Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath
Tagore
রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর |
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Tagore
c. 1915, the year he was knighted by George V.
Tagore repudiated his knighthood in protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre
in 1919.
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Born
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Died
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7 August 1941 (aged 80)
Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, British India |
Occupation
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Poet, short-story writer, song
composer, novelist, playwright, essayist, and painter
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Language
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Bengali, English
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Nationality
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Ethnicity
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Notable work(s)
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Notable award(s)
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Spouse(s)
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Mrinalini Devi (m. 1883–1902)
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Children
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five children, two of whom died in
childhood
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Relative(s)
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Signature
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Rabindranath Thakur, α[›] anglicised to Tagoreβ[›]
pronunciation (help·info)
(Bengali: রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর)
(7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941),γ[›] sobriquet Gurudev,δ[›] was a Bengali
polymath
who reshaped his region's literature and music.
Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful
verse", he became the first non-European to win the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1913. In translation his poetry was viewed as spiritual and
mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain
largely unknown outside Bengal. Tagore introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of
colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on
classical Sanskrit. He was highly influential in introducing the best of
Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the
outstanding creative artist of modern South Asia.
A Pirali Brahmin from Calcutta, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old. At age sixteen, he released his
first substantial poems under the
pseudonym Bhānusiṃha ("Sun Lion"), which were seized upon by
literary authorities as long-lost classics. He graduated to his first short stories and dramas—and the
aegis of his birth name—by 1877. As a humanist, universalist internationalist,
and strident anti-nationalist he denounced the Raj
and advocated independence from Britain. As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings,
sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs; his
legacy endures also in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati
University.
Tagore modernised Bengali art by
spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels,
stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and
personal. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced),
and Ghare-Baire (The
Home and the World) are his
best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed—or
panned—for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural
contemplation. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems:
India's
Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh's Amar Shonar Bangla.
Early
life: 1861–1878
The youngest of thirteen surviving
children, Tagore was born in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta, India to parents Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905) and Sarada Devi (1830–1875).ε[›] The Tagore family came into prominence during the Bengal Renaissance that
started during the age of Hussein Shah (1493–1519). The original name of the Tagore family was Banerjee. Being Brahmins, their ancestors were referred to as 'Thakurmashai'
or 'Holy Sir'. During the British rule, this name stuck and they began to be
recognised as Thakur and eventually the family name got anglicised to Tagore.Tagore family patriarchs were the Brahmo founders
of the Adi Dharm
faith. The loyalist "Prince" Dwarkanath Tagore, who employed European estate managers and visited with Victoria
and other royalty, was his paternal grandfather. Debendranath had formulated the Brahmoist philosophies
espoused by his friend Ram Mohan Roy, and became focal in Brahmo society after Roy's death.
The
last two days a storm has been raging, similar to the description in my song—Jhauro
jhauro borishe baridhara [... amidst it] a hapless, homeless man drenched
from top to toe standing on the roof of his steamer [...] the last two days I
have been singing this song over and over [...] as a result the pelting sound
of the intense rain, the wail of the wind, the sound of the heaving Gorai
[R]iver, have assumed a fresh life and found a new language and I have felt
like a major actor in this new musical drama unfolding before me.
“
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"Rabi" was raised mostly
by servants; his mother had died in his early childhood and his father
travelled widely. His home hosted the publication of literary magazines;
theatre and recitals of both Bengali and Western classical music featured there
regularly, as the Jorasanko Tagores were the center of a large and art-loving
social group. Tagore's oldest brother Dwijendranath was a respected philosopher and poet. Another brother, Satyendranath, was the first Indian appointed to the elite and formerly
all-European Indian Civil
Service. Yet another brother, Jyotirindranath, was a musician, composer, and playwright. His sister Swarnakumari became a novelist. Jyotirindranath's wife Kadambari,
slightly older than Tagore, was a dear friend and powerful influence. Her
abrupt suicide in 1884, soon after he married, left him for years profoundly
distraught.
Tagore largely avoided classroom
schooling and preferred to roam the manor or nearby Bolpur and Panihati,
idylls which the family visited. His brother Hemendranath tutored and physically conditioned
him—by having him swim the Ganges or trek through hills, by gymnastics, and by
practising judo and wrestling. He learned drawing, anatomy, geography and
history, literature, mathematics, Sanskrit, and English—his least favourite
subject. Tagore loathed formal education—his scholarly travails at
the local Presidency College
spanned a single day. Years later he held that proper teaching does not explain
things; proper teaching stokes curiosity:
After he underwent an upanayan initiation at age eleven, he and his father left Calcutta
in February 1873 for a months-long tour of the Raj. They visited his father's Santiniketan estate and rested in Amritsar
en route to the Himalayan Dhauladhars, their destination being the remote hill
station at Dalhousie. Along the way, Tagore read biographies; his father tutored
him in history, astronomy, and Sanskrit declensions. He read biographies of Benjamin Franklin among other figures; they discussed Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire; and they examined the poetry of Kālidāsa. In mid-April they reached the station, and at 2,300 metres (7,546 ft)
they settled into a house that sat atop Bakrota Hill. Tagore was taken aback by
the region's deep green gorges, alpine forests, and mossy streams and
waterfalls. They stayed there for several months and adopted a regime
of study and privation that included daily twilight baths taken in icy water.
He returned to Jorosanko and
completed a set of major works by 1877, one of them a long poem in the Maithili
style of Vidyapati; they were published pseudonymously. Regional experts
accepted them as the lost works of Bhānusimha, a newly discoveredζ[›] 17th-century Vaishnava
poet. He debuted the short-story genre in Bengali with
"Bhikharini" ("The Beggar Woman"), and his Sandhya Sangit (1882) includes the famous
poem "Nirjharer Swapnabhanga" ("The Rousing of the
Waterfall"). Servants subjected him to an almost ludicrous regimentation
in a phase he dryly reviled as the "servocracy". His head was water-dunked—to quiet him. He irked his servants by refusing food; he was confined to
chalk circles in parody of Sita's forest trial in the Ramayana; and he was regaled with the heroic criminal exploits of
Bengal's outlaw-dacoits. Because the Jorasanko manor was in an area of north
Calcutta rife with poverty and prostitution, he was forbidden to leave it for any purpose other than
travelling to school. He thus became preoccupied with the world outside and
with nature. Of his 1873 visit to Santiniketan, he wrote:
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Shelaidaha:
1878–1901
Because Debendranath wanted his son
to become a barrister, Tagore enrolled at a public school in Brighton, East
Sussex, England in 1878. He stayed for several months at a house that the Tagore
family owned near Brighton and Hove, in Medina Villas; in 1877 his nephew and niece—Suren and
Indira Devi, the children of Tagore's brother Satyendranath—were sent together with their mother, Tagore's
sister-in-law, to live with him. He briefly read law at University
College London, but again left school. He opted
instead for independent study of Shakespeare, Religio Medici, Coriolanus, and Antony and
Cleopatra. Lively English, Irish, and
Scottish folk tunes impressed Tagore, whose own tradition of Nidhubabu-authored
kirtans and tappas and Brahmo hymnody was subdued. In 1880 he returned to Bengal degree-less, resolving to
reconcile European novelty with Brahmo traditions, taking the best from each. In 1883 he married Mrinalini Devi, born Bhabatarini,
1873–1902; they had five children, two of whom died in childhood.
In 1890 Tagore began managing his
vast ancestral estates in Shelaidaha (today a region of Bangladesh); he was joined by his wife and children in 1898. Tagore
released his Manasi poems (1890), among his best-known work. As Zamindar Babu, Tagore
criss-crossed the riverine holdings in command of the Padma, the
luxurious family barge. He collected mostly token rents and blessed villagers
who in turn honoured him with banquets—occasionally of dried rice and sour
milk. He met Gagan Harkara, through whom he became familiar with Baul Lalon Shah, whose folk songs greatly influenced Tagore. Tagore worked to popularise Lalon's songs. The period
1891–1895, Tagore's Sadhana period, named after one of Tagore's
magazines, was his most productive; in these years he wrote more than half the stories of the
three-volume, 84-story Galpaguchchha. Its ironic and grave tales examined the voluptuous poverty
of an idealised rural Bengal.
Santiniketan:
1901–1932
In 1901 Tagore moved to Santiniketan to found an ashram with a
marble-floored prayer hall—The Mandir—an experimental school, groves of trees, gardens, a
library. There his wife and two of his children died. His father
died in 1905. He received monthly payments as part of his inheritance and
income from the Maharaja of Tripura, sales of his family's jewellery, his
seaside bungalow in Puri, and a derisory 2,000 rupees in book royalties. He gained Bengali and foreign readers alike; he published Naivedya (1901) and Kheya (1906) and translated poems into
free verse.
In November 1913, Tagore learned he
had won that year's Nobel Prize in Literature: the Swedish Academy appreciated the idealistic—and for Westerners—accessible
nature of a small body of his translated material focussed on the 1912 Gitanjali: Song Offerings. In 1915, the British Crown granted Tagore a knighthood. He
renounced it after the 1919 Jallianwala
Bagh massacre.
In 1921, Tagore and agricultural
economist Leonard Elmhirst set up the "Institute for Rural Reconstruction",
later renamed Shriniketan or "Abode of Welfare", in Surul, a
village near the ashram. With it, Tagore sought to moderate Gandhi's Swaraj protests, which he occasionally blamed for British India's
perceived mental—and thus ultimately colonial—decline. He sought aid from donors, officials, and scholars
worldwide to "free village[s] from the shackles of helplessness and
ignorance" by "vitalis[ing] knowledge". In the early 1930s he targeted ambient "abnormal caste
consciousness" and untouchability. He lectured against these, he penned Dalit heroes
for his poems and his dramas, and he campaigned—successfully—to open Guruvayoor Temple to Dalits.
Twilight
years: 1932–1941
Tagore's life as a "peripatetic
litterateur" affirmed his opinion that human divisions were shallow.
During a May 1932 visit to a Bedouin encampment in the Iraqi desert, the tribal
chief told him that "Our prophet has said that a true Muslim is he by whose
words and deeds not the least of his brother-men may ever come to any harm
..." Tagore confided in his diary: "I was startled into recognizing
in his words the voice of essential humanity." To the end Tagore scrutinised orthodoxy—and in 1934, he
struck. That year, an earthquake hit Bihar and killed thousands. Gandhi hailed
it as seismic karma,
as divine retribution avenging the oppression of Dalits. Tagore rebuked him for
his seemingly ignominious inferences. He mourned the perennial poverty of Calcutta and the
socioeconomic decline of Bengal. He detailed these newly plebeian aesthetics in
an unrhymed hundred-line poem whose technique of searing double-vision
foreshadowed Satyajit Ray's film Apur Sansar. Fifteen new volumes appeared, among them prose-poem works Punashcha
(1932), Shes Saptak (1935), and Patraput (1936). Experimentation
continued in his prose-songs and dance-dramas: Chitra (1914), Shyama (1939), and Chandalika (1938);
and in his novels: Dui Bon (1933), Malancha (1934), and Char
Adhyay (1934).
