Tag: Rabindranath Tagore

‘The Postmaster’ by Rabindranath Tagore, translated by Utsa Bose

For many years, literally all I knew of Tagore were those beautiful lines of poetry, “Those who speak to me do not know that my heart is full with your unspoken words / Those who crowd in my path do not know that I am walking alone with you”. Then I spent a while in Bangladesh, and I got the sense that Tagore means something to people there in a way I’m not sure any writer does to people in the UK or Western Europe. Also while there, I heard and really liked some of his songs. ‘Phagun Haway Haway’ jumps to mind (the Arnob version). 

So when I at last got round, about a year and a half ago, to reading a story of Tagore’s, I had high expectations. Nevertheless, I was completely blown away by it. 

I don’t want to reveal anything about the plot. I’ll just say this story somehow has a strong connection for me with a sculpture in this little garden right in the centre of Regent’s Park, where, in a previous life, I would sometimes go for my lunch breaks; this sculpture was of, as I remember it, a small girl standing defensively over a lamb; it had an inscription, announcing that the garden was dedicated to the protectors of the vulnerable. The story also makes me think of two other short or shortish stories I really love, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s ‘The Little Prince’ and Andrey Platonov’s ‘The Return’.

I’ve read a few more Tagore stories since, all good, none this good. By the way, did you know Freaky Friday is essentially a Tagore story? Called ‘Wishes Granted’. Crazy times.

First published in Bengali in 1891. Utsa Bose’s English translation was first published in Asymptote Journal in 2020 and is available to read here

‘The Postmaster’ by Rabindranath Tagore, translated from Bengali by Utsa Bose

As an emigrant and an immigrant (not necessarily in that order), I find that stories about people leaving a place tend to do odd things to me. This one also makes me feel closer to my father’s culture, though we’re not Bengali. The plot is simple: a self-obsessed postmaster decides to teach his young servant how to read. But he soon loses interest, both in the servant and the village he’s been posted to. Partly, the story asks us to question our motivations for what we like to imagine are acts of disinterested kindness. It might also be read as a subtle critique of a colonialism that professed magnanimity while committing violence, or of the echoing voluntourism that continues to this day in India and many other countries. But the exquisitely sad ending of ‘The Postmaster’ takes the story beyond such concerns and into something more fundamental. You might compare it to Joycean epiphany (and incidentally, it came a couple of decades before Dubliners was published), but whereas I feel Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ focuses more on Gabriel Conroy as an individual and an ego, Tagore’s story is more general, a portrait of the nexus between two people, or all people.

First published in 1891. Collected in Stories From Tagore, Macmillan, 1918, and available to read online at Asymptote. You can also hear it read on the BBC iPlayer here