Rabindranath Tagore was the hereditary leader of the Brahmo Samaj- a sect which rejected idol worship and which thus was closer to Islam- as well as a landlord who owned vast estates in East Bengal, which had a Muslim majority. Tagore knew the Hindus would be killed and chased away from there if the British left. This was in fact what happened to Amartya Sen's family which was from Dacca.
Tagore did not mince his words when it came to the need for Hindus to unite to protect their Religion, not to mention their lives and property.
“There are two religions in earth, which have distinct enmity against all other religions. These two are Christianity and Islam. They are not just satisfied with observing their own religions, but are determined to destroy all other religions. That’s why the only way to make peace with them is to embrace their religions.” (Original works of Rabindranath Vol. 24 page 375, Vishwa Bharti; 1982.)Sen, idiot that he is, in his article on Tagore for the Nobel prize website, refuses to admit that Hindus in Bengal faced an existential threat. Furthermore, Sen refuses to concede that Tagore wasn't just religious. He was the actual pontiff of a prominent religious sect. All Sen is willing to concede is that Tagore was of Hindu stock.
Rabindranath did come from a Hindu family – one of the landed gentry who owned estates mostly in what is now Bangladesh. But whatever wisdom there might be in Akhmatova’s invoking of Hinduism and the Ganges, it did not prevent the largely Muslim citizens of Bangladesh from having a deep sense of identity with Tagore and his ideas.
Because his father and grandfather rejected Hindu idol worship and considered themselves a separate religion. However, Bangladesh ethnically cleansed Hindus and Buddhists and Brahmos with vim and vigor.
East Bengal had joined Pakistan which had Urdu as the National language. The dictator, Ayub Khan, had banned Tagore's songs in 1965, which is why, when Bangladesh succeeded in defeating the Pakistani Army (thanks to India's intervention), it chose a song by Tagore as its national anthem.
Nor did it stop the newly independent Bangladesh from choosing one of Tagore’s songs – the “Amar Sonar Bangla” which means “my golden Bengal” – as its national anthem.
It later chose to become an Islamic Republic.
This must be very confusing to those who see the contemporary world as a “clash of civilizations” – with “the Muslim civilization,” “the Hindu civilization,” and “the Western civilization,” each forcefully confronting the others.
There is no confusion at all. Hindus are now 8 per cent of the population of Bangladesh. They used to be 30 percent in 1947 and 20 percent in 1971. Islamic Republics aren't good to their Hindu populations. On the other hand a well run Emirate provides safety to minorities who- if Hindu- quickly show loyalty to the ruler.
They would also be confused by Rabindranath Tagore’s own description of his Bengali family as the product of “a confluence of three cultures: Hindu, Mohammedan, and British”.
But it was only the Hindu religion with which his family picked a fight with. It may be that his 'Pirali' ancestors had converted to Islam and then reconverted to Vaishnavism- which in watered down, but melodious, form represents the attractive aspect of Tagore, or Gandhi's, oeuvre. What is certain is that his ancestors were temple priests of Kali before getting clerical appointment with Europeans.
Rabindranath’s grandfather, Dwarkanath, was well known for his command of Arabic and Persian,
That was Raja Ramohan Roy. Dwarkanath learnt Bengali and English and was apprenticed to an English lawyer. He rose in the service of the British- his highest appointment was as Dewan of the Opium, Salt and Indigo Board- before devoting himself to private enterprise. His lavish hospitality to the British and generous donations to public causes earned him the title of 'Prince' Dwarky which sounds a bit like Darky. On the other hand, Dwarky did use his ill gotten gains to some good purpose. He helped in the foundation of Presidency College and was a great patron of the Chowringhee theater. He was also, in a modest way, a Press Baron. Sadly, Dwarky's entrepreneurial elan and Anglophile tastes were not shared by his mother- who expelled him from the family home- or his son, the Maharishi who turned to spirituality and forced Rabindranath, his fourteenth child, down the same road. What followed was the retreat of the Bengali gentry from business. They became a class of parasitic rack-renters when they were not clerical drudges or bombastic barristers. Rabindranath, perhaps because he spent a lot of time collecting rents in the countryside, developed some common sense. But it was too late to catch up with the entrepreneurs of West India who, understanding well how to diversify risk, financed Gandhi. Tagore's risk averse class had become as effete and useless as the once much larger class of Ashraf Muslim literati whose days of glory ended at Plassey. Urdu, however, could make a comeback through Bollywood and, of course, Pakistani Radio & Television. Sadly Bengal's once thriving cinema industry sank under the weight of its own self regard.
and Rabindranath grew up in a family atmosphere in which a deep knowledge of Sanskrit
Not really. The Brahmos were narrow minded and excluded all that was alive in the Margi tradition in favor of their own puritanical shibboleths. On the other hand, some of Tagore's orthodox relatives were great Sanskritists and Musicologists and so forth.
and ancient Hindu texts was combined with an understanding of Islamic traditions as well
This is nonsense. The Hindus were rising while the Muslims were falling. There was little point in 'understanding their traditions'.
as Persian literature.
The Brahmo sect, apart from petitioning Westminster to send more Whites to India to keep the Muslims in check, was fighting with the orthodox Hindus. In this battle, Whites mattered. Muslims did not.
It is not so much that Rabindranath tried to produce – or had an interest in producing – a “synthesis” of the different religions (as the great Moghul emperor Akbar
The Brahmo sect was directly connected to Prince Dara Shikoh's translation of the Upanishads
tried hard to achieve) as that his outlook was persistently non-sectarian,In 1911, Tagore took over the leadership of the Adi Brahmo Samaj. He relaxed the old rule of allowing only Brahmins to the pulpit. But, as the head of a religious sect, he was- by definition- sectarian. The Brahmo Samaj fought court cases to show it was separate from Hinduism.
and his writings – some two hundred books – show the influence of different parts of the Indian cultural background as well as of the rest of the world.
Not really. His work reflects his father's and his family's influence- nothing more. I suppose we might mention another more learned branch of the family which studied music the better to understand the Sama Veda. Hara Kumar Tagore was its ornament. His son, the musicologist, Sourindro adapted 'God save the Queen' for Indian orchestras.
Abode of peaceThis was the Brahamacharyashram School which was inaugurated on 22 December 1901. As the name suggests, it was a religious institution. However, it was the poet's father who experienced a religious epiphany there and who executed the trust deed making it an Ashram in 1888. Sen, being an atheist, won't mention the purely religious nature of the place.
Most of his work was written at Santiniketan (Abode of Peace), the small town that grew around the school he founded in Bengal in 1901,
and he not only conceived there an imaginative and innovative system of education, but through his writings and his influence on students and teachers, he was able to use the school as a base from which he could take a major part in India’s social, political, and cultural movements.
No. He had been associated with the revolutionaries but withdrew from them. It was his literary status which gave him salience. Shantiniketan took some time to take off because funds were lacking. Tagore had tried to create a model farm and something like an agricultural research institute at Sriniketan. He even sent his son to study agronomy in America but that project didn't work out too well.
The profoundly original writer, whose elegant prose and magical poetry Bengali readers know well, is not the sermonizing spiritual guru admired – and then rejected – in London.
Tagore's work was suitable for school-kids. It was sonorous but unmeaning. Moreover, the indigenous 'Baul' tradition was strong meat. The middle class wanted none of it.
Tagore was not only an immensely versatile poet; he was also a great short story writer,
by Bengalis standards- sure.
novelist, playwright, essayist, and composer of songs, as well as a talented painter whose pictures, with their mixture of representation and abstraction, are only now beginning to receive the acclaim that they have long deserved.
Actually, the Americans quite liked his childish daubs in 1930.
His essays, moreover, ranged over literature, politics, culture, social change, religious beliefs, philosophical analysis, international relations, and much else.
But they were stupid shit. Anyway the Bengalis didn't get the one message he kept dinning into their ears- don't agitate for Independence. The Muslims will cut your throats. My granddaddy and his pal Roy spent a lot of money lobbying Westminster to get more Whiteys out here to keep the rapacious Muslim at bay.
Gandhi and Tagore
Since Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi were two leading Indian thinkers in the twentieth century, many commentators have tried to compare their ideas. On learning of Rabindranath’s death, Jawaharlal Nehru, then incarcerated in a British jail in India, wrote in his prison diary for August 7, 1941:
“Gandhi and Tagore. Two types entirely different from each other, and yet both of them typical of India,
they were vacuous bores with one difference. Tagore's people would have their throats slit if the Brits left. Gandhi's wouldn't. Still, in 1939, Gandhi said that if the Brits left without turning over the Army to Congress, the Punjabis and the Muslims would conquer India because Congress- being a High Caste Hindu affair- was addicted to Ahimsa- i.e. was cowardly and lacked fighting ability.
both in the long line of India’s great men … It is not so much because of any single virtue but because of the tout ensemble, that I felt that among the world’s great men today Gandhi and Tagore were supreme as human beings. What good fortune for me to have come into close contact with them.”
Nehru, to his credit, told Gandhi that his book 'Hind Swaraj' was shit. But Gandhi knew how to shake the money-tree. Non-violent politics means money politics.
Romain Rolland
a vegetarian, pacifist, influenced by Vivekananda. Sadly he decided that Stalin was the greatest man of his time.
was fascinated by the contrast between them, and when he completed his book on Gandhi, he wrote to an Indian academic, in March 1923: “I have finished my Gandhi, in which I pay tribute to your two great river-like souls, overflowing with divine spirit, Tagore and Gandhi.”
Stalin's river-like soul overflowed with blood. Rolland worshipped the fuck out of him.
The following month, he recorded in his diary an account of some of the differences between Gandhi and Tagore written by Reverend C.F. Andrews, the English clergyman and public activist who was a close friend of both men (and whose important role in Gandhi’s life in South Africa as well as India is well portrayed in Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi [1982]). Andrews described to Rolland a discussion between Tagore and Gandhi, at which he was present, on subjects that divided them:
Andrews was associated with St. Stephen's College in Delhi. Its reputation would rise. Shantiniketan's would fall.
“The first subject of discussion was idols; Gandhi defended them,
because he was a Hindu
believing the masses incapable of raising themselves immediately to abstract ideas.
if Hindus were stupid enough to think he was a Mahatma then- sure. Why not?
Tagore cannot bear to see the people eternally treated as a child. Gandhi quoted the great things achieved in Europe by the flag as an idol; Tagore found it easy to object, but Gandhi held his ground, contrasting European flags bearing eagles, etc., with his own, on which he has put a spinning wheel.
Which Nehru dropped. Incidentally, one reason Muslims voted for the League in 1946 is that they didn't like the INC flag.
The second point of discussion was nationalism, which Gandhi defended. He said that one must go through nationalism to reach internationalism, in the same way that one must go through war to reach peace.”
and go through the wall to get into the house. Doors are product of Satanic Civilization. They may open up for RAPIST! Just to be on the safe side, we must immediately kill our daughters and then offer ourselves to the rapist as compensation.
Tagore greatly admired Gandhi
who was able to get him money for Shantiniketan
but he had many disagreements with him on a variety of subjects, including nationalism, patriotism, the importance of cultural exchange, the role of rationality and of science, and the nature of economic and social development.
Also Tagore had a beard. Gandhi didn't.
These differences, I shall argue, have a clear and consistent pattern, with Tagore
who was the head of a religious sect
pressing for more room for reasoning, and for a less traditionalist view, a greater interest in the rest of the world, and more respect for science and for objectivity generally.
What was the result of all that 'pressing'? Nothing at all.
Rabindranath knew that he could not have given India the political leadership that Gandhi provided,
His people's throats would be slit and they'd lose their estates in East Bengal
and he was never stingy in his praise for what Gandhi did for the nation (it was, in fact, Tagore who popularized the term “Mahatma” – great soul – as a description of Gandhi).
But Gandhi got the title from an Arya Samaji Mahatma who had decided to promote himself to Swamy. Tagore's daddy had proclaimed himself a Maharishi. Sadly, Ramakrishna and Vivekananda were revered at home and abroad. He wasn't. Clearly, his mistake was not to be boring enough.
And yet each remained deeply critical of many things that the other stood for. That Mahatma Gandhi has received incomparably more attention outside India and also within much of India itself makes it important to understand “Tagore’s side” of the Gandhi-Tagore debates.
