literature and young adult fiction have
looked at his corpus primarily as imaginative writings, thereby not paying
sufficient attention to Tagore, the educator. I shall try to address that lacuna
in my chapter. I will attempt to show that as he entered the last stages of
his creative career, Tagore’s views about childhood and children’s litera-
ture underwent radical changes, given the matrix of the changing scenario
of the world-historical forces that he had to witness. Instead of approach-
ing the subject of children’s literature to nourish and nurture young minds,
Tagore began to use children’s literature as a potent weapon to debunk the
“childishness” that he identified in the adult world. From a means of edu-
cating children in his early twentieth-century texts, Tagore’s later writings
for children would become like an indictment against the oppressive forces
of the society, torn asunder by gender, caste, religion and racial hierarchies.
Children become more mature and rebellious in Tagore’s later writings.
They seem to demand, like Zlata Filipovic, whose words I have quoted at
the beginning, their childhood back from the adults. For me, Tagore’s later
writings for children are meant as much for children in educating them in
the ways of the world as for the adults to “teach” them where they have
gone wrong vis-à-vis the attainment of the full potential of the human race
and the shaping of the human civilisation.
If one charts Tagore’s career as a writer of children’s works, one would
also notice a chronotopic transformation in his corpus—from the early
years with the predominance of historical narratives, fairy tales and plays
celebrating seasonal festivals at Santiniketan, and stories based on contem-
porary reality, Tagore gradually took up the allegorical mode and finally
in texts like Khapchhara, Shey, Chharar Chhobi (all published in 1937),
Galpo-salpo and Chhara (both published in 1941) settling for literary
modes like fantasy and nonsense. I shall try to show how in his attempt to
present the child as the civilisational “Other,” Tagore became involved in
a genre-bending exercise in the field of children’s literature. This, in turn,

made his status as a writer for children problematic as far as the tradition of
Bengali children’s literature was concerned.
The Problem of Categorisation and Tagore’s

Career as a Writer for Children
Critics like Buddhadev Basu and Manabendra Bandyopadhyay believe that
apart from the primer Sahaj Path (1930), no other writing for children by
Tagore can be called a work of children’s literature proper. Lila Majumdar
236
thinks that this could probably be due to Tagore being too engrossed in
his poet’s idea of what a child might be. A successful writer for children
herself, she identifies three essential features that are the hallmark of truly
great works of children’s literature. According to her, subjects or treat-
ments which are unfit for young minds should not come within the field of
children’s literature. The presentation and the language employed must be
simple and straightforward. But first and foremost, the primary quality of
a good book for children is that it must pass all the tests of good literature
because the best books for children, like all good poetry, never grow out of
date (Majumdar 175). If we care to follow her three-point formula, it must
be admitted that while many of Tagore’s writings meant for children have
not lost their lustre and relevance, most of them cannot be said to possess
subject-matters and language which are simple and straightforward. She,
nonetheless, considers 20 books or so by Tagore that she thinks Tagore
wrote for children and about children. In this context, it would be relevant
to quote what the editor of an anthology of Tagore’s writings for children
has to comment in the “Introduction”:
His collected works already run into thirty-one volumes, with more
to come. Out of this, enough matter for at least two volumes consists
of writing for young people. This is a much bigger proportion than
with any other of the world’s great poets, writers or philosophers.
(Tagore, Selected Writings for Children 1)
It is, thus, clearly evident that there is no consensus among Tagore scholars
about which of his texts can be classified as children’s writings.
For Tagore, picking up his pen for writing for young minds was purely
a necessity-driven affair at the beginning. When his elder sister-in-law
Jnanadanadini Devi decided to publish a magazine for children in April
1885 named Balak, the onus fell on Tagore to be its chief contributor.
Although the magazine was very short-lived and only 11 of its issues were
published in one year, Tagore made his mark as a writer for children in a
most emphatic manner through his publications in this magazine. Among
the 13 items of the first number, 5 were by Tagore. In the pages of Balak, he
tried his hand at several genres—poems, essays, letters, charades, skits, rid-
dle-plays, one short novel (Mukut) and one long historical novel (Rajarshi),
which was serialised from the third issue of the magazine. A number of these
writings cannot be classified exclusively as works of children’s literature.
Although the novel Rajarshi has two very memorable child characters in
Hashi and Tata that Tagore ever created, its subject-matter and treatment
can hardly be called fit for the young minds—the magazine’s target readers.
The narrative involving court intrigues and raw violence in the political
arena and religious practices is of such a nature that children would hardly
find it easily comprehensible. But, it seems, as it becomes evident from
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Tagore’s observation that I have quoted at the beginning of my chapter,

