THE THEME OF LONELINESS IN TAGORE’S VERSE - M. Padmarani

 The theme of loneliness was much sought after by most of the Romantics. Wordsworths’ ‘Daffodils’ begins with the line “I wandered lonely as a cloud...”. In Keats’ “Ode To A Nightingale”, we have the narrator sitting all alone and musing over the melody of the bird’s song. The Ancient Mariner is all alone on the wide wide sea. This aspect as seen in the poetry of the Romantics can be noticed in Tagore’s poetry too.

            Loneliness is not merely being alone; it is an outlook, a mood that is reflected by the aid of external phenomenon like a lonely road, a lonely star or a lonely tree. They are just symbols to portray the loneliness present in the inner self.

            Loneliness is sometimes enjoyed. At times it is shown as something frightening, and at most of the times, very depressing.

            In Tagore’s poem loneliness lends intensity to the theme. For example in the poem ‘THE GOLDEN BOAT’ loneliness is presented with a tinge of pathos. The narrator is all alone sitting on the river bank and his harvest is ready. He puts the harvest load in a boat that goes to the other side of the place left for him. The boat sails away leaving him all alone on the bare river bank. The poem starts with the lines

“Clouds rumbling in the sky, teeming rains, I sit on the river bank, Sand and alone, The scene is all set,

“The river is swollen and fierce in its flow As we cut the paddy it started to rain.”

            So one can intute that things are heading towards something tragic. The boat coming nearer and taking all the paddy are all incidents linked with each other. Ultimately the narrator’s only companion is again loneliness.

“On the bare river, bank, I remain alone­

What I had has gone, the golden boat took all-”

            Basically the fact remains that this loneliness is a culmination of helplessness. On all sides he is faced with situations he cannot escape from. There is the harvest that is ready, it has to be cut and stored, on the other side there is rain, so the narrator is left with no choice but to put the paddy in the boat...These incidents are just symbolic representations of man’s life which is at all stages dominated by circumstances and the various vicissitudes of life. At each stage when man gains something he loses some other thing; At each stage he goes through the lonely phase of depression, which he tries to overcome gradually.

Short Story- India Is a Strange Country

 The story "India is a strange country" by one of our eminent writers gives a perfect insight of human nature.
     The story is set at the time when when India had just won her Independence  and the former rulers, the Britishers were leaving our country en masse.The newly won independence created a feeling of euphoria and also gave the Indian necessary courage to speak out their minds what they really thought about the English rulers.
     It is about one particular Englishman Mr. Kenneth Tyson who is snobbish to the hilt, but when the new brown sahibs of Gymkhana offer him free drinks he never reuses but n the other hand he never repays them also. He shows them very clearly that he still thinks that he is their superior. The Bengali sahib,the Punjabi maam may critisise his behavior but are secretly proud that he has deigned to join them. But he refuses to tell them his motive for not going back to England despite much probing
            Mr.Kenneth has a Dachshund bitch Martha the apple of his eye, He is forever indulging her whims as she was fond of investigating holes. He takes her or walks, and always carries her leash even when she is not tied to it.

   One day "martha" is killed in an accident. Mr. Tyson is inconsolable at her loss. But within next week he sells of his household articles and is ready to leave India for good.
The most revealing aspect of  Mr. Tyson Character comes to the fore when one of his friends who came to see him off tells him that everyone thought he was planning to settle in India. The reply proved every Indian right that Britishers could never ever treat Indians as equals.
It seems that the quarantine rule of England stated that one had to leave their pets in Quarantine for six months before they can be brought to England.
    Mr. Tyson was ready to suffer the company of lowly Indians in order to be with Martha the dog whom he loved as his child.

Ecology -Ramanujan

This poem, ‘Ecology’ is taken from Ramanujan’s third volume of poems, ‘Second Sight’, published in 1986. The speaker seems to be the poet himself or some imaginary person who is loyally devoted to his mother. He is very angry because his mother has a severe attack of migraine; a very bad kind of headache, often causing a person to vomit; which is caused by the fragrance of the pollen of the flower of the Red Champak every time it is in bloom. The fragrance is heavy and suffocating as the yellow pollen spreads everywhere. Even the doors of the speaker’s house cannot prevent the strong smell from entering the house. The walls of the house are able to absorb almost everything-the sounds, sights, the human voices, the harsh sounds produced when new shoes are worn. But they cannot stop the fog of pollen dust from the Champak trees.
            

The loving son therefore decides to cut down the tree, but he is prevented from doing so by his mother who sees the positive side of the tree in her garden. She says that the tree is as old as her and had been fertilized by the droppings of a passing bird by chance which is considered to be a very good omen. The positive side of it is that the tree provides many basketful of flowers to be offered to her gods and to ‘her daughters and daughter’s daughters’ every year, although the tree would give a terrible migraine to one line of cousins as a legacy. The yellow pollen fog is the yellow dust of pollen carried in the air which is thick and heavy like fog which covers the earth.

