Tracing my grandfather's footsteps

A grandson's attempt to reconnect with his grandfather

of a century in the past

Thursday, 21 July, 2011

It has been almost a month since I seriously contemplated researching the life and times of my grand father Kalimohan Ghsosh, and same time learn a bit more about Rabindranath Tagore's efforts at rural reconstruction.

In the past one month, I have written about six different articles on my grand father. Some have been in Bengali, but a majority are in English. I have put some up as a blog on my google account, and some as note on Facebook. At least one was circulated through emails to a few. This one is created on an iPad while having a beer at a pub and looking over a few of letters between Tagore and Rothenstein that refers to Kalimohan. Where this article would go, I am not sure yet. Also, the articles I wrote would not stitch neatly with one another, because they are not yet organized enough to be composed for a book. I am still in am exploratory stage about writing style and format. I do not even know if all these efforts deserve to be in a printed and published book in hard copy, or should be electronically distributed as a blog, or a PDF collection of writings or a E-book or some other incarnation. Perhaps this can be collection like Bhulumama's Santiniketaner Chithi was, coming out about twice a month in Ananda Bazar Patrika. The stories in the letters were not necessarily connected to each other, but all of them were like a lucid journal with the primary function of describing life and time in Santiniketan between 1952 and 1957.

Perhaps my writings can also be segmented similarly, each a self contained episode of it's own, but with the common theme of an effort to reconnect with my grandfather, who died 10 years before I was born.

Paintings and poems

So, I am sitting here with a book edited by Mary Lago, published by Harvard University Press in 1972 and contains a trail of a thirty year long correspondence between Rabindranath Tagore and William Rothenstein. Not all the letters survive, but Ms Lago, then Lecturer in English at the University of Missouri at Columbia, has done her best of collecting all that could be traced, along with a few very interesting photographs and sketches. Rothenstein wrote to Tagore in 1912, soon after they met and became friends - "You have walked so quietly into my life, yet somehow you have filled it with a new essence & I don't feel ever be quite the old life I shall live again."

They wrote over two hundred letters to each other over the next thirty years, averaging some 8 every year. But for me, tucked away into them are ten references of Kalimohan Ghosh. The first few involves my grand father, as a young thirty three years old, posing for Rothenstein on a few of his famous paintings of Indian scenes. The last one refered to translations of Kabir’s poems, where Kshitimohan Sen and Ajit Chakraborti did the first draft from the original Hindi, some of which then were apparently re-edited by Ezra Pound and my grandfather Kalimohan. Tagore himself also got involved and translated many of them. Tagore also tried to get the English translation of Kabir published soon, but apparently there were a few roadblocks, lack of enough noted English editors that knew about Kabir or sufi mysticism being one of them. Anyhow, there is a mention of “Certain poems of Kabir, translated by Kalimohan Ghose and Ezra Pound. From the edition of Mr. Kshitimohan Sen” MR 13 [1913] 611-613. I wonder if I could get my hands on that book.

I have ordered the book of a hundred poems of Kabir by Sir Rabindranath Tagore and Evelun Underhill that Rothenstein mentionsm. I look forward to what it might contain in reference to not just Kshitimohan Sen and Ajit Chakraborti, but also Kalimohan Ghosh and Ezra Pound. Perhaps I would  retrace the effort of my grandfather, along with Ezra Pound, toiling with the lines of Kabir, into English.

It was persistent high quality research of Mary Lago that unearthed the truth that Rothenstein’s paintings done in the second decade of the last century had my grandfather as a model. He apparently did not much talk about it in later years with his children, nor leave much information about those events in Santiniketan. My mother, I remember, lamented that she did not know about it, neither did her brothers according to her, till late in her life through us. Mary Lago’s book was published in 1972, but it would take more reading by people to pluck that information out of the book. Nimai Chatterjee had seen those pictures, he did mention, especially the one in India house with the scene of a ghat in Kashi, with both Tagore and Kalimohan used as candidates, gathering dust at a corner. I remmeber seeing it a few years ago where the pinting was prominently put up on a wall of a meeting room hall upstairs upstairs in India House, London. I could immediately recognize both a middle aged Tagore and a young Kalimohan.

Kuri had done good work identifying the locations of the paintings and seeking permission from India house as well as the Westminster, to see the two paintings where by Grandfather was a model for Rothenstein, both done around 1912-1913 in London. That is one year shy of a century ago.

And here I was, going through over two hundred letters between Tagore and Rottenstein, looking for more snippets of information that might help me retrace my grand fathers steps. Folks knew of enough pundits in Santiniketan that congregated around Gurudev Rabidnranath. Kalimohan was not supposed to be one of them. What was he doing, sitting with the American expatriate literary critic, poet and a rising force in the early modernist movement in English poetry, hauling it out of the Victorian era. What was my grandfather Kalimohan had at all common with him? How come the two of them, a few years apart in age as they were, doing with english translation of an ancient sufi mystic poet of punjab that was brought up in a Muslim home and later adopted by the Bhakti saint Ramananda, whose that so influenced the later Bhakti movement as well as Sikhism, and whose philosophy was to so influence Tagore too? Kabir did not become a sadhu, or a fakir. He did not embrace Sanyas and leave worldly life behind. He often spoke about leaving the Quran and the Veda behind, and follow the “sahaja” or simple path of living life and being touched by God. He was perhaps the first saint in India to have combined both Hindu and Islamic faith into a unified and universal path which both could follow without conflict. Rabindranath himself had been influenced by Kabir. He has written throughout his life on similar themes. Kabir created his verse with rustic vernacular compositions,  whereas Tagore expanded them greatly through his own self realization and powerful hold on languages Sanskritic, Bengali and English. I find evidence of Tagore’s universalism in spirituality in song after song, and writing after writing. Even Gitanjali is full of them.

Could it be that some of it had also rubbed off on Kalimohan ? I have learned that Kalimohan practiced a religion of his own which was only superficially Hindu, but without any ornamentation and indistinguishable at the root from most other faiths. I know he visited Muslim Mosques and take oath in the name of Allah to gain trust of the muslim villagers both in Shilaidah and around Santiniketan. I know he dallied a lot with the Brahmo Samaj movement and really liked the concept of a formless creator that is omnipresent, and did not allow replica of Hindu deities inside his home. Withought actually reading his diary (yet), I am beginning to bet that Rabindranath Tagore was a very big influence in Kalimohan’s pshyche, and Kalimohan had followed Tagore and Kabir into the path of a universal humanism that did not find any discriminatory distinction between one man and another and one creation and another and yet exulted in the richness and variety that life presented.

All that I am just beginning to understand. I think I would have greatly benefitted from a chance to sit with my grand father and actually going over these items with him. Unfortunately, that was not to be. But, somewhere along the line, Kalimohan the worker and the village man that worked with the uneducated peasants, had acquired enough literary acumen not only to appreciate Kabirs compositions, but enough dexterity in English language to be able to refine rough translations of Kshitimohan Sen, and that too with the likes of Ezra Pound. My grand father was around 33 years old at the time.

Tonu