Tagore never wanted to restrict the range of children’s reading habits only
because they were children. As I have already mentioned, this ideology is
also reflected in later years in the curriculum of Visva-Bharati when Tagore
was trying to formulate a philosophy of education having the needs of the
young learners at Santiniketan ashrama in mind.
Around 1895, Tagore, with the help of Abanindranath Tagore and oth-
ers, planned a series for young readers and named it “Balya-granthabali
Series” as he thought that there were not enough books available for children
to read. Abanindranath wrote in “Shishuder Rabindranath” that it was he
who persuaded Abanindranath to write stories for children (Abanindranath
369). Abanindranath contributed Shakuntala and Khirer Putul to this series,
and Tagore’s contribution was a long poem, “Nadi” (1896), which was
later included in Shishu. Around this time, in 1900, Tagore was experiment-
ing with a new form—story-poems. With their ballad-like qualities, these
poems have subject-matters ranging from religious events during the time of
Gautama Buddha to the exploits of valour, patriotism and sacrifice of the
Marathas, Sikhs and Rajputs. Stories from the folk tradition of Bengal and
episodes from the lives of ordinary villagers also figure in these works. The
poems (some of them are rather long), initially published in two separate
collections Katha and Kahini, were later put together in a single volume
and published as Katha o Kahini (1908). From an aesthetic point of view,
Tagore wanted to invoke the vanishing art of storytelling in an era plagued
by information. Tagore was well aware of the never-ending charms of sto-
ries among the young minds as well as in adults who, according to him, are
equally smitten by the pleasures of listening to a good story. In the section
titled “Stories” in Lipika (1922), Tagore writes:
As soon as the kid learned to speak, he demanded, ‘Tell me stories’

… not only are the children but also people of all age groups are
fascinated by stories. That is why, throughout the world, through
the ages, in people’s homes, oral tales, stories and narratives have
gradually piled up and have turned out to be an immense treasure
trove, unmatched by any other treasure of humanity.
(Rabindra Rachanabali, vol. XIII: 332)
During this period, the country was reeling under the pressure of an oppres-
sive colonial regime. It was also when the individual with exposure to a
western-style education system struggled hard to fashion a new self. The
choice of subjects for the story-poems of Katha o Kahini, therefore, shows a
conscious attempt at an “invention of tradition.” Themes were chosen from
different parts of India and from different ages of this ancient land. Such
themes like self-abnegation for a greater cause, fearlessness in the face of
238
violent oppression and the necessity to shed religious superstition serve the
purpose of gerrymandering the boundaries of an imagined community. In
the process, the chronotope that gets created in the texts comprises a space-
time combination of a vast land of millions of people—the “we” and the
“time immemorialness of an age-old oral tradition.” Children cannot under-
stand the full significance of all stories presented in the verses. It is partly
because, in the spirit of a true storyteller, Tagore keeps the stories free from
explanation. But the stories possess the quality of sharing experiences that
can be passed on through retellings of the story-poems. According to Walter
Benjamin, this is the real signature of the art of storytelling. This feature
of these texts encourages young readers to read the poems again and again
as they incorporate the readings of the texts with their growing-up pro-
cess. The poems provide counsel for the children, and as Benjamin writes,
“Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom” (Illuminations 86).
The following important phase in Tagore’s career as a children’s writer
came in the initial years of the twentieth century when he lost his wife,
Mrinalini Devi, in November 1902. This was a period of great sorrow
and suffering for the poet. Between 1903 and 1907, he lost his daugh-
ter Renuka, Satish Chandra Roy, his protégé at Santiniketan Brahma-
Vidyalaya, Maharshi Debendranath Tagore, his father, and his youngest
son Shamindranath. However, despite these telling blows, Tagore pro-
duced works prolifically that young readers possessing a degree of refined
sensitivity could enjoy. Between 1903 and 1922, Tagore either wrote
or published books like Shishu, Sharodotsav, Dak Ghar, Achalayatan,
Jivansmriti, “Totakahini” (it would later be included in Lipika), and
Shishu Bholanath.
It is a well-known fact that Tagore composed poems of Shishu to detract
the minds of his children after the demise of their mother. On his return
from his tour of America and Europe in July 1921, he wrote poems of
Shishu Bholanath to cleanse himself from the stains of acquisitive capitalism
that he was exposed to in America. But in Young Tagore: The Makings of
a Genius, a psychobiography of Tagore, Sudhir Kakar, the psychoanalyst,
argues that these texts are also, in a fundamental way, Tagore’s attempt to
“recreate” his early childhood. Since in many of the poems Tagore deals
with the intimate relationship between a little boy and his mother, Kakar
infers that:
there are poems of little Rabi at what psychanalysts would call the
‘eve of Oedipus’, when the three-to-four-year-old child’s love affair
with the mother and the maternal universe is at its height before it
is impinged upon by the world of men represented, above all, by
the father.
(Young Tagore 27)
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Despite the profound Freudianism involved in Kakar’s observation, it must

