Sen on Tagore's Childhood

Tagore hadn't been happy at any of the schools  he was sent to and, once his mother died, he was educated at home from about the age of 14. It appears he was weak in English. His third brother- who was attracted to scientific research- arranged various classes for him. At the age of 17 he was sent to England where he attended some lectures on English literature given by Henry Morley at UCL. I suppose the plan was for him to qualify as a barrister. However, his father decided he would be more usefully employed looking after the family estates back home. This suggests that he was of good character and sound understanding but not particularly 'academic' or attracted by the prospect of a glittering career as a leading advocate. Hearteningly, Tagore makes it clear that he was affectionately treated by his English hosts. He spontaneously came to love and understand their culture though he had no regrets in returning to rural Bengal and the unglamorous occupation of rent-collector. 

Is there a connection between Tagore's unhappiness at schools in Calcutta with his decision to make Shantiniketan a school rather than a Vedic patshala? Not really. His father wanted a patshala but it would have imposed too big a financial burden. Tagore had some notion that maybe kids from his school could go off to Japan or America and learn engineering or agronomy or other such useful stuff. 

I may mention, Tagore says that, as a child, he used to pretend to be a teacher and would terrorize the columns of the banister which were meant to be his pupils. Thankfully, no such sadistic intention inspired the creation of Shantiniketan which Tagore turned into a school for his sons and other relatives or associates- more particularly those whose sons were delinquents or irremediably stupid. (I should explain, if the family had set up a patshala, they would have had to pay to train the priests and then pay to keep them fed- i.e. such education would have been a complete drain on the family's income) 

Not all Shantiniketan's pupils were cretins. The  sons (or grandsons) of teachers at Shantiniketan were likely to be smart since they would inherit little wealth and thus needed to pass exams or else acquire artistic skills. 

Amartya Sen, famously, was one such gifted pupil as was his best friend- whose wife he later ran off with. He says of Tagore's account of his boyhood published shortly before his own death that 'it is an odd book.'

I suppose he means it is impressionistic and dwells on things we don't associate with Tagore- e.g. a childish belief in ghosts and monsters. Still, the fact is, Tagore could take pride in the fact that students at his school were free of such superstitions. Also, they didn't feel they were worthless if they could not rival the achievements of young boys who rubbed snuff in their eyes to keep awake while burning the midnight oil. 

Obviously, Tagore’s own account of his childhood days has intrinsic interest of its own, but it also tells us something about the development of the priorities that deeply influenced his later life.

I suppose, if one had to write a school essay on this topic, we could say Tagore rejected servility, rote-learning and blind acceptance of authority on the basis of his earliest experiences. As against superstitious and ritualistic practices, he affirmed instead man's participation in God who is the universal witness. 

On the other hand, since Tagore was a poet and song-writer, what we find in the book is a lyrical description of the circumstances in which he attracted the attention of the Muses. I thought it interesting that it was a teacher at the Normal School who first praised Tagore's handling of the traditional 14 syllable poetic form. However, it was the very simple rustic Bengali songs he first learned which Tagore would return to. 

Of the many different connections that are of interest,

there are none of interest to non poets

let me select three for brief comments.

First, Rabindranath passionately disliked the schools he encountered,

scarcely surprising in a poet. Still, he first received praise at the Normal School. This gave him confidence. At a later point, it was the appreciation and encouragement he received, for his poetic effusions, from educated girls his own age which confirmed his literary vocation. But it was a hobby rather than a means of livelihood.

and as a drop-out, he was educated at home, with the help of tutors.

again, not surprising given his family's wealth and social status.

Already in his childhood he formed some views on what precisely was wrong
with the schools he knew in the Calcutta of his day, some, as it happens, with fairly distinguished academic records.

Those views were shared by everybody. Passing examinations had become important. Schools were in the cramming business. This was fine if you came from a poverty stricken home and hoped to qualify as a Civil Servant or Lawyer. But it was the wrong sort of 'paidea' for a gentleman who owned thousands of acres of land. 

