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Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) |
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Greatest writer in modern Indian literature, Bengali poet, novelist, educator, and an early advocate of Independence for India. Rabindranath Tagaore won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Two years later he was awarded a knighthood by King George V, but he surrendered it in 1919 as a protest against the Massacre of Amritsar, where British troops killed some 400 Indian demonstrators. Tagore's influence on Gandhi and the founders of modern India was enormous. In the West Tagore is remembered more as a mystic than a reformer and critic of colonialism. "In the moonless gloom of midnight I asked her, "Maiden, what is your quest holding the lamp near your heart? My house is all dark and lonesome, — lend me your light." She stopped for a minute and thought and gazed at my face in the dark. "I have brought my light," she said, "to join the carnival of lamps." I stood and watched her little lamp uselessly lost among lights." (from Gitanjali (Song Offerings) by Rabindranath Tagore, a Collection of Prose Translations Made by the Author from the Original Bengali, with an Introduction by W. B. Yeats, London: Macmillan and Co., 1913, p. 60) Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta into a wealthy and prominent family. His grandfather, "Prince" Dwarkanath, was one of Calcutta's leading business magnates. He helped a number of public projects, such as Calcutta Medical College. Tagore's father was Maharishi Debendranath, a religious reformer and scholar. He had a large family, fifteen children in all. The Tagores tried to combine traditional Indian culture with Western ideas; all the children contributed to Bengali cultural life. Sarada Devi, Tagore's mother died when he was very young – he realized that she will never come back
was when her body was carried through a gate to a place where it was
burned. It was not until the age of ten when Tagore started to use socks and shoes.
"He was one of those boys who are unfitted for any sort of
rough-and-tumble. . . . His real education came, not from the desultory
and experimental alternation of tutor and school, with a background of
time spent with servants, but from the whole circumstances and
environment of his life." (Rabindranath Tagore: His Life And Work
by E. J. Thompson, Calcutta: Association Press, 1921, p. 7) Tagore, the youngest of the childred, started to compose poems at the age of eight. With his father he went on a tour of the Western Himalayas; it was Tagore's most important childhood experience. His first book, a collection of poems, came out when he was 17; it was published by Tagore's friend who wanted to surprise him. "On leaving the Normal School we were sent to the Bengal Academy, a Eurasian institution. We felt we had gained an access of dignity, that we had grown up—at least into the first storey of freedom." (My Reminiscences by Rabindranath Tagore, New York: The Macmillan Co, 1917, p. 60) Tagore studied history and culture, but he did not adjust to the school routine. At the University College, London, he studied law and attended lectures on English literature but left after a year – he did not like the weather. Once he gave a beggar a cold coin – it was more than the beggar had expected and he returned it. In England Tagore started to compose the poem 'Bhagna Hridaj' (a broken heart). In 1883 Tagore married Mrinalini Devi Raichaudhuri, with whom he had two sons and three daughters. In 1890 Tagore moved to East Bengal (now Bangladesh), where he collected local legends and folklore. Between 1893 and 1900 he wrote seven volumes of poetry, including Sonar Tari (1894, The Golden Boat), and Kanika (1899, Short Poems). This was highly productive period in Tagore's life, and earned him the rather misleading epitaph 'The Bengali Shelley.' More important was that Tagore wrote in the common language of the people. Tagore was the first Indian to bring an element of psychological realism to his novels. Among his early major prose works are Chokher Bali (1903, Eyesore) and Nastanirh (1901, The Broken Nest). They first came out in serialized form. Between 1891 and 1895 he published forty-four short stories in Bengali periodical, most of them in the monthly journal Sadhana. Especially Tagore's short stories influenced deeply Indian Literature. 'Punishment', a much anthologized work, was set in a rural village. It describes the oppression of women through the tragedy of the low-caste Rui family. Chandara is a proud, beautiful woman, "buxom, well-rounded, compact and sturdy," her husband, Chidam, is a farm-laborer, who works in the fields with his brother Dukhiram. One day when they return home after whole day of toil and humiliation, Dukhiram kills in anger his sloppy and slovenly wife because his food was not ready. To help his brother, Chidam's tells to police that his wife struck her sister-in-law with the farm-knife. Chandara takes the blame on to herself. 