Table Of ContentRABINDRANATH TAGORE: SELECTED SHORT STORIES
RABINDRANATH TAGORE was born in 1861, into one of the foremost families
of Bengal. He was the fourteenth child of Debendranath Tagore, who
headed the Brahmo Samaj (a Hindu reform movement). The family
house at Jorasanko in Calcutta was a hive of cultural and intellectual
activity. Tagore was educated by private tutors, and first visited Europe
in 1878. He started writing at an early age, and his talent was
recognized by Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the leading writer of the day.
In the 1890s Tagore lived mainly in rural East Bengal, managing family
estates. In the early 1900s he was involved in the svadeśī campaign
against the British, but withdrew when the movement turned violent. In
1912 he came to England with Gitanjali, an English translation of some
of his religious lyrics. It was acclaimed by W. B. Yeats and later
published by Macmillan, leading directly to his winning the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1913. In the 1920s and 1930s he made extensive lecture
tours of America, Europe and the Far East. Proceeds from these tours,
and from his Western publications, went to Visva-Bharati, the school and
international university he created at Santiniketan, a hundred miles
north-west of Calcutta.
Tagore was a controversial figure at home and abroad: at home
because of his ceaseless innovations in poetry, prose, drama and music;
abroad because of the stand he took against militarism and nationalism.
In 1919 he protested against the Amritsar Massacre by returning the
knighthood that the British had given him in 1915. He was close to
Mahatma Gandhi, who called him the ‘Great Sentinel’ of modern India;
but he generally held himself aloof from politics. His own translations
(Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore, 1936) have not proved
sufficient to sustain the worldwide reputation he enjoyed in his lifetime;
but as a Bengali writer his eminence is unchallenged. His works run to
thirty-two large volumes. They contain some sixty collections of verse;
novels such as Gora and The Home and the World; experimental plays
such as The Post Office and Red Oleanders; and essays on a host of
religious, social and literary topics. He also wrote over 2,000 songs,
which have become the national music of Bengal, and include the
national anthems of both India and Bangladesh. Late in life he took up
painting, exhibiting in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London and New York. He
died in 1941.
WILLIAM RADICE was born in 1951 in London. He has pursued a double
career as a poet and as a scholar and translator of Bengali, and has
written or edited nearly thirty books. In addition to his translations of
Tagore for Penguin, his publications include eight books of his own
poems, Teach Yourself Bengali (1994), Myths and Legends of India (2001)
and A Hundred Letters from England (2003). He has also translated from
German (Martin Kämpchen’s The Honey-Seller and Other Stories, 1995,
and Sigfrid Gauch’s autobiographical novel Traces of My Father, 2002)
and Italian (Puccini’s Turandot for English National Opera). He wrote the
libretto for Param Vir’s Tagore-based chamber opera Snatched by the
Gods (1992). He has contributed regularly to BBC radio, has lectured
widely in South Asia, North America and Europe, and has been given
literary prizes in both India and Bangladesh.
William Radice is Senior Lecturer in Bengali at SOAS, University of
London, and from 1999 to 2002 was Head of the Departments of South
and South East Asia. He lives in London and Northumberland.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Selected Short Stories
Translated with an Introduction by
WILLIAM RADICE
PENGUIN BOOKS
Dedicated to the Rivers of Bengal Revised edition dedicated to Arun Deb of
Konnagar on the Shore of one of the Rivers of Bengal
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in Penguin Books 1991
Revised edition 1994
Copyright © William Radice, 1991, 1994, 2005
All rights reserved
Acknowledgement is given to Visva-Bharati Publishing Department, on behalf of the
Rabindranath Tagore estate, and to Macmillan London Ltd for permission to reproduce the
following stories: ‘The Living and the Dead’, ‘The Postmaster’, ‘Housewife’, ‘Little Master’s
Return’, ‘Skeleton’, ‘A Single Night’, ‘Fool’s Gold’, ‘Punishment’, ‘A Problem Solved’, ‘Exercise-
book’, ‘In the Middle of the Night’, ‘Elder Sister’ and ‘The Hungry Stones’
The moral right of the translator has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,
by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the
publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published
and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent
purchaser
ISBN: 9781101491454
Contents
Preface to the 1991 Edition
Note on the 2005 Edition
Further Reading
Chronology
Introduction
The Living and the Dead
The Postmaster
Profit and Loss
Housewife
Little Master’s Return
