Chapter V

THE POST OFFICE

104
 THE POST OFFICE

The Post Office (1912) was written during what is known as the

Gitanjali period, the great creative period extending from 1905 to 1919, when

Tagore was supposed to have been at the height of his powers, working with

clarity of vision and complete self-assurance. The Noble Prize, which was

awarded to Tagore in 1913, drew the attention of the world to whatever he

wrote during this period, and The Post Office achieved, next only to Gitanjali,

great popularity in the West.

The play The Post Office shows that it is very perfectly constructed and

conveys to the right audience an emotion of gentleness and peace. The story

embodied in the play –the sickening loneliness telling upon a child of an

aristocratic house—presents the child Rabindranath’s own experience of

bondage and loneliness. On one level, the play describes the emotions and

responses of a lonely child, while it is also rich in symbolic meaning, and gives

full expression to the perception of the universal spirit in its imamate form.

Tagore said that the play The Post Office should be read through the

eyes of a child. The classic work on the vision of children is supposed to be

Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, about which a critic has rightly

said: “The universe here is seen through the eyes of a child, felt through its

senses, judged through its heart, and the child is the symbol of the most delicate

and courageous intuition in the human mind…”1 Tagore ardently plead for

giving the children the liberty to think and feel in their own way. Some of his

105
observations on childhood remind us of Wordsworth’s glorification of child

e.g., “But children, and those who are not over educated, dwell in that primer

paradise where men can come to know without fully comprehending each step.

And only when that paradise is lost comes the evil day when everything needs

to be understood” (My Reminiscences and My Boyhood Days).

The main theme of The Post Office seems to be the liberation of the

child from the bondage of various kinds—social, psychological, emotional and

spiritual. Freedom of all kinds has been the prime quest of Tagore. This theme

occurs in several of his poems and plays. Gitanjali (poem 28) says: “Freedom

is all I want”. The last line of the poem “Where the Mind is Without Fear”

(Gitanjali No.35) is: “Into that heaven of freedom, let my country awake”.

The Post Office contains elements of a tense human drama, a moving

fairy tale and a deeply suggestive spiritual symbol. “The play is impeccable in

construction and the message it conveys springs spontaneously out of the plot

of the human story”.2 It is read and appreciated by critics in different ways.

Some read it for its prose style and unsurpassable language. Many appreciate

its dialogue and its touching simplicity. Critics like Yeats praise it as a

perfectly constructed play. Edward Thompson considers it as an explosive

satire. There are some who dismiss the longings of the sick- boy as mere

childish pranks. And yet there are many who find autobiographical element.

Vishwanath Narayana in his philosophical study of Rabindranath Tagore points

out that Tagore tackles the problem of personality in The Post Office. Dr.

Iyenger takes it to be “one of the most deeply significant of Tagore’s plays,

106
which a child could read and understand, though it might intrigue the grown

ups.”3

The Post Office has a tight structural unity and its meaning comes to us

like a deep dream of peace. As a boy Tagore had been too well looked after by

servants, and this had irked him. It is said that he often had to spend hours in

room sitting near a window opening out into the garden and the pond. With all

the imaginative fervour of a boy, young Rabindranath must have thirsted for

the ‘Great Beyond’ as an escape from his cribbed existence within the four

walls of the room. One of his famous songs magnificently recaptures this

mood:

I am listless; I am a wanderer in my heart.

In the sunny haze of the languid hours, what vast vision of

Thine takes shape in the blue of the sky. . .

I forget, I ever forget, that the gates are shut everywhere in

The house where I dwell alone! 4

And there is another song in which the poet hears the answering steps:

I was singing all alone in a corner, and the melody caught your ear. You

came down and stood at my cottage door.5

Knock, and the door opens; call, and the response follows. As in the physical

world action and the reaction are equal and opposite, in the spiritual world too,

‘aspiration’ and ‘response’ have a like casual relation.

107
 Structurally, The Post Office is amazingly simple. The play, consisting

of 28 pages, is divided into two acts, the first being a little longer than the

second. Amal is, of course, the centre of the play, he being there all the time,

expect in the exposition in which, though he is physically absent, he is the

centre of the conversation. Structurally, Act I is much simpler than Act II: in

Act I not more than two characters are there on the stage at any given point of

time (the boys, since they are individualized, are essentially one character); in

Act II there is more of coming and going out and there are more characters than

two most of the time, the number getting augmented to seven at the end. The

pace of Act I is slow, whereas that of Act II is comparatively fast, so that from

the point of view of the destiny of impression both the Acts are evenly

balanced.

