Among the many emotive photographs displayed in the former family home of India’s empire-defying Rabindranath Tagore, now a museum, is one taken in Japan a little over a century ago.
It was in Japan that the poet-philosopher met his revolutionary compatriot Rashbehari Bose, who rather more forcefully took on the British Empire.
Bose was the Raj’s most wanted man, given to assassination as a political strategy. In the photo, he is stylish in a tuxedo, hands haphazard in his lap and head cocked slightly as he stares wearily into the distance.
He might well be wondering how he ended up fleeing to Japan to restart life as an outlaw after slipping out of Kolkata under the pretext of being a relative of Tagore.
Tagore is pictured with flowing robe and locks, staring commandingly straight ahead.
The worldly Bose has at his side his Japanese wife and their child. Tagore, who lost many close relatives early in life, including his wife and two children, wears his typical serene and otherworldly expression, reflecting a lifelong quest to spread the universal truths.
Tagore’s emotion-charged Bengali songs about life’s deep longings lilt through the hallways and alcoves of the estate in northern Kolkata. The house was built in 1784 and he spent his childhood there studying English, Bengali, Sanskrit, geography, mathematics, science, music, wrestling, drawing and gymnastics.
In later years he wondered aloud with the other great local thinkers of the Bengali Renaissance, the precursor to India’s independence movement, how to free the subcontinent from colonial rule and free humanity from its blights.
These are the poignant themes of “Gitanjali” (“Song Offering”), the short stories that won Tagore the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.
Particularly moving is a handwritten section of the book displayed in the room where he died in 1941. “I have tasted of the hidden honey of this lotus that expands on the ocean of light,” it says, “and thus I am blessed – let this be my parting word.”
Kolkata, the sometimes-blighted City of Joy so long known to the West as Calcutta, is blessed in its own ways.
There are pockets of vibrancy offering cheap and varied street food, and tailors – especially along bustling Rashbehari Avenue – who quickly produce custom salwar kameez and saris.
There are bookstores, galleries and cafes hiding down obscure lanes shaded by towering trees, witness to the rich artistic and literary traditions of Bengal, which has produced more than its fair share of India’s greatest artists – and revolutionaries.
These humble cradles of wisdom and insurrection often sit in the shadows of monstrously imperial edifices left over from the days of the Raj, with their sprawling verandas, soaring columns and other neoclassical dramatics.
Remains-of-the-day European charm invigorates the still-posh Park Street, lined with carryover restaurants with names like Moulin Rouge and ancient watering holes where Kingfishers are poured by neatly attired waiters.
Just across the footpath, street vendors offer classic dishes, like Tibetan momo dumplings, samosas and the local variant on Chinese chow mein. You can have the juice of freshly ground sugarcane or a five-rupee cup of chai served in disposable vessels of clay.
The former centre of socialising for the British, Park Street exudes the energy of one of Tagore’s powerful maxims also displayed at the family residence: “When the streams of ideals that flow from the East and from the West mingle their murmur in some profound harmony of meaning, it delights my soul.”
While Tagore’s greatest muse in early life was the girl who would become his sister-in-law – whose suicide devastated him and turned him irrevocably to spirituality – his final muse was Victoria Ocampo, a much younger Argentinean who loved “Gitanjali” and all that came after it. “He is as near to me as my life,” she said of Tagore, who matched her sentiment in “Last Writings”:
“How I wish I could once find my way to that foreign land where waits for me the message of love … Her language I know not, but what her eyes said will forever remain eloquent in its anguish.”
A tribute to a very different Victoria was erected in the metropolis while Calcutta was still India’s capital and the British Empire’s “second city”.
In the years when Victoria was queen and empress, much of the subcontinent’s riches flowed from the warehouses along the wide Hooghly River, a tributary of the Ganges.
On the spacious Maidan, an esplanade of greenery alongside the Mother Ganga, in the waning decades of their rule here, the British left behind a statement in stone, attempting to mirror the Taj Mahal, the iconic “monument to love” of the colonialist empire they usurped – that of the Mughals.
As Kushanava Choudhury writes in “The Epic City”, “The lawns in the front of the memorial are for families and kids … The grounds behind it are unofficially reserved for couples. On the southern lawn nestled behind shrubs, they get busy, Victorian-style.
“In Calcutta, love is sitting two by two at Victoria Memorial whispering moodily to one another.”
While a large likeness of the aged Empress of India sits outside the white structure, a standing version of her, looking slender and eternally young, commands attention inside the main chamber.
The marble statue is surrounded by murals that illustrate Queen Victoria’s life and the fantasy of an empire that lasted just a little longer than the quarter century which elapsed between the memorial’s completion and 1947, when the sun finally set on the Raj.
“Here for all to see,” reads a statement on display, a quote from the pre-eminent scholar of Orientalism Edward Said, “is the arrogance and opulence of Empire”.
The Victoria Monument remains stunning in its appearance and its sheer presence, but it is not, as some might versify, a Taj-like teardrop on the cheek of time. The architecture, termed “Indo-Gothic” or “neo-Mughal”, is more eccentric by far than anything else found in classical India. The minaret-like corners towers are stocky, not soaring.
If the memory of the foreign empress falters now, an indigenous, feminine energy still pervades Kolkata, especially during the Durga Puja, when the city’s favourite goddess is celebrated in the nocturnal explosions of firecrackers and bottle rockets. Lanterns rise and sparklers are twirled with enthusiasm.
It’s amusing and ironic that Durga has been honoured in recent festivals by gargantuan shrines funded by loyal patrons, who commission miniatures (but enormous ones) of Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, the London Eye and Tower Bridge.
The annual sequel is darker. While the Durga Puja reflects the noble intentions of “the goddess next door”, whose name denotes the concepts of “fortress” and “invincible”, there is no London landmarks theme to the Kali Puja.
The Kali Puja channels the energy of a goddess in touch with her inner nuclear option. Her name suggests “black” and “death” and was woven into Kolkata’s original name, Kalikshetra.
Kali is typically depicted as a long-tongued avenger saturated in bloodlust, thrusting her spear into Raktaveeja, the demon of desire.
In the pujas celebrating Durga, Kali and other deities, their images festoon kerbside shrines that pop up all over town and aboard pickup trucks parading the streets, sometimes to the accompaniment of bagpipers.
This profound sense of converging energies seems to flow through India. You notice it in conversation with shopkeepers, in good-natured banter with strangers.
Rabindranath Tagore was committed throughout his life to the ideals of the Brahmo Samaj, the Divine Society, and its universal quest for unity, balance and benevolence. Tagore best channelled the spirit of the City of Joy when he wrote this: “We are finite on our negative side. We must come to an end in our evil doing, in our career of discord. For evil is not infinite.
“Our will has freedom in order that it may find out that its true course is towards goodness and love. Love is the ultimate meaning of everything around us. It is not a mere sentiment. It is truth; it is the joy that is at the root of all creation.”
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