Tagore wrote the following about his grandfather's great friend and colleague
Rammohan Roy was able to assimilate the ideals of Europe
which ones? He was a sound enough Benthamite but Europe had plenty of ideals, other than Utilitarianism, most of which opposed each other bitterly.
so completely because he was not overwhelmed by them; there was no poverty or weakness on his side.
He was smart. More importantly, he really really liked money. If the Brits fucked off, the Muslims might make him poor again. That's why he was lobbying Westminster to permit unrestricted White immigration to Bengal.
He had ground of his own
he was a zamindar- i.e. a tax collector for the Brits. If they fucked off, he'd have lost that ground.
on which he could take his stand and where he could secure his acquisitions.
Not if the Brits fucked off.
The true wealth of India was not hidden from him,
Which is why he was useful to the Brits who wanted to help themselves to it
for this he had already made his own.
Not really. Apart from the Unitarians, everybody thought him a bore.
Consequently he had with him the touchstone by which he could test the wealth of others.
That touchstone was greed. The boy sure loved money. He was supposed to be the Ambassador of the Mughal Emperor but was a true believer in the British Civilizing Mission and greatly exceeded Warren Hastings in his desire to see British paramountcy established in the sub-continent. Rabindranath, being the hereditary head of a religious sect set up by his greedy grandfather and his greedy friend, told stupid lies about both.
The always idiotic Ram Guha in an essay titled 'Traveling with Tagore' gives the above quotation and follows it from one by Isaiah Berlin-
It is easier to preach passionately to a country that it should adopt some vast, revolutionary ideology, and centralise and simplify and subordinate everything to a single goal or a single man or a single party.
There are places where preaching this passionately may get you killed or sent to jail. It is easier and safer to speak vaguely about why everybody should be nice and not nasty.
It is not difficult to call for a return to the past, to tell man to turn their backs on foreign devils, to live solely on one’s resources, proud, independent, unconcerned.
It is difficult to do so if people keep stabbing you.
India has heard such voices. Tagore understood this, paid tribute to it, and resisted it.
His resistance was wholly ineffectual.
Ram Guha considers Tagore, along side Nehru and Gandhi and Ambedkar as one of the makers of modern India. A mathematician asked him why he had included Tagore.
The answer to this question was that he was India's most prominent man of letters and was held in high esteem by Nehru and Gandhi. It is notable that the four men named by Guha were 'loyalist' during the Great War. They opposed the 'Garam Dal' revolutionaries who wanted to end Imperialism. Sadly, by the middle of 1917, it was obvious to all that the age of multi-ethnic Empires was over. Tagore- who would lose his estates in East Bengal- lamented this outcome. Gandhi & Nehru belonged to the upper caste Hindu majority and had nothing to lose. Ambedkar, whose second wife was a Brahmin- took up Churchill's line about how Brahmins would beat and sodomize Muslims and Dalits once the Brits departed. Three out of four of these shitheads 'founded' nothing. Nehru founded a Dynasty. It was shit. But this has nothing to do with modernism in India which has to do with factor mobility and the division of labour and the theory of comparative advantage.
‘I can see why you singled out the other three’, said the mathematician: ‘Gandhi led the freedom movement,
such that it failed and thus the Brits dictated the pace and scope of reform till Hitler & Tojo bankrupted Britain and it had to cut and run- if not scuttle.
Nehru 2 / 51 nurtured the infant Indian state, Ambedkar helped write its Constitution and gave dignity to the oppressed.
The Brits had been doing that. Ambedkar took affirmative action away from Dalit Muslims.
But why Tagore?’
He got a Nobel Prize and, at one time, was seen as a Christ like figure preaching Lurve & Peas.
My questioner was no ordinary Indian.
He was extraordinarily stupid.
He comes from a family of distinguished scholars and social reformers. Like his father and grandfather before him, he had been educated at a great Western university but came back to work in India.
He was Maharashtrian. Tilak was surely more important than Tagore.
Like them, he is well read and widely travelled, and yet, deeply attached to his homeland. He fluently speaks three Indian languages.
but he isn't a Bengali. He is a Maharashtrian Brahmin. If you dislike Tilak, at least you could include Gokhale in your 'big four'. After all, Gandhi was Gokhale's protege.
If an Indian of his sensibility had to be convinced of Tagore’s greatness (or relevance),
then Guha was wrong. Tagore wasn't really one of the founders of modern India.
what then of all the others?
They too think Tagore is overrated.
Tagore’s reputation, within India and outside it, has suffered from his being made a parochial possession of one province, Bengal.
He wrote in Bengali. What else could he be?
It was in Bengali that he wrote his poems, novels, plays, and songs;
he kept telling the Hindu Bengali bhadralok not to insist on cutting their own throats by, first, demanding the Brits fuck the fuck off, and then demanding the Capitalists fuck the fuck off. True, under Mamta, Bengal has told the Communists to fuck the fuck off. But, Mamta seems cool with Hindus having to fuck the fuck off from Districts which have become Muslim majority in the last two decades.
works that are widely read and regularly performed seven decades after his death. The poet Subhas Mukhopadhyay
a Communist but of a useless sort
recalls ‘a time when the elite of Bengal fought among themselves to monopolise Tagore.