Clouds
come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add
color to my sunset sky.
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—Verse 292, Stray Birds,
1916.
Tagore's remit expanded to science
in his last years, as hinted in Visva-Parichay, 1937 collection of
essays. His respect for scientific laws and his exploration of biology,
physics, and astronomy informed his poetry, which exhibited extensive
naturalism and verisimilitude. He wove the process of science, the narratives of
scientists, into stories in Se (1937), Tin Sangi (1940), and Galpasalpa
(1941). His last five years were marked by chronic pain and two long periods of
illness. These began when Tagore lost consciousness in late 1937; he remained
comatose and near death for a time. This was followed in late 1940 by a similar
spell. He never recovered. Poetry from these valetudinary years is among his
finest. A period of prolonged agony ended with Tagore's death on 7
August 1941, aged eighty; he was in an upstairs room of the Jorasanko mansion
he was raised in. The date is still mourned. A. K. Sen, brother of the first chief election
commissioner, received dictation from Tagore on 30 July 1941, a day prior to a
scheduled operation: his last poem.
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I'm lost in the middle of my
birthday. I want my friends, their touch, with the earth's last love. I will
take life's final offering, I will take the human's last blessing. Today my
sack is empty. I have given completely whatever I had to give. In return if I
receive anything—some love, some forgiveness—then I will take it with me when
I step on the boat that crosses to the festival of the wordless end.
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Travels
Between 1878 and 1932, Tagore set
foot in more than thirty countries on five continents. In 1912, he took a sheaf of his translated works to
England, where they gained attention from missionary and Gandhi protégé Charles F. Andrews, Irish poet William Butler
Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Bridges, Ernest Rhys, Thomas Sturge Moore, and others. Yeats wrote the preface to the English translation of Gitanjali;
Andrews joined Tagore at Santiniketan. In November 1912 Tagore began touring
the United States and the United Kingdom, staying in Butterton, Staffordshire
with Andrews's clergymen friends. From May 1916 until April 1917, he lectured in Japan and
the United States. He denounced nationalism. His essay "Nationalism in India" was scorned and
praised; it was admired by Romain Rolland and other pacifists.
Our
passions and desires are unruly, but our character subdues these elements into
a harmonious whole. Does something similar to this happen in the physical
world? Are the elements rebellious, dynamic with individual impulse? And is
there a principle in the physical world which dominates them and puts them into
an orderly organization?
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Shortly after returning home the
63-year-old Tagore accepted an invitation from the Peruvian government. He
travelled to Mexico. Each government pledged US$100,000 to his school to
commemorate the visits. A week after his 6 November 1924 arrival in Buenos Aires, an ill Tagore shifted to the Villa Miralrío at the behest
of Victoria Ocampo. He left for home in January 1925. In May 1926 Tagore
reached Naples; the next day he met Mussolini
in Rome. Their warm rapport ended when Tagore pronounced upon Il
Duce's fascist finesse. He had earlier enthused: "[w]ithout any doubt he is a
great personality. There is such a massive vigour in that head that it reminds
one of Michael Angelo's chisel." A "fire-bath" of fascism was to
have educed "the immortal soul of Italy ... clothed in quenchless
light".
On 14 July 1927 Tagore and two companions
began a four-month tour of Southeast Asia. They visited Bali, Java, Kuala
Lumpur, Malacca, Penang, Siam, and Singapore. The resultant travelogues compose
Jatri (1929). In early 1930 he left Bengal for a nearly year-long tour of
Europe and the United States. Upon returning to Britain—and as his paintings
exhibited in Paris and London—he lodged at a Birmingham Quaker settlement. He
wrote his Oxford Hibbert Lecturesι[›] and spoke at the annual London Quaker meet. There, addressing relations between the British and the
Indians—a topic he would tackle repeatedly over the next two years—Tagore spoke
of a "dark chasm of aloofness". He visited Aga Khan III, stayed at Dartington Hall, toured Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany from June to
mid-September 1930, then went on into the Soviet Union. In April 1932 Tagore, intrigued by the Persian mystic Hafez, was
hosted by Reza Shah Pahlavi. In his other travels, Tagore interacted with Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Romain Rolland. Visits to Persia and Iraq (in 1932) and Sri Lanka (in 1933)
composed Tagore's final foreign tour, and his dislike of communalism and
nationalism only deepened. Vice-President of India M. Hamid Ansari has said that Rabindranath Tagore heralded the cultural
rapprochement between communities, societies and nations much before it became
the liberal norm of conduct. Tagore was a man ahead of his time. He wrote in
1932, while on a visit to Iran, that "each country of Asia will solve its
own historical problems according to its strength, nature and needs, but the
lamp they will each carry on their path to progress will converge to illuminate
the common ray of knowledge." His ideas on culture, gender, poverty, education, freedom,
and a resurgent Asia remain relevant today.
Works
Known mostly for his poetry, Tagore
wrote novels, essays, short stories, travelogues, dramas, and thousands of
songs. Of Tagore's prose, his short stories are perhaps most highly regarded;
he is indeed credited with originating the Bengali-language version of the
genre. His works are frequently noted for their rhythmic, optimistic, and
lyrical nature. Such stories mostly borrow from deceptively simple subject
matter: commoners. Tagore's non-fiction grappled with history, linguistics, and
spirituality. He wrote autobiographies. His travelogues, essays, and lectures
were compiled into several volumes, including Europe Jatrir Patro (Letters
from Europe) and Manusher Dhormo (The Religion of Man). His brief chat with Einstein,
"Note on the Nature of Reality", is included as an appendix to the
latter. On the occasion of Tagore's 150th birthday an anthology (titled Kalanukromik
Rabindra Rachanabali) of the total body of his works is currently being
published in Bengali in chronological order. This includes all versions of each
work and fills about eighty volumes. In 2011, Harvard
University Press collaborated with Visva-Bharati
University to publish The Essential
Tagore, the largest anthology of Tagore's
works available in English; it was edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarthy
and marks the 150th anniversary of Tagore's birth.
