In politics and spirituality, too, this aristocratic Brahmin hoped to take leadership of the rural masses and thus cut out the 'middle castes'- e.g. Kayasthas like Vivekananda or Aurobindo- as well as Banias, like Gandhi. This meant that the aristocrat would have a direct relationship with the distant King Emperor and his slumber would not be disturbed by the agitations or chicaneries of the middling sort.
As a practical business man from the boondocks, Tagore was very conscious of his shortcomings in the glittering world of literary London. He told Rothenstein and his brilliant pals that 'you people live, think and talk while a strong, critical light is constantly focussed on you. This creates a high social civilisation. We in India, on the contrary, live secluded among a crowd of relations. Things are done and said within the family circle which would not be tolerated outside; and this keeps our social standards low.'
Rothenstein feared that Tagore might yield to the temptation to become an Oriental Sage lionized by the smart set in Europe and America- ' ...great fame is a perilous thing, because it affects not indeed the whole man, but a part of him, and is apt to prove a tyrannous waster of time. Tagore, who has hitherto lived quietly in Bengal, devoting himself to poetry and to his school, would now grow restless. As a man longs for wine or tobacco, so Tagore could not resist the sympathy shown to a great idealist. He wanted to heal the wounds of the world. But a poet, shutting himself away from men to concentrate on his art, most helps his fellows; to leave his study is to run great risks. No man respected truth, strength of character, single-mindedness and selflessness more than Tagore; of these qualities he had his full share. But he got involved in contradictions. Too much flattery is as bad for a Commoner as for a King. Firm and frank advice was taken in good part by Tagore, but he could not always resist the sweet syrup offered him by injudicious worshippers.'
This is a little harsh. The fact is, Tagore was a landlord who played an active part in managing his Estates though, it must be said, successive bereavements and financial difficulties had taken their toll on him. If he wished to travel and make a little money into the bargain, no great 'opportunity cost' was involved. Moreover, the hereditary leader of a religious sect is supposed to travel far and wide meeting the great and the good and uttering benedictions or homilies of a suitably chastened or chastening type. What made this urgent was that if a rich Brahmin didn't do it, some Kayastha or Baidya or- worse yet!- a Bania like the Mahatma might emerge as the High Plenipotentiary of Ind's peerless Spirit or immortal soul or some such shite.
Amartya Sen, who shares Tagore's disdain for mercantile Hindu communities, writes of Tagore-
In his book Raga Mala, Ravi Shankar, the great musician, argues that had Rabindranath Tagore “been born in the West he would now be [as] revered as Shakespeare and Goethe.”
Goethe isn't particularly revered. The Germans may like him because he wrote in their language. He has some importance in German cultural history but German culture is itself a history of ignominy. Indians speak of Goethe because they have neither read him nor his successors.
Shakespeare, it must be said, was a good dramatist and poet. He set out to entertain, not to bore the pants of his audience. Also his language has become the global language par excellence. Indians did read Agatha Christie and P.G Woodhouse who made apt use of quotations from Shakespeare.
This is a strong claim, and it calls attention to some greatness in this quintessentially Bengali writer—
Shakespeare was quintessentially English and English, we must acknowledge, is the greatest global language. Neither German nor Bengali are other than parochial. Still, Tagore stands highest amongst the Indian poets of the freedom struggle because he was against it albeit in so vague a manner that maybe what he was actually for was the Sun being nice and the Moon being cute or something of that sort.
Tagore, in Europe, appeared to be a symbolist like Maeterlinck whose reputation declined sharply as he focused more on occultism and was accused of plagiarism. Tagore's stock, however, rose because it appeared that India would move rapidly to self-government and rise in prosperity and security. Then people read Tagore's novels or listened to what Gandhi was actually saying and realized that Hindus are as stupid as fuck.
If we compare Tagore to Strindberg- who died about the time Tagore won the Nobel- we see why the former was bound to fail. Strindberg had learnt some Sanskrit and immersed himself in mystical studies before he wrote of Indra's daughter in his 'Dream Play'. His rivalry with Ibsen spurred him on and, though he clearly was mad, his paranoia gave him unique insights into both the battle of the sexes and what might become a war between the classes. Tagore was perfectly sane but had nothing substantive to say about either issue. Indeed, it was embarrassing to watch him try.
identified by a fellow Bengali—that might not be readily echoed in the wider world today, especially in the West.
This is because if Tagore had been born in the West, he'd have had to compete against better poets and playwrights than any to be found in Bengal or India. I'm not saying he mightn't have become great. I'm just saying he would have written better.
For the Bengali public, Tagore has been, and remains, an altogether exceptional literary figure, towering over all others.
Why is it that there have been so many Hindi and other movie adaptations of Sharat Chandra's novels and so few of Tagore's?
His poems, songs, novels, short stories, critical essays, and other writings have vastly enriched the cultural environment in which hundreds of millions of people live in the Bengali-speaking world, whether in Bangladesh or in India.
