George Lukács, a Hungarian Communist who had to relocate to Austria after the failure of Bela Kun's revolution, wrote a review of Tagore's 'Home & the World' in 1922
Tagore’s Gandhi Novel
Tagore’s enormous celebrity among Germany’s ‘intellectual elite’
He was liked by ordinary people. This is because he was 'spiritual'. Indeed, he was the hereditary head of a Brahmin sect of a mystical type. He had won the Nobel prize. The Brits had given him a knighthood. More importantly, his melancholy poetry struck a chord. Many Germans had lost family members during the Great War. Since he had suffered frequent bereavements, Tagore had fashioned a consoling personal philosophy for himself. It was vaguely theistic but ecumenical. Great mathematicians & physicists like Brouwer & Einstein rated him.
is one of the cultural scandals occurring with ever greater intensity again and again
Lukacs, at that time, represented a fucking fiasco. Anyway, Tagore was 'Aryan' & aristocratic. True, Thomas Mann described him as a nice elderly English lady but Mann, unlike his elder brother, had chosen the wrong side during the Great War.
— a typical sign of the total cultural dissolution facing this ‘intellectual elite’.
Culture didn't matter. It was hyperinflation which fucked them up. Mann had been foolish to buy War bonds.
For such celebrity indicates the complete loss of the old ability to distinguish between the genuine article and the fake.
Tagore was genuinely 'old money' and the third generation leader of a prestigious sect in the 'second city' of the last and greatest of the European Empires.
Tagore himself is — as imaginative writer and as thinker — a wholly insignificant figure.
He was doing very well for himself at that time as an Oriental 'guru'.
His creative powers are non-existent;
He was primarily a poet & a prolific composer of songs.
his characters pale stereotypes;
Lukacs could have no knowledge of the originals. In any case the novel reflected on bhadralok society as it had been over a decade previously. By 1922, a lot of the 'Jugantar' revolutionaries were Communists. M.N Roy was much more important than Lukacs. The Comintern sent Roy to China to foment an agrarian uprising. Incidentally, Maugham had written a story based on 'Chatto' who either starved to death or was killed during one of Stalin's great purges.
his stories threadbare and uninteresting; and his sensibility is meagre, insubstantial.
In the opinion of a Commie shithead.
He survives by stirring scraps of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita
sacred texts of his Brahmin ancestors
into his works amid the sluggish flow of his own tediousness — and because the contemporary German reader’s instinct has become so unsure that he can no longer recognise the difference between the text and quotations.
Hilarious! This cunt wants to be taken as an expert on Hindu Scripture! Why not simply say, 'Tagore has never even been to India. He is actually a Jewish Lesbian who works as a seamstress in Cracow.' Meanwhile, Lukacs himself was the Dalai fucking Lama but was too modest to draw attention to this fact.
As a result these scanty leftovers from Indian philosophy
Religion. Tagore was a Brahmin, not a Lesbian seamstress from Cracow.
do not annihilate the unworthy material which frames them; on the contrary, they give it an esoteric sanction of profundity and of wisdom from afar.
There isn't much religion in the novel. The protagonist is an old fashioned Gladstonian liberal who might think Surendranath Bannerjee an extremist. The other chap appears 'Jugantar' but is actually on opportunist. The wife comes from a poor family. We suspect that hubby isn't giving her a good poking- which is why she doesn't have a baby.
That is not surprising. When Germany’s educated public is accommodating itself more and more to intellectual substitutes,
like Einstein?
when it is incapable of grasping the difference between Spangler and classical philosophy,
Spengler was a shithead. That's true enough. But he wasn't a philosopher. I suppose Lukacs thought Marx had the right 'theory of history'.
between Ewers
a patriot who had been interned as a German agent after the US entered the war. He was quite a good horror writer
and Hoffmann or Poe and so forth, how is it to perceive this difference in the far remoter world of India?
Germans understood that crazy shitheads could drag their country into a war or a revolution. Come to think of it Ewers had published a novel on this topic in 1910 (the Sorcerer's apprentice).
Tagore is the Indian Frenssen,[1]
A crazy neo-pagan who believed in free love. Tagore was a member & later the leader of a Puritanical sect with a strict moral code.
whom he faintly recalls in his unctuous tediousness, although his creative powers even fall short of Frenssen.
Did Lukacs know Bengali? No. The translation might be shit, but only Bengali speakers can speak to the quality of the original.
All the same, his great success has some significance as a symptom of the German mentality today.
No. Tagore was successful everywhere at a time when many suffered bereavement either because of war or the Spanish Flu or the crazy antics of nutters like Lukacs & Kun.
