Almost 25 years ago, Prof. Amardeep Singh published a blog-post about Yeats, Tagore & Eliot. Not surprisingly, given that the man teaches Eng Lit, it is ignorant shite.
Yeats had come under the influence of Mohini Chatterjee, whom the Theosophists had briefly promoted as a Messiah, when the latter visited Dublin in 1885. However, as with other artists and poets of the period, it was the spell of Japan- in particular that of Noh- which colored his tribute to his country's Celtic heritage. AE could be said to represent the purer Theosophical stream.
Tagore belonged to an older rival sect- the Brahmo Samaj- established in the Empire's second City- Calcutta. It was boring but by no means as bleak as Buddhism which colored much European reception of Indic spiritually. Politically too, Eliot, who saw himself as a Royalist, Anglo-Catholic, was on the other side of the barricade from the patriotic Indian and Irishman. In philosophy, Tagore was vaguely Theistic, Yeats was Neo-Platonist, while Eliot was a Hegelian idealist of the British type. What of their 'anima' or image or conception of their own female alterity? For Yeats, it is the 'rock born' fatal beauty of Inisfail, for Tagore it is Durga, a nice Bengali Mum only difficult to approach if Death supervenes as Fortress, for Eliot it is a frigidly faithful, singularly unfavored, bride of Christ whom one must tolerate at the breakfast table for the sake of the Son or the Father or a Spirit so thoroughly dispirited as to be merely Holy.
Putting things another way, if Ramanuja's trinity of object, image and mirror is, for Tagore, merely Maya, or transience, whereas, for Eliot, it is the impossibility of Monism (the silly man thought one can't be on both sides of a mirror forgetting that it could be a pocket mirror) save as utter subjection to a Master, while, more frighteningly, for Yeats it was that oneiric war with Ireland's fatal beauties, whose mirror is the stone of destiny all of which militates to the conclusion that, if we are truly Hindu, we must also admit the only effable atomic proposition is that India's national bard is not Tagore but the peacock.
W.B. Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore have a very strong historical and biographical relationship revolving around the fact that Tagore's first champion in the west -- the person most responsible for his initial success outside of India -- was Yeats.
Rothenstein introduced Tagore to London's literary elite. But, it was Tagore's cousin, a painter, who had introduced both Rothenstein and Okakura to the poet. Okakura had been a student of Fenelossa and his 'the Book of Tea' was a big hit in 1906. However, translations of Ramakrishna's and Vivekananda's works had already been well received in the West. Tagore, as the head of an elite Hindu sect, could fill a void left by Vivekananda's death. Also, unlike Mohini Chatterjee, he wasn't fucking White women.
I should mention that European belles lettrists- like Keyserling & Rolland- would have taken up that daft beardie in any case. Keyserling had met the fellow in Calcutta in 1912. My point is, if the Brits hadn't taken notice of the dude, the fucking Germans would have tried to become his 'tekhedars' or monopolists.
After reading some of Tagore's self-translated poems, Yeats was instrumental in getting the collection published, in spreading the word about Tagore in the literary circles in London.
So was Ezra Pound who met Tagore through Yeats. I may mention that Yeat's father had done a portrait of Sarojini Naidu for her first collection which came out in 1905. Naidu persuaded Fenelossa's widow to entrust her husband's manuscripts to Ezra Pound. They became the basis of this 'Cathay' which came out in 1915.
Perhaps most importantly, Yeats wrote the introduction to Tagore's Gitanjali, which first appeared in 1913.
Why was this important? Suppose Arthur Symons had written the introduction- as he did for Naidu- would the outcome have been different? The answer, I think, is yes. The Brits, at that time, favored an imperial division of labor in which the Irish would concentrate on being poets and wits while the Indians were welcome to have the monopoly on Spirituality. Needless to say, both must be ruled by the phlegmatic Anglo-Saxon, the better to concentrate on their 'comparative advantage'. Sadly, the Great War put an end to Pax Britannica. Ireland became free though, in India, the maha-crackpot was able to delay matters.
The introduction is notable for a number of reasons, one of which is of course its ecstatic enthusiasm for a writer that no one in England had ever heard of.
Amardeep doesn't get that the introduction to a book published by a new author is always an introduction of that sort. Indeed, introductions are generally only required if we have not previously heard of the person in question. On the other hand, it may be that Amardeep is in the habit of introducing his Mummy to his Daddy anytime the latter walks into the room.
The introduction may also be problematic in certain ways,
because Yeats was White. Whitey be debil.
especially insofar as it represents Tagore as culturally other and, as outside of history.
