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notes
I
t is a familiar and true perception
that on the Indian subcontinent,
there exists a virtually unbroken
and very powerful tradition of imbuing
the land, its geography and landscape
with symbolic, often divine significance. Our cultural landscape lends itself to interpretation as a country-wide
network of pilgrimage places associated
with geographic features whose abstract meanings overshadow completely the attributes of their physical being.
It is more than possible that the factual
condition of a geographic feature, say a
river or hill appears immaterial in comparison to the overwhelming spiritual
strength which its possession of this
transcendent quality implies.
ABOUT
Ideally the outlines of symbol and actuality would coincide: river waters
would not just be symbolically pure,
but scientifically so, forests and mountains would remain pristine, and there
would be no gap between spiritual and
temporal objectives.
RABINDRANATH
TAGORE
THE PRINCIPLE OF UNITY
AND THE LANDSCAPE OF BENGAL
In our realisation of the truth of existence, we put our emphasis either upon the principle of
dualism or on the principle of unity.
India holds sacred, and counts as places of pilgrimage, all spots which display a special beauty
or splendour of nature.
Rabindranath Tagore, Creative Unity (1922)
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FACING PAGE
Fine arts outdoor class rooms at Santiniketan
Photo courtesy: Anuradha Puri Rathore
That is hardly the case, and the lamentable disconnection between the timeless values of symbolically spiritual
landscapes and the everyday world in
which we live appears increasingly unbridgeable. The securing of these symbols, so vital to environmental integrity,
is a scientific as well as a technical task,
but it is also something of a conceptual
exercise, part of a larger quest seeking
traditional precedents for specifically
Indian perceptions of landscape.
Unity
The letters and literary works of Rabindranath Tagore show, in detail, a
poet’s vision of his world. In the broadest sense, from a philosopher’s point
of view, this was a vision dominated
by his own close observation of Nature and the idealisation of ancient India as a civilisation of ‘forest-dwellers’
and the forest hermitage1 where the
principle of unity rather than that of
duality prevailed: ‘in the level tracts of
Northern India men found no barrier
between their lives and the grand life
that permeates the universe. The forest
entered into a close living relationship
with their work and leisure, with their
daily necessities and contemplations…
the view of the truth, which these men
found, did not make manifest the difference, but rather the unity of all things.’
‘When are you coming to meet me
underneath the trees?’ asks an ascetic
village woman of the great poet when
she comes to see him. Later she looks
in pain as the flowers on his table are
about to be thrown away and replaced
by fresh ones from the garden; her
gesture of reverence for the discarded
flowers touches Tagore to write: she pitied me who lived (according to her) prisoned behind walls, banished away from
the great meeting place of the All…. I felt
that this woman in her direct vision of the
infinite personality of all things truly represented the spirit of India.
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W. B. Yeats,2 short poem The Indian
upon God (‘Crossways’, 1889), in
which each living thing identifies itself
with the divine, expresses similar sentiments. Yeats was Tagore’s contemporary and a Nobel Prize winner (1923).
He wrote the Introduction3 to the first
edition (1912) of Gitanjali. In it he reports an account by an Indian visitor, of
Tagore in meditation —
‘once, upon a river, he fell into contemplation because of the beauty of the landscape,
and the rowers waited for eight hours before they could continue their journey’.
The work of Kalidas finds prominence
in Tagore’s thoughts on the relationship of man to his environment; as the
first rains of the monsoon quench the
fields, the ‘poet of old Ujjain’ is revered
and remembered: ‘I wrote yesterday that
I had an engagement with Kalidas, the
poet’, he writes in a letter late in June
1892. A powerfully vivid portrayal of
the monsoon sky, written just a day or
so earlier4 —
Swollen masses of the deepest indigo blue
were piled, one on top of the other… looking like the puffed out moustaches of some
raging demon… under the jagged lower
edges of clouds there shown forth a bloody
red glare, as through the eyes of a monstrous sky-filling bison…
— is serendipitously evocative of cloud
descriptions in Meghadutam, for instance verses 15 and 19 5.
These letters are a part of a collection published as Glimpses of Bengal
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notes
(1920), in which the life of the villages
and the rural landscape of Bengal are
a pervasive backdrop, if not the central subjects. It is not a mere record,
though. They are presented as Tagore
experienced them in a formative period
between the age of twenty-seven and
thirty-five, in his own words ‘the most
productive period’ of his literary life.
With crystal-like clarity, simple narratives open a magical window to the
Bengal countryside, demonstrating at
the same time how a landscape can be
read and understood so as to yield profound insights about the larger issues of
existence.
Water
Sacred rivers and their myriad tributaries traverse the plains of Bengal before
the confluence of the Ganga with the
sea; fields and villages are dotted with
pukurs (ponds and lakes) which themselves are said to represent Ma Ganga,
encircled and shaded by the trees typical of the region. ‘Water Is God himself,
and He who sustains the earth’; it is central to the landscape of Bengal.
So, while speaking of a kind of water
landscape peculiar to the region – the
beel – which resembles neither a marsh
nor a lake, but is an area of shallow still
water formed when a stream or river
encounters low-lying land and spreads
sheet-like over it, inundating the rice
fields, but allowing the crop to grow
through – he draws a comparison with
poetry and prose. The river is poetry,
its constrained flow a symbol of the
vibrancy of life, the banks represent
the discipline of metre; ‘prose is like the
featureless, impersonal beel… the country
people call these beels “dumb waters” –
they have no language, no self-expression.’
At another place, a light-hearted simile
develops from the boulder-marked
footprints of dried-up streams common in the scarred landscape of the Purulia district. The dry boulder-strewn
beds of these erstwhile watercourses
recall for him the English nursery story
of children lost in the woods, who left a
trail of pebbles to find their way back:
‘these streamlets are like lost babes in the
great world into which they are sent…
they leave stones…to mark their course…
But for them there is no return journey!’
