by Melvyn Bragg
In 1915, largely in recognition of his Nobel Prize, Tagore received a knighthood from George V. Four years later, he renounced it, after one of the defining events in twentieth-century Indian history. This was the notorious Amritsar Massacre of April 1919, which John Stevens described.
JOHN STEVENS: There was a large group of protestors, they were protesting against the arrests of a number of congress leaders and against some very unpopular legislation, which had, effectively, made these arrests possible. They had gathered in Amritsar and Brigadier-General Dyer was there with his troops in the area. He became very worried by this protest, he saw it as evidence of a coming full insurrection in the area, which it wasn’t – this was an unarmed protest …
MELVYN BRAGG: And men, women and children …
JOHN STEVENS: Dyer ordered his troops to open fire on the unarmed crowd. Which they did. Reports state that they carried on firing for as long as ten minutes. They were shooting people who were running away, it was really awful.
The number of casualties, he said, was contested – perhaps 400 dead and 2,000 injured – but there were different figures. The British tried to suppress news of this massacre getting out, but it did get out. Dyer was severely criticised in Britain and forced to retire. Tagore got to hear of the massacre in May 1919 and his immediate response was to write to the viceroy to renounce his knighthood. That letter, John Stevens said, in which he renounced his knighthood, is now a very celebrated document of Indian resistance. Tagore was saying that he did not want to receive any special honours when his countrymen were being treated as insignificant.
Tagore used his Nobel Prize money to fund education. He had founded a school at Shantiniketan in 1901 and then his university in 1921, and the Rural Reconstruction Institute in Sriniketan in 1922. As a Nobel Prize winner, he was invited to lecture across the world and the funds from these lectures went back into his educational establishments. He supported interdisciplinary studies, with science alongside culture and arts, a liberal education bringing east and west together.
BASHABI FRASER: He also felt that university shouldn’t be separate from the surrounding areas and he worked very hard at Sriniketan through his rural reconstruction centre to replenish the villages around, which were Hindu, Muslim and Santhal, and to dispel the sense of apathy and to help them in self-awareness and self-reliance.
Gandhi had already heard of Tagore while he was in South Africa and, on arriving in India, he sought him out. They became good friends, Chandrika Kaul said, admiring and respecting each other’s views, although, in time, coming to disagreements over ideology and political practice. Gandhi wanted political freedom; Tagore was more interested in social reform.
CHANDRIKA KAUL: For Tagore, social progress and social reconstruction took primacy over political independence. He felt that, if India didn’t get her own house in order, then the grant of political independence in itself wouldn’t solve the problems besetting the country. There was a difference in emphasis.
When Gandhi launched the non-cooperation movement in 1920–22, Tagore was travelling around Europe trying to raise funds for Shantiniketan and advocating cooperation with western universities and intellectuals. He felt Gandhi was talking about non-cooperation not just with the British, but with everything modern and western. Tagore was opposed to Gandhi’s emphasis on the burning of foreign cloth and on the boycott of schools, because he felt these actions were essentially nihilist.
CHANDRIKA KAUL: [Tagore thought] you cannot ask the poor to burn the only clothes they have without supplying them with cheaper alternatives. Similarly, you cannot and you shouldn’t ask students to leave universities and schools without giving them a viable alternative. Given his emphasis on education, he felt very strongly about this.
Gandhi and Tagore both expressed their opinions in public, in print, so there was no escaping the disagreements. Tagore took particular exception to what he saw as Gandhi’s aversion to science and progress. In the 1930s, there was an earthquake in Bihar, which Gandhi talked about as a divine visitation because of the sins of untouchability, and Tagore was furious.
In the sphere of Bengali literature, Tagore’s influence was boundless. He was constantly quoted, people had his poems at home, they learned his songs by heart and he was translated into other Indian languages.
JOHN STEVENS: Another thing about Tagore’s output is there was so much of it and in so many different genres. He wrote novels and poems and plays, short stories, songs, dance dramas, you can go on and on. It came to the point where, really, if you were writing anything in Bengali, you were immediately compared, usually unfavourably, to Tagore.
