Tagore, Rabindranath

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TAGORE, RABINDRANATH

TAGORE, RABINDRANATH (1861–1941), renowned Bengali poet Author, activist, artist, choreographer, dramatist, educator, musician, and philosopher, Rabindranath Tagore was primarily a poet. He was called a "universal man," which he certainly was. His roots, both cultural and creative, were set deeply in his beloved Bengal. His talents blossomed from the dusty and wet plains of Bengal in over a thousand poems, two and a half thousand songs, a sizable number of short stories, novels, and discursive essays on education, history, literature, rural reconstruction, politics, philosophy, and science. He became a painter rather late in his life, when he turned seventy. In ten years, he produced some three thousand paintings.

Tagore was born in the Jorasanko district of Kolkata (Calcutta) on 7 May 1861. He was the youngest child of Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905) and Sarada Devi (1826–1875). Originally from Jessore, now in Bangladesh, the Tagore (Thakur in Bengali) family belonged to a Brahman subcaste known as Pirali. Orthodox Brahmans refused to have any social contact with the Tagores and other Piralis due to their closeness to Muslim rulers. The family moved to Kolkata around the time the city was founded, in the 1690s. The Tagores prospered working for the East India Company. Rabindranath's grandfather, Dwarkanath Tagore (1794–1846), known as "the Prince," built the family fortune with his great industrial enterprises, which included banking, insurance, agency houses, mining, shipping, and real estate. A contemporary of Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833) and a close associate in the reform movement, Dwarkanath was arguably India's first modern and global entrepreneur. His industrial enterprises collapsed soon after he passed away, but the extensive landed estates he had built up in East Bengal continued to comfortably support the extended family in the next generation.

Debendranath Tagore's large family lived in a commodious mansion in Jorasanko. All of his children distinguished themselves in some way or another. Dwijendranath Tagore (1840–1926) was a poet and philosopher, Satyendranath Tagore (1842–1923) was the first Indian to join the Indian Civil Service, Jyotirindranath Tagore (1849–1925) was a playwright and translator, and Swarnakumari Devi (1855–1925) was India's first woman novelist.

As a child, Rabindranath had trouble studying in school. He disliked the set currriculum, the strict discipline, and the restrictive atmosphere of the four schools he attended until he was thirteen. He was withdrawn from the St. Xavier's School in 1874. Thereafter he received home schooling from his brother Jyotirindranath and his wife Kadambari Devi. Both of them exercised great influence on Rabindranath's literary pursuits in his adolescence and early adult life.

Tagore started to publish verse, narrative poetry, short fiction, and translations from 1876 onward in the family's literary journal Bharati. He also started to act on the family stage. He appeared, for example, in the title role of Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentihomme, adapted to a Bengali farce by his brother Jyotirindranath. The following year, he traveled to London with his brother Satyendranath. He enrolled at the University College, London, to read English literature. His frankly explicit "letters" sent from London alarmed his elders, concerned about his youthful waywardness. He received urgent summons to return home. Upon reaching Kolkata, he began to publish in earnest. His opera Valmiki Pratibha(The genius of Valmiki), modeled after the European operas he saw in London, impressed Kolkata's literary elites, especially those engaged in experimenting with Western literary genres and music. Tagore scored the music for the opera and cast himself in the title role. He recorded his first major poetic inspiration in a passionate work that he titled "The Awakening of the Waterfall." A plethora of new works followed, including a series of devotional songs in the tradition of the medieval Mithila Vaishnava poet Vidyapati. He composed these songs in the company of Kadambari Devi, his talented sister-in-law.

Tagore had an arranged marriage in 1883 with Mrinalini Devi. The next year, Kadambari Devi committed suicide, apparently due to her unrequited love for Rabindranath. The tragedy shattered Tagore and arguably created the emotional impetus for his novella Nashtanir (The broken nest), which Satyajit Ray adapted for his film Charulata (1964). By 1890, when Tagore revisited England, he was considered a top literary talent in Bengal by no less than Bankim Chandra Chatterji.

