PAST IS PRESENT
- Kohinoor Dasgupta
- Nov 15, 2024
- 12 min read
Updated: Nov 25, 2024
By Kohinoor Dasgupta
The Bengali-language non-fiction book Puratani/Gyanodanandini Devi, now in its fifth reprint, was published in 2012 by Ananda Publishers Private Limited, Kolkata.
Sections of Puratani previously appeared in Bengali literary magazines such as Prabasi (in 1941-42), and Nirmalya Acharya’s Ekkhon (in 1990).
Puratani was first published as a book by Indian Associated Publishing Company in 1956. It was edited and introduced by Gyanodanandini’s daughter, Indiradevi Choudhurani. The book contained Gyanodanandini’s memoirs, 127 letters written to her by her husband Satyendranath Tagore, and an essay by distinguished editor Pulinbehari Sen.
Readers owe a debt of gratitude to Sen. Gyanodanandini (later helped by Indiradevi) had preserved some of Satyendranath’s letters for three quarters of a century. Sen persuaded Indiradevi that a selection of those letters would complement Gyanodanandini’s short memoirs. The editorial coup of adding Satyendranath’s voice to Gyanodanandini’s found this unusual book which was all dressed up and waiting to be noticed!
Those of you who read Bengali may enjoy Pritam Sengupta's article on Pulinbehari Sen in Anandabazar Patrika:
Anathnath Das edited the 2012 edition of Puratani. He added on Indiradevi’s two-part essay on her mother, published in memoriam in Prabasi (1941-42), and a second essay by Sen, titled 'Satyendranath Thakur o Gyanodanandini Debi’.
More than a century ago, Satyendranath jotted down points to be kept in mind should Indiradevi write a biography of Gyanodanandini. The closest Indiradevi came to writing the biography was the tribute she published in Prabasi after Gyanodanandini’s death. It is not known whether Gyanodanandini perused Satyendranath’s outline and what she thought of it if she did. She does not refer to it in her memoirs. We do not know whether he ever urged her to write her memoirs when she was much younger or whether she herself had considered doing so.
Gyanodanandini’s memoirs were dictated to and transcribed verbatim by Indiradevi. Indiradevi expresses regret, in the Introduction, for not taking up the project earlier. In her judgment, the memoirs, under the circumstances, turned out to be more a recollection of events and less Gyanodanandini’s thoughts and views.
The transcription sessions went on intermittently over several years. The first parts, titled 'Childhood’ and ‘Marriage’, do not provide the dates of transcription. The third part, 'Bombay’, mentions 1937. The last date of transcription of the last part, 'Abroad’, is July 20, 1939. Gyanodanandini died some two years later, on October 2, 1941, at the age of ninety or ninety-one. (Her birth year is not unanimously accepted.) Memoirs are usually written when an individual has a bird’s-eye view of the route of his or her life, and if memory remains sharp and the voice truthful, the older the author is, the more she has to say. Gyanodanandini’s memoirs, however, wind up around the year 1880. She gives only a handful of updates in passing. It was up to Indiradevi and Pulinbehari Sen to whisk us through the later decades of Gyanodanandini’s life. Looking for an epilogue, I went back to Satyendranath’s outline for a biography. He wrote it out in Ranchi in 1918, during the fifty-ninth year of his marriage to Gyanodanandini.
While Indiradevi merely transcribed Gyanodanandini’s words, she did play a role in shaping the narrative. She asked questions and presumably sought elaboration when necessary. She obviously was the perfect amanuensis who put Gyanodanandini at ease and knew what to ask, both as a loving daughter and as an experienced editor who had no intention of editing Gyanodanandini out of her own story.
Indiradevi describes Gyanaodanandini as an extreme empath, someone who felt other people’s pain to such a degree that she dreaded, for instance, visiting the recently bereaved. The octogenarian memoirist declines to track back to the skyfall days of misery and anxiety. She lets the dust settle on the broken rollercoaster at the carnival of intense emotions. Even while talking about losing her little son Kabindra ("Chobie”) whom, according to Indiradevi, she mourned till the end of her sentient days, Gyanodanandini shares a couple of details about Chobie rather than dwelling on her own grief.
