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283 pages

English

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A unique autobiography that provides an incomparable insight into the mind of a genius The Renaissance man of modern India, Rabindranath Tagore put his country on the literary map of the world when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. My Life in My Words is, quite literally, Tagore on Tagore. Uma Das Gupta draws upon the vast repertoire of Tagore s writings to create a vivid portrait of the life and times of one of India s most influential cultural icons. The result is a rare glimpse into the world of Tagore: his family of pioneering entrepreneurs who shaped his worldview; the personal tragedies that influenced some of his most eloquent verse; his groundbreaking work in education and social reform; his constant endeavour to bring about a synthesis of the East and the West and his humanitarian approach to politics; and his rise to the status of an international poet. Meticulously researched and sensitively edited, this unique autobiography provides an incomparable insight into the mind of a genius.

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Memoir

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	08 septembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184753974
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0550€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Rabindranath Tagore

MY LIFE IN MY WORDS
selected and edited with an introduction by Uma Das Gupta
Contents
Dedication
Introduction
Part One: My Life
1: My Family and the Changing Times
2: My Boyhood Days
3: My Father and Mother
4: A New Chapter in My Life
5: Leaving Home: Ahmedabad and England, 187 8-7 9
6: My Education
7: Writing Poetry
8: Restless Years, 1883-90
9: On the Threshold of Thirty
10: My Wife and Children
11: Letters to My Children
12: Starting My School at Santiniketan, 1901
13: My Experience of the Swadeshi Movement
14: Gitanjali and the Nobel Prize, 1913
15: My Travels in Japan and the USA, 1916-17
16: Renouncing the Knighthood, and My Arguments against Non-Cooperation
17: A World in One Nest : Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan
18: Visva-Bharati Sriniketan : A Scheme for Village Reconstruction
19: In China, 1924
20: An Unexpected Stop in Argentina
21: Gandhiji and I
22: In Europe Again, 1926
23: An Uneasy though Versatile Period, 1927-31
24: More Travel, More Poetry, More Drama
25: Crisis and Hope: My Last Years, 1937-41
Part Two: My Thoughts
26: On Myself
27: On Religion
28: On Nature
29: On My Country
30: On British Rule in India
31: To My Friends
32: From My Poems and Songs
Illustrations
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
To Mil and Jenny my young and kind family
Introduction
W hen Penguin Books invited me to do an autobiography of Rabindranath Tagore-a Rabindranath in his own words-my editor s idea, as she put it, was for me to write his autobiography as it were. I am very thankful for the idea as the reading for this work has been so enjoyable and inspiring. How wonderfully and untiringly Rabindranath Tagore wrote, with feeling and frankness, at times hard-hitting and repetitive but not without a sense of balance and tolerance. But even with this advantage, writing another s autobiography was a daunting task, made even more difficult by the great author s indifference to dates. He admitted to it. He wrote, for example, to his youngest daughter:
Like you, we too are having poetry sessions here. Teachers come after their afternoon meals to hear interpretations of my poetry and its associations with the story of my life. I see them earnestly taking notes. Ajit 1 is going to read something about my work on my birthday. He is driving me mad with questions about the dates and years of my poems-but I just can t remember dates. You know well how the dates on my letters are at variance with those in the almanac. I never won any accolades in my history class at school. I am afraid my biography will have to be published without taking the trouble to verify dates . . . 2
Rabindranath believed that life history was realistically only a collection of pictures of life s memories rather than a chronicle of dates and events. He was very conscious of the fleeting and fluid nature of what one can retain about what actually happened. In his view, the past was a matter of resurrection and the future a world full of mystery. He wrote explaining how those pictures of life s memories came to life when writing his autobiographies, and how he valued them for their literary worth more than anything else.
Some years ago, when questioned about the events of my past life, I had occasion to pry into this picture-chamber. I expected to be content with selecting a few materials from my life s memories for my life s story, but discovered as I opened the door, that life s memories are not life s history. Memories are the original work of an unseen artist. The variegated colours are not reflections of outside lights, but belong to the painter himself, and come passion-tinged from his heart, thereby disqualifying the canvas as evidence in a court of law.
But though the attempt to gather precise history from memory s storehouse may be fruitless, there is a fascination in looking over the pictures. This fascination cast its spell on me.
The road and wayside shelter are not pictures while we travel; they are too necessary, too obvious. When, however, before turning into the evening rest house, we look back upon the cities, fields, rivers and hills where we have travelled in the morning of our life, they are pictures indeed. Thus, when my opportunity came, I looked back, and was engrossed.
