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172 pages

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Can the icon that the multitude created escape the hunger of the eternal dust? . . . Rabindranath Tagore wrote thus in 1939; two years before his death. This intellectual biography of Tagore; perhaps the first of its kind; portrays him as a man who was deeply skeptical; self-critical; tormented by conflicts in his inner life ; aware of the historical significance of his times and continually interacted with adversaries and friends across the world; someone who built on the heritage of the nineteenth century renaissance in India and became one of the makers of the modern Indian mind. Young Rabi rebelled against Western schooling; suffered from chronic loneliness in childhood and after; and imbibed the cultural and literary climate in his privileged family; he also engaged as a cultural leader with the Swadeshi movement on Bengal s partition in 1905; founded the school in Santiniketan and renounced his knighthood after Jallianwala Bagh. Through his eighty-one years; Tagore swung between public life and seclusion of a poet. Over time; he would reinvent his creative self. His life was; however; not bereft of contradictions. His patriotism and love for Bengal and India flowed alongside his belief in a transnational humanist universalism; the religion of man for the future of civilization. Rabindranath Tagore: an Interpretation situates the iconic figure in the history of his tumultuous times of an India in the throes of the national struggle for independence and of a world moving from Victorian stability to the turmoil of World War II. Coinciding with his 150th birth anniversary; it illuminates Tagore s extraordinary contributions: as a poet and writer; nationalist and ideologue; educationist and philosopher; composer and painter.

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Lettres et linguistique

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	01 janvier 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184755398
Langue	English

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SABYASACHI BHATTACHARYA
Rabindranath Tagore
An Interpretation
Contents
Introduction
1. The Inner Life
2. The Enchanted Garden: 1861-1890
3. Into the World: Tagore in the Public Sphere: 1891-1908
4. The Sage of Santiniketan : 1909-1919
5. New Directions: 1919-1929
6. Towards the Religion of Man: 1930-1941
Epilogue: Looking Back
Notes and References
A Chronology of Tagore s Life and Contemporary Historical Events: 1861-1890, 1891-1908, 1909-1919, 1919-1929, 1930-1941
Bibliographic Note
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
Rabindranath Tagore. Self-portrait, ink and brush sketch, signed and dated 1935, 22.3 cm 34 cm, Rabindra Bharati University Museum, Calcutta. Courtesy of the Vice Chancellor of the university.
Introduction
It is curious how sceptical Rabindranath Tagore was of his fame. Would it stand, he asked anxiously over and over again, the test of time? Not that he did not aspire to be read by generations to come. A hundred years from now, / Who are you reading this poem of mine? He wrote that when he was barely thirty-five years of age and a relatively obscure poet. 1 But he doubted the habit of mind which encourages in men pretensions to immortality-for an instant . 2 His self-doubt seemed to increase with his fame. And with it the thought, how would history remember him? When I shall cease to be / should you wish to remember me 3 -thus begins one of his famous poems. At the peak of his success, he saw all his achievements turning some day into dust under the wheel of time , 4 gnawed away into nothingness by the remorseless ocean waves of time . 5
In putting together and thus conflating what might be looked upon as discrete pieces of writing from different points of time, are we exaggerating a tendency of his mind? Perhaps not. An acute consciousness of his place in history , in the memory of his people, seems to be a trait marking out Tagore from many other authors. As he became an icon in his country, he repeatedly asked himself the question, could this image ( putuli ) that has been made , escape the hunger of the dust ?
Today when we look back upon Tagore s life and work, his question seems to have been answered. He has not been forgotten. But is he remembered just as a national icon, with only fading remnants of his fame in the public mind and steadily fading knowledge of his place in history? The Bengali-speaking community in India and elsewhere may like to believe that this is not true. But those who cannot access his works in Bengali-given the fact that only a small fraction of his writings have been translated into English, and still less into Indian languages-may think otherwise. It seems worthwhile, therefore, to attempt a brief interpretative account of Tagore s life and work.
I think that there are many aspects of Tagore s life which remain unexamined. These are Frequently Unasked Questions about him. An inventory of them would show how they converge in particular on one aspect-the evolution of his intellectual life. This theme is addressed in the first chapter of this book and foregrounded in the narrative as a whole.
In pursuing that theme my method has been to draw from Tagore s own statements about the ideas and experiences which drove his creative and intellectual life. Tagore himself provides us the sources: in his autobiography, in his reminiscences and occasional self-analysis, and in over twenty-five hundred letters which have been archived. Read with his published literary works, these sources throw light on what the poet called his inner life . I have deliberately avoided citing learned literary critics-the vast amount they have produced takes us to a different terrain altogether and I have preferred to depend upon Tagore s own testimonies and self-reflective observations. As such, I have depended on Tagore s own translations of his writings and, of course, what he wrote in English, given that few translations do justice to Tagore as a poet. The problem is not so great as far as prose works, particularly essays, are concerned. As regards his poetic works, even Tagore s own translations have been questioned on stylistic grounds; but translations by the original author are presumably more dependable, so far as authorial intention is concerned. Since there are not many translations by Tagore himself out of his vast corpus of writings, occasionally I have had to make do with renderings by others, or myself. To my mind that is acceptable so far as his prose works, particularly his essays, are concerned, but not his poetry. Moreover, to those without access to the original language of an author the mere description of the beauty of his or her writings-which abound in some literary biographies-makes little sense. I have, therefore, tried to avoid such long descriptions and the customary superlatives. I am deeply conscious of the fact that only fragments of all his published writings and only an impression of the range and quality of Tagore s writings can be conveyed in a biography of this kind. Finally, I have also avoided elaborating upon the details of day-to-day life which appear to be irrelevant to his inner life. A set of chronological tables provide such details so that a reader may refer to them to locate various events of his life in the history of his times.