The trouble here is that though Faraizi Islam may have helped Bangladesh to rise, Tagore and Brahmoism appear to have made West Bengal stupider, poorer, more boring and more bigoted against Hinduism- not to mention a nation which only hangs together because the vast majority of its people are Hindus.
Something of that glory is acknowledged in India outside Bengal as well, and even in some other parts of Asia, including China and Japan, but in the rest of the world, especially in Europe and America, Tagore is clearly not a household name.
Tagore was associated with Okakura in Japan and poets like Li Chin Fa in China and thus is a footnote in their literary history of modernism. Tagore had admirers in the West but people like Yeats already had Indian Gurus like Mohini Chatterjee while Auden and Isherwood would do their own translations of Upanishads under the direction of Indian Swamys. Tagore simply wasn't a scholarly exponent of Hindu Shastras and thus Westerners preferred to move on to smarter exponents of Hindu thought. Radhakrishnan had something of a cult following in the Thirties in England. But, any high IQ westerner or easterner could easily learn Sanskrit- as Andre Weil did- and read Hindu scriptures for themselves. Come to think of it, the mathematician, Hermann Grassmann published a good translation of the Rg Veda in 1872. Tagore may have been the hereditary head of a Hindu sect, but he hadn't put in the hard work. Swamy Prabhupada would do so and his 'Hare Krishna' movement did become a 'household' word. There is a depth to Vaishnavism or Islam or any genuine religious tradition. There was no depth to a sect invented by a landowner who decided he was actually a Maharishi.
And yet the enthusiasm and excitement that Tagore’s writings created in Europe and America in the early years of the twentieth century were quite remarkable.
But Vivekananda and Ramakrishna had paved the way. Tagore was the hereditary leader of a prestigious Hindu sect and did okay but not great. Khalil Gibran, an artist turned poet, outsold him in America. Gurdjieff, whose father was an 'ashiq' composing Sufi dastans, had more magnetism. Neither made it their business to scold and bore the shite out of everybody they met.
Gitanjali, a selection of his poems for which Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, was published in English translation in London in March 1913 and was reprinted ten times by the time the award was announced in November. For many years Tagore was the rage in many European countries.
Because he was the head of a mystical sect- like the Dalai Lama nowadays. Then it was discovered that his sect wasn't mystical. It was middle class and as boring as shit.
His public appearances were always packed with people wanting to hear him. But then the Tagore tide ebbed, and by the 1930s the huge excitement was all over. Indeed, by 1937, Graham Greene was able to remark, “As for Rabindranath Tagore, I cannot believe that anyone but Mr. Yeats can still take his poems very seriously.”
What happened in 1937? Britain transferred power to elected politicians in the Provinces. A Muslim became the Premier of Bengal. Tagore and his ilk were irrelevant.
The one hundred fiftieth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore’s birth, which we mark this year, is a good occasion to ask what happened.
Tagore spread himself too thin. He was a good enough middle class poet and songster of a parochial kind. But he had no depth and was withal a humourless scold with no artistic range or elegance of expression.
The occasion has also generated some new books on Tagore, in addition to the distinguished ones that already exist. A very fine selection of Tagore’s writings, The Essential Tagore, with translations by leading scholars from Bangladesh, India, Britain, and America, along with insightful editorial comments by the two editors, Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, has just been published by Harvard University Press. The book has an imaginative and original foreword by the excellent writer Amit Chaudhuri, with a very engaging analysis of “poetry as polemic.”
Harvard is saying Tagore is essentially a stupid bore. His poetry was a polemic against poetry as anything other than boring, vacuous, shite.
The title of the book presumes that some of Tagore must be essential.
No. The title presumes that the selection offered is fully representative of the author. True, some yet more boring and vacuous shite may have been omitted but the essence of Tagore's boring vacuity has been presented.
But given the fairly comprehensive neglect of this writer in the contemporary English literary world, it could well be asked whether Tagore is indeed essential at all.
Tagore is essential if, like Sen, you are a Bengali who specializes in boring, vacuous, shite.
We must also ask why a writer who evokes comparison with Shakespeare and Goethe
comparisons made by a guy who strummed a fucking sitar.
tends to generate so little enthusiasm in Western countries today. There is surely some mystery here.
No. Tagore was interesting when he represented Hinduism. Then, it turned out, the guy was just a boring, vacuous, blathershite of a deeply provincial type. Bengal was welcome to him but Bengal was no longer of interest to anyone. The Bengalis were welcome to rule themselves or, if that had always been a pipe-dream, to just starve to death while scolding each other and being as vacuous and boring as possible.
At one level it is not particularly hard to see that his native readers can get something from Tagore’s writings, especially his poems and songs, that would be missed by those who do not read Bengali.
No one has any incentive to learn Bengali. Niradh Chaudhuri made money and gained fame by switching to English. Swamy Prabhupada promoted Sanskrit not Bengali. If you avoid high IQ stuff you are doomed to being a vacuous bore. Why not just become a Socioproctologist?
