Some 20 years ago, Amit Chauduri wrote in the LRB of Rabindranath Tagore in an essay titled 'two giant brothers' rather than 'a giant bore talking boring shite about another giant bore'.
Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, gave intellectuals and writers from once colonised nations (themselves often migrants, like Said)
his father was an American citizen as was he from birth. He went to an American prep school and College. He was an American who had spent his early years abroad in countries which were never colonies though Egypt was a 'veiled protectorate' for about 40 years while Palestine was a League of Nations mandated territory for 30 years.
a language that liberated and shackled in almost equal measure.
They already had it. Anybody could whine about Whitey or peeps wot said nasty things about them.
Said’s critical perspective gave both Europeans and non-Europeans a shrewder and more unillusioned sense of the subterranean ways in which power operated through the cultures of empire,
though nothing of the sort had ever occurred. Power operated through armies and administrations which levied taxes to pay for those armies. True, religions could be instrumentalized for political or military purposes in Said's part of the world. But, ultimately, it was armies which decided matters. Rommel was defeated by tanks- not by writers saying mean things about German culture.
and is now so familiar that it’s easily taken for granted.
By cretins teaching nonsense.
This would be foolish – Eurocentrism is alive and well,
Just as my egocentrism is alive and well though I have no fucking power of any kind.
and takes new and unexpected forms in every political epoch.
Those forms don't matter in any epoch. They aren't 'subterranean'. They are shit.
The limitations of Said’s seminal study have to do with the ideas it’s given us about ways the postcolonial might engage with the coloniser’s culture,
Like Said, they can study it well enough to teach it. But, what would be smarter would be to make money or gain political power and influence.
and with history; and, explicitly, the way the European engages with non-European antiquity.
The European doesn't. Some people may study various things.
We’re left with somewhat monochromatic types, defined almost exclusively by questions of power and appropriation, whose culture and past are at once static and strangely blurred.
Only if we read that shite. But why bother? Suppose people like Chinese martial arts or Indian Yoga. Anyone can study those subjects and make money setting up a chain of Kung Fu or Yoga studios in their own country.
Orientalism, at first glance at least, doesn’t seem to explain where its author, in his many-sidedness, comes from: Western metropolitan intellectual; radical political activist; postcolonial critic; champion of canonical European literature; classical pianist.
Said was Palestinian and acted as a spokesman for the Palestinian cause. He was pretending that the Israelis were 'European' colonists and they kept pointing at Palestinian dudes and saying 'ooga, booga! Look at that spear-chucking baboon!' This was very mean of them.
Yet the book contains a celebration of Raymond Schwab
a Jewish French Civil Servant who knew nothing of India. He wrote about how he believed particular authors reacted to ideas about India. What he didn't get was that only the market mattered. People wanted to read about India when it was a place where money was being made. As America became rich, people wanted to read about Cowboys.
, the author of La Renaissance Orientale, and gives us, in Schwab, an outline of another idea of, and way of responding to, the Orient,
by not responding to it but writing about writers who had responded to stuff written about it.
and, by extension, to a culture other than one’s own.
Writers in your culture may respond to other writers in your culture who are responding to writing about some foreign culture. But if you concentrate on such writers, you aren't engaging with or responding to any foreign culture. Suppose I eat only Indian food prepared by people who are responding to other Indian people's interpretation of supposedly Chinese dishes like 'gobi manchurian'. It is not the case that I eat Chinese food. I eat Indian food. True, some particular ingredient or recipe may have some remote or invented connection with China, but that does not make the dishes I eat Chinese.
Schwab himself, Said notes, looked back to another figure: Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805),
who genuinely studied ancient Indo-Iranian languages in India
‘an eccentric theoretician of egalitarianism, a man who managed in his head to reconcile Jansenism with orthodox Catholicism and Brahmanism’, and who ‘travelled as far east as Surat’ in India, ‘there to find a cache of Avestan texts, there also to complete his translation of the Avesta’.
The Parsis of Surat were factionalized and sought the protection of different Consuls. It was only under British patronage that their ascent into opulence became assured. This meant, at a later point, that they were able to benefit from the more thorough work of Martin Haug.
Essentially, as they got richer and better educated, the Parsis could get better deal from Western philologists which helped them keep up the morale of their own young people and give them an incentive not to convert to Christianity or some other religion. The supply of 'oriental' texts had a lot to do with particular communities wishing to advance their own interests.
But, back in Europe, popular demand for texts about exotic places was related to the chance of gaining wealth there. Nobody is interested in reading about a shithole where the woman are ugly and the biggest adventure you have involves recovering from dysentery. Equally, 'the Orient' only became interested in the Occident as it got richer and more powerful.
Said quotes Schwab on what the latter saw as Anquetil-Duperron’s legacy; it is one of the most affirmative and exuberant passages on cultural contact ever written:
any one can write nonsense
In 1759, Anquetil finished his translation of the Avesta at Surat;
it was shit
in 1786 that of the Upanishads in Paris
it was shit because it was from Dara Shikoh's Persian translation
– he had dug a channel between the hemispheres of human genius, correcting and expanding the old humanism of the Mediterranean basin
What fucking humanism? That was a place disfigured by Crusades and Jihads and feudal exploitation of a ragged peasantry.
.'.. Before him, one looked for information on the remote past of our planet exclusively among the great Latin, Greek, Jewish and Arabic writers ...'
The Jesuits had been translating Chinese texts from the seventeenth century. Anyway, there wasn't much information on the 'remote past' in Avestan or Vedic texts.
'A universe in writing was available, but scarcely anyone seemed to suspect the immensity of those unknown lands.
The Jesuits had known about it since the end of the sixteenth century. But the Greeks had themselves spoken of the far greater antiquity of the Egyptians. What made India different from China or Egypt was that Europeans could get very rich there very quickly. Indeed, they might be able to carve out an Empire for themselves. Knowing a bit of the lingo might help. Since Hanover was in personal union with England, philologists there had an incentive to go in for Persian and Sanskrit. This fashion spread in Germany. Sanskrit turned out to be useful for linguists. German Indology turned into a heavy industry. Consider Herman Grassmann, the great mathematician. When he failed to get a Professorship for his discoveries, he took up Sanskrit and translated the Rg Veda.
The realisation began with his translation of the Avesta, and reached dizzying heights owing to the exploration in Central Asia of the languages that multiplied after Babel. Into our schools ... he interjected a vision of innumerable civilisations from ages past, of an infinity of literatures.
This already existed and Jesuit and other missionaries were well aware of it. They had to study other literatures so as to prepare good translations of the Bible in those languages.
According to Said, the fact that certain Europeans opened themselves to the cultural store of the Orient in the late 18th and 19th century, produced, in those individuals, a ‘new, triumphant eclecticism’.
Said was wrong. Cultural eclecticism was a product of trade and commerce. More and more people were drinking Chinese tea and adorning their abodes with Chinoiserie. The fashion for India came a little later.
Among the figures he mentions are, of course, Anquetil-Duperron and Sir William Jones,
Jones was an important official. However, Jesuits and other missionaries had already shown they could be accepted by existing priestly or aristocratic circles and could produce translations though this was not their primary aim. The other point was that there was an indigenous market for good printed editions of Scriptural and other Literary work. The Missionary's printing press could make a profit churning this out.
the founder of Indology, whose researches on the Orient, Hinduism and the Sanskrit language include translations from – and, in effect, the recovery of – the great fourth-century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa.
Jones studied at Nabadwipa but a number of Company servants would employ a Munshi or a Pundit to acquire the rudiments of Persian and Sanskrit.
Yet Said is hard on Jones
who was hard on Anquetil
– ‘whereas Anquetil opened large vistas, Jones closed them down, codifying, tabulating, comparing’ – as if he somehow embodied the colonial project rather than the ‘new, triumphant eclecticism’.
Jones was important. Anquetil wasn't.
This is borne out, for Said, by Jones’s personal itinerary, and, for us, by the way Said describes it:
In due course he was appointed to ‘an honourable and profitable place in the Indies’, and immediately on his arrival there to take up a post with the East India Company began the course of personal study that was to gather in, to rope off, to domesticate the Orient and thereby turn it into a province of European learning.'
Just as Indians were making English Literature and European Science a 'province' of the Indian Educational system. Eclecticism may be all very well but professionalism is better.
This reservation has been echoed by others. Dipesh Chakrabarty, the author of Provincialising Europe, says something similar while enquiring into the reasons he finds it possible to engage in serious intellectual commerce with European philosophers,
Dipshit is too stupid to do any such thing
but not with Indian ones going back to antiquity: ‘Sad though it is, one result of European colonial rule in South Asia is that the intellectual traditions once unbroken and alive in Sanskrit or Persian or Arabic are now only matters of historical research for most – perhaps all – modern social scientists in the region.’
Because 'modern social scientists' are as stupid as shit. The plain fact is, Pundits continue to 'engage' with different philosophers from their religion. Sometimes, they are 'eclectic' and draw upon philosophers from elsewhere. Bhagwan Rajneesh, a Jain by birth, is an example. I was surprised that Jain Sadhus and Sadhvis took his nonsense seriously. But he knew his Umaswati from his Kundakunda.
But were intellectual traditions in South Asia ‘once unbroken and alive’ – ‘once’ referring to the hazy and golden period before colonisation?
For Hindus- or at least for Brahmins- the answer is yes.
This speculation is all the more surprising because it comes only a few sentences after Chakrabarty has admitted, pertinently, that the idea of an ‘unbroken’ European intellectual tradition going back to the Greeks is a relatively recent construct.
The Greek orthodox Church has maintained that 'unbroken' tradition for Greeks. Elsewhere there may have been interruptions.
The idea of an unbroken Indian tradition is itself probably an Orientalist invention, and Jones one of its early architects.
Jones met Brahmins and Vaidyas who clearly had an unbroken tradition. The way this could be established was that their orally preserved texts were more or less identical to those same texts preserved by other Brahmins living a thousand miles away. If stuff is handed down from father to son over thousands of years, it represents an unbroken tradition.
One of the earliest writers to perceive the great cultural, emotional, philosophical and political potential of the notion of the ‘Orient’ was Tagore
Emperor Ashoka is generally considered one of the first Indians to see the political and philosophical potential of exporting Indic religion, philosophy and material culture. There may have others in earlier times. Tagore wrote in Bengali for Bengalis. True, at a certain point he experimented with English and won a Nobel prize for his verse. But Sarojini Naidu had published her verse to some acclaim a little earlier. But Toru Dutt's poetry had been quite well received thirty years previously.
A hundred years before Tagore, no Bengal poet saw the Orient and its unbroken past as a foundation, a point of origin, and a parameter for the self and for creativity;
All Brahmin poets in Bengal did so. They believed themselves to be descended from the 'kavis' of the Rg Veda. Indeed, they could recite those Vedas and knew their associated Upanishads and Sutra commentaries.
there is no ‘Orient’, or ‘East’, for the medieval poets Chandidas, Vidyapati or Jayadeva,
There is Jambudvipa or Aryavarta for them. No doubt, learned Chinese or Japanese monks referred to India as 'the West' while Europeans considered the country to be to the East. Still, Brahmins knew whether they were located in the North, or South, or West, or East of the country of their ancestors. True, they may also have been unhappy about Muslim rule in parts of the country. But they did not believe the Muslims had completely destroyed their heritage because they still possessed it in ample measure.
as there is, so profoundly, for Tagore.
Tagore would lose big estates in the East if the Brits fucked off. Indeed, his grandfather had spent good money lobbying Westminster to send more Whites to Bengal so as to keep the Muslims in check.
Nor would it have occurred to Chandidas to locate himself in history,
the legends about him do so- e.g. the story that he was sentenced to death by the Nawab for attracting the attention of the Begum. As a village priest, he was located in the history of Hinduism by means of his gotra and pravara.
and to claim and create pan-Indian lineages
all Brahmins have a pan-Indian lineage. I am descended from the Rishi Bharadwaj just like many people in Bengal, Punjab, Maharashtra etc.
by using certain Indian poets and texts
He was welcome to do so because he was writing within a Vaishnava/Sahajiya tradition.
– such as Kalidasa
a Shaivite. But Kalidasa had influenced poets who influenced Jayadeva who influenced Chaitanya who influenced Chandidas etc. (though there is some doubts as to the dates)
or the Upanishads – as Tagore does.
Chandidas knew whichever Upanishad was traditional in his lineage. Even I do so. For Brahmins there is continuity. Perhaps not for Amit because he is not a Brahmin.
And, for Chandidas, naturally, there is no Europe.
There was the notion of the 'Yavanas'- or Greeks. It was the Greeks who gave Europe its name.
Europe was born, for the Indian, at about the time the Orient was:
No. It was created at the same time as other continents.
they are twins, though not identical ones, who had, in the Indian’s mind, a momentous and painfully coeval birth.
Rubbish! Hindus were pleased that the English defeated the Muslims and permitted them to rise up. Tagore warned against trying to chase the English away because then the Muslims would drive out the Hindus wherever they were in the majority.
The researches of the likes of Anquetil-Duperron and even Jones brought to Europeans a ‘new, triumphant eclecticism’, Said says;
Fuck off! Jones had helped the Brits expand their rule in India by military triumphs but peak Orientalism- as represented by Tom Moore's Lala Rookh or Southey's 'curse of Kehama'- was a passing fad. People wanted accurate information about India, not eclectic shite.
but that eclecticism had a relatively brief legacy in the West: by the early 20th century, it had narrowed itself to an almost exclusively European definition, so that words such as ‘cosmopolitan’ were more or less interchangeable with ‘European’.
In Europe, sure. But since Europe was most advanced, no true cosmopolitan would be ignorant of it. Similarly, not Japan is rich and China is rising, no Cosmopolitan doesn't eat sushi or express a preference between Szechuan and Cantonese cooking. Indeed, even I do it and I'm as common as muck.
Said doesn’t mention that the true and most significant inheritors of Anquetil-Duperron’s ‘triumphant eclecticism’ weren’t Europeans, but Orientals; they were the ones who took the fullest intellectual and artistic advantage not only of the advent of Europe but of the fact of the ‘Orient’, the ‘correction’ and ‘expansion’ of ‘the old humanism of the Mediterranean basin’.
Nonsense! Us guys were poor. We wanted to acquire useful education and make money as lawyers or doctors or engineers or entrepreneurs. After that, we wanted political power and social prestige. This might involve putting on a khaddar dhoti and a Gandhi cap and pretending to care greatly about cows while keeping secret your preference for Single Malt Whiskey over Ganga-jal.
It’s in this context that I want to situate Tagore, born in 1861, roughly eighty years after Anquetil-Duperron’s translation of the Upanishads,
roughly forty years after his grandfather and Raja Ramohan Roy were taken with Dara Shikoh's translation of the Upanishads which caused them to set up the Brahmo Samaj.
and, indeed, Said, one of the latest in the line of Orientals
Arabs
who have appropriated and complicated Anquetil-Duperron’s inheritance.
Said didn't learn Sanskrit. He could not 'appropriate' that dude's inheritance.
‘A 19th-century Orientalist was ... either a scholar ... or a gifted enthusiast ... or both,’ Said says, after pointing out that ‘there was a virtual epidemic of Orientalia affecting every major poet, essayist and philosopher of the period
there were fads from time to time. Publishing was a business. People wrote books with an eye to what was selling in the market.
... this is a later transposition eastwards of a similar enthusiasm in Europe for Greek and Latin antiquity during the High Renaissance.’
Parts of the Bible were composed in Greek. Smart people wanted to go beyond the Vulgate. Also, they wanted something a bit more refined than Church Latin. Cicero fitted the bill nicely.
But the resemblance with the Renaissance ends there. The Orient, in Europe, continued to remain the province of arcane scholars and gifted enthusiasts;
whereas costermongers and chamber-maids conducted their courtships entirely through the medium of ancient Greek and the Latin of the Augustan age.
in the realm of culture, it retained, and still does, the ethos of ‘Orientalia’. Unlike Greek and Latin antiquity, which became an indispensable resource and even a romantic myth for Modernism, the Orient, with a handful of exceptions, such as the final lines of The Waste Land, was never inserted into Modernist self-consciousness.
TS Eliot knew Sanskrit. There is plenty of it in Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's poems while Ezra Pound, like Tagore, translated Kabir. Yeats and Auden & Isherwood, translated Hindu scriptures in collaboration with Hindu Pundits. However, to my mind, the most remarkable use of Sanskrit by a 'modernist' is that of Strindberg in 'the dream play'.
Its domain became, in Europe, largely that of popular culture, of kitsch and the exotic.
No. Popular culture was about representations of different types of people familiar to the audience. Still, it sometimes happened that a particular foreign country was newsworthy or topical. I believe Gilbert & Sullivan's 'Mikado' was a response to the arrival of some Japanese people who had set up a village of their own in Kensington.
(Even in popular 19th-century Indian art, the Orient occupies the soft, hazy space of ‘Orientalia’.)
No. 19th century Indian art was a commercial activity. There was nothing 'soft' or 'hazy' about understanding the market and supplying it profitably.
It would have been easy for Tagore to treat the Orient as a magical and occult resource, as Yeats did Ireland.
No. Yeats wasn't a big landowner. He could write 'Countess Cathleen' without being reminded that a lot of his own tenants were malnourished. Tagore owned and managed large estates. Still, you may ask why Tagore didn't write some gripping 'swords and sorcery' type novel set in India. The answer is that he was a boring cunt.
Instead, radically, he inscribed it, in his vast oeuvre, into the trajectory of humanism and the ‘high’ modern:
Nope. His spiritual shite did well because he was after all the hereditary pontiff of a Hindu sect. But there was nothing modern, as opposed to meretricious, about him. By the end of the Twenties, young Bengali poets preferred the path of TS Eliot to Tagore.