Music
Tagore was a prolific composer with
2,230 songs to his credit. His songs are known as rabindrasangit ("Tagore Song"), which merges fluidly into his
literature, most of which—poems or parts of novels, stories, or plays
alike—were lyricised. Influenced by the thumri style of Hindustani
music, they ran the entire gamut of human
emotion, ranging from his early dirge-like Brahmo devotional hymns to
quasi-erotic compositions. They emulated the tonal color of classical ragas to
varying extents. Some songs mimicked a given raga's melody and rhythm
faithfully; others newly blended elements of different ragas. Yet about nine-tenths of his work was not bhanga gaan,
the body of tunes revamped with "fresh value" from select Western,
Hindustani, Bengali folk and other regional flavours "external" to
Tagore's own ancestral culture. Scholars have attempted to gauge the emotive force and
range of Hindustani ragas:
Tagore influenced sitar
maestro Vilayat Khan and sarodiyas Buddhadev Dasgupta and Amjad Ali Khan. His songs are widely popular and undergird the Bengali
ethos to an extent perhaps rivalling Shakespeare's impact on the
English-speaking world. It is said that his songs are the outcome of five
centuries of Bengali literary churning and communal yearning. Dhan Gopal Mukerji has said that these songs transcend the mundane to the
aesthetic and express all ranges and categories of human emotion. The poet gave
voice to all—big or small, rich or poor. The poor Ganges boatman and the rich
landlord air their emotions in them. They birthed a distinctive school of music
whose practitioners can be fiercely traditional: novel interpretations have
drawn severe censure in both West Bengal and Bangladesh.
For Bengalis, the songs' appeal,
stemming from the combination of emotive strength and beauty described as
surpassing even Tagore's poetry, was such that the Modern Review
observed that "[t]here is in Bengal no cultured home where Rabindranath's
songs are not sung or at least attempted to be sung ... Even illiterate
villagers sing his songs". A. H. Fox
Strangways of The Observer introduced non-Bengalis to rabindrasangit in The
Music of Hindostan, calling it a "vehicle of a personality ... [that]
go behind this or that system of music to that beauty of sound which all
systems put out their hands to seize."
In 1971, Amar Shonar Bangla became the national anthem of Bangladesh. It was
written—ironically—to protest the 1905
Partition of Bengal along communal lines: lopping
Muslim-majority East Bengal from Hindu-dominated West Bengal was to avert a
regional bloodbath. Tagore saw the partition as a ploy to upend the independence
movement, and he aimed to rekindle Bengali
unity and tar communalism. Jana Gana Mana was written in shadhu-bhasha, a Sanskritised register of Bengali, and is the first of
five stanzas of a Brahmo hymn that Tagore composed. It was first sung in 1911
at a Calcutta session of the Indian
National Congress and was adopted in 1950 by the Constituent Assembly of the
Republic of India as its national anthem.
Paintings
At sixty, Tagore took up drawing and
painting; successful exhibitions of his many works—which made a debut
appearance in Paris upon encouragement by artists he met in the south of France—were held throughout Europe. He was likely red-green color blind, resulting in works that exhibited strange colour schemes
and off-beat aesthetics. Tagore was influenced by scrimshaw from northern New Ireland, Haida carvings from British Columbia, and woodcuts by Max Pechstein. His artist's eye for his handwriting were revealed in the
simple artistic and rhythmic leitmotifs embellishing the scribbles, cross-outs,
and word layouts of his manuscripts. Some of Tagore's lyrics corresponded in a
synesthetic sense with particular paintings.
Rabindra Chitravali, edited by noted art historian R. Siva Kumar, for the first time makes the paintings of Tagore
accessible to art historians and scholars of Rabindranth with critical
annotations and comments It also brings together a selection of Rabindranath's
own statements and documents relating to the presentation and reception of his
paintings during his lifetime.
The Last Harvest : Paintings of
Rabindranath Tagore was an exhibition of Rabindranath
Tagore's paintings to mark the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore.
It was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, India and organised with NGMA
Delhi as the nodal agency. It consisted of 208 paintings drawn from the
collections of Visva Bharati and the NGMA and presented Tagore's art in a very
comprehensive way. The exhibition was curated by Art Historian R. Siva Kumar. Within the 150th birth anniversary year it was conceived
as three separate but similar exhibitions,and travelled simultaneously in three
circuits. The first selection was shown at Museum of Asian Art, Berlin, Asia Society, New York, National
Museum of Korea, Seoul, Victoria
and Albert Museum, London, The
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Petit Palais, Paris, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome, National Visual Arts Gallery (Malaysia), Kuala Lumpur, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Ontario, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi
Theatre
At sixteen, Tagore led his brother
Jyotirindranath's adaptation of Molière's
Le
Bourgeois Gentilhomme. At twenty he wrote his first drama-opera: Valmiki
Pratibha (The Genius of Valmiki). In it the pandit Valmiki
overcomes his sins, is blessed by Saraswati,
and compiles the Rāmāyana. Through it Tagore explores a wide range of dramatic styles
and emotions, including usage of revamped kirtans and adaptation of traditional English and Irish folk
melodies as drinking songs. Another play, Dak
Ghar (The Post Office), describes
the child Amal defying his stuffy and puerile confines by ultimately
"fall[ing] asleep", hinting his physical death. A story with
borderless appeal—gleaning rave reviews in Europe—Dak Ghar dealt with
death as, in Tagore's words, "spiritual freedom" from "the world
of hoarded wealth and certified creeds". In the Nazi-besieged Warsaw Ghetto, Polish doctor-educator Janusz Korczak had orphans in his care stage The Post Office in
July 1942. In The King of Children, biographer Betty Jean Lifton
suspected that Korczak, agonising over whether one should determine when and
how to die, was easing the children into accepting death. In mid-October, the Nazis sent them to Treblinka.