Even Yeats, his biggest promoter in the English-speaking world, did not like Tagore’s own English translations. “Tagore does not know English,” Yeats declared, adding a little theory to his diagnosis, as he often did: “No Indian knows English.”
Sarojini Naidu's English was fine. What Yeats had was genius. He tried to grapple with high IQ stuff. Tagore concentrated on scolding people.
Yeats was very willing to work with Tagore to overcome that handicap in the production of the English version of Gitanjali, though there are some serious problems with the Yeats-assisted translations as well. The more general obstacle to the appreciation of Tagore in English surely comes from the fact that poetry is notoriously difficult to translate.
Not if you are bilingual- which is what Tagore was. The truth is he simply didn't put a lot of work into his translations. But then, he didn't really have anything interesting to say. Tolstoy would do a lot of research. He may have gone mad but he had worked out an intellectual position for himself. Tagore was a good man, a good land-lord, a good poet, a good musician, a good artist, but he was an amateur who spread himself too thin.
Even with the best effort and talent, it can be hard—if not impossible—to preserve the magic of poetry as it is transplanted from one language to another.
Not if you actually have something to say or there is some wit to the underlying 'conceit'. This is where Urdu scored over its vernacular rivals. It had a Persian and Arabic heritage and a courtly tradition. Hindus had turned their backs on high IQ type Sanskrit and were left with nothing but rustic laments of a sentimental, but deeply boring, kind. No doubt, poets and pundits could give each other prizes for opposing Casteism, Imperialism, Naughtiness and Neo-Liberal economic policies. But who would pay to read such tedious shite?
Anyone who knows Tagore’s poems in Bengali would typically find it difficult to be really satisfied with any translation, no matter how good.
For the same reason that a charming but stupid person's conversation can't be reproduced to any good effect. What was cute or amusing about them was naivete and a comic sort of self-regard.
To this impediment must be added the fact that Tagore’s poetry, which often takes the form of songs in an innovative style of lyrical singing, called Rabindrasangeet,
Tagore wrote thousands of songs. Many of the great Hindi film-songs of yester-year derive from Tagore. But a film song only lasts for a couple of minutes and, speaking generally, there's a pretty girl for us to look at.
has transformed popular Bengali music with its particular combination of reflective language and compatible tunes.
It is sonorous, melancholy and interminable. Still if guests turn up unexpectedly, you can get your wife or daughter to sing Robindrosangeet to them till they flee gibbering into the night. Tagore was trying to fight the tradition by which the music was more important than the lyrics. But Tagore's lyrics were slow-witted.
There is, in addition, the problem that Tagore’s influence on Bengali writing is so gigantic and epoch-making that his innovative language itself has profound importance to the Bengali reading public.
But the Bengali reading public has fallen greatly in influence. There was a brief moment, at the beginning of the last century, when some claimed that if the vernacular language was improved, then the thinking of the people would be improved and they would grow rich and secure. Sadly, language has no such magical power. On the other hand, one can take trouble to write accurately and to some useful purpose in any language and this can indeed be helpful.
Kazi Nazrul Islam, almost certainly the most successful Bengali poet with the exception of Tagore, who was constantly expressing his admiration for the person whom he called, uniquely, “the world poet,” has testified that Tagore had altogether transformed the Bengali language.
Into what? The world does not want to learn Bengali. Indeed, the world has little interest in poetry. It is now seen as the sort of thing victims of horrific epistemic sexual self-abuse take up while in rehab.
In many different ways, Tagore’s writings reshaped and reconstructed modern Bengali in a way that only a handful of innovative Bengali writers had done before him,
I suppose Sen means Tagore helped change literary Bengali.
going back all the way, a thousand years earlier, to the authors of Charyapad,
It is likely those 'authors' were spiritual adepts using the vernacular rather than shaping it.
the Buddhist literary classics that first established the distinctive features of early modern Bengali.
No. It merely chronicles those features. A literary language generally diverges from the spoken idiom. Some writers give us snatches of contemporary idioms, some don't. What Tagore does convey very well was the priggishness and bigotry of the upper middle class Bengali patriarch.
Not only is language a part of the story in the contrast between Tagore’s appreciation at home
there is a cult, nothing more.
and the indifference to him abroad, but a related component of the story lies in the extraordinary importance and unusual place of language in Bengali culture in general.
Bengali is a language. It was partitioned on the basis of Religion.
The Bengali language has had an amazingly powerful influence on the identity of Bengalis as a group, on both sides of the political boundary between Bangladesh and India.
Religion has had a more powerful influence. By contrast, Tamil has had an enduring influence on Tamil identity.
In fact, the politically separatist campaign in what was East Pakistan that led to the war for independence, and eventually to the formation of the new secular state of Bangladesh in 1971, was pioneered by the bhasha andolon, the “language movement” in defense of the Bengali language.
The Bangladeshis didn't mind being looted by the West Punjabis. On the other hand, they had no love for Biharis.