Easternness, in his work, is no longer incompatible with individualism,
It never was. Buddha was so highly individual that he founded a big big religion. There were other dudes who made fortunes- like the Tagores- or set up as Maharajas or who meditated in forests or who practiced black magic.
with self-consciousness about the powers and limits of language,
which everybody who can speak already has
or awareness of the transformative role of the secular artist.
The movie star maybe. Lots of peeps watch movies.
In fashioning these paradigms, modes of consciousness and roles for himself, Tagore seems to be addressing, instructing and even rebutting not a Brahmin,
his family had been rebutting Brahmin orthodoxy for three generations
but a bourgeois orthodoxy in Calcutta;
there was no such thing. Calcutta had Europeans, Armenians, Baghdadi Jews, Marwaris etc.
in doing so, he, unprecedentedly, conflates his identity as an Oriental and his vocation as a secular artist.
No. He claimed to be an internationalist. Also, because he was the head of a religious sect, and dressed the part, and his poems were vaguely spiritual, the one thing he wasn't was a secular artist. This is also why his books were so boring. He couldn't show anyone having sex or even marrying for love.
By the time Tagore was born, both the first wave of Orientalist enthusiasm and the most significant phase of Orientalist scholarship were over. In 1813, Byron had advised Thomas Moore: ‘Stick to the East ... it [is] the only poetical policy.’ The ‘policy’ had impelled Byron, Southey and Moore to write about the gul-e-bulbul (the stock Persian metaphor for the nightingale in the garden),
Byron didn't gas on in that style. Still, Goethe had a Divan in imitation of Hafiz.
and probably also stimulated Edward FitzGerald’s ‘translation’ of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
No. By then, India was directly administered. Civil Servants and Army officers had to pass an exam in Persian to get their increment. Khayyam's verses were suitable because Geology and Darwin had made atheism popular. FitzGerald's Persian teacher was a Professor in Calcutta and sent him the Khayyam manuscript. But FitzGerald's Khayyam isn't sensual. It is austere when it isn't Epicurean.
(T.S. Eliot’s misgivings about FitzGerald’s poem, although he wasn’t immune to its appeal, are representative of Modernism’s distrust of ‘Orientalia’.)
FitzGerald had been taken up by the Pre-Raphelites and Swinburne. Perhaps the thing was over lush.
In the second half of the 19th century, the excitement waned, despite the work of Max Müller, the editor of the Rigveda, the sacred hymns of the Hindus.
Muller was considered a bit of a joke- a 'solar myth'.
In 1879, ‘Oriental’ poetry received a final fillip with the publication of Light of Asia, Edwin Arnold’s life of the Buddha, told in narrative verse.
No. Buddhism received a boost. But this would have happened anyway. Arnold
As early as 1817, Moore had received the unheard-of sum of 3000 guineas as an advance for his poem Lalla Rookh;
Which was a safe way to write about what was really of interest to the reading public- viz. the Irish rebellion and the role of Lord Castlereagh. But, it must be said, Lalla Rookh is very readable.
now, Light of Asia became an immense success on both sides of the Atlantic, and was reprinted eighty times. When Matthew Arnold visited America, he found that many people confused him with Edwin. Of course, the notion of ‘high seriousness’ that Matthew Arnold had himself formulated would prevail, guaranteeing that his reputation would outlast the frenetic but essentially light efflorescence of the ‘Oriental’ poem.
Edwin Arnold had been the principal of Deccan College. His mistake was to move from the Buddha to Christ with 'Light of the World'. Matthew Arnold, it must be said, had genuine poetic talent.
In the contrast between the two Arnolds, we’re reminded that ‘seriousness’ in literature remained a European or Anglo-Saxon province, and that the ‘Oriental’ was marked by lightness, colour and momentary success.
Unless a truly gifted poet wrote about the Orient. This happened when Kipling returned to the land of his birth.
The matter of success in the marketplace (one of the first things we associate with a certain kind of Indian writing today) and its relationship to the Orient has a lineage, then, stretching back to the early 19th century.
Prior to Kipling, the most successful book about India was Meadows Taylor's 'confessions or a thug'. But Otto Trevelyan's polished style meant that 'letters of a Competition Wallah' was widely read. My point is that if a good writer writes about a place in an interesting manner, his book may find its own market.
The example of the Tagore family shows us that, in Calcutta, the creation of a space for culture had everything to do with an embracing of ‘high seriousness’, and a turning away from commerce and material reward: the same turn that marks the emergence of Modernism in the bourgeois cultures of Europe.
This cretin doesn't get that Tagore made a lot of money from his books and plays. Yet, he was as serious as fuck. No 'bourgeois culture' turns its nose up at a poet or a dramatist or even a novelist who makes a lot of money by writing well.
Tagore’s grandfather, ‘Prince’ Dwarkanath, made his fortune as a middleman for the Company in Calcutta.
He was an entrepreneur. Sadly, some of his speculations didn't pay off.
He travelled to London and threw lavish parties; he died with his financial affairs in disarray. The disarray – not to speak of the vast estates – was inherited by his son Debendranath, who paid off his father’s debts and made his family financially secure again.
It was financially secure. Debendranath was actually taking a risk by taking on his father's debts. But he was no spendthrift.
But the turn away from commerce and entrepreneurship
was caused by market conditions. Essentially, global diversification reduced risk and brought scale and scope economies. Calcutta as the Capital City, would have such Managing Agencies. Also opium from Princely India would be exported through Bombay. Thus Indian entrepreneurship flourished more in Bombay than in Calcutta.
(if not from inherited land) that would come to characterise middle-class or bhadralok Bengali culture already marked Debendranath, who, besides being a man of property, became a philosopher-mystic – a maharshi or maha rishi, meaning ‘great sage’ – following his discovery of the Upanishads,
Which he would have done in any case if he had been religious and had maintained a family purohit.
a text that his father’s friend, the scholar, reformer and thinker Rammohun Roy, had translated into English
NO! He translated it into Bengali. Debendranath was genuinely interested in spiritual matters and he raised his family's prestige by his religious activities.
in the early 19th century, and which Anquetil-Duperron, too, had played his part in bringing to the world’s attention.
The Persian translation was made by the heir to the Mughal throne. The world pays attention to Princes. However the close connection between Upanishad and Brahmana and Veda is missing from that vacuous shite. After all, these are family books meant for those whose hereditary business it is to perform certain rituals.
The Upanishads became, for both Roy and Debendranath Tagore, a prism through which they recovered not only their own spiritual inheritance,
Since they were both Brahmins, they would have had the Upanishads if they had simply practiced their own ancestral religion. Translating from Persian into Bangla would have been unnecessary because they would be receiving that discourse in a Sanskrit which isn't really very difficult. The advantage of doing so, is the connection between orthodoxy and orthopraxy is transparent.
but the lineage of a humanism to be found outside the Mediterranean basin.
Since humans are found outside there, humanism too will be found outside there. But Brahmin lineages are spiritual. They are concerned with God not some 'secular art' or 'social science' or whatever shite Amit teaches.
The break with commerce was made more emphatic in the next generation,
there was no break. Collecting rents is a commercial activity.
especially by two of Debendranath’s 14 children: Jyotirindranath, his fifth son,
who lived off property income. It was a different son who made a living as a Civil Servant.
and Rabindranath, the youngest.
who managed the family property though other brothers also played some role in the management of other properties of their own.
Jyotirindranath, with his experiments in theatre, literature and especially musical composition (in the 1870s and 1880s he composed Bengali songs on the piano), was a great influence on Rabindranath, as was Jyotirindranath’s young wife, Kadambari, with whom he had an ambiguous relationship, part filial, part romantic: the sort of semi-articulate bond that animates much of his fiction and especially his songs – a bond that almost thrives on the impossibility of consummation:
Sadly, the elder brother had taken the trouble to educate his wife but not to consummate the marriage.
I could speak to her on a day like this,
on a day when it rains as heavily.
You can open your heart on a day like this –
when you hear the clouds as the rain pours down
in gloom unbroken by light.
Those words won’t be heard by anyone else;
there’s not a soul around.
Just us, face to face, in each other’s sorrow
sorrowing, as water streams without
interruption;
it’s as if there’s no one else in the world.
The lines
are terrible.
– they are the first two verses of a song and are given here in my translation – echo something Tagore wrote to Kadambari that was published in a collection of jottings and musings not long before her death:
I offer something more with these thoughts, which only you will notice. Do you remember that moment by the banks of the Ganga? That silent dark? Those wanderings in imagined worlds? Those deep discussions in low, serious voices? The two of us sitting silently, saying nothing? That breeze at sunrise, that evening shadow! And, once, those rain-bearing clouds, Sravan’s downpour, the songs of Vidyapati? ... I have concealed a handful of contentment and grief in these thoughts; open these pages once in a while and look upon them with affection, no one but you will be able to see what’s in them! The message inscribed into these words is – there’s one writing that you and I shall read. And there’s another writing for everyone else.