be admitted that writers who cannot revisit their childhood through their
writings will find it difficult to become successful as a writer of children’s
books. At some point, the artist needs to be able to think like a child. With
the help of the memories of his/her childhood, the artist needs to create a
world that children will happily inhabit. In Tagore’s famous poem, “The
Hero,” the poetic imagination helps create a fantasy world where little Rabi
acts like a hero who successfully protects his mother from all the demons
and villains who could harm her:
Mother, let us imagine we are travelling, and passing through a

strange and dangerous country.
You are riding in a palanquin and I am trotting by you on a red

horse.
It is evening and the sun goes down. The waste of Joradighi lies wan
and grey before us. The land is desolate and barren.
You are frightened and thinking—‘I know not where we have come
to.’
I say to you, ‘Mother, do not be afraid.’
(The English Writings, vol I: 149)
Imagination and its chief product, fantasy, according to Kakar, is the inher-
itance of all children, though it is more active in some than others. He finds
in the “palanquin episode” in My Boyhood Days, written in 1940 when the
poet was nearing 80, one instance in which Tagore could minutely recount
how his vivid imagination propelled his fantasies beyond the mundane
world of everyday reality and created an alternative reality where a boy,
under the sway of servants, could feel like a king:
It was to me an island in the midst of the ocean, and on my holidays

I became Robinson Crusoe. There I sat within its closed doors, com-
pletely lost to view, delightfully safe from prying eyes …. The day
wears on, the heat grows intense, the clock in the gate-house strikes
the hour. But inside the palanquin, the day does not acknowledge
the authority of clocks. Our midday is that of the former days, when
the drum at the gate door of the king’s palace would be beaten for
the breaking-up of the court, and the king would go to bathe in the
sandal-scented water.
(Tagore, My Boyhood Days 16–17)
240
Sahaj Path: The Primer Extraordinaire

The noted litterateur Buddhadev Basu commented that
For the learners, at an age when to be able to learn the alphabets is to

be considered as an adequate achievement, Sahaj Path provides the
readers with the first lessons in the appreciation of literature. How I
envy the good fortune of the Bengali children solely for this one book!
(Basu, “Bangla Shishusahitya” 63)
Thus, from Basu’s observation, it becomes evident that the genre-bending

ability shown by Tagore in the field of creative writing for children is dis-
cernible in this primer too. In the Bengali language, this book is a pioneer
as Tagore could successfully blend the requisite qualities of a primer with
distinctive literary values. None of the predecessors in the field of Bengali
primers had achieved that and the list of writers of such texts in Bangla is
very impressive, including stalwarts like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820–
1891).5 But, we must keep in mind that before the publication of the first and
second parts of Sahaj Path in 1930 there was a long preparation for writing
the book. Tagore’s attempts to write a primer started way back in 1889. In
Pocket Book of Rabindranath Tagore, we come across the very first draft
of the book (Kar 11). The second draft of the book can be dated around
1927–1928. In between, Tagore wrote a number of primers, namely Sanskrit
Siksha (first and second parts) (1896), Ingreji Sopan (first and second parts)
(1904), Ingreji Srutisiksha (1909), Paath Sanchoy (1912), Anubad Charcha
(1917), etc. Most of the poems included in the second part of the first edition
of Sahaj Path are selections of the poems from Shishu Bholanath (1922).
When Tagore was busy preparing the final manuscript of Sahaj Path,
Mahatma Gandhi was preparing the country for the Civil Disobedience
Movement. This movement began on 12 March 1930. The first two vol-
umes of Sahaj Path were published in April 1930. In that same year, Tagore
went to Russia. He visited Pioneer’s Commune, an orphanage in Moscow,
on 14 September 1930. Russiar Chithi (his letters from Russia) was pub-
lished in 1931. In Letter Number 6, Tagore wrote about his experiences of
interacting with the students of the commune. The students reminded him
of the Bratibalaks and Bratibalikas of his school at Santiniketan. He was
greatly impressed by the system of self-governance that the students of the
orphanage practised. The practice of fine arts was given a great point of
importance in the school curriculum. This is very relevant for our present
discussion of Sahaj Path. Tagore writes:
One outstanding attribute of this institution is that here the stu-

dents engage themselves in painting and drawing items from the
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DIPANKAR ROY
subjects that they pursue to learn. Consequently, the subjects that