Tagore came from a different culture which is why he normally wrote in a different language. Nobody in England thought Bengal was 'outside of history' because they had been ruling it for 150 years.
Before exploring how this is the case, however, it might be useful to look at the preface in some more detail.
Yeats, as an Irishman, was pretending he knew nothing of India. This is because, by popular belief, the Irish were as thick as shit.
To begin with, Yeats performs a kind of cultural translation of Tagore, and locates him in a context that will be familiar to English readers.
No. Yeats utters an 'Irish bull' which, however, was not pregnant. He says to an Indian Doctor ' An Englishman living in London in the reign of Richard the Second had he been shown translations from Petrarch or from Dante, would have found no books to answer his questions, but would have questioned some Florentine banker or Lombard merchant as I question you.
Fuck off! Every Englishman knows that the guy you needed to talk to would be Geoffrey fucking Chaucer who translated bits of Petrarch and Dante. Still, I suppose, back then, if you were a Mick, you had to pretend to be as thick as shit. You couldn't say 'to learn more about Tagore, I talked to the Professor of Bengali at London University.' People might remember that Yeats was a Protestant of sound Anglo-Saxon stock. He was merely pretending to be a leprechaun so as to make himself interesting.
Yeats' aim is to make Tagore seem respectable,
This could be easily done by mentioning his grandfather, 'Prince' Dwarkanath, who was received by Queen Victoria and King Louis Phillipe. Yeats was trying to make out that the Tagores were an ancient lineage of Druids to whom the squirrels came for their ablutions and upon whom doves alighted the more comfortably to defecate.
and as such it is absolutely crucial that the Indian he speaks to about Tagore be modern in some way -- and he is, "a distinguished Bengali doctor of medicine."
i.e. the sort of chap you have to see if you get the clap.
But the first voice in Yeats' introduction is his own, and it is quite emphatically approving. Yeats never hesitated to dismiss writing he didn't like, even if others around him approved of it, and yet he begins with Tagore as follows:
Though these translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years, I shall not know anything of his life,
it did not occur to Yeats to ask that big beardie about his life when he met him. Incidentally, there had been a couple of Indian Members of Parliament by then.
and of the movements of thought that have made them possible, if some Indian traveller will not tell me.
Other people found out about Russia and America and China by reading books. Yeats was too stupid.
Note that Yeats' attraction to Tagore's poetry is directly linked to a desire to know more about Tagore the man.
Yeats is using the pseudo-Biblical language of Wilde's 'De Profundis'. He come across as totes gay for the big beardie.
Is it simply a natural desire to know more about the poet, out of a sense of simple admiration, or is it something more -- is it possible that the poems are only interesting insofar as they are attached to their author?
Yes, if they are written by the head of a religious sect and the content of the poetry is spiritual or theistic. Similarly, we may read Steven Hawkins book about Time because he is a great Physicist. We would be less interested in his views about body building.
[A general question about authorship, not limited to this particular pair of writers: does it matter who the author of a given text is?
Yes, if the text is supposed to be authoritative rather than entertaining.
Or are we merely interested in the texts they've produced?
We are only interested in other similar texts an entertaining or authoritative author has produced. I will read JK Rowling's latest Harry Potter novel. I won't read her shopping lists.
Why does biography matter?
They don't unless they are informative or entertaining.
…. Perhaps it matters because it can in fact help us to read.]
Amardeep means that knowing more about an author can help you to understand or appreciate his oeuvre better. Sadly, his own work shows the opposite may also be the case.
Through the Bengali doctor, Yeats also puts Tagore in a religious context right away:
Because the great big beardie was swanning around in a kaftan. This was because he was the head of a Religious sect.
'A little while ago he [Tagore] was to read divine service in one of our churches -- we of the Brahmo Samaj use your word "church" in English
There had been a proposal, made by an American who went mad, to merge the Brahmo Samaj with the Unitarian Church. But this would have meant low-caste Indian Christians muscling their way in, so Rabi's brother put the kybosh on the proposal.
In part this is important because it names Tagore as a person who practices his religion in a "church,"
rather than a brothel. You mustn't raise expectations too high.
a religious body that is specifically modeled after the Christian mold, even if its practitioners would not identify as Christian.
Yeats knew that Rajaramohan Roy had influenced the Unitarians- e.g. Emerson. He wasn't genuinely stupid. Few Irishmen are.