Tagore raised a feeble cry of protest against Gandhi's crackpot schemes. But Gandhi, not Tagore, was flush with cash. So Tagore had to bow to the Gujerati from a lower caste. Sad.
In his prison diary, Nehru wrote: “Perhaps it is as well that [Tagore] died now and did not see the many horrors that are likely to descend in increasing measure on the world and on India. He had seen enough and he was infinitely sad and unhappy.”
The Hindu Bengali didn't get that they needed to sell up and get out of Muslim majority areas. They didn't understand what Tagore had tried to tell them. Still, for his part, he spoke up for his class- opposing the creation of Dacca University (Sen's grandfather was its first Registrar) and mocking the Communists by saying 'Ei dharoni nir-jamidar nir-mahajan hoilei jeno shanty ashibe” as if this earth would become a paradise without the land-lord and the usurer!
Toward the end of his life, Tagore was indeed becoming discouraged about the state of India, especially as its normal burden of problems, such as hunger and poverty, was being supplemented by politically organized incitement to “communal” violence between Hindus and Muslims.
Tagore's 'Home and the World' came out in 1916. It ends with Muslims slaughtering Hindu landlords like himself. To his credit, Tagore did protest against C.R Das's policy of appeasement to Muslims in Bengal. Then, when Muslims took power in 1937, his worst fears were realized.
This conflict would lead in 1947, six years after Tagore’s death, to the widespread killing that took place during partition; but there was much gore already during his declining days.
Tagore wrote a pamphlet urging Bengalis to boycott Bombay mill-cloth. It rankled that it was Gujeratis and Marwaris who were assuming the role of his entrepreneurial grand-father. Then, in 1937, a Muslim became Premier. Famine and pogroms were at the gate.
In December 1939, he wrote to his friend Leonard Elmhirst,
who married a Whitney who inherited 15 million dollars (which would be half a billion in current terms) at the age of 17. Her first husband too was a millionaire.
the English philanthropist and social reformer who had worked closely with him on rural reconstruction in India (and who had gone on to found the Dartington Hall Trust in England and a progressive school at Dartington that explicitly invoked Rabindranath’s educational ideals):5
It closed in 1987 after the tabloids discovered the wife of the Head Master posed for pornographic pictures. The one good thing about Rabi was that he kept his clothes on. Gandhi went around in a diaper.
“It does not need a defeatist to feel deeply anxious about the future of millions who, with all their innate culture and their peaceful traditions are being simultaneously subjected to hunger, disease, exploitations foreign and indigenous, and the seething discontents of communalism.”
Ethnic cleansing in Bengal was one-sided. Hindus were ejected from the East but the Muslim population in the West recovered and has increased.
How would Tagore have viewed the India of today?
This was written 20 years ago when the Left Front ruled West Bengal and Begum Khaleda Zia had launched a pogrom against Hindus in the East. Since then Bangladesh has improved greatly while Mamta's Bengal is nothing but a thugocracy.
Would he see progress there, or wasted opportunity, perhaps even a betrayal of its promise and conviction?
He'd have seen a Shantiniketan littered with used condoms and empty liquor bottles.
And, on a wider subject, how would he react to the spread of cultural separatism in the contemporary world?
He'd have tried to fuck Victoria Ocampo.
East and West
Given the vast range of his creative achievements, perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the image of Tagore in the West is its narrowness; he is recurrently viewed as “the great mystic from the East,”
No he isn't. His sect disappeared long ago. He is some gormless beardie who wrote vacuous shite.
an image with a putative message for the West, which some would welcome, others dislike, and still others find deeply boring.
The hippies had found another India which was way cooler than boring Brahmos talking bollocks.
To a great extent this Tagore was the West’s own creation,
No. The Tagore family and the Brahmo sect were the West's own creation. Had there been no East India Company to enrich those scoundrels, they'd have quietly converted to Islam.
part of its tradition of message-seeking from the East, particularly from India, which – as Hegel put it – had “existed for millennia in the imagination of the Europeans.”
Fuck message-seeking. Europeans only bothered with India because it was easy to get rich there. So long as the King of Hanover was also King of England, some German savants could make a little money teaching Persian and Sanskrit and so forth.
Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, Herder, and Schopenhauer were only a few of the thinkers who followed the same pattern. They theorized, at first, that India was the source of superior wisdom. Schopenhauer at one stage even argued that the New Testament “must somehow be of Indian origin: this is attested by its completely Indian ethics, which transforms morals into asceticism, its pessimism, and its avatar,” in “the person of Christ.”
The guy hated Christianity. Saying it was Indian was like saying it smelled bad and was full of shit.
But then they rejected their own theories with great vehemence, sometimes blaming India for not living up to their unfounded expectations.
It is difficult not to blame a supine and stupid nation for being utterly shit.
We can imagine that Rabindranath’s physical appearance – handsome, bearded, dressed in non-Western clothes – may, to some extent, have encouraged his being seen as a carrier of exotic wisdom. Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese Nobel Laureate in Literature, treasured memories from his middle-school days of “this sage-like poet”:
He ponced around in robes coz he was the head of religious sect. His daddy called himself 'Maharishi' which means 'Great Sage'. However, it was, Fenenlossa's student, Okakura Tenshin, whose 'Book of Tea' was a big hit in 1906 who opened the door to Tagore's Nobel prize. E.B Havell, the head of the Government Art College had influenced Abanindranath, Tagore's artist nephew, and Okakura came to know Tagore through him. Rothenstein, who had been influenced by Whistler, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec all of whom admired Japanese art, was a friend of Havell and met Tagore through him. Tagore dedicated Gitanjali to Rothenstein who helped make him a celebrity in literary London.
His white hair flowed softly down both sides of his forehead; the tufts of hair under the temples also were long like two beards, and linking up with the hair on his cheeks, continued into his beard, so that he gave an impression, to the boy I was then, of some ancient Oriental wizard.
Oriental? The guy saying this was himself Oriental!
That appearance would have been well-suited to the selling of Tagore in the West as a quintessentially mystical poet,
He was the head of a mystical sect! What else could he have been sold as? A fucking pirate?
and it could have made it somewhat easier to pigeonhole him.
If he didn't want to be 'pigeonholed' as the head of a mystic sect why did he dress like one?
Commenting on Rabindranath’s appearance, Frances Cornford told William Rothenstein, “I can now imagine a powerful and gentle Christ, which I never could before.”
Thomas Mann thought Tagore was a nice, elderly, English lady. His son however was muscular.
Beatrice Webb, who did not like Tagore and resented what she took to be his “quite obvious dislike of all that the Webbs stand for” (there is, in fact, little evidence that Tagore had given much thought to this subject),
or any other
said that he was “beautiful to look at” and that “his speech has the perfect intonation and slow chant-like moderation of the dramatic saint.”
or West Kensington charlatan
Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats, among others, first led the chorus of adoration in the Western appreciation of Tagore, and then soon moved to neglect and even shrill criticism.
Because more of Tagore's shite became available in English translation.
The contrast between Yeats’s praise of his work in 1912 (“These lyrics … display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long,” “the work of a supreme culture”)
Yeats had previously been under the spell of Mohini Chatterjee whose lectures had been a big hit in Ireland in the Eighteen eighties. The story is that he could have been the Theosophist Messiah if he hadn't started fucking French dames once he got to Paris. Say what you like, Bengalis can be randy buggers. Sen himself ran off with his best friends' wife.
and his denunciation in 1935 (“Damn Tagore”) arose partly from the inability of Tagore’s many-sided writings to fit into the narrow box in which Yeats wanted to place – and keep – him.
Yeats remained productive as a poet. Tagore did not. But Tagore was running Shantiniketan which did some good work.
Certainly, Tagore did write a huge amount, and published ceaselessly, even in English (sometimes in indifferent English translation), but Yeats was also bothered, it is clear, by the difficulty of fitting Tagore’s later writings into the image Yeats had presented to the West.
Yeats had gotten deeper into esoteric philosophy. Tagore, quite reasonably, had decided to do something useful for his people. Shantiniketan was able to procure quite good livelihoods for some of its more gifted alumni.
Tagore, he had said, was the product of “a whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us,”
Indians disagree. Tagore was Bengali. As Brewer's dictionary says 'the greatest bores are of the Brahmaputra'. The reference is to tidal bores. But it applies equally to Tagore.
and yet “we have met our own image, … or heard, perhaps for the first time in literature, our voice as in a dream.”
Yeats knew about stuff like 'tuirgen' and the Yoga Vashishta and Arthur Avalon and so forth. Tagore had a narrower focus- a good thing because he knew about Art and Music and that was the type of School he was running.
Yeats did not totally reject his early admiration (as Ezra Pound and several others did), and he included some of Tagore’s early poems in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, which he edited in 1936. Yeats also had some favorable things to say about Tagore’s prose writings. His censure of Tagore’s later poems was reinforced by his dislike of Tagore’s own English translations of his work (“Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English,” Yeats explained)
Yeats's father had painted a portrait of Sarojini Naidu whose first poetry collection was published in 1905 in London. Yeats couldn't make fun of her English because she had a degree from Cambridge. Incidentally, it was Sarojini who told Fenelossa's widow to give her husband's manuscripts to Ezra Pound.
, unlike the English version of Gitanjali which Yeats had himself helped to prepare.
It features a beggar maid who lifts her skirt over her head. This suggests she is not a beggar but a prostitute.
Poetry is, of course, notoriously difficult to translate, and anyone who knows Tagore’s poems in their original Bengali cannot feel satisfied with any of the translations (made with or without Yeats’s help).
But many Bengalis thought Tagore's Bengali was poor. There was an examination question which required students to rewrite a passage from Tagore in correct Bengali.
Even the translations of his prose works suffer, to some extent, from distortion. E.M. Forster noted, in a review of a translation of one of Tagore’s great Bengali novels, The Home and the World, in 1919: “The theme is so beautiful,” but the charms have “vanished in translation,” or perhaps “in an experiment that has not quite come off.”
Also, there isn't a lot of hot gay sex in the book. Shame. Forster's more substantial criticism is that the 'love triangle' at the heart of the novel is merely a boarding house flirtation. Sandip- the anti-Hero- is merely a West Kensington Babu.
Tagore himself played a somewhat bemused part in the boom and bust of his English reputation.
He had a good reason to care about his reception. He wanted money to expand Shantiniketan- a wholly praiseworthy end.
He accepted the extravagant praise with much surprise as well as pleasure, and then received denunciations with even greater surprise, and barely concealed pain. Tagore was sensitive to criticism, and was hurt by even the most far-fetched accusations, such as the charge that he was getting credit for the work of Yeats, who had “rewritten” Gitanjali. (This charge was made by a correspondent for The Times, Sir Valentine Chirol, whom E.M. Forster once described as “an old Anglo-Indian reactionary hack.”)
Chirol was never a part of the Indian administration. Forster was displaying his own ignorance. Chirol was a diplomat and senior journalist who took a liking to India and visited regularly.
From time to time Tagore also protested the crudity of some of his overexcited advocates. He wrote to C.F. Andrews in 1920: “These people … are like drunkards who are afraid of their lucid intervals.”
Tagore's problem was that his 'overexcited advocates' were as poor as shit and couldn't give him money. Gandhi's advocates were rich and generous.
God and others
Yeats was not wrong to see a large religious element in Tagore’s writings.
Because he was the head of a fucking religious sect!
He certainly had interesting and arresting things to say about life and death.
But only while alive. After death he was silent. This by itself is all the proof of God's mercy anybody could ask for.
Susan Owen, the mother of Wilfred Owen, wrote to Rabindranath in 1920, describing her last conversations 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.'”
words. Bengalis are loquacious. Still, the sentiment is Upanishadic- Om Purnamada, Purnamida &c.
When Wilfred’s pocket notebook was returned to his mother, she found “these words written in his dear writing – with your name beneath.”
Tagore suffered many bereavements. Still, he tried to do useful work and to help others to rise up in a similar manner.
The idea 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.
But his novels, Gora and Home and the World, have the idea that Muslims will slit the throat of Hindus stupid enough to clamour for the departure of the Brits.
From India’s diverse religious traditions he drew many ideas, both from ancient texts and from popular poetry. But “the bright pebbly eyes of the Theosophists” do not stare out of his verses.
Nothing does. His eyes are closed.
