Amit Chaudhuri's Shitanjali

This is from Scroll.in 

‘A gift to us’: Amit Chaudhuri on the achievements of Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Gitanjali’ as art-songs

Tagore's book- 'song-offerings' could be considered a gift to non-Bengalis because it is written in simple English and can be easily translated into any language. Amit is Bengali. 

It feels right that the Folio Society edition of the Gitanjali, published 112 years after its first outing, should begin with the original introduction by WB Yeats.

Yeats is a great poet. His introduction adds value.  

It’s as much part of the book as the poems are.

No. It is of interest in itself. But it is also deeply silly. Yeats does not mention the poet's grandfather, 'Prince Dwarkanath' who had made a great stir on his visit to London and Paris where he met the reigning monarchs and attracted the attention of writers like Dickens and Thackeray. Moreover, from the 'Celtic revival' point of view, Dwarkanath was linked to the re-constitution of the Welsh Eistedfodd poetry competition. 

Dwarkanath's son, Rabindranath, was the head of a neo-Hindu sect- the Adi Brahmo Samaj- and Rabi had inherited that position, which is why he had a great big beard and swanned around in a kaftan. Yeats does not explain that the Tagores were an important comprador family in Calcutta. He pretends Tagore is a Druid in whose beard birds nest and upon whom squirrels find it convenient to deposit their faeces. 

It is a reminder of the possibilities that existed in 1912,

which were like the possibilities which had existed a few years earlier when Arthur Symons wrote the introduction to Sarojini Naidu's book of verse. Incidentally, Yeats's dad had drawn her portrait- because he was in that line of work. 

possibilities that widened and enriched the trajectory of modern poetry and the reach of a new intercultural world only beginning to be discovered.

Nonsense! Shakuntala had been translated in the eighteenth century and Goethe had produced a Divan in the style of Hafiz. By the middle of the Nineteenth century, Sanskrit was better studied in Germany than in India. It was the study of Celtic languages which had lagged behind.  

In his introduction, Yeats is trying to express the fascination, wonder, and problem of encountering the Gitanjali for the first time: he wants to do the near-impossible – to place Tagore historically and not give in to romanticisation.

No. Yeats does not want to say 'this dude is the grandson of a guy who got rich working with John Company. His nephew is an artist who is a friend of Rothenstein and Okakura. Gitanjali is suffused with Hindu spirituality, just as Okakura's 'Book of Tea' is suffused with Shinto. Now Vivekananda is dead and people are getting a bit tired of the Theosophists, there can be a genteel cult of Tagore- a gentlemanly bore from the 'Empire's second City'. Did you know one branch of his family has the hereditary right to hold an umbrella over the head of the Viceroy? How cool is that?'

Yeats is acutely aware, at every moment, that he himself belongs to a particular movement in history; he does his best, as he starts his introduction, not to consign Tagore to a place outside it.

Yeats was of Anglo-Saxon stock but was playing the 'thick Mick' card. So he writes naive, wide-eyed, shite.  

The first questions he asks the “distinguished Bengali doctor”

because doctors are edumicated. They can read and write. Thick Oirish Micks ask Doctors about books. They don't ask the Professor of Bengali literature at King's College because Thick Oirish Micks don't know the meaning of the word 'Professor' or 'Collidge'.  

with whom he has a conversation about Tagore are related to how one might think of “world literature”. What can one safely take as givens? Tagore would have conceivably, at some point, asked himself the same questions – except, like James Baldwin or Jorge Luis Borges, he already knows more, from the vantage point of his Bengali modernity, about Yeats than Yeats could possibly discover about him.

Nonsense! Tagore didn't know Gaelic. He didn't know the minutiae of the Irish land question or the politics of Sinn Fein. He did know Okakura but not Okakura's Guru, Fenelossa and so, unlike Yeats, had no great interest in Japanese Noh theatre  whose protagonist, significantly enough, is traditionally termed the 'Shite'. Unlike the Irish writers of the period, he was not influenced by Ibsen and Strindberg. Indeed, he was incapable of creating a character as complex as the latter's 'Indra's daughter' or as terrifying as the 'Vampire Cook'.  