'In her thoughts, Chandara was saying to her husband, "I shall give my youth to the gallows instead of you. My final ties in this life will be with them."' Afterwards both Chidam and Dukhiram try to confess that they were quilty but Chandara is convicted. Just before the hanging, the doctor says that her husband wants to see her. "To hell with him," says Chandara. In 1901 Tagore founded a school outside Calcutta, Visva-Bharati, which was dedicated to emerging Western and Indian philosophy and education. It become a university in 1921. He produced poems, novels, stories, a history of India, textbooks, and treatises on pedagogy. Tagore's wife died in 1902, one of his daughters died the next year, and in 1907 Tagore lost his younger son. Tagore's reputation as a writer was established in the United States and in England after the publication of Gitanjali (Song Offerings), about divine and human love. The poems were translated into English by the author himself. In the introduction from 1912 William Butler Yeats wrote: "These lyrics—which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention—display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long." (Ibid., p. xiii) Tagore's poems were also praised by Ezra Pound, and drew the attention of the Nobel Prize committee. "There is in him the stillness of nature. The poems do not seem to have been produced by storm or by ignition, but seem to show the normal habit of his mind. He is at one with nature, and finds no contradictions. And this is in sharp contrast with the Western mode, where man must be shown attempting to master nature if we are to have "great drama." (Ezra Pound, in Fortnightly Review, 1 March 1913) However, Tagore also experimented with poetic forms and these works have lost much in translations into other languages. Much
of Tagore's ideology come from the teaching of the
Upahishads
and from his own beliefs. "When I was eighteen, a sudden spring breeze
of religious experience came to my life for the first time and passed
away leaving in my memory a direct message of spiritual reality." (My Reminiscences, quoted in 'Rabindranath Tagore' by Narayan Champawat, Great Thinkers of the Eastern World, edited by Ian P. McGreal, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995, p. 261) Tagore
said that there are three sources of knowledge: 1. senses, 2.
intellect, 3. feeling. By feeling man discovers the Supreme Person. Although Tagore welcomed Western science and Western ideas of
democracy and freedom, it was the West that was the source of all evil.
He warned of the dangers of nationalistic thought
and stressed the need for new world order based on transnational values
and
ideals, the "unity consciousness." "The soil, in return for her
service,
keeps the tree tied to her; the sky asks nothing and leaves it free."
Politically
active in India, Tagore was a supporter of Gandhi, but disagreed with
Gandhi's philosophy of noncooperation. Following the Bihar earthquake
of 1936, which killed thousands of people, Gandhi declared that the
natural disaster was punishment for the sin of untouchability. Tagore
protested, calling the claim irrational. Unable to gain ideological support to his views, Tagore
retired into relative solitude. Between the years 1916 and 1934 he
travelled widely. From his journey to Japan in 1916 he produced
articles and books. Even before he was invited to Japan, he had formed
a friendship with Kakuzo Okakura (1862-1913), the author of The Book of Tea (1906), and the
president of the National University of Art. In 1927 Tagore toured in Southeast Asia. Letters from Java (Java Jatrir Patra), which first was serialized in Vichitra, was issued as a book, Jatri, in 1929. He fully acknowledged the Soviet economic development in Russiar Chithi (1931, Letters from Russia), but criticized the lack of freedom in Communist system. Tagore's view that British policy in India compared unfavorably with Russian policies concerning education, led to the banning of his book by the British Raj. On the orders from Stalin, Izvestia shelved Tagore's interview in 1930; it did not appear until 1988. Among others, he said that "for the sake of humanity I hope that you may never create a vicious force of violence which will go on weaving an interminable chain of violence and cruelty." (Rabindranath Tagore: An Anthology, edited by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997, p. 125) All
his life, he was deeply interested in the
goings-on in the Western world. In the United States he traveled
in 1912-13, 1916-17, 1920-21, 1929 and 1930. His Majesty, Riza Shah
Pahlavi, invited Tagore to Iran in 1932. On his journeys and lecture
tours Tagore attempted to spread the ideal of uniting East and West.