There are only two acts in The Post Office, which has the hour-glass

structure. In Act I, the sick child squatting near the window muses and talks to

the strangers that pass along; in Act II, the child is in bed, and people talk to

him or watch him sleep. In the first movement, the boy looks out into the

world; in the second the world flows into the child’s consciousness. Dr.

Srinivasa Iyengar writes:

“There are, of course, two planes of action in the play. On the

realistic plane, the child looks out avid for experience and is

particularly excited by news about the new Post Office. He would

very much like to receive a letter from the King. The distant

Parrot’s isle too excites the child, for he would like to go there

108
 with Gaffer! If the Parrot’s Isle which is a mere exercise of

Gaffer’s fancy takes a firm hold on the child’s imagination, the

Post Office which is a big house with a flag flying high up comes

to be invested in the child’s mind with a romantic, even a mystic

aura, out of all proportion to its actual functions. Thus, on the

spiritual plane, the drama comprises the child’s (or the soul’s)

dream of the Parrot’s Isle, his intense longing for the letter from

the King, and the coming of the King himself to the child. The

sick-room at one end, and the Parrot’s Isle at the other (invisible

and the Great Beyond); and, in between, the Post office, which is

both a visible institution, and a symbolic clearing-house for the

transmission of human aspiration in one direction and of the

grace of response in the opposite direction. There is a letter, and a

reply; likewise, there is the surge of aspiration from below, and

the answering response from above.”6

The opening of the play is very revealing. Madhav is very much

concerned with Amal a sick child who is “so quiet with all his pain and

sickness”. His anxiety for the child, his love for him and his interest in earning

money are just contrasted with the learned, unconcern and impertinence of the

doctor who says “In medicine as in good advice, the least palatable is the

truest”.(3)* Madhav tells Gaffer how earning has become very significant for

* All the references in the parentheses are from Rabindranath Tagore. The
Post Office. Madras: Macmillan, 1974.

109
him after the arrival of the boy. He says “Formerly earning was a sort of

passion with me; I simply couldn’t help working for money. Now, I make

money, and as I know it is all for this dear boy, earning becomes a joy to me”

(5). Madhav loves Amal very much. He wants to save him. Amal wants to go

outside. He sees auntie grinding lentils in the quern, he sees the squirrel

crunching the broken grains, and says : “Wish I were a squirrel”!(7) He thinks

that going out into the world is more important than keeping within doors and

turning oneself into a bookworm. The hills yonder as good as speak to him:

It seems to me because the earth can’t speak, it raises its hands into the

sky and beckons. And those who live far off and sit alone by their

windows can see the signal (9).

And the very memory of Gaffer (the Fakir) excites Amal; he seemed so

carefree and adventurous. Madhav merely advises the boy not to go out.

The boy tells his uncle about his meeting with a crazy man who has a

bamboo staff on his shoulder with a small bundle at the top and a brass pot in

his left hand and an old pair of shoes on. Amal wants to go out to seek work.

Realization slowly comes to him. He is rather queer in his behavior because he

intends to walk on so many streams. When people are asleep with their doors

shut in the heat of the day, he will tramp on and on far, very far, seeking work.

He, also, loves to talk to strangers.

With the arrival of the Dairyman the play shifts to a different level. The

boy is thrilled to see the Panch-mura hills and the Shamli river near the

110
Dairyman’s village. He then goes on giving all the details about the village.

There is a moment of realization and another moment of ignorance. He

expresses his awe at the tune of the Dairyman. “I can’t tell how queer I feel

when I hear you cry from the bend of that road, through the line of those trees”

(17). The boy definitely teaches the Dairyman how to be happy selling curds.

As in Browning’s Pippa Passes the girl, by the mere fact of humming to

herself simple songs, solves other people’s ticklish problems, so also Amal by

merely talking to people makes them experience a sudden accession of the

sheer joy of life.

