BENOY R.
SAMANTA
PERSONALITY
Hazel Hoff and Gitanjali
BENOY R. SAMANTA
T
here is no shortage of gorgeous days
in Southern California, even in the
winter months of November through
February. There are very few places like this
on earth. Here, one could plan for a picnic or
any outdoor activity without ever worrying
about what the weather would be on that
particular day. One could also do gardening
in this area throughout the year, if one
wishes to. It was one of these days on one
Sunday more than twenty years ago that I am
going to describe.
The sun was up, the air was cool and
crisp, the sky was completely cloudless and
the San Gabriel Mountains at the not so
distant Angeles National Forest were
covered at the top with snow from previous
days. It was a spectacular morning. I decided
to go to a nearby garden shop to see what
could be planted for early spring.
With few plants in my cart, I was
standing at the checkout counter of a local
garden shop when a woman from behind
gently grabbed my forearm and said in a soft
voice, ‘You must be from India.’ ‘Yes, I am’
I said, turning back to her. I saw a well-
dressed elderly woman with a bouquet of
flowers in her hand. She must have been on
her way to the church.
‘You have to pardon me for meeting you
like this’ she said, ‘it is improper for a lady
from the South to meet a man this way. But I
couldn’t help myself. I just returned from
India a few days ago.’
‘That’s alright, where in India did you
go?’ I asked.
‘I went to visit Santiniketan,’ she said
and continued, ‘I arrived in New Delhi and
then took a train from there to Santiniketan.
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It was a long journey and took me more than
two days to reach there.’
She wasn’t able to make a reservation
for the faster train and had to settle for slow-
moving local passenger trains. Her journey
was not comfortable, but she had no
complaints about it. However, the mere
mention of the word Santiniketan greatly
surprised me, as I had never met any
Westerner who would travel to India just to
visit Santiniketan. It is just not heard of. If I
had ever met a stranger like this, who had
just returned from India visiting the common
tourist attractions like Taj Mahal, the palaces
in Rajasthan, the temples in South India, etc.,
our conversation would probably not have
continued beyond the checkout counter. But
I couldn’t let this woman go. I became
curious to know more about her interest for
Santiniketan.
‘Out of all the places to go in India, why
did you choose Santiniketan?’ I asked.
‘I had a long desire to visit that place and
moreover, I have been reading Tagore’s
Gitanjali my entire life,’ she replied softly.
The checkout counter of the garden shop
was not an ideal place for any further
discussion about her interest and love for
Tagore and his Gitanjali, so I suggested that
we meet again at our home. She was
delighted with this idea. We exchanged our
telephone numbers on a piece of paper and
then she extended her right hand and
introduced herself as Hazel Hoff. She said
she was 86 years old.
To most Indians, particularly Bengalis
from Eastern India and Bangladesh, the
presence of Tagore in everyday life is still so
powerful that any additional information on
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 HAZEL HOFF AND GITANJALI
Tagore or Santiniketan to the readers is
superfluous. But for this writing, few
relevant pieces of information are necessary.
Santiniketan (Abode of Peace) is a small
town that grew around a school that
Rabindranath Tagore founded in Bengal in
1901 and conceived there an imaginative and
innovative system of education. In 1951, the
school became one of India’s central
universities, called Visva-Bharati University.
Rabindranath died in 1941 at the age of
eighty. He was not only an immensely
versatile poet, he was also a great short story
writer, novelist, playwright, essayist, and
composer of songs, as well as a talented
painter. Tagore wrote volumes during his
lifetime, which included nearly twenty-five
hundred poetries, over seventeen hundred
songs, nine hundred essays, one hundred and
three short stories, fifty plays, and twelve
novels. Tagore is still very widely read and
his songs continue to reverberate around the
eastern part of India and Bangladesh. But as
Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate economist and
former student of Santiniketan wrote in
1997, ‘. . .in the rest of the world, especially
in Europe and America, the excitement that
Tagore’s writing created in the early years of
the twentieth century has largely vanished.’1
Gitanjali (Song Offerings), a selection of
Tagore’s one hundred or so poems for which
he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature
in 1913, was published in English translation
in London in March of that year, and had
been reprinted ten times by November of that
year, when the award was announced. The
concept of a direct, joyful, and totally
fearless relationship with God can be found
in many of Tagore’s religious writings,
including the poems of Gitanjali.
The element of religion in Tagore’s
writing, which attracted and inspired people
of the West, can be best described by citing
one example. Susan Owen, the mother of
Wilfred Owen, an English poet and soldier,
and one of the leading British poets of the
2013 Bulletin of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture
First World War, wrote to Rabindranath
in 1920, describing her last conversation
with her son before he left for the war,
which would take his life. Wilfred said
goodbye with those wonderful words
of yours–beginning at “When I go from
hence let this be my parting word.” When
Wilfred’s pocket notebook was returned to
his mother, she found ‘these words written in
his dear writing–with your name beneath.’
(The full text of this poem is included at the
end of this article.)
Hazel arrives at our house
Within a few days Hazel arrived at our
house driving her own car. Because of our
mutual interest in Tagore’s writing and my
own association with Santiniketan as a
student during my junior high school years,
my wife, Lolita and I quickly developed
close friendship with her. I wanted to hear
from her what inspired her to read Gitanjali
and how did it all start?
Hazel’s story was brief, but direct. When
she was young, the family moved from Texas
to San Marino, California, near Pasadena.
When she was in her early 20s, she fell
deeply in love with a young man from a well-
to-do family and was eager to marry him. But
the boy’s family wouldn’t agree to their
marriage and they moved their son out of the
area to break up their relationship. Hazel was
so heartbroken that she took to bed. She
couldn’t eat or sleep for days and became
very ill. Her family was very concerned for
her health. And it was during that time, a
close family friend presented Hazel with an
original copy of Gitanjali, one that was
published in 1913, and asked her to read
through it. It was the poems in Gitanjali,
according to Hazel, that eventually got her
out of her sorrows and despair. As unreal as
it may sound, Hazel had been reading
Gitanjali ever since, every single day. She
never went to sleep without reading few
verses from Gitanjali.
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 BENOY R. SAMANTA
‘What do you find in Gitanjali?’ I asked
one day.
‘The joy, the boundless joy’ she replied.
She didn’t elaborate any further.
Perhaps what Hazel Hoff experienced or
found by reading Gitanjali her entire life,
can best be understood by the speech
delivered by Herald Hjame, the Chairman of
the Nobel Committee of the Swedish
Academy during the award ceremony on
10 December 1913.
. . .He (Tagore) peruses his Vedic hymns, his
Upanishads, and indeed the theses of
Buddha himself, in such a manner that he
discovers in them, what is for him an
irrefutable truth. If he seeks the divinity in
nature, he finds there a living personality
with the features of the omnipotence, the all-
embracing lord of nature, whose
preternatural spiritual power nevertheless
likewise reveals its presence in all temporal
life, small as well as great, but especially in
the soul of man predestined for eternity.
Praise, prayer, and fervent devotion pervade
the song offerings that he lays at the feet of
this nameless divinity of his. Ascetic and
even ethic austerity would appear to be alien
to this type of divinity worship, which may
be characterized as a species of aesthetic
theism. Piety of that description is in full
concord with the whole of his poetry, and it
has bestowed peace upon him. He proclaims
the coming of that peace for weary and
careworn souls within the bounds of
Christendom.
This is mysticism, if we call it so, but not a
mysticism that, relinquishing personality,
seeks to become absorbed in an All
that approaches a Nothingness, but one
that, with all the talents and faculties of the
soul trained to their highest pitch, eagerly
sets forth to meet the living Father of the
whole creation.
Hazel got married
Later in life, Hazel got married and had
children. After her husband passed away, she
lived alone in an apartment in Claremont,
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California. We visited her in her apartment
twice. Every time we visited her, we saw
Hazel walking around her apartment,
clutching the Gitanjali close to her chest. It
was her constant companion.
Within a few weeks I was about to move
to Saudi Arabia on a work assignment and
told Hazel of my plan. The news greatly
disappointed her.
‘I’d like to come and visit you there,’ she
said.
Knowing the rules and limitations
regarding travel to Saudi Arabia, I told her
that it wasn’t an option. They simply do not
allow any visas to visitors. That remark
somewhat angered Hazel.
‘Don’t tell me that I can’t visit you. You
just do not want me to go and see you there.
You must be going there to work on some
secret Government assignment,’ she retorted.
I tried to explain, but I don’t think I ever
convinced her that I was not a part of any
secret mission whatsoever.
While we lived in Saudi Arabia, we
exchanged letters regularly with Hazel Hoff.
A year after we moved, Hazel moved from
her apartment to an assisted living home in
the same city and we visited her during our
trip back to California in July 1993. Hazel
invited us for lunch at the cafeteria of the
facility, where she lived and when we arrived
there we saw Hazel waiting at the lobby with
her dear Gitanjali in her hand. A few months
after our return to Saudi Arabia, Hazel
informed us in a letter that her beloved
Gitanjali had been stolen. She was greatly
distressed. She said she suspected someone,
whom she believed, had taken that precious
book away from her, and even worse, she
considered that person to be a friend of her.
We were saddened by the news, but felt
totally helpless to do anything about it. Hazel
managed to obtain another copy of Gitanjali
but the loss of that original publication was
perhaps too much for her to bear.
Not too long after this, letters stopped
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 HAZEL HOFF AND GITANJALI