The movement started on February 21, 1952, only a few years after the partition of the subcontinent,
four years after Urdu was declared the national language
with a large demonstration at Dhaka University in what was then the capital of East Pakistan (and now of Bangladesh), when the police gunned down a number of demonstrators.
Bengali was given official status in the 1956 constitution, as had been agreed two years previously
This turned out to be a decisive moment in the history of what would later become Bangladesh. February 21 is celebrated each year in Bangladesh as the Language Movement Day, and this has resonance across the world, since that day has been declared by UNESCO as the International Mother Language Day for the world as a whole.
UNESCO truly is shit.
Language has served as a very powerful uniting identity for Muslims and Hindus in Bengal,
No it hasn't. Partition occurred.
and this sense of shared belonging has had a profound impact on the politics of Bengal,
Which is why the Hindu percentage of Bangladesh's population keeps falling- right?
including its commitment to secularism on both sides of the border in the post-partition world.
Bangladesh has a state Religion. It is Islam.
The extraordinary combination of Tagore’s language and themes has had a captivating influence on his Bengali readers.
Perhaps because other Bengali writers are even more boring.
Many Bengalis express their astonishment at the fact that people outside Bengal could fail to appreciate and enjoy Tagore’s writings; and that incomprehension is at least partly due to underestimating the difference that language can make.
People outside Bengal may be under the impression that Bengalis are verbose bores. Maybe that is why they don't want to read Bengali writers.
E.M. Forster noted the barrier of language, as early as 1919, when Tagore was still in vogue, in reviewing the translation of one of Tagore’s great Bengali novels, Ghare Baire, translated in English as The Home and the World. (It would be later made into a fine film by Satyajit Ray.) Forster confessed that he could not make himself like the English version of the novel that he read. “The theme is so beautiful,” he remarked, but the charms have “vanished in translation.”
Forster wrote-
When a writer of Tagore’s genius produces such a sentence as ‘Passion is beautiful and pure—pure as the lily that comes out of the slimy soil; it rises superior to its defilement and needs no Pears’ soap to wash it clean’—he raises some interesting questions.
These are the words of a silly pseudo-revolutionary. He says he wants India to become militarized. Indians would no longer feel ashamed of the 'flag of Passion'- presumably patriotic passion- because they would be actual soldiers rather than metaphorical ones on 'the battlefield of life'. It is perfectly proper for a novelist to depict a shithead as babbling stupid shit. You may say a Doestoevsky or Tolstoy character would not write such nonsense but Russian university students tended to be as bright as fuck. Indian graduates were verbose blathershites when they weren't busily engaged in bucking for bureaucratic promotion or winning cases for their well-heeled clients.
The sentence is not attractive—in fact it is a Babu sentence
uttered by a seditious Babu up to no good
—and what does Tagore, generally so attractive, intend by it.
He is showing that seditious graduates are stupid and dishonest
Is he being dramatic, and providing a Babu of his creation with appropriate English,
Yes. It does not matter than Tagore himself could not have provided better English. What matters is that Sandip speak in the manner actual Sandips of the period spoke.
or is he being satirical, or was there some rococo charm that had vanished in the translation, or is it an experiment that has not quite come off?
Forster is being silly. He thinks that when an Oriental Sage mentions a lily or a lotus then some exquisite sentiment will be expressed. But rogues and charlatans can babble about various blossoms just as easily.
Probably an experiment, for throughout the book one is puzzled by bad tastes that verge upon bad taste
A more charitable reading is that Tagore was trying to warn people of his own class and religion that 'freedom fighters' might cause the Brits to fuck off- in which case Hindu landlords might be killed, their treasuries looted, and their women raped. That's how the novel ends.
The plain fact is that Bengalis of Tagore's class weren't saying anything very interesting or artistic or witty to each other and Tagore's readers knew this very well. I suppose there could have been a Bengali novel about MN Roy's adventures in Mexico. This could have featured crisp exchanges between the Indian revolutionary and Carranza and Borodin. But publishing such a novel would have pushed young Bengalis towards Moscow. It wouldn't have helped Rabi retain his estates.
So the importance of language provides a clue to the eclipse of Tagore in the West, but it cannot be the whole story.
Language doesn't matter. Subject matter does. Novels about hunted revolutionaries girdling the globe during the Great War would have found a ready market. Bengal had a Bruce Lee- Bagha Jatin- and a Scarlet Pimpernel- Rasbehari Bose- and intellectuals like Chatto (who featured in a Somerset Maugham spy story) as well as spiritual sages like Aurobindo who had received shelter from the French in Pondicherry.
Why weren't such novels published? One answer is that only women and kids read Bengali novels. You didn't want to put any ideas into their heads. Another answer is that being boring and vacuous is the badge of buddhijivi virtue.
