There is an account in R ni Chanda's book on Abanindranāth Tagore, Rabindran th's artist nephew, on Abanindranath's response to music. Listening to song after song, he would suddenly burst out: ‘Here are you all trying to construct Rabikā's biography, but his real biography is in his songs…. His whole life is contained in them. You will find his living image there among the words and the music.’ Much later, Niradchandra Chaudhuri seems to be saying something similar: if Tagore's songs are arranged by date, ‘one can construct his mental biography from them’.

The two observations sound much the same, but did the two speakers have the same thing in mind by the poet's ‘biography’? Abanindranath would listen to Tagore songs like ‘I can bear yet more blows’ or ‘Strike me more, still more, O lord’, or lines like ‘My sorrows are like a red lotus girding your feet’, and exclaim, ‘No, no, not that one, sing some other song. Rabika could say things like that, he had the courage; I don't. I can only say: I have borne enough, now raise me on high, make me a lamp in your temple.’ The idea of a ‘biography’ conveyed by such a remark (‘He had the courage’) seems very different from that of Niradchandra. The latter mines specific songs by Tagore for direct reflections of the poet's personal life.

He discovers, for instance, how ‘just as Chateaubriand could pass from France to Bengal, Rabindranath passed from Bengal to England’. Which is the song conveying this piece of biography? According to Niradchandra, it is ‘I know you, I know you, woman from a foreign land’. Niradchandra is well aware of the very different mystical insight behind its composition, as vouched by the poet himself in his reminiscences, but he does not place much reliance upon that account, as in his view, songs can only spring from sensory experience. The foreign woman, therefore, must be some blue-eyed blonde-haired beauty, not a cosmic or universal presence: if anyone thinks otherwise, ‘he cannot have seen a female form in his life, or felt the touch of a woman's body against his own’.