they study get manifested as visual representations in their minds.
Their skills in painting and drawing also develop in the process—
and the joys of creating art blend with the process of learning the
subjects.
(Rabindra Rachanabali, vol X: 574)
Tagore also believed that fine arts and music are essential components of the
education system and in the art of living—no less important than literature
and pure sciences. He established Kala Bhavana, the art and music insti-
tute, in 1919. We, therefore, notice that Tagore tried to produce a primer
in which the use of an evocative language with distinctive literary qualities
would blend with the representation of the letters through painting. Thus,
the linocuts in black-and-white by Nandalal Bose, an eminent teacher of
Kala Bhavana, ended up becoming an integral part of the entire series of
Sahaj Path. Tagore gave complete freedom to the artist in Nandalal. The
artist, too, did not try to draw his pictures as mere reflections of the texts.
The drawings are independent artworks in their own right. Till the eighth
lesson of the first part, the drawings predominate. Neither Barnaparichoy
by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar nor Hashikhushi by Jogindranath Sarkar,
the two most famous primers in the Bengali language before Sahaj Path,
has artistic embellishments as the core of the educational objective hard-
wired into the primer. Tanika Sarkar, in her essay “The Child and the
World: Rabindranath Tagore’s Ideas on Education,” writes, “From the
first page onwards the child, learning her very first letters, is opened up
simultaneously to letters, words, poetry, and pictures. She needs to read
them together, as a process of interanimation” (Sarkar 293). When Tagore’s
copyright expired, publishers of Sahaj Path incorporated colour drawings
by different artists in new editions. But that went against the very aesthetic
and pedagogic designs of the book as envisaged by their creators, Nandalal
Bose and Rabindranath Tagore. About the significance of black-and-white
illustrations in a children’s book, Walter Benjamin writes in his essay, “A
Glimpse into the World of Children’s Books,”
And if, in the coloured engraving, the child’s imagination sinks

dreamily into itself, the black-and-white woodcut, the plain pro-
saic illustration, draws it back out of itself …. Unlike the coloured
pictures, the surface of the black-and-white illustration is arranged
only suggestively and has a capacity for a certain condensation
[Verdichtung]. So the child composes into the picture.
(The Work of Art 227)
Sahaj Path is a genre-bender not only because it introduced a new aesthetic

paradigm in pedagogy but also because, as a primer in Bengali, it was the first
242
to introduce young kids to issues of caste and class oppression in contempo-

rary society. In the last lesson of the second part of the book, Tagore discusses
oppressive social conventions, unjust property rights under the zamindari sys-
tem and unfair police actions in a most unambiguous way. This was a revo-
lutionary move, to say the least. In the next section, I shall try to find the seed
of this rebellious spirit in Tagore’s career as a writer of children’s literature.
Children’s Literature and Tagore: Pushing

the Boundaries of Expectations
Critics often discuss that the last decade of Tagore’s life saw a major change
in the stylistic and thematic trajectory of his literary works. They find it
very significant that from the early 1930s till his death in 1941, he pro-
duced a substantial number of texts that can technically be classified as
writings for children: Khapchhara, Chharar Chobi, Shey, Galpo-salpo and
Chhara. There are at least three texts in which Tagore consistently champi-
ons unreason, and in the process, discards “instrumental rationality,” the
key Enlightenment principle: Khapchhara, Shey and Galpo-salpo.6 In these
texts, Tagore seems to present a mixture of the modes of fantasy and non-
sense that produces a carnivalesque effect. In Khapchhara and Shey, texts
are juxtaposed with Tagore’s drawings which can best be described as “gro-
tesque.” These children’s texts are many light years away from the “sea-
shore of endless worlds” where children congregate. The subversion of both
generic conventions and civilisational principles, and the poet’s anger in
these texts, catch us by surprise. We least expect such tendencies in Tagore’s
works for children for whom “fairy tale” was the genre of choice for a long
time.
Tagore first began to experiment with the generic metastability of fairy
tales in his book Lipika (1922). Critics for long have debated over the prob-
lem of generic classification of the short pieces that comprise this book.
In the debates, we may even see the possibility of considering these pieces
either as prose-poems or as short stories. Interestingly, some of the pieces of
this book show an overt allegorical design. Pieces like “Kartar Bhut,” “Tota
Kahini” and “Ratha Yatra” are written in an allegorical mode that aims to
subvert some common, unexamined and false assumptions rooted in the