It may seem like an incidental reference, but in a twenty page introduction Yeats is very spare on the details of Tagore's life as an Indian.
Because he was making him out to be a Christ like figure much loved by squirrels and other such woodland creatures. This also meant he had no time to join one of those nasty Revolutionary societies, like the one responsible for the slaying of Curzon Wylie, ADC to his Excellency, the Viceroy.
In mentioning the Brahmo Samaj, Yeats is hitting on a major biographical point about Tagore.
The fact that he was the son of his daddy who, strangely enough, was the son of his own daddy.
Tagore's family helped to found a reformist sect of Hinduism in Bengal, known as the Brahmo Samaj, which by the late nineteenth century had several thousand followers, mainly from that region. The members of the Brahmo Samaj (or the Brahmoists) were the elites of the state.
Some were rich. One or two were royal. Most were solidly middle class.
Many of them studied in English missionary schools,
the richest studied in English medium schools their own ancestors had set up
and worked closely with the British administration
some worked for it. Big landlords were often also Honorary Magistrates. Some were appointed to various administrative or executive councils
(by the early twentieth century the majority of administrative jobs in the vast English administrative apparatus in India were actually held by Indians).
This has always been the case. The upper cadres did sport a small number of natives but intensive Indianization only occurred at a later date.
The Brahmo Samaj emerged as a response to the pressure of British unitarian missionaries,
No. Raja Ramohan Roy helped the Unitarians in their polemic against the larger established sects as well as the Evangelicals- e.g. Baptists, Methodists etc.
who attempted to prove to the Indians that Christianity was a more rational and coherent faith than the complex array of rituals, beliefs, and religious texts that made up Hinduism.
The Brahmos, like the Arya and Prarthana Samajis, were actually trying to Islamicize Hinduism by getting rid of 'idol worship'.
The Brahmoists distilled Hindu pantheism with a more monotheistic emphasis on "Brahma"; they attempted to abolish the "irrational" social hierarchy of the caste system;
Nope. The Maharishi wanted the higher ranks of the Samaj to remain Brahmin. Keshab Chandra Sen- a Kayastha- was told to fuck the fuck off.
and they designed a new kind of temple that strongly resembled protestant churches.
i.e. were ugly and boring.
A Christianizing of Hinduism -- or an Indianizing of Christianity.
Tagore was not a fan of the 'Christian Sanyasi' Brahmabandhab Upadhyay who abandoned Brahmoism for Catholicism before re-converting to orthodox Hinduism before his death in 1907.
By the time Tagore began to write (1880s-1930s), the Brahmo Samaj was also a hotbed for anti-British sentiments.
No. It was as loyalist as the Indian National Congress. It was Hindu Sanyasis and then Vivekananda and Aurobindo who were revolutionaries.
The climate in Bengal was intensely political,
at the time of the anti-partition 'Swadesi' agitation between 1905-11
and Tagore was for a time a leading figure in the emerging movement for Indian independence.
No. His sympathies may have been with Vivekanand and Jugantar but he kept his nose clean.
By 1910 Tagore had, however, distanced himself from nationalist politics that was becoming more and more oriented towards the masses (and less an affair of the elite classes).
His estates were in the Muslim dominated East. He understood that the educated Hindus were alienating the Muslims. His novel 'Gora' makes this point. A little later, 'Ghare Bhaire' ends with Muslims slaughtering the stupid Hindus who had indulged in talk of 'swaraj'.
Nevertheless, the fact that Tagore was in many ways a political person brings us to a question about the nature of Yeats' representation of him.
Nope. Yeats, being Irish, knew very well that Bengal too could only get Independence at the price of Partition. He himself, though Protestant, sided with the Catholic majority South. Tagore didn't have that luxury. He was an actual landlord- like Countess Cathleen- and his tenants might either perish of starvation or else, egged on by their Mullahs, slaughter the Hindu landlords and steal their wealth.
'In your country is there much propagandist writing, much criticism? We have to do so much, especially in my own country, that our minds gradually cease to be creative, and yet we cannot help it. If our life was not a continual warfare, we would not have taste, we would not find hearers and readers.
Yeats and Joyce have chronicled those bitter years in literary Dublin. The Indian Doctor hints that the Ramayana and Mahabharata were being used to fuel patriotic- i.e. anti-British- feeling in India. I suppose he was thinking of Vivekandanda and, the Irish, Sister Nivedita.
Note that Yeats is here making two points: one about political rhetoric and propaganda, and another about the endless debates over aesthetics and literary value that circulated in Yeats' circle.
