The Post Office and Card Country - A Set of 2 Books (Old and Rare Books)

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About the Book The Life-enhancing aspects of The Post Office, to Amal’s eagerness to travel and see everything, to cross the barrier of the mountain he sees from his window, to learn the Curd-seller’s tune, to visit the country where Time goes… links up with the performance of the play by the Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, in the care of Janusz Korczak, a celebrated pediatrician and educationist who was influenced by Rabindranath’s educationist who was influenced by Rabindranath’s educational ideas.

About the Author William Radices was born in London in 1951. He studied English literature at Oxford and Bengali language and literature at SOAS, University of London, where he has, since 1988, been a lecturer in Bengali. As well as his well-known translations of the poems and stories of Tagore for Penguin, he has published ten books of his own poems. He has also written opera libretti: 'Snatched by the Gods' (based on Tagore's poem Debatar grass) for Pararn Vir, and 'Chincha-chancha Cooroo' (based on a story by Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri) for Bernard Hughes. He lives in London and Northumberland.

Foreword Putting two works together in a single volume can bring out contrasts but also unexpected connections between them. On the one hand, we have here two very different plays by Rabindranath Tagore: Diikghar, ('The Post Office', 1912) is poignant, tragic, and even bleak in some of its implications. In his portrait of the dying boy Amal, Rabindranath must have had in his mind the grief and bereavements he had suffered in the preceding ten years, culminating in the death of his younger son Samindra in 1907. Anyone looking for undercurrents of agnosticism and despair in Rabindranath's deep religious faith can certainly find them in Diikghar. The visionary promise of the arrival of the King, and of Amal's employment beyond death as the King's postman, is not shared by all the characters. 'What use is starlight to me?' cries Madhab Datta as Amal dies; the letter from the King that the Headman has handed to the boy is a blank sheet of paper; and we cannot feel wholly convinced when Thakurda claims to be able to read the King's writing on it. Taser desh ('Card Country', 1933, revised and expanded 1939) is, by contrast, cheerful, humorous, satirical; as infused with the spirit of life as Diikghar is dominated by death.

But immediately, anyone who knows and loves the plays will point to the life- enhancing aspects of Diikghar: to Amal's eagerness to travel and see everything, to cross the barrier of the mountain he sees from his window, to learn the Curd-sealer’s tune, to visit the country where Time goes, though the watchman tells him that no one knows which country it is. In Taser desh , equally, we have death as well as life: the living death of the Prince's luxurious yet tedious existence in his palace, the deathly regimentation of the Cards and their enslavement to rules, to 'moves' (chalk) rather than human, independent 'movements' (chalan).

So for all the differences of style, mood, tone and pace in the two plays, we begin to see that they are connected - not as mirror images, but perhaps as Siamese twins: unique in their separate personalities, but overlapping in some of their deepest elements and functions.

That connection goes beyond the simple one of being written by the same author. Though it might be possible to find links between any two works of Tagore, it is easy to think of much less compatible and interlinked pairs than Diikghar and Taser desh. And the fact that one is a tragedy and the other a comedy (though not in the conventional sense of those terms) points us to an aspect of Rabindranath's unity of vision that we might not have thought of had we not put them together like this.

What is the primary conflict or dialectic in the two plays, their essential, motivating idea? For whatever other creative impulses might lay behind them - in terms of character, feeling, poetry, language, rhythm and, in Taser desh, music and dance too - Rabindranath is always a poet of ideas. Central to both plays is a clash between the orthodox and unorthodox, caste-rules and freedom, timorousness and courage, literalness and imagination, convention and eccentricity, boredom and fun. This basic clash produces various kinds of incongruity, depending on the characters and situations involved. Thus, in Diikghar, Amal does not behave like a sick boy is supposed to behave. Madhab Datta is pained by the strict injunctions of the ultra-orthodox Kabiraj, but he still can't make his adopted son out, and he is even more alarmed by the subversive influence of the highly unorthodox Thakurda. The characters in the play can be placed along a scale of empathy for Amal, of understanding of the way his mind works. The harsh and sardonic Headman is at one end of the scale; the Curd- seller, the Watchman, the Boys are in the middle, Thakurda and the Royal Kabiraj are closer still to Amal, and the flower-girl Sudha is closest of all.

Their reactions are gauged above all by the nature of their laughs and smiles, despite the sadness of the play. Madhab Datta smiles at Amal with anxious, protective puzzlement; the Curd-seller humors him kindly; the Watchman laughs loudly - not cruelly, but not quite honestly either, for he says to himself, 'His questions are so amusing'; the Headman laughs at Amal openly and sadistically: 'Ha ha! What a fine fellow! Ha! A letter for you from the King'; the Boys smile and chatter with excitement at Amal's toys; Thakurda and, above all, Sudha smile with love.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages