Tagore’s sense of wonder in Indonesia:

by AMIYA DEV

Poet Rabindranath Tagore Tagore at Borobudur, Java, 1927

[These letters (Java-Jatrir Patra in the original), written between the middle of July and the very early October of 1927, are not a mere chronicle of Tagore’s visit to Indonesia. For that we would do better to look up his travel companion, Suniti Kumar Chatterji’s book Rabindra-Samgame Dvipamay Bharat o Syam-Desh (Island India and Siam in Rabindranath’s company). Written to a few select persons tuned to his cast of mind, Tagore’s twenty-one letters are also in part intimate journals—his classic in that respect having been Chinnapatra(loose leaves) written much earlier to a niece.

Eighty-five years ago Indonesia came alive to Tagore, not merely as a repository of some strands of Indian culture of yore but also as an indigenous culture, remarkable for her love of ritual and art. What struck him most was her primacy of dance, as if dance was her natural language. The letters are full of it. Indeed the letters carry a sense of wonder in meeting a people so familiar and yet so unfamiliar, that have taken so much and yet have so much to give.

It is this sense of wonder that I propose to trace in rereading these letters.— 18 October 2012]

If we ride the time-machine and go eighty-five years back, then on this day, 18 October, we would have a glimpse of Rabindranath Tagore at Penang ready to sail back after a three-month visit to Singapore and Malay, Indonesia, and Siam, that is, Thailand. In fact on 19 October he boarded the Calcutta-bound Japanese ship Awa-Maru. Of these three months about one was spent in Singapore and Malay, a day in Sumatra, two weeks in Bali, a little over three weeks in two stretches in Java, a week in Siam, the rest in travel to and fro in the South East. This visit was in detail chronicled by one of his travel companions, Suniti Kumar Chatterji the famous linguist (Rabindra-Samgame Dvipamay Bharat and Syam-Desh—‘Island India and Siam in Rabidranath’s Company’). On his part Tagore wrote twenty-one letters and five poems. His letters are called Java-Jatrir Patra, ‘Letters from a Traveller to Java’, which indeed they are, Java including Bali. He hardly says anything about Singapore and Malay, and only announces the trip he is taking to Siam. However, two of the five poems are on Siam, the first at first sight, the second at departure. The other three poems are one on Java, one on Bali and one on Borobudur. Of these the Bali poem, first named ‘Bali’ then renamed ‘Sagarika’ (‘Sea-maiden’), is best known. Though my focus in this article is on the letters, I shall also touch on his Indonesian poems.

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