This is pedestrian though heart felt. I suppose there were English or Chinese or African young men who became close to a sister-in-law neglected by her husband. But Tagore was not the man who could do the theme justice. On the other hand, he was energetic in managing the family estate.
Along with a few gifted members of a later generation, Jyotirindranath, Kadambari and Rabindranath formed the core of what was probably India’s first ‘artistic’ family:
The first Brahmin 'artistic families' were the udgatr rhapsodists of the Sama Veda. But there were plenty of non-Brahmin lineages specialising in the arts associated with various Temples. Among North Indian musicians, pride of place is given to descendants of Tansen- e.g. Dagar brothers. A number of Princely dynasties weren't just patrons of Art but also producers of it. I would say the Travancore ruling dynasty- which produced Swati Tirunal (1813-1846) and Raja Ravi Verma (1848-1906)- were the foremost 'artistic family' in the South. But, one could say that their influence was limited in the North. The truth is what is pan-Indian is Indo-Muslim- viz. the composite Indo-Ganga-Jamuna 'tehzeeb' of the Mughals which, in Calcutta, was exemplified by Nawab Wajid Ali Shah who directly influenced Raja Sourindra Mohan Tagore who founded the Bengal Music Academy. But, it was the Brits who were the prime movers in the rise of Calcutta and the Tagore family. Abanindranath Tagore, the great painter who was instrumental in introducing Rabi to Okakura & Rothenstein- thus paving the way for his emergence on the London literary scene- was educated in the British founded Sanskrit College and then the British founded Calcutta School of Art. If the Tagores were rich and artistic, it was because the Brits had made them so.
‘artistic’ in the sense of pursuing the arts with quasi-religious Victorian fervour,
even the Tagore's sect owed much to Unitarianism and Utilitarianism- both of which flourished in the early to mid Victorian period.
while just as self-consciously moving away from the preordained responsibilities of caste, class, property and even gender.
Nope. The Tagore's 'Adi Brahmo Samaj' didn't want to admit non-Brahmins and went in for child-marriage of daughters. The school at Shantiniketan was originally supposed to be a Vedic patshala for young Brahmin boys. But that would have cost too much and so Rabi turned it into a school for wealthy retards plus one or two bright kids related to Tagore or to the teachers he employed.
This salon
wasn't like a Parisian salon. It was a family affair. Tagore complained to his friends in London, that back in India he enjoyed no social life properly so called. Talking to aunty and uncle and nephew and niece is family life, not social life. Tagore did not enjoy the advantage of access to a sophisticated, urbane, circle of intellectuals and artists. He felt this drawback keenly in London where everybody of any distinction knew each other and frequently met each other at Clubs, Country Houses, and the salons of fashionable ladies. They also kept fucking each other. That was taking 'cross-pollination' too far.
– at once silly and deeply creative and original – and Tagore’s part in it were permanently put in shadow by Kadambari’s suicide in 1884.
No. It provided him with quite a good theme though he was incapable of doing it justice. The truth is, his Mum hadn't been very interested in him and thus made him go to school. He was only allowed to drop out after she died. Kadambari had arranged his marriage, but wasn't really interested in keeping up a Platonic relationship constituted by boring letters and poems. She wanted a baby. But, because her husband had come to look on her as a daughter whom he himself had educated, she was getting no nookie. She killed herself. Sad.
Her reasons are unclear: though speculation ranges from her attachment to Rabindranath, who got married a few months before she took her life (with an overdose of opium),
Opium is nice. Sadly, it makes a boring way of life seem even greyer and emptied of significance.
to her husband’s flirtation, possibly liaison, with an actress whose letters she discovered in his pocket – a scene retold in one of Tagore’s novels.
She wasn't getting any poking. This meant, even if she fucked the help, it would be difficult to explain how she got preggers. The problem with guys in their twenties marrying 9 year old girls is that they will come to think of them as younger sisters or daughters. An incest taboo will begin to operate. The solution was obvious. Let both girls and boys graduate and then get married. But, in his 'final song' Tagore depicts an educated girl, who loves Rabi's poetry, not marrying the boring, but anti-Rabi, shithead whom she is supposed to do. Basically, Tagore had to double down on the notion that the Brahmo buddhijivi must be a sexless bore. At least his son, who took over Shantiniketan, eloped with the wife of a teacher there. Sadly, this meant there was no way to prevent the place being taken over by th4e Central government who quickly turned it to shit.
Part of the legacy that Tagore’s father left him was an attachment to the Brahmo Samaj,
Tagore was raised in it and, after his brother died, had no choice but to take over its running after his Dad died. It must be said, he was a very obedient son. Perhaps if his Mum had cared about him, he would have been more independent of his Dad. Or else, maybe he just was a good Hindu son, a good Hindu husband, and a decent Hindu Guru who didn't try to cheat or fuck his students.
a reformist Hindu sect founded by Rammohun Roy.
and Dwarkanath. But both had bigger fish to fry and so it was Rabi's dad who was the prime mover till a charismatic non-Brahmin- Keshub Chandra Sen- appeared on the scene. This led to a split in the movement. Brahmo politics was as deeply stupid and boring as its vacuous creed.
The sect developed a curious but compelling mixture of Protestant high-mindedness and Hindu metaphysics; its prayers and meetings were conducted in a ‘church’; its central text was the Upanishads. In rejecting the idolatrous practices and the deities of ordinary Hinduism
it was following Islam. Anglican Churches have plenty of 'idolatrous' practices. Also there is a Trinity rather than just the one God. It was the Unitarians who drew on Raja Ram Mohan's stupid polemics.
and replacing them with the niraakar (‘formless’) One of the Upanishads, Brahmoism
Brahmoism is not 'one of the Upanishads'. Is Amit thinking of the Brahma Sutras? Who can tell. He is as ignorant as shit
supplied Tagore not so much with a religion – he was never that interested in its claims to being one
Tagore took over from his father as the head of the Adi Brahmos (though some other Adi Brahmos didn't recognize his authority) and was voted in as an honorary member of the Sadharana Brahmo Samaj in the early Twenties. This put him in conflict with Subhas Chandra Bose because of the Brahmo ban on celebrating Durga Puja in their College hostel. Tagore was ineffectual in political and religious matters. Sadly, his experiment with cooperative banking also failed (because of the Depression) and the financial burden of Shantiniketan forced him to make nice with Gandhi who could secure him funding.
– as an aesthetic. It was an aesthetic aligned to the Flaubertian dictum that
Art should be the Soul's condom?
would define a substantial part of the Modernist enterprise: ‘The author, like God in the universe, is everywhere present but nowhere visible in his works.’
But Tagore was present in his works. Embarrassingly so, in Shesher Kavita where the heroine gasses on about the greatness of 'Rabi Thakur'. Perhaps Amit thinks Madam Bovary similarly comments on the genius of Monsieur Gustave.
This is a notion of God, and his relationship to creation, that goes to the heart of Brahmoism’s vision of the world.
No. Brahmoism says there is a universal witness or 'Saakshi'. Also, everything in creation is a theophany. Flaubert was speaking of the God of the Bible. Brahmo's were Sufi-Goofy Advaitins of a terribly vacuous and boring type.
Indeed, it’s possible that Flaubert had been reading Anquetil-Duperron, and had aestheticised an Upanishadic idea.
Flaubert was merely saying that a novelist doesn't need to preach or depict good people getting rewarded and bad people coming to a sticky end. This was an argument for realism. It had nothing to do with God or the Upanishads or the Holy Quran or the Chinese Book of Changes.
One may say Flaubert was 'Callimachean'- i.e. rejected 'grand narratives' for a personal ideographic point of view. Callimachus was an 'African' writing in Greek.
Certainly, Tagore performed that aestheticisation in his own work,
Only in the sense that everybody did.
introducing to Bengali literature a new sort of self-reflexivity;
i.e. narcissism
he seldom named God in his writings,
Fuck God! I'm super special.
but spoke of the kabi or ‘poet’
because that was what he was
while referring to both author and divinity, and punned on the word rachana, or ‘composition’, to mean both text and creation.
Rabi literally thought himself to be too cool for skool.
Tagore’s education was unusual. Admitted to the Normal School at a ‘tender age’, he was deeply unhappy,
Mummy made him go to skool! How cruel!
and was subsequently mainly educated by tutors.
After Mummy died.
His least favourite lesson was English. ‘Providence,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘out of pity of mankind, has instilled a soporific charm into all tedious things. No sooner did our English lessons begin than our heads began to nod.’
Tagore's shite can put you to sleep within 30 seconds.
In 1878, when his first book of songs appeared, he went to England to study law at University College London, attended lectures for a few months, travelled through the country and observed English culture with a mixture of empathy and resistance.
He was affectionately received and thus came to like England.