[I]n
days long gone by [...] I can see [...] the King's postman coming down the
hillside alone, a lantern in his left hand and on his back a bag of letters
climbing down for ever so long, for days and nights, and where at the foot of
the mountain the waterfall becomes a stream he takes to the footpath on the
bank and walks on through the rye; then comes the sugarcane field and he
disappears into the narrow lane cutting through the tall stems of sugarcanes;
then he reaches the open meadow where the cricket chirps and where there is not
a single man to be seen, only the snipe wagging their tails and poking at the
mud with their bills. I can feel him coming nearer and nearer and my heart
becomes glad.
“
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His other works fuse lyrical flow
and emotional rhythm into a tight focus on a core idea, a break from prior
Bengali drama. Tagore sought "the play of feeling and not of action".
In 1890 he released what is regarded as his finest drama: Visarjan (Sacrifice). It is an adaptation of Rajarshi, an earlier novella
of his. "A forthright denunciation of a meaningless [and] cruel
superstitious rite[s]", the Bengali originals feature intricate subplots and
prolonged monologues that give play to historical events in seventeenth-century
Udaipur. The devout Maharaja of Tripura is pitted against the wicked head
priest Raghupati. His latter dramas were more philosophical and allegorical in
nature; these included Dak Ghar. Another is Tagore's Chandalika (Untouchable
Girl), which was modelled on an ancient Buddhist legend describing how Ananda, the Gautama Buddha's disciple, asks a tribal
girl for water.
In Raktakarabi
("Red" or "Blood Oleanders"), a kleptocrat rules over the
residents of Yaksha puri.
He and his retainers exploit his subjects—who are benumbed by alcohol and
numbered like inventory—by forcing them to mine gold for him. The naive
maiden-heroine Nandini rallies her subject-compatriots to defeat the greed of
the realm's sardar class—with the morally roused king's belated help. Skirting
the "good-vs-evil" trope, the work pits a vital and joyous lèse
majesté against the monotonous fealty of the king's varletry, giving rise to an
allegorical struggle akin to that found in Animal Farm or Gulliver's Travels. The original, though prized in Bengal, long failed to spawn
a "free and comprehensible" translation, and its archaic and sonorous
didacticism failed to attract interest from abroad. Chitrangada, Chandalika, and Shyama
are other key plays that have dance-drama adaptations, which together are known
as Rabindra
Nritya Natya.
Novels
Tagore wrote eight novels and four
novellas, among them Chaturanga, Shesher Kobita, Char Odhay, and Noukadubi. Ghare Baire
(The
Home and the World)—through
the lens of the idealistic zamindar protagonist Nikhil—excoriates rising Indian nationalism,
terrorism, and religious zeal in the Swadeshi movement; a frank
expression of Tagore's conflicted sentiments, it emerged from a 1914 bout of
depression. The novel ends in Hindu-Muslim violence and Nikhil's—likely
mortal—wounding.
Gora raises controversial questions regarding the Indian
identity. As with Ghare Baire, matters of self-identity (jāti), personal freedom, and religion
are developed in the context of a family story and love triangle. In it an Irish boy orphaned in the Sepoy Mutiny is raised by Hindus as the titular gora—"whitey".
Ignorant of his foreign origins, he chastises Hindu religious backsliders out
of love for the indigenous Indians and solidarity with them against his
hegemon-compatriots. He falls for a Brahmo girl, compelling his worried foster
father to reveal his lost past and cease his nativist zeal. As a "true
dialectic" advancing "arguments for and against strict
traditionalism", it tackles the colonial conundrum by "portray[ing]
the value of all positions within a particular frame [...] not only syncretism,
not only liberal orthodoxy, but the extremest reactionary traditionalism he
defends by an appeal to what humans share." Among these Tagore highlights
"identity [...] conceived of as dharma."
In Jogajog (Relationships), the heroine Kumudini—bound by the
ideals of Śiva-Sati, exemplified by Dākshāyani—is torn between her pity for the sinking fortunes of her
progressive and compassionate elder brother and his foil: her roue of a
husband. Tagore flaunts his feminist leanings; pathos depicts the plight
and ultimate demise of women trapped by pregnancy, duty, and family honour; he
simultaneously trucks with Bengal's putrescent landed gentry. The story revolves around the underlying rivalry between two
families—the Chatterjees, aristocrats now on the decline (Biprodas) and the
Ghosals (Madhusudan), representing new money and new arrogance. Kumudini,
Biprodas' sister, is caught between the two as she is married off to
Madhusudan. She had risen in an observant and sheltered traditional home, as
had all her female relations.