Despite the archaic language of the original translation of Gitanjali, which did not, I believe, help to preserve the simplicity of the original,
though Tagore's English, by necessity, is simpler- not to say more simple-minded- than his Bengali
its elementary humanity comes through more clearly than any complex and intense spirituality:
Yet without an esoteric tradition of complex and intense spirituality as their undergirding, they are vacuous.
Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads!
There is no 'chanting' and 'singing' and 'telling of beads' unless there is already a very complex and intense tradition of spirituality.
Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut?
There is already a temple commodious enough to have 'dark corners'.
Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!
Yes he is. God is everywhere- right? He is watching when you do naughty things.
He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones.
What about when the tiller takes a dump? Does God run away?
He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust.
Does he lift his skirt to cover his head like the beggar-maid? Is he there where the truck stop ho gives beejays? No. He is with the tiller sitting in the cockpit of his combine harvester. He is there where the path-maker uses a road-roller.
An ambiguity about religious experience is central to many of Tagore’s devotional poems, and makes them appeal to readers irrespective of their beliefs; but excessively detailed interpretation can ruinously strip away that ambiguity.
So can just reading that shite. The guy was for God but had a thing against temples. We get it. Idols are bad. Don't worship them.
This applies particularly to his many poems which combine images of human love and those of pious devotion. Tagore writes:
I have no sleep to-night. Ever and again I open my door and look out on the darkness, my friend!
Tagore had a door but not a window. India is very backward.
I can see nothing before me.
because you have pulled up your skirt over your head.
I wonder where lies thy path!
How many fucking paths lead to Tagore's door? In my case there is only one. Perhaps his house was much bigger and had grand entrances on all four sides.
By what dim shore of the ink-black river, by what far edge of the frowning forest, through what mazy depth of gloom, art thou threading thy course to come to see me, my friend?
Does it matter? Anyway, there's an app on your smartphone which might be able to give you this sort of information.
I suppose it could be helpful to be told, as Yeats hastens to explain, that “the servant or the bride awaiting the master’s home-coming in the empty house” is “among the images of the heart turning to God.”
That is certainly the case in the Psalms which Yeats's audience would have been familiar with. The point is that this isn't a dude looking for some red hot anal loving.
But in Yeats’s considerate attempt to make sure that the reader does not miss the “main point,” something of the enigmatic beauty of the Bengali poem is lost – even what had survived the antiquated language of the English translation.
Very true. Enigmatic beauty of Bengali tends to get lost because Bengali beggar maids are constantly pulling up their skirts to cover their heads.
Tagore certainly had strongly held religious beliefs (of an unusually nondenominational kind),
He was the head of a denomination which fought court cases to prove it wasn't part of the Hindu fold!
but he was interested in a great many other things as well and had many different things to say about them.
He was interested in building up Shantiniketan. Shame the place was ruined by the Central Government.
Some of the ideas he tried to present were directly political, and they figure rather prominently in his letters and lectures. He had practical, plainly expressed views about nationalism,
Hindu Bengalis would have to run away from East Bengal. C.R Das- Tagore's greatest political enemy- didn't get this. Das and Motilal (joined by Shurawardy!) went in for Muslim appeasement. That didn't end well.
war and peace,
He was against war. Shocker!
cross-cultural education,
Not really. West India's Art Schools rose because they were keen to import Western and other techniques. My sense is that Shantiniketan fell behind though it did have some truly great artists.
freedom of the mind,
He strenuously opposed the practice of sending the mind to jail for petty offenses to do with beggar maids lifting up their skirts to cover their heads.
the importance of rational criticism,
Sadly, he was incapable of any such thing.
the need for openness, and so on. His admirers in the West, however, were tuned to the more otherworldly themes which had been emphasized by his first Western patrons.
Because Bengal was distressingly short of this-worldly stuff.
People came to his public lectures in Europe and America, expecting ruminations on grand, transcendental themes; when they heard instead his views on the way public leaders should behave, there was some resentment, particularly (as E.P. Thompson reports) when he delivered political criticism “at $700 a scold.”
The guy should have been setting up branches of his sect and targeting wealthy donors. Anybody can scold. The trick is to get wealthy widows to leave you all their money.
For Tagore it was of the highest importance that people be able to live, and reason, in freedom.
No. He wanted the Brits to stick around so that Hindus did not get their throats slit.
His attitudes toward politics and culture, nationalism and internationalism, tradition and modernity, can all be seen in the light of this belief.
No. He was prescient in cutting ties with the Anushilan committees. That path would lead only to, first the Muslims slitting bhadralok throat, and then the Commies doing so in a more leisurely fashion.
Nothing, perhaps, expresses his values as clearly as a poem in Gitanjali:
Where the mind is without fear
There is stupidity or intoxication.
and the head is held high;
and covered by uplifted skirt.
Where knowledge is free;
you can be as stupid as shit and still get a PhD
Where the world has not been
broken up into fragments
by narrow domestic walls; …
So everybody can get free show of you sitting on the toilet
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit; …
or cliche
Into that heaven of freedom,
my Father, let my country awake.
By keeping the Muslims from slitting our throats and grabbing our Estates.
Rabindranath’s qualified support for nationalist movements – and his opposition to the unfreedom of alien rule – came from this commitment.
So, it was a useless commitment. Nationalism didn't need qualified support. Nor did alien rule. On the other hand, some good work was done at Shantiniketan.
So did his reservations about patriotism, which, he argued, can limit both the freedom to engage ideas from outside “narrow domestic walls” and the freedom also to support the causes of people in other countries. Rabindranath’s passion for freedom underlies his firm opposition to unreasoned traditionalism, which makes one a prisoner of the past (lost, as he put it, in “the dreary desert sand of dead habit”).
But the guy was a prisoner of his daddy's kooky sect! That's why he was poncing about in a kaftan.
Tagore illustrates the tyranny of the past in his amusing yet deeply serious parable “Kartar Bhoot” (“The Ghost of the Leader”).
Kartar means the Creator or Master of all Creation. Tagore's story is silly. If a ghost rules then things turn to shit and invaders take over. But they will impose their own religion. The irony is that Tagore was the hereditary leader of a useless sect and also a big 'kartar' or landlord. He could neither advance that sect nor save his lands or his Hindu relatives in the East. Why the fuck do Bengali kids have to read the witless ravings of this boring ghost?
As the respected leader of an imaginary land is about to die, his panic-stricken followers request him to stay on after his death to instruct them on what to do.
Did the dude have no son to pass on the crown to? Rabi's daddy did. He himself had sons. Why did he write this nonsense? He knew that when the old King dies, the Crown Prince takes over. Nobody wants the rule of a corpse. Why? Coz the job of the King is to fight enemies.
He consents.
That's not what Tagore says. It is God who decides to let the dude hang around as a ghost. Apparently, this ghost boxed the ears of people who worried about the future. Why did ghostie not fuck up invaders? Rabi won't tell us.
But his followers find their lives are full of rituals and constraints on everyday behavior and are not responsive to the world around them.
No. What happens is that a few people manage to evade the guards and get to the ghost in the middle of the night. They politely suggest that the ghost might want to depart. But the ghost says I can't depart till you banish fear. They then shit on him and he fucks off. Well, Tagore doesn't mention the last part because he didn't want to go putting any ideas into Gandhi's head.
Ultimately, they request the ghost of the leader to relieve them of his domination, when he informs them that he exists only in their minds.
Sadly, Tagore could not shake of the ghost of the Maharishi. The truth is Brahmoism had turned into garbled nonsense some ten years before the death of that deeply boring, deeply casteist, Sage. Ramakrishna and Vivekananda had made it obsolete. Tagore was making peace with the new Hinduism but he recoiled from Jugantar and the Anushilan committees because he knew the Muslims would take East Bengal.
Tagore’s deep aversion to any commitment to the past that could not be modified by contemporary reason extended even to the alleged virtue of invariably keeping past promises. On one occasion when Mahatma Gandhi visited Tagore’s school at Santiniketan, a young woman got him to sign her autograph book. Gandhi wrote: “Never make a promise in haste. Having once made it fulfill it at the cost of your life.”
This is sensible enough, if- like Gandhi- you were constantly fasting to death without ever actually dying.
When he saw this entry, Tagore became agitated. He wrote in the same book a short poem in Bengali to the effect that no one can be made “a prisoner forever with a chain of clay.” He went on to conclude in English, possibly so that Gandhi could read it too, “Fling away your promise if it is found to be wrong.”
Which is what Gandhi did when he unilaterally surrendered to the Brits in 1922.
Tagore had the greatest admiration for Mahatma Gandhi as a person and as a political leader,
No. As a fund raiser.
but he was also highly skeptical of Gandhi’s form of nationalism and his conservative instincts regarding the country’s past traditions. He never criticized Gandhi personally.
Coz Gandhi sucked up to him. Also Gandhi's pals were rich and Tagore needed money.
In the 1938 essay, “Gandhi the Man,” he wrote:
Great as he is as a politician, as an organizer, as a leader of men, as a moral reformer, he is greater than all these as a man, because none of these aspects and activities limits his humanity. They are rather inspired and sustained by it.
This is certainly true of a failed politician, an organizer who organized something really shitty, or a leader of men who led them up the garden path. A good man might do all these things because good men can be as stupid as shit.
And yet there is a deep division between the two men.
One had a long beard and wore a kaftan. The other pranced around in a diaper.
Tagore was explicit about his disagreement:
Tagore couldn't be explicit about shit.
We who often glorify our tendency to ignore reason, installing in its place blind faith, valuing it as spiritual, are ever paying for its cost with the obscuration of our mind and destiny. I blamed Mahatmaji for exploiting this irrational force of credulity in our people, which might have had a quick result [in creating] a superstructure, while sapping the foundation. Thus began my estimate of Mahatmaji, as the guide of our nation, and it is fortunate for me that it did not end there.
This is a perfectly sane criticism once we understand that Tagore's estimate of Gandhi rose after the guy got him money.
But while it “did not end there,” that difference of vision was a powerful divider. Tagore, for example, remained unconvinced of the merit of Gandhi’s forceful advocacy that everyone should spin at home with the “charka,” the primitive spinning wheel.
Everyone came to share that view. Gandhi was a crackpot. Spinning cotton adds negative value.
For Gandhi this practice was an important part of India’s self-realization. “The spinning-wheel gradually became,” as his biographer B.R. Nanda writes, “the center of rural uplift in the Gandhian scheme of Indian economics.”
Gandhi's scheme involved getting money from Indian mill-owners in return for getting Indians to burn foreign cloth. The charka only existed to foster the pretence that Gandhi cared about weavers. But they wanted to import the finest yarn so as to focus on the high value adding luxury segment of the market. They didn't want homespun yarn. Gandhi's big idea was that weavers should be forced to wear what they wove. Those who were doing well told him to fuck off. He then threatened to take up agriculture. But farmers tended to beat the shite out of Ashramites who turned up to lecture them. Thus Gandhi had to concentrate on sleeping naked with little girls so as to gain enough 'soul-force' to sleep naked with little girls.
Tagore found the alleged economic rationale for this scheme quite unrealistic. As Romain Rolland noted, Rabindranath “never tires of criticizing the charka.” In this economic judgment, Tagore was probably right. Except for the rather small specialized market for high-quality spun cloth,
Sen means woven cloth. Weavers wanted high quality imported machine made yarn.
it is hard to make economic sense of hand-spinning, even with wheels less primitive than Gandhi’s charka.
It is easy if you recall that Gandhi believed in reincarnation. Doing some spinning coz he told you to would get you reborn on a nice planet where there was no sex or other such nastiness.
Hand-spinning as a widespread activity can survive only with the help of heavy government subsidies. However, Gandhi’s advocacy of the charka was not based only on economics. He wanted everyone to spin for “thirty minutes every day as a sacrifice,” seeing this as a way for people who are better off to identify themselves with the less fortunate. He was impatient with Tagore’s refusal to grasp this point:
Then Gandhi understood that what Tagore wanted was money. Gandhi could be very obtuse about such things. Tagore finally had to spell things out. It was unseemly for an elderly beardie to go about on begging excursions for a meagre reward. Gandhi got Tagore about Rs 60,000 and later on promised to do what he could to protect Shantiniketan.
