by Amartya Sen
It does not need a defeatist to feel deeply anxious about the future of millions who with all their innate culture and their peaceful traditions are being simultaneously subjected to hunger, disease, exploitations foreign and indigenous, and the seething discontents of communalism.
How would Tagore have viewed the India of today, we may well ask on the fiftieth anniversary of its independence in 1947? Would he see progress there, or wasted opportunity, perhaps even a betrayal of its promise and conviction? And, on a wider subject, how would he react to the spread of cultural separatism in the contemporary world?
East and West
Given the vast range of his creative achievements, perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the image of Tagore in the West is its narrowness; he is recurrently viewed as ‘the great mystic from the East’, an image with a putative message for the West, which some would welcome, others dislike, and still others find deeply boring. To a great extent this Tagore was the West’s own creation, part of its tradition of message-seeking from the East, particularly from India, which – as Hegel put it – had ‘existed for millennia in the imagination of the Europeans’.* Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, Herder and Schopenhauer were only a few of the thinkers who followed the same pattern. They theorized, at first, that India was the source of superior wisdom. Schopenhauer at one stage even argued that the New Testament ‘must somehow be of Indian origin: this is attested by its completely Indian ethics, which transforms morals into asceticism, its pessimism, and its avatar’, in ‘the person of Christ’. But then they rejected their own theories with great vehemence, sometimes blaming India for not living up to their unfounded expectations.
We can imagine that Rabindranath’s physical appearance – handsome, bearded, dressed in non-Western clothes – may, to some extent, have encouraged his being seen as a carrier of exotic wisdom. Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese Nobel laureate in literature, treasured memories from his middle-school days of ‘this sage-like poet’:
His white hair flowed softly down both sides of his forehead; the tufts of hair under the temples also were long like two beards, and linking up with the hair on his cheeks, continued into his beard, so that he gave an impression, to the boy I was then, of some ancient Oriental wizard.6
That appearance would have been well suited to the selling of Tagore in the West as a quintessentially mystical poet, and it could have made it somewhat easier to pigeonhole him. Commenting on Rabindranath’s appearance, Frances Cornford told William Rothenstein: ‘I can now imagine a powerful and gentle Christ, which I never could before.’ Beatrice Webb, who did not like Tagore and resented what she took to be his ‘quite obvious dislike of all that the Webbs stand for’ (there is, in fact, little evidence that Tagore had given much thought to this subject), said that he was ‘beautiful to look at’ and that ‘his speech has the perfect intonation and slow chant-like moderation of the dramatic saint’.
Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats, among others, first led the chorus of adoration in the Western appreciation of Tagore, and then soon moved to neglect and even shrill criticism. The contrast between Yeats’s praise of his work in 1912 (‘These lyrics … display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long’, ‘the work of a supreme culture’) and his denunciation in 1935 (‘Damn Tagore’) arose partly from the inability of Tagore’s many-sided writings to fit into the narrow box in which Yeats wanted to place – and keep – him. Certainly, Tagore did write a huge amount, and published ceaselessly, even in English (sometimes in indifferent English translation), but Yeats was also bothered, it is clear, by the difficulty of fitting Tagore’s later writings into the image Yeats had presented to the West. Tagore, he had said, was the product of ‘a whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us’, and yet ‘we have met our own image … or heard, perhaps for the first time in literature, our voice as in a dream’.7
Yeats did not totally reject his early admiration (as Ezra Pound and several others did), and he included some of Tagore’s early poems in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, which he edited in 1936. Yeats also had some favourable things to say about Tagore’s prose writings. His censure of Tagore’s later poems was reinforced by his dislike of Tagore’s own English translations of his work (‘Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English,’ Yeats explained), unlike the English version of Gitanjali which Yeats had himself helped to prepare. Poetry is, of course, notoriously difficult to translate, and 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, in a review of a translation of one of Tagore’s great Bengali novels, The Home and the World, in 1919: ‘The theme is so beautiful’, but the charms have ‘vanished in translation’, or perhaps ‘in an experiment that has not quite come off’.*
Tagore himself played a somewhat bemused part in the boom and bust of his English reputation. He accepted the extravagant praise with much surprise as well as pleasure, and then received denunciations with even greater surprise, and barely concealed pain. Tagore was sensitive to criticism, and was hurt by even the most far-fetched accusations, such as the charge that he was getting credit for the work of Yeats, who had ‘rewritten’ Gitanjali. (This charge was made by a correspondent for The Times, Sir Valentine Chirol, whom E. M. Forster once described as ‘an old Anglo-Indian reactionary hack’.) From time to time Tagore also protested at the crudity of some of his overexcited advocates. He wrote to C. F. Andrews in 1920: ‘These people … are like drunkards who are afraid of their lucid intervals.’
God and Others
Yeats was not wrong to see a large religious element in Tagore’s writings. He certainly had interesting and arresting things to say about life and death. Susan Owen, the mother of Wilfred Owen, wrote to Rabindranath in 1920, describing her last conversations with her son before he left for the war which would take his life. Wilfred said goodbye with ‘those wonderful words of yours – beginning at “When I go from hence, let this be my parting word”.’ When Wilfred’s pocket notebook was returned to his mother, she found ‘these words written in his dear writing – with your name beneath’.
The idea of a direct, joyful and totally fearless relationship with God can be found in many of Tagore’s religious writings, including the poems of Gitanjali. From India’s diverse religious traditions he drew many ideas, both from ancient texts and from popular poetry. But ‘the bright pebbly eyes of the Theosophists’ do not stare out of his verses. Despite the archaic language of the original translation of Gitanjali, which did not, I believe, help to preserve the simplicity of the original, its elementary humanity comes through more clearly than any complex and intense spirituality:
Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut?
Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!
He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones.
He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust.
An ambiguity about religious experience is central to many of Tagore’s devotional poems, and makes them appeal to readers irrespective of their beliefs; but excessively detailed interpretation can ruinously strip away that ambiguity.8 This applies particularly to his many poems which combine images of human love and those of pious devotion. Tagore writes:
I have no sleep to-night. Ever and again I open my door and look out on the darkness, my friend!
I can see nothing before me. I wonder where lies thy path!
By what dim shore of the ink-black river, by what far edge of the frowning forest, through what mazy depth of gloom, art thou threading thy course to come to see me, my friend?
I suppose it could be helpful to be told, as Yeats hastens to explain, that ‘the servant or the bride awaiting the master’s home-comi
ng in the empty house’ is ‘among the images of the heart turning to God’. But in Yeats’s considerate attempt to make sure that the reader does not miss the ‘main point’, something of the enigmatic beauty of the Bengali poem is lost – even what had survived the antiquated language of the English translation.
Tagore certainly had strongly held religious beliefs (of an unusually nondenominational kind), but he was interested in a great many other things as well and had many different things to say about them. Some of the ideas he tried to present were directly political, and they figure rather prominently in his letters and lectures. He had practical, plainly expressed views about nationalism, war and peace, cross-cultural education, freedom of the mind, the importance of rational criticism, the need for cultural openness, and so on. His admirers in the West, however, were tuned to the more other-worldly themes which had been emphasized by his first Western patrons. People came to his public lectures in Europe and America expecting ruminations on grand, transcendental themes; when they heard instead his views on the way public leaders should behave, there was some resentment, particularly (as E. P. Thompson reports) when he delivered political criticism ‘at $700 a scold’.
Reasoning in Freedom
For Tagore it was of the highest importance that people be able to live, and reason, in freedom. His attitudes towards politics and culture, nationalism and internationalism, tradition and modernity, can all be seen in the light of this belief.* Nothing, perhaps, expresses his values as clearly as a poem in Gitanjali:
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; …
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; …
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
Rabindranath’s qualified support for nationalist movements – and his opposition to the unfreedom of alien rule – came from this commitment. So did his reservations about patriotism, which, he argued, can limit both the freedom to engage ideas from outside ‘narrow domestic walls’ and the freedom also to support the causes of people in other countries. Rabindranath’s passion for freedom underlies his firm opposition to unreasoned traditionalism, which makes one a prisoner of the past (lost, as he put it, in ‘the dreary desert sand of dead habit’).
Tagore illustrates the tyranny of the past in his amusing yet deeply serious parable ‘Kartar Bhoot’ (‘The Ghost of the Leader’). As the respected leader of an imaginary land is about to die, his panic-stricken followers request him to stay on after his death to instruct them on what to do. He consents. But his followers find their lives are full of rituals and constraints on everyday behaviour and are not responsive to the world around them. Ultimately, they ask the ghost of the leader to relieve them of his domination, when he informs them that he exists only in their minds.
Tagore’s deep aversion to any commitment to the past that could not be modified by contemporary reason extended even to the alleged virtue of invariably keeping past promises. On one occasion when Mahatma Gandhi visited Tagore’s school at Santiniketan, a young woman got him to sign her autograph book. Gandhi wrote: ‘Never make a promise in haste. Having once made it fulfil it at the cost of your life.’ When he saw this entry, Tagore became agitated. He wrote in the same book a short poem in Bengali to the effect that no one can be made ‘a prisoner forever with a chain of clay’. He went on to conclude in English, possibly so that Gandhi could read it too, ‘Fling away your promise if it is found to be wrong.’9
Tagore had the greatest admiration for Mahatma Gandhi as a person and as a political leader, but he was also highly sceptical of Gandhiji’s form of nationalism and his conservative instincts regarding the country’s past traditions. He never criticized Gandhi personally. In the 1938 essay ‘Gandhi the Man’, he wrote:
Great as he is as a politician, as an organizer, as a leader of men, as a moral reformer, he is greater than all these as a man, because none of these aspects and activities limits his humanity. They are rather inspired and sustained by it.