Others were uplifting: Shesher
Kobita—translated twice as Last Poem and Farewell Song—is his
most lyrical novel, with poems and rhythmic passages written by a poet
protagonist. It contains elements of satire and postmodernism and has stock
characters who gleefully attack the reputation of an old, outmoded,
oppressively renowned poet who, incidentally, goes by a familiar name:
"Rabindranath Tagore". Though his novels remain among the least-appreciated
of his works, they have been given renewed attention via film adaptations by
Ray and others: Chokher Bali and Ghare Baire are exemplary. In the first, Tagore inscribes Bengali
society via its heroine: a rebellious widow who would live for herself alone.
He pillories the custom of perpetual mourning on the part of widows, who were
not allowed to remarry, who were consigned to seclusion and loneliness. Tagore
wrote of it: "I have always regretted the ending".
Stories
Tagore's three-volume Galpaguchchha
comprises eighty-four stories that reflect upon the author's surroundings, on
modern and fashionable ideas, and on mind puzzles. Tagore associated his earliest stories, such as those of
the "Sadhana" period, with an exuberance of vitality and
spontaneity; these traits were cultivated by zamindar Tagore's life in
Patisar, Shajadpur, Shelaidaha, and other villages. Seeing the common and the poor, he examined their lives
with a depth and feeling singular in Indian literature up to that point. In "The Fruitseller from Kabul", Tagore speaks in
first person as a town dweller and novelist imputing exotic perquisites to an
Afghan seller. He channels the lucubrative lust of those mired in the blasé,
nidorous, and sudorific morass of subcontinental city life: for distant vistas.
"There were autumn mornings, the time of year when kings of old went forth
to conquest; and I, never stirring from my little corner in Calcutta, would let
my mind wander over the whole world. At the very name of another country, my
heart would go out to it [...] I would fall to weaving a network of dreams: the
mountains, the glens, the forest [...]."
The Golpoguchchho (Bunch
of Stories) was written in Tagore's Sabuj Patra period, which lasted
from 1914 to 1917 and was named for another of his magazines. These yarns are celebrated fare in Bengali fiction and are
commonly used as plot fodder by Bengali film and theatre. The Ray film Charulata echoed the controversial Tagore novella Nastanirh (The Broken Nest). In Atithi, which was made
into another film, the little Brahmin boy Tarapada shares a boat ride with a
village zamindar. The boy relates his flight from home and his
subsequent wanderings. Taking pity, the elder adopts him; he fixes the boy to
marry his own daughter. The night before his wedding, Tarapada runs off—again. Strir
Patra (The Wife's Letter) is an early treatise in female
emancipation. Mrinal is wife to a Bengali middle class man: prissy,
preening, and patriarchal. Travelling alone she writes a letter, which
comprehends the story. She details the pettiness of a life spent entreating his
viraginous virility; she ultimately gives up married life, proclaiming, Amio
bachbo. Ei bachlum: "And I shall live. Here, I live."
Haimanti assails Hindu arranged marriage and spotlights their often
dismal domesticity, the hypocrisies plaguing the Indian middle classes, and how
Haimanti, a young woman, due to her insufferable sensitivity and free spirit,
foredid herself. In the last passage Tagore blasts the reification of Sita's
self-immolation attempt; she had meant to appease her consort Rama's doubts
of her chastity. Musalmani Didi eyes recrudescent Hindu-Muslim tensions
and, in many ways, embodies the essence of Tagore's humanism. The somewhat
auto-referential Darpaharan describes a fey young man who harbours
literary ambitions. Though he loves his wife, he wishes to stifle her literary
career, deeming it unfeminine. In youth Tagore likely agreed with him. Darpaharan
depicts the final humbling of the man as he ultimately acknowledges his wife's
talents. As do many other Tagore stories, Jibito o Mrito equips Bengalis
with a ubiquitous epigram: Kadombini moriya proman korilo she more nai—"Kadombini
died, thereby proving that she hadn't."
Poetry
Tagore's poetic style, which proceeds
from a lineage established by 15th- and 16th-century Vaishnava poets, ranges
from classical formalism to the comic, visionary, and ecstatic. He was
influenced by the atavistic mysticism of Vyasa and other
rishi-authors of the Upanishads, the Bhakti-Sufi mystic Kabir, and Ramprasad Sen. Tagore's most innovative and mature poetry embodies his
exposure to Bengali rural folk music, which included mystic Baul ballads
such as those of the bard Lalon. These, rediscovered and repopularised by Tagore, resemble
19th-century Kartābhajā hymns that emphasise inward divinity and rebellion
against bourgeois bhadralok religious and social orthodoxy. During his Shelaidaha years, his poems took on a lyrical
voice of the moner manush, the Bāuls' "man within the heart"
and Tagore's "life force of his deep recesses", or meditating upon
the jeevan devata—the demiurge or the "living God within". This figure connected with divinity through appeal to
nature and the emotional interplay of human drama. Such tools saw use in his
Bhānusiṃha poems chronicling the Radha-Krishna
romance, which were repeatedly revised over the course of seventy years.
The
time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long.
I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light, and pursued my voyage through the wildernesses of worlds leaving my track on many a star and planet.
It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself, and that training is the most intricate which leads to the utter simplicity of a tune.
The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.
My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said 'Here art thou!'
The question and the cry 'Oh, where?' melt into tears of a thousand streams and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance 'I am!'
I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light, and pursued my voyage through the wildernesses of worlds leaving my track on many a star and planet.
It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself, and that training is the most intricate which leads to the utter simplicity of a tune.
The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.
My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said 'Here art thou!'
The question and the cry 'Oh, where?' melt into tears of a thousand streams and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance 'I am!'