In the first chapter of her memoirs, Gyanodanandini tells us how she learnt to read and write Bengali with a bunch of older boys, Hindus and Muslims, in Narendrapur village, Jessore, in the 1850s. The teacher would inflict severe punishments on the boys for truancy. Hindu females of the time were not supposed to be lettered. The ones who were, like Gyanodanandini’s mother, did not advertise their skill. Because Gyanodanandini’s father facilitated the village class by providing a room on his property, everyone turned a blind eye to the little girl.
In 1859, at the age of seven or eight, Gyanodanandini was married off to seventeen-year-old Satyendranath Tagore, the second son of Debendranath Tagore. Married life began in the andarmahal (inner house, women’s rooms) of the Tagore mansion in Calcutta. Gyanodanandini talks about those years in her memoirs. Her narrative is in no way complete either as a chronological account or as a personal diary. It is as if she morphs into the quiet but sharp-witted and observant child she used to be, taking everything in, missing her mother, joining in the home classes taught by her brother-in-law Hemendranath (girls and women could read all they wanted in Sanskrit and Bengali in the Tagore household) and attending the daily Brahmo worship, sometimes led by Satyendranath. It is impossible today to imagine a child of seven or eight realigning herself to new kin, with a husband at the heart of all the relationships. Gyanodanandini hints at trust in and tolerance for said husband. Talk was one-sided in the beginning as she was terribly shy. She does not share whether Satyendranath (who even as a teen argued with his mother about the concept of andarmahal) impressed upon her the importance of acquiring an education and developing self-confidence.
However, if you want to know how the establishment was run, who cooked the not-very-tasty meals, how Gyanodanandini’s mother-in-law coped with Debendranath’s long absences (he did not write to her frequently like Satyendranath was to do to Gyanodanandini), then Gyanodanandini’s crisp and candid observations will not disappoint.
She was ten or eleven when Satyendranth departed in 1862 for London to prepare for the Indian Civil Services examination. Gyanodanandini remembers writing a couple of lines of poetry on the eve of his departure. A kindly elderly relation, "Didima”, showed Satyendranath the couplet and he promptly completed the poem, turning it into a song echoing the child’s acknowledgment of the emotional bond already established between them. According to Indiradevi, Gyanodanandini used to sing the song even in her eighties.
People who seek chronological continuity may want to toggle between Gyanodanandini’s memoirs and Satyendranath’s letters from now on up until 1869. The first letter in Puratani’s selection is dated 17th March, '63 (1863). Exactly a year has passed since Satyendranath’s departure from Calcutta. There are eight letters from England, the last one dated 2nd July, '64, when Satyendranath is done with the ICS examination and is preparing to return to India.
Although at the time of dictating her memoirs Gyanodanandini could no longer recall whether she used to reply to Satyendranath’s letters from London, his letters suggest that he did hear from the child now and then. He converses freely with Gyanodanandini, expressing his hopes of liberating her from the andarmahal. In a later missive he writes that Debendranath pushed back when he broached the subject in a letter.
A year before Satyendrnath’s birth Debendranath had reimagined the Brahmo Samaj founded by Ram Mohan Roy in 1828. Debendranath’s model was spiritual. It was a way of deistic worship, breaking off from the idol worship and rituals of traditional Hinduism. Roy, supported by his mentee, Debendranath’s father Dwarkanath, had founded the Sabha with the objective of reforming Hindu society and ushering in liberal humanism through the worship of a universal God. Though it took time, the Brahmo movement overall played its part in combating irrationality and superstition and in the emancipation of Hindu women.
Keshub Chandra Sen (1838-1884) who stayed in Debendranath’s house for a while after being turned out by his father for embracing the Brahmo faith, was in favor of the remarriage of young Hindu widows while Debendrath, twenty-one years older than Sen, was unable to go there. Ishwar Chandra "Vidyasagar” (1820–1891), though not a Brahmo, was a liberal humanist who advocated for educating girls and for widow remarriage.
In his The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton University Press, 1979) Prof. David Kopf traced the evolution of the Brahmo Samaj from the 1820s to 1930. He argued that the Samaj influenced the rise of nationalism in India and reform movements which aimed at emancipating women and encouraging rational thought.
(Prof. Kopf passed away on April 8, 2023. He was Polish American and of Orthodox Jewish ancestry. His first book, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization 1773-1835 (University of California Press) was published in 1969.)