“I know no German,” Yeats says to his Bengali companion, yet if a translation of a German poet had moved me,

then he would have got more such translations including biographies written in English of that German poet. You can ask for such things at your library or at the book shop- unless you are thick Mick from the land of the bogs and the little people. 

I would go to the British Museum and find books in English that would tell me something of his life, and of the history of his thought. But though these prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years, I shall not know anything of his life, and of the movements of thought that have made them possible, if some Indian traveller will not tell me.

Fuck off! Rothenstein, who had met Tagore through E.B Havell and Abanindranath and Okakura, sent Yeats a partial translation of Gitanjali and, a few days later, Yeats met Tagore at a dinner party. They worked together on the book which was published a few months later. Yeats wasn't really a thick Mick from the bogs of Oireland. He was a man of letters in London who was a close friend and collaborator of Tagore. Yeats is lying when he gasses on about Bengali Doctors who have travelled across the Seven Seas to bring healing balms to spud eaters from the land of the leprechauns and who has a tale of a mystic Mage upon whom squirrels love to shit and sparrows to roost. 

This problem remains with us today. If anything, Tagore and his time – the “history of his thought” – have become more unknowable because

it was boring and stupid when it wasn't bleeding obvious apothegms like- don't tell the Brits to fuck off because otherwise the Muslims will slit our throats and grab all our cool shiny stuff 

of the thorough erasure of, and the lack of engagement with, in the last three decades, the experience of modernity in all its contradictoriness, so that now it stands only for a period in Western history, or occupies its fringes as “non-Western modernity”: a corrective or counter-measure.

Amit is a low IQ pedant forced to teach about 'modernity' or 'globalization' or some such shite. The erasure and lack of engagement he complains of, has to do with smart kids abandoning Literature because it has turned into a branch of Grievance Studies and is now only taught by disabled, transgender donkeys of colour.  

To engage with Tagore or Bengali poetry is

to be bored shitless. 

not, however, an attempt at decolonisation:

The Brits fucked off decades before Amit was born.  

it is to abandon the ideas of the East, and of India, which Yeats will, later in the introduction, have to fall back on.

 India exists. It is to the east of England. Deal with it. 

In order to reframe the questions that arise from his encounter with the Gitanjali,

That question is 'why is Yeats pretending to be a typically thick Mick from the misty bogs of Oireland and, worse yet, pretending the grandson of 'Prince' Dwarkanath- who was as rich as fuck- is a witless druid upon whom squirrels shit and sparrows roost?  

Yeats does subtly undermine the dichotomy of “East” and “West” by challenging the separations we make between modernity (the period in which Yeats and the doctor are located) and other epochs that we see as being anterior to the modern:

He does the reverse. He pretends he is as stupid as a fucking medieval peasant from the land of the bogs and the little people.  

'An Englishman living in London in the reign of Richard the Second, had he been shown translations from Petrarch

done by Chaucer. Go see Chaucer if you like it so much 

or from Dante,

there were none such till the nineteenth century 

would have found no books to answer his questions, but would have questioned some Florentine banker or Lombard merchant as I question you.

Richard II didn't rule any portion of Italy. The Brits ruled Bengal. There were Professors of Bengali and Sanskrit and so forth in London whom Yeats could have consulted. Also, he fucking knew Tagore. He had no need to go see a Bengali Doctor unless he had caught the clap in Calcutta.  

For all I know, so abundant and simple is this poetry, the new Renaissance has been born in your country and I shall never know of it except by hearsay.

Coz Tagore won't tell me about it even though he has been my dinner guest and I have worked closely with him to produce this dreck. 

This extraordinary moment of imaginative extrapolation and juxtaposition

i.e. Yeats pretending he is a thick Oirish Mick who doesn't know that the second city of the King Emperor's Empire is Calcutta, not Dublin.  

is also a moment of great poignancy.

No. It is a moment of great hilarity. Yeats had overplayed the thick Mick card.  

Yeats’s acknowledgement – of the impossibility of knowing a tradition and history

Which some Brits knew better than Tagore. That's why members of his extended family would pay big bucks to British barristers for their assistance in complex inheritance cases involving Mitakshara or Dayabhaga or other such Hindu law.  Consider the one-time Tagore Professor of Law, Chief Justice Sir John Woodroffe. What he didn't know about Tantra was not worth knowing. Had Rabi qualified as a barrister in London, he would have been consulting books by guys like Woodroffe on complex matters of Hindu law and 'Mimamsa' hermeneutics. 

– ends up being more suggestive of the singularity of that tradition than any kind of prior knowledge of it might be.

Fuck off! Ignorance isn't suggestive of anything but ignorance. A dude who says 'yo! Indian dude! Where have you parked your elephant?' doesn't exactly endear himself to you.  

Yeats, without realising it, is echoing what the thirty-year-old Tagore had written in 1891

Nonsense! Yeats was pretending to be too fucking stupid to understand that, in London, if you want to know about a Bengali poet, you go see a Professor of Indian languages at one of the Universities.  

about his encounter with the poet who mattered to him most, the 4th-century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa and his long poem, the Meghadutam, or “Cloud-Messenger”,

translated into English in 1813 

which belongs, imaginatively, to the rainy season.

Tagore didn't know that there is a similar 'sandesha-kavya' in the Rg Veda which is actually more poetic. A lover asks night to be his messenger. Also, the girl is rich. This is the 'rich girl, poor boy' motif beloved of Bollywood.  

It’s during the rains that Tagore wrote his 1891 essay:

Strangely, Tagore had the sense to get inside when it began to rain. He wasn't as stupid as Yeats made out. 

From Ramagiri to the Himalayas ran a long stretch of ancient India over which life used to flow to the slow, measured mandakranta metre of the Meghadutam.

Then the Muslims invaded and fucked everything up. Seriously, the Tagores didn't like Muslims. That's why Dwarkanath was so keen on the Brits. Only Whitey could hold the Islamists at bay. 

We are banished from that India, not just during the rain but for all time . . . We can only send our imagination there, never reach it in the flesh. (Trans. Bhawani-Prasad Chattopadhyay)

Sadly, India was so fucking underdeveloped, you could reach the past easily enough just by getting on a bullock cart and then walking for a bit through the jungle. 

“I shall never know of it except by hearsay,” says Yeats, because he finds himself – in relation to Tagore and, presumably, “world literature” – in the same position an Englishman would have been discovering Dante in the fourteenth century:

He could only have discovered Dante if he knew Italian. But, in that case, he could have got up to speed quickly enough. Tagore was in the same position. He had been to School and had learned Sanskrit. He could read Kalidasa well enough.  

starting from scratch, and, as a result, prompting a new beginning that research and information (“the British Museum”) alone can’t provide: “We can only send our imagination there, never reach it in the flesh.”

Yeats met Tagore in the flesh. They dined together and worked together. An Englishman was welcome to go to Italy and meet Dante or Petrarch. True, you couldn't get to meet Homer because he had died long ago but you could sail around the islands he described. 

Tagore can, and does, claim Kalidasa as his own (as Yeats can’t Tagore),

True. Homosexual marriage was not allowed at that time. Still, the fact is Yeats and Tagore collaborated. Tagore and Kalidasa did not.  

but his grasp on the Sanskrit poet and the inheritance he embodies is equally anguished and uncertain.

Nope. It was sound enough. True, he didn't get some of the 'Hindu' references because he was a stupid Brahmo bigot. Also, his powers of geographical description were markedly inferior to Kalidasa. Perhaps a conquered people are less interested in their own flora and fauna and rivers and mountains. Being ruled by foreigners makes you lazy.  

The intimation of the unknowable in relation to literary tradition – the feeling that no category, work, or author is a given or pre-decided – situates both Yeats and Tagore in the unfolding of modern poetry in the new, transcultural world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and puts them in a conversation with each other.

