I Won't Let You Go (44 page)

Immediately after completing the translation project which led to the
present
book, I went on to undertake an interdisciplinary project, in collaboration with other research colleagues, on looking carefully at Tagore’s use of colours in his writings and visual art. This investigation resulted in the following book: Dyson, Adhikary et al.,
Ronger Rabindranath
(Ananda, Calcutta, 1997).
Subsequently
I wrote an article in English summarising our main findings,
entitled
‘Rabindranath Tagore and His World of Colours’, which was published in July 2001 in the web magazine
Parabaas
(www.parabaas.com/rabindranath/ articles/pKetaki2.html). A paper adapted from this article was presented by me at an international Tagore conference at the University of Toronto in
November
2005 and is available in
Rabindranath Tagore: Reclaiming a Cultural Icon,
edited by Kathleen and Joseph O’Connell (Visva-Bharati, Calcutta, 2009).

In poem no. 106 of
Gitanjali
, translated for the present edition, the phrase ‘suffering’s red glare’ is a characteristic Tagore colour image. There is an ambiguity in his literary use of the colour red, which occasionally has
traditional
festive associations, but more often has a negative connotation, connected with death, darkness, violence, suffering, shame, embarrassment, humiliation etc.

271.
Song No. 39:
The second stanza of this song uses two technical terms of classical Indian music,
meed
and
murchhana
; I have translated the ideas instead of introducing the terms, so that the images can have direct impact on the reader. 

Achchhod:
literally, ‘that which has transparent waters’, the name of a lake in the seventh-century Sanskrit work of fiction,
Kadambari
. See the note on ‘The Victorious Woman’ in the Notes section.

Aghran/Agrahayan:
the eighth month of the Bengali calendar and the second month of autumn, mid-November to mid-December.

Ajay:
a river that rises from the Rajmahal Hills of Bihar, flows through West Bengal, and falls into the Bhagirathi.

amloki:
a beautiful deciduous tree with feathery foliage and sour-astringent fruit which is valued medicinally and also used as a condiment, the
Emblica
officinalis
, Gaertn., Euphorbiaceae, the same as
Phyllanthus emblica,
L., of the same family.

areca:
Bengali
supari
, the tall, slender, elegant, feather-leaved areca palm,
Areca catechu,
L., Arecaceae (Palmae). Its nuts, resembling nutmegs, are sliced and eaten, sometimes with betel leaves. The word
areca
is ultimately of South
Indian
origin.

Arjun:
Arjuna in Sanskrit, a celebrated character in the epic
Mahabharata
, one of the five Pandava brothers. For the reference in ‘Tamarind Flower’, see the entry on
Chitrarath
below.

Ashadh:
the third month of the Bengali calendar and the first month of the rainy season, mid-June to mid-July.

ashok:
an evergreen tree with a dense crown of dark green leaves and clusters of lightly scented flowers which are at first orange and then turn scarlet. The young leaves of the ashok tree have a pretty reddish tinge and its flowers are one of the major beauties of springtime. Its current botanical name has been given to me as
Saraca asoka,
(Roxb.) de Wilde, Caesalpiniaceae, but the curious are likely to find it often referred to as
Saraca indica,
L., of the same family, subsumed in the larger order of Leguminosae. Its earliest Latin name was
Jone-sia
asoka,
Roxb., after Sir William Jones.

ash-sheora:
a shrub the twigs of which are used to brush the teeth, the
Glycosmis
pentaphylla,
(Retz.) DC., Rutaceae, which would seem to be the same as
Glycosmis pentaphylla,
Corr., and
Glycosmis Retzii
of the same family.

Ashwin:
the sixth month of the Bengali calendar and the second month of the post-rains, mid-September to mid-October.

Badrinath:
a town in Uttar Pradesh, high up in the Himalayas, close to peaks of the same name, and a famous centre of pilgrimage.

Baishakh:
the first month of the Bengali calendar and the first month of
summer
, mid-April to mid-May.

banana:
the fruit of the banana tree is familiar to everybody in Britain, but those who have not travelled to the tropics will not know what the tree looks like. Strictly speaking, the
Musa sapientum,
L., Musaceae, is not a tree but a herbaceous plant with a trunk that is a cylinder of encircling leaf stalks pressed close together (Thomas H. Everett,
Living Trees of the World
(Thames and Hudson, London, 1969), p. 87). Sanskrit poets often likened a woman’s shapely thigh to the trunk of a banana tree. From the top of this distinctive trunk emerge
large flapping rectangular leaves of a soft yellowish green colour. The
predominant
impression the banana tree makes is of leafiness and greenness. ‘
Young-banana
-leaf-green’ is an expressive Bengali way of naming a certain shade of green. The large leaves are used as disposable plates. At night moonlight on the flapping leaves can make the tree look like a veiled woman beckoning, and this resemblance is a fruitful source of ghost stories.

