Summing up of a Tragic Life

Kadambari Devi (5 July 1859–21 April 1884) was married to Jyotirindranath Tagore, Rabindranath’s elder brother, and daughter-in-law of Maharishi Debendranath Tagore, on July 5, 1868, at the age of nine. She was ten years younger than her husband and two years older than her brother-in-law, Rabindranath Tagore. On April 19, 1884, at the age of 25, Kadambari Devi consumed a heavy dose of opium to end her life. After ingesting the drug, Kadambari fought for her life for two days before she passed away on April 21, 1884. This incident took place four months after the marriage of twenty-three year old Rabindranath in the illustrious Thakur house of Bengal.[/ihc-hide-content]

The translator notes in the foreword to the book that Rabindranath’s sister-in-law, whom he used to call notun bouthan (new bride), had written a suicide note. The work is a fictionalized account of the obscure events that led to her suicide. The author records that this long epistle, on burnt pieces of paper, was almost impossible to read and has been lost for 127 years, and he has chanced upon it only recently. Kadambari Devi’s suicide was stealthily hidden by Devendranath Tagore; his cryptic command destroyed every shred of evidence. After Kadambari’s overdose, Dr. DP Smith was called, and four hundred rupees were paid to him as fees. All of Kadambari’s letters, diaries, and coroner’s reports, as well as all traces of suicide, were wiped off. The events of those two days were suppressed and erased from public memory. Kadambari Devi ka Suicide Note is a fabricated account of the murky circumstances which prompted her suicide. It seeks to unravel several confounding questions about the last day of Kadambari Devi after consuming the poison: who had salvaged the remaining letter from the blazing fire? Was it Rabindranath? Did he disobey his father with this deed? What could a woman in the late nineteenth century, entangled in a complex web of emotions, have written in her suicide note? What impelled Kadambari to take such a step? What account does she narrate in her suicide note? How did she struggle and manage to survive her last two days? Had Rabindranath’s marriage severed the bond between them, making it unbearable for Kadambari to live?
This novel, published on January 1, 2015, more than 150 years after Kadambari’s death, is a long valedictory letter that sums up the poignant account of the tragic life of the star-crossed woman and searches for answers to all such questions. Ranjan Bandyopadhyay has shaped his imagination and deployed his creative liberty to compose a suicide note as the voice of Kadambari to her Thakur po (brother-in-law). The letter is addressed in first-person narration to Rabindranath as ‘Dear to life, Rabi. This is the morning of the last day of my life.’ The narrator, Kadambari, is narrating the story from her point of view, juxtaposing her past relationship with Rabi with her present miserable reality: ‘Earlier, you would get up before sunrise. Your singing would wake me up.’ Kadambari reminisced about the time she spent with Rabi. They shared intimate moments in the garden several times. Kadambari liked literature, loved poetry, and music, and cooked well. She would even supervise Rabi’s meals and introduce many new dishes to the household. He would read his poems to her, they would sing songs together, and jointly they designed a garden, which was named by Tagore ‘Nandan Kanan’ (Garden of Heaven). Her love for nature, flowers, and birds made her transform the terrace into a roof garden. The young Rabindranath considered her his motivating force; he would recite his poetry, and Kadambari would extend her appreciation. He even nicknamed Kadambari ‘Hecate’, the Greek goddess associated with the moon and magic. Gradually, an intellectual and emotional relationship developed between them. Kadamabri’s story goes back and forth evoking numerous instances and memories. These memories show subtle care, love, and longing—something that was regarded as forbidden and considered unethical. Kadambari’s father was a worker in the Thakur house, and they lived on the ground floor of Tagore’s sprawling, large house. She recollects how her father suffered humiliation in the Thakurbadi (Tagore’s house). When Kadambari married Jyotirindranath, as the bride of the family she was relocated to the upper floors, where the Tagores lived, and she met Rabi, who was merely seven at the time.
The Tagores believed in educating their daughters-in-law. Jyotirindranath made sufficient provision to educate his wife at home. She also learned horseback riding from her progressive husband. However, Jyotirindranath remained preoccupied with his business ventures, hobbies, and interests in theatre, paintings, translation, editing, and music and had no time for Kadambari. During summer afternoons, while Jyotirindranath would be occupied with the administrative work of the family properties, Tagore would share his poetic and literary creations with Kadambari. At other times, they read Bankim Chandra’s serialized versions of his novels in the popular journal, Bangadarshan. In the evenings, Rabindranath, Jyotirindranath and Kadambari were often on the terrace that she had elegantly decorated with palms and flowering shrubs. On such occasions, Jyotirindranath would play the violin, and Tagore would sing in his soprano voice. During these enchanting, dream-like hours, notun bouthan was a rapt listener and relished it wholeheartedly.
However, life was not all rosy for Kadambari. The members of the family blamed her for her incompetence as a woman for being childless. Kadambari also lost her much-loved adopted child Urmila in an unfortunate accident. She was reprimanded and looked down upon by all the women in the family who believed that her husband ‘merited someone much better than her’. There was an absence of love and intimacy between them. Kadambari called her relationship with her husband ‘a sham’. She confessed that there ‘was no love lost in her relationship with her husband’. The final crisis occurred when Jyotirindranath failed to turn up to accompany Kadambari for the inauguration of his new steamer. One day Kadambari accidentally discovered a love letter written to Jyoti by one of the theatre actresses in his pocket. Out of the many hurts and disappointments, she recalls her birthday when she requested her husband to come home early but he did not come home that night. The callous rejection, oblique and sometimes blatant insults, lack of empathy, warmth, and love in her married life, and the ensuing loneliness and alienation she experienced brought her close to Rabi. Kadambari and Rabindranath rehearsed for a theatre as lovers (the author of the drama was her husband himself). The rehearsal turned into a public avowal of affection by Kadambari to Rabi. Through theatre, she says, ‘This world, the sun, and the moon are my witnesses, you are my husband and I would repeat a million times that I am your wife.’ She acknowledges, ‘Thakur po, even today, I have not forgotten your expression of affection.’
Tagore was soon sent away to England to be trained as a barrister although he returned to Bengal in 1880 without completing his studies. Following this, his novel Bhagno Hridoy (Broken Heart) was dedicated to Kadambari Devi. The growing intimacy between the two led to gossip in the Jorasanko house, and Rabi was soon to be married to Mrinalini Devi. Before the marriage, Tagore returned all the letters that he had received from Kadambari. One day she could not resist herself and ended up going to Rabindranath’s room. She picked up his notebook to read his new poems, and she found these two lines: ‘Yahaan se jao puratan! Nutan khel arambh hua hai’ (Take your leave from here, O Olden Days! For a new game has now begun). She flipped over a few more pages in the hope that his poems were addressed to her. She found some intimate lyrics which she realized were about his new bride. Kadambari knew that she had lost the only hope of her life, and there was no going back. Four months and ten days after Rabindranath’s marriage, she committed suicide through an opium overdose. She locked herself in her bedroom, and the letters between Kadambari and Rabi were strewn all over the table. Kadambari got down to write one last time to her dearly beloved. With an agitated mind, cold and numb, her memories gushed forth. The moments she had lived for and the memories that she was dying for, still holding no one responsible for her death.
In the nineteenth century, the gendered dichotomies of public and private spaces were deeply entrenched reinforcing the idea of separate spheres where public spaces were considerably dominated by men. The narrative device provided by the fictional epistolary genre supplies marginal female characters with an avenue to speak when their worlds do not allow them to speak. While reading the book, one can feel Kadambari’s struggle, her anger, her loneliness, her love for Rabindranath Tagore, and all the discrimination and unfairness she faced. Kadambari Devi ka Suicide Note is not just her life story, nor does it circulate only around her relationship with Rabindranath; it talks about the entire family, where ‘all are starved of love and caress, in the Tagore household, “cherkal, prem ka upvas”’ (starved of love). The Note shows the members of the Tagore family in a different light, it exposes the contradictions of the Bengali Renaissance. The Tagore family, flaunted as the pioneers of the Brahmo Samaj was at the forefront of culture, education, and progressive thinking; inversely, in the familial spaces, they espoused conservative and patriarchal ideology, and in their homes, women were mainly oppressed.
(Ranjan Bandyopadhyay, Bengali novelist, started his career as a lecturer in English, Scottish Church College, Kolkata. He entered the field of journalism in the 1980s and became co-editor of the newspaper Aajkal. He was also co-editor of Anand Bazar and Samvad Pratidin. His main works are—Kadambari Devir Suicide-Note, Ami Ravi Thakurer Bou, Purono Sei Pujor Katha, Ravi O Ranur Adarer Daag, Pranasakha Vivekananda, Plata Nadir Dhare, Ras, Manikanchan, and Ma Priyotamasu, Nashta Purush Sharatchandra.

Shubhra Upadhyay is a renowned Hindi-Bengali writer and translator. His published works are: Antaral, Katra-Katra Zindagi (story collection); A Girl Running Parallel (poetry collection); Re-reading of Agyey’s Stories, Apne Apne Agyey (edited). He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Hindi at Khudiram Bose Central College, Kolkata.)
Anita Singh, Fulbright Nehru Fellow, is Professor & Head, Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi.[/ihc-hide-content]