The Bengali elite was slitting its own throat. Also, it would be more accurate to say that they competed to see who could be the biggest and most boring loser, rather than that they fought anything.
They tried to seal off Tagore, cordoning him away from the (sic) hoi polloi.’
They couldn't cordon shit.
Then he adds: ‘There was another trend, serving the same purpose, but in a different way. In the name of ideology and as the sole representative of the masses, some tried to protect the proletariat from the bourgeois poet’s harmful influence!’
One of the first Commies in Bengal was a nephew of Tagore's.
The Bengali Communists have since taken back their hostility to Tagore—now, they quote his verses and sing his lyrics with as much gusto as their (bourgeois) compatriots. But he remains the property of his native heath alone.
His ancestors were urban folk. They had no fucking native heath. Still, Tagore's father had acquired some land in a rural location where his son set up a school which turned into a College of Fine Arts.
This geographical diminution of the man and his reputation has been commented upon by that other great world traveller and world citizen of Bengali extraction, the sitar player Ravi Shankar.
whose brother, a self taught dancer, had been quite successful with a dance troupe touring Europe. Apparently, their father- a barrister- had set up as an impresario in London after the Great War. The bhadralok was actually more entrepreneurial than it was aesthetic. Sadly, it considered virtue to involve scolding everybody and being as boring as shit.
In his autobiography, the musician writes that ‘being Bengali, of course, makes it natural for me to feel so moved by Tagore; but I do feel that if he had been born in the West he would now be [as] revered as Shakespeare and Goethe…
In other words, he wouldn't have been a vacuous bore. There is some truth to this. If Tagore hadn't been forced to carry the banner of the puritanical, and deeply boring, Brahmo Samaj, he might have written something entertaining or interesting to read.
He is not as popular or well-known worldwide as he should be.
No. He was more popular and well-known than he ought to have been. This was because he was the hereditary head of a Hindu sect- at a time when there was great interest in exotic religions. It didn't hurt that the Brits gave him a knighthood during the Great War. On the other hand, the Swedes had given him a Nobel prize- i.e. he was only a little less boring than a turnip.
The Vishwa Bharati are guarding everything he did too jealously, and not doing enough to let the entire world know of his greatness’.
Why they are not publishing his laundry lists? World should know Gurudeva liked having clean undies.
Ravi Shankar compared Tagore to the German genius Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832);
whose laundry lists have been published and extensively commented on.
so, before him, had the critic Buddhadeva Bose.
Bengal was in terminal decline. It's own people would give up on its literature and its arts soon enough.
Both men, remarked Bose, ‘participate[d] in almost everything’.
No. Goethe was the equivalent of a Diwan in an Indian princely state. Had Tagore become a barrister, he might well have held some such post. To do him justice, Tagore wasn't interested in politics or administration. He did hope to be an 'improving' landlord and sent his son and son-in-law to America to study agronomy. Sadly, this misfired and so Tagore got a Brit to take over, or- at the least- pay for, the 'agricultural research' at Sriniketan.
Certainly, no one since Goethe worked in so many different fields
Tagore did make a film. It bombed. On the other hand, he was seen as a spiritual preceptor- which is why he swanned around in a kaftan with a great big beard.
and did original things in so many of them. Tagore was a poet, a novelist, a playwright, a lyricist, a composer, and an artist.
So- he was an artist who was also a landlord and head of a religious sect. But there were and had been plenty of artistic princes and kings in India.
He had good days and bad, but at his best he was outstanding in each of these fields.
He could have been. But he preferred to be a boring prig.
Tagore’s poems and stories are mostly set in Bengal. However, in his non-fiction, that is to say in his letters, essays, talks, and polemics, he wrote extensively on the relations between the different cultures and countries of the world.
He wrote bollocks on such relations.
Tagore, notes Humayun Kabir, ‘was the first great Indian in recent times who went out on a cultural mission for restoring contacts and establishing friendships with peoples of other countries without any immediate or specific educational, economic, political or religious aim.
His aim was financial. He was raising funds for Shantiniketan.
It is also remarkable that his cultural journeys were not confined to the western world’.
Where there was money to be had, there would he go.
He visited Europe and North America, but also Japan, China, Iran, Latin America, and Indo-China.
so as to gain money. He didn't go to places where there was no money to be made. Nothing wrong in that at all. Shantiniketan may have been a money pit but it wasn't wholly unproductive.
That these travels were undertaken without any instrumental purpose
getting money isn't 'instrumental'- thinks nobody at all.
marks Tagore out from the other members of our great quartet.
No it doesn't. Gandhi had spent a far longer period abroad. What was unusual about Tagore was that he had spent so little time getting an education in the West.
Gandhi studied law in London
Tagore gave up and returned home
and later went to South Africa to work. After he finally returned to India, in 1915, he visited England, once, to negotiate with the British Government. Apart from a short trip to Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon), he did not otherwise travel abroad in the last three decades of his life.
He was busy getting plenty of money from Indians which is why he travelled extensively in India. Tagore had to look further afield.
As a young man, Ambedkar
was given a scholarship by a Prince who expected him to return and serve in his State
went to the United States and the United Kingdom to acquire advanced degrees in law and economics. Then he came back to a life of social activism in India.
Because the Prince found him to be useless.
In later years, his trips overseas were to participate in political or academic conferences.
Because he was in the political wilderness.
At first glance, Nehru seems to have matched Tagore as a world traveller.
No. Tagore had the foresight to send his son and son-in-law to America to study. He understood that England was ceasing to matter. Even Japan would become more important.
Nehru first went overseas as a boy, to study at an English public school.
Tagore too went to England to study
Later, in the nineteen twenties and thirties, he travelled through Europe to forge links between the Indian freedom struggle and the world socialist movement.
Tagore travelled more extensively and, what's more, made a goodish sum of money doing so.
Still later, as Prime Minister of India between 1947 and 1964, he visited many different countries and continents. He went in his official capacity, representing and negotiating for his nation. Before and after Independence, Nehru’s journeys abroad were thus wholly political.
Disastrously so.
(The one exception was when his wife fell seriously ill, and had to be taken to Europe for treatment.)
Everybody was going to Europe for medical treatment in those days.
On the other hand, Tagore travelled to other lands out of curiosity,
No. He was invited on the strength of the popularity of his books and made money giving lectures. He was a celebrity and 'book-tours' were nothing new.
simply to see and speak with humans of a cultural background other than his own.
How come he didn't spend a lot of time in darkest Africa or up the Amazon? He went to cities where people had heard of him and might give him money.
Rabindranath Tagore’s internationalism was in part a product of his family background.
His grandfather had sojourned in England and on the Continent. His father hadn't. It was only after Tagore got the Nobel that he began globe-trotting so as to get money for Shantiniketan.
He was born in 1861, the youngest child of Debendranath Tagore, who was a pioneer of modern education in Bengal
No he wasn't. Roy and his daddy had been. Deb was a self-appointed Maharishi.
as well as being versed in the Upanishads. Debendranath’s father Dwarkanath was a friend and associate of the great, western-oriented reformer Rammohan Roy (1772- 1833).
'Prince' Dwarkanath had been a great social success in London and Paris, being received by royalty.
The Tagores followed Roy into the Brahmo Samaj,
No. Dwarkanath and Roy founded it together in 1828. The Trust deed was executed a couple of years later and featured some of their relatives. Essentially, it was a Brahmin 'anti-kulinism' movement.
a reform sect that had revolted against Hindu orthodoxy and polytheism.
No. It was against kulinism and certain other practices confined to their own ancestral community. This had nothing to do with the Hindu faith of 99.99 percent of their co-religionists.
Their social experimentation was undoubtedly helped by their wealth
derived from working with the Brits
—the family owned large tracts of land in eastern Bengal,
which they had got thanks to the Brits
and had also profited from the opium trade to China.
as 'compradors' to the Brits.
In a letter written in January 1885 to his friend Pramatha Chaudhuri, Tagore spoke of the tension in his own mind between the contending forces of East and West.
Easterners, like his grandfather, liked working for Westerners so as to grow rich. Tagore preferred to scold the Westerners for their materialism and lack of spirituality in return for money. What was annoying was to have to work hard for money. Why couldn't a nice money tree just sprout up in the garden?
‘I sometimes detect in myself”,
a bad smell because myself has farted unless OMG! maybe it was Brahma! I too am a Maharishi just like Daddy.
he remarked, ‘a background where two opposing forces are constantly in action, one beckoning me to peace and cessation of all strife, the other egging me on to battle.
Bengali battle- i.e. talking bollocks.
It is as though the restless energy and the will to action of the West were perpetually assaulting the citadel of my Indian placidity.
The Tagore's were sitting pretty so long as the Brits held the Muslims in check. Sadly, the British sense of fair play meant that they could be sympathetic to the genuine grievances of the Bengali Muslim tenant. The Tagores weren't happy when their ability to squeeze the peasant was interfered with by the District Magistrate.
Hence this swing of the pendulum between passionate pain and calm detachment, between lyrical abandon and philosophizing, between love of my country and mockery of patriotism, between an itch to enter the lists and a longing to remain wrapt in thought’.
He compromised by doing neither. Writing isn't fighting. Sadly, in Tagore's case, it also wasn't thinking.
Quoting this precocious passage, the Tagore scholar Swapan Majumdar says that it ‘strikes the keynote in his understanding of the West’.
No it doesn't. Majumdar is a cretin. The question for Tagore was whether he should carry on as the steward of his family's finances or double down on this Maharishi business. The latter was Western, mercantile and bourgeois. The other involved growing a long beard and poncing around in a kaftan.
Tagore’s mission to synthesize East and West was part personal, part civilizational.
He was competing with the Theosophical Society and then Swami Vivekananda and a host of other such Gurus and godmen. Also the Russians and the Irish and so forth were now gassing on about their own ancient spiritual traditions.
In time it also became political. In the early years of the 20th century, the
Hindu
intelligentsia of Bengal was engulfed by the Swadeshi movement, where protests against
the partition of Bengal which the Hindus believed would adversely affect their position in the Muslim majority East
British rule were expressed by the burning of foreign cloth and the rejection of all things Western.
The Brits cancelled the partition. Later the Hindus wanted and got it. Tagore warned against Muslim domination. Sadly, C.R Das and the Bose brothers went in for Muslim appeasement.
