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Rabindranath Tagore play the post office certainly has many layers of meaning and all its themes are deeply embedded in the play's inheritance symbolism. Symbolism according to its dictionary meaning denotes something that stand for, something very deeper or highly serious. There is no doubt that the play The Post Office is a great symbolical drama. On its surface level it is the story of pain and agony of human condition but in its more deeper level the play is replenish with symbolical meaning.
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| Flower girl Sudha |
A detailed analysis of the play entitled, The Post Office will substantiate the perfect usage of symbols by Tagore. It must also be remembered that Tagore used mostly characters as symbols and episodes only rarely. The story moves around a small village where a post office is opened having a tremendous impact on the imaginative faculty of Amal, an invalid child ordered to remain indoors and later doors and windows are perpetually closed to save him from infections. Earlier when the windows remain open he sits there making friends with all passers by expressing his desire to become a postman after growing up and also that he would like to meet the King. Towards the end of the play, the King’s messenger arrives with the royal physician to treat him. When people visit him inside the room, he is found mostly asleep creating an anxiety and when Sudha questions, “When will he awake?” The physician answers, “Directly the King comes and calls him”. The play ends abruptly leaving several questions in the minds of the audience, viz” Will the King really come? Has Amal died? Or will he be cured?
However, such a suspense tends to be the main strength of any symbolical writing. K.R. Srinivas Iyengar sums up the play aptly while comparing it to the ending of an earlier play, The King of the Dark Chamber. He writes
The King of the Dark Chamber is about a woman with a sick soul; The Post Office is about a child with a sick body. The King visits the dark chamber of the Queen’s Heart, and all is well; The King visits the sick chamber of the little boy and all is well again.
The physical death of Amal is thus not logically necessary to the story. On the other hand, it is more natural to assume that, as in the earlier play, in The Post Office too the adventure with the Divine leaves man cured in soul as well as body. Amal’s aspiration and the Divine response meet, and the result is new birth, not physical death.
The surface story of The Post Office hovers around an orphan invalid boy adopted by Madhav and is a subject of sympathy and compassion not only due to his physical agony but also his mental suffering due to house confinement and restricted movement which hampers his craving for outdoor life. The play also contains several symbolical connotations, the major one being Amal himself representing man’s perpetual yearning for union with God. This idea is a significant theme of Tagore’s poems, especially Gitanjali that human beings are continually struggling to release themselves from the fetters of life in order to liberate the soul for its ultimate journey to the Divine. This concept has a Platonic touch and in this sense the King becomes God and his letter symbolizes deliverance.
Amongst other characters the Watchman symbolizes time, flowers connote life, whereas the Boys represent worldly pleasures. Significantly enough the Bengali version of The Post Office was composed and produced in 1911, a year after the Bengali Gitanjali and a year before the English version of Gitanjali. English translation of The Post Office was brought out later in 1914 along with The King of the Dark Chamber, the year in which the poet-dramatist was honored with the knighthood.
Tagore designed the play Post Office to be descriptively very simple portrayal of Indian village life and characters. He keeps the character list short, the main character is a little boy by the name of Amal. The boy has an intense curiosity of the outside world and years for the type of knowledge that can't be learned from book. The understanding of Tagore's usage of symbolism in this play is intent to understanding his ideology.
Symbol of Letter :- Man's yearning is represented by Amal's eagerness to receive the king's letter. In another way the latter can be seen or thought as an invitation to the other world, the world of divinity. The letter symbolises and invitation to leave this world of pain and suffering and enter the world of eternal bliss where there is no pain.
Symbolism of Time:- The Watchman and his 'gong' symbolise time. The Time is most powerful and waits for none. The Watchmen in this play makes this fact clear to Amal. When Amal asks when will he sound the 'gong' The Watchmen tells that he will do so when the actual time will come.
Symbol of Flowers:- In the play Amal ask Sudha for a flower, which may be seen as a symbol of life and vitality. Sudha here symbolises freshness, fully free to live according to one's own choice. She makes a call to Amal to know her name properly, which symbolically maybe suggested the need for purity to be acquainted with freshness.
Symbol of Boy's:- The boys on the play maybe treated as symbols of worldly pleasures, because the physical life has to look for material things sometimes. The boys in the play, the group symbolically make a call to the imaginative boy to join the the carnival of worldly pleasures lying outside of ones private boundaries.
Symbol of King:- Tagore's writing particularly his deep philosophical dramas portray a name less vague grand figure, sometimes who is called as the "king of the dark chamber" or at other time he is the eternity itself. In the play the King symbolises the almighty for who's message Amal patiently waits. It gives him sense behind the nonsense existence of living. This King is truly one of the grandest symbolical figure in the play.