For one thing, Tagore’s nonfictional prose writings also have a gripping hold on the attention of Bengalis
With the result that they thought writing meaningless vacuous virtue signalling shite represented intellectual achievement.
and also of other Indians, but they are not seen abroad in a similarly admiring way at all. This is so despite the fact that these writings are much easier to translate: indeed, Tagore himself often presented these essays in very effective English about which it would be hard to grumble. In his essays and his lectures, Tagore developed ideas on a remarkably wide variety of subjects—on politics, on culture, on society, on education; and while they are regularly quoted in his homeland, they are very rarely invoked now outside Bangladesh and India.
They are meaningless. Why not just say 'It is nice to be nice. Be nice you stupid cunt!' ?
There has to be something other than the barrier of language in the lack of world attention to Tagore.
He had nothing to say.
And this raises the larger question: how relevant, how important are Tagore’s general ideas?
He kept warning the Hindus what would happen to them if the British left. That was his big idea.
Perhaps the central issues that moved Tagore most are the importance of open-minded reasoning
did this help Sen's people who had to flee the East? Did it help the Jews in Hitler's Germany? I suppose Sen's own father was smart enough to sell up and run away from Dacca before Partition. But an instinct for survival does not require an open mind or, indeed, very much reasoning.
and the celebration of human freedom.
What is the point in celebrating it if- as happened to Tagore's class- their own freedom would diminish as their Nation gained it?
I suppose what Sen means is 'previously we thought writers should praise God. Tagore and Kali Marx and some other guy taught us that instead of praising God we should celebrate human freedom. Also we should pretend our people didn't run away from the Muslims in the East. '
This placed him in a somewhat distinct category from some of his great compatriots. Tagore admired Gandhi immensely, and expressed his admiration of his leadership time and again, and did more than perhaps anyone else in insisting that he be described as “Mahatma”—the great soul.
Gandhi got the title from Munshi Ram who was promoting himself to Swamy status. Neither was a Brahmin. This annoyed the fuck out of Tagore.
And yet Tagore frequently disagreed with Gandhi whenever he thought that the latter’s reasoning did not go far enough.
Tagore thought 'Swaraj' was 'Maya'- delusion. If the Brits left, the Bengali Hindu would get it in the neck. Gujarat was Hindu majority. Gandhi had nothing to lose. In any case, it was obvious that Indians needed to learn a lot from the Brits- e.g. how to acquire and run a Navy- before forcing them to fuck off.
They would often argue with each other quite emphatically. When, for example, Gandhi used the catastrophic Bihar earthquake of 1934 that killed a huge number of people as further ammunition in his fight against untouchability
if people are stupid enough to believe God ordained untouchability why not tell them God is punishing them with earthquakes? Anyway, a 'Mahatma' may have supernatural knowledge of what God, as the only efficient cause, is getting up to in the world.
—he identified the earthquake as “a divine chastisement sent by God for our sins,” in particular the sin of untouchability—Tagore protested vehemently, insisting that “it is all the more unfortunate because this kind of unscientific view of phenomena
is untouchability 'scientific'?
is too readily accepted by a large section of our countrymen.”
A year later, Tagore was begging Gandhi for money. The Mahatma gave him 60,000 because he still had some nuisance value in Bengali politics.
Similarly, when Gandhi advocated that everyone should use the charka—the primitive spinning wheel—thirty minutes a day, Tagore expressed his disagreement sharply.
Back then, Tagore's tenants were still able to service the loans they had taken from his bank. After 1932, this resource failed and so Tagore needed Gandhi's money power.
He thought little of Gandhi’s alternative economics, and found reason to celebrate, with a few qualifications, the liberating role of modern technology in reducing human drudgery as well as poverty. He also was deeply skeptical of the spiritual argument for the spinning wheel: “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.”
This was equally true of Tagore's poetry or Sen's Social Choice papers. Still, Gandhi was liquid. He had donors lining up around the block. Tagore was struggling to keep the lights on at Shantiniketan.
In contrast with Gandhi’s advocacy of abstinence as the right method of birth control, Tagore championed family planning through preventive methods.
As opposed to butt sex.
He was also concerned that Gandhi had “a horror of sex as great as that of the author of The Kreutzer Sonata.” And the two differed sharply on the role of modern medicine, to which Gandhi was not friendly at all.
So guys who call each other 'Mahatma' or 'Gurudev' consider each other to be full of shit. Good to know.
Many of these issues remain deeply relevant today,
Which ones? Contraception? The Charka? No. I suppose Sen means the ability of Hindus to live peacefully in Muslim majority areas. The answer is- 'Sure. Unless the Muslims in question are Bengali.'
but what is important to note here are not the particular views that Tagore advanced in these—and other such—areas, but the organizing principles that moved him.
Why? Did he find the cure for cancer? No, the guy was a landlord with a taste for the arts whom the world has forgotten. Who cares what organizing principle moved him?
The poet who was famous in the West only as a romantic and a spiritualist was in fact persistently guided in his writings by the necessity of critical reasoning
It is only necessary if you are doing something useful or scientific . Art isn't about critical reasoning. It is about emotion and intuitions of an aesthetic type.
and the importance of human freedom.
