Memories of a literary landscape

Literary seductions have always worked wonders. You think of Virginia and Leonard Woolf and the impact they had on the Bloomsbury group and by extension on modern English literature. There is then the quiet passion, never publicly acknowledged, which forged a proximity between Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova, a relationship that was as mysterious as it was deep, in its many dimensions. In times closer to ours, Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser are rather impressive models of what literary relationships ought to be. And do not forget the riotous links, of a publicly carnal nature, which kept Henry Miller and Anais Nin bound to each other all their adult lives. The Brownings, yes! Who can forget them?
All of this is of course reason enough for us to go back to the poetic friendship which a relentlessly creative Rabindranath Tagore had cause to develop with the Argentine poet Victoria Ocampo in the 1920s. In a pretty inexplicable way, the poetic interaction which subsisted between Tagore and Ocampo has remained unexplored, at least for a very large swathe of literature enthusiasts in our part of the world. But now observe Anwar Dil, the quintessential scholar who has in these past several decades traversed a very wide expanse of Bengali cultural traditions, come forth to offer a fresh new perspective on the Tagore-Ocampo story. In Rabindranath Tagore amd Victoria Ocampo: The Creative Touch, Dil throws up in full measure the dimensions of the ties which brought the two poets together and despite the large difference in age between the two added fresh new substance to their poetry. Twenty nine years younger than Tagore, Ocampo nevertheless found a soulmate, sort of, a kindred being in the Bengali Nobel laureate. Ah, but that old question of whether age matters at all in the creative landscape arises again. The answer is simple: it does not. Which then is one impediment removed from the path to an understanding of the Bengali and the Argentine as they came in touch with each other and stayed that way in subsequent times.
Anwar Dil, a Pakistani married to the Bengali writer, academic and critic Afia Dil (both are now resident in the United States), begins on a pretty dramatic note. Observe:
This is the story of love between a man born in Calcutta, India, in 1861, and a woman born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1890, one hundred and eighty degrees of both latitude and longitude apart on the opposite ends of the globe.
Dil goes on, to describe Tagore as tall and handsome and Ocampo as 'a beautiful young member of a rich and prominent family' who 'loved reading literary masterpieces in French . . .' It is the year 1913, a time when the Bengali poet seized the world's imagination by becoming the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. For Victoria Ocampo, the future lies ahead.
Pause a while before you go into the relationship between the two poets. Dil's clear stance of describing the relationship as one of love may not quite be the way you look at it, for the simple reason that Tagore was essentially a poet in love with the idea of love. And within that concept came his fascination for women, for the spiritual, indeed for an entire spectrum of existence. What was it, then, that Tagore shared with Ocampo? The two first met on 6 November 1924 when Tagore arrived in Buenos Aires. Ocampo, having learned of his arrival, went over to the hotel to meet the poet. She came across Leonard Elmhirst, who let her in on the news that the poet's health did not permit his continuing his onward journey to Peru. A cheered Ocampo gushes:
"I immediately offered Elmhirst to arrange matters (sic) . . . I was resolved to move heaven and earth in order to find immediately a refuge where Tagore could spend his convalescence, far from the city's noise. And what incredible luck it was to have been on the spot at the precise moment when I could be of use to him!"
That was the beginning. Ocampo, in a frenzy, went about arranging accommodation for Tagore. She would subsequently note that at the time it was Gandhi and Tagore in her thoughts, considering that she had read Romain Rolland's work on the future father of the Indian nation and indeed had written about him and the poet in La Nacion. Tagore moved from his hotel to San Isidro, whence would flow a plenitude of conversations and poetry between the two. Ocampo showed Tagore the river from the balcony. She would later reminisce:
"I had instinctively led Tagore to that balcony upon his entering Miralrio, certain that if he was to take anything away on leaving it, it would be this: the memory of the landscape that would meet his eyes morning and evening, with its changing light. That landscape was the only gift worthy of him."
And Tagore? He called her Vijaya, clearly in translation of 'Victoria', and would soon be penning a poem to her he would call Atithi, or The Guest:
Woman, thou hast made my days
Tender with beauty
You received me with a quiet
And sweet smile
I don't know your language
But I have heard you sing:
You are a guest of love,
O my poet,
My guest for ever …
Anwar Dil is expansive in his dimensional view of the Tagore-Ocampo relationship. He brings the perspective of time into his assessment and within that ambience explores Tagore's understanding of the world as he perceived it through his links with other individuals. Ocampo was part of that process, and to that extent played a significantly contributory role in the working of his creative imagination. Again, Tagore's contribution to Ocampo's poetry was noteworthy. Here was an Indian poet come from a world far away, to cause waves in the soul of a beautiful woman whose poetry could only be even more enriched by such communion.
The Creative Touch is a whole lot more than an examination of the insularity of a relationship. It reaches out to other individuals and other perspectives to offer a broader insight into Tagore's place on the global literary scene. The book is replete with essays on the many aspects of the poet's life and literary activities. You have Mukul Dey, Shahid Suhrawardy, Ketaki Kushari Dyson, Mulk Raj Anand and others dissecting the principles which shaped the poet's life. Your pleasure soon grasps at greater heights, with the delightful addition of articles written at various points of time on Victoria Ocampo. Of course, Anwar Dil mentions Dyson's in particular. Equally especially, he brings forth a collage of the moments in which Ocampo stamped her own image on literature. Her feminism, her role in the journal Sur, her reputation as a builder of bridges between cultures are put across in clear outline here.
You read Anwar Dil, and you appreciate the meticulous manner in which he goes about delving into the links between the grand old man of Bengali poetry and the bright young woman spreading her light in the literary salons of South America. Somewhere, in somewhat a mysterious strumming of the violin that is the soul, you seem to hear Tagore sing shunilo shagorer shyamolo kinare / dekhechhi pothe jete / tulonahina re …