Next to be accosted is the Watchman on his rounds—old gipsy man,

sounding his gong. Suddenly they talk in parables. When the boy complains

that his physician keeps him in, the Watchman says. “One greater than he

comes and lets us free!” (21). There is a talk of the King’s Post Office and of

the postmen, and of the Headman who is seen approaching. The child accosts

the ill-mannered Headman (little man dressed in brief authority)—suppose the

King sent a letter to Amal, won’t he the Headman kindly direct the postman to

deliver it properly? The Headman thinks that it is Madhav’s impudence that

speaks through Amal, and walks on in a temper. Next there appears the girl,

Sudha (nectar), the flower seller. Amal had wished already that he were a

squirrel, and a curd- seller, and one of the King’s Postman, and now he wishes

he could help Sudha to gather flowers. She promises to come back later, and

when she disappears, a troop of boys pass in the street. Amal gives them his

own toys to play with and he is content to observe their play. This squatting

111
long has tired Amal, and has to rest. If Madhav’s solicitude for Amal is that of

a Man of Property, the Physician’s that of a jailor, if the curd-seller suggests

native bounty, if the watchman signifies natural order and the Headman

obtrusive authority, the girl symbolizes sweetness and beauty while the boys

enact before Amal the exuberance of play and adventure. Amal himself is an

angelic creature that can create the world of values in the mere act of

imaginatively perceiving it –an apparently passive person, but richly creative in

his own right. Only a series of casual conversations, but even so creepers of

understanding and sympathy grow quickly and bind the strangers to little Amal,

making him rich in imaginative experience and wise beyond his years.

In Act II, the hour-glass reverses its position, and the direction of the

flow changes. Amal’s condition has become worse on account of exposure to

the wind near the window. So he is now advised by Madhav to keep to his bed.

Soon Gaffer comes as a Fakir and tells Amal that he has just come from the

Parrot’s Isle—a land of wonders, of hills and waterfalls, of birds flying and

singing, and a land with no men at all. As he informs Amal that he would build

a small cabin for himself among their crowd of nests and passes his days

counting the sea waves, Amal says “How I wish I were a bird”(41). Madhav

says that the dairyman has left a jar of curds for Amal. Then he expresses his

desire to marry the curd-seller’s niece with a pair of pearl-drops in her ears and

dressed in a lovely red saree. The prosaic Madhav now leaving the room, Amal

has Gaffer all to himself. Has the King sent a letter to Amal? The letter has

112
“already started”, says Gaffer. In his reverie Amal sees clearly the progress of

the letter:

. . . I can see it all: there, the King’s postman coming down the hillside

alone, a lantern in his left hand and on his back a bag of letters; climbing

down for ever so long for days and nights, and where at the foot of the

mountain the waterfall becomes a stream he takes to the footpath on the

bank and walks on through the rye . . . I can feel him coming nearer and

my heart becomes glad (44).

Although Gaffer’s eyes are not young like those of Amal, yet under the

infection he catches from Amal. He sees clearly what Amal has described

.Gaffer tells Amal that he goes to the King who has the Post Office for alms

everyday and when Amal will get well he too will have alms for him. Amal

will go to the gate of the King’s palace and cry, “Victory to thee, O King!”(45).

Amal thinks how nice it would be, if he became the King’s postman, delivering

his letters from door to door. Madhav comes again, troubled because of the

loose talk of the King sending a letter to Amal. And Amal himself feels “a sort

of darkness coming over my eyes since the morning” (48) and doesn’t feel like

talking. The Physician pulls a long face, and only prescribes closed rooms and

shut windows.

On the other hand, although apparently asleep, percipience is uncanny.

“I can hear everything; yes and voices far away” (50), he tells Gaffer; “I feel

that mother and father are sitting by my pillow and speaking to me” (50).

113
While the headman indulges in his ill-timed mirth and Gaffer tries to smoothen

it out, Amal himself feels that he hears the King’s Trumpet, and talks sweetly

to the headman, this striking a responsive chord even in that stony heart. There

is a knock on the door, and the King’s Herald enters to announce that the King

himself will come in the middle watches of the night, and is sending in advance

his “greatest physician to attend on his young friend” (55). Immediately, there

is a knocking, followed by the arrival of the King’s State Physician. The first

thing the King’s physician does is to open the doors and windows. One thing

leads to the other, like the growth of a plant, naturally, inevitably and

beautifully. Amal is just himself in the presence of the State Physician.

