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CChhaapptteerr VVIIII

RREEDD OOLLEEAANNDDEERRSS

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RED OLEANDERS

Red Oleanders is one of the sixty plays, by Asia’s first Noble Laureate

Rabindranath Tagore. The play written in 1923-24, was begun during a visit to

Shillong, Assam and was inspired by the image of a red oleander plant crushed

to pieces of discarded iron that Tagore had come across while walking. A short

time later, an oleander branch with a single red flower protruded through the

debris, as if, he noted, “created from the blood of its cruelly pierced breast”. It

has been suggested that the play’s title might appropriately be translated as

Blood-Red Oleanders to indicate the beautiful and toxic nature of the flower

and its association with beauty and death in the play.

Tagore wanted the play to be an expression of the truth “to which we are

so accustomed that we have forgotten all about it”. He did not construe it to be

a sermon or a moral. Simply but, it is a play about evil and good, working side

by side, about greed and human sympathy, about that which separates fellow

begins and that which keeps us together. All this is surely not so different from

great works of art and literature, and touches upon life itself.

Red Oleanders clearly invokes the spirit of India’s great epic poems.

This is the story of Nandini, a beautiful woman who appears at a time of the

oppression of humanity by greed and power. The antagonist in the story is the

King, who represents enoromous authority but barricades himself behind an

iron curtain. He transforms a town into a fort and the humans into digging

machines who grope in the dark searching for gold.

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In this soulless mining Yaksha town, people forget the beauty of nature,

the green meadows, the dazzling sunshine, the tenderness and love between

humans. Nandini arrives to salvage humanity trapped behind mechanized

tyranny. She eventually frees the oppressed souls who are toiling underground,

but at a great sacrifice. The story ends in an unexpected climax after Tagore

knits an intricate network of sequence that ultimately becomes a parable. The

problem and the cure are simple. Like the blossoming of a flower, happiness

too had to be product of love and of labour that is civil and honest and made of

human sympathy and consideration. Tagore had a penetrating pen along with

an analytical approach to life at the base of which was his unfailing faith in

mankind.

Speaking of the play Red Oleanders Tagore himself told that “it is a

vision that has come to me in the darkest hour of dismay”.1 The English

version of the play Red Oleanders as available to us is the translation of the

Bengali text entitled Raktakarabi. This play is the most mobilizing instrument

for counter attack on postcolonial society, the by-product of the modern

materialistic system.

Red Oleanders, the last of Tagore’s symbolic plays, has, as most

symbolic plays do, provoked the interpretative intelligence of critic after critic.

With the result the ‘play’ is lost in its thematic interpretations. Sombhu Mitra’s

is the only attempt, to relate the theme of the play to its form in a general sort

of way. As he puts it:

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This play has in it a total picture of the crisis in civilization of the

contemporary world. It deals with the frightful dilemma of the

modern man in the grip of an acquisitive society. And because

the dilemma and the prospect have a larger-than-life nightmarish

quality about them the form given to the play is larger than the

frame of a picture depicting the particular and the individual. The

form had to be such as to be adequate to the content, which

stretches down to level after level of meaning and extends

beyond particular problems of a particular individual and family.2

The controlling vision of Red Oleanders is a comprehensive view of

twentieth century civilization, rugged individualism and its philosophy to shape

and sharpen i.e. moulding individuals to suit the existing system of Yaksha

Town. This town is an imaginary landscape like Dickens’ Coketown,

Narayana’s Malgudi and Scott’s Mayapore. The name of the town is

appropriate because of the venture the townsmen are involved in i.e. mining

gold, the master of which is Kuber, the Hindu God of riches and the Yakshas

are his servants. The town or the civilization poses some questions or

challenges, the answer or responses of which is to be found out, the riddle has

to be solved, but it is only Yudhishthir who can solve the same because it poses

the Yaksha Prashna.

Yaksha Town groping in darkness is certainly much more sensitive than

that of the Indian creative writers could offer by virtue of the significant details

intensifying Tagore’s deep perception of the historical milieu. It comes very

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close to some of the earliest recorded experience of the phenomenon, as well as

some of the latest modern experiences in imaginative literature. This is more or

less infernal machinery enveloped in darkness and charged with madness to

exploit riches. It not only foresees ecological imbalance but also points out

some aspects of urban industrial environment. The complete absence of ‘the

green of the woods’ and ‘golden sunshine’ is usurpation of nature but they

reduce the whole industrial base of progress and civilization to their very

opposites—savagery and barbarism. This is a continuous experience in

literature from Blake to Eliot and even after Eliot in terms of London and

Unreal City, as well as to the growth of modern metropolis. ‘Work’ here

assumes a peculiarly dehumanizing severity.