Tagore travelled widely, reportedly to thirty different countries across five continents. He was familiar with advances in technology and, as an example, Chandrika Kaul mentioned his attitude to the birth of broadcasting in India. Gandhi, we heard, shunned broadcasting, while Tagore embraced it to spread his political and social message and to read his own poetry, including one called Akashvani to celebrate the opening of the medium-wave transmitter in Calcutta. He firmly believed that shunning technology would isolate India and would not help it even when it gained independence.
His popularity as a poet dipped for a while, particularly with the groups of younger poets who felt they could not be heard in Bengal because of Tagore. There were several translations into English of his Bengali poems but these were not generally successful.
CHANDRIKA KAUL: He reinvents himself now as a painter, as an artist, and his paintings are widely exhibited in Paris, in Berlin, in London, in Moscow, and receive very flattering praise. He’s a polymath who doesn’t quite go away, though the attention shifts, to some extent, from him as a poet.
Tagore’s popularity also took a dent as he was lecturing against nationalism at a time when it was on the rise, internationally and in India. He died before Indian independence and became disillusioned that India was not yet free and that the world was being dragged into war again, as it had been at the start of the century. It was not until the centenary of his birth, and then again at the 150th anniversary of it, that his reputation resurged.
In the studio afterwards, there was agreement that Tagore’s critiques of sectarian nationalism were important, as was his universalist philosophy, the idea of unity in diversity that was later picked up by the Indian government. There was also mention of some of the incidents that tarnished his name in the west. While he was in America in 1917, there was a claim that he was a German agent.
BASHABI FRASER: The British foreign secretary told the American government that he was dangerous and he was actually colluding with the Germans. He had been very popular in Germany earlier. And, also, there was this fear when he went to Japan in 1916 that he went there to solicit Japanese assistance.
What was emphasised, though, by John Stevens was that Tagore absolutely believed that the way forwards for the world was for different cultures to interact with each other. He did not think that India should be transformed in the image of Britain, although he was very welcoming to British culture, and he never thought that India should isolate itself from other parts of the world. His very wide international travels were really about Tagore putting that philosophy into practice.
TRISTAN AND ISEULT
The story of Tristan and Iseult was one of the most popular of the Middle Ages. From its roots in Celtic myths, it passed into written form in Britain a century after the Norman conquest and almost immediately spread throughout northern Europe. It tells of a Cornish knight and an Irish queen, Tristan and Iseult, who accidentally drink a love potion at the same time, on the same boat, travelling to Cornwall, where she is to marry someone else. They have no choice: they consummate their love at sea and, from that point, must navigate the physical and moral dangers that follow. In one version, he slays a dragon and she saves him from certain death. They are a perfect match and their love is heroic, but could that excuse their adultery in the minds of medieval listeners, particularly when the Church was so clear t
hey were wrong?
With Melvyn to discuss Tristan and Iseult were: Laura Ashe, associate professor of English at Worcester College, Oxford; Juliette Wood, associate lecturer in the School of Welsh at Cardiff University; and Mark Chinca, reader in medieval German literature at the University of Cambridge.
Before the story of Tristan and Iseult was written down in the forms that survive, there were other stories being told in the British Isles with related themes. Juliette Wood told us of the Irish story of Deirdre of the Sorrows, who was forced to marry an older king yet fell in love with someone else and put her lover under geas, a form of compulsion common in Irish folklore, which led to his death and then hers. There was also the story of Diarmuid and Gráinne, in which Gráinne, who was married to Fionn MacCoul, approached Diarmuid, again with geas, and they escaped constantly, until they were both killed. These were part of the wide body of folklore from which stories developed.
There is no historical evidence for Tristan and Iseult; they appear to be completely the products of fiction. All the same, from the seventeenth century, their story has been linked to geographical locations in Cornwall, and that has inspired archaeologists looking for historical evidence of the castle of King Mark, the intended husband of Iseult.