State Physician: How do you feel, my Child?

Amal: I feel very well, Doctor, very well. All pain is gone. How

fresh and open! I can see all the stars now twinkling from the

other side of the dark.

Physician: Will you feel well enough to leave your bed when the

King comes in the middle watches of the night?

Amal: Of course, I am dying to be about for ever so long. I’ll ask

the King to find me the polar star—I must have seen it often, but

I don’t know exactly which it is (55).

Amal also intercedes with the King’s Physician that the unwanted

Headman too can remain in the room. But how is the King to be received?

With “puffed rice”, says the Physician. The oil lamp is now put out, only

114
straight starlight streams in. Amal is in deep sleep. Gaffer stands up folding his

arms, in an attitude of reverence, as he senses the approach of the King. Sudha

is the last to come and she places the flowers in Amal’s hand and says, “Tell

him Sudha has not forgotten him” (59).

Amal is the central, the most dominating, character of the play. Amal, as

suggested earlier, is a romantically conceived child, a child-angel, endowed

with the characteristic Tagorean qualities. The most striking feature of the child

is his intense imagination coupled with an intense love of the concrete reality.

He longs to be free, to wander about, to go beyond the hills, but essentially he

is a quiet, docile child willing to submit to the dictates of the elders. He has a

mind of his own. What he cannot get in real life he creates through the power

of imagination. He wins over people through sheer gentleness and affection,

through sheer docility and submission. He has the capacity to bring out the best

in the people whom he encounters. His curiosity is unbounded. His hunger for

experience is tremendous. His imagination helps him to get any account of

vicarious experience.

Amal, the protagonist, a nice little boy, who has the characteristic

Tagore an impulses and attitudes: he is imaginative, adventurous, innocent,

observant, full of curiosity and inquisitiveness, sympathetic, affectionate,

docile, obedient, with a mind of his own thought. (Amal, Tagore said, was his

own youth) Amal is conceived, most obviously, in a true Romantic fashion, but

what makes this highly idealized angel of a child acceptable is the concreteness

115
of the terms in which his character is worked out. He sounds credible most of

the time except in places where there is an intentional poeticality as in:

Amal: Uncle, do you think it (the hill) is meant to prevent us crossing over? It

seems to me because the earth can’t speak it raises its hands unto the sky and

beckons. And those who live far off and sit alone by their windows can see the

signal… (9).

What is more remarkable about The Post Office is the use of symbols in

the play. Amal’s confinement to the small room symbolizes the human soul

imprisoned in the mortal body. His soul has received “the call of the open

road,” where there is light and beauty of the world beyond. But it is denied to

his soul, which is confined or imprisoned in the prison of the body. The only

way to secure freedom of the soul is through death, as death is said to be the

emancipation of spirit. Therefore the doors and windows of the room are

opened on the arrival of the King’s Physician. The opening of the gate by the

King’s Physician is the opening of the human mind to the nature of experience.

Amal finds some comfort in his soul as death brings him spiritual freedom.

Tagore himself gave an interpretation of The Post Office to G.F. Andrews thus:

Amal represents the man whose soul has received the call of the

open road—he seeks freedom from the comfortable enclosure of

habits sanctioned by prudent and from the walls of rigid opinion

built for him by the respectable.7

116
 One of the important and recurrent symbols in the play is Time. When

the watchman sounds the gong, Amal asks him:

Amal: Won’t you sound the gong, Watchman?

Watchman: Time has not yet come.

Amal: How curious! Some say time has not yet come, and

some say time has gone by! But surely your time

will come the moment you strike the gong!

Watchman: That’s not possible; I strike up the gong only when

it is time.

Amal: Yes, I love to hear you gong. . . Tell me, why does

your gong sound?

Watchman: My gong sounds to tell the people. Time waits for

none, but goes on forever (20).

In the same sequence, when Amal expresses doubts whether his doctor

will let him out, the Watchman tells him that one greater than he comes and lets

us free.

