{"id":358,"date":"2011-12-29T17:05:17","date_gmt":"2011-12-29T17:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/landc.wpengine.com\/silhouette\/?p=358"},"modified":"2016-09-06T15:21:11","modified_gmt":"2016-09-06T09:51:11","slug":"kabuliwala-by-tagore-kolkata-dublin-via-kabul-tagores-internationalism-cinema","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/kabuliwala-by-tagore-kolkata-dublin-via-kabul-tagores-internationalism-cinema\/","title":{"rendered":"From Kolkata to Dublin via Kabul: Tagore\u2019s Internationalism And Cinema"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>

The most successful adaptation of a Tagore story outside Bengal was of course, Hemen Gupta\u2019s Kabuliwala (1961)<\/a>, produced by Bimal Roy, starring the veteran actor Balraj Sahni.<\/p><\/div>\n

At a symposium organised to mark the 150th<\/sup> birth year of Rabindranath Tagore<\/a> in Dublin last month, the organising team \u2013 a small group of five academics with an interest in South Asia, working across universities and disciplines in Ireland \u2013 decided to screen Kabuliwala<\/em> (Hemen Gupta\/Bimal Roy, 1961) as part of the programme.<\/p>\n

The symposium was inherently interdisciplinary, touching upon Tagore\u2019s internationalism, his perception of East-West relations, and his contribution to literature, political thought, theatre, cinema, and poetry.<\/p>\n

Tagore\u2019s tremendous influence on the Indian imagination is evident in the enthusiastic response the philosopher\u2019s 150th<\/sup> birth year has invited in the shape of renewed engagements with his ideas irrespective of regional, linguistic or national affiliations both within and outside India. If Tagore was rooted in the language and culture of Bengal, shaping it for the generations to follow, his intellectual and imaginative explorations abided by no linguistic, regional or cultural boundaries, freely embracing the world for inspiration, content and idiom.<\/p>\n

The larger human drama that many Tagore stories explore transcends national boundaries, and even while being located in the specific historical context of colonial India, speaks to concerns and anxieties that are positively trans-national, and possibly universal.\u00a0 This is perhaps one of the reasons why Tagore\u2019s stories have been so attractive to filmmakers as they lend themselves to the visual depiction of concerns, values, and sentiments that cut across boundaries, inviting identification from a diverse audience.<\/p>\n

The screening of the Hindi version of Kabuliwala<\/em> and the fact that the symposium was happening in Ireland were both significant in their own way. Ireland merits a special place in Tagore\u2019s life by way of his long and intense correspondence with the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, who was so taken by Tagore\u2019s poetry that he writes in his 1912 introduction to the English translation of Gitanjali<\/em> that \u2018I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me\u2019.[1]<\/p>\n

In 1913, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on the recommendation of Yeats, four years younger than Tagore, who himself had to wait until 1923 to join the list of Nobel Laureates. In many ways, it was Yeats who drew the world\u2019s attention to Tagore, who then subsequently in years to come, developed long-standing associations with writers, artists, and thinkers from different parts of the world, sustaining lengthy correspondences and strong friendships with several of them.<\/p>\n

It is not surprising, given Tagore\u2019s modernist leanings, his visionary thinking, his belief in the value of the arts and his ability to look ahead to the future, that he would nurture a genuine fascination for the cinema, going on to proclaim it as the primary medium of art expression for the 20th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

Tagore\u2019s interest in cinema was international, and he keenly watched silent films made in Europe and the Soviet Union, during his travels abroad to raise funds for his university at Shantiniketan. Closer to home in Calcutta, he worked closely with B.N. Sircar, the founder of the New Theatres, whose idea it was to film Tagore\u2019s dance-drama Natir Puja<\/em> on Tagore\u2019s seventieth birthday. The twenty-minute film includes archival footage of Rabindranath Tagore, and was directed by the poet-philosopher himself in four days with the help of students from Shantiniketan.<\/p>\n

\"Kabuliwala<\/a>

Tapan Sinha\u2019s 1957 Bengali version of the film, adds and modifies details to render the narrative cinematically while holding on to the larger idea of humanism foregrounded through the original story.<\/p><\/div>\n

Sangeeta Datta, director of the English-Bengali film Life Goes on<\/em> (2010) and author of the BFI-commissioned book on Shyam Benegal points out that the association with Tagore suited New Theatres particularly well as cinema was still considered a taboo line of work, especially for women, and an association with Tagore enabled for New Theatres to carve out a distinctively upper caste respectability that found favour with the Bengali bhadralok<\/em>.[2]<\/p>\n