Rubbish! Both wrote in a conventional manner. Yeats pretended to be a thick Oirish Mick from the land of the bogs and the little people. Rabi pretended to be some sort of Yogi-Bhogi. The difference was that Yeats was for Irish independence. Tagore thought Indian independence would be a fucking disaster. Muslims would kill and rob Hindus wherever they were weaker or less numerous. 

Yeats, an Irishman, as a 14th-century Englishman; the Bengali doctor as a Florentine banker or Lombard merchant – this

stupidity 

estranging realigning of the relationship of the self to the milieu of the past and present at once unsettled and defined Tagore’s late 19th-century landscape.

No. Tagore was sensible enough. The guy looked after vast agricultural estates and wrote stuff which it was safe for women and kids- not to mention the servants- to read.  

His 1895 short story “Kshudito Pashan” (‘The Hungry Stones’) follows the recurrent nightly transformation of a Bengali tax collector – who’s temporarily occupying a Mughal-era mansion – into a Mughal personage who is haunted by an invisible beloved

nope. Some Persian lass came to a gristly end. But Tagore won't tell us what it was.  

and the palace’s history.

It's a ghost story. Well, that's what it is meant to be. But it is interrupted. The narrator sees an English friend and abandons his tale. Why? The answer is obvious. There would have been sex and passion in the actual story. Boring Bengali Brahmos were not allowed to write of such things. Thus we are told the job title and monthly pay of the narrator and that should suffice our curiosity. The fucker has a proper job and knows Englishmen. That's why adventures happen to him. They shouldn't happen to us because we have dedicated ourselves to being stupid, boring, and useless. 

The reality of the late 19th and early 20th century was probably no more stable than the world the tax collector finds himself occupying,

It was the same world. What Amit means is 'the world of the late Mughals was just as unstable as that of the British Raj at Noon-tide.' But Amit is wrong. The late Mughal world was very fucking unstable. 

and this instability allows Tagore to access history non-sequentially in the story.

Nope. There is a pretentious Babu who starts telling a ghost story. Then he fucks off. Still, at least we find out that a collector of cotton cess under the Nizam gets 450 Rs. per mensem. That's all that interests the Bengali Babu. Who gives a fuck if 'stones' are hungry or thirsty or if the ghosts of perished Persian lasses are milling around the place?  

Yeats’s opening paragraphs, too, are informed by a powerful inkling of non-sequential history

i.e. stupidity. This is because he was from the land of the bogs and the little people and thus was as thick as shit.  

– of the Europe of Dante and Petrarch becoming immediately present to him through his discovery of the Gitanjali.

Amit asked an English Doctor about Enid Blyton. As a result the Russia of Pushkin and Gogol became immediately present to him. Sadly, it tried to sodomize him and so his Mummy told it to fuck off.  

And, in a sentence, we travel from the world of the Lombard merchant to the present: “For all I know…

because Yeats was a thick Mick and knew shit 

the new Renaissance has been born in your country

the Renaissance was born when Byzantine Greeks started to run away to Latin Europe. Fuck did Yeats think was happening in India?  

and I shall never know of it except by hearsay.”

He could only know about the guy he was dining and working with by hearsay from some Bengali doctor he had to see because he had the clap. 

This extraordinary observation, locating Tagore not in civilisational heritage but in a contemporary cultural shift, points to

stupidity of an extreme sort. Yeats was overdoing the thick Mick shtick.  

a modernity that is lost sight of the moment it is glimpsed.

Did you know Yeats and Tagore had dinner together? Dinner is very modern. But because both gobbled up that dinner very quickly, that glimpse of modernity vanished almost as soon as it first appeared.  

Yeats’s historically acute speculation captures the Bengali epoch – called in 1907 by the scholar Shibnath Shastri the nabajagaran or “new awakening” (the term “Renaissance” would be put to use only around four decades later by the Marxist historian Susobhan Sarkar in Notes on the Bengal Renaissance).

Niradh Chaudhuri had already said that Bengal got its Renaissance, Reformation, Romantic revolution, Risorgimento and all sorts of other site beginning with R, all at the same time. But, because the Brits were on their way out, Bengal turned to shit nevertheless. 

