Rabindranather Malatiputhi by Amitrasudan Bhattacharya [Hardcover]

"To become the ‘Rabindranath’ that he is known as, Rabindranath Tagore had a notebook during his childhood writings and literary creations, which was his daily companion as a young poet—this much-renowned and much-discussed notebook in the history of Rabindra literature is named Malati Puthi. In his childhood, the two previous notebooks were lost. The first one was the 'Blue Paper Notebook'. In ‘Jibonsmriti’, the poet wrote, ‘I started writing poems in large, crude letters with a pencil, drawing uneven lines by hand.’ Later, 'I bid farewell to that torn blue notebook and acquired a bound Lettuce Diary.’ In it, he wrote a heroic poem called ‘The Defeat of Prithviraj’. Recalling his childhood memories, the poet said, 'Despite its abundance of heroic spirit, that poem couldn't be saved from destruction. Its appropriate vehicle, the bound Lettuce Diary, also followed the elder sibling Blue Notebook into oblivion, and no one knew where it went.’ The subsequent notebook after these two was Malati Puthi, which was the poet’s constant companion from childhood to pre-adolescence. This too was lost and forgotten. After the poet’s demise, this notebook was recovered. Many valuable compositions or initial drafts of his literary creations from the emergence phase are inscribed in his handwriting in the pages of this notebook. This manuscript contains many poems written by Rabindranath, parts of epic poems, many songs, some prose writings, practices of translations from Sanskrit and English to Bengali, daily routines from childhood, numerous strikethroughs within poems, discarded passages, unpublished writings, practice signatures, some scribblings, and a few childhood drawings. From various angles, this manuscript has been considered a highly valuable and rare material in the history of Rabindra studies. Under the skillful editorship of former Visva-Bharati Rabindra professor and renowned Rabindra researcher Amitrasudan Bhattacharya, Rabindranath’s renowned Malati Puthi is published in book form for the first time."