When Tagore established his own school in Santiniketan in 1901, he was determined to make it critically different from the schools he knew.

Because it was in a rural location and would only attract thickos as fee-paying students. The advantage for the families concerned was that their delinquent sons couldn't get into too much trouble in a remote village. Also they would at least learn to speak Bengali in a cultured manner.  

It is not always easy to spot what made his school in Santiniketan so different
(this is in fact even more difficult to identify if you have been mainly schooled there,
as I have been), but the Boyhood Days tells a great deal about what Tagore was
looking for in his vision of a school appropriate for children.

It was appropriate for thickos of whom nothing very much was expected. The children of staff members, however, might be more motivated to study on their own. 

One particularly important idea to look for is Tagore’s focus on freedom, even for school children, on which Marshall did comment.

Tagore needed to charge fees. But only wealthy thickos would pay those fees and beating wealthy thickos might backfire. They might knife you or run away. In either case, you lose revenue.  

This, in fact, identifies an aspect of Rabindranath that the standard commentaries on him – from W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound onwards – missed.

Strangely enough, few people are focused on becoming a slave. There is no need to remark that a particular dude wanted to be free rather than to pluck cotton under the lash.  

Yet his yearning for substantive freedom in human life comes through very clearly in Boyhood Days, and it stays throughout his life as a constant thought.

Very few people yearn for slavery.  

Let me now turn to a second connection that deserves some attention.

Rabindranath wrote a lot of songs and invented a lot of tunes. He came from a musical family. This doesn't deserve a lot of attention because there is nothing unusual about a musical dude coming from a musical family.  

At his home Rabindranath was surrounded by people who loved music, varying in taste from austerely classical to more relaxed art forms of song-making and singing.

Another branch of the family were accomplished musicologists.  

Rabindranath had a fine introduction to classical Indian music, but he resisted the usual long years of formal training of the aspiring specialist.

It was uncommon for a gentleman to undertake that type of training. One does not need classical training to be a good enough song composer. 

The third connection I want to comment on concerns Tagore’s intellectual world, in particular the emergence of Tagore’s rather special priorities in analytical and empirical inquiries and his expectations from them.

Tagore was a successful Estate manager who was also a productive writer. His was a commercial and creative world, not an intellectual one.  

This is a complex subject and has been much misunderstood.

There is nothing to understand. Tagore wasn't an intellectual. He did take over his father's religious role- because another brother died- and, in the context of the export of Eastern wisdom, this meant he had to ponce around in a kaftan waxing mystical.  

However, since the beginnings of Tagore’s priorities and expectations are clearly noticeable in Boyhood Days, the subject deserves a little exploration here, for a better understanding even of the later Rabindranath.

Tagore was a straightforward man. He didn't claim to have been an intellectual genius or to have experienced nirvikalpa samadhi at a tender age. He genuinely was of good character and genuinely had artistic talent. He tried to help his tenants and he definitely helped some of his students.  

Tagore’s commitment to reasoning was strong – sometimes fierce – throughout his life.

No. You may say he, like other Brahmos, was more committed to Reason than to Mysticism or the belief that supernatural 'siddhas' can be gained by esoteric means. But he was not committed to reasoning because there is little point doing so if the sensible thing to do is self-evident.  

This is well reflected in his arguments, for example, with Mahatma Gandhi (whom he chastised for obscurantism),

but who could get him the money he needed to run Shantiniketan 

with religious parochialists

i.e. Muslims whom he correctly predicted would take away his agricultural estates in the East.  

