In Panchabhut (The Five Elements, serialized 1892–5), a poem by one of the five interlocutors stimulates variant readings in the other four. The fictional poet concludes, ‘Poetry has this virtue, that the poet’s creativity stimulates the reader’s own.’15 A poem, like a flame, ignites a range of fireworks in readers, and all readings are legitimate if true to the pleasure the text generates. This passage is close to another in ‘Shityasrishti’ (Literary Creation, 1907), an essay published more than a decade later: “Thus throughout human society, the thoughts of one mind strive to find fulfilment in another, thereby so shaping our ideas that they are no longer exclusive to the original thinker…. In fact, what we say is shaped by the conjunction of speaker and listener”
(The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore, by Sukanta Chaudhuri, page 354)
In essays like “Koutuk Hasya” (“Mirth”) and “Koutukhasyer Matra” (“Measure of Mirth”) collected in the book Panchabhut (The Five Elements, 1897) Tagore discusses the aims and objectives of the comic and classi es it according to its different levels and degrees.7 The generic combination of romantic comedy and farce, thus, gives Tagore an opportunity to showcase a gamut of characteristics and excesses of the late nineteenth-century Bengali bhadralok society in Chirakumar Sabha.
(The Politics and Reception of Rabindranath Tagore’s Drama; The Bard on the Stage, by Arnab Bhattacharya, Mala Renganathan, page 65)