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Summary
Putting two works together in a single volume can bring out contrasts but also unexpected connections between them. On the one hand, we have here two very different plays by Rabindranath Tagore: Dakghar, (‘The Post Office’, 1912) is poignant, tragic, even bleak in some of its implications. In his portrait of the dying boy Amal, Rabindranath must have had in his mind the Grief and bereavements he had suffered in the preceding ten years, culminating in the Death of his younger son Samindra in 1907. Anyone looking for undercurrents of agnosticism and despair in Rabindranath’s deep Religious Faith can certainly find them in Dakghar. The visionary promise of the arrival of the King, and of Amal’s Employment beyond death as the king’s postman, is not shared by all the characters.
‘What use is starlight to me?’ cries Madhab Datta as Amal dies; the letter from the King that the Headman has handed to the boy is a blank sheet of paper; and we cannot feel wholly convinced when Thakurda claims to be able to read the King’s Writing on it. Taser desh (‘Card Country’, 1933, revised and expanded 1939) is, by contrast, cheerful, humorous, satirical; as infused with the spirit of life as Dakghar is dominated by death.
Literature
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