Debendranath was fond of his level-headed second son and eventually put up with his shenanigans. There was no stopping Satyendranath after he returned from England. In one of his two essays in Puratani, Pulinbehari Sen traces Satyendranath’s contribution towards emancipating Bengali women, starting with his own family. As evidence, Sen presents excerpts from the writings of Hemendranath Tagore, Jyotirindranath Tagore and Swarnakumari Devi, all younger siblings of Satyendranath, who held their brother in awe for being a catalyst of change in the Tagore household.
Dwarkanath, Debendranath and Satyendranath were all rebels in their own ways. At age twenty Satyendranath may have found his thinking more aligned with that of Dwarkanath (who died when he was four) than with that of his father. Although unworldly Satyendranath seems on the surface to be nothing like his grandfather who was a savvy industrialist who, apart from supporting Ram Mohan Roy’s social reforms, had bought a theater and a bank in Calcutta and made so much money that even Queen Victoria received him more than once, it seems to me that Satyendranath did inherit Dwarkanath's forward-looking, liberal outlook and unshakeable self-belief.
In his Dwarkanath Tagore: A Forgotten Pioneer, a Life, Krishna Kripalani makes the educated guess that "had Dwarkanath lived after 1846, he would have supported Vidyasagar’s efforts for female education and widow remarriage”.
From a letter to his cousin Ganendranath (Satyendranath’s Letters, edited by Indiradevi Choudhurani, 1924) we know that in 1862 Satyendranath visited the hotel in Worthing, West Sussex, where Dwarkanath had stayed with a large entourage, all supported by him, when he was terminally ill. Satyendranath talked to the proprietress of the hotel, who told him all she could remember about Dwarkanath and all that transpired during his stay.
The name of Dwarkanath Tagore had not been forgotten in England, especially by those who were interested in the early Brahmos. Although he was neither particularly religious nor a spiritual seeker like his son Debendranath would become, as mentioned above, Dwarkanath was an enthusiastic supporter of Ram Mohan Roy. Himself a visionary, Dwarkanath saw in the older man (Roy was seventeen years older than him) a prophet of change in India. He supported Roy’s campaign for freedom of the press in 1823 and for the abolition of Sati in 1828. Although he remained a Hindu, he saw no conflict in supporting the inclusive and secular deals of Roy’s Brahmo Samaj.
As such, the Tagore grandson was noticed by the likes of (Friedrich) Max Müller (1823-1900) who was an Oxford academic at the time, and Mary Carpenter (1807-1877) who had met Ram Mohan Roy in Stapleton, Bristol in 1833, the year he died. Müller remembered Satyendranath as a young student, and was aware of when the latter retired from the ICS. Mary Carpenter corresponded with Satyendranath when he returned to India, and regularly enquired about Gyanodanandini.
Carpenter was a Unitarian minister’s daughter and a teacher. In 1833, the year she met Roy, she also met American Unitarian Joseph Tuckerman (1778-1840) who was visiting Bristol. She was inspired by Tuckerman’s work among the poor in Massachusetts (Tuckerman Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts is named after Joseph Tuckerman) and his idea of a farm school. Carpenter became a dedicated social worker who championed schooling for poor children, women’s education and prison reform. After meeting Satyendranath and his friend Manomohan Ghosh, she was persuaded to visit India and promote education for girls in Ram Mohan Roy’s homeland. She visited India more than once in the late 1860s. On one visit, when Satyendranath was Assistant Collector at Ahmedabad, she stayed for a time with the Tagores.
More than sixty years later, recalling Carpenter’s visit, Gyanodanandini does not refrain from judging Carpenter for her refusal to visit Hindu temples. Being a strict Unitarian, Miss Carpenter could not bring herself to visit places where idols were worshipped. Gyanodanandini, her husband noted in his outline, was all for freedom of worship, and respect for all religions. Presumably, her Brahmo kin, who did not worship idols either, were not averse to visiting temples. On a facetious note, Miss Carpenter seems to have hit a raw nerve in Gyanodanandini. How could her husband converse on and on in English (a language she had not mastered back in those early days in Ahmedabad) with an elderly lady, not paying attention to his wife? Satyendranath seems to have made a running joke out of her pique. In his letter dated 8 June 1868 from Ahmednagar, he applauds her decision to hire an English tutor in the Tagore home in Calcutta. He adds:
"I send blessings; may you speak English like Miss Carpenter. Happy now?”