A possible response to this sharp rejection of Tagore is to invoke an international fame (or rather, fame in Britain).
Tagore was big in China & Latin America.
The English bourgeoisie has reasons of its own for rewarding Mr. Tagore with fame and riches (the Nobel Prize):
awarded by the Swedes. It must be said, the Brits did encourage vernacular Indian languages but they had acquired a momentum of their own by the 1880s.
it is repaying its intellectual agent in the struggle against the Indian freedom movement.
Did you know that the Brits are using mind-rays to get Germans to buy Tagore's books. This is because a guy who returned his knighthood is actually a British agent. Communism rots the brain.
For Britain, therefore, the scraps of ‘wisdom’ from ancient India,
They had taken the trouble to subsidize its translation. British (& then Germans) savants spent a lot of time ensuring that much more than 'scraps' were available. This happened before Lukacs was born.
the doctrine of total acquiescence and of the wickedness of violence — only, of course, when it relates to the freedom movement
in a place where Muslims will slit your throat & take your property if the Brits fuck off. There was a good reason Tagore's grandfather spent a goodly sum lobbying Westminster to permit unrestricted European migration to Bengal.
— have a very concrete and palpable meaning.
Everything had a very concrete and palpable meaning to Lukacs. Thus when people said to him 'you have shit for brains', what they really meant was 'you are a friggin' genius, mate. Wall Street trembles when you speak.'
The greater Tagore’s fame and authority, the more effectively his pamphlet can combat the freedom struggle in his native country.
Tagore was seen as a patriot in India. That is why the Indian national anthem is written by him. Lukacs, of course, thought no country is truly free unless it is a puppet of Bolsheviks in the Kremlin.
For a pamphlet — and one resorting to the lowest tools of libel
If anybody had been libelled they would have brought a case against him. He had lots of money.
— is what Tagore’s novel is, in spite of its tediousness and want of spirit.
i.e. it isn't Commie propaganda. The truth is nobody can do tediousness like a Commie.
These libels seem all the more repugnant to the unprejudiced reader the more they are steeped in unctuous ‘wisdom’ and the more slyly Mr. Tagore attempts to conceal his impotent hatred of the Indian freedom fighters in a ‘profound’ philosophy of the ‘universally human’.
Indians understood that the dude would lose his estates in the East. Ireland had been partitioned on religious lines & there had been a Civil War. Also, there was now a Communist threat. But, what concentrated minds was the prospect anarchy in the rural areas. Rent rolls would collapse. There would be a 'scissors crisis' for the cities. What would come next? Warlordism with different Princes recruiting battle hardened mercs from around the world? Anyway, the Brits were transferring power albeit in a grudging matter. That is why, though Egypt & Ireland & Afghanistan gained independence in 1922, the Indians were content to delay matters till they could be sure Provincial administrations could be safely Indianized. Dyarchy was like training wheels on a bike. You might resent them because you are a big big boy, but the safer thing would be not to complain too much about them.
The intellectual conflict in the novel is concerned with the question of the use of violence.
No. Tagore's readers understood that violence was futile. Tegart had killed 'Tiger' Jatin. Even if the German Crown Prince sent arms shipments, the Indians would meet the same fate as the Boers with this difference. The guys mowing them down would be Indian. They would get pensions. The 'Ghaddarites' would get nothing even if the Brits fucked off. Why? There would be no Treasury to pay them.
The author portrays the beginnings of the national movement: the struggle to boycott British goods, to squeeze them out of the Indian market and to replace them with native products
i.e. to benefit Hindu & Parsi industrialists but harm Muslim weavers & small businessmen. But that was a theme in 'Gora', Tagore's earlier book.
. And Mr. Tagore broaches the weighty question: is the use of violence in this struggle morally admissible?
Fuck morality. Would violence lead to your having more money or security? If not, the thing was simply stupid unless the people collecting money for it were swindlers or sociopaths.
The hypothesis is that India is an oppressed, enslaved country,
People like Tagore might have agreed with Santayana 'the world never had sweeter masters'. The big thing about the Brits was that even if they took your land, they wouldn't rape you wife. Also, if your brother killed you, he wouldn't get to keep the ancestral property no matter how big a bribe he offered the Judge.
yet Mr. Tagore shows no interest in this question.
Because Indians were not interested in it. In law & morality, the question was settled. If you can gain independence by violence- go for it. If the result would be anarchy- don't.
He is, after all, a philosopher,
Radhakrishnan thought so and did well for himself as a result. Other Indians considered him a poet & the head of a perfectly respectable religious sect.
a moralist only concerned with the ‘eternal truths’.
Lukacs had shit for brains. That's an eternal truth. Still he made a bit of money out of his shitty Marxist schtick.