(whose reasonless sectarianism upset him greatly),

Lots of Hindus had to run away from East Bengal.  

with the British establishment (for their crude treatment of India, in contrast with what he admired greatly in British intellectual life and creativity),

Tagore understood that his class would lose wealth and power when and if the Brits ran away.  

with his Japanese admirers (who received, despite Tagore’s general admiration of Japan his sharply angry critique for their silence – or worse – in the face of Japan’s newly-emerging supernationalism,

Japan had a Divine Emperor. The Japanese were Imperialists of a type which had existed in East Asia for at least 3000 years. 

including the Japanese treatment of China),

Tagore was passing around the begging bowl. He couldn't afford to alienate anybody who might give him money. 

and with the administrative leadership of both British India

Sadly the Brits Indianized the administration- which promptly turned to shit 

and the Soviet Union (he compared the Soviet achievements in school education across its Asian and European span very favourably with the gross neglect of school education in British India,

by Indians.  

while also chastising the Soviet leadership for its intolerance of criticism and of freedom of expression).

No. Tagore was under the impression that the Soviets had cured the Muslims of their aggressive instincts. Since Tagore managed his family estates, he knew that universal literacy would kill off his own source of wealth.  Tagore wasn't a fool. He didn't think scolding Stalin or Hitler would do any good. 

Tagore’s commitment to a reasoned understanding of the world around us came through also in his wholehearted support for scientific education (his school insisted on every child’s exposure to the new findings emerging anywhere in the world).

Back then, if you expected people to pay to attend your school, you had to pretend you'd teach science and math rather than tree-climbing.  At a later point, Tagore tried to turn his school into an University. This happened at around the time Sen's grandfather was appointed Registrar of the newly created Dacca University which rose and rose. Shantiniketan stagnated more particularly after it was taken over by the Central Government though it did become a Central University after Tagore's son ran off with the wife of one of the teachers there and thus lost the moral authority to keep the thing in the family. 

The same commitment to reason is seen also in Tagore’s cultural evaluations, including his firm mixture of pride in Indian culture

but he gave no reason for it- or rather, no good reason. The fact is, he had no choice but to imbibe some Bengali culture because he was Bengali but Bengali culture turned out to be shit. 

and rejection of any claim to the priority of Indian culture over all others.

Smart people all over the world started to study Western culture. Why? It was better and thus had priority. Sen writes in English and teaches at Harvard rather than Howrah Skool of Bengali Boringness.  

It is also seen in his refusal to see something called "the Indian civilization" in isolation from influences coming from the rest of the world:

And yet scholars publish books on Indian civilization as though it were indeed isolated. This is because there is little trace of Greek or ancient Persian civilization in the Indic record.  

this remains very relevant today, not just as a critique of what is now called the "Hindutva" approach, but also of the widely popular theses of the "clash of civilizations," which is frequently invoked these days as a gross –and rather dangerous – simplification of the complex world in which we live.

Sen didn't notice that the country he lived in was waging a ruthless war against Muslims. 

In every case, Rabindranath’s firm convictions were driven explicitly by critical reasoning which he clearly spelt out.

No. He didn't give any rhyme or reason for anything he did or believed in. This was because nobody was paying him to do so. Sensible people don't do boring shite unless they get paid for it.  

And yet to many contemporary observers in Europe and America, Rabindranath appeared to be anything but a follower of reason.

Because he was a follower of a religious sect headed by his daddy.  

It was faith he was identified with, and with a penchant for mystification over seeking clarity.

All faith is founded on mystery not reason or 'clarity'.  

While some of Tagore’s admirers (of suitably mystical kind themselves) loved this "re-done Tagore," others found it unattractive, even detestable.

Nonsense! Some of his admirers found fault with translations but none considered Tagore as other than mystical- i.e. Brahmo- though, no doubt, in youth he had shown himself capable of writing on epic and romantic, but not erotic, themes. Satire and scolding were not alien to him but he had too much nobility of character to wish to wallow too much in that vein. 

A clear formulation of that interpretation of Tagore can be found in two unpublished letters of Bertrand Russell to
Nimai Chatterji.

No. Russell was never an admirer of Tagore. His poet was Shelley and, later on, his dialogue was with TS Eliot. In a novel he wrote before the Great War, Russell depicts a poet who argues that 'man must adjust himself to his alien universe instead of projecting his own needs onto it'. 