Everyone who doesn't want to be a slaves understands this importance. How fucking stupid are Bengalis if they need to have a separate 'organizing principle' to remind them not to become the slave of any passer-by?
Also, those were the philosophical priorities that influenced Tagore’s ideas on education, including his insistence that education is the most important element in the development of a country.
But education costs money- as Tagore well knew. Thus what was most important for development was money which is what you get by raising productivity and engaging in commerce.
In his assessment of Japan’s economic development,
Tagore once planned on sending some of his students to Japan to learn about technology. He did send his son and son-in-law to America to study agricultural science.
Tagore separated out the role that the advancement of school education had played in Japan’s remarkable development—an analysis that would be echoed much later in the literature on development. He may have been exaggerating the role of education somewhat when he remarked that “the imposing tower of misery which today rests on the heart of India has its sole foundation in the absence of education,” but it is not hard to see why he saw the transformative role of education as the central story in the development process.
Tagore was not a fool. He was a guy who had spent a lot of time managing a big estate. Lack of money meant people couldn't send their kids to school. Tagore had some notion that he could use tractors and so forth to raise productivity and thus get more money, some of which could be spent on schools. Sadly, agriculture is a complicated business.
Tagore devoted much of his life to advancing education in India and advocating it everywhere.
He set up a couple of schools. The Ramakrishna Mission and the Arya Samaj achieved much more. There is little point advocating stuff which people are too poor to pay for.
Nothing absorbed as much of his time as the school in Santiniketan that he established.
He was absorbed in getting money for himself, his family and his school. However, it must be said, he cared deeply about his estates. He invested his Nobel money in the Bank he set up for his tenants. Sadly its loans became non-performing during the Great Depression'.
He was constantly raising money for this unusually progressive co-educational school. I have to declare a bias here, since I was educated at this school, and my mother was schooled there decades earlier, in what was one of the early co-educational institutions in India.
Lawrence School, Sanawar, established in 1847 is considered the oldest co-ed school. Small schools often educated the daughters of teachers- like Sen's mother- along with the younger boys. But it would be misleading to speak of Shantiniketan as being like a 'co-ed' American College.
After learning that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, Tagore told others about it, or so the story goes, in a meeting of a school committee discussing how to fund a new set of drains that the school needed. His announcement of the recognition apparently took the eccentric form of his saying that “money for the drains has probably been found.”
He gave the money to his Zamindari bank with the School to receive interest on the loan- if any such thing was actually forthcoming.
In his distinctive view of education, Tagore particularly emphasized the need for gathering knowledge from everywhere in the world, and assessing it only by reasoned scrutiny.
as opposed to assessing it by shoving it up your arse. The plain fact is, Tagore didn't have the money to hire teachers of good standard to come and live in a remote area with endemic cholera and other such diseases. Also, the school attracted only delinquents and thickos who had crashed out of more conventional types of schools.
As a student at the Santiniketan school, I felt very privileged that the geographical boundaries of our education were not confined only to India and imperial Britain (as was common in Indian schools then).
Was Sen taught French or Swahili?
We learned a great deal about Europe, Africa, the USA, and Latin America, and even more extensively about other countries in Asia. Santiniketan had the first institute of Chinese studies in India;
Did Sen learn Chinese?
my mother learned judo in the school nearly a century ago; and there were excellent training facilities in arts, crafts, and music from other countries, such as Indonesia.
Yet, the only Shantiniketan students who did well academically were those who were the sons and grandsons of Professors- like Sen and his best friend (with whose wife he would later run off).
Tagore also worked hard to break out of the religious and communal thinking that was beginning to be championed in India during his lifetime—it would peak in the years following his death in 1941, when the Hindu-Muslim riots erupted in the subcontinent, making the partitioning of the country hard to avoid.
The Bengali Hindus in the West of the Province showed no relish for Muslim rule. Sen thinks Tagore would have opposed partition. Sen is wrong.
Tagore was extremely shocked by the violence that was provoked by the championing of a singular identity of people as members of one religion or another,
which is what Islam and Christianity do. The Pope isn't allowed to worship Buddha. The Ayatollah can't take a part-time job as a cantor in a Synagogue.
and he felt convinced that this disaffection was being foisted on common people by determined extremists:
viz. the Muslim League.
“interested groups led by ambition and outside instigation are today using the communal motive for destructive political ends.”
He meant, some stupid agitators are trying to get the Brits to fuck off in which case Tagore would lose his Estates in the East.
Tagore became more and more anxious and disappointed about India and about the world in the years before his death, and he did not live to see the emergence of a secular Bangladesh, which drew a part of its inspiration from his reasoned rejection of communal separatism.
Hilarious! Bangladesh split from Pakistan because it 'rejected separatism'! Did the Biharis there have a wonderful time?