After an initial enthusiasm for the movement, Tagore turned against it. His ambivalence was expressed in his novel
'Gora' whereas with
The Home and the World
he graphically depicts the outcome of the stupidity of the 'Revolutionaries'. Hindus are raped, robbed and killed by Muslims.
and, more succinctly, in a letter written to a friend in November 1908, which insisted that ‘patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter’. ‘I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds’, wrote Tagore,
this is because it is not profitable to do so. What was profitable was selling books which appeared 'spiritual' or 'artistic' to stupid people.
‘and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live.
He had no power to allow or prohibit anything at all. He was merely a racially inferior subject of a benign, but wholly alien, Emperor.
I took a few steps down that road and stopped: for when I cannot retain my faith in universal man standing over and above my country, when patriotic prejudices overshadow my God, I feel inwardly starved’.
Fuck that! His people would be ethnically cleansed or would outwardly starve if the Brits made Bengal autonomous. At any rate that is what happened in 1943 and 1946-7
Tagore’s internationalist views and orientations were to find powerful public expression in his book Nationalism, which was based on lectures delivered in Japan and the United States in 1916 and 1917.
Which is why Berlin liked him. Brouwer had been an early convert which is why when Witlesstein came back to philosophy after hearing a lecture by Brouwer, he started reading out Tagore to the Vienna Circle.
I shall come to that book presently; but let me first introduce a lesser known essay that forms the essential prehistory to it. Entitled ‘East and West in Greater India’, this was published in the Bengali journal Prabasi in August-September 6 / 51 1908—that is, at the height of the Swadeshi movement. The printed text was based on lectures delivered by Tagore at different venues in Bengal. The essay begins by deprecating the sectarianism and xenophobia that lay at the heart of nationalist politics. ‘Whether India is to be yours or mine’, said Tagore, ‘whether it is to belong more to the Hindu, or the Moslem, or whether some other race is to assert a greater supremacy than either—that is not the problem with which Providence is exercised.
But we are. Providence is merely the name given to God's care or management of the world. One may say 'it was providential that x occurred and thus y triumphed because y is what God, as we understand him, requires.
It is not as if, at the bar of the judgement seat of the Almighty, different advocates are engaged in pleading the rival causes of Hindu, Moslem or Westerner,
Brahmos say God is the universal 'sakshi' or witness. Tagore knew enough Law to know that a Judge can't also be a witness. What he has written is nonsense. It is a different matter that different courtiers may advance arguments to the King as to why they should be considered more loyal or more attached to the Royal cause.
and that the party that wins the decree shall finally plant the standard of permanent possession.
This cretin didn't get that every religion claims its Scripture is 'uncreated' and a direct revelation from God.
It is our vanity which makes us think that it is a battle between contending rights—the only battle is the eternal one between Truth and untruth’.
Maybe in Manichaeanism. Not in any extant religion. There may be a battle, within the soul, between Sin and Virtue, Angel and Devil and so forth, but there is no such thing at the Cosmic scale.
He continued: ‘If India had been deprived of touch with the West, she would have lacked an element essential for her attainment of perfection.
That's why Grandpa spent good money lobbying Westminster to lift all restrictions on White immigration. Perfection, for Tagore, involved being ruled by nice White Christians.
Europe now has her lamp ablaze. We must light our torches at its wick and make a fresh start on the highway of time. That our forefathers, three thousand years ago, had finished extracting all that was of value from the universe, is not a worthy thought. We are not so unfortunate, nor the universe, so poor’.
Why not imitate the Japs instead? They had just kicked Russia's arse. Also, lighting torches at the wick of the West's lamp involves writing about Chemistry or Mathematics. It does not involve penning boring Bengali verse of a lugubrious type.
Tagore held up, as exemplars, his family preceptor Rammohan Roy and the Maharashtrian jurist Mahadev Govind Ranade. He said of Roy that ‘with a wonderful breadth of heart and intellect he accepted the West without betraying the East’.
He sold out his country so as to get rich serving a foreign conqueror.
Meanwhile, ‘in the Deccan, Ranade spent his life in the making of this same bridge between East and West’.
He was a Judge and thus didn't get very rich.
Unlike the chauvinists of Tagore’s day, both Roy and Ranade
were long dead. Had they been alive they would have understood that the days of multi-national empires were numbered.
had worked ‘to clear the way for an acceptance of whatever elements in the British are of value for the true History of India…’.
Which is that Hindus will be displaced by Muslims from Bengal and parts of Assam.
While deploring xenophobia, Tagore admitted that colonial rule in India was far from being the West at its best
But in Tagore's India, Indians were best at kissing Whitey's ass.
. Thus, ‘in no capacity, be it as magistrate, merchant, or policeman, does the Englishman present to us the highest that his racial culture has attained,
This was false. The ICS officer was not inferior to a member of the Home Civil Service. The best merchants- e.g. Sassoons- tended to move on from India to China or Egypt. But that was because India was shit. In one regard, the Anglo-Indian was ahead of the folk back home. The Indian police was better than Scotland Yard. It pioneered the use of finger-prints. Charles Tegart, who crushed Jugantar, was the best cop in the entire Empire. That's why he was put in charge of preventing a Black market in food developing when Britain imposed rationing during the Second World War. Kipling was a journalist in India. He got the Nobel prize before Tagore. Ronald Ross was in the Indian Medical Service. He too got the Nobel. The plain fact is, the Englishman in India was not inferior to the Englishman in England or anywhere else.
and so is India deprived of the greatest gain that might have been hers by reason of his arrival;
Churchill started his career in India. I suppose, Tagore thinks he should have stuck around in Bangalore wiping the arses of the Indians. It is sad that he fucked off back to Blighty so as to defeat the Huns.
on the contrary, her self-respect is wounded and her powers deprived
because England isn't sending its best people to wipe the bums of Indians
on every side of their natural development’.