            
This poem portrays Ramanujan’s strong interest in the family as a very important theme of his poetic craft. His memories of the past would inevitably bring pictures of his family, especially his mother who is self sacrificing. There is also a reference to his Hindu heritage as he mentions the gods and the ancient beliefs in the poem. The sense of irony is indicated when the mother very angrily protests the idea of cutting down the tree even though she is suffering very badly from the migraine caused by it. She has a kind of emotional attachment to the tree, saying that it is as old as herself.            


‘Ecology is a poem which could be read as one single sentence. However, each stanza has one particular idea. There is a casual connection between the ideas and they flow from one stanza to the next. ‘Flash her temper’; an instance of the use of irony because she is very angry at the idea of having the tree cut down. The actual meaning of the word ‘Ecology’ is not followed here but the poet seems to convey the thought that a particular kind of tree may have both negative and positive factors and therefore it need not be pulled down.

The Professor - Nissim Ezekiel

The Professor by Nissim Ezekiel is a satirical poem written in the form of a conversation between a professor and his student. A satire is way of criticizing a person, an idea or something where the poet uses humour to point out their faults and weaknesses. Here, the professor makes fun of himself by the way he speaks or thinks. A professor is someone who should be proper in his subject or the medium he teaches. But the professor in The Professor is caricatured because of his erroneous dialect. A Professor can also be called a monologue because one can find that the professor speaks but listener does not say a word. The poem is composed in Indian English and the poet mocks Indians who finds prestigious to speak in English, even when they are not so good in it, rather than in their mother tongue.

POEM IN DETAIL:
(Lines1-11) The poem, The Professor begins with a question, ‘Remember me?’. The question is from a retired Geography professor to one of his former student. He then introduces himself as Professor Sheth who had once taught Geography to that student. Then he describes his current position, his family and his health. He tells him that his wife has passed away few years back and by God’s will, all his children ‘are well settled in life.’ He also mentions that one of his sons is a Bank Manager and another is a Sales Manager. To describe their social and financial condition, the retired professor says they both own cars. Then he mentions about his third son whom he considers as the black sheep of the family.
(Lines 12-21) The professor then talks about his daughters, Sarala and Tarala. He says that they both are married and leading a happy life. His son-in-laws ‘are very nice boys.’ The professor then proudly tells his student that he has eleven grandchildren. He even asks his student how many issues he has. The student probably says three when the professor says people are going in for family planning these days which is good.
The professor keeps on talking. He talks about the changing times and the importance of change. He talks about how the whole world is changing along with India. He then talks about the change in values. Old values are been replaced by new values.
(Lines 22-36) The professor now talks a bit about himself. He says that he hardly go out because of his old age. Then he says his ‘health is O.K’ but he does have usual aches and pains. He is not suffering from diabetes, blood pressure or heart disease. He says proudly that he is healthy because of the good habits that he has cultivated from his youth.
He even enquires about his student’s health and is happy when he comes to know that the student is in good health. The professor reveals his age, he says that he is sixty nine and hopes to live for a hundred years. He jokes with his student that the latter was like a stick earlier but now he has gained weight and become a ‘man of weight and consequence.’ Finally, the professor asks him to pay a visit to his home if he ever comes near to his dwelling place.