prevailing social order—in Barthesian terms, attempts to attack the doxa.7
In Lipika, Tagore introduces a new generic type that, for want of an appro-
priate term, can be classified as “adult fairy tales.” Set against contemporary
reality, the pieces of this book are indictments against the onslaught of colo-
nial modernity. These fairy tales are, in temperament, quite unlike the ones
that Oscar Wilde wrote. Wildean fairy tales are multi-layered allegories in
a kind of semiotic register that can charm young and adults alike. Tagore,
however, primarily addresses the adult readers in these pieces. Or could it
be that Tagore did not wish to make any fundamental distinction between
243
DIPANKAR ROY
young and adult readers? After all, the world inhabited by adults is the same
world where children live.
In Tagore’s fairy-tale world of Lipika, the prince leaves his kingdom and
arrives in a city where the roads are carved with tramlines and officegoers
jostle for space in crowded streets. The prince wears a worn-out shirt, dirty
dhoti and tattered shoes. He has to give private tuitions to make both ends
meet. His city-dweller princess is dark-skinned and belongs to a different
caste. The prince and his princess elope after they fall in love and marry
secretly. Hands of law find them and put the prince in prison. In the end,
when the prince completes his sentence, he finds himself all alone in the city
till death comes and releases him from his exile in this Eliotesque world.
There is another adult fairy tale in Lipika titled “Porir Porichoy” (The
Fairy’s Identity) that deserves special mention. In this narrative, Tagore
introduces a location, a world of alternative reality that he names “Poristan”
(The Land of the Fairies). The prince in this story searches for the route to
reach this land for long till at long last he finds it beside a lake, beneath
the hills. There he meets his fairy, a dark-skinned girl who is an inhabitant
of the forest. The prince marries the fairy and brings her to his kingdom,
only to lose her in the end. The trope of an alternative world of imagina-
tion, which has the power to challenge the brick-and-mortar reality of the
modern world, is what Tagore uses as a foundational principle in creating
the allegorical world of texts like Shey or Galpo-salpo.8 In such a world, the
power of imagination teams up with “greater truth” that Kusmi, a character
in Galpo-salpo, is asked to distinguish from “ordinary truth.” For Tagore,
the genres existing in the literary tradition of children’s literature did not
seem to be equipped to articulate the themes that he wanted to explore, to
say things the way he wanted to say to the children. Thus, Lipika marks
a significant signpost in the roadmap of the artistic adventure that Tagore
undertook during the very last years of his life—an adventure that resulted
in a seismic shift in the world of Bangla children’s literature.
It will be wrong to say that fantasy and nonsense as literary modes were
absent in the tradition of Bangla children’s literature before Tagore. Even
if we do not consider the age-old oral folk forms of literature in which ele-
ments of nonsense and fantasy are present in an unmistakable manner (it is
often believed that in many countries these modes have their roots in tra-
ditional folk literature), in the print culture of Bengal these literary modes
had made their appearance in the works of Troilokyonath Mukhopadhyay
(1847–1919), Upendrakishor Raychoudhuri (1863–1915), Abanindranath
Tagore (1871–1951) and Sukumar Ray (1887–1923). But none of these
writers used those modes as weapons the way Tagore did to subvert the
demons of the contemporary world that were wreaking havoc all across the
globe.
Let us briefly look at what theorists of literature have to say about the
subversive potential of the fantasy and nonsense modes. Pamela S. Gates,
244
Susan B. Steffel and Francis J. Molson, in their book, Fantasy Literature for
Children and Young Adults, write:
Because of its penchant for outrageous what-ifs and its refusal

to respect tradition and its trappings, fantasy can be subversive,
ripping away facades, undermining the pillars of orthodoxy, and
exposing the special pleading and self-interest often lurking behind
convention and respectability.
(6)
In Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature,

Jean-Jacques Lecercle comments:
‘nonsense’ … is the mark of a process not merely of denial but also

of reflexivity, that non-sense is also metasense. Nonsense texts are
reflexive texts. This reflexion is embodied in the intuitions of the
genre. Nonsense texts are not explicitly parodic, they turn parody
into a theory of serious literature.
(2)
To cite a couple of examples that showcase Tagore’s outstanding execu-

tion of the nonsense and fantasy modes in Galpo-salpo the character of
an old man is presented who has invented a language that does not follow
any lexicological rules. We get a glimpse of his “Bugbulbuli” language in
English, which seems equally nonsensical, “The habbarfluous infatuation
of Akbar dorbandically lazertized the gorbandism of Humayun” (Rabindra
Rachanabali, vol XIII: 501). In Shey, the unnamed character, known simply
by a pronoun, “He,” effortlessly creates a fantasy-luncheon for Pupedidi,
the young girl:
I was invited to play cards in Tasmania, a simple game of dekha-

binti. The man of the house, Kojmachuku, and his missus Srimati
Hanchiendi Korunkuna had a daughter called Pamkuni Devi; she
had cooked us a kintinabu meriunathu with her own fair hands ….
That’s just the vegetables. There were great barrels of kangchuno-

sangchai to follow. There was chewed peel of aankshuto, a fruit
very popular in that region. And for dessert, there was a basketful
of iktikutir bhiktimai.
(Tagore, He (Shey) 49–51, translated
by Aparna Chaudhuri)
Tagore’s artistic design included a strong desire to subvert the dominant social
and political discourses of his times and to turn the subversive potential of
nonsense and fantasy literature into the possibility of framing an alternative
245
DIPANKAR ROY
ontology. In his ambush against the materialist civilisation with its principles
of political economy and the “nation-state,” he used these modes as heavy
artillery. Among these texts, Chhara was published posthumously. Rhymes,
narratives depicting social reality, lyrical passages, Lewis Carrol-like word
plays, descriptions of imaginary Swiftian characters, line drawings of fan-
tastical animals—all kinds of heterogeneous elements are put together in
these verses, most of which would defy generic classification. One becomes
surprised when one realises that all of these texts were meant to be read by
children. In the last prose-piece in Galpo-salpo titled “Muktokuntala” (The
Lady with Unbound Tresses), children visit the elderly narrator and demand,
“Grandfather, tell us frankly, do you believe that we are still kids?” and
declare most emphatically, “Fairy tales will not do for us anymore. We have
grown older” (Rabindra Rachanabali, vol XIII: 511). If children have come
of age, it only follows that children’s literature also needs to evolve. Hence,
given the kind of subject-matters, temperament and treatment that these
texts showcase, we can say that Tagore was keen to push the boundaries of
children’s literature—both generically and thematically.
Educating Adults through Children’s Literature