There is only one point being made here. All of Europe was aware of the cult of the assassin and the manner in which certain avant garde poets and novelists had contributed to it. Around the time Yeats was writing this, some Bengalis tried to kill the Viceroy. But as in Ireland (the Phoenix Park murders) the thing could be either counterproductive or else presage anarchy.
Yeats' assumption throughout his introduction is that Tagore's writing is apolitical and outside of the mundane realm of daily life,
This is because Tagore said as much in plain terms. He was against nationalism because it was Imperialism which kept him safe and solvent.
the product of a soul untarnished by mediocrity:
who wants to read a mediocre poet?
'These verses will not lie in little well-printed books with indolent hands that they may sigh over a life without meaning, which is yet all they can know of life, or be carried about by students at the university when the true work of life begins,
Amardeep misses out 'to be laid aside' when the true work of life begins
but as the generations pass, traveller will hum them on the highway and men rowing upon the rivers.
Amardeep adds 'rowing'. Clearly, he feels Yeats's English requires correcting.
Each of Yeats' fantasies about the life of Tagore's poems
what fantasies? It is a fact that Rabi wrote songs some of which are indeed hummed by Bengali dudes as they trudge homeward upon the highway or ply their oars upon rivers.
(which in many ways echoes the aspirations he had for the effect of his own work on his readers)
No. Yeats had a different aspiration. He was an 'Art for Art's sake' dude though much taken with Neo-Platonic magik like his rival- Aleister Crowley.
attempts to move Tagore out of a given place and away from a given time.
This is wholly false. Yeats emphasizes Tagore's rootedness in his own native soil. It is a different matter that his songs will live on from age to age. But that was equally true of Sappho.
To be more specific, Yeats moves Tagore outside of and away from the present moment;
No. He says Tagore's poetry is univocal with that of the Age of Faith- before Martin fucking Luther fucked everything up.
all of the names of writers to whom Yeats compares Tagore are of the Renaissance, the medieval period, or antiquity.
So, they are pre-Reformation. Had there been no Protestantism, Ireland would have been united and opulent. Fuck you Luther! Fuck you very much!
Yeats, we might say, wants to turn Tagore into a kind of medieval sage, playing a lute by a river.
No. He would be meditating by a river while various birds and woodland critturs perched upon him.
And yet it's not that simple. Part of what Yeats finds so appealing is the accessibility of the writing,
because it was meant to be accessible and appealing.
the sense of spiritual immediacy
there is a sense of the tears at the heart of things. But there is no sense of immediacy. We would say Tagore's poems are about 'birha'- love in separation. True, we decided the 'Viyogini' is superior to the Yogi a thousand years ago, but that means waiting is better than arriving. Christ bids the beloved disciple tarry till the end of the World.
even as he continues to rely upon the assumption that the culture of the poet is in fact alien to the west:
Amardeep assumes that Bengali culture isn't alien to American people. That is why Biden wears saree.
'A whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us, seems to have been taken up into this imagination; and yet we are not moved because of its strangeness, but because we have met our own image
Yeats is invoking the Pre-Raphelites. This was foolish. Tagore may have been a bore but he was never precious or narcissistic. Rossetti dug up Lizzie's grave to retrieve some poems he had interred with her. Tagore showed no similar penchant to comb through his wife's ashes so as to find a lapidary phrase. It must be said, even in materialistic London, most dudes are more like Tagore rather than Rossetti.
Still, in this passage from Gitanjali, which Yeats quotes we do find something very strange indeed.
He often seems to contrast his life with that of those who have lived more after our fashion, and have more seeming weight in the world, and always humbly as though he were only sure his way is best for him: “Men going home glance at me and smile and fill me with shame.
Clearly, Tagore is some sort of elderly rent-boy. In London, it is uncommon for men, going home, to smile or wink at me even when I am clean shaven.
I sit like a beggar maid, drawing my skirt over my face,
thus exposing her genitals. Again, this is not usual behaviour on the London tube- except perhaps on certain stretches of the Bakerloo line.
and when they ask me, what it is I want, I drop my eyes and answer them not.”
Back in 1982, as a junior auditor, I got on an Epsom bound train to visit a client. A school girl came and sat opposite me. When my glance fell upon her, she lifted her skirt to display her vagina. She smiled encouragingly and pointed it out to me so there could be no mistaking her intent. I hurriedly left the compartment. It was later explained to me that some prostitutes frequented that particular train service. The trollop had mistaken me for some sort of Arab (back then, only Arabs, had any money) and this was the reason she was behaving like Tagore. Sadly, because she didn't have a big beard, she was not given a Nobel Prize. Personally, I blame Mrs. Thatcher. She was a disaster for the working classes of this country- more particularly those of us who lost our jobs because it was discovered we couldn't actually do Arithmetic.