Was this interest only a natural affection for my own past? There must have been some personal feeling, of course, but the pictures also had an artistic value of their own. No event in my reminiscences is worthy of being preserved for all time, but the quality of the subject is not the only justification for a record. What one has truly felt if only it can be made sensible to others, is always of importance to one s fellowmen. If pictures which have taken shape in memory can be brought out in words, they are worth a place in literature.
It is as literary material that I offer my memory pictures, to take them as autobiography would be a mistake. In such a view these reminiscences would appear useless as well as incomplete. 3
The autobiographies Rabindranath wrote were Jibansmriti , published in 1912, when he was fifty years old, and Chhelebela , published in 1940, a few months before his death. Jibansmriti and Chhelebela were translated into English in his lifetime as My Reminiscences and My Boyhood Days , respectively. Besides these, there is Atmaparichay (Knowing Oneself), a collection of six of his inward-looking essays, published posthumously in 1943. Atmaparichay has not been translated into English as a whole book but some of the contents of those essays can be traced in his English writings elsewhere. In the fourth essay of that collection, he writes about how difficult it is to know oneself-his favourite autobiographical theme.
It is not easy to know oneself. It is difficult to organize life s various experiences into a unified whole. Had God not given me long life, had He not permitted me to reach seventy years of age, I could hardly have got a clear picture of myself. I have tried to make sense of my life at different times through its various activities and experiences. The only thing I have been able to conclude about myself is that I am a poet, nothing else, no matter all the other things I may have done with my life. 4
I find this verdict about himself worthy of consideration, particularly after going over a large amount of material on his life, so much of which is about his social activities and his serious involvements in that sphere. He was the first ever to start work on rural and educational reform, and it remained a lifelong commitment with him. He could never keep himself from worrying over what was needed for his country. His prose reflects that inward and outward struggle in his life. He wrote every word with reasoned passion. On reading him again and again, I realized that his prose is repetitive mainly because he was anxious to convey the problems that bothered him. One gets the strong sense that he was hammering out those words because they were critical to the changes he wanted to bring about. That is not so in his poetry. Except very occasionally, his poetry was never didactic. It may be said, perhaps, that his life was a fusion of ideas and artistic creativity.
In selecting and presenting the material about his life from his words , I have largely relied on his prose consisting of his autobiographies, essays, speeches, lectures and letters, and included only a little of his poetry. The reason for giving poetry less space is from my personal reluctance to link his poetry to anything specific in his life. Given his views about writing poetry, I think he would have approved of my restraint in deducing all manner of hidden meaning in his poetry. He wrote, for instance:
But does one write poetry to explain something? Something felt within the heart tries to find outside shape as a poem. So when, after listening to a poem, anyone says he has not understood, I am nonplussed. If someone smells a flower and says he does not understand, the reply to him is: there is nothing to understand, it is only a scent. If he persists, saying: that I know, but what does it all mean ? Then one either has to change the subject, or make it more abstruse by telling him that the scent is the shape which the universal joy takes in the flower . . .
That words have meanings is just the difficulty. That is why the poet has to turn and twist them in metre and verse, so that the meaning may be held somewhat in check, and the feeling allowed a chance to express itself.
This utterance of feeling is not the statement of a fundamental truth, or a scientific fact, or a useful moral precept. Like a tear or a smile a poem is but a picture of what is taking place within. If Science or Philosophy may gain anything from it they are welcome, but that is not the reason of its being. 5
Even so, I have reproduced some of his poetry contextually, where I found it meaningful to my presentation, or if the context was directly taken from particular moments of his life. There is that kind of hard data for a few of his poems. And rather than translating his poetry, I have offered it in his own English writing or in his translation. Fortunately, there is as considerable a body of his poetry and prose in English also. The majority of his English writings have been compiled by Sisir Kumar Das and published in three volumes by the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi. Titled The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore , each volume comes with a scholarly introduction. The first volume contains only poems and the other two volumes his various prose.
In this volume, My Life in My Words , I have used Rabindranath s writings in English wherever possible, using the original publications in English from his lifetime without any alterations to the language. The exact references to the texts will be found in the footnotes and the editions cited are listed