He returned to Calcutta in 1880, without a degree. Like Kipling,
whose parents were too poor to send him to Uni, but who loved his school
he was secretly traumatised by what Foucault called the ‘disciplinary’ society – the cluster of institutions comprising schools, universities, hospitals, prisons –
he was traumatised by his Mum's not wanting to spend much time with him. His Dad, however, took him with him on his excursions.
but unlike Kipling he remained ill at ease in it.
Kipling wasn't a boring shithead.
Not just his opposition to imperial England,
he wanted the Brits to stay because otherwise he would lose his estates in the East.
but his suspicion of nationalism and the nation-state seems to derive from this unease, as does his fanciful experiment in a more open and relaxed form of learning at a school he called ‘Shantiniketan’ or ‘Abode of Peace’.
Daddy had wanted him to set up a Vedic patshala. The problem was that the family would have to pay not just for the education of its victims but provide livelihoods for its products. They just didn't have the money. So, Tagore turned it into a school for affluent thickos.
From childhood onwards, Tagore had been looking out of windows and partitions; the word khancha, or ‘cage’, recurs in the songs and poems, and there is a concern with the possibilities and avenues of egress which is common in victims of a disciplinary society.
i.e. places where you get sent to jail if you stab some other dude.
When Tagore published his first book of songs at the age of 16, he was praised by the foremost writer of the time, the first major Bengali novelist, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.
Posh peeps praise the sons of other posh peeps.
But his relationship with Bengali literary culture was not easy.
He was a vacuous bore.
He had several vociferous detractors, whose comments ranged from the snidely witty to the piously outraged. Even after he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, the passages in which he had first tried out a new colloquial Bengali prose were included by Calcutta University in the MA paper in Bengali as specimens to be rendered by examinees into ‘chaste Bengali’.
Or so says Niradh Chaudhuri. BTW how fucking retarded do you have to be to do an MA in Bengali?
The Nobel Prize itself was the climax of a series of meetings and accidents.
The British head of the Calcutta Government Art School was a pal of both Rothenstein and Okakura. He was trying to revive an Indian style of art. Tagore's nephew was the most promising pupil of that school. Also he was rich. He introduced first Okakura and Rothenstein to Tagore. Okakura's 'book of tea' was a best-seller. Sarojini Naidu's book had been well received. After the death of Vivekananda, there was a gap in the market for Hindu spirituality. Rabi's vacuous shite filled it briefly. But Annie Besant was already promoting an Iyengar lad as the Universal Messiah and the future lay with a Dynasty whose lodestar was home schooled by an English Theosophist pederast.
On board a ship to England in 1912, Tagore completed his translations of the metrically strict but delicately agile
boring as shite
Bengali songs of his Gitanjali into loose English prose poems with a hint of biblical sonority: ‘The pages of a small exercise-book came gradually to be filled, and with it in my pocket I boarded the ship.’ In London he gave the translations to the painter William Rothenstein, a friend of his nephew’s whom he had met in the winter of 1910-11 in Calcutta. Rothenstein had then been intrigued by both Tagore’s presence
he was handsome, he was rich and he had a spectacular beard
and his silence during conversations;
the Sage should be silent. He should not incessantly suggest sodomy to his interlocutor.
not knowing of his reputation as a writer, his curiosity grew when he happened to read a story by him in Calcutta’s Modern Review
lots of stories in 'Modern Review' were by him. Its editor, Ramananda Chatterjee, was a Sadharan Brahmo and a close friend.
. Astonished and moved by the translations in the Gitanjali,
which were less shite than the Bengali originals though they did feature beggar maids who lifted up their skirts to cover their heads- probably because they weren't beggar maids at all. Their motto was 'cover the face and, for a fee, screw the base'. Oddly, something similar happened to me on my honeymoon night except I didn't get paid.
Rothenstein showed them to Yeats.
India are Ireland were supposedly similar in being exploited by Proddie bastids. Incidentally, Yeats's dad had done a portrait of Sarojini who may have looked less like a buffalo as a teenager.
‘I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me,’ Yeats wrote.
Yeats made a fool of himself over Tagore. Rothenstein's friend, Max Beerbohm, complained that the great Indian sage smelled bad. The Brits had clearly failed to explain to their Indian subjects the proper use of soap.
Why Tagore translated the songs into a language he’d once found so tedious, and which he used with a degree of insecurity (‘That I cannot write English is such a patent fact that I never had even the vanity to feel ashamed of it,’ he confessed to his niece Indira), is mysterious.
No it isn't. If non-Brahmins, like Vivekananda, can make money out of writing in English, and even some chit of a girl can do so, then why not a big, bearded, bore?
Also mysterious is why they excited and even instructed – for a relatively short while – the most exacting figures of literary London, including Ezra Pound.
The answer was that Rabi dressed like the head of an 'Oriental' religious sect. Also, when they asked around, it turned out he was as rich as fuck. Thackeray and Dickens had written about his gradfather- the 'Prince'.
The English Gitanjali is a shadowy approximation of the marvellous original;
It is better because it is shorter and less vacuous.
if it continues to be of interest, it’s for cultural and even psychological reasons, not literary ones
Amit thinks it is shite.
– and the same is true, as it happens, of the ‘Orient’. The writers who’d once promoted Tagore went off him not long after he was awarded the Nobel Prize; in 1917, Pound wrote in a letter that Tagore had got the prize ‘because, after the cleverest boom of our times, after the fiat of the omnipotent literati of distinction, he lapsed into religion and was boomed by the pious nonconformists.’
Also he was as rich as fuck. Pound wasn't.
The word ‘boom’ is striking; in The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen seems to pick up that word and both recall and refute Pound when, speaking of Tagore’s reputation, he places it within the logic of capital and the free market by saying it was a victim of the ‘boom and bust’ cycle that most Oriental enthusiasms constitute in the West.
Fuck off! Yoga is a big business which is anti-cyclical. It grows and grows. What disappointed Yeats- an Irish nationalist- and Pound, who admired WS Blunt- was that Tagore supported the British Empire because he knew that without the Brits, his people would lose lives and property in East Bengal.
Tagore’s star waned irrevocably in the Occident;
He was big in post-War Germany though Thomas Mann thought him a 'nice, elderly, English lady'. His son however was tall and muscular.
or at least the Oriental Tagore’s did – the humanist Tagore’s star had never appeared in that firmament.
No. There were Russians and Poles- like Janusz Korczak- who rated him because they lived under horrible tyrannies.
The Oxford translations present an opportunity to take stock of Tagore’s achievement and its historical moment.
It has provided an opportunity for a cretin to write ignorant nonsense- e.g. Raja Ram Mohan Roy translated Upanishads into English!
The series not only gives us an overview of the vast range of his work but is a fresh attempt to assuage the anxiety that Tagore has seldom been well translated, least of all by himself, and to allay the fear that he cannot be.
Anything can be translated well enough.
‘Bad’ Tagore translation is not only a matter of insufficient fidelity to the original, or inadequate mastery of the target language: it has to do with a naive and specious spirituality
which is what Tagore, like his Dad, displayed
or Easternness in the English version
why did the big beardie ponce around in a kaftan? He was clearly portraying himself as a duskier, more constipated, Christ?
that in the original is present in more complex and oblique ways.
the dude was Eastern. Still, his ignorance of both Hinduism and Islam did serve him well.
The ‘bad’ translations, including Tagore’s own, insert Tagore into Orientalia.
No. They inserted him into a Western market for 'spirituality'. But plenty of Westerners were supplying it. Look at, that cunt, Romain Rolland.
The Oxford translations are themselves a late expression of the sort of humanist project that Tagore began in Bengal in the late 19th century:
He wasn't a humanist. Humanism is about getting lots of education. It isn't about having a big beard and being as thick as shit.
his emphatic rejection of Orientalia in Bengali,
e.g. his denunciation of Kabir and Chandidas?
despite slipping dangerously close to it in English;
when? His beggar maids are constantly lifting their skirt to cover their face. In English a beggar woman may cover her face with her shawl. She does not display her vagina no matter how abashed she may be.
his situating of the Oriental in the human and universal, and vice versa.
He 'situated' India in the British Empire. If the Brits fucked off, the Muslims would kill and rob the Hindus as happens at the end of his novel 'Ghare Bhaire'.
The Oxford series is an attempt to capture the way in which Easternness, in Tagore’s oeuvre, becomes integrally a part of the narrative of the human – until then largely the domain of the West.
But Kipling painted a better and brighter picture of India. Tagore was a vacuous bore who could only represent his own family and other such families talking verbose bollocks to each other while the Brits kept the country safe from famine or invasion.
Tagore’s view of himself, expressed in and across his essays, is that he is an Oriental,
No. The fucker wasn't representing himself as Japanese samurai or a Chinese mandarin. He was a guy whose family had done well under British protection who was saying to his people 'don't chase away the Brits. The Muslims will eat our lunch.'
bringing to bear on the modern world the special insight of the Oriental;
viz. Bengalis, but not Japs or Chinks, are shit.
that he is a Bengali, who has recourse to the emotional terrain of Bengal;
He got very emotional when he condemned the freedom fighters as sociopathic nihilists.
and that, as a poet, he is a ‘universal’ human being,
i.e. happy to be the subject of an Empire over which the sun never set
with access to a humanity that is larger than nations, or conflicts, or even the fact of colonisation.