Tagore spent the next decade (1890–1900) supervising the family's extensive landed estates in what is now Bangladesh. The experience brought him in close and intimate contact with Bengal's countryside and its people. He wrote scores of short stories showing the dark side of Bengal's village life while celebrating in exquisite verse the beauty and bounty of the land. The first decade of the twentieth century saw the emergence of two diametrically opposed profiles of Tagore: the first was that of a dedicated patriot and political activist, and the second that of a deeply mystical poet searching for unity and oneness in the complexity and diversity of the universe.

Tagore's political involvement began in 1886, when he composed and sang at the inauguration of the Indian National Congress. The next year, he participated in the public protest against the blatantly discriminatory policies of Lord Cross, the secretary of state for India. One sees Tagore's fully formed political personality and activism in the wake of Lord Curzon's decision in 1905 to partition the province of Bengal in two halves, roughly corresponding to the Hindu and Muslim populations. The swadeshi (self-rule) movement (1905–1911) was the first major "militant" agitation against colonial rule. During the first phase, Tagore led the protestors in the streets of Kolkata, singing patriotic songs he had composed for the movement. He gave music to Bankim Chatterji's famous hymn to the motherland, Band Mataram. The hymn soon became the battle cry of the antipartition patriots as well as the name of a fiery journal edited by Aurobindo Ghose (later Sri Aurobindo). Terror and violence marked the extremist challenge against the Raj in Bengal. Unable to accept the narrow nationalism and its destructive divisiveness, Tagore withdrew himself from the movement. He was quickly condemned and criticized; some called him a "lackey" of the British. A decade later, in 1915, Tagore published Ghare Baire (The home and the world), a major novel (also later adapted to film by Satyajit Ray) in which he articulated his theses on nationalism.

This period of intense public activism was followed by private withdrawal, which coincided with great personal tragedies in Tagore's life. His wife Mrinalini passed away in 1902, his daughter Renuka died in 1903, his father Debendranath died in 1905, and in 1907 his youngest son Samindranath died of cholera. It appears that Tagore attempted to negotiate the crises in a series of profoundly moving poems, also songs, uniting humanity to nature and nature to humanity. His own elegant yet simple prose translation of Gitanjali took the English literary circles by storm in 1912. Among Tagore's admirers in England were Mez Sinclair, Evelyn Under-hill, Ezra Pound, Bertrand Russell, and most importantly, W. B. Yeats, the Irish poet. "These prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years," Yeats wrote in his introduction to Gitanjali (p. ix). In 1912 and 1913 Tagore was in the United States, lecturing at the University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana, and Harvard University. Soon after his return to India, Tagore received the news that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Yeats lamented that even though the poetry of Tagore stirred sublime emotions in him, he knew nothing about "his life, and of the movements of thought that have made them possible." At once unique to Bengal and universal, Tagore's work was the product of the Anglo-Bengali, East-West encounters of the nineteenth century. The colonial world that Tagore inhabited, and the asymmetrical power relations among the colonizers and the colonized, prompted him to seek new and novel pathways to express his autonomy and creativity.

From 1913 to 1941, one can locate this dialectical process in three areas of Tagore's life. The first was the project of building a utopian community in Santiniketan, 100 miles (160 km) outside Kolkata in the saffron-colored soil of southern Bengal. In 1863 his father Debendranath had bought the land, built a guest house, and named it Santiniketan (Abode of Peace). A prayer hall was built in 1891. In 1901 Rabindranath established an academic institution to provide an "overall development of the students amidst close contact with nature . . . classes were to be held in open air under the shades of the trees." In 1918 Tagore transformed the institution into Visva Bharati (World University). Although the atmosphere and environment reminded one of the intentional communities of the Upanishadic age of the pre-Christian era, Visva Bharati was purportedly a twentieth-century academy. Tagore invited scholars and students from the East and the West to occupy an academic and creative space that was, by design and intent, outside the baneful influences of colonialism, industrialism, and nationalism. To raise funds for Visva Bharati and to speak about its mission, he traveled the globe: to China and Japan (1924), South America (1925), Europe and Egypt (1926), Southeast Asia (1927), and Canada (1929). He delivered the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford in 1930, which were published as Religion of Man.