Thus the symbol suggests time and its conquest. In this world we are

bound by Time. But we can conquer Time. All of us want to conquer time. But

the task is not easy. It calls for great suffering and penance. Only then does the

Great Deliverer come to free us from the mortal coils of Time

117
 The next important symbol that draws our attention is the post office,

which gives the play its title. A symbol performs two functions in this play.

First, it provides an emotional centre around which a pattern may emerge.

Second, it places in focus emotional attitudes towards important questions of

all kinds.8 This symbol is very much complex, and works on several levels in

different parts of the play. As S.K. Desai has rightly observed: “The post office

might be the whole world; the King might be God sending messages of eternity

to everyone, according to their capacity for reception, through the visible

Nature (seasons like Badal, Sharat . . .?)”9

On the simplest level, the post office receives and gives letters, which

contain information. It was the most popular medium of communication before

the invention of the modern electronic media. There have been several poems

anxiously awaiting the postman. A man who is looking wistfully towards a post

office is a man longing for some information from somebody. Communication

is itself a kind of ventilation. Thus, the symbol of post office gives a concrete

base to the theme of freedom from all kinds of bondage__physical, emotional,

psychological and spiritual, which is the leitmotif of this play.

But the post office is not just an ordinary one nor is its postmaster an

ordinary one. The postmaster is nobody else but God sending divine messages

which are delivered through this Post Office. The man who plays a part in this

work hopes to make his life meaningful. Perhaps that is why Amal says he will

ask the King: “Make me your postman that I may go about, lantern in hand,

delivering your letters from door to door” (46) and “I shall ask him to make me

118
one of his postmen that I may wander far and wide delivering his message from

door to door” (56).

On the whole we understand that the King stands for God and the post

office might be the whole universe, and nature, with her seasons. Badal and

Sarat, might be the agents through whom God sends his messages. The letter is

the message of eternity, the message calling us to reach God. The Blank Slip of

paper symbolizes the message of God. The Post Office is the place where

messages are received and delivered.

The last scene is also symbolic. It shows sleep, death and silence, but all

suffused with an aura of Great Liberation. Sleep comes softly. The lamp is to

be blown out. Only the starlight is to be let in. the unimaginative Madhav asks:

“How will starlight help” (57)? Any man could feel the same way. Starlight is

to be contrasted with the light of the oil lamp. The light of the lamp can help us

to see only physical things, but the light of the stars gives its vision of the Great

Beyond.

The symbolism of the last line of the play is also to be noted. Sudha tells

the Royal Physician to tell dying Amal: “Tell him Sudha has not forgotten

him” (59). The symbolism of the statement depends upon the meaning of the

words of Sudha—both denotative and connotative. Sudha, the character, in the

symbolic scheme of the things, is a foil to materialists like Madhav. She is a

symbol of love and affection. Perhaps she wants to convey to Amal that she has

always remembered him. Connotatively, in Hindi, the word Sudha means

119
nectar, and its innumerable variants. The symbolic meaning, then, would be

that Amal is not dead, that he has with him Sudha, the drink of immortality. We

know that it is only the body that dies, that the soul is immortal.

It is to be noted that in The Post Office symbolism as a dramatic device

has been different from that in the earlier plays like Sanyasi, Red Oleanders,

and Chitra. In the earlier plays symbols are more ethereal than terrestrial.

Suggestions are often dim and vague. Denotation and connotation often fall far

apart.

But in The Post Office we have a sense of firm concreteness, and

connotation and denotation are close to each other. The Post Office, doors,

windows are all concrete. Characters like Madhav, Doctor and Watchman are

common. Curd seller and Gaffer belong to the common folk.

Tagore uses symbols that have been part either of the life of the

common people or of the ancient Indian tradition. Only by using them

unconsciously could he transform them into the living symbols, not of any

particular time but of the past, the present and the future in one. In this sense,

his work may be said to be archetypal.

Tagore has the rare gift which some poets and writers of fairy stories

have, of unconsciously using symbols while consciously writing an interesting

story. But he appears to be aware of his gift, and for this reason he is not like

the writers of fairy stories, and is indeed, half-way between Coleridge and T.S

Eliot.

120
 The play embodies the myth of the child as conceived by the Indian

poets and sages. Amal in his keen longing for escape, from the ephemeral and

materialistic world, into the world of sensations, and in his wish to seek

identity with God somewhat resembles Dhruva and Prahlada.

