Speaking of his own vocation as a poet, Rabindranath Tagore remarked, “I am a poet. I merely give expression.” But the significance of this phrase can only be grasped if one bears in mind how rich the personality is which gives expression. Trees, too, ‘express’ their selves in flowers. But can one forget the earth, sky, light, water through which trees and plants ceaselessly draw nourishment and the exacting toil which gives birth to roses or lotuses? The beauty, flavour, colour and fragrance of a flower perhaps conceal or maybe embody the soil, sky, water and light which have sustained it. This explains why Tagore’s ‘creating’ a play was so different from anyone else writing drama. The original impulse that went into its making was different and the play flowered at its own pace, in the wake of its own laws. 

Whenever Tagore felt that a particular experience or contradiction, so essential to drama, needed to be expressed, he moulded that experience into a dramatic form of his choosing. 

Tagore’s personality was, without a doubt, shaped by Indian and European literature, music, religious thought, human contact and his own inborn intelligence. But he was never a mere imitator. Sensitive to the slightest change in the breeze wafted by the seasons, as aware of the warmth of light as a plant in the open, he never used Nature as a backdrop to unfold a situation. The spirit that animates Man, Nature and the Universe coursed through him and so his plays, like his music, had an originality of their own. Perhaps that explains his remark about not being able to ‘write’ a play. 

play. At the age of 12, Tagore translated Macbeth into Bengali. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Rajkrishna Mukhopadhyaya listened as the boy-playwright read it out to them. Mukhopadhyaya even suggested some alterations in the metre of the witches’ dialogue. The manuscript of the complete play cannot be traced but this scene of the witches (with the alterations) is available in print.

A century ago, the theatre of Calcutta was split into two strands—the dramatic art of the bhadra samaj and that of the palli (rural) samaj. While the professional stage (as in Maharashtra) imitated British theatre, the folk drama of Bengal was performed during feasts, festivals and jatras and continued to retain its hold on the audiences. These folk plays did not have to depend on curtains, sets or lighting, but on the ability to communicate with the audience through the words of the poet-dramatist effectively enacted on the stage. The plots were based on episodes from the epics, puranas and folk narratives. The artistes of the Panchali or the jatra tradition could carry their listeners from palace to forest or through rain, light or darkness on the strength of words, reinforced by music and acting; their voices could conjure a royal entourage embarking on a voyage and caught in a storm. 

To the alien rulers, this powerful folk drama appeared ‘crude’ and ‘uncouth’. The Bengali middle-class, educated in British ways, created in the name of ‘realism’ a polished but lifeless dramatic form. Techniques borrowed from the British were rated as art. Lighting skills and verbal pyrotechnics dazzled the audiences and such ‘craft’ attracted business interests. The professional drama company took over, reducing the relationship of the artiste and the spectator to a trader customer equation. Tagore, by never writing for a company, freed himself of all commercial ties and their mundane rationale. He created the characters that he discovered in his heart: what they said of their joys or sorrows, their conflicts and doubts, the way they sang and danced was put to paper and enacted on the stage. 

Herbert Spencer’s ‘The Origin and Function of Music’ had a strong impact on the young Tagore. He began to feel that emotions could find expression in song and be shaped into dramatic form. Thus was born Valmiki Pratibha, the musical play written by Tagore in 1881, when he was barely 20. There is context to his choice of this particular episode from the Ramayana as the theme of his first attempt at drama.

The Tagore family mansion, Jorasanko, was the venue of ‘Vidvajjan Samagam Sabha’, a gathering of scholars, artistes and writers. Among these was Tagore’s elder brother, Jyotirindranath, an accomplished musician and scholar, who deeply influenced the poet’s intellectual and artistic development. At one such gathering, it was decided to stage a play. Earlier, Biharilal Chakraborty’s long narrative poem ‘Sharada Mangal’, based on the transformation of the tribal Ratnakar into the poet Valmiki, had won unprecedented acclaim. 

Tagore chose the same theme, and the play was staged on 26th February 1881 at Jorasanko. The role of Valmiki was played by the poet and of Saraswati by 15-year-old Pratibha, the daughter of Tagore’s brother Hemendranath. Among the distinguished invitees was Bengal’s leading novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. This was Tagore’s first appearance on the public stage. 

The music for the play was based on classical ragas, on some of Jyotirindranath’s compositions. As a boy, Tagore had come across an illustrated edition of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies, which had a picture of a veena. One of the songs in the play (‘Vani Veenapani’), the lament of a forest goddess, and the chants of the robbers, are set to these Irish tunes.

