Carrying over the legacy
By Adil Jussawalla

EDWARD THOMPSON was a friend of Rabindranath Tagore’s for almost 28 years. He was a British missionary who began his work in India in 1910. He did his best to make Tagore’s work accessible to the British and his first major book on Tagore was published in London in 1926. Thompson died in 1946, shortly after revising the book for his publishers. The revised version was finally published in 1948.

Tagore’s friend was the father of someone most of us known simply as E.P. Thompson. The "E" probably stands for Edward too I haven’t been able to find out. This bothers me.

It bothers me because the Thompsons seem to have had a good working relationship with each other. Perhaps E.P. was his working name, I’m not sure. In his last book Alien Homage (1993), an attempt to explore the relationship between two men from different cultures — his father and Tagore — E.P. acknowledges the efforts of Theodosa, his mother, and Kate, his daughter, in helping him put his book together — his father’s book as much as his own, given the subject.

Such households aren’t rare. When it comes to perpetuating the memory of an illustrious member of the family many hands get busy, hands that would normally be straining to scratch other family member’s eyes out. Often, in the best of Byzantine traditions, the co-operation and maiming happen at one and the same time.

Let’s face it, it’s boring dealing with family matters, boring dealing with family papers, family letters. In going through his father’s notebooks and correspondence, undisturbed for almost 40 years, E.P. must sometimes have been heavily bored. A historian, Marxist, famed author of The Making of the English Working Class and tireless campaigner for nuclear disarmament, he wasn’t exactly driven to his task out of filial love, duty or guilt. Pressure to contribute something to the celebration of Tagore’s 125th birth anniversary did the trick. He went up to the attic where the papers were and didn’t come down "till four months later, with the draft of a little book in hand."

I dipped into Alien Homage shortly after I’d read Scorpio, a story by Dilip Chitre. The story ends with the image of an enormous empty socket in the brain, an eye, a sun. And with it a jet black scorpion "charging ahead" its "house on its back". E.P. was the scorpion that carried his house on his back like his father had before him. His father considered Tagore to be a permanent guest in his house; he thought of him continually.

It’s not what a Marxist might have said of himself or his father but carrying their houses on their backs is what some writers do. Six years after E.P.’s death, and 43 after his father’s, their houses remain. Fascinating in themselves, it’s chiefly because of an important guest they both share now that our Indian interest grows.— Associated News Features