With its independence, Bangladesh chose one of Tagore’s songs (“Amar Sonar Bangla”) as its national anthem, making Tagore possibly the only person in human history who authored the national anthems of two independent countries: India had already adopted another one of his songs as its national anthem.
India defeated the Pakistani Army and liberated Bangladesh. Tagore's song was chosen because the new country needed Indira's India then.
All this must be very confusing to those who see the contemporary world as a “clash of civilizations”—with “Muslim civilization,” “Hindu civilization,” and “Western civilization,” defined largely on religious grounds, vehemently confronting each other.
Only Sen is confused. He doesn't get that Muslim Pakistan has fought four wars against Hindu India. Bangladesh is too weak to try but that might change.
They would also be confused by Tagore’s own description of his own cultural background: “a confluence of three cultures, Hindu, Mohammedan, and British.”
But only the Hindu background mattered. Rabindranath is not a British or Islamic name.
Rabindranath Tagore’s grandfather, Dwarkanath, was well known for his command of Arabic and Persian,
but his knowledge of English is what made him so rich
and Rabindranath grew up in a family atmosphere in which a deep knowledge of Sanskrit and ancient Hindu texts was combined with the study of Islamic traditions as well as Persian literature.
His father knew Persian but he didn't.
It is not so much that Tagore tried to produce a “synthesis” of the different religions (as the great Mughal emperor Akbar had attempted for a time),
the poor fellow was obliged to take over his father's role as head of a Hindu sect
but his reliance on reasoning and his emphasis on human freedom militated against a separatist and parochial understanding of social divisions.
Human freedom means the freedom of human beings to separate themselves into groups and to be just as parochial or socially divided as they please. Tagore wasn't saying everybody should dine in common and sleep in communal dormitories.
If Tagore’s voice was strong against communalism and religious sectarianism, he was no less outspoken in his rejection of nationalism.
Because he'd lose his Estates if the Brits left or the Permanent Settlement was undone.
He was critical of the display of excessive nationalism in India, despite his persistent criticism of British imperialism. And notwithstanding his great admiration for Japanese culture and history, he would chastise Japan late in his life for its extreme nationalism and its mistreatment of China and east and southeast Asia.
The Japanese quaked in their boots at this chastisement- thinks nobody at all. The fact is Japanese atrocities against the Chinese were well publicized in Bengal at that time. Two Bengali Doctors went on a medical mission to help the Chinese along with the immortal Dr. Kotnis.
Tagore also went out of his way to dissociate the criticism of the Raj from any denunciation of British people and British culture.
Because his family had grown rich as compradors and would lose much of their wealth if the Brits departed.
Consider Gandhi’s famous witticism in reply to the question, asked in England, about what he thought of British civilization: “It would be a good idea.” There are some doubts about the authenticity of the story, but whether or not it is exactly accurate, the purported remark did fit with Gandhi’s amused skepticism about claims of British greatness. Those words could not have come from Tagore’s lips, even in jest. While he denied altogether the legitimacy of the Raj,
No he didn't. The Raj, like Swaraj, was an illusion- 'Maya'- Man works his own subjection. Everybody should just listen to Gurudev and do what he tells them and all these so called problems of the modern world will disappear.
Tagore was vocal in pointing out what Indians had gained from “discussions centered upon Shakespeare’s drama and Byron’s poetry and above all.... the large-hearted liberalism of nineteenth-century English politics.”
which was gained in more ample measure by the Americans after they told mad King George to fuck the fuck off.
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 Brits relied on shitty compradors like the Tagores.
Tagore saw the world as a vast give-and-take of ideas and innovations.
His tenants thought he took much and gave little back.
He insisted that “whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin.”
So British Raj is actually Tagore Raj because they are enjoying it too much- innit?
He went on to proclaim, “I am proud of my humanity when I can acknowledge the poets and artists of other countries as my own.
Sen felt prouder of his humanity when he could call the wife of his best friend his own.
Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of man are mine.”
Why not the great glories of womankind?
The importance of such ideas has not diminished in the divisive world in which we now live.
They are useless. Why not have ideas about how everybody should be very nice and that naughtiness should not occur?
If that gives at least a part of the answer to the question of why Tagore still matters,
Sen thinks Tagore matters because Bengalis are so fucking stupid they don't get that they shouldn't incessantly stab each other.
it also puts into sharper focus the strangeness of the eclipse of Tagore in the West after an initial outburst of enthusiasm.
The West does not need a boring beardie to scold it- for a fee.
In explaining what happened to Tagore in the West, it is important to see the one-sided way in which his Western admirers presented him.
He presented himself in a one-sided way. He never talked about what he actually did for a living- viz. squeeze money out of peasants on his Estate- instead he pretended he was a little beam of sunlight.
This was partly related to the priorities of Tagore’s principal sponsors in Europe, such as Yeats and Pound.
Rothenstein was his initial sponsor but the Nobel Prize made Tagore a global celebrity. People like Mussolini made a great fuss of him. Yeats and Pound were not then what they are now in the firmament of English poetry. Anyway, Yeats had been crazy about Mohini Chatterjee. He was bound to fall from some Yogi-bhogi or the other.