Bankipore:
an important town in Bihar, close to Patna.

banyan:
Bengali
bot
, the
Ficus benghalensis,
L., Moraceae, the spreading
branches
of which send down shoots which take root and become additional trunks. Spreading itself in this manner, one tree can eventually cover a very large area. The shady banyan tree plays an important part in Indian village life. The
curious
are likely to find the name of this tree more often than not entered under the broad family name of Urticaceae. The word
banyan
came to English from Gujarati, via Portuguese, and is ultimately of Sanskrit origin; the name was first given by Europeans to a particular tree of this species growing near
Gombroon
(modern Bandar Abbas) on the Persian Gulf, under which
banyans
or Hindu (presumably Gujarati) traders had settled and built a small temple.

Baruna:
a river bordering Benares that joins the Ganges. The name of the city, properly Varanasi, derives from the two rivers, Varuna (or Varana) and Asi, which enclose the principal part of the city and fall into the Ganges.

Baruni:
a river of this name exists in eastern Bengal (Bangladesh) at latitude 24.35N, longitude 90.58E, and I have traced it in a 1927 Government of India Survey map. Did Tagore choose this name in the poem ‘Impossible’ to evoke the magic of his youthful days in the riverine landscape of eastern Bengal, when he lived in houseboats and went up and down the rivers? The name has a strong association with water itself, meaning the daughter of Barun (Skr. Varuna), who in later mythology is the god of the oceans, a kind of Indian Neptune. Baruni or Varuni rose from the waters at the time of the churning of the oceans and is the presiding deity of wine. There is also an association, through the sound of the name, with the mythological river Baitarani (Skr. Vaitarani) which encircles the underworld, an Indian Styx.

Baul:
See the note on poem no. 13 of
Shesh Saptak
in the Notes section.

bel:
a small climbing shrub of the jasmine family, usually clipped down to a low height in gardens, with fragrant white flowers, the
Jasminum sambac,
(L.) W. Ait., Oleaceae.

Benares:
the celebrated sacred city of the Hindus on the Ganges in Uttar
Pradesh
. See the note on Baruna above.

betel leaves:
leaves of the
Piper betle,
L., Piperaceae, sweetish and pungent at the same time, which are rolled, for chewing, into little triangular packets with areca nuts and other ingredients inside them. The word
betel
is ultimately of Sanskrit origin and has journeyed to English via Malayalam and Portuguese; the Bengali word commonly used is
paan
.

Bethune School:
initially known as the Victoria Girls’ School, was founded in Calcutta in 1849 by the British administrator J.E.D. Bethune. Targeted at the daughters of the Hindu upper classes, it was the first public institution for the education of girls which was not under the control of Christian
missionaries
. After Bethune’s death in 1851, it was maintained for five years by Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General of British India, from his private purse,
after which it was taken over by the government. It had to struggle to establish itself; Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, the noted activist for female emancipation, was involved in its management for many years. By the closing decades of the 19th century Bethune School and its collegiate extension, Bethune College, had become trail-blazers in female education in Calcutta.

Bhadra:
the fifth month of the Bengali calendar and the first month of the post-monsoon season, mid-August to mid-September.

bigha:
a unit of land measurement, approximately a third of an acre.

black drongo:
the
phinga
or
phinge
, a common bird of the Bengali
countryside
, belonging to the Dicruridae family, brisk and busy, with a long forked tail which it dangles as it perches on a tree or a telegraph wire. It sometimes sits on the hump of a grazing cow or buffalo, from where it swoops on insects dislodged from the grass by the movements of the feeding animal. Black drongos are valued in farms because of their depredations on insects.

boinchi:
a low compact spiny shrub that bears berries. When ripe, the berries are dark purple – nearly black – in colour and sweet in taste. The Latin name given to me is
Flacourtia indica,
(Burm. f.) Merr., Flacourtiaceae. I have also seen it called
Flacourtia sepiaria,
Roxb., Bixineae, with variants
Flacourtia ramontchi
and
Flacourtia cataphracta
.

bokul:
an evergreen tree with a dense crown and small, fragrant, star-shaped flowers,
Mimusops elengi,
L., Sapotaceae.

cajan:
Bengali
arhar
, a variety of pulse that is made into dal,
Cajanus cajan,
(L.) Millsp., Fabaceae, identical with
Cajanus indicus,
Spreng., Leguminosae.

camellia:
a shrub belonging to the tea family,
Camellia japonica,
L., Theaceae, bearing showy flowers.

casuarina:
Bengali
jhau
, the tall straight-stemmed
Casuarina equisetifolia,
Forst., Casuarinaceae, with jointed near-leafless branches that look like huge
horsetails
and rustle in the wind. ‘Its so-called leaves are really jointed branches bearing a whorl of minute scale-leaves’ (Satyendra Kumar Basu & Rammohan Dutta,
Trees of Santiniketan
(Visvabharati, 1957), p. 50).