The problem with this view is that man is not alien at all. We evolved by natural selection on this planet which is nourished by the Sun's light and heat. True, in order to advance as a species, we have found it useful to have some intellectuals and artists who feel they are 'not at home in this world'. They create ontologically dysphoric goods and services which, strangely enough, turn out to be very useful from the economic point of view. The more we project our needs- including our need to see that the poorest of our brethren are well looked after- onto the Universe, the better off we all are. Indeed, a time may come when we can ourselves create a Universe more to our liking. 

Margaret Moran, in an essay on Russell's 'Perplexities of John Fortice' wrote- 'According to this view (that of the poet), man is exalted by taking the responsibility for generating his own spiritual force instead of expecting any help from outside the human realm. As Russell wrote epigrammatically to Lady Ottoline, "If there is a God so much the better, but we are more worthy of him if we can do without him." (read more here). 

If we have parents, so much the better. But we are not more worthy of them if we decide we can do without them. Let them perish in some miserable Twilight home- why should we put ourselves to the trouble and expense of visiting them? 

 Returning to Russell's views on poetry, this passage in a letter of  clarifies matters-  

Romanticism, it seems to me, is the creed of passion, the belief that the good consists in overmastering emotion, of whatever kind, the stronger the better. Hence, it is led to dwell specially upon the strongest emotions- love, hatred, rage, jealousy-with one exception: No romanticist praises fear, though this is certainly as strong as any emotion can be.

Romantics dwell much on the fear of being rejected in Love or of dying without having made a name for oneself. Indeed, Romanticism was a cult of Fame which is the only way the tortured, narcissistic, genius can triumph over death and utility. Russell, being a philosopher,  truly was as stupid as shit.  

The reason is that the romanticist loves emotion

because she fears it. This is why the Romantic would rather fake it than make it- if that thing was the type of Love we Hindus call 'Vatsalya' as between Mummy, Baby, or Christ who suffers us all, as little children, to come to Him.

as an assertion of personality,

what else could it be if it were also to inspire love? Nobody has a passion for peristalsis, or a romantic view of respiration.  

of individual force, while fear expresses the antithesis to this, the slavery of the individual to the world.

Fear is an emotion. The Romantic prizes the hero who is more afraid of fearing Death than of dying. The world neither enslaves nor grants manumission. It is the antithesis of nothing though, to Shelley, it represents a 'slow stain' or the contagion of a but commercial or congregational or civic conatus.  'Rather Use than Fame' was the motto of my old school- which Russell's grandson and great-grandson, the Sixth and Seventh Earls respectively, attended.

The world, in the view of romanticism, is primarily material for the development of the individual-

Vivekananda considered the world a 'moral gymnasium'. Shaw took over this notion but attributed it to the English.  

thus Kant is the parent of the romantic movement,

Russell is thinking of Coleridge. He is wrong. 

and Nietzsche is its child.

No. There is a line from Fichte, not Kant, to Nietzsche 

Its antithesis is not classicism,

Yes it is- unless you speak a Romance language.  

but Buddhism, quietism,

Kant, by birth, was a fucking Pietist or 'quietist'.  

the doctrine of submission to fate,

Is absent in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism- even the Ajivika tradition. It arose in the West out of Augustine's poor knowledge of Greek. The Bible does not say we all sinned with Adam. Russell wrote about Pelagianism etc. from a point of view of radical philological ignorance. But then, he needed the money. Stupidity sells. Nobody lost money underestimating the intelligence of the book buying public. 

and the hope of annihilation or absorption as the reward of virtue.

We are all annihilated or absorbed at every moment of our social, or 'species' bein.  

This is, of course, more akin to romanticism than classicism is; but that is, the nature of antitheses.

Russell is parading his ignorance of Hegel here. To be fair, it wasn't till Lawvere, in the mid Eighties, that we had a mathematical (category theoretical) description of the Hegelian dialectic. But we can see it easily enough in the Zermelo vs Skolem quarrel. Essentially, Zermelo was saying that Math's world of objects can only be grasped by infinitary means. Tagore, being a Brahmo Brahmin of a Dara Shikoh monist/majazi/ mayavadi type, is solidly on the side of Zermelo. But, as I pointed out in my last book, this is but 'zugzwang' though, to Zermelo, the gift- lemma means gift- of Zorn. 

