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For far too long the poetry of Tagore has been treated like a shibboleth, as a test to distinguish the true-blue Rabindra Sangeet-loving Bengali from the non-Bangla-speaking others. What is more, it is like a sacred space where non-Bengalis too fear to tread. A new book corrects an old wrong. Appropriately enough, it is called Romancing Tagore for awe and veneration for the Bard’s immortal verses are replaced by pleasure and passion here. Transcreated into Urdu by Indira Varma and Rehman Musawwir, it infuses a new zest into these ageless poems of love and longing. Indira Varma, a connoisseur of the Urdu ghazal and an established poet with two published volumes of poetry behind her, has been in love with Tagore for decades. As she writes in her Preface: "...Tagore has left us with one of the best repositories of love to be fo und anywhere in any language. This love has multiple forms – it is divine, it is patriotic, and it is romantic ... Tagore sees romance exuding from the mundane, from the rites and rituals of everyday life." Varma has culled poems from Tagore’s vast repertoire with painstaking exactitude, poems that speak of small joys and sorrows, of the monsoon cloud heavy with rain, a glimmer of love in the beloved’s eye. And she has clothed them in the many-splendoured robes that only a language as seductively sweet as Urdu can provide.
Tum se shanasa dil hua, us paar ke sanam Sagar ke paar rehte ho us paar ke sanam (I know you, know you, O lady from foreign land You live across the ocean, O lady from foreign land) Designed by Suneet Varma, this handsomely produced book is a series of minutely etched cameos that combine to make it a collector’s edition. Exquisite Jaamdaani patterns from antique sarees, fragments of Kantha embroidery, intricate motifs and borders make the reader linger over every page. Each set of facing pages carries an English translation, the transcreated Urdu version in Urdu script as well as Devnagari and in Roman English, thus making these translations available to a wider audience. Interspersed with the Urdu transcreations are Tagore’s paintings, opening yet another dimension to the Bard’s immense creativity. Accompanying the book, is a CD containing 10 of these Urdu nazms set to music by Debajyoti Misra. While four are recitations by Indira Varma, the rest are sung by the Pakistani singer Najam Sheraz and Shubha Mudgal and Kamalini Mukherji. Reminiscent of Tagore’s own compositions, it shows how poetry travels across the barriers of language. In its Urdu version, it has all the sweet melodiousness that my Bengali friends swear by. Coming at the close of the 150th-year celebrations of our national poet, Romancing Tagore is a loving tribute and an apt one too; for, it tells its readers and listeners how and why Tagore’s songs have echoed the heartbeats of countless Bengalis. (Rakhshanda Jalil blogs at www.hindustaniawaaz-rakhshanda.blogspot.com)
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For instance, a poem such
as Aami chini go chini tomare that is brimful with an aching love
for a distant beloved has been translated as: