July 30, 2023
What a thrilling blurb Penguin India has given Tagore's masterpiece: “the most competent description of the nationalist Neo-Hinduism.” Critics rave! Well, it is that, I guess. And Anna Karenina is “a measured study of liberal reform movements in 1870s Russia.” Moby Dick: “a decent overview of American whaling practices.”
Gora is about a zealous Hindu nationalist raised in a wealthy Brahmin family in Kolkata ca. 1880. There's just one thing his parents neglected to tell him: he's actually Irish! That explains why his mother's complexion is “in no way comparable”!
Humans are foolish and humans in novels are doubly foolish. When those humans are busy being foolish in a time and culture other than yours, it can be even easier than usual to react with frustration. “Oh for God’s sake,” you shake the book, “marry the teenager you're in love with, not the 10-year-old you've never met! Or, I don't know, marry a grown-ass woman?” But this was a different universe, morally and culturally, and marrying the child was the socially-sanctioned choice. Tagore himself married—perhaps I should say was married to—a 10 year old in 1883. But then, this is one of Tagore’s main themes: how do you defend your culture against an imperial power utterly persuaded of its own superiority, when you know that there is so much deeply wrong with the very culture you're defending? And that it's a different set of wrongs than those afflicting the culture of the oppressor? How do we measure our own internal moral compass against the dictates of society and culture against the imperatives of patriotism and resistance? How to reconcile pride and humility in a world that at once demands and punishes both? How distorted are our personal lives and hearts when our every decision becomes politically motivated? Or is it the illusion that it is possible not to be political that distorts and destroys our hearts?
Gora is no place to start with Tagore. Unlike Chokher Bali or Relationships (Jogajog), the novel tried my patience at times. It is the kind of grand, early-20th-century novel that has in its sights an entire social world, and yet is strangely blinkered, too. A high ridge is climbed—only to reveal another, higher ridge just beyond. But the novel is beautiful and vivid. Tagore draws his characters so richly. He is able to render them at once human beings and symbols, grappling with truth, religion, prejudice, race, empire, family. Gora’s real heroes are two women, Sucharita/Radharani and Lalita. (Sucharita/Radharani’s two names reflect Tagore’s overall interest in doubles and doubling, which echoes through the novel at a variety of scales.) Lalita’s defiant refusal to compromise herself complicates Gora’s equally strident nationalism, while Sucharita/Radharani’s internal and external struggles defy all attempts at classification. Both characters impressed themselves deeply on my mind.
The language of the novel is equally stirring with regard to love and to politics—and to a sort of intellectualized infatuation that is somehow both and neither. Reading Gora, one has the constant feeling of awakening. A new morning dawns. The world revealed is the same world on which the sun set the evening before, but must be discovered anew, no matter. What does it mean to act willfully in this world? Would you be free? Ha! And yet... Would you be true? Ha ha! And still... Would you have faith? In what? In who?
Radha Chakravarty’s translation is wonderful (as is her translation of Chokher Bali). All previous translations must be avoided. Tagore himself described the translation done in his lifetime as “extremely unsatisfactory”. One need only read the first page to understand why. E.F. Dodd’s translation, done in the 60s, is abridged and stilted. Sujit Mukherjee’s translation is unabridged and stilted.
Gora is about a zealous Hindu nationalist raised in a wealthy Brahmin family in Kolkata ca. 1880. There's just one thing his parents neglected to tell him: he's actually Irish! That explains why his mother's complexion is “in no way comparable”!
Humans are foolish and humans in novels are doubly foolish. When those humans are busy being foolish in a time and culture other than yours, it can be even easier than usual to react with frustration. “Oh for God’s sake,” you shake the book, “marry the teenager you're in love with, not the 10-year-old you've never met! Or, I don't know, marry a grown-ass woman?” But this was a different universe, morally and culturally, and marrying the child was the socially-sanctioned choice. Tagore himself married—perhaps I should say was married to—a 10 year old in 1883. But then, this is one of Tagore’s main themes: how do you defend your culture against an imperial power utterly persuaded of its own superiority, when you know that there is so much deeply wrong with the very culture you're defending? And that it's a different set of wrongs than those afflicting the culture of the oppressor? How do we measure our own internal moral compass against the dictates of society and culture against the imperatives of patriotism and resistance? How to reconcile pride and humility in a world that at once demands and punishes both? How distorted are our personal lives and hearts when our every decision becomes politically motivated? Or is it the illusion that it is possible not to be political that distorts and destroys our hearts?
Gora is no place to start with Tagore. Unlike Chokher Bali or Relationships (Jogajog), the novel tried my patience at times. It is the kind of grand, early-20th-century novel that has in its sights an entire social world, and yet is strangely blinkered, too. A high ridge is climbed—only to reveal another, higher ridge just beyond. But the novel is beautiful and vivid. Tagore draws his characters so richly. He is able to render them at once human beings and symbols, grappling with truth, religion, prejudice, race, empire, family. Gora’s real heroes are two women, Sucharita/Radharani and Lalita. (Sucharita/Radharani’s two names reflect Tagore’s overall interest in doubles and doubling, which echoes through the novel at a variety of scales.) Lalita’s defiant refusal to compromise herself complicates Gora’s equally strident nationalism, while Sucharita/Radharani’s internal and external struggles defy all attempts at classification. Both characters impressed themselves deeply on my mind.
The language of the novel is equally stirring with regard to love and to politics—and to a sort of intellectualized infatuation that is somehow both and neither. Reading Gora, one has the constant feeling of awakening. A new morning dawns. The world revealed is the same world on which the sun set the evening before, but must be discovered anew, no matter. What does it mean to act willfully in this world? Would you be free? Ha! And yet... Would you be true? Ha ha! And still... Would you have faith? In what? In who?
Radha Chakravarty’s translation is wonderful (as is her translation of Chokher Bali). All previous translations must be avoided. Tagore himself described the translation done in his lifetime as “extremely unsatisfactory”. One need only read the first page to understand why. E.F. Dodd’s translation, done in the 60s, is abridged and stilted. Sujit Mukherjee’s translation is unabridged and stilted.