The poet lives for the morrow, and would have us do likewise …. “Why should I, who have no need to work for food, spin?” may be the question asked. Because I am eating what does not belong to me. I am living on the spoliation of my countrymen. Trace the source of every coin that finds its way into your pocket, and you will realise the truth of what I write. Every one must spin. Let Tagore spin like the others. Let him burn his foreign clothes; that is the duty today. God will take care of the morrow.
Then Tagore advocated burning the Mill cloth produced by Gandhi's financial backers. Tagore failed but Gandhi did give him some money which is what really matters. Gandhi's own Ashrams were worse money-pits than Shantiniketan. But Gandhi helped his backers get richer.
If Tagore had missed something in Gandhi’s argument, so did Gandhi miss the point of Tagore’s main criticism. It was not only that the charka made little economic sense, but also, Tagore thought, that it was not the way to make people reflect on anything: “The charka does not require anyone to think; one simply turns the wheel of the antiquated invention endlessly, using the minimum of judgment and stamina.”
The same is true of Sen's economics or philosophy. That is its chief virtue. You just keep turning the wheel and get your credential.
Celibacy and personal life
Tagore and Gandhi’s attitudes toward personal life were also quite different. Gandhi was keen on the virtues of celibacy, theorized about it, and, after some years of conjugal life, made a private commitment – publicly announced – to refrain from sleeping with his wife.
This happened after an Arya Samaji stayed with him. That same missionary persuaded Lala Hardayal to do likewise. Sadly, the Punjabi didn't get that celibacy precluded one from incessantly marrying Swiss or Swedish damsels.
Rabindranath’s own attitude on this subject was very different, but he was gentle about their disagreements:
Because Gandhi's pals had lots of money
[Gandhiji] condemns sexual life as inconsistent with the moral progress of man, and has a horror of sex as great as that of the author of The Kreutzer Sonata, but, unlike Tolstoy, he betrays no abhorrence of the sex that tempts his kind.
But he'd get upset if they refused to sleep naked with him.
In fact, his tenderness for women is one of the noblest and most consistent traits of his character, and he counts among the women of his country some of his best and truest comrades in the great movement he is leading.
Gandhi wanted everybody to give up sex. It is a frightful business. On the other hand, killing your daughter is cool because otherwise she might be raped. What's important is that you offer up your own back-side to the rapist as compensation.
Tagore’s personal life was, in many ways, an unhappy one. He married in 1883, lost his wife in 1902, and never remarried. He sought close companionship, which he did not always get (perhaps even during his married life – he wrote to his wife, Mrinalini: “If you and I could be comrades in all our work and in all our thoughts it would be splendid, but we cannot attain all that we desire”).
Very true. Tagore should have taken turns breast-feeding the baby.
He maintained a warm friendship with, and a strong Platonic attachment to, the literature-loving wife, Kadambari, of his elder brother, Jyotirindranath.
Who educated the damsel but neglected to fuck her. Sad.
He dedicated some poems to her before his marriage, and several books afterward, some after her death (she committed suicide, for reasons that are not fully understood, at the age of twenty-five, four months after Rabindranath’s wedding).
Much later in life, during his tour of Argentina in 1924-1925, Rabindranath came to know the talented and beautiful Victoria Ocampo, who later became the publisher of the literary magazine Sur. They became close friends, but it appears that Rabindranath deflected the possibility of a passionate relationship into a confined intellectual one.
She was having an affair with some cousin. Also Tagore was very very old.
His friend Leonard Elmhirst, who accompanied Rabindranath on his Argentine tour, wrote:
Besides having a keen intellectual understanding of his books, she was in love with him – but instead of being content to build a friendship on the basis of intellect, she was in a hurry to establish that kind of proprietary right over him which he absolutely would not brook.
Lenny tried to put his hand up her skirt. She was not amused.
Ocampo and Elmhirst, while remaining friendly, were both quite rude in what they wrote about each other. Ocampo’s book on Tagore (of which a Bengali translation was made from the Spanish by the distinguished poet and critic Shankha Ghosh) is primarily concerned with Tagore’s writings but also discusses the pleasures and difficulties of their relationship, giving quite a different account from Elmhirst’s, and never suggesting any sort of proprietary intentions.
Victoria Ocampo, however, makes it clear that she very much wanted to get physically closer to Rabindranath: “Little by little he [Tagore] partially tamed the young animal, by turns wild and docile, who did not sleep, dog-like, on the floor outside his door, simply because it was not done.”
She did not bite his bollocks off. Good to know.
Rabindranath, too, was clearly very much attracted to her. He called her “Vijaya” (the Sanskrit equivalent of Victoria), dedicated a book of poems to her, Purabi – an “evening melody,” and expressed great admiration for her mind (“like a star that was distant”). In a letter to her he wrote, as if to explain his own reticence:
When we were together, we mostly played with words and tried to laugh away our best opportunities to see each other clearly … Whenever there is the least sign of the nest becoming a jealous rival of the sky [,] my mind, like a migrant bird, tries to take … flight to a distant shore.
which might become the jealous rival of the sea or the sky or a half tamed animal that might bite your bollocks off.
Five years later, during Tagore’s European tour in 1930, he sent her a cable: “Will you not come and see me.” She did. But their relationship did not seem to go much beyond conversation, and their somewhat ambiguous correspondence continued over the years. Written in 1940, a year before his death at eighty, one of the poems in Sesh Lekha (“Last Writings”), seems to be about her: “How I wish I could once again find my way to that foreign land where waits for me the message of love!/… Her language I knew not, but what her eyes said will forever remain eloquent in its anguish.”
If I ever write shite like that, bite my bollocks off.
However indecisive, or confused, or awkward Rabindranath may have been, he certainly did not share Mahatma Gandhi’s censorious views of sex. In fact, when it came to social policy, he advocated contraception and family planning while Gandhi preferred abstinence.
Tagore was against abortion.
Gandhi and Tagore severely clashed over their totally different attitudes toward science. In January 1934, Bihar was struck by a devastating earthquake, which killed thousands of people. Gandhi, who was then deeply involved in the fight against untouchability (the barbaric system inherited from India’s divisive past, in which “lowly people” were kept at a physical distance),
Gandhi got money for this but spent it as he pleased. Ambedkar was not happy. At least Tagore actually spent any money he got on his Shantiniketan. Also, in 1926, Tagore attended a Namasudra Conference arranged by the great Guru Chand Thakur.
extracted a positive lesson from the tragic event. “A man like me,” Gandhi argued, “cannot but believe this earthquake is a divine chastisement sent by God for our sins” – in particular the sins of untouchability.
Gandhi's sin was to go to Champaran in Bihar and pretend the Hindus weren't bashing the Muslims all over the Province. On his last trip there he said he knew which Hindu Congressmen had been killing innocent Muslims. Needless to say, he took no action against them. He just collected some money and moved on.
“For me there is a vital connection between the Bihar calamity and the untouchability campaign.”
Hypocrisy was that vital connection. It is notable that Kumarappa, a C.A by training, refused to pay Gandhi's nutty Ashramites a single penny for their 'relief work' in Bihar. This was because they were useless and incapable of any type of work. Gandhi had to tap some other fund so as to provide for those losers.
Tagore, who equally abhorred untouchability and had joined Gandhi in the movements against it,
But the Brits- and even some Mahrajas- had got there first. These guys were playing catch up.
protested against this interpretation of an event that had caused suffering and death to so many innocent people, including children and babies. He also hated the epistemology implicit in seeing an earthquake as caused by ethical failure. “It is,” he wrote, “all the more unfortunate because this kind of unscientific view of [natural] phenomena is too readily accepted by a large section of our countrymen.”
Earthquakes are caused by sodomy. Underwater earthquakes are caused by fish getting gay with each other. Come to think of it, continents float on molten lava. Fuck you gay lava fish! Fuck you very much!
The two remained deeply divided over their attitudes toward science.
Gandhi didn't want science to have gay sex with lava fish. Tagore was more open minded but then his nest got jealous of the sky and so he flew off to a distant shore which got jealous of gay fish and then Victoria Ocampo wouldn't even give him a handie.
However, while Tagore believed that modern science was essential to the understanding of physical phenomena, his views on epistemology were interestingly heterodox.
Sen means they were stupid.
He did not take the simple “realist” position often associated with modern science.
Modern science is not associated with any simple 'realist' position. Sen must have heard of Schrodinger's cat.
The report of his conversation with Einstein, published in The New York Times in 1930, shows how insistent Tagore was on interpreting truth through observation and reflective concepts. To assert that something is true or untrue in the absence of anyone to observe or perceive its truth, or to form a conception of what it is, appeared to Tagore to be deeply questionable. When Einstein remarked, “If there were no human beings any more, the Apollo Belvedere no longer would be beautiful?” Tagore simply replied, “No.”
Tagore was a cretin. His family creed describes God as 'jagatsakshirupam'- 'witness of the Universe'. What is the point of poncing around in a kaftan and being the head of a religious sect if you don't even understand the 'upasana' you mindless recite at Divine service?
Going further – and into much more interesting territory – Einstein said, “I agree with regard to this conception of beauty, but not with regard to truth.” Tagore’s response was: “Why not? Truth is realized through men.”
Though computers now do not just proof checking but also provide actual proofs.
Tagore’s epistemology, which he never pursued systematically,
in which case it wasn't an epistemology at all.
would seem to be searching for a line of reasoning that would later be elegantly developed by Hilary Putnam, who has argued: “Truth depends on conceptual schemes and it is nonetheless ‘real truth.'”
The reverse is the case. Conceptual schemes have to adapt to the truth. But no truth is 'real' though it may be canonical or non-arbitrary or context independent.
Tagore himself said little to explain his convictions, but it is important to take account of his heterodoxy,
The head of a religious sect aint 'heterodox' at least for members of his own Church which I take Sen's grandpappy to have been.
not only because his speculations were invariably interesting, but also because they illustrate how his support for any position, including his strong interest in science, was accompanied by critical scrutiny.
Critical scrutiny of science has to itself be sciencey. It can't be any old bollocks you happen to blurt out. Sen-ile econ, however, is another kettle of fish.
Nationalism and colonialism
Tagore was predictably hostile to communal sectarianism
save when he thought his side had a chance of winning everything on the table. This was perfectly sensible.
(such as a Hindu orthodoxy that was antagonistic to Islamic, Christian, or Sikh perspectives). But even nationalism seemed to him to be suspect.
Because he'd lose lots of property.
Isaiah Berlin summarizes well Tagore’s complex position on Indian nationalism:
Tagore stood fast on the narrow causeway, and did not betray his vision of the difficult truth. He condemned romantic overattachment to the past, what he called the tying of India to the past “like a sacrificial goat tethered to a post,”
But the goat doesn't remain tethered for long. It it is killed, cooked and eaten. On the hand, it is true that India should not be tethered to its past. It should be tethered to the future of gay lava fish in a galaxy far far away.
and he accused men who displayed it – they seemed to him reactionary – of not knowing what true political freedom was, pointing out that it is from English thinkers and English books that the very notion of political liberty was derived.
But the very notion of killing the foreigners and grabbing all their cool stuff was older than Adam.
But against cosmopolitanism he maintained that the English stood on their own feet, and so must Indians. In 1917 he once more denounced the danger of ‘leaving everything to the unalterable will of the Master,’ be he brahmin or Englishman.
Brahmins had little power in India because praying a lot- which is what they were paid to do- tends to sap your will-to-power. Constantly grovelling to God fits you to be a constant groveler.
The duality Berlin points to is well reflected also in Tagore’s attitude toward cultural diversity. He wanted Indians to learn what is going on elsewhere, how others lived, what they valued, and so on, while remaining interested and involved in their own culture and heritage.
The alternative was to fly from their nests to some far shore and then fly back again because that far shore had got jealous of gay lava fish.
Indians have a religious heritage- Hinduism. Sen isn't interested or involved in it. America has a cowboy heritage. Did Sen become a rodeo clown in between giving lectures at Harvard?
Indeed, in his educational writings the need for synthesis is strongly stressed. It can also be found in his advice to Indian students abroad. In 1907 he wrote to his son-in-law Nagendranath Gangulee, who had gone to America to study agriculture:
To get on familiar terms with the local people is a part of your education. To know only agriculture is not enough; you must know America too. Of course if, in the process of knowing America, one begins to lose one’s identity and falls into the trap of becoming an Americanised person contemptuous of everything Indian, it is preferable to stay in a locked room.