By the late 1960s, Sarkar had revised his own views;

he wrote the manifesto of the CPI. His revised view was that he should simply have emigrated and opened a Tandoori restaurant in Bethnal Green. Well, that's what it ought to have been. 

Bengali Marxists had begun objecting to the term “Renaissance” for the cultural shifts that marked 19th-century Bengal for both being inaccurate and carrying too much hubris: it had failed to be the European Renaissance.

Because Bengal is a shithole.  

But of course, it had: Tagore, if anything, was involved in a counter-movement to the Renaissance in Europe.

viz. ensuring Bengal would be a shithole 

His instincts are anti-monumental, non-representational, spatial, and provisional.

i.e. be as boring as fuck. If you are setting out to tell an exciting ghost story featuring sexy Persian damsels, mention the salary of the narrator. Then, just stop.  

The Bengal Renaissance is an anti-Renaissance,

it is stupidity, ignorance and being as boring as shit.  

the work of a new cultural aristocracy of misfits:

that is a kakistocracy.  

it was not, unlike the one that happened in Europe, a phenomenon emanating from a great centre of power. It was created by a new, rootless, derecognised elite

in which case it wasn't elite at all 

that lived in Calcutta, the hub of Britain’s imperial project – a second-class citizenry.

who were anxious to become third class and then fourth class and finally just have their throats slit by Muslims or Maoists or anyone else who could be bothered to do so.

The “original” Gitanjali was published in 1910.

Nope. That was a Bengali book.  

The word is a misnomer: not only is the English Gitanjali you’re holding in your hands actually a version of a Bengali book of songs of the same name, it is partly an invention, in that the English book is made up of poems/songs from at least four different books and only shares some songs in common with the Bengali collection.

The English book is in English. It isn't a translation of a particular Bengali book.  

What Schoenberg said about John Cage – “He is not a composer, but he is an inventor of genius” – can also be used, rephrased, for Tagore:

No it can't. Tagore wrote good songs and good enough poems. He wasn't a genius. But he wasn't wholly lacking in talent.  

“He is not only a songwriter, he is an inventor of genius.”

Tagore invented nothing. He wrote songs to various tunes and also wrote middle brow poems which sold quite well.  

Tagore couldn’t have imagined how a particularly provisional text like the Gitanjali would come to dominate his work in the wider world:

He knew Okakura had done well out of his 'Book of Tea'. If he couldn't outsell Sarojini, what was the point of poncing around in a kaftan with a great big beard? Seriously, now Vivekananda and Nivedita were dead- the time was right for the Brahmos to strike back against the Neo-Sanatanis. What would be cool would be to earn some hard currency by doing so. 

how it would be taken completely seriously, embraced and then dismissed, and placed far away from the playfulness that informed all his creative work.

Very true. The right way to read Gitanjali is by farting noisily and wiggling your buttocks 

What is Tagore’s achievement as a Bengali songwriter?

It is to write rather doleful Bengali songs.  

It is to be the first major creator, possibly anywhere, of the art-song.

An art song- i.e. a leide or melodie- is one for a solo voice accompanied by a piano. It has been popular on the Continent since the late eighteenth century. In England, however, it dates back to Dowland and Campion and Lawes. 

I suppose Tagore's songs could be sung with a harmonium. The missionaries had popularised this.   

What came to America in the 1960s emerged in Bengal about a hundred years earlier:

Stephen Forster was writing art songs in America before Rabi was born.  

a new kind of song that would borrow from folk and devotional music, from classical traditions and also from the music of other cultures, but would be none of these things.

Like Samuel Barber's Crucifixion. Bengal can boast no such thing.  

The modern Bengali song would be situated on its own terms in the new realm of “art”.

Schmaltz. Bengal can point to nothing comparable to Schubert's 'Erlkoning' or 'Gretchen at the spinning wheel' not to mention Charbier's 'L'invitation au Voyage'. Had Hilda Doolittle sung Ezra Pound a song not of Lawes but Tagore, his Envoi would have been a fart.