His 'access to humanity' was confined to other vacuous, verbose, Bengali shitheads.
Each one of these personae (for the want of a better word) is assumed by Tagore at different times,
To be fair, he dropped the 'freedom fighter' persona quickly enough. He wasn't stupid.
and developed and pursued according to the appropriateness of the moment or the argument, without any sense of self-contradiction or confusion or embarrassment. He was distressed by European Modernism, represented to him mainly by the early Eliot and his urban despair, but nevertheless studied it dutifully, if balefully.
He translated the 'gift of the Magi'. Eliot had studied Sanskrit and knew the Upanishads better than Tagore.
In doing so, he positioned himself as an Oriental who, implicitly, brought a far more profound response to life
based on being as rich as fuck
than Eliot’s shallow (as Tagore saw it) urban angst. Tagore’s rejection of Eliot and the decaying industrialised city of Modernism led younger poets and admirers like Buddhadev Bose to classify him as a late romantic, someone not quite modern.
He was basically a song-writer though one or two of his plays were 'Symbolist' and middle brow enough. Yeats and Strindberg were strong meat.
It’s an impression that persists even today; as if a rejection of modernity as subject-matter – tenement housing, electric lights, offices, scenes of urban dereliction – were an infallible sign of a distance from Modernism;
Nope. That shite is 'modernist'. Beggar maids and Princes are 'Romantic'.
as if the fact that Tagore claimed Indian antiquity as a great part of his intellectual inheritance, and repeatedly invoked nature in his songs and poems, marked him simply and uncomplicatedly as a romantic.
He was the middle-brow patriarch of an ineffectual sect. Compare him to Annie Besant who could write reams on the concept of 'prarabhda karma' while also heading up the Indian Home Rule League, and you get a notion of his utter uselessness.
While officially stating his reservations about the Modernists and about Eliot, and his disagreements with Bose, he was also studying and taking cues from them.
But Eliot had actually studied Sanskrit and Latin and Greek and Christian theology. Tagore was too stupid.
The topoi and characteristics of much of the work of his middle and late periods – the experiments in fragmentary and free verse; the appearance of the lower-middle-class city in poems like ‘Banshi’ or ‘Flute-Music’ (translated in this series by the novelist Sunetra Gupta, who also gives us some very striking renditions of some of the prose poems); the unfinished and provisional quality of many of the late poems and paintings – are partly the irresolvable marks of what Edward Said called ‘late style’, and partly a working out of Tagore’s problematic relationship with stimuli he felt compelled to reject, and yet couldn’t ignore.
'Late style' returns to subjects deeply pondered in youth. With Tagore there was no pondering. He shared with Gandhi a passionate distaste for the modern world.
Very few modern poets, with the exception of Yeats, have aged as intriguingly as Tagore;
No. Tagore is as dead as a door-nail. Even Pound, crazy as he was, has some lines which will live. Incidentally, Fenelossa's widow had wanted Sarojini to take charge of his manuscripts. She was smart enough to pass on the job to Pound. Hence 'Cathay'.
very few have continued to be such gifted, if often recalcitrant, students, while appearing to the world as masters.
He wasn't a student. He was a facile song-writer and composer of tunes. But Rabindra Sangeet just means mournful wailing such as might be set up by people anally raped by their own Alsatians but who can't have the beast put down because otherwise Maneka Gandhi will bite them.
Yet it would be a mistake to impose a dichotomy on Tagore’s work, between the modern, the political, the ‘critical’, on the one hand, and the romantic, the ahistorical, the organic, on the other, as two of the most intelligent critics of Bengali culture, Bose in the 1940s and, more recently, Chakrabarty have done.
Equally, if you are writing about a vacuous shithead, it would be a mistake not to impose some fucking dichotomy or other. The fact is, Tagore was right about why East Bengal. Indeed, he may be right about West Bengal. As Muslims become the majority in more and more districts, Hindus will have to flee.
It’s a dichotomy that Tagore seems to invite and to confirm in his own pronouncements, but one which his work dismantles.
By being univocally vacuous shite.
For Bose, and others after him, Tagore’s turning away from the crises of modernity – urban squalor, man’s alienation from the industrialised landscape – distinguishes him decisively from the Modernists.
He was a rural landlord. He wasn't modern. Still, he understood that if the Brits slyly fucked off, his class would lose lives and property.
Bose’s idea of the modern seems to have its source in Eliot’s essay on Baudelaire. Tagore’s late poem ‘Banshi’, about a clerk (Modernism’s ‘little man’) who lives in a squalid tenement in Calcutta, is seen as an attempt by the poet to come to terms with the Baudelairean inheritance and milieu of Modernism.
Tagore was dismissive of Baudrelaire. He told Borges 'I don't like this poet of furniture'. Borges deeply agreed. Incidentally, the Tagore's got rich by first becoming 'clerks' to the Brits. Some clerks and peons and PAs in India have become very rich by their association with one or other of our political dynasties.
But this is to identify Modernism by theme alone,
i.e. the lack of beggar-maids and Princes
and ignore the radical revisions in forms of perception that it constitutes. Two of the fundamental preoccupations of the Modernist imagination, the moment in time as a means of accessing the transformed present, and the image which can’t be entirely broken down or reduced,
which we find in Homer and Hesiod
are both integral to Tagore’s poetics
because that is how poetry works
and his view of the world: the moment, in his work, is kshan,
which means 'moment'
and the image chhabi, or ‘picture’,
from the Sanskrit 'chitra'.
and they recur in his poems, especially in his songs, in an infinity of contexts.
Because he was boring and vacuous
‘Banshi’, as it happens, is a romantic poem about modernity; but the so-called romantic songs about the weather, the beloved and nature, are replete with the Modernist’s fragmentary apprehension of the real, and of the irreducible image.
Buddhism had developed a notion of 'kshanikavada'- momentariness- thousands of years ago.
Chakrabarty, in an essay on Tagore, distinguishes the poet’s ‘critical eye’, which he finds in his stories, and which negotiates history and society, from the sensibility or gaze found in the poetry, which he describes as the ‘adoring eye’: romantic, transcendent, bucolic.
Stories have to have some point to them. Poems can gush and gush like a school-girl.
A ‘division of labour’ is at work here,
poetry is different from fiction. Who does not know this?
and this is how Chakrabarty puts it:
At the same time ... as he employed his prosaic writings to document social problems,
like the problem with young Bengalis demanding the Brits fuck off though this would mean Muslim hegemony in the East.
Tagore put his poetic compositions (not always in verse) and songs to a completely different use.
Because poetry is different from fiction.
These created and deployed images of the same category – the Bengali village –
there are no villagers in Tagore's oeuvre, though there are beggar-maids and Princes and vacuous, verbose, cunts.
but this time as a land of arcadian and pastoral beauty overflowing with the sentiments that defined what Tagore would increasingly – from the 1880s on – call ‘the Bengali heart’.
as opposed to its anus.
This is true; and yet, to get a fuller sense of the impact nature had on Tagore, and the impact it has on us through his writing, we have to take into account its long-lasting and intriguing influence on his intellectual development.
Landscape taught Tagore calculus?
In fact, Tagore’s natural world, in the songs and poems, has little of the finished repose of arcadia, but is beset by physical agitation, either subtle – tremors, tricks of light – or violent and Shelleyan, as in the famous poem about the flight of the wild geese in the collection Balaka.
He tried to recite his poetry to wild geese. They flew away.
In contrast, the conception of nature Tagore theorised in his essays is arcadian – and indispensable to his politics.
He could have written about cooperative banking and agronomy- with which he was actually involved. But that's not what the market wanted.
The arcadia is India, or ancient India, and its source and mediator is Kalidasa. It has a deceptive tranquillity; for Tagore, nature is as much a political metaphor, an instrument for national contestation, as it is for John Clare
who was mad
and Ted Hughes.
who was a thorough scholar of English poetry. I suppose both Clare and Hughes could be considered 'working class'. Their ancestors had toiled in the fields owned by people of Tagore's class.
Critics such as Tom Paulin and Mina Gorji have drawn our attention to the ways in which nature becomes a metaphor for an embattled Englishness in Clare and Hughes;
because they were sympathetic to people of their own class.
the unfinished ‘naturalness’ of nature is conflated with the ‘rude’ qualities of English dialect or Northern speech, and set, implicitly, against the refined and false graces of the court and the city. Tagore’s deployment of nature in his politics and aesthetics is equally ideological, equally to do with nationality, but it moves in the opposite direction, critiquing imperialism
but condemning the 'garam dal' freedom fighters.
while overturning the verities that we’ve come to associate with postcolonial writing and identity.