Tagore attempted to provide a practical and material foundation to his vision of the World University. At the adjacent Sriniketan, he established the Center for Rural Reconstruction in 1922. Its first director was Leonard K. Elmhirt, an English agricultural expert. Experimental research activities accompanied agronomy and rural development. Chemical fertilizers and modern medical facilities were introduced. The focus at Sriniketan was, and still is, on vocational education: leather craft, wood craft, clay craft, lacquer work, embroidery, bookbinding, carpet weaving, and block carving and printing. Along with the Art School (Kala Bhavan) and the Music School (Sangit Bhavana), the Santiniketan-Sriniketan complex combined the practice of the traditional arts with contemporary and modern elements.

The second project that preoccupied Tagore during this period concerned his scrupulous spurning of forms of colonial knowledge, and his staunch anti-imperialist and antinationalist positions. He rejected, for example, "academic histories" that are narrowly focused on political and public policies of the state. In numerous poems, plays, and novels, he attempted to capture what Ranajit Guha has called the "historicality" of everyday life.

Tagore surrendered his knighthood in an angry protest against the Amritsar Massacre of 1919. Although he disagreed with Mahatma Gandhi about some aspects of the nationalist movement, his harshest critique was directed to the West, sundered as it was by the Holocaust and World War II. In his last address and testament to the world before he passed on in 1941, he stated, "Perhaps the new dawn will come from this horizon, from the East where the sun rises."

The third area of Tagore's involvement was his continued creative effort. He remained magnificently innovative and profusely productive to his last day. He started experimenting with verse libre in 1933; he invented a new play form combining music, mime, and dance. He took up painting at seventy, and the three thousand paintings he completed are considered among the best of modern Indian art.

William Radice, arguably the best translator of Tagore in English, divides Tagore's life and work in a series of paired oppositions borrowed from Isha Upanishad: he moves, he moves not; he is far, he is near; he is within all, and he is outside all. Tagore moved away from the orthodox Brahmo church founded by his father; he also moved away from the Hindu revivalism and nationalism. Tagore was quite a radical in more ways than one, but he remained tradition-bound in some key areas. For example, he married a ten-year-old semiliterate from his own caste; he followed the family custom by giving his two daughters in marriage when they were only twelve and fourteen. He can seem utterly foreign to non-Bengali readers. Although there are some good translations, most of Tagore's poetry is inadequate if not inaccessible in translation. Tagore's songs are equally inaccessible to non-Bengalis. There are over two and a half thousand of them, sung and listened to every day by Bengalis everywhere. As a composer of songs, Satyajit Ray says, Tagore has no equal, even in the West (quoted in Dutta and Robinson, p. 385). Most non-Bengalis, however, are denied the pleasure of enjoying Tagore's songs. Yet Tagore proves—in his fervent idealism, in his spiritual reality, in his romanticism—close to all of humankind. Tagore's modernity as a poet, thinker, and activist is accessible to most, as are his antimaterialist, feminist, and educational ideals. Most important is the agency or autonomy of Tagore the artist and poet, and its expression in his creative work. His personality and life are present in his poetry, plays, stories, and novels. He is within all. Yet he is outside all—human creativity is, in his own words, "amoral, arbitrary, fanciful, whimsical, unreal," and the natural artist in him "is naughty, good for nothing, separate from the man of a hundred good intentions" (quoted in Radice, pp. 36–37).

Is it possible to overcome the translational problems to appreciate Tagore, the poet? Anna Akhmatova, who translated Tagore into Russian, offers an insight: "He is a great poet, I can see that now. It's not only a matter of individual lines which have real genius, or individual poems . . . but that mighty flow of poetry which takes its strength from Hinduism as from the Ganges, and is called Rabindranath Tagore" (quoted in Dutta and Robinson, p. 1).

Dilip K. Basu