They were dedicated to placing Tagore in the light of a mystical religiosity that went sharply against the overall balance of Tagore’s work.
Tagore's big selling point was that he genuinely was the head of a prestigious Hindu sect based in 'the second City of the Empire'.
In Yeats’s case, his single-minded presentation included adding explanatory remarks to the translation of Tagore’s poems to make sure that the reader got the religious point, eliminating altogether the rich ambiguity of meaning in Tagore’s language between love of human beings and love of God.
A good thing, surely? Back then, lots of White folk assumed that Orientals had plenty of concubines, if not catamites.
However, a part of the answer to the puzzle of the Western misunderstanding of Tagore can be found, I think, in the peculiar position in which Europe was placed when Tagore’s poems became such a rage in the West.
Latin America wasn't placed in that position. They were very keen on Tagore.
Tagore received his Nobel Prize only a year before the start in Europe of World War I, which was fought with unbelievable brutality. The slaughter in that war made many intellectuals and literary figures in Europe turn to insights coming from elsewhere, and Tagore’s voice seemed to many, at the time, to fit the need splendidly.
This does not explain why the book was popular before the war and remained popular in places wholly untouched by it.
When, for example, the pocket book of Wilfred Owen, the great anti-war poet, was recovered from the battlefield in which he had died, his mother, Susan Owen, found in it a prominent display of Tagore’s poetry. The poem of Tagore with which Wilfred said good-bye before leaving for the battlefield (it began, “When I go from hence, let this be my parting word”) was very much there, as Susan wrote to Tagore, with those words “written in his dear writing—with your name beneath.”
Sen doesn't say that the line in question is inspired by a line in the Isa Upanishad.
Tagore soon became identified in Europe as a sage with a teaching—a teaching that could, quite possibly, save Europe from the dire predicament of war and disaffection in which it recurrently found itself in the early twentieth century.
No. People who had liked Vivekananda, thought Tagore was his replacement. L.E.J Brouwer was typical in this respect.
This was a far cry from the many-sided creative artist and emphatically reasoned thinker that people at home found in Tagore.
Radhakrishnan thought that publishing a book titled 'the Philosophy of Tagore' would endear him to the Bengalis. He was fortunate that its reception was influenced by Tagore's renunciation of his Knighthood. The Bengalis did make him a Professor and Tagore was indeed pleased with him. He got to present the Hibbert lecture in place of Tagore who was ill and that got him an Oxbridge Professorship. Nobody now thinks of Radhakrishnan as a philosopher. Still, no question, he was one smart dude and ended up occupying the Viceregal Palace.
Even as Tagore urged his countrymen to wake up from blind belief and turn to reason,
after which they were welcome to top themselves if they discovered they had no fucking money
Yeats was describing Tagore’s voice in thoroughly mystical terms: “we have met our own image ... or heard, perhaps for the first time in literature, our voice as in a dream.” There is a huge gulf there.
No. Yeats was responding poetically to the work of another poet because poets are poetical. There is no gulf here whatsoever. Anyway, the Gaels had a notion of 'tuirgen' as 'investigative birth seeking' which had Hindu parallels.
Tagore argued for the courage to depart from traditional beliefs whenever reason demanded it.
Why not argue for making this a traditional belief?
There is a nice little story by Tagore called “Kartar Bhoot,” or “The Ghost of the Leader,” illustrating this point. A wise and highly respected leader who received unquestioned admiration from a community had become, in effect, a kind of tyrant when he lived, and enormously more so after he died.
Tagore's daddy had decided to be a Maharishi. This meant Tagore himself had to ponce about in a kaftan.
The story describes how ridiculously restrained people’s lives became when the dead leader’s recommendations get frozen into inflexible commands. In their impossibly difficult lives, when the members of the community pray to the dead leader to liberate them from their bondage, the leader reminds them that he exists only in their minds—that they are free to liberate themselves whenever they so decide.
By then people had liberated themselves from reading Tagore. The notion that he could write well was just bondage to an illusion from which all can liberate themselves.
Tagore had a real horror of being bound by the past, beyond the reach of present reasoning.
Yet he remained the 'kartar' of a Hindu undivided family and continued to undertake the duties Daddy had assigned him.
Yet Tagore himself did not do much to resist the wrongly conceived reputation as a mystical sage that was being thrust upon him.
He dressed like the head of a religious sect because that is what he was. I suppose, Tagore, like everybody else realized- after about 1932 when it was difficult to squeeze money out of the land- that not just the Raj, Capitalism itself might be doomed. The smart play would to learn about Communism or Mathematical Economics or some other such fraud. I suppose that is what Sen means by 'present reasoning'. Talk the type of bollocks those who pay or protect you like to hear. Make sure it is wholly meaningless. People might think you are merely stupid rather than lazy and greedy.
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