Unless that locked room becomes jealous of the sky in which case you should become a bird and go to a far shore which is bound to get jealous of gay fish in which case you should go to America and try to get some money by poncing around in a kaftan.
Tagore was strongly involved in protest against the Raj on a number of occasions, most notably in the movement to resist the 1905 British proposal to split in two the province of Bengal, a plan that was eventually withdrawn following popular resistance.
Then a Muslim became Premier of Bengal and Famine and blood-shed followed so swiftly that the Hindus begged for that very same partition they had opposed when they hoped to take over the entire province.
He was forthright in denouncing the brutality of British rule in India, never more so than after the Amritsar massacre of April 13, 1919, when 379 unarmed people at a peaceful meeting were gunned down by the army, and two thousand more were wounded.
Dyer then led Indian soldiers in a successful war against Afghan invaders. Punjab remained peaceful for another 25 years. Punjabi Premiers tended to whine to the Brits for more Dyers who could administer the 'smack of firm government'. Needless to say, Gandhi called off the Rowlatt agitation after Amritsar. The word 'Rowlatt' in Punjabi came to mean the rule of ruffians.
Between April 23 and 26, Rabindranath wrote five agitated letters to C.F. Andrews, who himself was extremely disturbed, especially after he was told by a British civil servant in India that thanks to this show of strength, the “moral prestige” of the Raj had “never been higher.”
Sadly, this was precisely the outcome Dyer had intended. Kipling predicted it. At the end of 'under the City walls', Petit the District Commissioner quotes Caiaphas 'it is better than one man die for the people than the whole nation perish'.
A month after the massacre, Tagore wrote to the Viceroy of India, asking to be relieved of the knighthood he had accepted four years earlier:
Since Tagore had been given an inferior sort of Knighthood unconnected with any order of chivalry, he couldn't be relieved of it. However, the Provincial Government was welcome to stop addressing him as Sir Rabidindianut or whatever.
The disproportionate severity of the punishments inflicted upon the unfortunate people and the methods of carrying them out, we are convinced, are without parallel in the history of civilized governments, barring some conspicuous exceptions, recent and remote.
But only such swift and decisive action could have prevented the murder of hundreds of thousands during Partition.
Considering that such treatment has been meted out to a population, disarmed and resourceless,
it is bound to attain its objective. The Punjab stayed quiet for another 25 years.
by a power which has the most terribly efficient organisation for destruction of human lives,
which is why it had a monopoly of legitimate coercive power
we must strongly assert that it can claim no political expediency, far less moral justification
The reverse was the case. Killing a couple of thousands cheaply and quickly to prevent endless chaos is justified on grounds of both expediency and utilitarian morality.
… The universal agony of indignation roused in the hearts of our people has been ignored by our rulers –
Because that 'agony of indignation' could be roused by anything- raising the age of marriage, imposing sanitary measures to tackle the plague, partitioning a Bengal which later the Hindus decided did need partitioning- the list was endless. Yet, by shooting some and jailing others, all these great tempests of indignation quietened down.
possibly congratulating themselves for imparting what they imagine as salutary lessons … I for my part want to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen who for their so-called insignificance are liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings.
Iqbal clung to his knighthood when it was finally offered to him. He understood the Punjab better than Tagore. Indeed, it was his ideology which prevailed in East Bengal.
Both Gandhi and Nehru expressed their appreciation of the important part Tagore took in the national struggle. It is fitting that after independence, India chose a song of Tagore (“Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka,” which can be roughly translated as “the leader of people’s minds”)
i.e God
as its national anthem. Since Bangladesh would later choose another song of Tagore (“Amar Sonar Bangla”) as its national anthem,
because Ayub Khan's goons had banned Tagore
he may be the only one ever to have authored the national anthems of two different countries.
Some say he also wrote the music for the Sri Lankan anthem 'Namo Namo Matha' by Ananda Samarkoon who had studied at Shantiniketan. But then a relative of Tagore's had done the Indianized setting of God save the Queen.
Tagore’s criticism of the British administration of India was consistently strong and grew more intense over the years.
It became hysterical.
This point is often missed, since he made a special effort to dissociate his criticism of the Raj from any denigration of British – or Western – people and culture. Mahatma Gandhi’s well-known quip in reply to a question, asked in England, on what he thought of Western civilization (“It would be a good idea”) could not have come from Tagore’s lips.
Because it was witty. What Tagore actually said was 'if you can call it civilization' just as Gandhi spoke of 'what is known as Western civilization'. Some time around 1923, the following joke started appearing in America- “What’s your opinion of civilization?” “It’s a good idea. Somebody ought to start it.” It was attributed to Gandhi in the Sixties.
He would understand the provocations to which Gandhi was responding – involving cultural conceit as well as imperial tyranny. D.H. Lawrence supplied a fine example of the former: “I become more and more surprised to see how far higher, in reality, our European civilization stands than the East, Indian and Persian, ever dreamed of …. This fraud of looking up to them – this wretched worship-of-Tagore attitude is disgusting.” But, unlike Gandhi, Tagore could not, even in jest, be dismissive of Western civilization.
His grandpappy and other relatives spent a lot of money on importing European art. On the other hand they also had Chinese style pagodas and faux Japanese follies in their pleasure grounds. The nouveau riche aren't dismissive of anything that looks like it cost more than it actually did. Sadly, Tagore's people had declined economically.
Even in his powerful indictment of British rule in India in 1941,
Bengal had had a Bengali Muslim premier since 1937
in a lecture which he gave on his last birthday, and which was later published as a pamphlet under the title Crisis in Civilization, he strains hard to maintain the distinction between opposing Western imperialism and rejecting Western civilization.
Tagore thought that Stalin was civilizing the bahusankhyak maruchar musalman jatir (many Muslim nomadic tribes) which had previously supplied India with Sultans and Emperors. He had got it into his head that Iran and Afghanistan were civilizing themselves and this would make 'minorities' safe there. In other words, he was blaming the Brits for creating the 'communal problem' and was saying that once they left Muslims would somehow become civilized in such a manner that they didn't slit Hindu throats and grab their estates. The man was utterly senile. The English translation omits mention of Muslims. After all, they already had the administration in their hands and though there was still a British Viceroy, their hands might begin to itch for knives with which to cut Hindu throats.
While he saw India as having been “smothered under the dead weight of British administration”
it was by serving that administration that his people became rich and cultured. Hindus in East Bengal didn't fare too well when the 'dead weight' of British administration was removed. But then, truth be told, neither did independent India or Pakistan except in so far as they expanded and strengthened that administration.
(adding “another great and ancient civilization for whose recent tragic history the British cannot disclaim responsibility is China”),
Hong Kong did better under the Brits than Shanghai under the Commies.
Tagore recalls what India has gained from “discussions centred upon Shakespeare’s drama and Byron’s poetry
No it hadn't. We fucking hate that shite because our ancestors had to cram and regurgitate it so as to get a clerical berth.
and above all … the large-hearted liberalism of nineteenth-century English politics.”
Lord Ripon was nice. If only we could set the calendar back to the 1880s!
The tragedy, as Tagore saw it, came from the fact that what “was truly best in their own civilization, the upholding of dignity of human relationships, has no place in the British administration of this country.”
Because the Indians who manned that administration liked to make other Indians grovel. Come to think of it, 'crawling order' Dyer was born in India. His people set up the brewery in Murree which still makes excellent beer.
“If in its place they have established, baton in hand, a reign of ‘law and order,’ or in other words a policeman’s rule, such a mockery of civilization can claim no respect from us.”
Tagore didn't live to see 'Direct Action Day' or the partition blood-letting. Had he done so he might well have regretted the demise of 'policeman's rule'.
Rabindranath rebelled against the strongly nationalist form that the independence movement often took,
He truly was a cretin. Independence meant the establishment of a Nation State. The Independence movement could only be Nationalist. It couldn't demand that the Americans and Germans and Japanese take a share in ruling over India.
and this made him refrain from taking a particularly active part in contemporary politics.
He knew the Muslims would take power from the Brits in East Bengal. West Bengal would fall behind Bombay. The future belonged to the Gujju and Marwari bania.
He wanted to assert India’s right to be independent
which could only arise if it had the capacity to defend and rule itself. The problem was that Tagore and his ilk could not build any such capacity.
without denying the importance of what India could learn – freely and profitably – from abroad.
But Nationalism was one such needful lesson. That and the importance of having a kick-ass Army and Navy and Air Force.
He was afraid that a rejection of the West in favor of an indigenous Indian tradition was not only limiting in itself; it could easily turn into hostility to other influences from abroad,
But that hostility already existed in vast quantities!
including Christianity, which came to parts of India by the fourth century;
and which forcibly converted Hindus and instituted an Inquisition in Goa- which India later annexed by force.
Judaism, which came through Jewish immigration shortly after the fall of Jerusalem,
Jews weren't keen on converting people though some 'slaves' did convert and did well financially. Still it wasn't till the mid-Thirties that the division between White, Brown (Yemeni) and Black (indigenous) Jews was declared to be contrary to the Jewish religion.
as did Zoroastrianism through Parsi immigration later on (mainly in the eighth century), and, of course – and most importantly – Islam, which has had a very strong presence in India since the tenth century.
But Hinduism is no longer a very strong presence in Sen's ancestral East Bengal. Tagore had said the Hindus were 'idiots' to have ever let the Muslims in.
Tagore’s criticism of patriotism is a persistent theme in his writings. As early as 1908, he put his position succinctly in a letter replying to the criticism of Abala Bose, the wife of a great Indian scientist, Jagadish Chandra Bose: “Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live.”
Tagore's humanity was protected by the patriotic Jolly Jack Tar- i.e. the Royal Navy- and the equally patriotic Tommy Atkins- i.e. the British Army.
His novel Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) has much to say about this theme. In the novel, Nikhil, who is keen on social reform, including women’s liberation, but cool toward nationalism, gradually loses the esteem of his spirited wife, Bimala, because of his failure to be enthusiastic about anti-British agitations, which she sees as a lack of patriotic commitment.
Bimala is ugly and comes from a poor family. She doesn't get that hubby is rich only coz the Brits are holding down the 'turbulent' and 'pugnacious' (to use A.O Hume's description) East Bengali Muslim.
Bimala becomes fascinated with Nikhil’s nationalist friend Sandip, who speaks brilliantly and acts with patriotic militancy, and she falls in love with him.
She has no kids. You can't blame a Kadambari or a Bimala for wanting some dude to use his dick to give her a baby if hubby is too high minded for that sort of thing.
Nikhil refuses to change his views: “I am willing to serve my country; but my worship I reserve for Right which is far greater than my country.
Whatever it was that the Brahmo's worshipped, they placed a curse on it. That's why being very very boring is counter-productive. Soon everybody is running away from you so fleetly that you don't get to bore anybody and thus fail as a Brahmo.
To worship my country as a god is to bring a curse upon it.”
Sandip is a crook. He finally understands that the Muslims will kill him to get his money. Nikhil dies trying to save some fellow Hindu landlord from a Muslim mob. Bimala is simply as stupid as shit.
As the story unfolds, Sandip becomes angry with some of his countrymen for their failure to join the struggle as readily as he thinks they should (“Some Mohamedan traders are still obdurate”). He arranges to deal with the recalcitrants by burning their meager trading stocks and physically attacking them.
Only if they show no sign of fighting back. Bhadralok valour had its limitations.
Bimala has to acknowledge the connection between Sandip’s rousing nationalistic sentiments and his sectarian – and ultimately violent-actions.
She stole hubby's money and handed it over to the scoundrel Sandip. Stealing from a Brahmo is WRONG. This is a core tenet of the Brahmo Religion.
The dramatic events that follow (Nikhil attempts to help the victims, risking his life) include the end of Bimala’s political romance.
Nikhil goes to save his Hindu neighbor. This is the English translation of the ending of the novel- the narrator is Bimala
"I have not the time, Nikhil," said Sandip as he paused near the door. "The Mussulmans, I am told, have taken me for an invaluable gem, and are conspiring to loot me and hide me away in their graveyard. But I feel that it is necessary that I should live. I have just twenty-five minutes to catch the North-bound train. So, for the present, I must be gone. We shall have our talk out at the next convenient opportunity. If you take my advice, don't you delay in getting away either. I salute you, Queen Bee, Queen of the bleeding hearts, Queen of desolation!"
