Shesher Kabita is one of Rabindranath Thakur's entertaining novels, enigmatic and challenging. Most people enjoy reading it, and admire it, but many feel a little baffled by its pyrotechnics and contrarieties. It presents the picture of a typical intellectual, full of theories - of union and separation, of creation, vacation, and destruction and conservation. It also presents the picture of an intelligent woman, who is not easily swept off her feet and who can keep her head. The short novel is studded with gems of inlaid ideas, and it is for the reader to unravel the various chains of thought and find out deep humane interest.
Shesher Kabita is translated into English by Dhananjoy Sen, Retired Professor of English, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Prof. Sen has also translated Abanindranath, Anna Seghers, written a collection of tales from the Mahabharata, and a Handbook of English Grammar and Speech.
SHESHER KABITA (1928) is one of the later novels of Rabindranath Thakur, composed as a twin sibling of YOGAYOG, a very serious novel that portrays and explores the man and wife relationship. The two works are so very different in theme and literary style that a comparative study turns out to be bewildering. In Shesher Kabita, we have a romantic tale of 'love at first sight', in which Indian Rhetoric is wedded to Western, with sidelights on love and libido, on Relativity and Cosmology; and passing references to concepts like Scattering of light, Oxidation, theory of Union, and subjectivity of Truth.
The plot has a rather nominal and lax structure, although it does abide by the classical mould of the Beginning, the Middle and the End. It hops from one discursive observation to another, from this polemic to that, the story-line often dipping through the basic tennets of Indian Philosophy, while the author draws a Victorian veil over the Anglicised Bengali aristocracy of the Shillong Hills, and of Calcutta.
The entire fiction is spun around the theme of the War of Literary Generations, of the fighting between the 'traditionalists' and the so-called 'modernists', narrated in a tongue-in-cheek style. With all his mock self-derogation, Rabindranath has the last word, and the last of the 'new look' poems as well. The reader receives, as bonus, models of verbal pyrotechnics, full of contrarieties, witticisms and romantic ego-trips. It is a love story of the post-Tagorean period, in which there is only rationalization, and reconciliation, and no recrimination between the dramatis personae.
Rabindranath was in two minds about starting on a new fiction just when he was on the finishing line of YOGAYOG. This story of Omitraye (the putativeSecher Kabita) was something entirely different from the story of Omitraye, (referred to in Kabir Sangey Dakshinatyey, by Nirmal Kumari Mahalanabish, D. M. Library, Kolkata). It was something entirely different from the telephony story Rabindranath had discussed and mooted with the Mahalanabishes, and finally superseded in Shesher Kabita. He was vacationing at Ballabrooighee, Bangalore, as guest of Sir Brojendranath Seal, Mathematician and Philosopher, who was then Vice-Chancellor of Mysore University. Rabindranath completed writing the wonderful work at Bangalore, and read out the complete manuscript to a small audience of hosts, friends, and companions at the request of Sir Brojendranath, to the delight and awe of all.
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