Tagore’s achievement here is without parallel,

He was facile. But only Bengalis whose Mummies sang that shite have any taste for Rabindra Sangeet.  

though his contemporaries – DL Ray,

who studied agriculture in England. Tagore sent his son and son-in-law to study agronomy in America. Nothing came of it. Apparently plants don't respond to being scolded by buddhijivis.  

Nazrul Islam,

was of a different generation 

Rajanikanta,

who had a genuine spiritual bent 

Atul Prasad

a senior barrister but very tuneful. Apparently, Yeats's Mohini Chatterjee, too, was a successful lawyer.  

– are significant for their formative contributions to the genre. Tagore writes songs about love, yes, and about the natural world and the numinous:

he wrote lots of hymns for his religious sect 

but he’s also excited by the pre-existing musical forms and conventions in which he finds these subjects located. He wants to borrow from these and translate them into art-song

There is no 'art for art's sake' in Rabi. He had cousins who went in for that sort of thing but he was a big beardie swanning around in mystic robes because his Dad had appointed himself a Maharishi. 

– to something that’s finite in shape (his Bengali songs are short, and don’t lend themselves to improvisation), exact, inflected by a multiplicity of cultural registers, and which has, strictly speaking, no home except in art.

but that art is boring and stupid. It hasn't found a market outside India. By contrast, Chinese and Japanese and Nigerian and Mexican sopranos will sing German liede. 

Tagore’s Bengali songs are unprecedented in their preoccupation with superfluity, objectless excess, and an intense sense of limitlessness.

No. They are quite tuneful and if you hit the singer repeatedly you can make her stop.  

We’ll find this tendency running through the English Gitanjali, too, however couched it may seem to be in a language of piety. The opening line of the first song is a shock, and brings immediately to our attention – if we don’t get too distracted by the thys, thous, and thees – the radical truths available to this imagination: “Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure.”

Boring people do appear to speak in an interminable manner. But if you beat them they will stop. Such is our pleasure.  

Not “Thou art endless”, as we would expect from a reverential utterance, but “Thou hast made me endless”.

It's not my fault, I'm a crushing bore. Blame God.  

This is not reverence or worship, but celebration and invocation as a way of radically rethinking the usual relationship between deity and devotee.

If God ordained devotion, he ordained boredom.  

Is the “thou” a deity at all? What kind of deity or god feels “pleasure”?

Bengali deity should feel only boredom and spread such a feeling as widely as possible. But the Bengali deity should be too feeble to stand up to any other type of God.  

The capacity for pleasure is something we attribute to human beings, not God.

Speak for yourself, Amit. We think God will be well pleased if your wife beats you to death.  

Are we being introduced to the notion of some other kind of pleasure?

That of shoving a hamster up your butt? No.  

Is this a creative force that’s indistinguishable from creation (in which case, it could participate in process and pleasure)?

Nope. Tagore already existed. 

If creator and creation are in some way interchangeable,

Because Tagore could just as easily have created the Galaxies- right? 

is the seeming separation between addresser and addressee an illusion produced, and also challenged, by the grammar, structure, and meaning of the line?

No. Don't be silly.  

The word in the Bengali song that Tagore translates as “pleasure” is leela:

play 

the childlike, unmindful, divine play of which the universe is an inadvertent consequence.

Nope. It is an end in itself- like what is done in play.  

The universe’s beauty – and man’s “endlessness” – happen, then, by chance: they did not comprise a premeditated end.

Nope. Creation is an end in itself. That is premeditated but it is not instrumental.  

Nevertheless, they delight the addressee, the “thou” – something the addressee appears

to this cretin 

to need reminding of, so unconscious do they seem to be of their actions.

Nonsense! In a poem, the poet may speak to inanimate objects. This does not mean he is reminding them of anything. Nor is he giving them tax advise.  

Right here, in the first line, we’re being asked to participate in a realignment in how we understand finitude, being human, and creation. Life – contrary to everything we know about it – is, the song claims, infinitely replenishable: “still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill”.

