BLiterature-Apratim

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“Balai” is a unique story. Here the writer depicts a boy whose heart is full of
admiration for a tree. This boy gradually grows up as a nature lover. And the sad
happening of uprooting that tree separates him from his beloved kith and kin.
“Laboratory” is a story of self-righteousness of modern women – a story of
contradiction between freedom and ruthlessness. The laboratory of the story is in
fact a lab of humans’ dark mind intended for animalistic sexual practice.
Tagore’s dramatic works are diversified, but the ultimate fact appearing from
those works is that he is a poet; because he wrote his plays in stilted language, and
often in verses.
In his plays, Tagore upholds humanity and criticizes all prejudices and
inhuman practices prevailing in the society. In a number of his dramas, he conveys
the notion that a society cannot survive without adaptations of its faiths and traditions
with the demand of time.
In the famous verse-drama Bisharjan (Emulsion), he draws the conflict of love
and convention through a story of making human sacrifice at a temple.
His Chitrangada is a beautiful verse-drama; here he shows the conflict of
physical beauty and inherent competence of the female. The ugly princess
Chitrangada worships to the love-god to lend her appealing beauty for a year in
order to impress prince Arjuna. Her wish becomes fulfilled as Arjuna marries her, but
he leaves her when after a year her god-gifted beauty disappears. Then the princess
recognizes that beauty as her own antagonist.
His mystic thoughts are exposed in the metaphorical plays Raja (The King)
and Dakghar (The Post-office). Dakghar tells us of man’s dream for a union with the
cosmic soul. A boy dreams of becoming a runner, as he wishes to carry news to all
corners of the world. When the king of the world decides to meet him, he plans to
ask the lord to make him a cosmic runner. However, before his departure, a girl
expresses her love for him. Thus a mystic boy, who is on the way of the great world,
does not lose his entire existence in this earth.
In Muktadhara (The Unbound Stream), a symbolic play, Tagore shows the evil
nature of civilization in an emerging age of mechanical technology. A king builds a
dam in a river to gratify his vengeance against another kingdom. Then the prince, the
son of the king, sacrifices his own life in order to destroy the dam and make the river
water free-flowing.
But another symbolic play titled Raktakarabi (The Red Oleander) is his
dramatic masterpiece. Here he attacks materialism, religious fanaticism, imperialism,
capitalism and evil exercise of power; and sings the song of victory of love,
humanity, motherhood of nature and the invincible spirit of eternal youth. The story
is: the king of the netherworld engages his slave-laborers to get the hidden treasures
of the earth. A loving couple is suspected by the workers’ leader to be miscreants.
The couple unknowingly makes the key role to split the workers’ class. Then, as the
result of a conspiracy made by the gang-leader, the king kills the lover boy without
identifying him. Out of remorse, he decides to destroy his kingdom of the
netherworld. Then the farmers’ song reaches there from the outer world, and endless
light of that free land gives them new hope.