The worship of passion has, I confess, a great instinctive attraction for me, but to my reason it is utterly abhorrent.

Russell's passion caused brilliant heirs to be born to his body. One, sadly, developed a mental illness late in life, but there can be no doubt that his descendants are of great value to a Crown and a Country,  I now ineffectually sully and disfigure by my blinkered and Blimpish passionate avowals of allegiance.

By contrast, Nimai Chatterji adorned a culturally ecumenical  Commonwealth. 

On 16th February 1963, Earl Russell wrote to Nimai Chatterji:

I recall the meeting [with Tagore] of which Lowes Dickinson writes only vaguely.

When did that cunt write otherwise? You could go to prison for being homo back then. 

There was an earlier occasion, the first upon which I met Tagore, when he was brought to my home by Robert Trevelyan

considered a bit soft in the head. Harrovian, donchanknow. 

and Lowes Dickinson. I confess that his mystic air did not attract me and I recollect wishing he would be more direct.

Russell wanted the big bearded Indian to denounce Imperial Britain in passionate terms. 

He had a soft, rather elusive, manner

back then, Russell had very very bad halitosis. People thought this might prevent his having sex with women. Thus, the fellow was probably a confirmed sodomite. It is better to a bit elusive with aristocrats of that description. 

which led one to feel that straightforward exchange or communication from which he would shy away. His intensity was impaired by his self-asorbtion [absorption]. Naturally, his mystic views were by way of dicta and it was not possible to reason about them.

Russell didn't like Tagore's poetry. LEJ Brouwer did. But then Brouwer was pretty mystical in a somewhat puritanical manner. Russell, on the other hand, believed that the true poet is a thaumaturge- Yeats and Crowley were actual magicians- and though very much a Socialist and a Pacifist, Russell was no Puritan. He liked sex.  An American dentist fixed his teeth and suddenly even quite well brought up women were prepared to perform coitus with that silly cunt. Tagore, on the other hand, was an 'improving' landlord and family man with strict Victorian values. Russell, quite naturally, was repelled by, what appeared to him to be, a pillar of the Indian establishment. 

In a later letter, dated 26th April 1967, Russell was even sharper in his denunciation of what he took to be Tagore’s flight from reason:

Zermelo was making a similar flight. Brouwer and Weyl- to Hilbert's great anguish- were making a flight in a different but equally fatal direction. Meanwhile, Frege, in the Twenties, was turning into a proto-Hitlerite.  

'His talk about the infinite is vague nonsense. The sort of language that is admired by many Indians unfortunately does not mean anything at all.

Russell was a logical atomist. He thought there was a finite list of true predicates of any particular object. Moreover, something like an 'atomic proposition' must exist. Tagore was saying, quite reasonably, that there in no limit to the web of predication which in any case might be delusive or 'sublatable'. There are no simple, i.e. atomic, propositions. There can be a universal witness but there is no algorithmic method of cranking out all knowledge because the thing is limitless- i.e. faces a halting problem. Interestingly, Turing, in the Thirties, used Brouwer's choice sequences to establish the sort of 'phenomenological' result for which Husserl had sought in vain. Witlesstein, too, in his witless way, had returned to Philosophy after hearing Brouwer's lecture. But he didn't understand that 'pendulum numbers' were perfectly Hilbertian. Russell, meanwhile, had become a 'Friend of India' of a singularly useless sort.

So what’s going on here?

Russell didn't like Tagore's poetry. Brouwer, an intuitionist, liked Tagore's poetry and his mystical view of the universe.  Still, Russell, like Tagore and Elmhirst and Jeddu Krishnamurthy founded his own progressive school. After all, thickos too need edumication. 

Why would the reason-centred priorities of Tagore appear just the opposite of that to some towering intellectuals in Europe and America whom he met?