For Yeats, Tagore's writing is at once "immeasurably strange"
because Rudyard Kipling wasn't incessantly raising his skirt and pointing at his vagina
and directly reflective of the western culture he himself seems so ambivalent about.
He was enriching Western culture. There can be no ambivalence about that.
Tagore is both in and out of the idea of the ideal poet
spiritual poet
Yeats is attempting to figure in this introduction; he is both a "reflection" of western aesthetic values
No. Yeats says that a true grasp of western aesthetic values enables one to enter strange and distant lands limned by poets whose native tongue we do not know, such that, so to speak, we hear our own voice returning to us from that oneiric, perhaps incompossible, realm.
[Yeats is looking in the mirror; all of the ecstatic praise he lavishes on Tagore he also means, therefore, to lavish on himself!]
We may indeed congratulate ourselves on understanding a mathematical theorem or mystical text of great authority. For a moment we have 'participated' (methexu) in the mind of a Master Spirit.
, and a kind of prism through which we might perceive something other.
Only if there really is something on the other side of it. I suppose what Amardeep means is 'ipseity is good. Alterity is bad. Whitey be debil due to he sees us darkies as 'other'. Fuck you Whitey! Fuck you very much!'
Though Yeats does at moments reveal his desire to find in Tagore a reflection of the European self-image,
He reveals it to Amardeep only because Amardeep has done a lot of research on Yeats. Did you know the fellow was White? Also, he had a penis. White penises are very evil. The created 'colonial epistemology'. They forced brown peeps to choose to have either a vagina or a dick. Previously, darkies changed gender as their mood dictated. Colonial authorities instituted a strict surveillance of genitals so as to enforce gender conformity.
in general it is clear that Yeats wants Tagore to be more mystical than Tagore the person is;
The fucker was the hereditary head of a mystical sect! That's why he had a long beard and ponced around in a kaftan.
he wants Tagore to be a kind of Oriental sage or saint, all spirit and no body.
Sadly, oriental sages have bodies which is why so many of them end up in Court for statutory rape.
But this image of a saint, which was precisely what made Tagore so marketable throughout Europe and America in the 1910s, bore little resemblance to Tagore in his home environment.
In Bengal, Tagore dressed like Annie Oakley. True, he would lift his skirt to cover his face while robbing stage-coaches but if you tried to take a peek at his genitals, he would shoot your eyes out.
[Of course, we can't forget the fact that to a large extent Tagore specifically chose and exploited this "Oriental" image of himself, downplaying his worldly investments in politics,
He had no such investments though he did accept a Knighthood for services to literature. He returned it after Jallianwallah Bagh. The dude was righteous enough.
in favor of the attributes of a saint. He did, after all, choose to translate the generally apolitical poems of Gitanjali to make his entrée onto the western scene -- rather than one of the political novels he had written and published in Bengali in the previous decade.]
Tagore was experimenting with writing in English. Gitanjali could be called 'transcreations'- i.e. most of the poems have no exact Bengali equivalent. Tagore's novels weren't political though 'Gora' does warn against pissing off the Brits who, as his grandfather said, were the only force capable of safeguarding Hindu purses and penis fore-skins.
Rather than rejecting modernity, Tagore was a person passionately committed to public debate and print culture.
So were the ancient Greeks and Indians who had no print culture. The hall-mark of modernity is the easy availability of escapist fiction. Why debate shit if you aren't a fucking lawyer or a politician?
Most critics today think of him as first and foremost a novelist rather than a poet.
No one thinks that. His novels are shit. His songs are good- if you like mournful shite.
Moreover, in his Bengali language writings, Tagore was a master stylist, who used many radical, expressly modernist methods, in his Bengali language texts.
He was a prolific composer and lyricist. Some considered his Bengali to be not quite correct. But he didn't stand out as an innovator in the way Madhusudhan did.
All of this, however, drops out in the translated Tagore that we have in Gitanjali.
Tagore's English was good enough. Prose poems were coming into vogue. Anyway, he was the head of a Religious sect. If Kayasths and Baidyas can get money from selling spirituality to the West, why not a Brahmin?
This brings us to the poems -- what do we do with them? Many of them, in my opinion, do not carry much weight in English.