Toba Tek Singh :Sadat Hasan Manto

"Toba Tek Singh" is surely the most famous story about Partition, and very possibly the best one. I'd argue that it is in fact the best, and that most of the other good candidates are also by Manto. This story was one of his last ones; it was published in "Phundne" (Lahore: Maktabah-e Jadid) in 1955, the year of his death.
Every reader at once realizes that it's a powerful satire, and also a bitter indictment of the political processes and behavior patterns that produced Partition. But the author's brilliant craftsmanship lies partly in the fact that there's not a single word in the story that tells us so. The story presents itself as a deadpan, factual, non-judgmental chronicle of the behavior of certain lunatics in an insane asylum in Lahore. It thus shares the conspicuously effective technique of Jonathan Swift's *"A Modest Proposal"*.
The story is told by a reliable but not omniscient narrator who speaks as a Pakistani, and seems to be a Lahori. The narration is for the most part so straightforward that the narrator's voice seems even naive (or faux-naif, depending on how we want to read it). The narrator reports to us with apparent matter-of-factness a series of events that are not quite as straightforward as they appear. The time frame, for one thing, is oddly jagged. The first two paragraphs take us to the Wagah border itself, where the lunatics are described as having already arrived. Then we drop abruptly into a very long flashback: we return to an earlier time, when the inmates in the Lahore asylum first learn of the proposed exchange. We follow their reactions and behavior, until at the very end of the story we once again arrive at the time and place of the first two paragraphs.
A much greater oddity is that the whole story, as we're told in the first sentence, takes place "two or three years after Partition," so it seems highly implausible that not only the lunatics, but the people around them as well, can't figure out where Toba Tek Singh is; the district isn't even anywhere near the border, so after "two or three years" there could hardly be any confusion. But it's a tribute to Manto's narrative skill that on the first reading, this question doesn't even occur-- and perhaps not on the second or third reading, either.
We don't meet the main character until well into the story, when we've gone through an illustrative sequence of other lunatics. The narrator reports that everyone calls the main character "Toba Tek Singh" (though in the whole course of the story we never actually hear anyone doing so); but the narrator himself always refers to him by his full name, Bishan Singh. Does he do this pointedly, as a sign of respect, and to differentiate himself from the others? And when he seeks to interpret Bishan Singh's outbursts, he always qualifies his suggestions with a respectful "perhaps," to show that he is not privy to Bishan Singh's inner life, but is only speculating.
Whatever the reason, the narrator's carefulness in this respect enables him to set up a wonderfully elegant, haunting, ambiguous conclusion. After Bishan Singh gives a single loud shriek and collapses, the narrator locates him in a no-man's-land between the two new nations' barbed-wire borders. My translation is entirely literal: "In between, on that piece of ground that had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh." We know of course that the person Bishan Singh lay there. But since the narrator never calls this person by that name, he's able to force us to the additional reading that the real location of the village Toba Tek Singh is between the two new states' sharply demarcated borders. But if the village is there, then in what sense exactly, and in whose eyes? Is Bishan Singh sane or mad, conscious or delirious, alive or dead? With wonderful subtlety and literary restraint, the author allows us-- and thus also forces us-- to invent our own ending.
Because of its simple and deliberately repetitive use of language, the story also provides excellent reading practice for students learning Urdu. My translation is almost as literal as it can possibly be. This is partly for the convenience of students, and partly because I love translations that try to bring you right up against the very grammar, the very sentence structures, of the original.
And my translation is literal also as a form of reaction against Khalid Hassan's extremely free one, which is widely available in print; see for example Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition (New Delhi, Penguin India, 1997, pp. 1-10). Khalid Hassan, who wrote such a fine and sympathetic *memoir* of Manto, apparently felt quite free to "transcreate" his literary idol's greatest story. As only one example, though a particularly irritating one, here is the start of section [08]. The original is, like the whole of the story, stark and simple in almost a minimalist way; my translation reflects those qualities, as you can easily check for yourself in the Urdu text:

He had one daughter who, growing a finger-width taller every month, in fifteen years had become a young girl. Bishan Singh didn't even recognize her. When she was a child, she wept when she saw her father; when she'd grown up, tears still flowed from her eyes.

Khalid Hassan, by comparison, takes away some information that the author wanted us to have (the poignant emphasis on the daughter's gradual growing up over the years, and her continuing silent grief), and adds a fair amount of other "information" that he himself invents (including a whole final sentence of obtrusive padding):

When he was first confined, he had left an infant daughter behind, now a pretty young girl of fifteen. She would come occasionally, and sit in front of him with tears rolling down her cheeks. In the strange world that he inhabited, hers was just another pretty face.

I'm sure Khalid Hassan did this sort of damage with no evil intentions, but only carelessly, and perhaps seeking somehow to "help" or please the English reader. 

In Custody -Anita Desai

"This is a novel about a small-town man, Deven, who gets the opportunity to go interview his hero, the great poet Nur, the greatest living Urdu poet. Having always loved Urdu poetry and missed the chance to be an Urdu language professor, he is charmed into going to Delhi the big city. Even though he shrinks at the idea of possibly being exploited by his sharp and selfish friend Murad, the dream of meeting Nur draws him on. So he sets off on a number of adventures on Sundays, the one free day that he should have spent with his wife and son. 

What Deven finds at his hero's house is misery and confusion. Having sunk into a senile old age, surrounded by fawning sycophants, married to a younger calculating wife who wants to use his glory to win herself fame, Nur is not what he once was. Or perhaps he always was this. 

Deven, a shrinking and weak man, is somehow drawn to this old poet, wishing to help and protect him even as he cannot defend himself. Perhaps it is the tie of Urdu poetry that he remembers from his treasured times as a child with his father. 

In order to save the name and works of Nur for posterity, he decides to record his voice on tape for his small-town university. In the process Deven is exploited monetarily and emotionally, where Nur's family and hangers on demand money to keep themselves happy, Murad refuses to pay him for submissions to his self-proclaimed literary magazine. His wife Sarla is indignant at his time away, his fellow professors think he is having an affair in Delhi or push him to get a taping of Nur's voice. The saddest part is the result of the sessions. Drunk and encouraged by his admirers who follow him along to the sessions, Nur offers nothing new or novel.