A tiger of the stripy kind

A mirror chanced to view,

And seeing the black upon his coat

Into a temper flew.

He thought the matter urgent --

So to find a good detergent,

Bade Jhagru post to Prague

Or else Hazaribagh."

So at the 'command' of his nine-year-old grandaughter Pupe, or Nandini, was born the rhyme about a tiger. It led eventually to Shey, to what Shankha Ghosh terms as "a fantasy in fourteen chapters." The remarkable thing about the translator Apurna Chaudhuri is that she is in her final year at Calcutta Girls' High School; she read Shey when she was ten (approximately Pupudidi's age when she listened to Dadamashai's first installment), and began the translation soon afterwards -- "the first draft contained more doodles than writing." Now, at about the same age as Pupe was -- 16 years - when the original volume was published in 1937, she has published her own translation of the tales. For somebody still in high school Apurna is startlingly mature about the art of translation, writing that aside from the usual agonies of rendering into English "the colloquial language, the frequent play on words, the caricatures of the heroes and deities of Indian mythology," the central problem posed in translating Shey was the rendering of this particular 'He' -- a Bengali third person pronoun - "who helps the writer to make up the story" and in the process "becomes the story's most integral element."

These stories enchant, and part of the enchantment is that those very stories simultaneously illuminate the process of story-telling. Rabindranath was way ahead of the vaunted 'unreliable narrator' of modernist creations, while the result of Apurna's efforts is something far beyond her years, readable and liberating.

The Bengali bourgeoisie has buried Rabindranath in its bardolatry. Sukanta Chaudhuri (general editor of the Oxford Tagore translation series) said as much once in his 'View from Calcutta' newspaper column, writing that "a certain refinement of sentiment and utterance, the classicizing of certain features of the Bengali landscape, a certain vein of exalted romanticism," perpetuates an "elite, effete Tagore tradition," that like "dentist's ether, de-fangs" Rabindranath. Forgotten are, Sukanta observed, Rabindranath's "prose writings on politics and society that, beneath a superficial datedness, still reach out like a whiplash to touch the Bengali psyche," neglected are "works (where) you will read, as in a prophecy, searing analyses of how the city (Calcutta) and society view and conduct themselves to this day."

So too in Shey, ostensibly written for children, Rabindranath rips through the conventions- the shastras -- laid down for this form. The result is something rich and strange. Rabindranath mocks academic pedantry, parries with the Bengali modernists -- the 'He' tells Pupudidi's Dadamoshai, "'You see, Dada, this is your way of telling stories. Instead of tracing them out clearly and simply with your forefinger, you write them out in exaggerated curves and flourishes, as if you had Lord Ganesh's trunk for a pen. You must twist the familiar into the strange. It's very easy. People might laugh when you say the viceroy's set up trade in oil and is selling dried fish at Bagbazar, but the laughter you win by a cheap joke like that is of no worth.'" One can hear Hamlet here, addressing the Players: "But it was as I received it...an excellent play, well digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty as cunning. I remember one said there were no sallets in the lines to make the matter savoury, nor no matter in the phrase that might indict the author of affection, but called it an honest method, as wholesome as sweet..."

And this is barely the beginning! In his own inimitable way Rabindranath rails against the tuneless and the discordant, urges overbred Bengalis to break the 'gentlemanly cut of poetry, beat out the backbone of verses with clubs.' Angry at a caste-ridden society, he chases it by very funnily describing the tribulations of a caste-conscious tiger! In this children's book, he displays what Lila Majumdar called "biting satire underneath the evident humour." Then, Prospero-like, there is meditation, too, on his own art, on how to step away 'directionless/in baul's dress' and be 'a worthless flower among weeds' - with even a kind of a Bengali Ariel in the guise of Sukumar, a character who gradually begins to make an appearance in place of 'He'.

I finished the book in a kind of dazzled wonderment: had Rabindranath been alive today, would he have shunned the 'gentlemanly cut' of all the elegant columns and words written about him on 'Baishay Srabon' and 'Pochishay Boishakh'? Would he himself have looked at our continual "elite, effete" reproduction of the Tagorean tradition and invented a new tiger rhyme, written a new Shey? What would he have said about, say, 1971 and our constructions of nationalism? Would he have 'seared' Dhaka, too, revolted by the degradations caused by class and poverty? Would he have liked us as we are now?

Your stomachs you stuff

With more than enough,

In your pockets you stash

Your bundles of cash,

But add up the due,

You'll find that it's true

That of your reserve,

The orphans deserve

The larger share,

And love and fond care.

So arise and awake

For the orphan's sake.

O, give to the poor; help lessen their pain--

O, give to the poor and give once again!

Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.