JULIETTE WOOD: Tintagel, Castle Dore, places like that, have been excavated. The problem with the archaeological histories is that they have, in turn, created a lot of folklore, particularly in the 1930s when the first big excavations were done. People were actually looking for proof of Arthur and Tristan and Iseult and these stories, and, of course, when you look for proof, you find it.
One of the first to write down the story was Thomas of Britain, about whom little is known, although Laura Ashe could tell us that he refers to his name, Thomas, twice in the text of his story, and the German poet who translated his work a few decades later described him as Thomas of Britain, which almost completes the scant detail. He was probably from Normandy, though working in England for aristocratic courts, and he was writing in French between the 1160s and 1180s, but that is about all that is known. As for the text of Thomas’s Tristan and Iseult, that probably contained between 12,000 and 15,000 lines, of which only 3,500 survive in manuscript fragments and, up to a point, in translation into German by Gottfried, as well as, more faithfully, in a translation into Old Norse in its entirety.
LAURA ASHE: It’s worth bearing in mind that, as Juliette’s been implying, there’s no such thing really as a whole story of Tristan. I mean Thomas himself, when he’s writing, it’s one of the earliest extant texts we have, but he still says this story comes in many versions, many people have told this story, I’ve heard many different ways of telling it in many different plots and here’s my version. And he says, ‘My version is definitive.’
Even from the perspective of someone in the twelfth century, Thomas sets the story in the distant past. At some point in pre-history, Tristan’s parents had an illicit affair that ended with his father’s death in battle. His mother died of grief in childbirth, hence his name, from triste, or ‘sorrow’. Tristan does not know his background, but he is brought up as a favourite at King Mark’s court in Cornwall, where his connection to him as Tristan’s uncle becomes known. Tristan defeats an Irish prince, Morholt, who came to demand tribute from Cornwall, leaving a chip of his sword in Morholt’s skull, and he has various adventures in Ireland, winning the right to take Iseult from Ireland to Cornwall for King Mark, who had already heard from Tristan what an astonishing woman she is after he had met her on an earlier adventure. And then, Laura Ashe continued, the couple drank a love potion at sea by mistake; by the time they land, Iseult is no longer a virgin and her lady-in-waiting, Brangaine, takes her place in the marital bed on the first night. After that point, we have the substance of the story, which comes in three sections.
LAURA ASHE: There are the long periods when they’re at court conducting their affair clandestinely and Mark is riven with suspicion. People attempt to expose them and there’s never quite proof and they’re repeatedly challenged and then reinstated. Then there’s a phase when Mark can’t bear it any more and he banishes both of them. And they go into the forest and the final end game (and Thomas’s version kicks in here): Iseult is back at court, now Tristan is banished alone and he meets another woman, a beautiful woman [also] called Iseult, and he decides, for a series of psychologically mad reasons, that he will marry this other Iseult. And now we have a love quadrangle. Finally, he’s wounded by poison. Only Queen Iseult can save him, she is on her way to save him; his wife tells him that she is not coming and he dies of despair. And then Iseult comes and finds his body and she lies down and dies also in despair.
One measure of the popularity of this story is how quickly it spread. Mark Chinca noted the move from England to continental Europe and Scandinavia. Gottfried of Strassburg reworked Thomas into Middle High German, the literary form of German at the early thirteenth century, probably around 1210. There was also another translation of Thomas into German, made somewhere in the northwest of the continent in a literary language that is usually called Low Franconian, the forerunner of literary Dutch, and fragments of that survive. There is also the Old Norse version, as a saga.
MARK CHINCA: That saga is very important because it enables us to reconstruct the whole of the plot of Thomas because it is, in fact, the only, I think, translation of Thomas surviving that actually completes the whole story. It survives mainly in manuscripts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but those manuscripts contain a prologue in which they say that the translation was made by a monk called Brother Robert in 1226 at the court of King Haakon, that’s Haakon IV of Norway.