Because Tagore didn't have any 'reason-centered priorities'. We might just as well suggest that Russell didn't like Tagore because Tagore had a very large vagina which made growling noises.  

And, in the present context, what insights can we get from Tagore’s recollections in his Boyhood Days about this dissonance between Tagore’s consistent
championing of reason and Russell’s belief that Tagore hated reason with a passion – a passion of the "self-absorptive" kind.

Russell identified reason with mathematical logic. Tagore wrote poems not the fucking Posterior Analytics. Russell suspected Tagore was a narcissistic Godman. He wasn't. But he did want money for Shantiniketan and thus had to play the part of the Eastern Sage scolding the materialistic West in return for hard currency. .  

For an adequate understanding of what is happening, we have to

tell stupid lies. Tagore had no interest in logic and never supplied compelling or convincing reasons for anything he did or believed in. This was fine because he was a poet of a mystical type.  By contrast the 'fundamental assumption' of a Logic based Metaphysics is, to quote Dummett, 'the assumption that, when we have a sentence containing a logical constant, that sentence could have been derived using the introduction rule for the constant'. I think Tagore, like Gentzen, would have thought there must be an 'elimination rule' at the same time. Otherwise you have a natural deduction system that is foolish or anti-inductive.  The Brahmo sect sought a Creator who is the Universal Witness but can't in any sense be instrumentalized by reason of performing a function. 

take out, first, two incidental factors

firstly that he was a poet and secondly that he was the head of a mystic sect 

that no doubt had their influence but which could obscure a fuller picture of the contrast of epistemic priorities that lies behind the apparent dissonance.

The first incidental factor is Tagore’s partial inclination to play the role that was assigned to him by his early admirers in England – W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and others –

They didn't assign any role to him. Rothenstein had met him in India. He told everybody that Tagore came from one of the best families in the Empire's Second City and was the head of an important Hindu sect. Also, his poems were good. If you liked Sarojini, you will dig Rabindranath. 

in which his poetical exposition, particularly in Gitanjali, of what can be seen as extraordinary features of the world overwhelmed his understanding of ordinary but very important things that make up the world and in which Tagore was (as Boyhood Days confirm) deeply interested from his very early days.

the ordinary thing Sen does not understand is that Tagore was not deeply interested in science or math or engineering. He speaks deprecatingly of his one attempt to invent a sort of ink press for flowers.  

This would later flower into his interest in science, culture, education, politics, ethics and epistemology.

He had no such interests though he did write a little book about how Science is nice.  

Russell "knew" what to expect from the man that Lowes Dickinson brought to Russell’s home,

No. He had heard rumors about the Nationalist- even Terrorist!- proclivities of the Hindu intellectual. Was Tagore similar to Vivekananda and Aurobindo? The big beardie wouldn't say.  

and he seemed to have decided that he got plentifully exactly what he expected to get from Rabindranath.

No. Russell was a radical. He'd have enjoyed hearing a vigorous takedown of Christianity or even an envenomed denunciation of the British Raj. Had Tagore produced a bomb from under his beard, Russell would have been yet more thrilled. But Tagore wasn't going to rise to any bait. Bad enough having to rely on an Irish nationalist like Yeats. The sensible thing was to keep Russell at arm's length. During the Great War, the Brits had to imprison that son of an Earl.  

Tagore’s admirers in England would not leave much room for any way of contrasting the allegorical poetry of Gitanjali (itself over-mysticised by its English rendering)

which Tagore himself worked on or, at least, approved 

and Rabindranath’s prosaic beliefs about the ordinary world.

Nonsense! English people understand that a mystical poet still needs to take a shit from time to time.  

As I have discussed elsewhere, Rabindranath was initially happy enough to play this role, even though he was shocked by the over-praise he was getting.

No. Tagore wanted to make money for Shantiniketan by selling his books. His friend Okakura had made good money out of 'the book of tea'. Even Sarojini had made money out of her English poetry. Now that Vivekananda was dead, Tagore had a brief window of opportunity to corner the market for Yogi-bhogi bollocks.  

