J | "|~T VEN in the- very pH minor affairs of life. * the freedom that ottr women lack has always angered and saddened me. Is it not by an accident that I have been born a man endowed with all the rights and privileges that our society accords to its male members? Yes, not every human being is destined to be happy. Be that as it may, but for a human being, nothing. can be worse than a life without freedom."

Thai was Rabindranath writing lo his youngest son-in-law Nagendranath in 1922. For Rabindranath. i( was not a pic< <- of sentimental rhetoric, but the pronouncement of a long suffering, aggrieved father who had learnt that bitter lesson from the hard school of his own life. One of the less well-known facts of Rabindranath’s life was the unhappy married lives of the two daughters thal he had the misfortune of' watching from the sidelines. So. in his case, life's bitter experiences equipped him to deal'much more compassionately with the whole range of women s issues in our society.

But true to his own convictions. he simply could not keep the issue of female liberation separate from the broader issue of human emancipation. In his eyes, emancipation from bondages — religious, social, economic and intellectual — was equally essential for both men and women, without which no human being could reach the height of his or her full |M>ientials. This is why one finds that the term "emancipation” Is the most widely used one in Rabindranath’s literary oeuvre.

Given such concerns, it is quite natural that Rabindranath would take a very hard look at the various aspects of women’s real-life problems With the unerring instinct and compassionate care of a loving mother. Rabindranath por irayed the deplorable conditions. the pains and sufferings of our womenfolk — rich and poor alike — at the hands of a male-dominated society For the literate Bengalis — or lor that matter, the Indians — it was an unforgettable experience to come face to face with such an impressive number of Tagorean heroines He still remains unique In the sense that neither before nor since do we find, In our literary world, such an impressive crowd of female characters who challenged, objected to. and rebelled against, the norms and usages of an oppressive. patriarchal social system.

But surely, no one. even a genius like Tagore, could create such a world without going through a long process of intellectual transformation. Indeed. Rabindranath's views on various women s issues were never static. His long creative career saw the development of his Ideas about. and Ideals of. womanhood through a constant process of evolution and transformation In keeping

■with shifts and turns in his inner and outside worlds.

Indeed, his early ideas on various women's issues can hardly be said to be reassuring, not to speak of revolutionary. Thus, in 1878. we find a youthful Rabindranath, not yet out of his teens and on his first ever visit to the West, while holding men responsible for the sad plight of our women, saying. "It is not due to male oppression but because of the laws of nature that women have to take care of their children within the bounds of family life". A decade later, he entered into a bout of polemical writing, in the pages of "Bharati and Balaka", the journal edited by his eldest sister Swarna Kumari Devi, with the Marathi feminist leader Pandita Ramabai who had been- preaching the gospel — inflammable and unacceptable in the eyes of the Indian male — of equal gender ability. Joining in the fray, the editor once commented, "How could the writer (Rabindranath) be so sure that women can receive and assimilate ideas but cannot create? This is something utterly beyond our comprehension."

Similarly Henrik Ibsen's (1828-1906) A Doll's House (1879) — that noble literary endeavour movingly portraying a woman’s urge to seek and establish her own distinct human identity and fulfilment — did not appear to have touched Rabindranath much. His comment on Nora's rebellion was. "Really, the condition of women In Europe appears to me to be extremely unacceptable". Rabindranath's quarrel with another noted Bengali female writer Krishnabhavinl Das (1864 1919) on the contents of ideal female education Is another example of his doubts about the nature of education suitable for women’s fulfilment

But those contradictions apart. Rabindranath was unequivocal in his strong condemnation of female oppres slon and denial of their human rights in the name of religion and social conventions. Not surprisingly, while Krishnabha-vini. faced with mounting criticisms from the reactionary elements in her society., almost InstanUy beat a hasty retreat from her radicalism for Rabindranath, there could be no going back. The supreme humanist could only move forward.

Hence in the early decades of this century, we find Tagore changing his course rather sharply But the process, of course, had started much earlier. For In the early 90s. we find him coming out with another first in Chitrangada — a play in which the royal heroine sought her own fulfilment in an equal partnership with Arjun, her male suitor. She quite resolutely looked upon that relationship as a mutually satisfying bond nurtured not on the conventional Ingredients of sexual satisfaction alone, but on a much desirable and hence durable foundation

built on shared ideals, plea- ' sures and pains of life together. This was the ideal of a new womanhood, though not entirely new in the sense that Chitrangada. while objecting to the use of women as a sexsymbol. objected initially to the attempt of winning over Aijun by the same questionable exploitation of female charms.

Froln then on. Rabindrahath never had to look back. It,is impossible to do Justice, in a few lines or with a very broad brush, to the full range of Rabindranath's female characters.

We can only take a. cursory look at a few of them. In his "Letter from a wife." we find Mrinal, the first literary rebel in Bengal talking of finding, herself "in writing poems secretly. That was where I found my emancipation, my own self'. In her quiet determination and resolute rejecUon of all the domestic rules that for so long kept her in chains, she triumphed over her male 'superiors' including her husband. But the realist that • Tagore was. he knew he could not turn Mrinal into a Bengali Nora unlike whom Mrinal found her salvation ndt in desertion but in death.

The mother and the sweet heart — these are the two ideals of womanhood that captivated Tagore throughout his long literary career. Again and again, these two rolemodels he idealised and idolised in his various literary writings. But there was an exception to this also. He was not slow to recognise the shame. decepUons and the hollowness that had come to characterise the existing realities obtaining in our society. His Kumu — the exquisite heroine of his novel Jogafog was trained to idealise marriage and motherhood from her early childhood. And yet in the end. what she finds are these: 'There are certain things in life which a mother cannot surrender even for the sake of a son. When a human being wants freedom, nothing can prevent him/her." There was Haimanti who gave her life quickly In the knowledge that even a loving husband, being a prisoner himself, cannot set her free. It Is said that the failed marriage of Tagores' eldest daughters Madhuri inspired the distressed father to draw the immortal picture of Haimanti. A real life tragedy indeed

All Tagore s heroines — Shashikala. Chandara. Haimanti. Mrinal. Kumu. Labanya — to name only a few. had. to a vanring extent, radical non-cpniormlst Ideas on the whole range of women's issues affecting their lives. Tagore, never an extreme social radical, made all his heroHjes appear towering over their male counterparts by making them behave rather ludicrously In their own arena. In their own ways, these Tagorean women, rendered their male counterparts into so many worthless, empty-headed human beings lit for contempt and nothing more.