Tagore’s preoccupation with death goes back to a traumatic event of his youth—the suicide of his Muse and the love of his life, his sister-in-law Kadambari, three months after the poet’s marriage at the age of twenty-three. In his first autobiography, penned at the age of fifty, he writes: I had seen nothing beyond life, and accepted it as ultimate truth. When of a sudden death came, and in a moment tore a gaping rent in its [life’s] smooth-seeming fabric, I was utterly bewildered. All around, the trees, the soil, the water, the sun, the moon, the stars, remained as immovably true as before; and yet the person who was as truly there, who, through a thousand points of contact with life, mind and heart, was ever so much more true for me, had vanished in a moment like a dream. What perplexing self-contradiction it all seemed to me as I looked around! How was I ever to reconcile what remained with which had gone? On Rabindranath Tagores fascination with death: the first in a series of extracts in Vantage from the best current works of non-fiction.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 11:31:18 +0000
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