Revisiting Ratnakar: Exploring the Connotations of Changing Human-Animal Interactions in Rabindranath Tagore’s Balmiki Pratibha

The Hindu epic Ramayana begins with the tale of the divinely mediated transformation of its author from a notorious bandit, Ratnakar to a pioneering poet, Balmiki. In his 1881 dance-drama Balmiki Pratibha, Tagore reworks this tale, originally a celebration of divinity, into a rumination on kindness, universal justice, and creativity. Through a comparative reading of the two texts, this essay explores how or whether Tagore’s reworking of the tale is influenced by the late-Victorian transnational animal-rights and anti-cruelty consciousness. Tagore frames Balmiki’s transformation around his changing perception of the wilderness, including the wild animals, that acts as a backdrop which responds to, and even shapes, Balmiki’s transition. By examining Tagore’s dramatization of Balmiki’s first utterance in the Ramayana – a painfully passionate curse to a hunter killing a bird entranced in lovemaking, this essay analyses how Tagore situates kindness as the precondition to creativity. Finally, by exploring the problematics of adapting an ancient Hindu text, steeped in Brahminical ideals for a liberal nineteenth-century audience, professedly against caste discrimination, the paper explores the limitations underlying the late-Victorian aspirations for a syncretic East-meets-West conception of non-violence.