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Style
Explanation and Analysis:
Tagore’s writing style in “Kabuliwala” is lyrical and poetic. The narrator of the story is himself a writer and the literary style of his narration highlights this. Tagore’s style is also defined by the way he weaves details about Bengali culture into the narrative, a common practice during the Bengal Renaissance (a literary movement of which Tagore was a part). The following passage—which comes near the end of the story on the narrator’s daughter Mini’s wedding day—captures these different elements of Tagore’s style:
It was a most beautiful morning. Sunlight, washed clean by monsoon rains, seemed to shine with the purity of smelted gold. Its radiance lent an extraordinary grace to Calcutta’s back-streets, with their squalid, tumbledown, cheek-by-jowl dwellings. The sānāi started to play in our house when night was scarcely over. Its wailing vibrations seemed to rise from deep within my ribcage. Its sad Bhairavī rāga joined forces with the autumn sunshine, in spreading through the world the grief of my imminent separation. Today my Mini would be married.
This passage showcases Tagore’s poetic and imagistic writing style, as seen in descriptions like the sunlight “seem[ing] to shine with the purity of smelted gold” and lending “an extraordinary grace” to the city, as well as the “wailing vibrations” of the clarinet music “seem[ing] to rise from deep within [the narrator’s] ribcage” before “spreading through the world the grief of [his] imminent separation” from his daughter Mini. The language here helps readers to understand the narrator’s grief over losing his daughter, which emerges from his deep fatherly love for her.
The passage also includes references to different aspects of Bengali and Indian culture. Sānāi is the Bengali word for clarinet, and “Bhairavī raga” is a reference to a specific melody played on the clarinet in Indian culture. It is likely that the translator of the story left these words in Bengali and Hindi in order to retain the authenticity of the cultural references in Tagore’s writing.
Related Themes:
