ডাকঘর

Why it matters

The Post Office (Dakghar in Bengali) is a play Rabindranath Tagore published in 1912; Wikipedia reports that he wrote it in four days. Its hero is Amal, a child confined to the house of his adoptive uncle, Madhav, by an incurable illness. He sits in the courtyard and asks passers-by where they are going. When a new post office goes up nearby, he fantasizes about receiving a letter from the King, or about being the King’s postman. The play stays alive because of how small and plain it is: a child shut indoors looks at the world through imagination while the adults around him worry, mock or stand helpless. Wikipedia says it holds a special place in Tagore’s reputation, in Bengal and beyond.

Notice how far the play travelled. According to Wikipedia, W. B. Yeats produced the first English version and wrote a preface; the Abbey Theatre in Dublin staged it in 1913, directed by Yeats and Lady Gregory, and the production moved to the Court Theatre in London the same year. The Bengali original was staged at Tagore’s Jorasanko theatre in Calcutta in 1917. The same page reports 105 performances in Germany, a French translation by André Gide, a Spanish one by Juan Ramón Jiménez, and a Polish version performed under Janusz Korczak’s supervision in the Warsaw Ghetto. Tagore himself called the death in the play “spiritual freedom”, in the words Wikipedia quotes in his biography.

Watch how much tension the play builds from a very small setting: a courtyard, a road, a boy not allowed out. The Bengali Wikisource text is divided into three parts, and the action rests on short conversations, so it reads quickly. Wikipedia describes the village headman mocking Amal with a false letter from the King, and a royal physician who then really arrives; the ending is not given away here. Content note: a child’s serious, incurable illness and an implied death; nothing graphic. The Vietnamese text on this site is the site’s own translation, made directly from the Bengali original.

Introduction written for LitMundi with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed below.