When he visited Japan in 1916 he gave three public lectures. "Japan
must be reminded, that it is her sense of the rhythm of life and of all
things, her genius for simplicity, her love for cleanliness, her
definiteness of thought and action, her cheerful lortitude, her immense
reserve of force in self-control, her sensitiveness to her code of
honour and defiance of death, which have given her the power to resist
the cyclonic storm of exploitation that has sprung from the shores of
Europe circling round and round the world. All these qualities are the
outcome of a civilisation, whose foundation is in the spiritual ideals
ol life." (The
Spirit of Japan: A Lecture by Sir Rabindranath Tagore, Tokyo:
Indo-Japanese Associarion, 1916, p. 28) Many Japanese
intellectuals disagreed with his concept of a spiritual East standing
aloof from the materialistic West. (Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and
His Critics in Japan, China, and India by Stephen N. Hay,
Cambridge, MA: Harvad University Press, 1970, p. 7) Tagore met Albert Einstein for the first time in July 1930. In a conversation at Einstein's residence in Caputh, Germany, Tagore argued that truth is not independent of the human mind; the world is a human world. Einstein had the opposite view: "Even in our everyday life we feel compelled to ascribe a reality independent of man to the objects we use. We do this to connect the experience of our senses in a reasonable way. For instance, if noboby is in this house, yet that table remains where it it." Tagore said: "Yes, it remains outside the indiovidual mind, but not the universal mind." ('Appendix 1: the Tagore-Einstein conversation on the nature of reality,' in Einstein, Tagore and the Nature of Reality, edited by Partha Ghose, New York: Routledge, 2017, p. 223) Because Tagore did not understand German and Einstein was not fluent in English, there was an interpreter. They both claimed to be realists. When progressive writers attacked Tagore and defined him as a
bourgeois poet and too feudal for his admiration for Upanishads, Ralph
Fox, a British Communist, objected and said it would be a distortion of
Marxist theory to describe Tagore as a bourgeois poet. His most important works Tagore wrote in Bengali, but he often
translated his poems into English. At the age of 70 Tagore took up
painting. He was also a composer, settings hundreds of poems to music.
Many of his poems are actually songs, and inseparable from their music.
Tagore's 'Our Golden Bengal' became the national anthem of Bangladesh.
Only hours before he died on August 7, in 1941, Tagore dictated his
last poem. His written production, still not completely collected,
fills nearly 30 substantial volumes. Until the end of the 1920s, Tagore was a widely read
author in the West. In Finland his ideas were advocated by J. A. Hollo, who translated his works into
Finnish. Though his
popularity has waned, his many writings continue to be read and
translated. Paul McCartney credited in his book The Lyrics: 1956-Present (2021),
edited by Paul Muldoon, Tagore for providing a line ("light a
candle") for his song 'Pipes of Peace' (1983). A Chinese translation of
Stray Birds
(1916), made by Feng Tang, was withdrawn in 2015 by the publisher,
because it took great liberties with the original text, containing
lines such as "The world unzipped his pants in front of his lover". For further reading: Rabindranath Tagore: His Life and Work by E. J. Thompson (1921); Rabindranath Tagore by Krishna Kripalani (1962); Rabindranath Tagore by Hiranmay Banerjee (1971); Rabindranath Tagore. His Mind and Art; Tagore's Contribution to English Literature by B.C. Chakravorty (1971); An Introduction to Rabindranath Tagore by Vishwanath S. Naravene (1977); The Humanism of Rabindranath Tagore:Three Lectures by Mulk Raj Anand (1979); Rabindranath Tagore by Sisirkumar Ghose (1986); The Unversal Man: Tagore's Vision of the Religion of Humanity by antinath Chattopadhyay (1987); Sir Rabindranath Tagore: His Life, Personality And Genius by K. S. Ramaswami Sastri (1988); Gandhi and Tagore: Visionaries of Modern India by David W. Atkinson (1989); Rabindranath Tagore: a Humanist by Kakoli Basak (1991); Social Thought of Rabindranath Tagore: A Historical Analysis by Tapati Dasgupta (1993); Science and the Indian Tradition: When Einstein Met Tagore by David L. Gosling (2007); Tagore, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism: Perceptions, Contestations and Contemporary Relevance, edited by Mohammad A. Quayum (2020); The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore, edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri (2020) Selected works:
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