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10 Chapter 5
10 Chapter 5
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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
wrote during this period, and The Post Office achieved, next only to Gitanjali,
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
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
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
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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
The main theme of The Post Office seems to be the liberation of the
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”.
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
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
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.
out that Tagore tackles the problem of personality in The Post Office. Dr.
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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:
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
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,
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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,
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.
realistic plane, the child looks out avid for experience and is
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
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with Gaffer! If the Parrot’s Isle which is a mere exercise of
Post Office which is a big house with a flag flying high up comes
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
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.
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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
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.
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.
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
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Dairyman’s village. He then goes on giving all the details about the village.
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.
herself simple songs, solves other people’s ticklish problems, so also Amal by
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
King sent a letter to Amal, won’t he the Headman kindly direct the postman to
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
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long has tired Amal, and has to rest. If Madhav’s solicitude for Amal is that of
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
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
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
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“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
bank and walks on through the rye . . . I can feel him coming nearer and
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.
“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).
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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
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
Physician: Will you feel well enough to leave your bed when the
the King to find me the polar star—I must have seen it often, but
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
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straight starlight streams in. Amal is in deep sleep. Gaffer stands up folding his
is the last to come and she places the flowers in Amal’s hand and says, “Tell
Amal is the central, the most dominating, character of the play. Amal, as
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.
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
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
vicarious experience.
Amal, the protagonist, a nice little boy, who has the characteristic
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
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of the terms in which his character is worked out. He sounds credible most of
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
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One of the important and recurrent symbols in the play is Time. When
Amal: How curious! Some say time has not yet come, and
some say time has gone by! But surely your time
it is time.
Amal: Yes, I love to hear you gong. . . Tell me, why does
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
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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.
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
On the simplest level, the post office receives and gives letters, which
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
is itself a kind of ventilation. Thus, the symbol of post office gives a concrete
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
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one of his postmen that I may wander far and wide delivering his message from
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
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
symbol of love and affection. Perhaps she wants to convey to Amal that she has
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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.
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.
connotation and denotation are close to each other. The Post Office, doors,
windows are all concrete. Characters like Madhav, Doctor and Watchman are
Tagore uses symbols that have been part either of the life of the
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,
Tagore has the rare gift which some poets and writers of fairy stories
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.
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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
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
that the Infinite can only be understood in close relationship to the Finite, that
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.
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,
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
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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:
you in there.
(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.
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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
In The Post Office, symbols play the role of what Eliot calls ‘objective
which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the
external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the
It is precisely this that the symbols in this play do. On the whole, the
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
surface level like, say, the soul’s longing for the beyond, for death, for eternity
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and so on. What is dramatically significant is the irony in the Watchman’s
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
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 play? I think this is most unwarranted. We should at the most consider such
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
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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.
intensity of Western tragedy with the platitude of Indian folk and classical
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,
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
his predicament. He is all the time interested in living and death comes to him
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
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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,
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
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REFERENCES
1981. 231.
Introduction .60
Prakashan,1965. 56-57.
10. T.S. Eliot, “Hamlet,” Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace,
1932. 228
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11. Edward Thompson. Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist rev.
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