By what? The presence of the Brits who did all the brain work. But Tagore should blame his grandfather for this outcome.
The India in which he lived and worked was marked ‘by this failure of East and West to come together.
Tagore's Grandfather got together with William Carr to set up a company which initially made a lot of money.
Bound to be near each other, and yet unable to be friends, is an intolerable situation between man and man, and hurtful withal’.
What was more hurtful was being killed or chased away by Muslims. To be fair, Tagore did try to warn his co-religionists that this would be their fate in East Bengal once the Brits departed.
A characteristic Indian reaction to the fact of colonialism was
to make money as a comprador
an unthinking deference; a second reaction, an equally unthinking defiance.
to make money or gain political power so as to make money- though, if you used violent means, you tended to come to a sticky end. Then the Brits fucked off, and a lot of Tagore's people in East Bengal came to a very sticky end even if they neither knew nor cared about the British.
Tagore was uncomfortable with both. ‘Those of us who go to the Englishman’s durbar with bowed heads and folded hands, seeking emoluments of office or badges of honour,—we only attract his pettiness and help to distort his true manifestation in India.
Very few Indians were sucking up to the Brits. This was because there were very few Brits.
Those, again, who in a blind fury of passion would violently assail him, succeed in evoking only the sinful side of the Englishman’s nature’.
Those who fuck with the Government are apt to get fucked up by the Government. Otherwise there is no fucking Government. But this is true of England and America and everywhere else.
Indians complained of colonial arrogance, and yet they treated their own people so badly.
Indians complained about taxes and rents and stuff costing too much. They still do. But so does everybody else.
So long as landlords regarded tenants as their personal property, so long as high castes looked down on low castes, ‘so long shall we not have the right or power to demand from the Englishman proper behaviour towards ourselves’.
Tagore was saying the same thing as his grandfather. Don't ask for 'proper behaviour' from the Brits because they may accord equally proper treatment to the Muslims who will lose no time in fucking us Hindus up. This is because Hindus hate each other more than they hate Muslims or Christians or foreigners of any description. The big enemy the Brahmo Tagores faced was their own Sanaatani cousins.
These cleavages of class and status, believed Tagore, had to be healed not by ‘tall talk nor violence’, but by ‘sacrifice and service’.
i.e. boring bollocks
The poet ended his essay/lecture in an exhortative but not unhopeful vein. ‘At every turn’, he remarked, in her religion, in her samaj, in her daily practice—does the India of to-day fail to do justice to herself.
Hindus aren't cohesive and lack martial spirit. If the Brits fuck off, Hindu Bengalis are fucked.
She does not purify her soul by sacrifice,
Britain was always purifying its soul by chopping its arms and legs off as a sacrifice to Jehovah.
and so on every side she suffers futility. She cannot meet the outsider on equal terms and so receives nothing of value from him.
Except Defence, Law & Order, Trains which run on time, Hospitals, Schools, Universities and Technical Institutes- including the Government School of Art in Calcutta- the encouragement of vernacular languages and literature, Archaeological research uncovering the country's past glories, and admission to the League of Nations in 1919.
No cleverness or violence can deliver her from the sufferings or insults of which the Englishman is but the instrument. Only when she can meet him as his equal will all reason for antagonism, with it all conflict, disappear.
The Brits left after defeating the Japs and preventing them conquering the country. Bengalis are still very angry about this.
Then will East and West unite in India, country with country, race with race, knowledge with knowledge, endeavour with endeavour.
No. The place is a shit-hole. Smart peeps run away.
Swapan Chakravorty has pointed out that Tagore’s essays in Prabasi were in the nature of an auto-critique.
No. They were in the nature of verbal diarrhoea.
When the Swadeshi movement began, Tagore had published several poems and songs apparently endorsing its agenda.
He was initially enthused. Then he remembered that he owned big estates in the East.
He was then chastised by some contemporaries for fanning the flames. As the essayist Ramendrasundar Trivedi remarked, while Tagore ‘never advised futile and pointless bluster’, he nonetheless ‘contributed in no small measure to the excitement and frenzy of the time’. These criticisms went home. Or, to put it in Tagore’s own words, ‘I took a few steps down the road, and then stopped…’.
But Aurobindo and Har Dayal and Savarkar, and so forth, also stopped. They realized that without the Brits, Hindu India could repeat the same mistakes it had been making for the previous millennium.