He could not do so. He lived and died a subject of a British Emperor.
If Tagore were to fit in with our stock idea of the postcolonial writer, he would have
to actually be post-colonial.
enlisted the wildness of nature, of the indigenous landscape, as a trope of resistance against European civilisation and the Enlightenment.
in other words, against himself. He was a landlord who managed his family estates in the East.
Instead, for Tagore, nature is the site of civilisation, refinement and certain ideals of the Enlightenment, such as living in harmony with the world:
he liked living in rural Shantiniketan. He started an agronomical institute there after sending his son and son-in-law to study Agricultural Science in the US.
and it’s a specifically Indian location for these things.
because he lived in India- not China.
Tagore, audaciously, does not so much present a critique of the Western Enlightenment and humanism, and the idea of ‘civilisation’ itself, as snatch them away from their expected location and give them another source and lineage, in India and its antiquity;
Plenty of European Indologists had already done so. The Theosophical Society, under Besant, had gone a step further and was promoting an Iyengar lad as the Universal Messiah.
cheekily, he implies this lineage might be the more authentic one.
There was no need to be 'cheeky'. Plenty of Europeans were gassing on about the Aryans and the Swastika and Mahatmas on the Astral plane. Tolstoy had read Vivekananda and Ramakrishna- who were 'sanaatani'. The Brahmos needed to stay in the game by promoting one of their own.
Here, both nature and Kalidasa – for him, the ur-poet of the physical world
Nonsense! He was a Brahmin. The Vedic kavi is the ur-poet.
– are crucial. Tagore’s engagement with Kalidasa is all the more astonishing when we think of Chakrabarty’s honest, if remorseful admission that modern Indian intellectuals are unable to enter into a fruitful dialogue with their forbears:
Rubbish! Most lower-middle class Bengali Brahmins of the period learned Sanskrit thoroughly because it was a 'scoring subject'. My father's Bengali contemporaries could recite large chunks of Kalidas. The difficulty was to get them to stop.
the dialogue Tagore has with Kalidasa
he would ask him for tips on how to pick up hot chicks- right?
is not just instinctive and emotional, but pressing and contemporary.
Nope. Tagore wrote nothing in the sandesh kavya style. Indeed, the reason Tagore's work was valuable was that he completely omitted erotic themes- i.e. the vast size of the heroine's breasts and buttocks.
We begin to understand, as we read him theorising about nature and the Sanskrit poet, the radically revisionist nature of his project:
i.e. he was as boring as shit- but that did mean it was safe pabulum for your wife and kiddies. The big theme of 'Ghare Bhaire'- apart from the fact that Muslims will slit your throat- is that wives should not steal money from hubby even if it is to give that money to some 'freedom fighter'.
not only to insert the Orient into Western humanism, but to subsume the more true, the more humane tradition of humanism under the Orient.
Humane tradition of Bengal is to ask for foreigners to come rule over them or, if they refuse, to say 'China's Chairman is our Chairman'.
Towards the end of ‘The Religion of the Forest’
which is what is found in the Aranyakas
(an essay that isn’t included in any of the Oxford volumes), Tagore reflects on two broad, and conflicting, civilisational impulses:
When, on my recent voyage to Europe, our ship left Aden and sailed along the sea which lay between the two continents, we passed by the red and barren rocks of Arabia on our right side and the gleaming sands of Egypt on our left. They seemed to me like two giant brothers exchanging with each other burning glances of hatred, kept apart by the tearful entreaty of the sea from whose womb they had their birth.
This cretin didn't get that Egyptians speak Arabic and are Muslim just like Arabians.
‘The two shores,’ he says, ‘spoke to me of two different historical dramas enacted.’
The Islamic conquest of Egypt ensured that both would be part and parcel of the same historical drama. Egyptian influence over Islam reached a peak under the Fatimids.
In Egypt, he sees a civilisation that grew around a ‘noble river, which spread the festivities of life on its banks across the heart of the land.
Iraq had two rivers. Punjab had five. That is why Punjabis are insufferable.
There man never raised the barrier of alienation between himself and the rest of the world.’
Egypt was a great imperial power with lots of slaves from elsewhere.
But on the opposite shore of the Red Sea, ‘the civilisation which grew up in the inhospitable soil of Arabia had a contrary character ...
Muslims will slit your throat if the Brits slyly fuck off.
There man felt himself isolated in hostile and bare surroundings.’ For Tagore, these ‘two civilisations represented two fundamental divisions of human nature. The one contained in it the spirit of conquest and the other the spirit of harmony.’ He concludes that ‘both of these have their truth and purpose in human nature.’
Why quote this Islamophobic shite? The fact is, the Religion of Muhammad is egalitarian and open to all races.
It’s clear, however, which side Tagore is on,
like his grandfather, he is against the Muslims. Also, at the time he wrote this, Britain dominated Egypt but not Saudi Arabia.
and what the purpose of this elaborate meditation is. ‘Egypt’ is a trope for the Orient, ‘Arabia’ for the coloniser, and, by extension, the West.
Because England is not a green and pleasant land. It is a desert populated by camels and Bedouin.
This is evident from the textual analysis he undertakes in the essay, a comparison between literary responses to nature in English and in Sanskrit. The English works he looks at are mainly by Shakespeare, who is found wanting:
because he was a dramatist. The Lake poets gassed on about nature.
‘In The Tempest, through Prospero’s treatment of Ariel and Caliban we realise man’s struggle with nature and his longing to sever connection with her.’
This is mad. Prospero treats Ariel and Caliban differently. I suppose the latte could be said to represent 'nature' of a bestial kind.
In Macbeth, all we evidently get of the non-human world is a ‘barren heath where the three witches appear as personifications of Nature’s malignant forces’;
Fuck off! In Macbeth, the tyrant is overthrown when the forest itself comes to life- or so it appears.
in King Lear, ‘the storm on the heath’ is a symbol of the human tumult enacted in the play.
No kidding!
And the ‘tragic intensity of Hamlet and Othello is unrelieved by any touch of Nature’s eternity’.
Ophelia floats off down a river. Millai's pictur was well known.
Tagore glances at play after play, before washing his hands of both the English poet and the culture he belongs to:
he made a fool of himself. Shakespeare was a great dramatist. Tagore was a vacuous bore.
‘I hope it is needless for me to say that these observations are not intended to minimise Shakespeare’s great power as a dramatic poet but to show in his works the gulf between nature and human nature owing to the tradition of his race and time.’
In Tagore's plays, the heroine is also a bush. Sadly the hero is a giraffe and thus leaves the heroine's bush severely alone.
Milton, too, is implicated: even though the ‘very subject’ of Paradise Lost ‘seems to afford a special opportunity for bringing out the true greatness of man’s relationship with nature’,
Adam should have fucked the snake.
Tagore detects a disturbing element of mastery in Milton’s account of that relationship – ‘Bird, beast, insect or worm, durst enter none,/Such was their awe of Man.’
Whereas, in Bengal, birds and beasts are constantly entering the nuptial chamber.
As Tagore reads these poets, he seems to argue that Western humanism – and its idea of ‘civilisation’ – is complicated, and compromised, by its compulsion to dominate and colonise nature.
Tagore sent his son to the US to study agricultural science. He even bought a tractor. It wasn't the case that he lived in a tree and spent his time fucking snakes.
It’s a conclusion remarkably similar to the one D.H. Lawrence reaches in Etruscan Places. Lawrence’s metaphors for coloniser and colonised are the Romans and the Etruscans respectively: the former’s civilisation is marked by territorial conquest and the domination of nature, the latter’s by its investment in agricultural and spiritual regeneration.
The Brits were great agriculturists. The Dutch even greater. Both, like the Etruscans, had numerous colonies. What distinguished Rome was militarism. But that was also true of Sparta.
Tagore notes the break in the English imagination with the advent of Romanticism;
There was no such break. The Romantics found plenty of material in Shakespeare and Milton. It should be remembered that 'Romance' means following from Classical Roman- i.e. Latin- language. But, in Latin there are the Georgics and Ausonius and so forth.
and, extraordinarily, he finds the source of the new relationship to nature, and the new definition of the human, in the Orient:
Nothing extraordinary in an oriental dude finding everything originates in his own back yard.
We observe a completely different attitude of mind in the later English poets like Wordsworth and Shelley, which can be attributed in the main to the great mental change in Europe at that particular period through the influence of the newly discovered philosophy of India which stirred the soul of Germany and aroused the attention of other Western countries.
Shelley was influenced by a book by a fellow Etonian on the sexual freedom enjoyed by Nair women. But he was steeped in the Greek and Latin classics. British Indology was highly practical. If you knew the Dharma Shastras you could make a lot of money as a lawyer. German Indology was initially Romantic.
In spite of his use of the word ‘philosophy’, he is not so much thinking of Max Müller,
who belongs to a different generation from
Schiller, Schelling
neither of whom had any interest or knowledge of India
and German Indology, but of nature and poetry, of Kalidasa, and of Goethe’s enthusiasm for the Shakuntala.