Sandip then left almost at a run. I stood stock-still; I had never realized in such a manner before, how trivial, how paltry, this gold and these jewels were. Only a short while ago I was so busy thinking what I should take with me, and how I should pack it. Now I felt that there was no need to take anything at all. To set out and go forth was the important thing.
My husband left his seat and came up and took me by the hand. "It is getting late," he said. "There is not much time left to complete our preparations for the journey."
At this point Chandranath Babu suddenly came in. Finding us both together, he fell back for a moment. Then he said, "Forgive me, my little mother, if I intrude. Nikhil, the Mussulmans are out of hand. They are looting Harish Kundu's treasury. That does not so much matter. But what is intolerable is the violence that is being done to the women of their house."
"I am off," said my husband.
This is a difficult subject, and Satyajit Ray’s beautiful film of The Home and the World brilliantly brings out the novel’s tensions, along with the human affections and disaffections of the story.
No it doesn't. It is as boring as shit.
Not surprisingly, the story has had many detractors, not just among dedicated nationalists in India. Georg Lukács found Tagore’s novel to be “a petit bourgeois yarn of the shoddiest kind,” “at the intellectual service of the British police,”
rather than Stalin.
and “a contemptible caricature of Gandhi.” It would, of course, be absurd to think of Sandip as Gandhi, but the novel gives a “strong and gentle” warning, as Bertolt Brecht noted in his diary, of the corruptibility of nationalism, since it is not even-handed. Hatred of one group can lead to hatred of others, no matter how far such feeling may be from the minds of large-hearted nationalist leaders like Mahatma Gandhi.
Ray's movie differs from Tagore's novel. The love triangle is played up though the woman is fat and the revolutionary is in his fifties. Also the hero loses his life to 'rioters' rather than guys who are robbing a wealthy neighbour while perhaps also raping his womenfolk. Still the movie featured the first on screen kiss in Bengali Cinema. How very shocking! Sen should be ashamed of himself for watching such smut.
Admiration and criticism of Japan
Tagore’s reaction to nationalism in Japan is particularly telling. As in the case of India, he saw the need to build the self-confidence of a defeated and humiliated people,
Japan would only be defeated and humiliated in 1945 after taking two atomic bomb hits. They had self-confidence in plenty.
of people left behind by developments elsewhere, as was the case in Japan before its emergence during the nineteenth century.
Nope. They were happy campers. The Dutch merchant, Titsing wanted to trade all the wealth of golden Bengal for Japan's vitality.
At the beginning of one of his lectures in Japan in 1916 (“Nationalism in Japan”), he observed that “the worst form of bondage is the bondage of dejection, which keeps men hopelessly chained in loss of faith in themselves.”
The Nips nodded their heads pityingly. Their island had never been invaded. India, thanks to the Buddha and other such nutters, had taken it up the ass from virtually anybody who could be bothered to get there.
Tagore shared the admiration for Japan widespread in Asia for demonstrating the ability of an Asian nation to rival the West in industrial development and economic progress.
His grandpappy had a Japanese style folly in his pleasure garden. Dutch merchants like Titsing had introduced Calcutta to the glories of Japanese art.
He noted with great satisfaction that Japan had “in giant strides left centuries of inaction behind, overtaking the present time in its foremost achievement.” For other nations outside the West, he said, Japan “has broken the spell under which we lay in torpor for ages, taking it to be the normal condition of certain races living in certain geographical limits.”
The Nips knew their own history. They had adapted European weapons and watches and so on and very quickly improved on them. They could have been a great naval power much earlier. But, for smart peeps, it's never too late to catch up.
But then Tagore went on to criticize the rise of a strong nationalism in Japan, and its emergence as an imperialist nation.
Japan like Germany only got on the gold standard after getting war reparations. Japanese imperialism helped it rise. Military success made parents clamour for education for their boys so they could rise in the Army. That's why their literacy shot up.
Tagore’s outspoken criticisms did not please Japanese audiences and, as E.P. Thompson wrote, “the welcome given to him on his first arrival soon cooled.”
On the other hand, they liked Rash Behari- the Indian Scarlet Pimpernel- well enough. Apparently he started a curry business.
Twenty-two years later, in 1937, during the Japanese war on China, Tagore received a letter from Rash Behari Bose, an anti-British Indian revolutionary then living in Japan, who sought Tagore’s approval for his efforts there on behalf of Indian independence, in which he had the support of the Japanese government. Tagore replied:
Your cable has caused me many restless hours, for it hurts me very much to have to ignore your appeal.
Tagore knew that the Mody-Lees agreement- by which Manchester and Bombay did a deal to the detriment of the Indian cotton farmer and the Japanese textile industry- had been a factor in pushing Japan down a militaristic path. He may also have known that some Brits thought that Japan would take over garrison duties in their South and South East Asian Empire in return for a complex deal which would freeze out both the US and the Soviet Union.
I wish you had asked for my cooperation in a cause against which my spirit did not protest. I know, in making this appeal, you counted on my great regard for the Japanese for I, along with the rest of Asia, did once admire and look up to Japan and did once fondly hope that in Japan Asia had at last discovered its challenge to the West, that Japan’s new strength would be consecrated in safeguarding the culture of the East against alien interests.
Tagore had been to Japan. He knew that Japan had begun its rise by first attacking Buddhist temples and forcing monks to get married and take up proper jobs.
But Japan has not taken long to betray that rising hope and repudiate all that seemed significant in her wonderful, and, to us symbolic, awakening, and has now become itself a worse menace to the defenceless peoples of the East.
Gandhi, on the other hand, took a more sanguine view of Japanese victory in 1942. Tagore was less stupid than Gandhi. That's the important point to grasp here. But Gujjus and Marwaris did smart things. Bengali buddhijivis didn't. That's why Gandhi is still famous while nobody reads Tagore.
How to view Japan’s position in the Second World War was a divisive issue in India. After the war, when Japanese political leaders were tried for war crimes, the sole dissenting voice
other than from the French and Dutch
among the judges came from the Indian judge, Radhabinod Pal, a distinguished jurist.
He was right in law but might is the law.
Pal dissented on various grounds, among them that no fair trial was possible in view of the asymmetry of power between the victor and the defeated. Ambivalent feelings in India toward the Japanese military aggression, given the unacceptable nature of British imperialism, possibly had a part in predisposing Pal to consider a perspective different from that of the other judges.
Also the guy would have to return to India afterwards. Some Azad Fauj nutter might take a samurai sword to him. I'm kidding. He'd have taken a merciless pen to him. Pal was Bengali.
More tellingly, Subhas Chandra Bose (no relation of Rash Behari Bose), a leading nationalist, made his way to Japan during the war via Italy and Germany
where he got cozy with Hitler while marrying an 'Aryan' and recruiting Indians for the Waffen SS
after escaping from a British prison; he helped the Japanese to form units of Indian soldiers,
who were tortured and killed if they did not turn their coats
who had earlier surrendered to the advancing Japanese army, to fight on the Japanese side as the “Indian National Army.” Rabindranath had formerly entertained great admiration for Subhas Bose as a dedicated nonsectarian fighter for Indian independence.
Then Bose spearheaded a campaign by students in a Brahmo Hostel which demanded the right to celebrate Durga Puja.
But their ways would have parted when Bose’s political activities took this turn, although Tagore was dead by the time Bose reached Japan.
Lots of Indian P.O.W's whose 'ways parted' with Bose ended up dead soon enough.
Tagore saw Japanese militarism as illustrating the way nationalism can mislead even a nation of great achievement and promise.
Why not see Korean and Chinese nationalism as defective instead? Japan's mistake was to attack America.
In 1938 Yone Noguchi,
whom the Japs had sent to India in 1935-36 to drum up support for their 'Co-Prosperity Sphere' swindle
the distinguished poet and friend of Tagore (as well as of Yeats and Pound),
Noguchi was bisexual but didn't fuck either Yeats or Pound. Sad.
wrote to Tagore, pleading with him to change his mind about Japan. Rabindranath’s reply, written on September 12, 1938, was altogether uncompromising:
It seems to me that it is futile for either of us to try to convince the other, since your faith in the infallible right of Japan to bully other Asiatic nations into line with your Government’s policy is not shared by me …. Believe me, it is sorrow and shame, not anger, that prompt me to write to you. I suffer intensely not only because the reports of Chinese suffering batter against my heart, but because I can no longer point out with pride the example of a great Japan.
Also 'great Japan' meant a Bengali whose new zamindars would be those quickest to learn Japanese. Also they might have to fuck Noguchi.
He would have been much happier with the postwar emergence of Japan as a peaceful power.
Would he? That's sweet.
Then, too, since he was not free of egotism, he would also have been pleased by the attention paid to his ideas by the novelist Yasunari Kawabata and others.
There is a psychological commonality here. A mother lost in childhood and inappropriate attachments to sisters-in-law or other such complications. Kawabata, however, was not burdened with having to ponce about in robes as the head of some stupid cult.
Tagore was not invariably well-informed about international politics. He allowed himself to be entertained by Mussolini in a short visit to Italy in May-June 1926,
Everybody thought Musso was cool back then. Gandhi was greatly taken with him. Iqbal was even more smitten though Musso was massacring Senussi Muslims in Libya on an industrial scale.
a visit arranged by Carlo Formichi, professor of Sanskrit at the University of Rome. When he asked to meet Benedetto Croce, Formichi said, “Impossible! Impossible!” Mussolini told him that Croce was “not in Rome.” When Tagore said he would go “wherever he is,” Mussolini assured him that Croce’s whereabouts were unknown.
Mussolini arranged for Tagore to meet Croce in 1926- his second visit there. The Fascists had been generous to Shantiniketan and had lionized the old beardie to the top of his bent.
Such incidents, as well as warnings from Romain Rolland
who would become a Stalin worshipper
and other friends, should have ended Tagore’s flirtation with Mussolini more quickly than it did. But only after he received graphic accounts of the brutality of Italian fascism from two exiles, Gaetano Salvemini and Gaetano Salvadori, and learned more of what was happening in Italy, did he publicly denounce the regime, publishing a letter to the Manchester Guardian in August. The next month, Popolo d’Italia, the magazine edited by Benito Mussolini’s brother, replied: “Who cares? Italy laughs at Tagore and those who brought this unctuous and insupportable fellow in our midst.”
Sonia Gandhi- daughter of an Italian Fascist- took over the Indian National Congress enabling it take two terms in office. Italy laughed last and loudest.
With his high expectations of Britain,
based on what?
Tagore continued to be surprised by what he took to be a lack of official sympathy for international victims of aggression.
Why stop there? How come there is so little official sympathy for people who drank a little too much and ended up shitting themselves at the Christmas party? I'm not saying that happened to me. It was this other bloke I know. We were in the SAS together which is why I can't tell you his name.
He returned to this theme in the lecture he gave on his last birthday, in 1941:
While Japan was quietly devouring North China, her act of wanton aggression was ignored as a minor incident by the veterans of British diplomacy. We have also witnessed from this distance how actively the British statesmen acquiesced in the destruction of the Spanish Republic.
A Republic which spent a lot of time raping nuns. Then Franco turned up with Moorish soldiers who took their time raping everybody while Hitler and Musso did the heavy lifting.
But distinguishing between the British government and the British people, Rabindranath went on to note “with admiration how a band of valiant Englishmen laid down their lives for Spain.”
Or against Spain, depending on your point of view. The fact is Franco enabled Spain to rise up and prosper. He died peacefully in his bed after having arranged to restore the Monarchy. Fascism is only bad if it loses wars. We are all now cheering for the Azov battalions.
Tagore’s view of the Soviet Union has been a subject of much discussion. He was widely read in Russia. In 1917 several Russian translations of Gitanjali (one edited by Ivan Bunin, later the first Russian Nobel Laureate in Literature) were available, and by the late 1920s many of the English versions of his work had been rendered into Russian by several distinguished translators.
Stalin viewed Tagore as similar to Tolstoy. Vacuous beardies like him would pave the way for the triumph of Communism. By the Thirties one of Tagore's nephews was a leading Communist.
Russian versions of his work continued to appear: Boris Pasternak translated him in the 1950s and 1960s.