In the summer of 1912, Rabindranath Tagore visited England,
E.B Havell, the head of the Government Art College, was a friend of both Rothenstein and Okakura. Along with Abanindranath, he had developed the Bengali school of Art. It was through these gentlemen that Tagore came to the attention of Rothenstein who, in turn, cleared the path for Tagore's literary success in London. A few years later, Rothenstein would help Uday Shankar- the elder brother of Ravi Shankar- who would do a lot to promote Indian music and dance.
a country he had been to twice before. He was carrying some translations of his poems, which were misplaced on the London Underground. Fortunately, they were retrieved from the ‘lost luggage’ department of the Underground.
Brits turn lost property over to the proper authorities. This is because they are very arrogant.
Shortly afterwards, Tagore struck up a friendship with W. B. Yeats,
No. Rothenstein enrolled Yeats. Promotto Loll Sen, of the Cooch Behar Royal family, & Brajendranath Seal played a role. This was a case of Brahmo boosterism. Anyway, if a chit of a girl like Sarojini Naidu had been feted, why not a dude with a long beard? Also, Okakura's 'book of Tea' had been a big success.
who helped him refine the translations. Published by the India Society under the title Gitanjali, these poems were an immediate sensation, going through ten printings in six months. In November 1913 Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
Because the committee couldn't read Bengali.
The Nobel Prizes had been in existence only a decade, but had acquired a considerable prestige. Tagore was the first Asian winner in any category.
He was the third person from British India to get one.
He was already known in Europe and the United States (which he had visited, after finishing with Yeats and company, in that summer of 1912), but the Nobel award gained for him a massively enhanced status within India, and across Asia. The award was seen as an acknowledgement of the importance of a continent anxious to reclaim its past greatness. Thus, when Tagore arrived for the first time in the Japanese capital of Tokyo in June 1916, some twenty thousand people turned out to receive him at the city’s central railway station.
The Japanese had a high opinion of India as the homeland of the Buddha. However, in 1916, what was foremost in their minds was their new role as England's ally. Would this translate into trade and other concession in British India? The Tagore family were close to the British.
Tagore was very keen to visit Japan. Some years previously, he had made the acquaintance of Okakura Tenshin, the leading Japanese art historian and art curator of his day. Okakura spent nine months travelling in India in 1902, much of it in Bengal, where the Hindu nun of Irish extraction, Sister Nivedita, helped him finalize the manuscript of his book The Ideals of the East. Here Okakura spoke of three ‘mighty’ Asian civilizations, India, China, and Japan, while placing his own country at the apex. Japan, he argued, had synthesised and elevated all that was best in Indic and Chinese culture and history.
It must be admitted there was some truth to this assertion.
At the time Okakura wrote his book, his country was in many respects recognizably in advance of India and China. It had been not conquered by the Europeans; a freedom the Japanese used to imitate the methods of those who had subordinated their fellow Asians. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 had set in motion a series of important changes: land reform in the countryside, the willing acceptance of factory methods of production in the cities, and a reorganization of the military according to European (or more specifically Prussian) models. By the first years of the 20th century, Japan was clearly the power to look out for in Asia. Already, in 1895, it had subjected China to a humiliating military defeat. A decade later it was to vanquish a more powerful adversary on the battle field; this victory, over Russia, ranking as the first achieved by an Asian country over a professedly European one.
Ottoman Turkey was Asian. Its soldiers reached the gates of Vienna. Still, in the twentieth century, Japan stood out as a country which had defeated on both land and sea a much bigger power which was in fact European though, no doubt, it had a substantial Asiatic population.
Then, in 1910, it flexed its muscles further by annexing the Korean peninsula. In 1916, a speaking bureau based in New York offered Tagore $ 12, 000 to undertake a lecture tour in the United States. He agreed, because it would allow him to raise money for his school in Santiniketan. That he would go via Japan was an added attraction.
This was the route taken by the Indian revolutionaries then based in California. At an earlier period, Tagore had some sympathy for their cause.
As he had written to a scholar from that country, ‘I want to know Japan in the outward manifestation of its modern life and in the spirit of its traditional past. I also want to follow the traces of ancient India in your civilization…’.
I suppose, untouchability in Japan was a trace of ancient Indian Buddhism.
Tagore’s first speech in Japan was delivered in Osaka on the 1st of June 1916. It was reported in the newspapers under the heading, ‘Tagore Curses Civilization’. The characterization was not inaccurate; for within a week of arriving in Japan the poet had concluded that ‘all the civilized nations [were] being pressed into the modern mold and [were] assuming the same form or lack of form’.
Rash Behari Bose had escaped to Japan in 1915. He gained the patronage of 'the shadow Shogun' Tōyama Mitsuru.
As a British intelligence agent wrote of a later speech in Tokyo, ‘Tagore harps on the evils of European civilization and on mission of Japan to lead in the spread of the higher idealled (sic) Asiatic civilization. Not the kind of speech one would hope to hear from a member of the British Empire—but perhaps he should be given poetic license…’.
At that point, the Brits wanted the Japs to stay in the war. Their navy had helped put down a mutiny in Singapore and, by 1917, were operating in, not just the Pacific and Indian Oceans but also the Mediterranean.
Tagore’s talks in Japan, written up and revised, form a central chapter of Nationalism. A special responsibility devolved on Japan, as the first Asian country to engage with the modern world.
Why didn't the Japs have grandfathers who sold themselves to the Brits or the French or some other bunch of Europeans? One reason is that too many of their people were converting to Christianity. The safest course was to deny Europeans access to Japan.
