Pavi Ramhota
“The main object of teaching is not to give explanations, but to knock at the doors of the mind. »Tagore
2024 marks the 163rd birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore. Rabindranath Tagore was born in Jorasanko Thakurbari in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on May 7, 1861. As evidenced by the raptures of his songs and mystic visions, Rabindranath Tagore is a millennium in himself, the essence of Indian wisdom. He provided the country with the intellectual foundation it required to forge a new path. He inspired the Bengal Renaissance, which initially encouraged other Indian vernaculars to provide lofty creative potentials.
With over 1200 songs with music composition, 38 plays, 12 novels, 200 short stories, and over 2,700 pictures, he has left behind the greatest body of creative works in history. Not to mention his direction, stage-setting, acting, and choreography, which came from his ability to perceive rather than from any rational conjecture or previously published philosophical treatise. His poetic vision and philosophy combine to create a worldwide religion by which everyone can strive the universal soul that unites the spiritual from within and the outside world.
Although Tagore received praise from all around the world for his unwavering creativity and exquisite inventiveness, his remarkable iconic status among his fellow Bengalis can be attributed to his complete absorption into the fabric of Bengali society, regardless of social class. Sukanta Chaudhuri searches for the elements that have sustained Tagore’s enduring legacy and given it modern significance. Tagore as a poet has deeply influenced the Bengali ethos with the elements of theism and secularism in his multifaceted humanism, with Rabindrasangeet leading the poet’s cultural prominence. By supporting every aspect of the native culture and absorbing the advantages of the influence of Western civilization, he strengthened the Bengal Renaissance of the 19th century. Rabindranath has had a profound impact on Bengal’s cultural life as well as on the region’s administrative and economic landscape. He has also ingrained himself into the public consciousness by extending his empathy beyond class boundaries and embracing all socioeconomic classes. “This deep-seated high-cultural component in a community’s total definition of itself does not, to my knowledge, exist anywhere else in India, and perhaps seldom in the world”, writes Chaudhuri.
According to a recent article by historian and critic Ramachandra Guha, “the intellectuals of Bengal have sold him short despite their love and knowledge of Tagore.” Tagore, a thinker whose ideas went far beyond Bengal, has been provincialized and parochialized by them, making him a local hero. Indeed, it should come as no surprise that Bengali academics have produced the best research on Tagore (1). On a broader scale, though, Guha might be right, and maybe a cultural icon like Tagore—who was always Bengali—is more likely to face this kind of treatment than a political hero like Gandhi—who was typically an Indian first and rarely a Gujarati.
However, no scholar from a nation conquered by a European colonial power ever approached the level of renown that Tagore experienced following his 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature triumph. Tagore was the first Asian to introduce what is now known as “Eastern culture” into the mainstream of Western intellectual life, spanning from North and South America to Europe. He travelled remarkably far for a man of his era (2). Translations of Tagore’s works are available in English, Spanish, French, German, and other Asian languages.
Translation has never been an easy topic to settle and some versions may have certain translations undoubtedly had an effect, supporting the overly sentimental and ultimately unfulfilling notion of Tagore as an Eastern “poet-seer.” However, a number of Tagore’s early critics, most notably W. B. Yeats, aggressively promoted this notion while scolding him for “talking too much about God”.
The Gitanjali collection of Tagore had profoundly impacted W. B. Yeats, and after meeting with Tagore in London in the summer of 1912, Ezra Pound wrote to a friend expressing that he felt like ‘a painted Pict with a stone war-club’ in Tagore’s presence (3). Pound praised Tagore’s writings in an essay he published in the Fortnightly Review in March 1913, comparing them to “the poetic piety of Dante.” (4)
As we commemorate Tagore’s 163rd birthday, even today it’s possible that our understanding of the profundity and scope of his ideas and practices is still very limited. In scholarly research, university courses on world literature and history, and in conversations about the intellectual history of modernity, Tagore ought to be much more well-known than he is. This should not detract from recognising the brilliance of his creative work; Tagore has enough facets to warrant at least a “thousand bonds of delight.” However, for this cultural figure to remain relevant globally, Tagore must be comprehended in all his complexity and richness.
- Guha was referring in particular to the works of late R. K. Dasgupta as well as more recent ones by Tapan Raychaudhuri, Uma Das Gupta, Supriya Chaudhuri and Rosinka Chaudhuri.
2.England and America in 1912 and 1913; Japan and then America again in 1916; Western Europe in 1921; China and Japan in 1924; Latin America in 1924 and 1925. In 1927 he visited Singapore, Malaya, Java, Bali, Thailand and Burma. In 1930 he returned to America and Europe, again making an important visit to England, and in 1932 he made his final overseas tour, this time of Iran and Iraq.
3.Ezra Pound to Dorothy Shakespeare, 4 October 1912: published in A. Walton Litz & Omar S. Pound, Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespeare: Their Letters, 1910-1914 (London: Faber, 1985), p. 163: quoted in Dutta & Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: An Anthology (London, Picador, 1997), p. 102.
4.Ezra Pound, ‘Rabindranath Tagore’, Fortnightly Review, 99, March (1913).