Not Just a Poet

As Asia’s first Nobel laureate enters his 150th year, it is important to remember that Rabindranath Tagore was far more than only a poet.

When the University of Oxford conferred Rabindranath Tagore an honorary doctorate in 1940, the citation described him as a ‘myriad-minded man’. We chose this as the title of his biography which I co-authored with Andrew Robinson.

Since the publication of the biography, there has been a resurgence of interest in Rabindranath abroad, though he is still generally perceived either as an English writer of florid verse or as an eastern prophet of mysticism. For example, in a debate on Unesco in the House of Lords in 1993, a speaker remarked that the English language was “not only the language of Shakespeare and the Romantic poets, but also the language of James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore and of Hemingway, and many African writers today”. Also in a biography of TS Eliot, Peter Ackroyd remarked that Eliot was the sixth Briton to win the Nobel Prize for literature. His predecessors were Kipling, Tagore, Yeats, Shaw and Galsworthy.

In Tagore’s The Collected Poems and Plays, first published by Macmillan in 1936 and for many decades the standard edition of his works outside India, he appears to be a writer in English, like RK Narayan or Salman Rushdie. And yet, Tagore was a Bengali, whose Bengaliness was as integral to his writing as Russianness was to Tolstoy. Apart from some letters, lectures and essays in English, he wrote almost entirely in Bengali. The standard edition of his Bengali works run to over 30 substantial volumes.

In the introduction to our biography, we observed: ‘Seen from the West, Tagore appears to have come from nowhere in 1912 and collected a Nobel prize without the least effort: to have travelled the world and enjoyed worldwide homage for over two decades not granted to any other writer this century; then to have evanesced until he is barely a name. But seen from Bengal, he looks very different. Before 1912, Rabindranath Tagore was rejected by many, perhaps the majority of Bengalis, as being a product of western influence; for the rest of his life he experienced a unique blend of vilification and homage; and only after his death in 1941 was he canonised as Bengal’s greatest creative artist and raised to the Olympian pedestal he now occupies. No writer, living or dead, is today more actively worshipped in Bengal than Tagore.’

But one wonders: how did Rabindranath come to be published in the English language way back in 1913?

He first visited England as a young 17-year-old in 1879 and studied at University College, London. Though he was unable to continue his studies, because his father summoned him home to get married, he continued to read and enjoy English literary works.

He revisited London in June 1912 as an established poet and stayed in the Vale of Health in Hampstead Heath. The house now has a ommemorative blue plaque.

During his stay, he met WB Yeats through the artist Sir William Rothenstein, who was a family friend of the Tagore family. Yeats read some of Tagore’s poems translated into English by Rabindranath himself and was impressed. He organised a star-studded dinner in honour of the Indian poet at the Trocadero. Famous guests, among them Cecil Sharp, Vaughan Williams, HG Wells and Maud Gonne, were present. Yeats thought Tagore’s poems merited publication and offered to write a preface introducing him to the British literary world. Yeats ecstatically wrote in it: ‘I have carried the manuscript of these translations about me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me.’

His collection of poems, The Gitanjali, was published in March 1913 and was reprinted ten times before the Nobel Prize was awarded on November 1913. Almost instantly, Tagore became the great literary phenomenon of the day.

More publications followed. His poems were translated into other European languages too. André Gide translated Tagore’s poems into French, Juan Ramón Jiménez into Spanish, and Anna Akhmatova into Russian. Tagore became a poet of poets, a celebrity writer—travelling all over the world, including America and China, giving lectures and reading.

He was also given a Knighthood in 1915. Many Western intellectuals like Bertrand Russell, Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, HG Wells, Romain Rolland and Sigmund Freud, sought him out. But Tagore’s meetings with these great men failed to develop into proper friendships. The cultural incomprehension that existed at the time between the East and West is possibly the reason. None of them had the faintest understanding of Bengal’s history, culture and literary heritage. These men were basically ‘Eurocentric’ with the colonial attitude of racial superiority.

For instance, Shaw ridiculed him as ‘Stupendranath’, Russell was put off by the notion of mysticism that unfortunately dogged Tagore in the West, and Freud treated him with vanity. The story of their meeting, as reported by someone who accompanied Tagore, goes like this. As Tagore came to see him in Vienna in 1926, Freud, sitting on a swivel chair, spun 360º and said, “Tagore! Now you can say that you have seen Freud from all sides,” and promptly left the room! Romain Rolland was upset to learn that Mussolini had invited Tagore to visit Italy. Only Einstein had a serious discussion with him about the philosophy of music.

However, Rabindranath’s fame in the West declined for several complicated reasons. Firstly, the Second World War was looming to fracture the peace and quiet of a civilised Western world, drowning all tranquil voices. And then as India’s struggle for independence gained momentum under Rabindranath’s trusted friend Mahatma Gandhi, the heavy-handed British colonial system duly became suspicious of Rabindranath.

When the British opened fire at Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh, killing 379 unarmed people and wounding 1,500 more in April 1919, Rabindranath was outraged. He wanted to organise a protest meeting against this brutal act. At the time, no one, not even Mahatma Gandhi, offered him any support for fear of punitive measures. Characteristically, Rabindranath decided to act alone. As a private individual, he wrote his famous open letter to Lord Chelmsford repudiating his Knighthood. It was the first public protest against the British atrocity by a prominent Indian. The letter was immediately published in the Manchester Guardian. He wrote:

‘The accounts of the insults and sufferings undergone by our brothers in the Punjab have trickled through the gagged silence, reaching every corner of India, and the universal agony of indignation roused in the hearts of our people has been ignored by our rulers—possibly congratulating themselves for imparting what they imagine as salutary lessons… The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in the incongruous context of humiliation.’

This act of moral courage did not endear him to the British government. A Special Branch dossier was activated on him; he became a target closely watched by the intelligence service. But the irony is that when he died in 1941, almost every British obituary referred to him as ‘Sir’.

Away from all these political upheavals, he retreated to his writing, music-composing, painting and above all to the school he had founded in Bengal in Santiniketan—the Abode of Peace. This was no conventional school. There he promoted learning through practical work and exposure to nature, music, art and literature. Children sat beneath a shady tree and learnt from looking at a real plant or a piece of sculpture or listening to birdsong or flute music. They were stimulated to ask questions and give personal responses. They were encouraged to be inquisitive and develop their creativity.

Later, Rabindranath enlarged the school and turned it into a centre of Indian culture. Even when the enmity between Britain and India was at its peak, Rabindranath welcomed Western visitors to encourage intellectual intercourse between nations. Interested scholars and Indologists turned up from all over the globe. He travelled to the West once more to broadcast his ideas of cross-cultural intellectual friendship. This is what an editorial in the London Nation, ‘A League of Spirit’, said in April 1921:

‘While the whole world is at war, it is some comfort to hear even one voice, however still and small, persistently murmuring of peace… In such a spirit it is that Tagore has been moving… from country to country, and from hemisphere to hemisphere, insinuating his conception of an international university.’

Santiniketan still exists, though some of its ideals are no longer maintained. In its heyday, Indira Gandhi, Satyajit Ray and Amartya Sen had studied there. However, Rabindranath’s educational ideas left a lasting influence on another institution, which is yet another inspirational story of his gifts.

Leonard Elmhurst, the founder of Dartington College of Arts, went to Santiniketan in 1921. During his stay, he had many discussions with Tagore on education. Much later, Elmhurst published a book on the subject and incorporated them in his own school at Devonshire’s Dartington Hall, where music and the arts are flourishing. Among professional educators, Tagore is now regarded as one of the 50 most important thinkers.

I have spoken and written on Rabindranath in many institutions and journals in Europe and the US. I see him as a true polymath and an important original thinker. He wrote once: ‘I do not put my faith in any new institutions, but in the individuals all over the world who think clearly, feel nobly and act rightly. They are the channels of moral truth.’

I regard him as one of those channels. His vision of society in which the enterprise of the individual and the ethical values of the community interact to produce a sustainable future for humankind has gained ground among eminent thinkers such as EP Thompson, Sir Isaiah Berlin and Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine. Rabindranath was a genuine visionary who first foresaw an interdependent global world. He warned us about the destruction of nature when the concept of global warming was undreamt of.

Our best tribute to him would be to study his serious writings—particularly his essays and letters to point us to a truly sustainable future.

Nobel PrizeRabindranath Tagore