Tagore could not believe that ‘Japan has become what she is by imitating the West’. As he reminded his audience, ‘you have the freedom to use the materials you have gathered from the West according to your genius and your need’.
Why couldn't Japs use that genius to import White Viceroys and Governors and District Collectors?
The materials Tagore himself was willing to gather from the West were its fabulously rich art and literature;
the Japanese did a better job. They had already translated everything and anything they could lay their hands on.
its spirit of justice;
The Tagore's had funded a Law Professorship at Calcutta Uni. It had been occupied by an expert on Tantra- Sir John Woodroofe- who later became Chief Justice.
its knowledge and its science. Those things he had long loved; but now, in the midst of the most destructive conflict in history (the First World War), they were overshadowed by other and darker attributes. In a brilliant passage, he wrote that ‘the political civilization which has sprung up from the soil of Europe [and] is overrunning the whole world, like some prolific weed, is based on exclusiveness.
The Brits included India in the territory ruled by their King. Japan, sadly, excluded foreign conquerors.
It is always watchful to keep at bay the aliens or to exterminate them. It is carnivorous and cannibalistic in its tendencies, it feeds upon the resources of other peoples and tries to swallow their whole future. It is always afraid of other races achieving eminence, naming it as a peril, and tries to thwart all symptoms of greatness outside its own boundaries, forcing down races of men who are weaker,
the difference between Tagore and the Japanese was that he believed his own race was 'weaker'.
to be eternally fixed in their weakness’.
Sadly, the Brits decided in 1917 that the age of Empires was over. India would have to be self-garrisoning and self-administering.
The choices before Asia were sometimes presented as fear or flattery; between lying ‘passively dormant, or feebly imita[ting] the West’.
Tagore didn't get that though you may start by imitating a person with superior skill, you may exceed that person. Indeed, you may yourself become the exemplar for others who are determined to rise up.
Japan could, if she wished, show a third way—to embrace the best of the West without damage to her cultural traditions.
Japan did a very good job of preserving its own cultural traditions.
(While disenchanted by the outward show of nationalism and militarism, Tagore was very impressed by the sophistication of Japanese aesthetics, as manifested in their gardens, and the decorations and lay-out of their homes and shrines). ‘True modernism’, the poet told his audience, ‘is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste.
That was Okakura's point.
It is independence of thought and action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters’.
Don't go to school. Climb a tree instead.
Tagore’s hopes and fears for Japan were expressed in interviews to the press before he left the country’s shores. He advised the Japanese ‘to avail of the fruits of Western civilization, but not to be caught in its meshes’.
Import it. Don't make it. Climb a tree instead.
When a correspondent from the Manchester Guardian asked whether the ‘Eastern outlook can be reconciled with the mechanism of Western civilization’, he answered that ‘it can and must be’. He himself conceived ‘of a kind of federation of nations in which each contributes its own characteristic philosophy’.
or stupidity.
The Japanese, he discovered, ‘think it their country’s mission to unite and lead Asia’. Tagore did not necessarily contest this ambition. But he pointedly asked: ‘Has she in view a federated or an imperialized Asia? In military and naval power, and in commerce and industry, she is already the foremost country in the East. In things purely of the intellect and spirit she is not’.
I suppose that was true at that time. India had had Western type Colleges for much longer. But within a decade Japan would take a decisive and enduring lead. It is instructive to compare S.N Bose (after whom the boson is named) and Yoshio Nishina- the father of Japanese physics. Bose was 4 years younger but was able to make a contribution to QMT in the early twenties. But thereafter he did little ending up as the V.C of Tagore's University.
Meanwhile, Nishina had discovered the muon and mentored two Nobel prize winners. It must be said, Nishina had a head start thanks to Hantari Nagaoka who was the first to synthesize gold from mercury by bombarding it with neutrons. Sarojini Naidu's father, a Science professor in Hyderabad, conducted more traditional alchemical experiments of a ludicrous type. Yet, he had a D.Sc from Edinburgh.
Through his talks in Japan, Tagore had moved (in Stephen Hay’s felicitious phrase) ‘from poetry to prophecy’.
Japan had turned him into Jeremiah.
He had sought to use his standing as an artist to sound a tocsin against the wholesale embrace of modern civilization.
He scolded modern civilization so as to get money.
His hosts were not entirely receptive. Since the Japanese national experience was untinged by colonialism, their intellectuals were more optimistic about what they could get from the West.
Since no Japanese family had gotten rich by working for foreign invaders, they wanted to become as advanced as the West rather than get paid to keep their own country backward and in bondage.
One novelist complained that ‘Tagore doesn’t even mention the possible use of material civilization for the benefit of all mankind’. A leading philosopher said sarcastically that Tagore’s voice was ‘like the song of a ruined country’.
It was the song of the grandson of a guy who had gotten rich ruining his country so that foreigners could rule over it.
As ‘the people of a rising nation’, he added, ‘I think we should make every effort especially to exclude the Indian tendency towards pessimism and dispiritedness’. An English journalist long resident in Kobe thus captured the reaction to the Indian visitor: ‘Tagore’s contempt for mere nationalism is naturally the bitterest pill for the Japanese to swallow, since from the cradle to the grave the importance of being Japanese is firmly impressed upon them. How can they put nationalism behind them? Surely such a doctrine can only be preached by a man whose country has lost its independence—by an inhabitant of a pale, decaying land, where all things droop to ruin’.