“
”
Tagore reacted to the halfhearted
uptake of modernist and realist techniques in Bengali literature by writing
matching experimental works in the 1930s. These include Africa and Camalia, among the
better known of his latter poems. He occasionally wrote poems using Shadhu
Bhasha, a Sanskritised dialect of Bengali; he later adopted a more popular
dialect known as Cholti Bhasha. Other works include Manasi, Sonar
Tori (Golden Boat), Balaka (Wild Geese, a name
redolent of migrating souls), and Purobi. Sonar Tori's most famous poem,
dealing with the fleeting endurance of life and achievement, goes by the same
name; hauntingly it ends: Shunno nodir tire rohinu poŗi / Jaha chhilo loe
gêlo shonar tori—"all I had achieved was carried off on the golden
boat—only I was left behind." Gitanjali (গীতাঞ্জলি)
is Tagore's best-known collection internationally, earning him his Nobel.
Song VII of Gitanjali:
আমার এ
গান
ছেড়েছে তার
সকল অলংকার তোমার কাছে রাখে নি আর সাজের অহংকার। অলংকার যে মাঝে প'ড়ে মিলনেতে আড়াল করে, তোমার কথা ঢাকে যে তার মুখর ঝংকার। তোমার কাছে খাটে না মোর কবির গরব করা- মহাকবি, তোমার পায়ে দিতে চাই যে ধরা। জীবন লয়ে যতন করি যদি সরল বাঁশি গড়ি, আপন সুরে দিবে ভরি সকল ছিদ্র তার। |
Amar e gan chheŗechhe tar shôkol ôlongkar
Tomar kachhe rakhe ni ar shajer ôhongkar
Ôlongkar je majhe pôŗe milônete aŗal kôre,
Tomar kôtha đhake je tar mukhôro jhôngkar.
Tomar kachhe khaţe na mor kobir gôrbo kôra,
Môhakobi, tomar paee dite chai je dhôra.
Jibon loe jôton kori jodi shôrol bãshi goŗi,
Apon shure dibe bhori sôkol chhidro tar.
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Tagore's free-verse translation:
"Klanti" (ক্লান্তি;
"Weariness"):
ক্লান্তি আমার
ক্ষমা করো
প্রভু,
পথে যদি পিছিয়ে পড়ি কভু॥ এই-যে হিয়া থরোথরো কাঁপে আজি এমনতরো এই বেদনা ক্ষমা করো, ক্ষমা করো, ক্ষমা করো প্রভু॥ এই দীনতা ক্ষমা করো প্রভু, পিছন-পানে তাকাই যদি কভু। দিনের তাপে রৌদ্রজ্বালায় শুকায় মালা পূজার থালায়, সেই ম্লানতা ক্ষমা করো, ক্ষমা করো, ক্ষমা করো প্রভু॥ |
Klanti amar khôma kôro probhu,
Pôthe jodi pichhie poŗi kobhu.
Ei je hia thôro thôro kãpe aji êmontôro,
Ei bedona khôma kôro khôma kôro probhu.
Ei dinota khôma kôro probhu,
Pichhon-pane takai jodi kobhu.
Diner tape roudrojalae shukae mala pujar thalae,
Shei mlanota khôma kôro khôma kôro, probhu.
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Tagore's poetry has been set to
music by composers: Arthur Shepherd's triptych for soprano and string quartet, Alexander Zemlinsky's famous Lyric
Symphony, Josef Bohuslav
Foerster's cycle of love songs, Leoš Janáček's famous chorus "Potulný šílenec" ("The Wandering
Madman") for soprano, tenor,
baritone, and male chorus—JW 4/43—inspired by Tagore's 1922 lecture in
Czechoslovakia which Janáček attended, and Garry Schyman's "Praan", an adaptation of Tagore's poem
"Stream of Life" from Gitanjali. The latter was composed and
recorded with vocals by Palbasha Siddique to accompany Internet celebrity Matt Harding's 2008 viral video. In 1917 his words were translated adeptly and set to music
by Anglo-Dutch composer Richard Hageman to produce a highly regarded art song: "Do Not Go, My
Love". The second movement of Jonathan
Harvey's "One Evening" (1994)
sets an excerpt beginning "As I was watching the sunrise ..." from a
letter of Tagore's, this composer having previously chosen a text by the poet
for his piece "Song Offerings" (1985).
Politics
.
Tagore opposed imperialism and
supported Indian nationalists, and these views were first revealed in Manast, which
was mostly composed in his twenties. Evidence produced during the Hindu–German
Conspiracy Trial and latter accounts affirm his
awareness of the Ghadarites, and stated that he sought the support of Japanese Prime
Minister Terauchi Masatake and former Premier Ōkuma Shigenobu. Yet he lampooned the Swadeshi movement; he rebuked it in "The Cult of the Charka",
an acrid 1925 essay. He urged the masses to avoid victimology and instead seek
self-help and education, and he saw the presence of British administration as a
"political symptom of our social disease". He maintained that, even
for those at the extremes of poverty, "there can be no question of blind
revolution"; preferable to it was a "steady and purposeful
education".
So
I repeat we never can have a true view of man unless we have a love for him.
Civilisation must be judged and prized, not by the amount of power it has
developed, but by how much it has evolved and given expression to, by its laws
and institutions, the love of humanity.
“
”
Such views enraged many. He escaped
assassination—and only narrowly—by Indian expatriates during his stay in a San
Francisco hotel in late 1916; the plot failed when his would-be assassins fell
into argument. Yet Tagore wrote songs lionising the Indian independence
movement Two of Tagore's more politically charged compositions,
"Chitto Jetha
Bhayshunyo" ("Where the Mind is Without Fear") and
"Ekla Chalo Re" ("If They Answer
Not to Thy Call, Walk Alone"), gained mass appeal, with the latter
favoured by Gandhi. Though somewhat critical of Gandhian activism, Tagore was key in resolving a Gandhi–Ambedkar dispute involving separate
electorates for untouchables, thereby mooting at least one of Gandhi's fasts
"unto death".