Russia has a lot of very brilliant people. Yet- like West Bengal- it seems to fuck up all the time. Why?
When Tagore visited Russia in 1930, he was much impressed by its development efforts and by what he saw as a real commitment to eliminate poverty and economic inequality.
Also Stalin had suppressed the Muslims very effectively.
But what impressed him most was the expansion of basic education across the old Russian empire. In Letters from Russia, written in Bengali and published in 1931, he unfavorably compares the acceptance of widespread illiteracy in India by the British administration with Russian efforts to expand education:
By then there was a wholly Indian administration and it was even shittier. Under 'Dyarchy' Indians had been in charge of education for the previous decade.
In stepping on the soil of Russia, the first thing that caught my eye was that in education, at any rate, the peasant and the working classes have made such enormous progress in these few years that nothing comparable has happened even to our highest classes in the course of the last hundred and fifty years …. The people here are not at all afraid of giving complete education even to Turcomans of distant Asia;
This was Tagore's theory that 'civilizing' virile Muslim tribesmen will cause them to stop conquering Hindustan every couple of centuries.
on the contrary, they are utterly in earnest about it.
If you don't educate the masses, you won't have anybody to throw in your Gulags for thought-crimes.
When parts of the book were translated into English in 1934, the under-secretary for India stated in Parliament that it was “calculated by distortion of the facts to bring the British Administration in India into contempt and disrepute,”
in other words, a legal test had been met for the thing to be banned.
and the book was then promptly banned. The English version would not be published until after independence.
Not in the Soviet Union. Stalin didn't like it. Tagore strained at a gnat- Musso- but swallowed the craziest genocidal butcher in History.
Education and freedom
The British Indian administrators were not, however, alone in trying to suppress Tagore’s reflections on Russia.
I too tried to suppress Tagore's reflections by farting continually. Then Mummy told me to stop because Tagore died long ago. I explained that I was farting against Tagore 'kartar bhoot'. Mummy slapped me and discontinued my Bengali lessons.
They were joined by Soviet officials.
Not really. When Soviet officials suppressed shitheads, they stayed suppressed.
In an interview with Izvestia in 1930, Tagore sharply criticized the lack of freedom that he observed in Russia:
I must ask you: Are you doing your ideal a service by arousing in the minds of those under your training anger, class-hatred, and revengefulness against those whom you consider to be your enemies?
The answer is- 'yes'. The ideal of the Communists was class struggle ending in the dictatorship of the proletariat and the physical elimination of the class enemy.
… Freedom of mind is needed for the reception of truth; terror hopelessly kills it ….
Nope. You need brains, not a great big beard, for the 'reception of truth'. Terror doesn't matter. You may be shitting yourself but you can sill understand the truth is you are fucked.
For the sake of humanity I hope you may never create a vicious force of violence, which will go on weaving an interminable chain of violence and cruelty …. You have tried to destroy many of the other evils of [the czarist] period. Why not try to destroy this one also?
Because Commissars, like Tzars, who no longer terrify their subjects soon get killed.
The interview was not published in Izvestia until 1988 – nearly sixty years later.
After which the USSR quickly collapsed.
Tagore’s reaction to the Russia of 1930 arose from two of his strongest commitments: his uncompromising belief in the importance of “freedom of mind” (the source of his criticism of the Soviet Union),
which doesn't matter in the slightest. Russia rose in science and technology under Stalin. India declined in both after Independence. JBS Haldane and his drunken wife took Indian citizenship and moved to India so as to have more 'freedom of mind'. Haldane ended up going on Hunger strike because some Canadian Quaker (who later became a Warlock) refused his invitation to dinner.
and his conviction that the expansion of basic education is central to social progress (the source of his praise, particularly in contrast to British-run India).
But Education had become the responsibility of Indians in 1921! Sadly, they turned out to be shit in many places.
He identified the lack of basic education as the fundamental cause of many of India’s social and economic afflictions:
Namasudras and Muslims identified the bhadralok as the fundamental cause of illiteracy. Those swindlers didn't want the peasants to learn to read the documents to which they attached their thumb prints.
In my view the imposing tower of misery which today rests on the heart of India has its sole foundation in the absence of education.
Which is what suited zamindars like Tagore though he himself was considered a rara avis who actually spent some of the tenants' money on education.
Caste divisions, religious conflicts, aversion to work, precarious economic conditions – all centre on this single factor.
This wasn't the case. Getting girls into factory dormitories was the single factor which might have mitigated 'precarious economic conditions'. Let Bimala sew shirts from the age of 14 to 24. She'd then have only one or two kids and would return to work when labour market conditions were tight. Urbanization is favourable to literacy. This is because smut sells.
It was on education (and on the reflection, dialogue, and communication that are associated with it), rather than on, say, spinning “as a sacrifice” (“the charka does not require anyone to think”), that the future of India would depend.
Unemployable graduates are a fucking nuisance. Just get girls into factories. Boys can knife each other or get jobs in construction.
Tagore was concerned not only that there be wider opportunities for education across the country (especially in rural areas where schools were few), but also that the schools themselves be more lively and enjoyable.
Put porn on the curriculum.
He himself had dropped out of school early, largely out of boredom, and had never bothered to earn a diploma. He wrote extensively on how schools should be made more attractive to boys and girls and thus more productive.
The answer was 'Sex, Drugs & Rock & Roll.'
His own co-educational school at Santiniketan had many progressive features.
But not enough Sex, Drugs & Rock & Roll. Sad.
The emphasis here was on self-motivation rather than on discipline, and on fostering intellectual curiosity rather than competitive excellence.
Lots of peeps who go to ordinary schools have 'intellectual curiosity'. The problem with Shantiniketan is the kids were being set up to compete for the title of most vacuous bore of the Century. Sen won that prize.
Much of Rabindranath’s life was spent in developing the school at Santiniketan. The school never had much money, since the fees were very low. His lecture honoraria, “$700 a scold,” went to support it, as well as most of his Nobel Prize money. The school received no support from the government,
Why not? Indians controlled the Education Dept. from the Twenties onward. The answer is that Shantiniketan was not teaching to an acceptable standard. Dacca University, set up in the same year, flourished.
but did get help from private citizens – even Mahatma Gandhi raised money for it.
Could Tagore have monetized Santiniketan better? Perhaps. There was a market for primitive art and woven stuff and so forth in Amrika. What was lacking was the entrepreneurial elan of his grandfather and great-grandfather.
The dispute with Mahatma Gandhi on the Bihar earthquake touched on a subject that was very important to Tagore: the need for education in science as well as in literature and the humanities.
Yet, as Sen told us, Tagore had none.
At Santiniketan, there were strong “local” elements in its emphasis on Indian traditions, including the classics, and in the use of Bengali rather than English as the language of instruction.
Which was also the case in Government schools- which is why people saved up to send their kids to Convent Schools.
At the same time there were courses on a great variety of cultures, and study programs devoted to China, Japan, and the Middle East.
Shantiniketan did attract some remarkable scholars- like Tan Yun Shan of whom I've written elsewhere.
Many foreigners came to Santiniketan to study or teach, and the fusion of studies seemed to work.
Did it though? It is no surprise if the son and grandson of Professors becomes a Professor. Did Shantiniketan enable social mobility for the son of agricultural labourer?
I am partial to seeing Tagore as an educator, having myself been educated at Santiniketan. The school was unusual in many different ways, such as the oddity that classes, excepting those requiring a laboratory, were held outdoors (whenever the weather permitted).
This was not an oddity in rural Bengal- or rural England for that matter.
No matter what we thought of Rabindranath’s belief that one gains from being in a natural setting while learning (some of us argued about this theory), we typically found the experience of outdoor schooling extremely attractive and pleasant.
Kids also like picnics. Being outside makes food taste nicer.
Academically, our school was not particularly exacting (often we did not have any examinations at all), and it could not, by the usual academic standards, compete with some of the better schools in Calcutta.
Sen and his best friend were educated there and both did very well in the Western Academy. But Sen ran off with his best friend's wife. That's the problem with kids growing up watching the birds and the bees when they should be cramming so as to get into the IAS.
But there was something remarkable about the ease with which class discussions could move from Indian traditional literature to contemporary as well as classical Western thought, and then to the culture of China or Japan or elsewhere.
This is how gobshites are created the world over.
The school’s celebration of variety was also in sharp contrast with the cultural conservatism and separatism that has tended to grip India from time to time.
Sen's people didn't want to get gripped by Muslims in Dacca. They chose to be 'separatist' and thus to 'conserve' their lives and religion. This was a mistake. They should have celebrated as a variety or sharp objects sliced through their flesh.
The cultural give and take of Tagore’s vision of the contemporary world has close parallels with the vision of Satyajit Ray, also an alumnus of Santiniketan
he went to a posh school and College before going to Santiniketan to study Art.
who made several films based on Tagore’s stories.
So, a guy who makes a film based on a book displays 'close parallels' to the writer's vision. That's an amazing coincidence.
Ray’s words about Santiniketan in 1991 would have greatly pleased Rabindranath:
I consider the three years I spent in Santiniketan as the most fruitful of my life …. Santiniketan opened my eyes for the first time to the splendours of Indian and Far Eastern art. Until then I was completely under the sway of Western art, music and literature. Santiniketan made me the combined product of East and West that I am.
Ray studied Art there after first taking a degree in Econ. He then worked in Advertising. His first film was made with the help of Government money. Thus was born a type of poverty porn which had Madison Avenue production values.
At the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence, the reckoning of what India had or had not achieved in this half century was a subject of considerable interest: “What has been the story of those first fifty years?” (as Shashi Tharoor asked in his balanced, informative, and highly readable account of India: From Midnight to the Millennium).
Tharoor thought that story was of the Dynasty- which he described as the Kauravas- i.e. the bad guys. Sadly, he later joined Congress. With hindsight, that was a mistake. Sonia could only hold things together for so long.
If Tagore were to see the India of today, more than half a century after independence, nothing perhaps would shock him so much as the continued illiteracy of the masses.
Why? The guy had figured out that if very poor people keep having babies those babies are going to be very very poor. The least of their complaints is going to be that they can't read poems about beggar maids lifting up their skirts to cover their heads.
He would see this as a total betrayal of what the nationalist leaders had promised during the struggle for independence
Pakistan's nationalist leaders delivered on what they promised- deliverance from Hindu zamindars like Tagore. Bangladesh pulled ahead of West Bengal after it started putting rural girls into big factory dormitories.
– a promise that had figured even in Nehru’s rousing speech on the eve of independence in August 1947 (on India’s “tryst with destiny”).
Shame on Nehru! He should have promised to truly fuck the country up.
In view of his interest in childhood education, Tagore would not be consoled by the extraordinary expansion of university education, in which India sends to its universities six times as many people per unit of population as does China.
This was 20 years ago. India now realizes that Universities make people stupid. Get girls into factory dormitories. Don't give them PhDs in worthless shite. China now probably has double the percentage enrolment in tertiary education than India. But a lot of Indian degrees are utterly worthless.
Rather, he would be stunned that, in contrast to East and Southeast Asia, including China, half the adult population and two thirds of Indian women remain unable to read or write.
But they could have babies like crazy.
Statistically reliable surveys indicate that even in the late 1980s, nearly half of the rural girls between the ages of twelve and fourteen did not attend any school for a single day of their lives.31
But they could have babies like crazy.
This state of affairs is the result of the continuation of British imperial neglect of mass education,
because rural girls kept having babies like crazy
which has been reinforced by India’s traditional elitism, as well as upper-class-dominated contemporary politics (except in parts of India such as Kerala, where anti-upper-caste movements have tended to concentrate on education as a great leveller).
provided you can work abroad to get some money for your family. Otherwise you are seriously fucked.
Tagore would see illiteracy and the neglect of education not only as the main source of India’s continued social backwardness, but also as a great constraint that restricts the possibility and reach of economic development in India (as his writings on rural development forcefully make clear). Tagore would also have strongly felt the need for a greater commitment – and a greater sense of urgency – in removing endemic poverty.
I think Sen should feel a stronger need to get Tagore to feel a stronger need to get everybody to feel a stronger need for a yet stronger need to do something other than just have stronger needs coz wishing for horses does not actually mean that beggars will ride.