The symbol of the soul longing for eternity and the relationship between

the finite and the infinite and other symbols of the play can be ascribed to the

influence of the Upanishads and in certain aspects of Vaishanavism. The ideas

that the Infinite can only be understood in close relationship to the Finite, that

man is a “finite-infinite” being conscious of his Finitude only through the

presence of an Infinite nature within him are some of them. Soul yearns for

eternity. God, too, sets out to meet the soul. Amal’s prayer for the King’s letter

is answered by the King who sends his Royal Physician. “I can feel him

coming nearer and nearer and my heart becomes glad” (44) says Amal.

What is most important to notice is that Amal’s desires, longings,

fancies, intuitions, etc., arise naturally and spontaneously out of the situations

that he encounters. He looks at a squirrel ‘sitting with his tail up and with his

little hands. . . picking up the broken grains of lentils and crunching them. .

.’(6) and he says, ‘Wish I were a squirrel___ it would be lovely.’(7). Like this,

in accordance with the prompting of the situations, he would love to be a

number of things: he would like to be a workman going about findings things

to do, a Curdseller, a bird, a champa flower, the King’s postman and so on; he

would love to go about and see everything that there is, or go beyond the hills;

he would love to fly away with time to that land of which no one knows

121
anything; he would be a gallant boy picking flowers for Sudha from the very

topmost branches right out of sight; he would marry the Dairyman’s niece; he

would have his alms from the King; he would ask the King ‘ to make me one of

his postman that I may wander far and wide, delivering his message from door

to door’(56). Even his obsession with the post office grows out of a concrete

situation. The post office is there just outside his window, and he is inquisitive:

Amal: Post Office? Whose?

Watchman: Whose, why, the King’s surely!

Amal Do letters come from the King to the office here?

Watchman: Of course. One fine day there may be a letter for

you in there.

Amal: A letter for me? But I am only a little boy.

Watchman: The king sends tiny notes to little boys.

Amal: Oh, how splendid! When shall I have my letter

(22-23)

So he longs to have a letter from the King. But how would he read it

since he can’t read? He would keep the letters carefully and read them when

he’s grown up. But suppose the postman can’t find him? So he tells the

Headman to let the postman know that it’s Amal who sits by the window. In

Act II his desire to get a letter from the King grows into an obsession. The post

office has somehow reconciled him to his illness and to his confinement.

122
Gaffer is led to tell him that the letter is on the way. Amal almost sees him

coming, with a ‘lantern in his left hand’. But it is the Headman who comes with

a blank slip of paper and mockingly says that it’s letter from the King. The

contemptuous Headman interrupts and says that the King would be calling on

Amal shortly, and that he would want to have puffed rice from Amal. Gaffer

reads into the letter another message, gentle and encouraging, and says that the

King’s State Physician would himself come to see Amal.

In The Post Office, symbols play the role of what Eliot calls ‘objective

correlative,’ which he defines as “ a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events

which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the

external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the

emotion is immediately evoked.”10

It is precisely this that the symbols in this play do. On the whole, the

naturalistic level, simplified and rarefied to some extent, is maintained in Act I.

There are only two occasions where the naturalistic level is slightly keyed up to

a fairly symbolic level—one where Amal and the Watchman talk about time.

The watchman speaks of the ‘land of which no one knows anything’, the land

to which all of us have to go one day, and of a greater doctor who will come

and let us free, and Amal says: ‘When will this great doctor come for me? I

can’t stick it here anymore’ (52). There are obviously some suggestions about

death and God. But the child’s talk is so natural and realistic in the context that

it is absolutely not necessary to read a deeper meaning than is suggested by the

surface level like, say, the soul’s longing for the beyond, for death, for eternity

123
and so on. What is dramatically significant is the irony in the Watchman’s

implied suggestion of death contrasted with the child’s innocent desire to go to

the land to which all of us have to go one day, and all this in the context of the

actual situation of the child’s impending death. The second occasion is where

Amal and the boys speak of the king’s postmen:

AMAL: Who are they? Tell me their names.

A Boy: One’s Badal.

ANOTHER BOY: Another’s Sarat.

ANOTHER BOY: There’s so many of them (36).

