Kadambari Devi

Biography

The wedding took place on 5 July 1868, the day the bride turned nine. Her husband, Jyotirindranath Tagore, was about nineteen.

Kadambari was born in Kolkata (Calcutta) and given the name Matangini Gangopadhyay. The date is reported differently: most often 5 July 1859, but 1858 also appears. She was the third child of Shyam Ganguly and Trailokyasundari Devi. Her grandfather Jaganmohan Gangopadhyay was a well-known musician, and she took music lessons from him. The Tagore family, which she entered, was one of the centres of cultural life in Bengal. Her husband saw to her education. Rabindranath, her husband’s younger brother, was almost her own age: by one account he was only two years older than she was. She became his friend and playmate, and later his reader: her responses and comments, it is generally believed, pushed him to write poems. She is called a literary critic in this sense; as far as one can tell, no printed work of hers survives. Between the spring and autumn of 1883 Jyotirindranath, Kadambari and Rabindranath lived together in Karwar. Soon afterwards Rabindranath married.

Kadambari Devi died in April 1884. The date differs: 19 April and 21 April are both given. The Tagore family kept silent, and no official explanation was recorded. Over the years guesses have appeared: some link what happened to the fading of their former closeness after Rabindranath’s marriage, others cite rumours of a relationship between her husband and the actress Binodini Dasi. These versions are hard to check against documents, and I would treat them as conjecture rather than as established fact.

Rabindranath remembered her all his life, and scholars see the mark of this loss in his early poetry. Her image is also linked with the novella “The Broken Nest” (“Nastanirh”), on which Satyajit Ray based his film “Charulata”. Films about her herself came later: “Chhelebela” by Sukanta Roy (2002), “Chirosakha He” by Bandana Mukhopadhyay (2007), the documentary “Jeevan Smriti” by Rituparno Ghosh (2011) and “Kadambari” by Suman Ghosh (2015), in which she was played by Konkona Sen Sharma.