In 2011, the NFDC released a compilation of Tagore Stories on Film, which include Natir Puja<\/em>, Satyajit Ray\u2019s 1961 English documentary on Tagore, Tapan Sinha\u2019s 1960 Bangla film Khudito Pashan<\/em> (Hungry Stones), Satyajit Ray\u2019s 1961 Bangla film Teen Kanya<\/em> (Three Daughters) as well as his 1984 film Ghare Baire<\/em> (Home and the World), along with Hemen Gupta\u2019s 1961 Hindi film Kabuliwala<\/em>, which was previously made in Bengali by Tapan Sinha in 1957, and Kumar Shahani\u2019s Hindi film Char Adhyay<\/em> (1997).<\/p>\n

However, this is only a small selection of films inspired by, or adapted from Tagore\u2019s stories, novels, plays and songs and film critic and writer Satyen Bordoloi states that \u2018over the years, more than a 100 films, more than half in Bengali, have been made on Tagore\u2019s works, making him one of the most adapted writers of all times\u2019.[3]<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for film enthusiasts and historians, many of these films have been lost to negligence and time, including films like Manbhanjan<\/em> (1923), Bisarjan<\/em> (1929), Bicharak<\/em> (1929), Giribala<\/em> (1930), Dalia<\/em> 91930), and Noukadoubi<\/em> (1932) from the silent era, as well as films like Gora<\/em> (1938), Choker Bali<\/em> (1938), Sodh Bodh<\/em> (1942) and the later version of Naukadoubi<\/em> (1947) from the pre-independence era. A third version of Noukadoubi<\/em> has recently been made by Rituparno Ghosh, who also previously made Choker Bali<\/em> with the Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai in 2003.<\/p>\n

The interest in adapting Tagore\u2019s stories to film was not restricted just to New Theatres and Bengali cinema. In 1947 Nitin Bose made Milan<\/em> starring the superstar Dilip Kumar; in 1972 Sudhendu Roy adapted Samapti<\/em> into Malyalam with Upaharam<\/em>; and Kumar Sahani made Char Adhyaya<\/em> in Hindi in 1997.<\/p>\n

The most successful adaptation of a Tagore story outside Bengal was of course, Hemen Gupta\u2019s Kabuliwala<\/em>, produced by Bimal Roy, starring the veteran actor Balraj Sahni. The simple story of Kabuliwala<\/em> is about the affection between Rehman Khan (Balraj Sahni), an Afghani immigrant dry-fruit-seller in Calcutta and Mini (Sonu), a young girl who he imagines as his child-figure in memory of his daughter, Amina (baby Farida), left behind in Kabul.<\/p>\n

This story, unlike many other Tagore-inspired-films that are more strongly rooted in context and period, offers a more classical perspective on humanism, identify and difference. Tagore\u2019s Kabuliwala<\/em> was published as a short story in Sadhana<\/em>, a Bangla literary magazine he edited through the 1890s and the early decades of the twentieth century. The story was translated from Bangla into English by the Irish woman Margaret Elizabeth Noble, more popularly known to the world as Sister Nivedita, and published in the Modern Review<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It was this story of Tagore\u2019s that the English painter William Rothenstein read and was moved enough by to make enquiries about Rabindranath through his painter brother Abanindranath Tagore, who arranged to send him translations of some of Tagore\u2019s poems. It was Rotheinstein who subsequently wrote to W. B. Yeats about Tagore, bringing the Irish connection full circle.<\/p>\n

Kabuliwala<\/em> is a reflective account narrated by Mini\u2019s father\/author of his own journey towards understanding humanism as overriding the historical and contextual differences that divide people.<\/p>\n

In the short story, the reader, and indeed Mini\u2019s father, do not know that Abdur Rehman\u2019s friendship with the five-year-old Mini is built upon his yearning for his own little daughter in Kabul (whose name and image Mini\u2019s father casts in familiar modes as the mountain-resident Parbati) until after Rehman returns from having served a long prison sentence for the murder of a man who had refused to pay him for his wares.<\/p>\n

The narrative of the short story is constructed so as to first allow the reader to encounter difference fully – as a reflective rendition of the unlikely bonds between an Afghan dry-fruit seller, a returning immigrant in Calcutta, belonging to another history and nation and a young girl from a progressive middle-class Bengali family at the turn of the 20th<\/sup> century \u2013 before destabilising its basis as a mere construction that camouflages a more universal bond of humanity.<\/p>\n

The bond, in this instance that between father and daughter, shared across time and cultures, is made manifest through the imprints of Abdur Rehman\u2019s daughter\u2019s small hands on a creased and dirty piece of paper: \u2018Not a photograph. Not a drawing. The impression of an ink-smeared hand laid flat on the paper. This touch of his own little daughter had always been on his heart as he came year after year to sell his wares in Calcutta. Tears came to my eyes. I forgot that he was a poor Kabuli fruit-seller, while I was\u2014but no, what was I more than he? He was also a father.\u2019[4]<\/p>\n

Kharo Bayu Boye Beghe<\/strong><\/em> (Kabuliwallah<\/strong><\/em>, 1957, Bengali)<\/p>\n