DEATH OF RABINDRANATH
TAGORE
The poet Rabindranath
Tagore died on August 7th, 1941. Hugh Tinker charts the life of the man who
'was, perhaps, India's greatest son in modern times'.We have discovered by now
that the stereotype of 'the Unchanging East' obscures more than it explains.
Yet, equally unhelpful in the Asian context is the Victorian concept of
Progress or in our own day Development (they are much the same) envisaging an onward
evolution towards an 'advanced' material culture. This error was perceived long
ago by an Indian thinker when he wrote:You have to judge progress according to its
aim. A railway train makes its progress towards the terminus station – it is a
movement. But a full grown tree has no definite movement of that kind. Its
progress is the inward progress of life. It lives, with its aspiration towards
light tingling in its leaves and creeping in its silent sap.The writer was, perhaps,
India's greatest son in modern times: Rabindranath Tagore. Yet he never saw
himself as belonging exclusively to India. He identified most with his native
Bengal, and ultimately with all mankind. His family background seems at first
to demonstrate just that adaptability to change which we associate with
modernisation. The poet, like his father, moved beyond such an induced response
to the environment, searching for universal answers to the problems of an India
stirring and restless under the grip of British Imperialism.
The poet's ancestors from
the most ancient times belonged to Bengal, the land of rivers and rice fields.
They were Brahmans, and, like clerics in medieval Europe, they possessed a
near-monopoly of the learning and literary skills which were necessary to
unlettered princes. When the Muslim invaders occupied Bengal in the twelfth
century these learned Brahmans were taken into their employ. According to
tradition some, in attending the Muslim Governor, inadvertently inhaled the
odour of the Muslims' food, including the aroma of meat. Thereby they forfeited
their exclusive position at the apex of the Hindu caste hierarchy. Perhaps this
made them less rigid, less restricted in their ways, for certainly when the
English first settled in Bengal the descendents of these displaced Brahmans
moved to the foreign trading station on the Hughli which was to become
Calcutta.Most of the local inhabitants were of low caste and they showed their
veneration for the Brahman newcomers by addressing them as Thakur, deity (from
the Sanskrit thakkura). The newcomers adapted their skills to commerce and
became agents and later partners with the English merchants who – unable to
pronounce any Indian word without mangling it – called them Tagore. For a
hundred years the Tagores contributed to the growth of the commercial
metropolis. The English had their mansions in south Calcutta, Chowringhee,
while the Indians were segregated in the 'Black Town' to the north. Here the
Tagores built their family mansion, Jorasanko, where the clan multiplied. As in
the homes of almost all wealthy Bengalis there was a spacious central
courtyard, surrounded by galleries, with at one end an elevated platform. The
whole closely resembled an Elizabethan theatre, and its purpose was in a sense
theatrical, for the various seasonal festivals were celebrated here in music,
dance and recitation upon the stage.
The family fortunes reached
a peak with Dwarkanath Tagore (1794-1846). Handsome, gifted, enterprising he
came to the fore when British administration was reaching out across the land
from the creeks of Burma to the hills of Afghanistan, at the same time as the
British-led industrial revolution was making its first impact upon India. In
this age of opportunity, Dwarkanath invested in a whole series of manufactures:
sugar, tea, indigo, and the first coal mine in India. He owned a fleet of cargo
boats and founded the first modern bank incorporating Indian capital. Like most
leading entrepreneurs he took risks and he made sensational losses as well as
profits, but he treated misfortune with disdain. His style of living was
lavish. He entertained Europeans with a sophistication few of them could
emulate. Among his guests was Emily Eden, the literary sister of the
Governor-General. He subscribed generously to good causes, he supported the
arts. His contemporaries called him 'Prince' Dwarkanath. His greatest friend
was Ram Mohan Ray, the originator of the Bengali renaissance. Ram Mohan was a
religious reformer, the pioneer of the search for synthesis between spiritual
enlightenment and social reconstruction which had its culmination m Gandhi in
the twentieth century. Ram Mohan sought to breathe new life into the corpse of
Hinduism as it was then: a meaningless cult of caste rituals, the mechanical
recitation of sacred books. Supreme Truth, he believed, was variously realised
in the Islamic doctrine of One Invisible and Omnipotent God, in the Christian
faith in a loving, understanding Saviour, and in Hindu philosophy, the Upanisads .
The Protestant missionaries hoped that Ram Mohan and his followers would
embrace Christianity, and indeed they did adopt forms of congregational worship
and a creed akin to Unitarianism. In the field of social action Ram Mohan
condemned the perversion of Hinduism in such practices as sati (the widow's
immolation on her husband's funeral pyre) and the multiple marriages prevalent
among the highest-ranking Brahmans. But he also sought to revive other features
of his traditional culture, notably to encourage the Bengali language as a
vehicle for literature, religion and social action. Bengali had been neglected
during the centuries of Muslim rule in favour of Persian and Arabic and was now
threatened by the enthusiasm of Bengali youth for English, which they saw as
the way into the modern world, Ram Mohan promoted the application of Bengali to
journalism, polemical writing and popular literature.
In all this Prince
Dwarkanath was active, assisting his friend with his money and influence.
Together they set up the Calcutta Unitarian Committee and the Hindu College
(later Presidency College) a non-sectarian institution offering a university
education on the Western model. Ram Mohan Ray wanted to persuade the East India
Company, India's governing body, to liberalise its regime. A new Charter of
Government was due to be granted by Parliament and he decided to go to England
to make representations to the Parliamentary Committee of the House of Commons.
At this time it was utterly forbidden to any high-caste Hindu to cross the
'Black Waters'; loss of caste was inevitable. Ram Mohan had made the forbidden
journey and met important people in England, but he died and was buried at
Bristol in 1833.Dwarkanath determined to make the forbidden voyage also. He
selected three young Bengalis, members of his congregation, to accompany him
with the object of placing them in British medical schools (the first Indians
to receive European medical training). He was received by Queen Victoria and
the leading men of Britain. He returned triumphant, and then decided to make a
second visit to Europe, along with his nephew and youngest son. They stayed
almost two years, then quite suddenly Dwarkanath became ill and died in London
in August 1846 at the early age of fifty-one.His heir was his eldest son
Devendranath (1818-1905), who had inherited none of his father's commercial
acumen; indeed he turned his back on the world of business. However, Dwarkanath
had acquired vast landed estate in east and west Bengal and his heir was able
to follow the life he wanted, which was a combination of country gentleman and
mystic. In 1843 Devendranath re-established Ram Mohan Ray's 'church' as the Brahmo
Samaj – Society of Worshippers of the One God. The Brahmos were
virtually all upper-middle class Bengalis. Though they abjured caste and
rejected idol worship they still preserved the sacred thread of the Hindus and
followed other Hindu practices. In many ways Devendranath was a moderniser. He
established a high school to counter the prestigious missionary schools, with
Bengali as the teaching medium. He founded a newspaper, Tatvabodhi
Patrika which vigorously replied to missionary propaganda and fostered
the Bengali consciousness. From among the ranks of the Brahmos (never more than
a few thousand in number) were to come the great majority of the Victorian
Indian élite – civil servants, judges, professors, newspaper editors, doctors,
scientists – the men who laid the foundations of a new India. Yet the
Devendranath Tagore who had organisational flair, travelled widely by railway
and steamship, made speeches, wrote articles, was also a man who desired to
renounce these worldly pursuits and seek God in the silence. Among his estates
he owned some barren land in the extreme west of Bengal, at Bholpur in Birbhum
district. Here, two miles down a dusty track he built himself a country house,
planted a grove of mango trees, and contemplated the bare, broken landscape
called the kwai , He named the place Santiniketan –
Abode of Peace. He built a little mandir or prayer hall whose
architectural inspiration might have been the Crystal Palace for it was of
finely cast iron with walls of faintly coloured glass. All were invited to
worship who accepted no idols; hence Christians or Muslims might attend.
Devendranath's saintliness
was recognised by the title he received, Maharishi or Great
Sage. He thought of renouncing the world utterly, becoming a sadhu or
hermit in a cave in the Himalayas, but he remained a householder,
paterfamilias, with his fifteen children. Last but one was Rabindranath, born
in May 1861. His name reflected the glory of the sun. Rabi's childhood was
spent among the rambling corridors and courts of Jorasanko and his disjointed
education was in his native Bengali. However, Devendranath's second son,
Satyendranath, had succeeded in winning a place by examination in the
government corps d'elite , the Indian Civil Service. He was
the first Indian to be admitted to this all-British service (in 1864) which
attracted the cream of graduates from Oxford and Cambridge. In 1878
Satyendranath decided to take his family to England. Rabindra went with them.
The purpose was to provide him with an English education and after having
private tuition he entered University College London. If the intention was to
equip him to compete for the Indian Civil Service or the Bar this did not
succeed. Rabi already possessed the striking looks which were his into old age:
a tall upright figure with flowing locks and piercing eyes, he was immensely
attractive to women and perhaps his attractiveness put too many demands on his
energies, for he returned home after eighteen months having acquired no
academic award. He had acquired a lasting love of English literature – Shakespeare,
Walter Scott, Dickens – and a deep familiarity with the New Testament (as his
well-worn copy of the Bible still testifies). From England he brought back the
manuscript of a long lyrical drama, Bhagna Hriday, the Broken Heart. Rabindra
had been writing poems and plays since his childhood. Now, they began to
achieve recognition. All the Tagore family were artistic, and it was the most
natural thing for them to perform Rabi's works on the stage at Jorsanko.
Increasingly, the Calcutta intelligentsia came to applaud. It was an era when
Bengali literature was recognised as outstanding among the Indian regional
languages and was even competing in Calcutta with English as the preferred
literary medium. The leading writers included Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824-73)
a convert to Christianity and a pioneer in Bengali blank verse drama and Bankim
Chandra Chatterji (1838-94) whose main vehicle was the novel. His best-known
book was Ananda Math (The Abode of Bliss) set in the period
when Muslim rule in Bengal was overthrown by the British (then viewed as
liberators by Bengali Hindus). It included a patriotic song, Vande
Mataram , Hail to the Motherland, which was to become an unofficial
national anthem. In the last decade of his life Bankim Chandra hailed Rabindra
as the future voice of Bengal.He did not succumb to the life of a Calcutta
celebrity. His father, increasingly remote, entrusted to him the management of
the family estates in East Bengal (now Bangladesh). This experience of rural
life was a formative influence. He gained a deeper feeling for Bengali folk
culture, listening to the Bauls, the traditional minstrel-bards. He absorbed
the Bengali landscape, spending 1ong days drifting by boat down the River Padma
which symbolised for him the still beauty and solemnity of Golden Bengal.
As was customary,
Rabindra's bride was chosen for him by his father and his choice fell on the
eleven-year-old daughter of one of the employees on the East Bengal estate, an
uneducated girl of no great beauty. The wedding took place in 1883. Out of this
unpromising beginning a love was to be born, but before this came about Rabi
suffered a grievous emotional loss. During their time in England he had become
ardently attached to Satyendranath's wife, whose age was near his own. Five
months after his marriage she committed suicide. This was the first of the
personal tragedies which marked his long life. He reacted by abandoning
convention, discarding the elegant robes in which he appeared so beautiful –
almost Christ-like – for unkempt dé . He was in despair, until
his work drew him back, and he resumed the astonishing output of poems, plays
and novels which he maintained almost to the end.Bela, his eldest daughter, was
born in 1886; he was a loving father to his four children but his life was
never bounded by his family. He visited England again in 1890, but returned
abruptly. The account of the visit which he published, in Bengali, was critical
of the urban, industrial society of the West:Huge buildings, huge factories, all kinds
of entertainment places, people coming and going, to and fro, as in a great
fair. No matter how dazzling and wonderful this may be it tires the onlooker.
Increasingly, his writings
returned to India's past for inspiration, though the subjects he explored were
as relevant to the present as to the past and his work is full of social
comment and often humour. The influence of his aged father seems to have
impelled him to accept much of traditional custom in these middle years, for he
arranged the marriages of his daughters at the ages of eleven and fourteen
though earlier he had written against child marriage. Increasingly, he
contrasted the pristine vigour of the countryside with the decadence of the
city and in 1901 he started a school at Santiniketan, at first with only five
pupils including his son, Rathindranath. There were to be no examinations and
no preparation for entry into the Indian universities, modelled as they were on
London University. Emphasis was given to music, dance, drama and painting. The
intention was to bring out the potential of the human personality, not to
produce candidates for government jobs.This pastoral life was interrupted when
the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, decreed that the province of Bengal would be divided.
The province had increased in territory and population until it included eighty
million people (more than the population of the United States). Partition
solved administrative problems but it infuriated the politicised Bengalis. It
was now that Vande Mataram became a hymn of resistance.
Rabindra was also inspired to write patriotic songs invoking the motherland,
and to sing them to emotional audiences. 'The British now began to regard him
as a subversive nationalist, though in fact his national- ism was purely
cultural. He played no part in the Indian National Congress with its demands
for an increased share in the legislatures and the higher civil service. To
Rabindra all that was as alien and meaningless as the British administration,
His idea of politics was effort directed to the reconstruction of Bengali village
life. Characteristically, when he later visited Cornell University in New York
State as a celebrity, and had to sign the distinguished visitor's book, in the
space for the visitor's nationality he inscribed not 'Indian' but 'Bengali'.
Having aroused the
suspicion of the British rulers of India., Rabindra was about to arouse the
admiration of the public in Britain. A young painter, Will Rothenstein, was
touring India. He met the poet and made a great impression on him. Will
encouraged Rabi to translate some of his poems into English. The friendship
also stimulated him to make another visit to England. The English translations,
called Gitanjali , Song Offerings, were published – first in a
limited edition by the India Society of London and subsequently by Macmillan.
Their acceptance owed much to the enthusiasm of W.B. Yeats, but there seems
little substance in the claim Yeats made after Gitanjali became
a best- seller that he contributed substantially to the English text. This is
presented like prose, ignoring the convention of printing blank verse in
separate lines, and is quite unlike Yeats's own poetry. He certainly helped to
introduce the poems to the English public. For example, he gave a reading at
Will Rothenstein's Hampstead home where several literary celebrities were
present – Ezra Pound, Alice Meynell, Ernest Rhys. The poet ignored them all to
greet an unknown missionary from Delhi, Charlie Andrews.Like many who suddenly
find themselves famous, Tagore was both gratified and dismayed by the publicity.
After being the sensation of the London season he was glad to take refuge with
the Rothensteins in their country retreat and with Andrews in a Staffordshire
vicarage. When he returned to India it was to be told that he had received the
Nobel Prize for Literature for 1913. The prize was instituted in 1901: Rudyard
Kipling had been the recipient in 1907, and Yeats, the second recipient from
the British Isles, had to wait until 1923 for the award.
Tagore (he was now Tagore
to the world, no longer the Bengali Rabindra) had caught the contemporary mood
in the West for the exotic, the colourful: almost at the same moment the
Russian Ballet captured Britain and America. Gitanjali went
through more than twenty editions before 1915. The British establishment in India
could not remain impervious. It was left to the missionary Charlie Andrews to
introduce Tagore to the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, and Hardinge recommended him
for a knight-hood. The accolade was bestowed in 1915.In wartime, Tagore was
restless. He set out on another voyage, this time to Japan where he was
welcomed as a symbol of the Asia accorded honour by the West. The Japanese did
not understand his message of Asian brotherhood and internationalism. Tagore
denounced nationalism, and this seemed to the Japanese a retreat into
submissiveness. He was equally unsympathetic to the rising spirit of
nationalism in his own country. As he wrote to Andrews: 'We, the famished,
ragged ragamuffins of the East are to win freedom for all humanity! We have no
word for "Nation" in our language.' His ideas were crystallised in a
book, Nationalism , published in 1917. He warned his
countrymen: 'The advent of another people into the arena of nationality makes
another evil which contradicts all that is highest in Man.' Tagore was writing
this at the very moment when Woodrow Wilson was preaching the virtues of
national self-determination to the world.
Tagore's most splendid
gesture was made in 1919. Gandhi launched a campaign against repressive
legislation imposed by the Government of India. The agitation got out of hand
and Gandhi called a halt, admitting to a 'Himalayan Blunder'. Only gradually
did it become known that in suppressing the violence the Government (or its
agent, General Dyer) were guilty of a murderous act of retaliation at Amritsar.Gandhi
was humbled. Other politicians were afraid to speak. Only Tagore was ready to
step forward. He addressed the Viceroy thus:The enormity of the measures taken by the
Government in the Punjab fop quelling some local disturbances has, with a rude
shock, revealed to our minds the helplessness of our position as British
subjects in India.
Tagore was ashamed of
'badges of honour... in the incongruous context of humiliation'. He asked the
Viceroy to relieve him of the knighthood he had accepted from Hardinge. It was
not in his nature to harbour bitterness and two years later when Gandhi's
campaign against British rule included the burning of foreign cloth he
protested against this 'moral violence'. Gandhi saluted him contritely as 'the
Great Sentinel', 'warning us against the approach of enemies called bigotry,
lethargy, intolerance, ignorance, inertia, and other members of that brood'.
Tagore was again planning to promote international understanding and he
resolved to add to the educational work at Santiniketan a universityVisva
Bharati , which was to be both truly Indian and also truly
international, and which Tagore called 'the Nest of the World'. Here, as in the
school, the arts were cultivated. Scholars were invited from Europe, like
Sylvain Levy, the French Sinologist, and Guiseppe Tucci, the Italian
Buddhologist. Another innovation was the creation of an agricultural college at Sriniketan (Abode
of Plenty) nearby, for Tagore wanted university teaching to be integrated into
rural life. It didn't all work out as he wished. Middle-class Indians, however
idealistic, were irresistibly lured by city life and government service. Even
if they did not remain in the countryside, most absorbed something of the
Santiniketan ideal; among them, Satyajit Ray, the poetic film writer and
director, Professor P.C. Mahalanobis, statistical expert and scientific
planner, and Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister.
An inordinate amount of
time in later years was devoted to foreign travel, usually to raise money for
Visva Bharati. Tagore toured Western Europe, the United States, Canada and
Latin America, as well as China and the Soviet Union. He was not unaware that
there was something incongruous about delivering his 'other-worldly' message
while busily trying to raise funds. He was no longer quite such a cult-figure;
and though his books still sold in the West the 'Message of the East' was less
in demand. He still had a message, as in his Oxford lectures on The
Religion of Man (published in 1930). He was still prepared to make his
own personal gesture. When American immigration officials made difficulties
about his entry, he cancelled his American tour and returned home rather than
concede that Asians must accept second-class status in the West.
In old age, Tagore still
rose long before dawn to witness the birth of each new day, and he still wrote
fluently in his own hand. He liked to make extensive corrections; he also liked
his manuscripts to be elegant; hence he began turning his erasures into
decorations, forming intricate patterns and pictures of serpents and birds of
his own imagination. From this odd beginning came his last artistic adventure,
as a painter. His paintings and sketches cannot be com- pared to those of any
other artist or school. They possess some of the stark crudity of folk art with
the imagery and symbolism which he saw in his visions. Tagore was eighty years
old when he died in 1941. He had endured the deaths of wife, children, and his
only grandson. Still restless, he built new dwellings for himself at
Santiniketan, though his travels now were limited to a few hundred yards. He
died in the midst of a world war which seemed the negation of all he had loved
(he appealed to President Roosevelt to intervene when the Germans marched into
Paris, to avert its destruction). If he looked forward to India's independence
it was not because he wanted to see a new nation but because he believed that
only in freedom could Indians be true to their inheritance. Like all great men
his memory was to be manipulated after death by time-servers. His poems were
chosen to be the national anthems of two new nations – India and Bangladesh. He
would have made a pithy short story out of the irony of this well-meant
tribute.
Prof. John Kurakar
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