At the same time, Tagore would undoubtedly find some satisfaction in the survival of democracy in India,
and the ethnic cleansing of Hindus from Bangladesh
in its relatively free press,
which praises Modi unless Mamta's goons are hovering in the vicinity or some nice Non-profit funds their magazine
and in general from the “freedom of mind”
freedom from mind
that post-independence Indian politics has, on the whole, managed to maintain. He would also be pleased by the fact noted by the historian E.P. Thompson (whose father Edward Thompson had written one of the first major biographies of Tagore:
All the convergent influences of the world run through this society: Hindu, Moslem, Christian, secular; Stalinist, liberal, Maoist, democratic socialist, Gandhian. There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East that is not active in some Indian mind.
The reverse, sadly, is not the case. Nobody in the West is thinking 'how the fuck can I emigrate from this shithole to somewhere nice ruled by White Christians ?'
Tagore would have been happy also to see that the one governmental attempt to dispense generally with basic liberties and political and civil rights in India, in the 1970s, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (ironically, herself a former student at Santiniketan) declared an “emergency,” was overwhelmingly rejected by the Indian voters, leading to the precipitate fall of her government.
She returned with more power and an explicit dynastic mandate three years later.
Rabindranath would also see that the changes in policy that have eliminated famine since independence had much to do with the freedom to be heard in a democratic India.
The freedom to be heard by Americans who would then send PL480 shipments to a predominantly agricultural nation unable to feed or defend itself.
In Tagore’s play Raja O Rani (“The King and the Queen”), the sympathetic Queen eventually rebels against the callousness of state policy toward the hungry.
Tagore was 6 years old when he wrote it. It isn't stupid shit at all, if you bear that in mind.
She begins by inquiring about the ugly sounds outside the palace, only to be told that the noise is coming from “the coarse, clamorous crowd who howl unashamedly for food and disturb the sweet peace of the palace.”
Compare Tagore's shite with Yeats's Countess Cathleen. Yeats was a poet. Tagore, a vacuous bore.
The Viceregal office in India could have taken a similarly callous view of Indian famines, right up to the easily preventable Bengal famine of 1943, just before independence, which killed between two and three million people.
Food was a transferred subject. Suhrawardy was a brown man. So was Mujib ur Rahman. There were two big famines in Bengal during Sen's lifetime. Both were caused by the transition to Democracy.
But a government in a multi-party democracy, with elections and free newspapers, cannot any longer dismiss the noise from “the coarse, clamorous crowd.”
Sure it can. Just blame the Hindus. Then kill them.
Fearless reasoning in freedom.
Unlike Gandhi, Rabindranath would not resent the development of modern industries in India,
Yes he would. He didn't like machines. Unlike beggar-maids, they weren't constantly lifting up their skirts to cover their heads.
or the acceleration of technical progress, since he did not want India to be shackled to the turning of “the wheel of an antiquated invention.” Tagore was concerned that people not be dominated by machines,
Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' was good. So was Chaplin's 'Modern Times'. Bengalis who tackled the same theme were shite.
but he was not opposed to making good use of modern technology.
don't shove modern technology up your arse. Find a good use for it.
“The mastery over the machine,” he wrote in Crisis in Civilization, “by which the British have consolidated their sovereignty over their vast empire, has been kept a sealed book, to which due access has been denied to this helpless country.”
He wrote this in 1941 by which time Indians were running the provinces while, at the Federal Level, people with names like Srivastava and B.R Sen were in charge of Food. How fucking senile was that old fool?
Rabindranath had a deep interest in the environment –
but the environment found him boring
he was particularly concerned about deforestation and initiated a “festival of tree-planting” (vriksha-ropana) as early as 1928.
A.O Hume had been doing tree planting before Tagore was born. Come to think of it Rabi's dad had done tree planting in Santiniketan when he first moved there.
He would want increased private and government commitments to environmentalism; but he would not derive from this position a general case against modern industry and technology.
Because that would be a 'sealed book' to him. British were so cruel they went around sealing all the nice books! Poor Indian man had to read Tagore's shite instead.
On cultural separation
Rabindranath would be shocked by the growth of cultural separatism in India, as elsewhere.
Sen's family were 'cultural separatists'. They ran away from their homes in Dacca. This would have greatly shocked Rabi Da.
The “openness” that he valued so much is certainly under great strain right now – in many countries. Religious fundamentalism still has a relatively small following in India;
What about Pakistan?
but various factions seem to be doing their best to increase their numbers.
Rather than wait till they have to run away from their homes.
Certainly religious sectarianism has had much success in some parts of India (particularly in the west and the north).
i.e. the bits which weren't as horrible as Bengal.
Tagore would see the expansion of religious sectarianism as being closely associated with an artificially separatist view of culture.
Like the one Sen's people displayed by running away from Dacca.
He would have strongly resisted defining India in specifically Hindu terms, rather than as a “confluence” of many cultures.
In which one particular culture felt it had a Religious obligation to dominate and decimate the kuffar.
Even after the partition of 1947, India is still the third- largest Muslim country in the world, with more Muslims than in Bangladesh, and nearly as many as in Pakistan. Only Indonesia has substantially more followers of Islam.
But they haven't killed their Hindus. On the other hand Hindus and Muslims worked together to slaughter Commies.
Indeed, by pointing to the immense heterogeneousness of India’s cultural background and its richly diverse history, Tagore had argued that the “idea of India” itself militated against a culturally separatist view – “against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one’s own people from others.”
We know what happened to his 'idea of Bengal'. Who wants to wait around for the same thing to happen to this 'idea of India'?
Tagore would also oppose the cultural nationalism that has recently been gaining some ground in India, along with an exaggerated fear of the influence of the West. He was uncompromising in his belief that human beings could absorb quite different cultures in constructive ways:
Sadly, Sen's people ran away from the constructive ways of those of a different culture in their native Dacca.
Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin.
Not if your check bounces. Your BMW gets repossessed even though you really enjoy German engineering.
I am proud of my humanity when I can acknowledge the poets and artists of other countries as my own.
Sen also acknowledged his best friend's wife as his own. That's why both of them had to leave India.
Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of man are mine.
Sen is proud of the Bangladeshi achievement in driving his people out of Dacca. Indians may feel differently.
Therefore it hurts me deeply when the cry of rejection rings loud against the West in my country with the clamour that Western education can only injure us.
Tagore asked for and got money from Gandhi who had raised that clamor. Tagore's 'deep hurt' was cured for the low low price of 60,000 Rupees.
In this context, it is important to emphasize that Rabindranath was not short of pride in India’s own heritage, and often spoke about it.
So do I- which is why I'm given a wide berth, more especially by Indians.
He lectured at Oxford, with evident satisfaction,
because Oxford had not lifted its skirt to hide its head which is what Cambridge tends to do anytime I'm in the vicinity
on the importance of India’s religious ideas – quoting both from ancient texts and from popular poetry (such as the verses of the sixteenth-century Muslim poet Kabir).
Sen's grandpappy helped Tagore with this
In 1940, when he was given an honorary doctorate by Oxford University, in a ceremony arranged at his own educational establishment in Santiniketan (“In Gangem Defluit Isis,” Oxford helpfully explained), to the predictable “volley of Latin” Tagore responded “by a volley of Sanskrit,” as Marjorie Sykes, a Quaker friend of Rabindranath, reports.
Britain had once been a Roman colony. That didn't stop it from keeping Latin.
Her cheerful summary of the match, “India held its own,” was not out of line with Tagore’s pride in Indian culture.
But Britain still held India.
His welcoming attitude to Western civilization was reinforced by this confidence: he did not see India’s culture as fragile and in need of “protection” from Western influence.
India stood in need of British and American troops to turn back the Japanese invaders. Whatever Tagore thought was irrelevant.
In India, he wrote, “circumstances almost compel us to learn English, and this lucky accident
Accident? Tagore's greedy ancestors ensured that there was nothing accidental about the thing.
has given us the opportunity of access into the richest of all poetical literatures of the world.”
Which, however, genuine English peeps find as boring as shit. Rap is way cooler. I like big butts and cannot lie.
There seems to me much force in Rabindranath’s argument for clearly distinguishing between the injustice of a serious asymmetry of power
like babies not being as strong as adults
(colonialism being a prime example of this) and the importance nevertheless of appraising Western culture in an open-minded way, in colonial and postcolonial territories, in order to see what uses could be made of it.
What does asymmetry of power have to with appraisals of utility? Nothing at all. I see guys power-lifting three or four times as much as me at the gym. But they might admire my nifty new smartwatch which counts reps and I might take note of their sweat wicking fleece.
Game theory tells us that where there is an uncorrelated asymmetry- i.e. each player knows what 'type' he is- then there is a 'bourgeois strategy'. For example I know I have a toothache and my dentist knows he is qualified to help me. Thus, our meeting very quickly becomes productive for both of us. I don't offer to fix his teeth. He does not offer to pay me to do so. He fixes my teeth and then I pay him. This may be 'traditional', it may be 'bourgeois', it may take no account of the fact that I am a survivor of horrendous sexual self-abuse, it may completely ignore my dentist's functioning's and capabilities as a flamenco dancer, but this is what works out best for everybody.
Rabindranath insisted on open debate on every issue,
No he didn't. Guys who wanted to debate what types of vegetable Rabi might like shoved up his arse were told, politely but firmly, that they should just very kindly fuck the fuck off.
and distrusted conclusions based on a mechanical formula, no matter how attractive that formula might seem in isolation (such as “This was forced on us by our colonial masters – we must reject it,” “This is our tradition – we must follow it,” “We have promised to do this – we must fulfill that promise,” and so on).
These aren't 'mechanical formulas'. These are reasoned arguments. Something 'forced' on you by an invader is likely to be bad. If it weren't we wouldn't use the word 'forced'. We'd speak instead of a welcome innovation introduced, it is true, by an evil invader.
If a tradition isn't followed then it isn't a tradition. If some benefit flowed from its observance, chances are it will cease to flow from its discontinuance.
Promising to do things entails doing those things or else forfeiting one's reputation for keeping promises. Thus promises lose all value unless there is a 'Muth rational' expectation that it will be fulfilled.
The question he persistently asks is whether we have reason enough to want what is being proposed, taking everything into account.
But we can't 'take everything into account'. We are not omniscient Gods. Information is costly to acquire. Knightian Uncertainty is ubiquitous. The best we can do is follow a regret minimizing strategy- i.e. follow the rule but hedge your bets.
To be fair, Sen is fathering his own idiocy on Tagore.
Important as history is, reasoning has to go beyond the past.
Facts can't go beyond what is known or knowable to get to what can't yet be known. Reasoning has to be done with facts.
It is in the sovereignty of reasoning – fearless reasoning in freedom – that we can find Rabindranath Tagore’s lasting voice.
But reasoning is not sovereign because it is defeasible. Freedom always has to be vigilant. It must make provision against contingencies tending to its own erasure. Fearless reasoning would be imprudent reasoning. It may be paranoid or psychotic reasoning. It would have no survival value. There's a reason we have evolved to feel fear. There is also a reason we have evolved some reasoning ability alongside some purely emotional ways of breaking 'concurrency deadlock' or 'vicious' logic loops and so forth.
Sen made a hash of his Chancellorship of Nalanda. Tagore's Shantiniketan, all things considered, was a success. Why? Sen had no fear of fucking up Nalanda. He didn't give two shits about it. Tagore cared deeply about Shantiniketan. He had put his own money into it and thus had 'skin in the game'. He may not have been a sound reasoner, but he had common-sense. He predicted what would happen in East Bengal. He foresaw the rise of the Commies. It made sense to turn agricultural rents into cultural capital- which your two legs can take with you when you have to run away from Dacca.
Tagore made a decision which was 'regret minimizing'. His family has reason to be proud of him. The World heaped accolades on him and he used the resources this gave him access to in a manner intended to benefit his own people. Sen has done nothing similar. He gained salience during a false Dawn punctuated by the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of China. It was a time of great stupidity and endless virtue signalling. It produced nothing of value in Economics or Philosophy or Literature. Though the next few years will be tough and may mark a permanent shrinking of Western soft and hard power, nevertheless it is with a sigh of relief that we bid farewell to the Sen-ile gobshites who, we now realize, were as beggar maids lifting up their skirts to cover their heads as the day's pitiless light softened to mellower shades of dusk.
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