But Amardeep's opinion carries no weight. Yeats and Pound's opinions do.
Also, the fact that Tagore chooses to translate his pronouns using archaic forms ("thou" and "thy" instead of you and your), makes the language seem at times unpleasantly lofty.
No. It clarifies that the beloved is God.
Still, there are some startling bits of language. For instance, take poem 96:
When I go from hence let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable.
If Amardeep were a Hindu he'd understand that this is the Upanishadic- purnam adah, purnam idam purnat purnam udachyate; purnasya purnam adaya purnam evavasisyate- however, there is a Sufi/Baul twist. The meaning is that the poet/sage will attain samadhi on that full moon night when all see the Lord clearly- not as in a glass darkly. In other words, hermeneutics ends with an egalitarian univocity.
And there may be others? [Class?]
A class taught by this dunce would become more imbecilic yet.
But what I think is most striking, and perhaps most specifically modernist about the poems, is the ongoing theme of the rejection of institutional, ritualized religion that we find in a number of them.
The novel 'Gora' ends when the Irish dude gives up 'Sanathan dharma' for Brahmoism. The joke was that Rabi's cult was more casteist than that of the Kayasth Vivekananda.
Most emphatically:
'Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!
Why not? God is everywhere
'He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the path-maker is breaking stones.
Does he lend a hand? That would be cool. It would save the landlord or the Highway Department a lot of money.
He is with them in the sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!
Tagore didn't take off his kaftan to take up ditch-digging.
'Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found?
After death. Prior to that, we have other more pressing engagements.
'Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation; he is bound with us all for ever.
To be fair, if you happen to be a big zamindar who is also posing as the head of a religious sect, you may have to tell your tenants to get back to work, you lazy sods. Stop praying. Jesus or Buddha or whoever will turn up to lend you a hand. That's also the reason I'm not going to pay you the full rate.
'Come out of thy meditations and leave aside the flowers and incense!
Wives, in those days, used to get a bit of respite from household chores by sitting in the Puja Room offering flowers and incense to the idols there. This irked their husbands. Darling, why don't you go out and dig some ditches? God will definitely bless you if you do so.
'What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained?
It's no skin off my nose whatsoever. Also, what harm is there if I take all your money and spend it on booze? Seriously. Why not transfer all your savings to me? Then you can fuck off and dig ditches along with God or Satan or Santa Claus or whoever.
'Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.'
Tolstoy, too, owned a lot of land. But he was genuinely mentally ill.
In some ways, poem XI is simply arguing against asceticism, against the isolation of human experience from the everyday and natural world.
Tagore is saying 'quit being a Sanatani Hindu. Join my sect. Why not transfer all your assets to it? After that you and God and Santa fucking Claus can go dig ditches.
It is a rhetoric familiar from Romanticism
No. It is familiar from the Benedictines and even earlier ascetic communities
– one sees here traces of William Blake’s radicalism, for instance.
Blake thought sex was cool. Tagore, not so much.
But the details of the Hindu ritual (“chanting and singing and telling of beads”),
Amardeep hasn't noticed that Christians and Muslims 'chant and sing' and have rosaries.
and the spatial opposition between the “dark corner of a temple” and the open field are important because they particular to the Hindu context
No. There are plenty of Islamic and Christian poems which denounce the 'munafiq' or 'whited sepulcher' and suggest that the Imam or the Bishop should just very kindly fuck off and dig some nice ditches already.
– something Yeats does not address.
Amardeep thinks that in Yeats's Ireland Churches had no dark corners. Also, there were no open fields. The whole place had been turned into a glass-house.
Interestingly, the opposition here is not that of a hard asceticism contrasted with a soft Romanticism.
The opposition is between praying and doing manual labor.
Rather, it is posed as the distinction between “flowers and incense”
which are 'consumption goods'
and the “hard ground,”
which is a factor of production
the life of everyday toil.
i.e. manual labor.
It is not nature that intoxicates
it is wine or drugs- which are the product of labor
and is “soft,”
bits of nature are soft enough
but the ascetic life, caged by mind-numbing ritual.
Ritualism does not entail ascetism. My dear friend, Queen Marie Antoinette, often speaks of having to attend banquets and balls as a 'mind-numbing ritual', but I remind her that she still owes me a tenner and so should go back to lifting her skirt to cover her face till some nice Arab gentleman does the needful. I may mention that my friend is a Gujarati queen. That is why I lent him the money. Normally, Gujjus can be trusted in such matters.