The poet was observing the landscape
in a particularly artistic way. Another,
unrelated context serves to explain6–
Satyajit Ray is describing his experience of rural Bengal in 1949 as an assistant with the celebrated Jean Renoir:
‘What really fascinated me was his way
of looking at things – landscapes, people,
houses and a hut, clustering banana trees
by a pond with water hyacinths. The ‘aahs’
and ‘oohs’ that punctuated his words were
always in response to something seen with
a great painter’s eye…’
Trees
The region is replete with place names
derived from the names of trees, for example Jhautala ( Jhau - Casuarina spp),
Bakultala (Bakul - Mimusops elengi),
Beltala (Bel - Wood apple), Amtala
(Aam - Mango), Jamtala ( Jam - Jamun),
Keoratala (Keora - a type of mangrove),
Neemtala (Neem - Azadirachta indica),
Battala (Bat - Banyan) and so on. ‘Tala’
literally means ‘underneath’ but when
associated with the name of a tree, it
denotes a certain place or neighbourhood. Often, the existence of an extensive garden also inspires the name of a
place like ‘Bakulbagan’ or a garden of
Bakul trees and ‘Jorabagan’ signifying
twin gardens.
In a passage whose main effect is to
evoke with extraordinary emphasis the
idea of the tree as a living personality,
a primordial guardian and companion,
Tagore imagines himself when the
earth was born: ‘I must have been one
of the trees sprung from her new formed
soil…’ . As ever, the imagery is scientifically flawless: ‘I was drinking the sunlight with all my being…. holding fast and
sucking away at mother earth with all my
roots’. And again, it is subliminally reminiscent of Kalidas, when he describes,
in the same paragraph, the gathering of
the shade-giving clouds comforting his
‘tree incarnation’ with a tender touch.
Over the centuries a tree is diversely reborn, he suggests; his communion with
trees is mystical: ‘whenever we sit face
to face alone together, various ancient
memories, gradually, one after another,
come back to me’.
At this point, an ironical interlude is
useful for making a connection between this, what one might otherwise
imagine as only a poet’s fantasy, with
the very real issue of tree preservation
today. Juxtapose these sublime feelings
with the currently popular concept,
couched in typical quasi-technical jargon, of ‘compensatory planting’, where
the cutting of mature trees is justified
on the grounds that, say ten new trees
will be planted. A modicum of elementary logic and some insight would reveal
that a mature tree represents the accumulated energy silently gathered over
decades, perhaps a century or more.
It demands a minimum of resources
from the earth, and no attention from
humans. Its gifts are probably unquantifiable — comfort, visual delight, the
sound of the breeze through its leaves,
spiritual symbolism, and a connection
with the infinite cycle of life.
It will be a long time, if ever, before the
new trees will provide anything like
the same quantum of amenity, and in
the meantime they consume resources,
energy and labour while they are being
nursed, and there is nothing to replace
the huge green parasol that has gone.
What is offered, in so many development oriented forums, as a reasonable
and pragmatic solution is revealed as an
illusion, while a poet’s ‘illusion’ might
actually direct our thoughts towards
some real answers.
The ‘Ordinary’ made Profound
The veneration of nature is almost
always correctly seen as the centrepiece of any theory about the Indian
landscape, and the discussion tends
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FACING PAGE
On way to Santiniketan...
Photo courtesy: Anuradha Puri Rathore
towards seeking how, over an extended
period of history, this ancient point of
view is manifest in the establishment of
tradition and in dealing with the physical arrangement of habitable space. The
search yields a grand view of the universe, cosmic in scope, mystical in content, and for many, esoterically opaque.
It is Tagore’s genius that elucidates,
and raises our awareness of these exalted symbolic and sacred connotations
through the actual everyday scenes of
rural Bengal, investing the landscape
with meaning, emotion, and immeasurable aesthetic value: it is the ‘ordinary’,
made profound.
More than a century has gone by since
Tagore wrote. As we look at attitudes
to landscape today, especially the proliferation of somewhat ersatz ‘cuttingedge’ design styles, it would seem as if
what these great masters of the poetic
vision — Kalidas, Tagore, Ray even, and
so many others — showed us with such
precision and love, needs to play a major
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part in contemporary landscape theory; so that in cities and in village fields,
on the coast and on the river-beds, in
valleys and on hillsides, we do not continue to turn our profound birthright
into something even less than ordinary.
The principle of unity is important:
where landscape and inhabitant are
perceived as one, neither is harmed.
The opposite perception is one of alienation and inequitable exploitation.
According to Tagore, ‘The hermitage
shines out, in all our ancient literature, as
the place where the chasm between man
and the rest of creation has been bridged’.
As the gap between city and village expands, both culturally and materially,
there is a need to look at the common
rural landscapes of everyday agriculture (not just the spectacular scenes of
Incredible India) with great empathy
and participation, not as the remote
and incomprehensible abode of strangers. Of course, the ‘hermitage’ is gone
for ever, but many refuges and islands
of serenity remain.
References
The author gratefully acknowledges the kind
assistance of Suchandra Bardhan for her note on
cultural practices in relation to the landscape,
and Madhup Mazumder who was very generous
with his time and literature from his library.
1. Rabindranath Tagore; Creative Unity; Rupa
and Co. 2002
2. W. B. Yeats; Selected Poems; Macmillan 1956
3. Rabindranath Tagore; Gitanjali; UBSPD 2007
4. Rabindranath Tagore; Glimpses of Bengal;
Macmillan India 1985
5. Kalidasa; The Loom of Time; Penguin Classics
1989
6. Satyajit Ray; My Years with Apu, A Memoir;
Penguin Books 1996
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