Yaksha Town has parallels with Dickens’ Coketown. It is a landscape

both real and symbolic, a point of focus where perversions of human nature and

society are joined to certain conditioning quality of work and this quality is

linked to the spirit of civilization that is almost a return to savagery. It is also a

place that has devitalized physical sources of energy. This is the world which is

a kind of hell, a vision of the crowded, confused and disconnected fragment of

man’s existence threatened by his own work which reduces him into a

machine, a hand or a stomach, a place stunting human nature and perverting it.

If at all there is any relationship, it is the relation of progress to achievement,

education to ignorance and refinement to inhumanity. Here the mines are run

by human labours, tragically found to be numbered like commodities. This has

parallels with Dickens’ children numbered in Chokumchild’s School or the

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human samples produced in the hatchery in Brave New World having

numerical labels. These are human beings driven like cattle and have to be of

utility to the existing system of Yaksha Town at any cost. As such, just as

Soma is administrated to the infants in Brave New World, we are told of

labours being drugged with wine only to degrade and dehumanize the mass of

workers who are ignorant of the losses they sustain. The dehumanizing effect is

so deep that it appears to be a waste land.

The curtain rises “on a window covered by a network of intricate pattern

in front of the palace” (1)*. The network which remains throughout the play

only to be demolished at the end is, one might say, the central symbol of the

play. That symbol goes on acquiring a semantic dimension is clear from the

many references to it in the play: Nandini asks the Professor: “Then again, you

hide your king behind a wall of netting. Is it for fear of people finding out that

he is a man?” (7). The Professor replies that their “ghostly royalty, made hazy

by this net is fearfully potent with its inhuman power to frighten people” (7).

He also says that he too, lives behind “a network of scholarship” (9). Quite

early in the play Nandini claims with confidence, “I shall find my way through

the network” (9). In their first meeting, which takes place through the network,

the King accuses Nandini, “Do you know, Nandini, you too are half hidden

behind an evasion,--you mystery of beauty!”(23). Later, when Nandini wants to

* All the references in the parentheses are from Rabindranath Tagore. Red

Oleanders, London: Macmillan, 1948.

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go away from Yaksha Town and asks the professor to show her the way, the

latter says: “. . . there’s a wire network stretched from post to post, from

country to country” (113). So the net is spreading farther and farther. Towards

the end of the play Nandini knocks and pushes at the network shakes it

violently and at the very end the network lies torn to shreds.

The important point to be noted is that the network is not a wall barring

all communication; it allows partial communication and partial contact. At one

stage, for example, the King stretches out his hand through the network and

asks Nandini to place her hand on it for a moment (31). Thus the network

stands for many things—isolation, self-protection, imprisonment, partial

communication, the possibility of a dialectical action-reaction process, haziness

and mistiness, half-knowledge and half-understanding, invisible authority and

so on. It is with this multi-dimensional symbol as the back drop that the action

of the play takes place.

The play begins with the King behind a network window and ends with

the breaking of the same and the King showing himself. It is on his name that

the town is administered by a Governor and his police who symbolically stand

for the Leviathan State machinery to which, by the end of the play the King

himself rebels; but only after the coming of Ranjan and Nandini in this

insensitive world, where values are insignificant, love is forbidden and freedom

is not granted. The coming of the two in this inhuman world awakens human

sentiments and manliness. Ranjan is important only for building up the central

encounter between Nandini and the King. He acts as a catalytic agent in the

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process of liberation of the Yaksha Town. The transformation of the King

which is the central theme of the drama symbolizes by action-reaction

relationship between Nandini and the King through the network. The King

ultimately emerges as a symbol of human creativity turned perverse. He has all

the power that human civilization has generated but this power has turned dead

and perverse.

Nandini is the central character in the play dominating the entire action

central as well as peripheral. She is a leader like character, or that she is created

to be a leader with all the charismatic qualities of a mass leader, because she

has to influence each and every character in the play who constitute the ‘mass’

and who will aid her in her call to break open the net and unveil the King. This

will be her triumph and it is this triumphal march that the dramatist is interested

to depict from the beginning to the end. Her march is endless; this is what she

propagates because she wants it to continue even after her death, precisely

because the world is not to perish with her. Her march is an initiation,

beginning of a way of life, set of beliefs, meaning giving principle, etc., that

would constitute the foundations on which she wants to remodel the Yakshs

Town by overthrowing the cherished ideals of the King behind the net.

The first three scenes—Nandini-Kishor; Nandini-Professor; and

Nandini-Gokul—could be taken as exposition scenes, which establish the

situation, the level of action and the dramatic mode of the play. The situation is

: Nandini, a woman, who ‘awakens a cry in our hearts (5), is brought to Yaksha

Town, a queer place ruled by a King who always keeps himself behind a

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network structure in the palace, with its inhabitants busy working in the

underground tunnels, digging for gold. The level of action is far from being

realistic, but it is consistently simple, serious and symbolic, suggesting all the

time a deeper level of meaning. The mode is that of poetic drama, which strives

to present a vision of some archetypal pattern of human experience through its

imagery and what we might call dhvani .

The first three scenes develop Nandini as a tangible human figure with

symbolic overtones. She is the principle of love, evoking tremendous devotion

in Kishore, who says, “I dream of dying one day for your sake, Nandini” (3).

While accepting his homage, the offering of red oleanders, she shows great

concern for him and his safety. In the company of the professor, who, thanks to

her influence, gives an honest analysis of Yaksha Town. She shows an

intellectual quality much superior to the professor’s. She makes him realize that

all he says is a kind of made-up talk and he borrows day and night in a mass of

yellow pages, like the diggers in the bowels of the earth. It is to him, who

obviously understands her but cannot follow her, that she speaks about her

Ranjan, who, endowed with God’s own thoughts and spontaneous strength,

will, she says, “put a beating heart behind these dead ribs” ( 9); and about his

love for her, as a symbol of which she wears the garland of red oleanders. The

professor begs her to fly away from the city under an eclipse, and asks for a

flower so that he can try and understands its colour. In the third scene that

follows, Gokul, a digger, hurls abuses at her, calls her a witch, snaring

everybody with her beauty, bringing some unknown doom upon them. To him

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the tassel of red oleanders appears menacing ‘like an ominous torch with a red

flame’. The first three scenes present Nandini from three different point of

view—those of devotion, understanding and antagonism, and adumbrate the

impending conflict between Nandini and the King and also the impending

arrival of Ranjan, the Deliverer. They also dramatically keep the action poised

between hope and despair, the possibility of salvation and that of destruction. It

is she who asks the King

The living heart of the earth gives itself up in love and life and

beauty, but when you rend its bosom and disturb the dead, you

bring up with your booty the curse of its dark demon, blind and

hard, cruel and envious. Don’t you see, everybody here is either

angry, or suspicious or afraid? (14)

This is a pertinent question as to what has been made of Yaksha Town

by the King and what great tyrants, dictators and the Big Brothers of modern

history are making of dominions, territories and nations. They are taking care

of and exploiting the territories and resources on the name of progress by way

of disemboweling the earth, defacing nature and conditioning man to grow sans

love, sans morals, sans beauty.

This scene, which climaxes the first part of the play, is one of the finest

that Tagore has written. On the level that has been established so far, the scene

moves with tremendous power and valid emotional intensity. To begin with, it

is Nandini who first knocks at the network and asks the King who is but a

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Voice throughout the scene to let her in. She says “My heart is full today, I

have brought you a garland of white kunda flowers” (18). The King is reluctant

to let her in. “I have no time”, he says. She sings an autumn song for him and

invites him to come out—out into the fields. If he doesn’t want to come out at

least he could be made to listen to what she has to say about “the living heart of

the earth” (21) which gives itself up in love and life and beauty and about his

disturbing the dead bowels of the earth which brings up the curse of blindness,

cruelty, avarice and envy, “the curse of grabbing and killing” (21). She,

however, admires his immense strength and again invites him to come out into

the light and “let the earth be glad” (22). But he is gripped by his own

obsession:

“Do you know, Nandini, you too are half-hidden behind evasion,-

-you mystery of beauty! I want to pluck you out of it, to grasp

you within my closed fist, to handle you, scrutinize you,--or else

to break you to pieces. Why can’t I strain out the tint of your

oleanders and build a dream out of it to keep before my eyes?”

(23)

He insists on knowing what she thinks of him. She replies, “I think you are

wonderful. Strength swelling up in your arms, like rolling clouds before a

storm, __

it makes my heart dance within me” (24).

But, what about Ranjan? The king knows: “In me there is only strength,

in Ranjan there is magic” (26), the magic of life, of the grass and the flowers,

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the magic of youth. “If I had Ranjan’s youth I could leave you free and yet hold

you fast. Alas, everything else can be kept tied, except joy” (27).The king’s is

the tragic cry of the desert for a blade of grass. Old and weary, he knows that

“over-grown power crushes itself inwardly by its own weight” (29). He sees in

Nandini “the dance rhythm of the All” (29) and that is why he wants to possess

her: “If I wished to hold you with all of me, would you come to me, Nandini?”

(31). He stretches out his hand from the window and says, “Place your hand on

it for a moment” (31), but he doesn’t let her in, because:

My busy time, overloaded with work. . . is not for you. On the

day when you can arrive, full sail before the wind, into the bosom

of my full leisure, the hour of welcome will strike. Even if that

wind be a storm, all will be well. That hour is not yet come (31-

32).

Nandini says that Ranjan would bring that delightful wind. “He carries

his holiday-time with him, even in his work. . . .How to fulfil leisure you will

learn from him” (32). The King turns wretched with envy: “He has the red

wine if oleanders to fill his cup. But to me you want to pass an empty leisure.

Where is the wine?”(32) Nandini throws a challenge before she goes: “I go.

But I tell you, my Ranjan is coming today. You cannot prevent him” (33).

The scene is highly complex , subtle and dramatic, with the symbolic

and the human joining hands in perfect marriage. The King’s tremendous

knowledge includes the tragic knowledge of his essential limitation and of the

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inevitable hopelessness. But he, the King of Power, must, by the force of his

very nature, stretch his hand to posses Nandini, the goal of all his life-long

endeavours . Although he is the master of his universe, possesses all the

material powers he is unable to love and he loved because of the net he himself

has created in order to veil him. In this situation, the King presents the

predicament of the great makers of History who enslaves themselves in the

systems they have themselves have created, be it their courts, palaces, forts or

even the tight security ring around themselves. The King is not only within the

net, he is also overloaded with work, which amounts to amassing immense

wealth. Nandini tells the King that Rangan is for her to spent enough time.

Although the King has ‘all’ he is a pauper because he is devoid of creativity of

life and joy of life.

The King’s agony is the agony at the heart of all human civilizations, of

all human aspirations, of human life at all levels; it is the existential angst of

man. This King-Nandini scene is one of the finest and most perceptive

dramatizations of this human angst, and, therefore, it has the quality of myth,

satisfying both in its concreteness and artistic perfection. Tagore is telling the

truth when he says, “It (the play) is a vision that has come to me in the darkest

hour of dismay.” The dark hour of dismay which Tagore is experiencing is

same as Petronius and Eliot have experienced. The craving of the soul in

distress is the desire of emancipation. The King’s cry is therefore tragic in the

sense the cry of the Cuman. Sibly is tragic because of it being deprived of the

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youthful vigour. Just as Sibly is shown hanging in a cage, the King here is

hanging behind the net.

The scenes that follow depict the life patterns of the Yaksha Town. It is

a holiday in Yaksha Town on account of the Worship of the Flag, and here

holidays are more of a nuisance than work-days. Phagulal and his wife Chandra

recall the life of freedom of their village where they could taste the essence of

life in “the green of the woods and the gold of the sunshine” (40) which is

never to be experienced in this world of the King and the mighty Governor.

This has parallels in Blake’s chimney-sweepers recalling the echoing green and

other experiences. Bishu,the poet, who is possessed by Nandini, sings of the

joys of freedom and the “boundless tavern underneath the blue canopy” (41),

and criticizes the dehumanizing tendencies of Yaksha Town. He also hints that

the tyrannical rule of the King and his Governor exists not only because of their

designs and methods but also because of the mean-mindedness and greediness

of the inhabitants of the town, the Yakshas. The Governor handles his people

with utter sophistication and hypocritical concern, and arranges for Gosian’s

soothing religious and moral sermons. To Bishu, Nandini has revealed the

reason of the eternal sorrow of man in terms of ‘sorrow of aspiration’ and to

forget the same is the greatest of sorrows.

In this town, Nandini finds in Bishu the only one to whom she can talk

freely and feel the happiness of birds. Admiring Nandini in one of his poems,

he addresses her as “a breaker of my sleep and a waker of my sleep” (66-67),

probably because she has promised his liberation: “I’ve come to take you away

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from here” (70). Nandini now speaks of her visit to the King inside his

chamber, and there is a bit of an interesting development in their relationship.

She recalls how the king who looked “like a man of the epics” (71) gazed at her

face, gently stroked her hand and buried his fingers in her unbound hair and sat

for a long time with closed eyes. “I loved”, she says, “to give that bit of joy to

that lonely soul” (72). She speaks with genuine sympathy about the King’s

agony and his pathetic desire to know her. “You don’t know how desperately

he wants to live” (74), she says, even though her total allegiance to Ranjan has

maddened him. To her he looked like a big greedy boy. This second encounter

of Nandini with the King is dramatically significant, since it clearly indicates

the desperateness of the King and the tremendous destructive force it might

engender. What is to be noticed is, in spite of the mounting dramatic tension

and in spite of the fact that the Governor is planning something ominous with

regard to Ranjan; Nandini is still hopeful about meeting him that very day and

offers the Governor the garland of kunda flowers. Apart from the dramatic

irony inherent in the scene, what is significant is Nandini’s calm of mind and

clarity of vision which will later triumph over the immediate catastrophe. The

play’s success is bound with this realization of the profound faith in the heart of

Nandini.

The next encounter between Nandini and the Voice (King) proves

conclusively that the King is at the end of his tether; he boils with the Lava of

cruelty and threatens to destroy her, “I must either gather or scatter. I can feel

no pity for what I do not get. Breaking is a fierce kind of getting” (89).

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He wants Nandini to crown him with her red oleander which she has

kept for Ranjan, so that he might die in peace. But from here onwards the play

moves on to depict the realistic i.e. the ugly aspect which is a point of attack by

Nandini and her associates. The Headman informs of Ranjan’s enslavement,

because he had infected the diggers with a new spirit. Anyhow after his escape

from Vajragarh, he plans to meet Nandini. The Governor wants to arrest him

and so he spreads words of Nandini’s arrest by the King. In reality Nandini was

inside the net only to witness the enslavement of many of her friends from her

village, in the palace. This makes Nandini realize the principle of fiendishness

inherent in the King. With a sudden desperation she cries, “If this is the way of

man’s being, I refuse to be, I want to depart with those shadows,--show me the

way” (112).

But there is no way—there’s a wire network all around. Nandini

desperately knocks at the King’s net window, she cries, “If it is necessary to die

in order to live like men, what harm in dying?” (116)

Then follow in quick succession a number of scenes. The battered

wrestler on whom Nandini pours the balm of sympathy ultimately cringes

before the state power and accepts his slavery. In contrast, Bishu, who is

imprisoned for telling the truth, is free in his bondage. Nandini sends with

Kishore the tassel of red oleanders to Ranjan who, she knows, inside the

palace. The King’s doctor speaks of the King’s mental disease, the remedy for

which is some kind of a game like war. As the play moves towards its end,

there is a bit of time for a little comedy satirizing the mean and corrupt ways of

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power in the little scene between the Governor and the Headman. The play is

now free to move towards its long-awaited climax with Nandini desperately

asking everyone about the whereabouts of Ranjan. (A beautiful scene with four

different colourful bands of people being accosted by Nandini). Now there is

no alternative but to encounter the King. And Nandini starts shaking the

network violently. The door opens and the King appears on the stage for the

first time. And Ranjan too, appears, but dead. Nandini, mad with grief, cries

out, “Then lull me to sleep—the same sleep! Oh, why did you work this havoc?

I cannot bear it any more” (166).

Kishore, too, is dead. Nandini prepares herself for the last fight, “King, the

Time is indeed now come. . . For the last fight between you and me” (168).

The king submits, “make me your comrade today. . . to fight against me,

but with your hand in mine” (169). He breaks his flagstaff and begs, “Let your

hand unite with mine to kill me, utterly kill me. That will be my emancipation”

(169-170). Phagulal, who has come with others to break the prison gate, is

baffled to find Nandini with the King, with Ranjan lying dead. Nandini tells

Phagulal:

That is what I’m still alive for, Phagulal. I wanted to bring

Ranjan amongst you. Look there, he has come, my hero, braving

death! . . . I did await his coming, and he I did come. I still wait

to prepare for his coming again, and he shall come again. . .

(173).

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Nandini runs off to face the Governor and his army and the King

follows her. Bishu who has come out of the broken prison comes to look for

Nandini. Phagulal says, “She has gone in advance of us all. . . To the last

freedom,” (179) and rushes out to the fight, shouting “Victory to Nandini”

(180) while Bishu picks up her wristlet of red oleanders, and the autumn song,

which is heard off and on during the play, is heard again in the distance:

The earth’s mantle of dust is filled with ripe corn!

O the joy ! the joy! (181)

Red Oleanders is one of the most difficult of Tagore’s symbolic plays.

It is the most complex of these proposition plays, and hence, to many, the most

‘obscure’ or ‘puzzling’ or ‘elusive’. It excited a great deal of interest as to its

real meaning. The playwright found that many of his Western readers failed to

understand its real meaning. Hence, he gave an elaborate explication of its

allegorical meaning in the Manchester Guardian. It may be pointed out here

that in this enthusiasm for decoding the allegory and its various ramifications,

not much attention was paid to the play as a work of art. It was much later,

when it was staged by the Bohu-rupee Theatrical Group that it was realized

how tremendously powerful this play can be on the stage.

In this play Red Oleanders Tagore makes a determined effort to make as

comprehensive a statement as possible about his philosophy of life. There are

in it two distinct worlds, one containing all that Tagore disapproves of and the

other containing all that he values and loves. Into the world that he disapproves

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of he puts the following: pursuits of material wealth, over-organization,

nationalism, tyranny, conventional religion (used as opium), destructiveness,

possessiveness, scholarship, artificial pleasures of the market place, and the

consequences of all these—loss of freedom, loss of individuality,

dehumanization, mutual suspicion, sorrow, boredom, weariness, a sense of

emptiness, of homelessness etc. Into the other world, which represents his

positive values, he puts: Nature, beauty, youth, love, joy, creative power,

freedom, home, song, laughter, generosity, sympathy, pity, affection, desire to

do good, to help others, to liberate, to emancipate, etc. Tagore’s attitudes are

clearly indicated, with no equivocation or ambivalence, through the pattern of

symbols and the attendant images that he uses.

The first symbol that strikes our attention is the setting of the play itself

which serves as a metaphor. The Yaksa Town itself is the symbol of the

modern, mechanized civilization encouraging highly bureaucratic and almost

dictatorial forms of government which delights in dehydrating people. Besides

the Yaksa Town, the inhabitants of the kingdom are also symbolic. S.K. Desai

opines, “The characters sometimes oscillate between the symbolic and the

allegoric.”3

The king who is the head of the government is naturally the symbol

of the supreme authority. The king happens to be controlled by the negative

laws of the Yaksa Town. The king who is traditionally known as the well-

wisher of the subjects, or the guardian of Truth or justice or the human

representative of the Absolute is reduced to being self-imprisoned in the jail or

his own tyranny. He has to wield his power through the governmental

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machinery consisting of the hierarchical order of officers like the governor, the

assistant governor, and the headman etc. The king and his political machinery

represent the suppressive government but upon the pursuit of material wealth,

the inimical group of characters like Nandini, Ranjan, Professor, Kishor and

Bashu among others represent the idealistic philosophy of life. The idealist set

of characters have become misfits in the Yaksa Town. Thus these symbols

(some-times mere allegories) hold a mirror to the contemporary Indian society

and signify Tagore’s dissatisfaction with the mechanical life which had no

place in it the spiritual values at all. The Professor describes very eloquently

the lineaments of this town, “Yaksa Town is a city under eclipse. The Shadow

Demon, who lives in the gold caves, has eaten into it. It is not whole itself, nor

does it allow anyone else to remain whole” (8) .

The theme of the play is the interaction between the two worlds or the

impact of the second world upon the first, represented by the relationship

between the King and Nandini and her impact on him, which, on the

metaphysical level, is the impact of Spirit over Matter. The structure of the

play, the patterns of images and symbols, are so carefully organized and are so

intellectually satisfying that they certainly deserve our full-throated praise, but

there is something wrong at the very heart of the play. This becomes clear if we

try, for instance, to analyze the role of Nandini, the principal symbol of the

play.

In this soulless, heartless, mechanized city there is Nandini, a beautiful

girl, who symbolizes what is best in human nature—love, faith, trust and

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fearlessness. She makes them aware of their bondage, and creates in them a

desire to be free. She is a symbol, to begin with, but she grows on you, as she

does on every one with whom she comes in contact in Yaksa Town. She is

warm; she understands the meaning of love. Possessions do not mean anything

to her; she has learnt how to be generous with love. Her red oleanders, the

flowers with which she is identified, become her red bandage of courage. The

red oleander is a symbol of love, passion, vitality, courage, beauty and nature.

It becomes the ‘living heart of the earth’.

The level that is established at the beginning of the play is essentially

poetic, and the poetic is closely related to the human. On this level Nandini

functions satisfactorily both as a symbol and as a human being. Tagore says in

a letter, “Nandini. . . has definite features of an individual person. She is not an

abstraction. . . .She is a real women. . .” 4 only until she talks to the King. She

evokes devotion in Kishor and admiration mixed with restlessness in the

Professor, and a kind of fear in both the Professor and Gokul—so far, the

surface level and the inner level of significance do not clash. But the clash

begins with her relationship with the King which makes no sense at all on the

level which is established in the beginning. On the poetical-human level,

Nandini’s admiration for the King, her desire to go into the private chamber,

her coaxing him to go out with her, the King’s desire to hold her with all of his

coupled with his reluctance to let her in since the hour of welcome is not come

yet—all this strongly smacks of perversity. The emotional response to this

situation has no relevance to the intellectual meaning contained in it, which is

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this: Matter needs Spirit to give it life, beauty, joy, ‘the dance rhythm of the

All’, and Spirit longs to lend life, beauty, etc., to Matter. Or, materialism, with

its immense strength and power, is lifeless (the King is old, weary, utterly

bored), though its aim is to posses life, beauty, joy, etc. (Nandini and the Red

Oleanders are symbols of the life-principle, of ‘the dance rhythm of the All’).

And the life-principle, by virtue of its very nature, longs to lend its spirit to all

those who want it. According to Tagore, “Nandini is Woman, the female

principle, who alone can restore the human to the desolated world of man”5.

There is no quarrel about the significance of the symbol, but the context

in which the symbol operates arouses certain emotional responses that tend to

confuse the issues involved. For instance, Nandini, who loves Ranjan, likes the

King’s strength and power and gives him some joy out of pity: “Then he buried

his fingers in my unbound hair and sat long with closed eyes… I liked it…..I

loved to give that bit of joy to that lonely soul” (71). This kind of relationship,

which makes sense on the thesis-level, creates confusion on the surface, human

level. On the other hand, the King’s jealousy towards Ranjan and his final

killing of Ranjan make sense on the realistic-human level, but on the level of

inner significance they make no corresponding sense. In Tagore’s art we often

find this clash between the symbolical and the realistic, one trying to assert

itself over the other. Another example will make the point clearer. In a fairly

interesting scene between the King and Nandini, which is quite satisfactory on

the human level, the King, after expressing his love for Nandini and jealousy

towards Ranjan, bursts into philosophy:

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Nandini: What is it you see in me?

Voice: The dance rhythm of the All.

Nandini: I don’t understand.

Voice: The rhythm that lightens the enormous weight of matter.

To that rhythm the bands of stars and planets go about dancing

form sky to sky, like so many minstrel boys. It is that rhythm,

Nandini that makes you so simple, so perfect… (50).

Red Oleanders is described on the title page as a ‘a drama in one act’6

But even a cursory reading would show that it is not what is usually called a

one-act play, a form of play with certain distinctive features like one situation,

one theme, a few characters and limited duration of about an hour. ‘One act’,

with reference to Red Oleanders , probably indicates only that the play is to be

staged with no break at all and with no change of scenery (one can’t guarantee

a non-break production on the modern stage; but the stage setting does remain

the same throughout the play, and that is a significant feature); it does not

indicate, however, limitedness of theme, situation and character. Infact, the

play consists of many scenes, one flowing into the other, in the Yatra fashion.