The Divide
Taraprasanna’s Fame
Wealth Surrendered
Skeleton
A Single Night
Fool’s Gold
Holiday
Kabuliwallah
The Editor
Punishment
A Problem Solved
Exercise-book
Forbidden Entry
In the Middle of the Night
Unwanted
Elder Sister
Fury Appeased
Ṭhākurdā
Guest
Wishes Granted
False Hope
Son-sacrifice
The Hungry Stones
Thoughtlessness
The Gift of Sight
Appendix A: ‘Passing Time in the Rain’
Appendix B: Letters
Bibliographical Notes
Glossary
Map: The Padma River Area
Tagore’s Family Tree
Preface to the 1991 Edition
This book was conceived as a companion volume to my Selected Poems of
Tagore, published by Penguin Books in 1985 and revised in 1987. I
originally intended to do for the stories what I tried to do for the poems:
select from the full range of Tagore’s stories from 1884 to 1941, and
write an Introduction that would survey a lifetime of story-writing. I
soon realized that this was not practicable: a one-volume selection from
over ninety stories would either be too unwieldy or too thin. I also
wanted to reach a fair critical assessment of each story before choosing
or rejecting it, and it was difficult to do this for so many. It is possible
(fairly or unfairly) to skim through a poem to decide whether it might be
possible to translate it; this is not so easy with stories, which need to be
read carefully from beginning to end.
I also realized that there were other good reasons for limiting my
selection to the 1890s, Tagore’s most fertile decade as a short-story
writer, and that the Introduction could, in explaining these reasons, go
more deeply into a particular period of Tagore’s life than was possible in
my Introduction to Selected Poems. I believe that any book of English
translations of Tagore has to ‘introduce’ him in the sense that it should
not assume prior knowledge; but that is not to say that we should be
reluctant to move beyond the general portrait to examination of
particular phases or aspects of his life and work. The Tagore of this book
is a man in his thirties, with a wife and young children, not the majestic
sage of later fame.
Selected Poems was designed for the Western English reader. One of
the surprises that it brought me was the interest it aroused in India and
even in Bengal itself. It is unusual for a translation to provoke
controversy and interest among those who have no need for it; but I
have come to see that the very special importance that Tagore has for
Bengalis, their excellent command of English, and their understandable
desire that he should be appreciated and properly understood by
outsiders, all combine to make translations of Tagore newsworthy in
Bengal in a way that no translation of an English author has ever been –
to my knowledge – in Britain. This book, while mainly intended for non-
Bengalis, has therefore been done with a sideways glance at Bengali
readers and critics. I have given Bengali language sources in my
Introduction, and related what I have said quite closely to what I have
been able to learn of Bengali criticism of Tagore’s stories.
It seems appropriate, now that there are many Bengali speakers living
in Britain and other Western countries, to assume a greater communality
of interest between Bengali and non-Bengali readers: to refer in a
footnote to a book written in Bengali does not seem as academic as it
might have done even ten years ago. This is an aspect of the way our
societies are changing: Bengal is closer to Britain than ever before – so
Tagore is less distant from us than he was. At the same time, the extreme
difficulty and challenge of translating and presenting him properly
remains. Just because the stranger has become a neighbour does not
mean we have to work any less hard to understand him well.
I have used the same system of transliterating Bengali words as I used
in Selected Poems. For names of people and places, however, I have gone
for commonly accepted spellings with no diacritical marks. It is never
easy to indicate Bengali pronunciation by any system of Romanization.
When in doubt, consult a native speaker!
As always I must acknowledge the support of friends. Sujata
Chaudhuri, Ranjana Ash and the late Subhendusekhar Mukhopadhyay
answered my translation queries (the last named also gave me special
help with the notes in Appendix B), and Prasanta Kumar Paul – Tagore’s
leading contemporary biographer – gave me vital advice while I was
working on the Introduction. I must also thank Visva-Bharati University
in West Bengal and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London
for making it possible for me to go to Santiniketan for six weeks in
March and April 1989. The Introduction was largely written in Rabindra
Bhavana, the most beautiful and civilized library in the world. Finally I
should like to thank those at Rajshahi University in Bangladesh, who in
1987 took me by university jeep, and by ferries over the Padma and
Gorai rivers, to the still magical place where most of these stories were
written, a century ago.