In his “Introduction” to Aparna Chaudhuri’s English translation, pub-
lished with the title He (Shey), Sankha Ghosh draws our attention to the
fact that young writers who were trying to initiate a post-Tagore era in
Bengali literature often criticised the poet for ignoring contemporary real-
ity. For them, Tagore’s works failed to capture the “real,” the harshness
faced by the modern man, as his temperament remained quintessentially
romantic throughout his artistic career. In this connection, I wish to refer to
the poem (Poem Number 6 of Chhara, the collection of nonsense rhymes)
Tagore composed on 17 February 1940. On the face of it, the poem is just
another example of nonsense verse. Each stanza of the poem comprises
descriptions of incidents that defy any kind of logic. But the poet keeps the
last four lines in each of them to record the large-scale deaths and destruc-
tions caused by Hitler, incongruously juxtaposed with a narration of how
different species of domesticated birds are trained to behave inside their
cages. References to the trademark butterfly toothbrush moustache, the

official propaganda blared by the German radio, the sound of the bombs
and guns, murders and mayhems and the sinking of the ships by men-of-
war—the rhyme reads like a running commentary of the march of maraud-
ing Nazi power in western Europe and other parts of the world. History
tells us that on 14 June 1940, the army of Hitler occupied Paris. The poem
ends with the observation:
The world is all topsy-turvy on the other sides of the seas. They are
crushing bones to make a whole new universe out of them. Truth
246
is becoming so unmistakably true in that new world, and false is

turning out to be so terribly false. The good and the bad, the two
giants, are battling it out, and the resultant tremors are causing a
heart attack. The wheels are in motion, and nobody knows what
will happen in the end.
(Rabindra Rachanabali, vol XIII: 103)
In a prose-piece titled “Ddhawnsho” (Destruction) in Galpo-salpo,

Dadamoshai (the grandfather) narrates a story to little girl Kusmi of how the
happy family of Pierre Chopin, the horticulturist, and his daughter Camille,
living in a village near Paris, and their delightful garden are destroyed as
German bombers kill the daughter and devastate the garden (Rabindra
Rachanabali, vol XIII: 506).
Closer home, in a poem composed sometime in July 1937, titled “Achala
Buri” (the Obsolete Old Woman), later included in Chharar Chhabi, Tagore
creates a touching ballad of the caste-ridden village society of contemporary
times. In this poem, the poet presents the character of an old lady who stands
up against the dominant patriarchy and its practices of gender and caste
discrimination. She gives shelter to a helpless widow who is hounded by
society’s bosses for taking up the job of a caregiver in the village hospital. She
nurses a wounded dog to health and keeps an eccentric woman as her house-
maid. Her most potent act of protest is discovered only after her death when
everybody learns that she has donated her money, not to some Brahminical
religious organisation (the common practice of the day by wealthy widows)
but entirely for “Rai Domni,” a poor untouchable woman, who has been a
victim of social injustice (Rabindra Rachanabali, vol XI: 86). So, during this
phase, be it a ballad, a nonsense rhyme, or a fantasy narrative, Tagore, in
his writings for children, had decided to unleash his most savage criticism
against the wrongs of the world that he had witnessed during his long life as
an artist.
In Khapchhara and Shey, Tagore had even cryptically introduced a dis-
course on literary criticism, thereby participating in the debate over the
“modernist” aesthetics that was raging in contemporary Bangla literature.
In Poem Number 20 of Khapchhara, he writes:
The mind is wayward, the eyes are drowsy, and the expression of
the pale face looks as if it will break into tears any moment. The
language is dishevelled, the emotions are all helter-skelter and the
rhymes have gone awry.
The readers complain, ‘It is all so abstruse. We cannot even
make out whether we have understood the poem or not.’ The poet
declares, ‘It is because the dice of my poetry is modernist.’
(Rabindra Rachanabali, vol XI: 18)
247
DIPANKAR ROY
In the twelfth part of Shey, the protagonist declares:
A poet has joined the ranks—his appearance inspired us to hope he