And yet there is a deep division between the two men. Tagore was explicit about his disagreement:
We who often glorify our tendency to ignore reason, installing in its place blind faith, valuing it as spiritual, are ever paying for its cost with the obscuration of our mind and destiny. I blamed Mahatmaji for exploiting this irrational force of credulity in our people, which might have had a quick result [in creating] a superstructure, while sapping the foundation. Thus began my estimate of Mahatmaji, as the guide of our nation, and it is fortunate for me that it did not end there.
Mahatma Gandhi with Rabindranath Tagore during a visit to Tagore’s school at Santiniketan, 18 February 1940
But while it ‘did not end there’, that difference of vision was a powerful divider.
Tagore, for example, remained unconvinced of the merit of Gandhi’s forceful advocacy that everyone should spin at home with the ‘charka’, the primitive spinning wheel. For Gandhi, this practice was an important part of India’s self-realization. ‘The spinning-wheel gradually became’, as his biographer B. R. Nanda writes, ‘the centre of rural uplift in the Gandhian scheme of Indian economics.’10 Tagore found the alleged economic rationale for this scheme quite unrealistic. As Romain Rolland noted, Rabindranath ‘never tires of criticizing the charka’. In this economic judgement, Tagore was probably right. Except for the rather small specialized market for high-quality spun cloth, it is hard to make economic sense of hand-spinning, even with wheels less primitive than Gandhi’s charka. Hand-spinning as a widespread activity can survive only with the help of heavy government subsidies.11
However, Gandhi’s advocacy of the charka was not based only on economics. He wanted everyone to spin for ‘thirty minutes every day as a sacrifice’, seeing this as a way for people who are better off to identify themselves with the less fortunate. He was impatient with Tagore’s refusal to grasp this point:
The poet lives for the morrow, and would have us do likewise…. ‘Why should I, who have no need to work for food, spin?’ may be the question asked. Because I am eating what does not belong to me. I am living on the spoliation of my countrymen. Trace the source of every coin that finds its way into your pocket, and you will realise the truth of what I write. Every one must spin. Let Tagore spin like the others. Let him burn his foreign clothes; that is the duty today. God will take care of the morrow.12
If Tagore had missed something in Gandhi’s argument, so did Gandhi miss the point of Tagore’s main criticism. It was not only that the charka made little economic sense, but also, Tagore thought, that it was not the way to make people reflect on anything: ‘The charka does not require anyone to think; one simply turns the wheel of the antiquated invention endlessly, using the minimum of judgement and stamina.’
On Celibacy and Personal Life
Tagore and Gandhi’s attitudes towards personal life were also quite different. Gandhi was keen on the virtues of celibacy, theorized about it, and, after some years of conjugal life, made a private commitment – publicly announced – to refrain from sleeping with his wife. Rabindranath’s own attitude on this subject was very different, but he was gentle about their disagreements:
[Gandhiji] condemns sexual life as inconsistent with the moral progress of man, and has a horror of sex as great as that of the author of The Kreutzer Sonata, but, unlike Tolstoy, he betrays no abhorrence of the sex that tempts his kind. In fact, his tenderness for women is one of the noblest and most consistent traits of his character, and he counts among the women of his country some of his best and truest comrades in the great movement he is leading.
Tagore’s personal life was, in many ways, an unhappy one. He married in 1883, lost his wife in 1902, and never remarried. He sought close companionship, which he did not always get (perhaps even during his married life – he wrote to his wife, Mrinalini:
‘If you and I could be comrades in all our work and in all our thoughts it would be splendid, but we cannot attain all that we desire’). He maintained a warm friendship with, and a strong Platonic attachment to, the literature-loving wife, Kadambari, of his elder brother, Jyotirindranath. He dedicated some poems to her before his marriage, and several books afterwards, some after her death (she committed suicide, for reasons that are not fully understood, at the age of 25, four months after Rabindranath’s wedding).
Much later in life, during his tour of Argentina in 1924–5, Rabindranath came to know the talented and beautiful Victoria Ocampo, who later became the publisher of the literary magazine Sur. They became close friends, but it appears that Rabindranath deflected the possibility of a passionate relationship into a confined intellectual one.13 Leonard Elmhirst, who accompanied Rabindranath on his Argentine tour, wrote:
Besides having a keen intellectual understanding of his books, she was in love with him – but instead of being content to build a friendship on the basis of intellect, she was in a hurry to establish that kind of proprietary right over him which he absolutely would not brook.
Ocampo and Elmhirst, while remaining friendly, were both quite rude in what they wrote about each other. Ocampo’s book on Tagore (of which a Bengali translation was made from the Spanish by the distinguished poet and critic Shankha Ghosh) is primarily concerned with Tagore’s writings but also discusses the pleasures and difficulties of their relationship, giving quite a different account from Elmhirst’s, and never suggesting any sort of proprietary intentions.