Repudiation
of knighthood
Tagore renounced his knighthood, in
response to the Jallianwala
Bagh massacre in 1919. In the repudiation letter
to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford,
he wrote
“
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The time has come when badges of
honour make our shame glaring in the incongruous context of humiliation, and
I for my part, wish to stand, shorn, of all special distinctions, by the side
of those of my countrymen who, for their so called insignificance, are liable
to suffer degradation not fit for human beings.
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”
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Santiniketan
and Visva-Bharati
Tagore despised rote classroom
schooling: in "The Parrot's Training", a bird is caged and force-fed
textbook pages—to death. Tagore, visiting Santa Barbara in 1917, conceived a new
type of university: he sought to "make Santiniketan the connecting thread
between India and the world [and] a world center for the study of humanity
somewhere beyond the limits of nation and geography." The school, which he named Visva-Bharati,η[›] had its foundation stone laid on
24 December 1918 and was inaugurated precisely three years later. Tagore employed a brahmacharya system: gurus gave pupils personal
guidance—emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Teaching was often done under
trees. He staffed the school, he contributed his Nobel Prize monies, and his duties as steward-mentor at Santiniketan kept him
busy: mornings he taught classes; afternoons and evenings he wrote the
students' textbooks. He fundraised widely for the school in Europe and the
United States between 1919 and 1921.
Theft
of Nobel Prize
On 25 March 2004, Tagore’s Nobel
Prize was stolen from the safety vault of the Visva-Bharati University, along
with several other of his personal belongings. On 7 December 2004, the Swedish Academy decided to present
two replicas of Tagore’s Nobel Prize, one made of gold and the other made of
bronze, to the Visva Bharati University.
Impact
Every year, many events pay tribute
to Tagore: Kabipranam, his birth anniversary, is celebrated by groups
scattered across the globe; the annual Tagore Festival held in Urbana,
Illinois; Rabindra Path Parikrama walking pilgrimages from Calcutta to
Santiniketan; and recitals of his poetry, which are held on important
anniversaries. Bengali culture is fraught with this legacy: from language
and arts to history and politics. Amartya Sen scantly deemed Tagore a "towering figure", a
"deeply relevant and many-sided contemporary thinker". Tagore's Bengali originals—the 1939 Rabīndra Rachanāvalī—is
canonised as one of his nation's greatest cultural treasures, and he was roped
into a reasonably humble role: "the greatest poet India has
produced".
Who
are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.
“
”
Tagore was renowned throughout much
of Europe, North America, and East Asia. He co-founded Dartington Hall
School, a progressive coeducational
institution; in Japan, he influenced such figures as Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata. Tagore's works were widely translated into English, Dutch,
German, Spanish, and other European languages by Czech indologist Vincenc Lesný, French Nobel laureate André Gide, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, former Turkish Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit, and others. In the United States, Tagore's lecturing
circuits, particularly those of 1916–1917, were widely attended and wildly
acclaimed. Some controversiesθ[›] involving Tagore, possibly fictive, trashed his popularity
and sales in Japan and North America after the late 1920s, concluding with his
"near total eclipse" outside Bengal. Yet a latent reverence of Tagore was discovered by an
astonished Salman Rushdie during a trip to Nicaragua.
By way of translations, Tagore
influenced Chileans Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral; Mexican writer Octavio Paz; and Spaniards José Ortega y
Gasset, Zenobia Camprubí, and Juan Ramón Jiménez. In the period 1914–1922, the Jiménez-Camprubí pair
produced twenty-two Spanish translations of Tagore's English corpus; they
heavily revised The Crescent Moon and other key titles. In these years,
Jiménez developed "naked poetry". Ortega y Gasset wrote that "Tagore's wide appeal [owes
to how] he speaks of longings for perfection that we all have [...] Tagore
awakens a dormant sense of childish wonder, and he saturates the air with all
kinds of enchanting promises for the reader, who [...] pays little attention to
the deeper import of Oriental mysticism". Tagore's works circulated in
free editions around 1920—alongside those of Plato, Dante,
Cervantes, Goethe, and Tolstoy.
Tagore was deemed over-rated by
some. Graham Greene doubted that "anyone but Mr. Yeats can still take his
poems very seriously." Several prominent Western admirers—including Pound
and, to a lesser extent, even Yeats—criticised Tagore's work. Yeats,
unimpressed with his English translations, railed against that "Damn
Tagore [...] We got out three good books, Sturge Moore and I, and then, because
he thought it more important to know English than to be a great poet, he
brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation. Tagore does not
know English, no Indian knows English." William Radice, who "English[ed]" his poems, asked: "What
is their place in world literature?" He saw him as "kind of counter-cultur[al],"
bearing "a new kind of classicism" that would heal the
"collapsed romantic confusion and chaos of the 20th [c]entury." The translated Tagore was "almost nonsensical", and subpar English offerings reduced his trans-national
appeal:
“
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[...] anyone who knows Tagore's
poems in their original Bengali cannot feel satisfied with any of the
translations (made with or without Yeats's help). Even the translations of
his prose works suffer, to some extent, from distortion. E.M. Forster noted [of]
The Home and the World [that] "[t]he theme is so beautiful,"
but the charms have "vanished in translation," or perhaps "in
an experiment that has not quite come off."
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