Which is just another way of saying- ' Om purnamadah purnamidam purnat purnamudachyate purnasya purnamadaya purnamevavashisyate Om Shaantih Shaantih Shaanti.' Tagore wasn't saying something new. But he was saying it at a time and in a manner which had an impact- for e.g. on soldiers in the trenches of the Great War. 

Although the language of the English Gitanjali is often archaic,

Not particularly. There are no 'eftsoons' in it. 

its looseness making for a very different ethos from the compression and pressure that define the Bengali songs,

Tagore was better at Bengali. This is because that is where he lived and it was his mother tongue. Perhaps he knew of Hari Singh Gaur's experiments in blank verse which had met with some small meed of critical acclaim in the early 1890's. 

there are lines everywhere that carry the imprint of the Bengali Tagore.

Because those lines were by Tagore and he was a Bengali.  

“I know thou takest pleasure in my singing.

He wasn't a particularly good singer. Still, we all have our little vanities.  

I know that only as a singer I come before thy presence.”

Tagore was smart enough to understand that God didn't want to see his booty shake 

To sing is to break free of the boundaries and proprieties of purposeful thought,

No. It is merely to sing. Some songs are perfectly sensible and informative. Others are boring or trite.  

to revel in life and in being in the world, ignoring the rational mind’s caveat that there must first be an ostensible reason for doing so.

This is not the case. A song can be as informative as anything else.  

Rationality tells us that the only way we can justify celebrating life is if we have the right to do so;

Nonsense! Rationality tells us that if we don't have the right to do a thing, then we may have to do it surreptitiously. Thus, if you want to shit on your neighbour's front step, do it when nobody is looking. Also make sure they don't have one of those 'Ring' cameras.  

song is about our unearned right to whatever is ours without our having to prove we deserve ownership.

No it isn't. Song is about making noises which are tuneful and which other people might like listening to.  

This radical and freeing possibility is what makes Tagore’s songs unique both in what they say and in how they embody their own liberating function.

There is no such possibility. It is not the case that prisoners become free by singing or that Tagore gained Indian independence by composing a song for the Viceroy.  

To sing is also to listen – to be transported by intense longing and desire (which is, after all, what listening is):

Nope. Singing is one way not to listen. 'La la la la, I'm not listening to you'.  

My heart longs to join in thy song, but vainly struggles for a voice.

Not vainly enough. 

I would speak, but speech breaks not into song, and I cry out baffled.

You also fart in a despondent manner.  

Ah, thou hast made my heart captive in the endless meshes of thy music, my master!

Sadly, those meshes aren't strong enough to get you to shut the fuck up. Seriously, if your master is singing, don't keep interrupting to him to complain about not having a voice or not being able to provide a musical accompaniment with your farts. 

Although Tagore adds the word “holy” here (Song 3) in the fifth line despite there being no equivalent of the word in the Bengali

Sure there is. It is 'pabitra'.  

– “the holy stream of thy music” – he is primarily interested not in religious devotion but in adoration.

Religious adoration is religious devotion.  

Through words like “master” and “he”, the English versions flirt dangerously with something like a Judaeo-Christian God.

Which Brahmos have. There was a time when they were thinking of merging their cult with the Unitarians.  

In Bengali, “he” would be the gender-neutral shé. In a modernist context, shé takes on a suggestive quality that’s at once erotic

only to Amit.  

and not-quite-human, a third indeterminate gender that haunts the Indian languages (one could, here, invoke Eliot’s words in The Waste Land, “Who is the third who walks always beside you?”).

No one couldn't. The third is a dude. Also 'when any two are gathered in Christ's name' Christ too is there. He too has a dick.  

If the addressee were male (as suggested by the word “master”), the half-forgotten residue of devotional, Radha-Krishna-adoring songwriting (which Tagore loved) would ensure that the singer, even if he were male by gender, was not entirely male by soul.

Nonsense! Dudes can love God without having to have a female soul. Indeed, you can love your Dad that way.  

The English translation occasionally reduces these inflections into a tone that’s more straightforwardly worshipful and gendered.

