‘I brought her up with such loving care’: Tagore writes about missing his daughter after marriage

In one of his letters to his wife, Mrinalini Devi, Rabindranath wrote:

I do constantly try not to worry about our children. It is our duty to see to it that they are well-behaved and that they get a good education. Beyond that it is a mistake to torture our minds over them. They will grow up to do their life’s work in their own way whether good, bad, or indifferent. They are our children, true, but they are also individual in their own right. We shall not exercise control over the way they live their lives.

Let us do our duty by them but let us not expect too much from them. How they shall turn out as human beings is in God’s hands. Expecting and imagining that my child shall be the best of all is the product of a certain vanity. I have no right to do that. So many other children have hard lives, do we feel concerned for them?

Like a protective mother, Mrinalini Devi used to worry over how their daughter Bela was doing after her marriage. To reassure her, Rabindranath visited Bela at her husband’s home and wrote that he found her doing well.

I have seen Bela...

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