was the New Age incarnate. His poems corrected our mistake: he’s
one of your lot after all. We’ve told him a thousand times, ‘Beat the
backbone of your verses with a club.’ ‘Reflect constantly that all
sense is but nonsense.’ We explained to him, ‘Respect for the mean-
ing of words shows a slavish bent of mind.’
(Tagore, He (Shey) 126)
In texts like Shey, Khapchhara and Galpo-salpo, fantasy and nonsense modes
are not only used to criticise the jingoistic nationalism of the West, resulting
in the Second World War and the caste-ridden, patriarchal society of Bengal
but also to establish the supremacy of the truth of the imagination.9 Motifs
like the Age of Truth, Poristan, the Greater Truth, the Ultrahistorical Age,
the Invisible King’s Palace, only to be seen through the mind’s eye portrayed
in these texts, help formulate an alternate chronotope. This one is more hos-
pitable to children than the one which the adults have been trying to thrust
them into, which, of course, results in, like Zlata Filipovic, the loss of their
childhood. In the chronotopic world created by Tagore, a little girl named
Pupe is told of a wish that runs counter to modernity and its developmental
discourse. It, with the possibility of an ecocritical reading notwithstanding,
belongs to a completely different order of existential understanding:
I had wanted to be a bit of the landscape, stretched over a wide

expanse. It’s the hour of dawn, and now that the month of Magh is
drawing to a close; the wind is restless. In the tossing of the wind,
the old ashvatthva tree seems as lively as a child; the waters of the
stream have broken into a soft babble, and the trees stand in shad-
owy groups on its rolling banks.
(Tagore, He (Shey) 149)
The presence of a child-like vision, buttressed by the newness of the chrono-

topic and generic characteristics of these writings, would surely help adult
readers to locate an agency of the child-figure for whom the modern civi-
lisation has for long been a world of “discipline and punish.” In them, the
adults might even experience a sense of the Freudian uncanny (the return
of their repressed childhood selves?). The adults learn how Sukumar, the
young boy in Shey, with the power of his pure imagination, transforms his
uncle’s tattered umbrella into a winged steed that would fly him so high that
he would reach the land of clouds above. The power that lies behind the cre-
ation of Sukumar’s world of pure imagination reminds the adults that it is
still perhaps not too late to imagine a world that would resemble the paradi-
siacal vision, about which, echoing the Tagorean temper, Walter Benjamin
248
writes in his celebrated essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” “four

moons would illuminate the earthly night, the ice would recede from the
poles, sea-water would no longer taste salty, and beasts of prey would do
man’s bidding” (Illuminations 259).
Conclusion
Thus, only children’s literature and its “metasense” of nonsense could have
offered Tagore the scope for a thoroughgoing critique of contemporary civi-
lisation when, for Tagore, the time was so out of joint from 1939 to 1941,
the year he died. With the creative overdrive resulting in the publication
of several texts in so short a time, we see how Tagore embraced this field
as his own and left it as a branch of creative writing most philosophical.
Therefore, in this chapter, I have not attempted a comparative study of
Tagore and his predecessors or contemporaries in this field, for I consider
Tagore’s works to be sui generis.
I end the chapter by quoting the concluding lines of “The Child,” the
only major poem that the poet originally composed in English:
The poet strikes his lute and sings out:

‘Victory to Man, the new-born, the ever-living.’
They kneel down, the king and the beggar, the saint and the sinner,
The wise and the fool—and cry:
‘Victory to Man, the new-born, the ever-living.’
(The English Writings, vol I: 485–86)
Notes
1 All translations from Tagore’s writings, unless stated otherwise, are by the author
of the chapter.
2 This chapter follows the date of the movement suggested by historian Sumit
Sarkar, which differs from other sources, e.g. Stanley Wolpert and Banglapedia.
3 See, for instance, Buddhadev Basu, “Bangla Shishusahitya”; Lila Majumdar,
“Tagore as a Writer for Children”; Manabendra Bandyopadhyay, Rabindranath:

Shishusahitya; and Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, “On the Seashore of Endless Worlds:
Rabindranath and the Child.”
4 For a detailed account of the teaching and learning process practised in Tagore’s
school in its early years, see Pramatha Nath Bishi, “Sikkhok Rabindranath”
(Rabindranath as a Teacher), Rabindrath O Santiniketan (1908).
5 For a scholarly and densely theoretical discussion of the historiography of prim-
ers in Bengali, see Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, Gopal Rakhal Dwandosamas (2013).
6 For a wonderful theorisation of “instrumental rationality,” “communicative
rationality” and their relationship with the “colonisation of the life world” in the
context of the post-Enlightenment world, see Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An
Unfinished Project” (1997).
249
DIPANKAR ROY
7 For an in-depth analysis of the genealogy of the concept of doxa and its uses by
Roland Barthes, see Anne Herschberg Pierrot, “Barthes and Doxa.”
8 It would be an interesting study if an attempt was made to contrast the allegori-
cal mode adopted by Tagore in these texts with what Walter Benjamin theorises
about the role of allegory in German Baroque drama, which is how, in allegory,
art resides in the ruin that history is and how it seeks “to make historical content
… into philosophical truth” (Benjamin, Origin 182). However, that approach lies
outside the scope of this chapter.
9 For a detailed discussion of Tagore’s attempt to outgrow “the political” and “the
historical” in Shey, a fantasy in 14 parts, see Dipankar Roy, “All That is Solid
Melts into Air: A Study of Rabindranath’s He (Shey).”
Works Cited
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2000.
Bandyopadhyay, Sibaji. Gopal Rakhal Dwando Samas: Uponibeshbad o Bangla
Shishusahitya. Kolkata, Karigar, 2013.
———. “On the Seashore of Endless Worlds: Rabindranath Tagore and the Child.”
The Cambridge Companion to Tagore, edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 254–67.
Basu, Buddhadev. “Bangla Shishusahitya.” Sahitaychinta. Kolkata, Dey’s Publishing,
2009.
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John
Osborne. London, Verso, 2003.
———. “A Glimpse into the World of Children’s Books.” The Work of Art in the Age
of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, translated by
Edmund Jephcott et al., and edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and
Thomas Y. Levin, London, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008.
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London, The Bodley Head, 2015.
Bishi, Pramatha Nath. “Sikkhok Rabindranath.” Rabindrath O Santiniketan.
Kolkata, Visva-Bharati, 1908.
Cunningham, Hugh. Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500. 3rd
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Gates, Pamela S., Susan B. Steffel, and Francis J. Molson. Fantasy Literature for
Children and Young Adults. Oxford, Scarecrow Press, 2003.
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Ghosh, Sankha. “Introduction.” He (Shey), translated by Aparna Chaudhuri, New
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of Modernity, edited by Maurizio Passerin d’Entreves and Seyla Benhabib,
Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1997.
Kakar, Sudhir. The Young Tagore: The Makings of a Genius. New Delhi, Penguin
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Lacercle, Jean-Jacques. Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian
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Majumdar, Lila. “Tagore as a Writer for Children.” Rabindranath Tagore: A

Centenary Volume 1861–1961, edited by Jawaharlal Nehru. New Delhi, Sahitya
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Mukherjee, Himanshu Bhushan. Education for Fullness: A Study of the Educational
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2002, pp. 427–42.
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11

OF BROKEN UMBRELLAS AND

In the world of children’s literature at the present time, books are

The number of textbooks and children’s books that he [Tagore]

BOREDOM!!! SHOOTING!!! SHELLING!!! PEOPLE BEING

232 DOI: 10.4324/9781003157762-14

On the seashore of endless worlds, children meet.

If one studies the curriculum followed in Tagore’s school in Santiniketan

a genre-bending exercise in the field of children’s literature. This, in turn,

The Problem of Categorisation and Tagore’s

Tagore’s observation that I have quoted at the beginning of my chapter,

As soon as the kid learned to speak, he demanded, ‘Tell me stories’

(Rabindra Rachanabali, vol. XIII: 332)

Despite the profound Freudianism involved in Kakar’s observation, it must

Mother, let us imagine we are travelling, and passing through a

You are riding in a palanquin and I am trotting by you on a red

It was to me an island in the midst of the ocean, and on my holidays

Sahaj Path: The Primer Extraordinaire

For the learners, at an age when to be able to learn the alphabets is to

Thus, from Basu’s observation, it becomes evident that the genre-bending

One outstanding attribute of this institution is that here the stu-

subjects that they pursue to learn. Consequently, the subjects that

And if, in the coloured engraving, the child’s imagination sinks

Sahaj Path is a genre-bender not only because it introduced a new aesthetic

to introduce young kids to issues of caste and class oppression in contempo-

Children’s Literature and Tagore: Pushing

subvert some common, unexamined and false assumptions rooted in the

Because of its penchant for outrageous what-ifs and its refusal

In Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature,

‘nonsense’ … is the mark of a process not merely of denial but also

To cite a couple of examples that showcase Tagore’s outstanding execu-

I was invited to play cards in Tasmania, a simple game of dekha-

That’s just the vegetables. There were great barrels of kangchuno-

Educating Adults through Children’s Literature

cages. References to the trademark butterfly toothbrush moustache, the

is becoming so unmistakably true in that new world, and false is

In a prose-piece titled “Ddhawnsho” (Destruction) in Galpo-salpo,

In Poem Number 20 of Khapchhara, he writes:

In the twelfth part of Shey, the protagonist declares:

A poet has joined the ranks—his appearance inspired us to hope he

I had wanted to be a bit of the landscape, stretched over a wide

The presence of a child-like vision, buttressed by the newness of the chrono-

writes in his celebrated essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” “four

The poet strikes his lute and sings out:

“Tagore as a Writer for Children”; Manabendra Bandyopadhyay, Rabindranath:

Ghosh, Baridbaran. Rabindra-rachito Bhumika. Kolkata, Visva-Bharati, 2002.

Majumdar, Lila. “Tagore as a Writer for Children.” Rabindranath Tagore: A

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