Tagore s Life and Times
About eighteen months before his death, Tagore, in a self-reflective comment on his creative life, wrote:
My literary writings have undergone changes just as seasons of nature change. Often that has occurred without my being conscious of it. Such changes in the trend of writing follows changes in the environs, it is so natural that it is not a conscious act. The writer remains unaware of it. It is the critic at a distance from him who can observe those trends. 6
When one considers the versatile creativity of Tagore and the staggering range of his thoughts and writings over a period of over sixty years, those words seem to hold the key to any attempt to comprehend his works as a totality. Tagore s creative self renewed itself over and over again in his long creative life. No doubt there were a few things which remained constant. This is apparent from a study of the changes that he and his works underwent. Of course one looks at them in this day and age, from a distance and through the optics of another age, from a point of view possibly different from his. But Tagore had the perspicacity to concede that it is the privilege of the external observer to perceive the trends, to point to changes and continuities. That perception, he maintained, is not a necessary part of the act of creation by the author observed.
This dictum of his justifies a periodization of Tagore s intellectual life. This attempt is tentative but, nevertheless, it is founded on certain ideas which need to be mentioned. First, the historical location of Tagore is given a central explanatory role. It is often said of an author that he is in advance of his times . That is truer of Tagore than of many others. But notwithstanding that autonomy of the authorial mind, the extent to which it is shaped by the historical circumstances merits consideration. It may appear sufficient to certain critics to look at any literary creation solely in its own terms, but is that a sufficient condition for comprehending the entire reality? An approach that assumes a completely autonomous trajectory of an author s development is likely to miss out connections between the history of those times and the life of the mind which we aim to understand. Therefore, a good deal of space is given to contemporary history as well as the inheritance from the past in the following pages; in that respect this book is unlike the standard literary biographies. Tagore himself reflected on his restless present and the historical past:
I have felt your muffled steps in my blood, Evermoving Past, have seen your hushed countenance, in the heart of the garrulous day. You have come to write the unfinished stories of our fathers in unseen script on the pages of our destiny
Tagore wrote this poem in 1903 and translated it himself. 7
Secondly, Tagore was not only a poet and a lyricist-though he thought, perhaps rightly, that his poetry and his songs were his most lasting contribution-but he was also a thinker who impacted social and political thought trends in his times. I believe that it is not generally known today how important Tagore s role was as an ideologue. In the evolution of the reformist ideology of the Brahma Samaj, later in the anti-partition or Swadeshi movement 1905-09, and in his writings supporting and sometimes differing from Gandhi from 1919 onwards, Tagore was a political thinker of consequence, addressing issues that were facing the emerging nation and the incipient freedom struggle, right from the beginning of the twentieth century. In the following pages a good deal of attention is paid to Tagore s social and political essays; few of them have been translated. No complete appreciation of Tagore s mind and activities can be arrived at if one excludes those writings.
Thirdly, it needs to be underlined that, given the constraint of the poverty in the quality as well as the quantity of translation and the consequent difficulty of access to a good deal of Tagore s writings for those not acquainted with his language, we have focused in the following pages on the ideas at the core of his writings. Needless to say, this involves an interpretation of the trends of Tagore s thinking. Fortunately, as we shall see, Tagore often took up the role of his own critical interpreter. In the task of interpretation, one is helped by those commentaries. Nevertheless, there will always remain the possibility of interpretations other than that offered in the following pages. It is worthwhile to recall what Tagore himself had said of the interpretation of literature: different readings of creative writings are possible and admissible. 8 If the int