Aug 18, 2003 04:05 PM
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(Updated Aug 18, 2003 04:30 PM)
“The eternal curse of Love – Its embrace soon turns into bondage.”
Love is a strange thing! Making people act in strange ways. Wrecking all that comes in their way as obstacles. And when the love is finally theirs, they simply give it up. Idiosyncrasies such as these and others are in full display by the principal players of Rabindranath Tagore’s novel Chokher Bali
First published in 1902, Chokher Bali is a simple story told simplistically. Tagore has written many novels and short stories better than Chokher Bali, but probably in none is he a better storyteller. This is a gentle, calmly ironic and attention grabbing look at human viles and drama, yet minus his customary poetic rhapsodies and intellectual dissertations. Non-frilly and to the point.
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The one single factor that Chokher Bali is worth reading for is its key character- Binodini. The way Binodini was written raised a furore when the book was published. Though bold, today Binodini does not shock as much as she might have unsettled people then. A real, convincing, full-blooded and unapologetic character of a beautiful and vivacious child-widow, full of viles and deceit.
She is a stunning, talented and well-educated girl who cannot get a husband, as her parents have not enough money for her dowry. In panic, she is married off to a poor sickly man, who soon dies (this is set in a time when it was a social disgrace to keep an unmarried girl over age 12 at home) leaving her stranded and widowed in an unsympathetic world.
She rebels against the trials and tribulations to be faced by a widow and uses her bewitching looks and charm to inch her way into a respectable high class family of a rich widow Rajlakshmi to assert and fulfill her rights for the love of a man, a home and happiness.
As a consequence she has two men vying for her attentions and she enjoys every moment of it. Of these one is married - Mahendra ready to dump his wife of 11 years, Asha - a sweet and loving, illiterate girl of a humble background, ill-equipped to handle transitions and conflicts in her life. The other is single - Bihari, Mahendra friend
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Through Mahendra and his mother Rajlaxmi, Tagore takes potshots at the way sons are brought up in India. Utterly spoilt by mothers to become nincompoops, unable to handle criticism, take coherent decisions, or doing anything on their own.
A fiery seductress who knows how to use her charm to get her way. A femme fatale out to destroy the peace of a household. Her moves, her ploys, her gestures and words are all calculated to make the desired effect. Chokher Bali is all about these messy, inextricable entanglements Binodini willfully creates and its subsequent resolution.
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The English translation of this novel is available at The Sahitya Akademi under the title ‘Binodini’ and the Hindi translation is available as “Aankh Ki Kirkiri”
The novel of 200 pages reads like a breeze and is done in a jiffy. The book is only limited to the interpersonal relationships and the intensely interesting ups and downs of the lives of these five characters, which it devotedly and intricately follows. Readers expected anything more than that, will find it stifling. But those expecting the classic Tagore writing would not be disappointed.
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“Like the enraged black-bee which stings whatever comes in its way, so Binodini, mad with rage prepared to wreak her vengeance on the world around her, a world that seemed hell-bent on thwarting her, spiting her. Were all her longings, all her endeavors doomed to frustration? Then there was only one way to avenge her frustrated life. To defeat and drag into dust those who had cheated her of her right to be happy, who had trampled on the graceful flowering of her womanhood, robbing her off her natural rightful due.”
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