Because that's what Tagore wanted.  

It also takes our attention away from the fact that Tagore’s affirmation of song is an affirmation of contingency – the accident of existence; leela.

Leela is not 'contingent'. Play is not accidental or aleatory. It is predetermined. You go to play a game of 'hide and seek'. That game does not spontaneously turn into a tennis match.

Play is an end in itself. It isn't instrumental. Amit is as stupid as shit.  

English can make him sound world-denying and pious,

as could the fact that he was the head of a religious sect and dressed the part 

which he is the opposite of.

Nope. He genuinely was his father's successor as the head of a branch of the Brahmo Samaj.  

Tagore is unsettling precisely because he’s world-embracing.

That's not unsettling at all. 

This, then, is Tagore’s gift to us, or his “offering”. “Gitanjali” is one of Tagore’s many portmanteau coinages: geet is song, and anjali refers to the flowers you offer to the deity at the end of worship, often during festivities.

No. Anjali means offering. Pushpanjali is the flower offering. Gitanjali is like 'Shraddanjali' which is found in many Indian languages.  

It is an act of both momentary contemplation (you bow and close your eyes) and physical spontaneity (you throw the handful of flowers in the deity’s direction). There is no penitence or specific prayer attached: it’s a moment of celebration.

Nonsense! The priest has chanted a particular prayer or else you have silently formulated a 'sankalpa' or uttered a mantra. Small kids or imbeciles, like Amit, may be incapable of the latter act.  

Tagore secularises the idea of the anjali by turning it into a metaphor

a song is not a metaphor for a song. It is a fucking song. Songs can be offered in devotion just as flowers can.  

for the literary and the musical;

No. He merely affirms that the purpose of this literary exercise is devotional. What he has written is his offering to God.  

the question of whom the songs are offered to remains open.

No. It is God. Tagore was not a slave. His master was the big dude up in Heaven.  

For Tagore, the object seems redundant; the act of giving, or offering, is cherishable in and of itself. Giving what, though?

Devotion. Gratitude.  

Not kindness, or wisdom, or moral counsel, though the English translation sometimes comes across as one of these: “Life of my life, I shall ever try to keep my body pure, knowing that thy living touch is upon all my limbs” (Song 4).

Tagore also ran a school. He didn't want the kids there to spend all their time masturbating or bumming each other. 

The English Gitanjali is characterised by tension: there are a number of remarkable counter-statements in it that remind us that giving (and living) is disconnected from any kind of morality, or system of reward, human or theological.

Rubbish! Make your offerings to God, not some syphilitic ho-bag. Your reward is not getting the clap. That's a pretty straightforward morality right there.  

Song 16 opens with this extraordinary statement: “I have had my invitation to this world’s festival, and thus my life has been blessed.” In the Bengali song, this is even more radical: instead of “my life” (amar jiban), it reads as “human life”, or “life as humans know it” (manab jiban).

Every human lives life as humans know it.

And there’s no “thus” in the Bengali: no justification or logic to this sense of blessedness.

Maybe this is because Bengali is a relatively underdeveloped language spoken by backward shitheads.  

It says, simply: “I am invited to the world’s festival, / blessed is human life.”

Which is a bit arrogant. The fact that you got invited to a party is not the reason that others who go to the party are 'blessed'- unless you are Beyonce.  

On one level, this is outrageous; on another, true to everything we feel but dare not express. Tagore’s anjali – in the form of a new kind of art-song – is nothing and everything.

It is boring. Still, the guy was a genuine Brahmin who was a leader of a perfectly respectable branch of the Brahmo Sect and thus Amit's Mummy was encouraged to sing his shite. Sadly, White peeps didn't care for it and thus Bengali professors have to pretend Tagore was a 'modernist' writer.

On the other hand, Tagore's Gitanjali & 'Post Office' are readable whereas nothing by Aurobindo or his brother, or Sarojini, come to that, are readable. Being less educated and having been cut off from the company of literary folk turned out to have been an advantage. Sadly, it is an advantage Amit singularly lacks.