Tagore, in other words, is inviting the addressee of the poem to come into the world, to experience life as she (?) or he knows it, rather than remain caged up in the hard world of beads and incense.
Amardeep doesn't get that counting beads and lighting joss sticks ain't hard work. Digging ditches is. Tagore sent his son and son-in-law to study agronomy in Amrika. Sadly, they were shit at the subject and so his pal, Leonard Elmhirst, had to take over Sriniketan. The manual work he had to do there, to make it financially viable, involved ploughing his wife- an American heiress.
If it's an appeal to the reader/listener to come into a version of modernity,
Sadly, no reader/listener of Tagore or Yeats has the choice of rejecting modernity and moving back to Times of Yore.
it's a very different kind of image than the bleak modernism of Yeats or Eliot.
Yeats isn't bleak. Cuchulainn isn't a ten bob a week clerk. He is an ancient Irish warrior. Fergus, when not ruling the brazen cars, isn't a bus conductor. Countess Cathleen, on the other hand, does run a laundromat in Willesden Green.
It might be worth commenting for a moment on Eliot,
who knew Sanskrit and who had a PhD in philosophy. Incidentally, he audited three lectures Tagore gave at Harvard in 1913. It is possible that Eliot also knew of some German work on the Sama Veda which might have influenced his own technique. What is certain is that he knew that, by the end of the Twenties, Bengal's own 'Adhunikta' modern young poets worshipped him and Pound while reviling Tagore. Tagore responded, intelligently enough, by using Pound's translation of Li Po's 'River merchant's wife' to justify the view that modernism didn't mean rushing too and from the brothel while trying to find sufficiently repulsive descriptors for the leper's sores or the syphilitic's nose as emblematic of Golden Bengal's fate under Capitalism's final phase.
specifically the final 30 lines or so of the Waste Land.
Since 'Waste Land' in 1922 conjured up images of the 'No Man's land' of the Western Front and since the goriest description, in World Literature, of such a place is given in the Mahabharata, Eliot's knowledge of that Sanskrit epic had salience.
Why, many people have asked, does Eliot turn at the climax of his poem to a seemingly obscure set of terms and images derived from Indian geography (the Ganges River [Ganga]), and Hindu scripture (the Upanishads)?
Because he knew Sanskrit. His references aren't obscure at all to people who know that language. One may say that Eliot was taking up where Matthew Arnold had left off with respect to the Gita. The difference was, Eliot was taking a high Tory line. Why? The enemy was not the smug self-satisfaction of the bourgeoisie. It was the collapse of all moral authority.
Perhaps it is a gesture somewhat similar to the double-gesture Yeats is making in his introduction to Tagore's Gitanjali.
Perhaps Amardeep is full of shit.
That is to say, Eliot is using the example of Hindu religion and philosophy to articulate an idea both alien to the European landscape of his poem,
Back then, lots of Europeans still thought Sanskrit was their own original language. Clearly, there had ben something like Ragnorok- a cosmic conflict or 'vishodhana' blood-letting as at Kurukshetra. What would emerge from it? Palingenesis- as in mere repetition? Sadly, yes. There was a Second World War. Thankfully, as Oppenheimer noted at Los Alamos, Krishna became Death, destroyer of Worlds, and thus us boomers have been spared a third European conflagration.
and yet somehow natural to it.
Come to think of it, there were plenty of Sikh soldiers on the Western front.
The emphasis on the river echoes other parts of the poem that figure the Thames (and this might also remind us of the two rivers in Heart of Darkness: the Thames and the Congo -- connected waterways):
Eliot did use 'Mistah Kurtz, he dead' as the epigraph of 'Hollow Men'.
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves [note the reference to the jungle in
leaves]
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant. [Himalayas -- obscure word]
The jungle crouched, humped in silence [note the anthropomorphism of the
Jungle]
DA
I suppose Eliot had read about the monsoon. But then a lot of people had read Kipling's Jungle Book. Still, the fact is, Eliot had studied this particular Upanishadic text at Harvard. His Professor, Elmer More, was a good poet. I still quote some of his translations of Brhratrhari in preference to my own. But this is because they aren't in Bhratrhari at all.
In some ways the weaving of eastern and western ideas is embedded in etymology here.
Back then, lots of people did a bit of Sanskrit as part of their introduction to 'scientific' philology. The Germans set that trend.
The root of the three Sanskrit words, echoed in all-caps several times in these final lines, is exactly the same Indo-European root as the word that produces the English word "data" and "mandatory." [Latin: Do, Dare]
Da/do means give or grant. A datum is something everybody takes for granted. What is mandatory is specified by the authority which gives the power to act for some particular purpose.