Tagore did not conceive of Valmiki Pratibha as a play to be read. If one does not listen to the sounds while it is enacted, then its flavour is lost. It is not an opera in the European tradition. The dramatic core is expressed through musical notes and there are hardly any occasions in it where the melody has an independent appeal. 

The play bears the influence of Jyotirindranath and his friend Akshaya Chandra Chowdhury. Even so, it contains the seed of Tagore’s future development as a dramatist. The killing of the innocent bird, the anguish and anger that it arouses leading to the curse, which is uttered in the form of a shloka, reveals not merely the mystery of the poetic impulse informing the Ramayana but all creative work. Without intense experience, artistic creation can only rise to the level of superior craftsmanship. For Tagore, every experience was realised at a deeply passionate and personal level (without the shackles of social conventions and bias), which led him to believe that the writer has to fulfil a role similar to that of the Creator. Valmiki Pratibha is the fountainhead of subsequent works in which this faith finds expression.

Valmiki Pratibha should also be viewed in the context of the society of the times: the orthodox customs of some of its sections and the anxiety of other ‘reforming’ groups to ape the ways of the British rulers. Tagore married his son to a child widow for which his family had to face ostracism ... The emancipation of women is often restricted to issues of widow remarriage, dowry, better educational facilities. But it must also be remembered that this was a period when a girl had only to appear on a stage or sing or dance before outsiders to be branded a delinquent. Young Pratibha, playing a role in the play, was a step towards freedom and the staging of Valmiki Pratibha thus assumes a special social significance.

Valmiki Pratibha was a bold innovation: the flow of the words and music blended in a unique fashion with due importance to the rhythm of the whole. Instead of following the set cycle of a tala, Tagore adopted Bengal’s Kathakata tradition in which the expression of the emotion inherent in words was not confined to a rigid musical convention. Thus, when he was barely 20, Tagore had already begun to question notions of acting, playwriting and decor borrowed from English norms and to evolve his own style. This makes him, in a sense, a pioneer of the experimental theatre in the country. 

The core of almost all of Tagore’s plays is freedom. There are constraints—social, economic, religious, political and even those imposed by Nature and Fate— which burden human lives. They provoke conflicts in the hearts of men. Out of these struggles are forged the characters in Tagore’s plays. Rathayatra is a picture of the chariot of Hindu society prostrated by the caste system. Raktakarabi is a plea for the triumph of people’s power over iron barriers. Achalayatan satirises institutions which equate parrot-like repetition with genuine education. Dakghar offers a glimpse into the workings of a cruel Fate: the boy Amal, with his thirst for wandering free in the wide world, is chained to his sick bed. But Tagore’s love of freedom does not denote a flight from reality. In fact, one can hardly imagine an artiste so involved in the joys and sorrows of common people. Beauty is for him as meaningful as Truth and roudra, the awe-inspiring element in Nature, necessary for the actual revelation of her beauty.

Tagore was acutely aware of the fears which oppressed institution-ridden societies and deprived men of the power to perceive beauty. Whenever such ugliness reared its head and warped human minds, he struck back; he believed that it was the poet’s vocation to forge minds capable of perceiving beauty, that is to forge ‘man’ himself.

A creation such as Valmiki Pratibha, born of a rare poetic impulse and welling up from the springs of folk art, may yet be regarded ‘obscure’ by those accustomed to well-trodden and familiar paths. But Tagore refused to follow the beaten track and to ‘model’ plays on lines set by conventional norms. 

“I do not wish to die in this lovely mansion but to dwell within it with men.” This thought finds echoes in the songs of his plays. In Valmiki Pratibha, the gang of robbers decides to offer ‘Saraswati’ (Knowledge) in the form of a girl as a sacrifice to their goddess. Overcome by pity for her plight, Valmiki frees the girl. The poet can never win the blessings of ‘Saraswati’, unless she is liberated ... In the play, the original shloka from the Ramayana is retained and after it is uttered, the dacoit, struck with awe, wonders how the words came unbidden, the flame flickered in the darkness …

One can imagine the impact of the original Bengali with the brilliant young poet himself singing these words.

This article first appeared in the September 1981 issue of the NCPA Quarterly Journal (Volume X, Issue 3). It was published in the year of the 120th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore and the centenary of his play, Valmiki Pratibha, which was first produced at Jorasanko on 26th February 1881. To commemorate the occasion, the NCPA Quarterly Journal published excerpts from the first of the Tagore Lectures delivered by P. L. Deshpande in Pune, under the auspices of the University of Pune on 28th February 1980.