The First Sorrow", a poem by Rabindranath Tagore

This poem is Tagore's reminiscence on the demise of Kadambari Devi who was the young and much neglected wife of Jyotirindranath Tagore, one of Rabindranath's elder brothers. It is understandable why she had taken a fancy on the young Rabindranath.

He called her Hekati, patterned after Hecete, the Greek goddess. Ergo, she was his constant companion for 17 "swift years", his muse, and after his mother's demise, even his "mother figure". But why Hecate and why not any other Greek goddess? Perhaps here lies an answer to the perpetual Kadambari-Rabindranath enigma.

There was a form of duality in the ancient Greek's worship of this deity. In one of her roles, Hecate had the prowess to give wealth and passion (often being served by mortal eunuchs). In the other role Hecate was associated with witchcraft and the more baser things associated with sexual sensations. Recall also that ever since the age of 12 (when he had stolen a copy of highly erotic Vaishnava manuscripts from an elder brother's desk), Rabindranath was hooked into the "rashleela" cult of Radha and Krishna! Ergo, was Kadambari (aka Hekati) then that female deity who needed to be serviced by a self-efacing eunuch as a form of expressing ones total devotion, or was she the Radha of his passions and his altruistic lover?

On December of 1883 at the age of 22 Tagore decided to marry a girl of 11, whom he renamed Mrinalini. Just 4 months into his marriage, Kadambari decided to take her own life, just like in the mythology wherein Hecate commited suicide on account of the scorns and insults given by Artemis, another goddess. It is unlikely the reason behind Kadambari's suicide was to "get even" with the 11 year old wife of her erstwhile companion. Perhaps the rash-leela had really happened and she had suddenly discovered that she was carrying his child? We hope this poem and the metaphors used in it can shed some light on the age old enigma.

Tagore's original poem "Pratham Shok" was published in 1919, written in Bengali. This was some 36 years after the demise of Kadambari. Perhaps there was a sense of guilt and remorse brooding within Tagore for all these years. Later on, when he translated the same poem to English, he intentionally left out the "rain bearing" metaphors which he had used in his Bengali original. Why? Was it done to protect his self-created image of a "mystic poet" in the Western world?

In my own translation of this poem, I have tried not to stray too much from the original Bengali one. I shall also end this note with a key hint for the Western viewer: in the Bengali culture the concept of love can take 3 different forms, whereas in the West love is generally considered either as platonic or as one, akin to lust.