coming from Hazel. A follow-up letter didn’t
bring any replies back. We had no other
means to find anything about her. We also
didn’t return to California for several years.
Hazel Hoff was probably no more.
One may wonder, why am I writing
her story, so many years after I stopped
hearing from her?
Rabindranath Tagore was born in 1861.
This year, India, Bangladesh and other parts
of the world are celebrating Tagore’s 150th
birthday in various forms. I remembered
Hazel Hoff and missed her, and wondered
how she would have celebrated Tagore’s
150th birthday, if she were still around.
I do not have the answer. Perhaps, that
pious woman would be reading her
Gitanjali quietly in her den. Tagore
wrote (Gitanjali 96):
‘When I go from hence let this be my
parting word, that what I have seen is
unsurpassable.
I have tasted of the hidden honey of this
lotus that expands on this ocean of light, and
thus I am blessed—let this be my parting word.
In this playhouse of infinite forms I have
had my play and here have I caught sight of
him that is formless.
My whole body and my limbs have
thrilled with his touch who is beyond touch;
and if the end comes here, let it come–let this
be my parting word.’ „

REFERENCE
1 Amartya Sen, Tagore and His India. 1997.

* Mr Benoy R. Samanta has spent almost eighteen years in the Middle East on engineering
assignments and held various positions during his professional career. He is currently a resident
of Los Angeles, California.

2013 Bulletin of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture 211