There can always be doubts about authenticity, but the statement fits what we know about the court of King Haakon, notably that he was interested in promoting European literature in the early thirteenth century. There is also a version by Béroul, about whom we again know nothing, and this was in continental French, so not from England, and from the second half of the twelfth century, and it had a different approach to the story.
MARK CHINCA: The most striking difference is that the love potion in Béroul is time-limited. In the Thomas tradition of the story, the potion causes those who drink it to love until they die, so it’s absolute and unending love. In Béroul’s version, we’re told that the potion’s effect wears off after three years; it works only for that period of time.
Where Thomas appears more interested in creatively mining the story for general problems that he can put up for intellectual debate and discussion, Mark Chinca added, Béroul prefers the maximum of narrative suspense and excitement from the story. There is an episode in Béroul in which Mark has sentenced the lovers to death, with Iseult handed over to a colony of lepers and Tristan captive in a chapel high on a rock, from which he makes a death-defying leap onto the cliffs below, just in time to rescue Iseult and ride with her into exile in the forest, all told for narrative suspense.
The moral position in the raw material of the folk tales was fluid in that this would have been left for the teller to insert as he chose. Looking at the early versions, according to Juliette Wood, the stories are all about conflict between duty and love, the duty owed to an overlord, as with Diarmuid and Fionn, and the love of a woman, as with Diarmuid and Gráinne.
As well as the narrative suspense, there is something else that is unusual in Béroul; he includes a rather strange story.
JULIETTE WOOD: King Mark has horses’ ears, probably for comic purposes. I think understanding medieval humour is something that we have problems with. Now ‘mark’ in Cornish, Breton and Welsh means horse. So it’s not surprising that you get that story. And you find that story quite well attested, particularly in Welsh. It suggests that Béroul has got closer to the localisation of the story in Cornwall.
While there may have been no defined moral position in the folklore, the Church had a view that was hardening at the time these stories were being written down. Laura Ashe explained that the Church had drama
tically attempted to have a greater role in marriage in the twelfth century, in which it was no longer just an alliance between noble families but a sacrament that relied on the absolute consent of both parties.
LAURA ASHE: It’s possible to argue – many people have – that the growth in the ‘romance’, the fiction of love, is a response to that, saying, ‘If marriage has to be about consent, then we now need to understand what consent to that kind of bond would mean.’
This sacramental approach runs straight into a problem with Tristan and Iseult, where the couple consents but the love is adulterous and directly against the bonds of marriage. On the face of it, Thomas’s narrative of adultery runs counter to orthodox Christian teaching, and some critics have argued that he must simply be showing the lovers’ sufferings as a just punishment for their sins. Alternatively, he is elevating love itself as an alternative religion, a cult, although Laura Ashe finds that tendency more in Gottfried. To her, Thomas’s narrative shows something that is real, something that happens to people.
LAURA ASHE: Thomas develops a moral sense, based not on the question ‘Are they sinning or not?’, but based on the question of the effect they have on others. He shows us, very painfully, the hurt they cause to others all around them, and that, I think, develops a much more interesting kind of moral ambiguity than the simple question ‘Are they sinning by loving adulterously?’
The moral ambiguity continues in Gottfried who, like Thomas, put phrases into the lovers’ mouths that were often borrowed from the Church’s own definitions of marriage. Mark Chinca gave examples of this. In the Thomas version, when Tristan agonises over whether to marry this second Iseult, he frames the problem to himself in terms of breaking his faith with the first Iseult, his fidelity, and, in canon law, the phrase used for adultery is that it breaks the bond of marital fidelity. In Tristan’s mind, entering into a legitimate marriage could itself be an act of faithlessness and, implicitly, of adultery. Canon law often says the wedding ring symbolises the consent and the bond of the two hearts, the marital fidelity. In Gottfried, when the lovers are parting for the very last time, Iseult presents Tristan with a ring of adulterous fidelity.