Let the British come to terms as they wish and in their own way with the damage done to their souls through their use of violence:
Like Brigadier Dyer? The problem is that, after the Moplah uprising, Hindus were clamouring for the 'smack of firm government'. Moreover, Dyer helped defeat the Afghans a few months after Jallianwallah Bagh.
Mr. Tagore’s task is to save the Indians spiritually and to protect their souls from the dangers posed by the violence, deceit etc. with which they are waging their struggle for freedom.
That was Gandhi. Tagore was more practical. He was telling his fellow bhadralok zamindars they would lose their estates and maybe also their lives if they let their sons- or, increasingly, their daughters- into revolutionary mishegoss.
He writes: “Men who die for the truth are immortal; and if a whole people dies for the truth it will achieve immortality in the history of mankind.’
Tagore didn't write that. Maybe it was there in the German edition. Brahmos believe that the soul is immortal. If you die for the truth or, in other ways, live righteously, you are re-absorbed into the Godhead. Otherwise, maybe there is rebirth. As for the 'history of mankind' it gets expunged every so often if not by 'pralaya', then by barbarian invasions or epidemics or economic collapse. Indians were aware that a lot of their own history was little known- or not known at all- by anybody now living.
This stance represents nothing less than the ideology of the eternal subjection of India.
Tagore's family had served Muslims & they had served the Brits. They preferred the Brits.
But Tagore’s attitude is even more blatantly manifest in the manner in which he shapes this demand in the action and the characters of his novel.
Not really. The Indian reader understands that Sandip is a scoundrel. They knew plenty of Jugantar revolutionaries had been of the highest calibre. This fellow was a bombastic opportunist- nothing more.
The movement which he depicts is a romantic movement for intellectuals.
Bengalis knew that 'gau raksha' & 'swadesi' were a vehicle for poorer rural youth- not intellectuals. Interestingly, a lot of Jugantar revolutionaries were from such backgrounds though some had gotten a fair amount of education in Calcutta.
It strongly reminds us — without taking the analogy too far, since the social circumstances are entirely different — of such movements as the Carbonari in Italy and indeed, in certain aspects (particularly the psychological aspects), the Narodniks in Russia.
It didn't remind Tagore's readers of any such thing because they had never heard of either. On the other hand there had been a cult of Mazzini at an earlier time.
Romantic Utopianism, ideological exaggeration and the crusading spirit are an essential part of all these movements.
Whereas Communism was about killing lots of 'class enemies' & 'left adventurists' & 'right adventurists' & people who looked a bit Jewy.
But this is only the starting point for Mr. Tagore’s libellous pamphlet.
It's quite a long book. Does it accurately reflect domestic life in the mansions of the bhadralok? Sadly, yes.
He turns this crusading romanticism, whose typical representatives were without question motivated by the purest idealism and self-sacrifice, into a life of adventure and crime. His hero, a minor Indian noble
landowner. As a 'kulin' his ancestors may have enjoyed a degree of pre-eminence amongst Brahmins a century previously. But he didn't belong to the Princely or aristocratic caste.
who advocates the current doctrine,
He doesn't advocate shit. He wants his wife to stop being 'purdah nashin' & to attend public meetings where progressive ideas were discussed.
is destroyed both inwardly and outwardly by the rapacious excesses of such a ‘patriotic’ criminal band.
Not really. His wife comes to her senses. But it is too late. The Muslims are attacking a neighbouring Hindu landlord. He rides to his death at their hands in a doomed attempt to save them.
His home is destroyed. He himself falls in a battle that was sparked off by the unscrupulousness of the ‘patriots’.
Fuck off! Muslims don't need a reason to kill 'kaffirs' more particularly if they have stuff you can steal & daughters you can rape. Admittedly, this is true of agriculturists of all religions.
He himself is supposed, according to Mr. Tagore, to be by no means hostile to the national movement; on the contrary, he even wants to promote the nation’s industry. He experiments with native inventions — provided, though, that he does not pay for them.
He pays his bills. Brahmos were very good that way.
He gives shelter to the patriots’ leader, a contemptible caricature of Gandhi!
Gandhi was in South Africa at that time. He, like the protagonist, would be a Gokhale type moderate. Sandip is a 'Bal-Pal-Lal' type. But he isn't Jugantar. The guy didn't acquire bulging muscles in the Anushilan Samitis. Instead he is a bullshit artist concerned with swindling money for himself. He fears the Muslims have got wind of this & will kill him for his cash.
But when the affair becomes too hot for him, he protects everybody afflicted by the violence of the ‘patriots’ with his own instruments of power and with those of the British police.