The second factor is Russell’s propensity to dismiss anything that he did not find to be immediately clear to him.

Russell had no such propensity. That's why he was able to make a big contribution to set theory and the theory of types.  

If Rabindranath got the raw end of that perspective in Russell’s reactions to him,

he didn't. The two may have disliked each other but were considered to be great thinkers 

he did not fare any worse than Friedrich Nietzsche had in the caricature of him that Russell had produced in his History of Western Philosophy, in the form of a simulated conversation between Nietzsche and Buddha concocted by Russell to bring out the stupidity – as well as some possible nastiness – of Nietzsche’s ideas as interpreted by Russell.

Russell says he knows no way to prove the Buddha is right and Nietzsche (as imagined by Russell) is wrong. An intuitionist might say there is a 'witness', access to whom would allow us to reject one position and affirm another. The Brahmo Religion says God is that 'witness' (Saakshi).

Despite the importance of these associative factors, Rabindranath’s
understanding of intellectual priorities did, in fact, have some special features which contributed to the misunderstanding that is being examined.

He had no notion of 'intellectual priorities'. A guy who likes poetry will have one type of poetry. A guy who likes math will have different priorities and predilections.  

One of them was Tagore’s willingness to accept that many questions will
remain unresolved

not for God- the universal witness- or for those who are absorbed into the Godhead 

and their answers can remain uncompleted.

Tagore would have no problem with 'completeness' being 'infinitary'. Sen is babbling nonsense.  

The domain of unfinished accounts would change over time,

God is outside time. Sen simply won't accept that Tagore was a theist. He genuinely believed in his daddy's religion.  

but not go away, and in this Rabindranath saw not a defeat but a humble – and also beautiful – recognition of our limited understanding of a vast world,

why not see the beauty in the humble recognition of a cat that is a dog?  

even an incomprehensibly large,

nothing is incomprehensible for God 

possibly infinite, universe (the kind of remark that so exasperated Russell).

Russell was cool with Leibniz who was a theist. He didn't get exasperated with Einstein though he couldn't understand Godel. 

Rather than seeing this as a defeat of reason he clearly saw this as the way reason works in human life, at any point of time.

Leibniz has a principle of sufficient reason. Plenty of atheists don't.  

He also saw some aesthetic beauty in the continuing incompleteness of our answers: this is where, I presume, Russell would have walked away had Tagore not been sitting at Russell’s own home.

Russell could always say 'I forgot I have an appointment with the Queen Gor'bless'er. Pray excuse me, gentlemen'.  

We can glimpse the early beginnings of this celebration of the unresolved and the incomplete in many remarks in Boyhood Days (this is another "hint" to the young reader),

a stupid one. The young reader knows that fairy stories are purely imaginary. Nothing epistemic is involved in their being unresolved or incomplete.  

but none perhaps more spectacular than the youthful Rabindranath’s retreat from the discipline of tutored knowledge that was being poured into him.

His Mum made him go to school because, like most Mums, she liked to have some time to herself. After she died, he stayed home and his brother engaged tutors for him. 

He would regain his peace when he could resume his reflection of the vast universe that lay beyond his tutors’ grasp (p. 43):

it lies beyond everybody's grasp.  

In bed, at last, I found some moments of leisure. There, I listened to
the story that never reached its conclusion.

"The Prince rides across the boundless terrain…."

Tagore makes it clear that he didn't enjoy learning English in Calcutta because it was taught by people who didn't know the language well. In England, living with an English family, he quickly gained anything in its literature that was congenial to him.  

This is not the occasion to pursue Tagore’s views of knowledge and
reason further,

then why mention the subject? The truth is, Sen has no views on knowledge or reason. He just likes virtue signalling and pretending he is smart.  

and yet I found it striking, as I was rereading Boyhood Days (I had read the book, in Bengali, in my own boyhood days), how many of these connections with Tagore’s epistemic and aesthetic priorities were already beginning to take shape in those early days.