It is here that Tagore hints at some symbolic meaning: the seasons are

the King’s postmen. Then our minds are teased on thinking: the King might be

God, the post office might be the whole universe, and Nature, with her seasons,

like Badal and Sarat, might be the agents through whom God sends his

messages. The question is: Should this be taken as an indication for considering

the entire play as symbolic and to go in for symbolic-hunting in every corner of

the play? I think this is most unwarranted. We should at the most consider such

instances as symbolic overtones that spring unobtrusively, without disturbing

the central naturalistic level.

The Post Office, unlike any other play by Rabindranath Tagore, moves

on two planes: the naturalistic and the symbolic, the human and the spiritual.

On the first plane, it may be explained as a desire or strong will of the mind for

things afar. But at the same time, there is also the desire of the soul for the over

124
soul and it is the fulfillment of this desire which is symbolized by Amal’s

death. The shadow of death darkens the play till the end, but when the end

arrives, death comes in a glorious form. Rabindranath had written nearly all his

plays in winter when the wells of poetic inspiration dried up. He accepted this

fact. When he wrote plays, the prose in them has the beauty of a lyric.

Tagore’s play is not a play of action, but a play of feeling, a play of

carnival delight and eternal identity. It attempts to synthesize the rhythmic

intensity of Western tragedy with the platitude of Indian folk and classical

drama. Equally remarkable is the simplicity and naturalness of language, and

the restraint exercised by the poet who builds upon a substructure of

sentimentalism. As Edward Thompson says: “In The Post Office only the

poet’s skill has avoided catastrophe; if the language had been a shade less

perfect in simplicity and naturalness, the play would have sagged downward,

into a hopeless mush and welter of sentimentalism.” 11

The most important theme that intersects the central theme of love is

that of death. The play begins with Amal being on the brink of death, and it

ends with his actual death. What is most central to the play is that though

Madhav, the Physician and Gaffer, each in a different sort of way, are full of

concern for Amal’s impending death, Amal himself is completely unaware of

his predicament. He is all the time interested in living and death comes to him

as a matter of course. To Tagore, as passages from the Gitanjali show, death is

a journey to the other shore; it is giving oneself up at last into God’s hands; it is

a love-tryst in the darkness of night; it is seeing God’s face and offering him

125
one’s silent salutation. Hence, his main problem was to take the sting out of

Amal’s death and show that death, after all, is not such an awful thing, that it is

not a matter of loss, but a matter of joy, triumph and peace. The last scene,

therefore, could be taken as an objective correlative of the mystery, naturalness,

peace and joy that Tagore wants death to be associated with.

In conclusion, we might say that The Post Office is essentially a

play with a number of symbolic overtones. The play is successful. The play’s

roots are essentially in actuality, in life, and not in a premeditated thesis, except

probably in the last scene, and it is because of this that it has attained greatness.

This is not to deny that there are many hidden meanings as suggested by

Tagore scholars, but the point has been to assert its basic realistic level and

leave the play to radiate its meanings to readers according to their sensibility

and spiritual kinship with the philosophy of Tagore.

126
 REFERENCES

1. Legouis and Cazamain. A History of English Literature. Macmillan,

1981. 231.

2. T.R.Sharma. Perspectives on Rabindranath Tagore. Ghaziabad:

Vimal Prakashan, 1986. 149.

3. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar. Indian Writing in English. New Delhi:

Sterling Publishers pvt.Ltd., 1962. 116.

4. K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar. Rabindranath Tagore: A Critical

Introduction. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers pvt.Ltd., 1965. 60

5. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar: Rabindranath Tagore: A Critical

Introduction .60

6. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar: Rabindranath Tagore. Popular

Prakashan,1965. 56-57.

7. Quoted by B.C. Chakravarthy: Rabinranath Tagore; His Mind and

Art. New Delhi: Young India Publication, 133.

8. Rosenthal and Smith .Exploring Poetry. Macmillan,1995. 129

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

Indian Writing in English. Macmillan India, Madras, 1977. 177.

10. T.S. Eliot, “Hamlet,” Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace,

1932. 228

127
11. Edward Thompson. Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist rev.

ed. Oxford University Press: London, 1948. 213.

128