The fluidity of its structure baffled the Western critics to such an extent that

they saw neither plot nor action in it. A. Aronson said:

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But its characters come on and go off the stage without doing

anything that form a plot with exposition, development and

denouement.7

This drama of ‘one act’ (which Tagore might have planned for theatrical

convenience) in its theme and purpose, has only one act important—the act of

transformation and continue to ensure the result of this transformation in the

interest of the inhabitants of the town. Early reviewers noticed no action in this

play, except the action involving the breaking of the net. This is precisely the

demand of our civilization which even C.G.Jung noticed. Noticing his

profound awareness of the crises of modern civilization, he noticed modern

civilization, he noticed modern mind having lost all contact, dissociated from

all sides, living in complete isolation, in its one sided cultivation or reason or

an empire ( Coketown or Yaksha Town) because of the splitting of the world

today by Iron Curtain. Whether it is the net or the iron curtain, it has to be

broken to save humanity from total annihilation. It requires courage and in this

play it is Nandini who has the courage, the courage of a martyr or a saint, in

consonance with the spirit of the modern world. She finally emerges as a

woman symbolizing individual freedom and uncompromising spirit of

revolution. The other characters are more or less allegorical. This play has a

pattern more or less of Dicken’s Hard Times.

What is most organically and significantly connected with the play,

from the point of view of theme, structure and level are the songs which are

woven into its texture. There are about nine of them, three of which are autumn

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songs, which speak of the ripe corn and the harvest. These autumn songs are, of

course, associated with the King, who is the ripe corn fit to be harvested, so

that the earth gets ready for a new Spring. One of Bishu’s songs runs as

follows: ‘when the sap is dry the wine of death “flushes all emptiness with its

laughter” ’. Bishu sings in all his six songs about ‘the call of far away landing’,

‘the wine of death’, the coming of night, Nandini—the ‘breaker of my sleep’

and the ‘waker of my grief’—the mystery of waiting and, finally, the joy of

mowing of the corn. Nandini sings two: one, the autumn song, and the other of

universal love:

I love, I love___

’Tis the cry that breaks out

From the bosom of earth and water (80 and 91).

Tagore, thus, connects up the course of human life and human history

with the cycle of seasons and asserts that behind all this lila of destruction and

creation operates the spirit of Love, the prime mover of the universe. The songs

are important in that they lend a poetic dimension to the play and help to

universalize the themes. They also help in maintaining the poetic level of the

play by intensifying it from time to time.

Red Oleanders ends on an almost opposite strain. The King decides to

open his ever closed doors to Nandini. His own officers, the Furies of the

machine world, resenting the King’s transformation, make him kill Ranjan

unawares. Nandini sees Ranjan lifeless and screams out, for once, in her

womanly earthly voice: “King, they all say you know magic. Make him wake

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for my sake” (164). The King’s reactions vary from shock, anger to

lamentation repentance: “My machine can put an end to waking.—Alas ! I

know not how to awaken” (164). Nandini launches her war in full scale against

the machine world. In a sudden, but not too unexpected move, the King himself

offers to be her companion. Nandini’s passionate, pathetic voice rings like a

prayer for the victory of Ranjan; “he leaves behind him in death his conquering

call. He will live again . . . I did await his coming, and he did come. I still wait

to prepare for his coming again, and he shall come again” (173) the masses of

the Yaksha Town join her, although doubts remain if they share her faith. In

fact, a sceptical voice is heard in the melee: “Shall we be able to win through?”

(175) to which the more experienced King has a ready answer: “we shall at

least be able to die! . . .I have found the meaning of death. I am saved” (175).

Penance is a way to salvation. To equate personal salvation with social redress

is a Promethean task that neither the King nor Nandini has the potentiality to

perform.

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REFERENCES

1. Rabindranath Tagore. A Centenary Volume. New Delhi: Sahitya

Akademi, 1961. 241.

2. Somdhu Mitra. Reflections on Tagore’s Plays. The Illustrated weekly

of India, 7 May, 1961. 41.

3. S.K. Desai: “Symbolism in Tagore’s Plays” in Critical Essays on

Indian Writing in English. Macmillan India, Madras, 1977. 165.

4. Rabindranath Tagore. A Centenary Volume. New Delhi: Sahitya

Akademi, 1961. 241.

5. Rabindranath Tagore. A Centenary Volume. New Delhi: Sahitya

Akademi, 1961. 241.

6. Rabindranath Tagore. Red Oleanders. London: Macmillan, 1943.

7. A. Aronson. Rabindranath through Western Eyes. Allahabad:

Kitabistan, 1943. 115-117.