Ripples In The Waterfall

That was some years back. Now, it’s an Argentine film director, Pablo Cesar, with films like Hunabku and Unicornio to his credit, who is working on a film on Tagore’s association with Victoria Ocampo—a beautiful Argentine writer/socialite with whom he shared an intimate association for over a decade. Calling it a mystical love story, Cesar says he is not moving beyond the realm of the correspondence between the two. “I think the two shared an incredible relationship and it is quite evident that Ocampo was transformed by it. The story of a high-society, highly cultured young woman and a world-renowned poet is worth telling the world,” Cesar told Outlook.

Cesar will be visiting India next month to scout for his cast. “Thinking Of Him is really a film within a film, and delves at length on how cultures influence and impact each other through their main protagonists,” he says. Incidentally, the film title is from the last telegram sent  by Ocampo on hearing about the poet’s death. Cesar intends to tell two stories—one set in the present and the other which looks at the love  between Tagore and Ocampo as it can be visualised from the correspondence between the two.

The film’s story starts in 2009, when a young Argentine woman researching the lives of Tagore and Ocampo has a chance encounter with a young Bengali man in Calcutta. To quote from the synopsis of Thinking of Him: “Emma is a young literature student from Argentina who has come to India to start a research on the relationship between Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria Ocampo. A few days after her arrival, a young burglar makes off with her bag containing documents of her research. He returns it and falls in love with her.” It is Emma who tells her lover about the Tagore-Ocampo relationship. It is through flashbacks that Cesar plans to tell the story.

Tagore’s foray into the Latin world began in 1924, when he got off at Buenos Aires with the intention of proceeding to Peru. He would spend at least two months here—recuperating from influenza—in a villa made available to him by a young Argentine woman who was a devoted admirer of his work: Victoria Ocampo. A bond was forged.

They wrote letters to each other. Ocampo wrote on January 15, 1925: “Gurudev (a thousand times dear...), I must admit that I miss you too much. It is becoming quite uncomfortable, quite inconvenient because I can’t think of anything else. But I won’t bother you with sentimental descriptions of my feelings (partly because it is too difficult to find expression for them in English, partly because I am depressed). Your letter from Rio arrived this morning. When I recognised your writing my heart gave a jump, a terrible jump.... To look at that envelope was a joy you can’t imagine.”

And here’s a letter from Tagore to Ocampo on December 30, 1925: “Dear Vijaya (the name by which Tagore addressed her), Your cablegram has made me glad. Last year it was about this time that I was in San Isidro and I still vividly remember the early morning light on the massed group of strange flowers, blue and red, in your garden.... Often I have a tinge of regret in my mind that I did not stay longer under your tender ministrations and escape all kinds of strain that have wearied (me) and made me weak....”

Cesar’s Thinking Of Him is a joint Indo-Argentine project. The idea of the film came from the Indian ambassador to Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay R. Viswanathan. It was he who told Cesar about the possibility of capturing the Tagore-Ocampo association on celluloid. “The film is also about India’s first cultural-literary bridge to Latin America. In some ways, she was his muse and rejuvenated him,” says Viswanathan.

Cesar’s scriptwriter is in India scouting for a handsome face to play Tagore. “From all accounts and photographs, he was an exceptionally good-looking man. I need an incredibly good-looking man to play Tagore,” says Cesar. As it often happens, it is in the interpretation of associations that lends itself to a captivating story. Gangopadhyay chose the relationship between the poet and a young girl to provide an intimate portrait of the poet. But when he  faced severe criticism, what came to his rescue was the diary maintained by the girl. “I got hold of the diary—autobiographical notes which I photocopied and kept as proof. I personally do not think there was anything bad about the relationship. It was a good, fruitful relationship.... Between Ocampo and Tagore, we don’t know how far they went. We Indians tend to hide these things and hate to admit that Tagore enjoyed the company of intelligent women,” he says.

This association was the subject of In Your Blossoming Flower Garden (1988), a book by Ketaki Kushari Dyson, which dissects the relationship, portraying it as an intimate one based on letters exchanged between the poet and the Argentine beauty. Again, it chagrined some scholars. What’s with public figures in India—be it Nehru or Tagore—that official renditions of their lives tend to airbrush the more personal parts of their biographies, even if they may be vital to an overall historical understanding? Especially since a generalised picture of the facts is always public knowledge.

Dyson’s interpretation, almost unerringly, found critics. Says Supriya Roy, a Tagore expert: “I don’t think we should read too much into the context of their correspondence. I don’t think Tagore was obsessed with her, they certainly did not have an affair. But a film (on them) lends itself to a sensitive portrayal of both, largely because Rabindranath Tagore lives in the memory of everyone.”

Gangopadhyay won’t have this reflex conservatism: “We reduce relationships to platonic associations. We don’t like to admit public figures have personal lives. Tagore was a lonely man who lost his wife at a young age. What’s wrong if he was attracted to intelligent women. If that’s written or talked about or filmed, why should it embarrass anyone?”

Thinking of Him will be shot in Calcutta, Santiniketan, Paris and Argentina with a star cast from both India and the Latin American country. Whether the result will be ‘sensitive’ enough for India is a moot question to ask at this point. For now, it may suffice to give the benefit of the doubt to Cesar, who says, more than anything, the film is about how cultures are impacted by chance encounters.