"Give" in Sanskrit is also give in English. It may seem obscure of Eliot to go in this direction (is it any more obscure than Greek, German, Spanish, Italian, Latin, and French?),
Only Sanskrit has this particular story of the three meanings of 'what the Thunder said'. Eliot could have gone to no other language to invoke a Scripture written in that language. Still, I suppose, Amardeep would accuse us of 'obscurity' if we say 'Sat Sri Akal' to him rather than ' suges gallus meus' which is Latin for 'mera lund choos' and the polite way of greeting an Iyengar wot went to fucking Modern School on Barakhamba Road.
but the buried meaning in this particular language underscores interconnectedness and integration rather than disharmony or fragmentation.
There is no 'buried meaning'. God tells the denizens of Heaven to go easy on the booze and the sex. Humans are counselled to be charitable. Demons might try showing a bit of compassion instead of incessantly sticking their pitchforks up the arses of the damned. Eliot isn't obscure at all.
In terms of imagery, note the similarity to the image of the west: sunken, limp. Strangely sexualized
There is a bit of homoeroticism in the Wasteland. Back then homosexuality was criminalized so poets had to pretend to be into it.
… infertility.
The Fisher King- sure. Eliot explains it.
The larger arc of the passage: If the Ganga is waiting for rain, does the rain begin to fall?
Only after the lightening and the thunder- if it is lucky.
Perhaps the idea of shantih -- peace ("the peace which passeth understanding" actually from Job 37:5) -- is not so much an image of a redemptive rain, signifying completion, as it is a kind of stoppage or final renunciation.
For Theists- and the Gita is not just Theist it is occassionalist- God's Grace is as the gratuitous gift of rain to a parched land.
Perhaps the idea of "shantih," which Eliot finds untranslatable,
Nope. He says 'peace that passeth understanding' is a feeble translation of the content of the word. For edumicated dude- like Eliot- the association is with Irene and the collocation 'peace and prosperity'. The problem was that the Great War had proved far more costly than anybody had envisaged in 1914.
is one he means to apply or direct towards the western world he has been attempting to represent.
The first volume of Spengler's 'Decline of the West' (whose title invokes 'the twilight of the Gods' as well as Nietzsche's nuttiness) had come out in 1918. America had returned to prosperity but Eliot, a banker by profession, knew of the parlous state of Europe's finances.
An ancient, "other" term for modernity, and for Europe.
Not Eliot's Europe. Their had been an Armistice and then the unilateral imposition of the exact opposite of what President had called 'peace without victory'- i.e. a lasting settlement acceptable to all sides. Eliot was the poet who best captured the European interregnum when neither War nor Peace reigned. There was merely an uneasy post-prandial nap for some while, for the many-too-many, sleep punctuated the rage of an empty belly.
Eliot, of course, was familiar with the Mahabharata's 'Shanti parva'. As a 'Royalist', he thought the ruler (or ruling class) has certain duties to the great unwashed. Sadly, he hailed from a Republic which turned its back on its duties not just to Europe but also to itself. But England, too, like the amnesiac in James Hilton's 'Random Harvest', aspired to nothing higher than a 'long golden afternoon of declining effort and increasing rewards'. Still, more fortunate than Tagore's own 'bhadralok' zamindar caste, the Brits were able to regain their sense of national honor by standing up to Hitler and standing up all the more stubbornly when allies they had none. I imagine some of Amardeep's own ancestors displayed their valor on European battlefields.
I think it was in 1943 that Eliot wrote the following lines- perhaps to oblige Cornelia Sorabjee who had to run away from India after coming out in support of Katherine Mayo's 'Mother India'.
This was not your land, or ours: but a village in the Midlands,
And one in the Five Rivers, may have the same graveyard.
Let those who go home tell the same story of you:
Of action with a common purpose, action
None the less fruitful if neither you nor we
Know, until the judgement after death,
What is the fruit of action.
This isn't particularly good but when we recall that Eliot could have fled to America before the Blitz, we feel these lines are heart-felt. As for Tagore, he was fortunate to die before he saw a Muslim League Government in Bengal preside over, first a Famine, and then a pogrom of Hindus in Calcutta, which, sadly, not even the buddhijivi Brahmos, or his cretinous Commie nephew, could prevent from turning into a slaughter of the resident Muslims thus preserving that great city for the Indian Union- at least for the time being.
No comments:
Post a Comment