He had no epistemic priorities because he wasn't setting up in a knowledge profession. He was setting up as a creative poet and song writer. He shows us that his Sanskrit and classical Bengali was up to snuff. It wasn't true that he was an illiterate yahoo. Also, since he had lived in England and took Morley's lectures, his knowledge of English literature was more than sufficient for his purpose. True, he somewhat overeggs the cake regarding his family's poverty and his own suffering at the hands of venal servants but, after all, poets are meant to be sensitive little flowers. 

Before ending, I would like to make a couple of comments on a more
mundane subject. It has been claimed that to say goodbye is "to die a little."

To learn you are too stupid to do Physics and must be content with an Econ degree is to die more than a little.  

To read the translation of a book one knows in the original is also to die a little,

No. The translation may be superior or more illuminating.  

and no translation, no matter how good and accurate, can prevent that.

Rubbish! There are Persian poets who say that Fitzgerald's translations of Khayyam are better than the original or even, more mystically, that they are the original. What is majazi may be more haqiqi than Truth itself. 

One of the special problems arises in this case from the fact that
words in one language sometimes do not have exact equivalents in another language.

In which case, why not import it?  

The problem is compounded by the fact that some words have more than one near-equivalent in another language.

This is not a problem for the literary artist. It is an opportunity.  

In fact, the English rendering of Gitanjali, somewhat influenced by Tagore’s early admirers in England, had tended to select the most "mystical" of the near-equivalents, sometimes mercilessly killing the necessary ambiguities in Tagore’s Bengali expressions.

But the bloke did it himself. Gitanjali is a work by a bilingual author. There is no law against having your poems touched up by a person with superior literary skill.  

The plurality of near-equivalent English words applies even to the
title of this book. "Chelebela" in Bengal refers to childhood, even though the word used in that compound expression, to wit "chele," also does mean a boy,

no. It means a child of either sex. Sen will admit this in his next sentence.  

in its literal and original use. Bengali dropped gender about seven hundred years ago (there is not even any equivalent of the English distinction between "he" and "she," or between "him" and "her"), and it is quite standard for words like "chele" to be used to cover both sexes, that is, girls as well as boys. So "chelebela" could be translated as "Childhood Days," and not specifically as "Boyhood Days."

Just 'Childhood' is enough though his book does stretch to his adolescence. However it is written from an infantile, not an analytical, perspective. Tagore as a teenager is shown as being affectionate and in need of affection- like a child. 

In this case, this might not matter tremendously, since Rabindranath was indubitably a man and his childhood was clearly his boyhood as well.

It does not matter at all.  

There is perhaps more of a problem with Tagore’s "Preface" which begins with the sentence: "I received a request from Goswamiji to write something for the boys." There were both boys and girls in the school (indeed my mother herself had been a student there

because her Dad taught there 

long before me), and no matter what the genderized form of the Bengali expression is, Tagore’s interest in presenting his recollections of his early years would have involved his willingness to cater to the curiosity of both boys and girls in the school (there is internal evidence of this in the text as well of Tagore’s reach across the gender divide).

Tagore gives us an insight into a boy's mind. He says he was exiled from the women's quarter.  Also, he was not given instruction in how to wear saree because he had a dick, not a vag. 

Goswamiji too whose request, we learn from the Preface, started off this entire project, was a marvellous teacher, and as I remember vividly, cared no less for the girls than for the boys. The request for "something for the boys" (taking the genderized form of words in the restrictive sense) must have included the girl students at the school as well. The coverage of many Bengali words, such as "chele," has this plasticity.

In which case, why bring up the matter? Goswami was a teacher. He requested Tagore to write 'something for the kids'. Tagore obliged. That's all there is to it.  

Are there things in the Bengali absent in the English translation? Yes. This has to do with Tagore's relationship with his oldest brother whose poetry must have influenced him. It seems the older man was also a bit of a mathematician and a philosopher. In the English translation, this brother comes across as something of a zany. I have heard that in the original there is a touch of respectful 'mimesis' to an old man whom visitors to Shantiniketan considered an eccentric jester. 

.