Nonsense! He had some money, but no power. Lukacs makes him out to be a Prussian baron or a Magyar magnate.
This propagandistic, demagogically one-sided stance renders the novel completely worthless from the artistic angle.
If so, all Commie novels are worthless.
The hero’s adversary is not a real adversary but a base adventurer who, for instance, when he wheedles a large sum of money out of the hero’s wife for national ends and talks her into theft, does not hand the money over to the national movement but feasts on the sight of the gleaming pieces of gold.
A real revolutionary would have been robbing banks- like Bagha Jatin.
No wonder the men and women whom he has led astray turn away from him in disgust the moment they see through him.
Guys like him have to stay on the move. Is he also an agent provocateur or informant? Maybe. The reason the nation turned to Gandhi was that he kept careful accounts of money given to him & kept kids out of trouble. He even broke up Nehru's sister's marriage to a Muslim.
But Tagore’s creative powers do not even stretch to a decent pamphlet.
The novel is limited in scope. I think it is better than Gora. The question is whether Bengali readers found it useful. I think many did.
He lacks the imagination even to calumniate convincingly and effectively, as Dostoyevsky, say, partly succeeded in doing in his counter-revolutionary novel ‘Possessed’.
Let's face it. The Rooskis were as smart as fuck. Indians have an IQ slightly higher than cows- which is why they worship them.
The ‘spiritual’ aspect of his story, separated from the nuggets of Indian wisdom with which it is tricked out, is a petty bourgeois yarn of the shoddiest kind.
No. It is about a traditional, pious, joint-family facing the stresses and strains of modernity. One might say there is a domestic calamity parallel to the much greater international calamity that was the Great War.
Ultimately it boils down to the ‘problem’ of the standing of the ‘man of the house’: how the wife of a ‘good and honest’ man is seduced by a romantic adventurer, but then sees through him and returns to her husband in remorse.
Oddly enough this was also the plot of Ulysses. I firmly believe that Molly decides, at the end of the book, that Blazes Boylan can go to blazes. She appoints Leopold her theatrical agent & conducts a successful American tour. The couple invest the profits in the new 'motion picture' industry. Stephen Daedalus writes the script for 'Matcham's master stroke' & is hired by United Artist. He converts to Reform Judaism & marries Samuel Goldwyn's daughter. He gives up booze & takes to Sarsaparilla/
This brief sample will suffice to give an impression of the ‘great man’ whom German intellectuals have treated like a prophet.
Germans liked Tagore because he was spiritual, irenic & an 'internationalist' at a time when German needed the help of the international community to overcome pariah status. His novel could be seen as prescient because the Bolsheviks took power the very next year. Landlords & the urban bourgeoisie were well and truly fucked. So was everybody else including most of the Old Bolsheviks.
To rebut such totally dismissive criticism, of course, his admirers will point to his other, ‘more universal’ writings. In our view, however, the significance of an intellectual trend is evident precisely from what it can say about the most burning contemporary questions
What Tagore was saying was that Nationalism & Socialism & other such shite can lead to plentiful ters being shed before bedtime. He was right. Lukacs was wrong about Communism. It was utterly shit.
_if it presumes to point the way in an age of confusion. Indeed the value or worthlessness of a theory or outlook (and of those who proclaim it) is evident precisely from
how many of their own people they kill. Lukacs had killed some of his own soldiers.
what it has to say to the people of that age in their sufferings and their strivings.
Fuck that. A theory is valuable if it raises total factor productivity relatively non-coercively. Marx was supposed to be an economist.
It is difficult to assess wisdom ‘in itself’ in the vacuum of pure theory
Not if you are Einstein level smart.
(and within the walls of an elegant salon).
Shitty salons are fine.
But it will reveal itself the moment that it comes out with the claim to act as men’s guide.
Sensible Bengalis who read Tagore's book, gave their wives a good seeing-to & threatened to break the legs of any smooth-talking loafer who glommed onto them.
Mr. Tagore has come out with that claim in this novel.
When Ireland was partitioned on religious lines, the wisdom of his claim was realised by Bengalis with property in the East.
As we noted, his ‘wisdom’ was put at the intellectual service of the British police.
Tegart had no need for Tagore's services. There were plenty of Indians willing to earn a bit of money as informants. If Sandip survived, he was probably one of them.
Is it necessary, therefore, to pay any closer attention to the residue of this ‘wisdom'?
It wasn't necessary for this cretin to write this shite. Hopefully, he got paid decently to do so. That's how 'print capitalism' works. Tagore too was making money which he ploughed back into his Art School. He was a thoroughly decent man. Lukacs was loo-crap.
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