Chaitra:
the twelfth month of the Bengali calendar and the second spring month, mid-March to mid-April.

chakravaka:
literally, the bird ‘with the speech of wheels’, so called because of its screeching cry, known in colloquial Bengali in the shortened form of
chakha
(male) and
chakhi
(female), which are the actual words used in the original of Song no. 6 translated in this volume (beginning ‘Sunshine and shadows play hide-and-seek today’). This bird has a strong symbolic meaning in Indian bird-lore. The male and the female of the species are supposed to spend the night apart, calling to each other from opposite banks of a river, thus representing the faithful couple doomed to stay apart. Known as the Brahminy Duck in old Anglo-Indian terminology, the bird is identified in
Hobson-Jobson
as the
Casarca rutila
or ‘Ruddy Shieldrake’: ‘constantly seen on the sandy shores of the Gangetic rivers in single pairs, the pair almost always at some distance apart’ (Col. Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell,
Hobson-Jobson,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969, p. 112).

chalta:
the
Dillenia indica,
L., Dilleniaceae, an evergreen tree bearing large white scented flowers and globose fruits which consist mainly of the enlarged
sepals which are hard outside and fleshy inside. The fruit is made into sweet and sour dishes.

chameli:
a flowering creeper of the jasmine family. The Latin name given to me is
Jasminum grandiflorum,
L., Oleaceae.

champa/champak:
an evergreen tree bearing very fragrant yellow-orange flowers with longish petals,
Michelia champaca,
L., Magnoliaceae.

Chandi:
one of the many names of the Mother Goddess. She is the same as Durga or Kali.

Chariot Festival:
the annual festival, held in the monsoon month of Ashadh, in which the god Jagannath (‘Lord of the World’, an aspect of Vishnu) is
carried
in procession on a grand chariot pulled by devotees. The festival is
accompanied
by a country fair in which children are well catered for and where there are toy chariots on sale. It is from this festival, especially the one held in Puri, Orissa, where the principal temple of Jagannath is situated, that the English word
juggernaut
is ultimately derived.

Chitrarath:
Tagore seems to have made a mistake in his reference to Chitrarath in ‘Tamarind Flower’. A Gandharva of this name (Sanskrit Chitraratha) does exist in the
Mahabharata
, but far from being a vanquisher of Arjuna, he was in fact vanquished
by
him. His chariot too was burnt by Arjuna. Because of the prayer of his distressed wife Kumbhinasi and at the intercession of
Yudhisthira
, the eldest of the Pandava brothers, Chitraratha was afterwards released by Arjuna, became a friend of his, and there was an exchange of gifts between them. It seems that Tagore has mixed up two Gandharvas, because there is another Gandharva in the
Mahabharata
named Chitrasena, a courtier of Indra and a teacher of music and dance in Indra’s heaven, who fits the reference partially, but again, not totally, because Chitrasena was never a vanquisher of Arjuna either. Chitrasena was a friend of Arjuna during the latter’s sojourn in Indra’s heaven and taught him dance and music. He actually vanquished Duryodhana, the head of the Kaurava brothers, but released him at Yudhisthira’s request after being nearly overcome in battle by Arjuna.

coconut:
remember that the tree that bears coconuts, the
cocos nucifera,
L., Arecaceae, is a tall and elegant palm, often with a leaning trunk, crowned by long dark-green pinnate leaves that seem to comb the air as it blows through them. A group of rustling coconut trees contributes greatly to the beauty of the landscape in which it occurs. In commercial terms the tree is the world’s most valuable palm and produces numerous products from ropes to oil. Every part of the tree is used. It is certainly very important in India’s economy.

Darjeeling:
a hill resort and important town, 7000 ft. above sea-level, in the north of West Bengal. The British regarded it as ‘the most important
sanatorium
of Bengal’ (
Handbook for Travellers in India, Burma and Ceylon
( John Murray, London, 13th edition, 1929), p. 486). Both Everest and Kanchenjunga are visible from here. Teas grown in the tea gardens of the Darjeeling district are regarded by connoisseurs as ‘the champagne’ of Indian teas.

date tree:
is likely to be the wild variety,
Phoenix sylvestris,
Roxb., Arecaceae, a native of India, valued specially as a source of molasses and toddy, rather than the
Phoenix dactylifera,
valued for its fruit. Remember that in either case it is a palm tree with its characteristic shape.