The letters printed in Puratani were written to Gyanodanandini in 1863, 1864, 1866, 1868 and 1869, during the periods that they were apart. The first eight are from London, about a hundred are from Ahmednagar. All the letters were written by Satyendranath when he was in his twenties, first a student, then a rookie "Civilian" posted in Bombay Presidency.
Upon his return from England in 1864 Satyendranath took Gyanodanandini along with him to Bombay, where they stayed with a Parsi family, the Cursetjees. From the educated and sophisticated Cursetjee daughters, Gyanodanandini picked up the Parsi way of draping saris over a petticoat and modified it by pleating one end over the left shoulder instead of the right one.
The last letter in the selection in Puratani is dated 11th November 1869 and written from Surat.
Indiradevi mentions in her essay that her father retired in 1896, and that his last posting was at Satara. She writes that during his long career Satyendranath worked all over Bombay Presidency, in places such as Ahmedabad, Ahmednagar, Poona, Belgaum, Nashik, Shakkar, Shikarpur, Thane, Sholapur, Bijapur, and Karwar. Gyanodanandini lived with him when she could and visited him during vacations when she lived in Shimla or Calcutta with their two school-going children.
All of us who were educated in Indian classrooms know this fact about Satyendranath Tagore from our History textbooks: he was the first Indian in the Indian Civil Service. I came across the fact when I was unschooled enough to wonder how an "Indian” Civil Service could exist before the first Indian passed the ICS examination!
Before Satyendranath, the ICS was all Brit and all white.
Here I will digress to mention an amusing anecdote from Gyanodanandini’s memoirs.
In 1877 Satyendranath planned to spend his furlough in England with his family, but he got caught up in work. Unfazed, he got a couple of servants and requested an English couple to look out for his family on the journey to England. A pregnant Gyanodanandini, three small children in tow and having little English, arrived in England.
After staying for a while with a Tagore cousin who had converted to Christianity, Gyanodanandini and company moved out and started renting. Gyanodanandini’s baby was born prematurely and died shortly afterwards. As per her wishes, he was buried next to Dwarkanath Tagore in Kensal Green Cemetery. Her beloved "Chobie” also died in England.
Satyendranath finally arrived in England in 1878, accompanied by his youngest brother, Rabindranath Tagore, then seventeen years old.
Meanwhile, a year in England had convinced the children, Indiradevi (called "Bibi”) and her elder brother Surendranath, then aged about four and five respectively, that all Papas too were Brit and white.
I translate from Gyanodanandini’s memoirs:
"The kids would hear: "Papa’s home, Papa’s home!” But, having observed that every child’s Papa there was white and noting his (Satyendranath’s) dark complexion, Bibi hid behind the door and said: "That’s not my Papa!”
Indiradevi (1873-1960) entered the twentieth century as a graduate and as an adult and equal partner in marriage. The Brahmo reformers would have gazed at her with pride. She made good use of her education, talents and her ringside seat in Tagoreworld, making her contribution as an essayist, a collator of Rabindranath Tagore’s letters, an editor, translator, memoirist, a composer of Brahmosangeet (Brahmo devotionals), a notator of Rabindrasangeet (songs of Rabindranath Tagore) and as an eminent public figure who could be counted upon to canvass for women’s causes.
For Bengali readers: Obituary by Shishir Roy, Aug 13, 1960 in Anandabazar Patrika
Puratani is an engrossing compilation. Gyanodanandini’s memoirs, apart from being a precious slice of life of those times, also stand out because she has no desire to be correct and she does not embellish. She needs no more than a few sentences to shed light on people and their quirks. Her tone ranges from detached to peppery to droll to indulgent.
At the end, she writes (I translate):
"I too am old and frail now. I do not see or hear well. I forget everything, which pains me most of all. Thus, it is almost impossible to talk about the past in a continuous flow. However, my daughter will not give up. So, I respond to her questions the best I can. What you will get is a jumble of bits and pieces.”
As for the letters, through them Satyendranath Tagore steps out of History into the real world of the first Indian civil servant finding his feet in small-town India of the nineteenth century. The letters are fascinating on that account alone. In addition, we get a husband who incessantly urges his wife to read and think and communicate, and writes to her almost every day.
Many thanks to my aunt (by marriage) for giving me this book.
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