He was even more enthusiastic for Hafiz. Credit must go to Sir William Jones for this.
This is more than Tagore’s version of what Schwab called the ‘correction and expansion of the old humanism of the Mediterranean basin’:
There were Indo-Greeks. It was Christians and Muslims that Tagore warned against.
it’s a wresting of the humanist and civilisational initiative from the West.
By reminding Hindu Bengalis that the Muslims would fuck them up if the Brits left. Nirad Chaudhuri ends his 'autobiography of an unknown India' by demanding that White- any sort of White- turn up and save the Bengalis from themselves. No wonder, the Brits made much of him.
Tagore, then, is not so much interested in providing a critique of the Western Enlightenment in the now familiar postcolonial manner as in relocating its original impetus in the Orient and in India.
Hitler's 'Swastika' was from Aryan India.
This relocation, of course, was an obsession with a branch of Orientalist scholarship but, while the Orientalists were content to discern certain features of the Enlightenment in Indian antiquity, Tagore wants to trace a lineage from antiquity to modernity, from Kalidasa to himself, and to use that lineage to rebuff the coloniser.
If he had wanted such a lineage he would have composed one or two Sanskrit kavyas. Plenty of other heads of Brahmin sects did so at that time.
At the time Tagore was writing, traditional Indian literature was seen (as it sometimes still is) to be almost indistinguishable from mythology and religion;
Nonsense! India was the origin of 'wisdom literature' featuring talking animals- like in Kipling's Jungle Book. Tagore could not have written anything like it because he was only interested in vacuous bores who talked bollocks incessantly.
and although his own poetry and imagination were radically secular,
No. He was the leader of a Hindu sect- albeit a crap one. That's why he had a long beard and wore a kaftan.
he himself was translated as a public figure into the realm of mythology and mysticism, partly by his own connivance.
He refused to dance the can can though invited to do so by Josephine Baker
Yet the nature of his engagement with Kalidasa has to do with a very different concern, which also brings him closer than one might expect to the Modernist preoccupation with exactness, concreteness and sensory perception.
Some modernists had such concerns. Others did not.
The reasons for Tagore’s more or less ignoring, as a practising poet, the influence of his immediate as well as not-too-distant precursors in Bengal, such as the devotional poets Chandidas and Vidyapati (except in a youthful pastiche he did of the latter’s work), and turning to a North Indian Sanskrit poet of antiquity are manifold.
He was part and parcel of a Sankritization movement within vernacular languages. However, he moved away from 'sadhu bahasa' to use more colloquial idioms.
Tagore saw Kalidasa as a proto-modern, someone whose primary subject was the physical universe,
every one of his works is religious. Shudraka is 'secular'. Kalidas isn't.
unmediated by religion, and whose primary concern was language itself,
Nope. Some Sanskrit poets did write works primarily concerned to display different grammatical rules and the literary possibilities this created. In Tagore's time, this type of poetry was not highly regarded.
and its ability to convey and enrich ways of seeing. And, according to Tagore, the English Romantics inherited, consciously or indirectly, their habit of looking at the world from Kalidasa.
NO! They were consciously or indirectly influenced by Kanye West.
The lines he quotes in his essay,
it is a poem- a shit one
‘The Meghadutam’, about Kalidasa’s great poem sequence, invoke not so much tradition as contemporariness;
The fool didn't even know that there is a sandesha kavya in the Rg Veda. A poor poet asks Night to herself take his message to the father of the Princess he loves. This is related to the notion that the viyogini (maiden separated from her beloved) is higher than the yogi.
they’re lines in which perception, memory and immediate physical sensation come together in a single moment and image, and are quite unlike anything in Chandidas or Vidyapati:
not to mention Kanye West
‘The breezes from the snowy peaks have just burst open the leaf-buds of deodar trees
Tagore, cretin that he was didn't understand that the relevant breezes, carrying rain clouds swept in from the Indian ocean. The Yaksha's wife lives in the North. That is why he has to ask a breeze blowing in from the South to take his message to her.
and, redolent of their oozing resin, blow southward.
Perhaps he wrote this doing the winter monsoon.
I embrace those breezes, fondly imagining they have lately touched your form, O perfect one!’
Tagore got naked and tried to fuck the breeze. His wife was not amused.
Kalidasa is crucial to Tagore’s revisionist notion that a fundamental strain of Enlightenment humanism – the idea that
Science matters. Technology is cool. Factories are better than forests.
the individual fashions and reorders his relationship to the physical universe through language – is
Bengali. Sadly, talking bollocks changes nothing.
more authentically Indian, or Oriental, than European. As a colonial subject, Tagore would have known that, ever since James Mill wrote his contemptuous diatribe on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata,
like the Tagores, Mill worked for John Company.
the common English view of Indian writing had been that it was overblown, grotesquely overwritten and excessively romantic.
This was the common India view. We liked Sherlock Holmes and, later on, PG Woodhouse and Agatha Christie.
In Mill’s words,
These fictions are not only extravagant, and unnatural,
like the Bible or Homer
less correspondent with the physical and moral laws of the universe, but are less ingenious, more monstrous and have less of any thing that can engage the affection, or excite admiration ...
What engaged his affection was money. The East India Company paid him quite well. But the Tagores became very very fucking rich.
Of the style in which they are composed it is far from too much to say, that all the vices which characterise the style of rude nations ... they exhibit in perfection. Inflation; metaphors perpetual, and these the most violent and strained ... repetition; verbosity; confusion, incoherence; distinguished the Mahabharat and the Ramayan.
Mill wasn't a real high IQ guy. That's why, like Ram Mohan and Dwarkanath, he was a Benthamite. But they got very fucking rich. Scots had to work hard to rise up.
Through Kalidasa, Tagore wishes to show his readers that classicism – refinement and obliqueness in language; impersonality in perception – is not only native to India, but has older roots there than in Europe.
He wasn't such a fool. Virgil was older than Kalidasa and Homer was much older than Virgil.
In another, brilliant essay on Kalidasa, in which he compares Shakuntala to The Tempest,
there is no resemblance between them whatsoever.
Tagore turns Mill’s rhetoric on Shakespeare, claiming, in effect, Hellenic classicism as an essentially Oriental literary characteristic, and Orientalising, in Said’s sense of the word, Shakespeare and the European poets:
Why not say that Einstein was a Bengali lad from Birbhum? He never went to Europe. He used to sit quietly in a forest where various birds and beasts used him as a toilet.
Universal nature is outwardly serene, but a tremendous force works continually within it.
Universal nature wants to take a shit real bad.
In Shakuntala we see an image of this state. No other drama exhibits such remarkable restraint.
Shakuntala does not sit on the King's face. You know she wants to, but she doesn't.
European poets seem to grow wild at the least chance of displaying the force of nature and impulse.
Juliet was constantly sitting on Romeo's face.
They love to bring out, through hyperbolic utterance, how far our impulses can lead us. Examples aplenty can be found in plays like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Among all Shakespeare’s dramatic works, there is no play as serenely profound, as restrainedly complete and perfect as Shakuntala.
I suppose he could have written boring shite, if paid to do so.
Such love dialogue as passes between Dushyanta and Shakuntala is very brief, and chiefly conveyed through hints and signs ...
Shakuntala points at her bush. She doesn't sing 'I'm jus' bluffin' with my muffin' because she is a well brought up girl.
Precisely where another poet would have looked for a chance to let the pen race, [Kalidasa] quells it.
Because the drama arises from 'the recognition' of Shakuntala.
Reading the essays on Kalidasa, I sensed that Tagore was trying to do for literature what Rammohun Roy and his own father had done a few years before him for religion and philosophy.
They had invented a new sect for which working for the Brits was an act of great piety.
Faced with the charge that the Hindu religion was incorrigibly polytheistic,
a charge made by the Muslims. The British didn't give a fuck what the natives worshipped. Ram Mohun's importance lay in his condemnation of Trinitarian Christianity.
they didn’t reject the European humanism from which that charge emanated,
they embraced Benthamite Utilitarianism. Humanism was about studia humanitatis- i.e. masterpieces of secular literature. Roy wasn't into that. He wanted informative literature from which you could make money.
but turned to ancient texts like the Upanishads to claim that, in a sense, the Enlightenment had an older lineage in India than it did in Europe.
As did English literature. Moreover Jazz was invented by Valmiki.
For Tagore, Kalidasa’s arcadia is as significant and loaded with meaning as the discovery of the Upanishads was to the Brahmo Samaj sect.
Brahmins are descended from the authors of the Upanishads. I suppose you could say that Roy 'discovered' Dara Shikoh's translation which wrenched it out of its Vedic context.
‘Universal nature is outwardly serene, but a tremendous force works continually within it’: it’s as if, in speaking of nature, Tagore actually has literature in mind, and the politics of literature,
which was boring shite. Actual politics was interesting.
as it appears to a man living in a momentous and turbulent time
but who was as boring as shit.