India wasn't pale. It was as dark as fuck. Still, Bengalis, like Netaji Bose, were keen to make a present of the place to the Japanese. Sadly, Churchill insisted on defeating the Japanese and thus rescuing India. No true Bengali will every forgive him for that.
Turning to a writer who had actually met Tagore, Guha writes
Jorge Luis Borges had sensed that there is one Tagore who speaks principally to his fellow Bengalis, but also another Tagore who speaks to (and for) the world.
This was obvious. A Bengali writer speaks to Bengalis. If he writes in English- or is translated into English- he is writing for the world.
In a review published in 1937 of Tagore’s Collected Poems and Plays, he spoke witheringly of the poet’s ‘unconquerable love of vagueness’.
He felt Tagore was a verbose bore.
The Indian writer, he said, was ‘incorrigbly imprecise’, while his poetry was ‘typically fluid and formless’.
Borges thought the fellow might be stupid. The bigger difference between them was that Borges was a Post-War expressionist. Tagore was a pre-War idealist of some vague but irenic kind.
Two decades later, on Tagore’s birth centenary, he was asked to write about his book Nationalism. This time he was more impressed. He saw it as prescient; written in 1917,
during the Great War. Nationalism was ruining Europe.
but anticipating the later excesses of the national spirit, as in Nazi Germany
which merely continued the Prussian militaristic Nationalism of Bismarck.
or during the Second World War or indeed in the Soviet Union, where (as Borges put it) ‘under the innocent mask of Marxism the government of Russia is also exercising nationalism’.
The Bolsheviks gained power because of the Great War. They stayed in power because they were more brutal than the Tzar.
These developments validated ‘the book Tagore wrote about half a century ago’.
It was a futile protest against a force which had been gaining ground since the late eighteenth century.
Borges added that ‘the rhetorical emphasis and a certain oriental resignation towards the use of common-places can not hide the sharpness of thought of the author’.
I suppose Borges was trying to suck up to Victoria Ocampo by saying something nice about her hero.
In a later passage, Borges nicely caught the mixture, within Tagore’s own soul, of the best of the East and the West. Writers like George Bernard Shaw ‘rejected capitalism, which condemns some to poverty and others to tedium;
whereas serfdom was just one big barrel of laughs.
in the same way Rabindranath Tagore rejected imperialism,
by telling the Viceroy to fuck off? Tagore didn't do that. He knew he would lose his estates in the East if the Brits slyly fucked off.
which diminishes the oppressed and the oppressor.
Imperialism need not be oppressive and oppression does not have to be imperialistic.
Eastern and Western cultures combined in this man who managed the two instruments of English and Bengali; each page of this book is filled with the Asiatic affirmation of the unlimited possibilities of the soul
Europeans, by contrast, insist that the soul can only go to Heaven or Hell. Bengalis think it can turn into a bicycle.
and the mistrust that the state machinery inspired in Spencer.’
State machinery costs money. India was too poor to have very much of the commodity.
Guha ends his essay thus-
I would like to end this essay with a tribute that Tagore heard in his own lifetime. This was offered by the residents of Rangoon
over half of whom were Indian
in the last week of March 1924. Tagore had stopped at the Burmese capital en route to China. Five thousand people turned out to hear him speak. In an address presented beforehand, they greeted him in ‘the name of that universal culture which you have promoted with admirable devotion and singleness of aim.
The Burmese didn't want to be part of British India. 13 years later they got their wish. In the Sixties, much of the Indian origin population of Burma had to leave.
We greet you in the name of Human Brotherhood, inculcation of which in East and West has been with you a consuming passion.
Burmese didn't feel brotherly towards Indians at all.
We greet you as a votary of Truth sensed through Beauty.
Nice people like Truth and Beauty. Nasty people don't.
We greet you as one representing the rebirth of Asia, and as one who had thrown across [a] chasm of ignorance and misunderstanding a bridge of future comprehension between Asia and EurAmerica….’.
The whole world will come to understand that Tagore was a vacuous bore.
One does not know whether this appreciation nourished Tagore at the time.
i.e. did he get some money from the good folk at Rangoon? I hope so.
For the bridge he sought to lay between East and West had been dynamited at the start.
Only you can dynamite a bridge you are seeking to lay- more particularly if you don't have any dynamite and aren't building shit.
He had been accused of being anti-Western by some,
who were being charitable. Stupid is the mot juste.
of being a colonial agent by others, seen as too much of a patriot by the foreigner and as not patriotic enough by the Indian. He had, we might say, been comprehensively misunderstood by the ignorant. It appears that the residents of Rangoon had anticipated this—why else would they look for a ‘future comprehension’? Now, with his words in hand, we might begin to lay that bridge again.
If we don't know Bengali then the words in question would be English words. But there was a dude named Shakespeare who built a better bridge to everywhere than it is in our power to do. Guha's 'modern India' was a shithole. You can blame Tagore for this just as much as any other vacuous bore. But nobody wants a bridge to a stinking pile of shite. In the future, perhaps even Guha will comprehend this.
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