Tagore : The Oriental and Modern

Author(s): Prabhakar Machwe

Source: Indian Literature , September-October 1976, Vol. 19, No. 5 (September-October
1976), pp. 80-94
Published by: Sahitya Akademi

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 Tagore : The Oriental
and Modern

Prabhakar Machwe

"I love India, not because I cultivate the idolatry of

geography, not because I have had the chance to be born in
her soil, but because she has saved through tumultuous ages
the living words that have issued from the illuminated
consciousness of her great sons".
Tagore in the Spirit of India.
"I sometimes feel within myself the conflict of two
opposite forces, the one of which beckons me always to cessa
tion and fulfilment, while the other would not simply let
me rest. The dynamism of Europe has ever been impinging
on the quietism of my Indian nature—hence anguish on the
one hand and resignation on the other; poetry here, philos
ophy there ; .. .on the one side, the pull of action, on the other,
the magnetism of thought." (Tagore in his letter to Prama
tha Chaudhuri, January 29, 1898).

I do not believe that there is a dichotomy between Oriental,

a category of space and Modern, one of time, Both co-exist.
Tagore is a bridge between East and West, old and new, nationa
lism and internationalism, art and literature, power and know
ledge. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, in his introduction to the
Tagore Centenary Volume wrote:

For all his Indianness, he was essentially a person of

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 tagore: oriental and modern

international mould and thinking. Nationalis

times apt to become a narrowing creed. Tagore
some extent, to break these barriers and yet
firmly in a people growing from their own soil
ing to their own genius He wrote:
I have heard the West repeatedly ask, 'where is the
voice of India?' But when the inquirers from the West
come to India and listen at her door, they simply hear a
feeble echo of their own Western voice and it sounds like
a parody! I too have noticed that modern Indians fresh
from their study of Max Muller have always sounded like
European brass bands, irrespective of whether they are
bragging about their own ancient civilization or condemning
or repudiating the West.

Tagore gave to all traditional ideas a new meaning and new

interpretation: 'How to be free from arrogant nationalism is
today the chief lesson to be learnt. Tomorrow's history will
begin with a chapter on internationalism, and we shall be unfit
for tomorrow if we retain any manners, customs or habits of
thought that are contrary to universalism. There is, I know,
such a thing as national pride, but I earnestly wish that it never
makes me forget that the best efforts of our Indian sages were
directed to the abolition of disunity.'
Tagore had his acquaintance with Eastern wisdom and
profound mysticism from his childhood through his father Maha
rishi Devendranath. He refers to it in his My Childhood (Jib an
Smriti). He had his acquaintance with modern West also from
his childhood, through his travels abroad. He was not torn
like Kipling between 'the never-meeting twain' but accepted
the best of both. He loved to watch Himalayas and travel by
a boat in Padma. He was equally at home with Alps, Thames
or Volga.
Victoria Ocampo of Argentina wrote in her reminiscences:
"Tagore had doubts as to the Westerner's capacity of under
standing Eastern thoughts." As an example she quotes the
translation which Tagore did of one of his own poems for her :
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 INDIAN LITERATURE

"I read the poem in his presence and could not conceal my di
appointment. 'But such and such things you read to me yeste
day are not here' I reproached him. 'Why did you suppres
them? They were the centre, the heart of the poem.' He
replied that he thought that would not interest Westerners."
Tagore Centenary Volume, page 404).
Elsewhere Tagore opined, 'In most of the Western countries
today, it is noticeable how quickly men change their minds i
the appreciation of literaure and creative art. Speed is every
day increasing in transport and conveyance. Speed is cont
nuously driving the heart and soul of man like a machine. Bu
the life substance is not merely made of iron, to be run at frantic
speed by electricity or steam. It has its internal rhythm"
(quoted by Mulk Raj Anand, Tagore Centenary Volume,
page 73).
He began with an open mind to accept the best in the West.
His faith was enhanced by the way his Nobel Prize-winning
Gitanjali was received abroad. But in his twelve foreig
tours, he went four times to U.S.A., once to Soviet Russia
Slowly his ideas about Europe underwent a change :

I started life with a devout faith in Europe's gift of

civilization, in the riches of her soul. Today, as I am about
to go, that faith of mine is gone completely bankrupt.
(Crisis of Civilization, April 1941).

Partly because the moods of Europe in 1913 and Europe after

the Great War were two different stories. Now the Falling
Towers and Waste Land had set in. Mayakovsky had sung of
the Red Sun of Revolution, and India had launched an anti
imperialist campaign in 1920, to be redoubled every decade
after in 1930 and 1940. Tagore got disillusioned.
Tagore criticized the moderns in no equivocal terms:

We find in modern literature that something life a

chuckle of an exultant disillusionment is becoming contagious,
and the knight-errants of the cult of arson are abroad, setting

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 tagore: oriental and modern

fire to our time-honoured altars of workship,

that the images enshrined in them, even if beauti
of mud. They say that it has been found out th
ances in human idealism are deceptive, that th
mud is real. (The Religion of Man, page 124).

Even then Tagore had personal friends among

of all the countries he visited. He started his gr
experiment at Vishva Bharati: 'Where the Unive
nest' of scholars from abroad, from East and West. He was
India's one-man Ambassador of culture. Wherever he went,
he saw and conquered the hearts of the people.

Rabindranath is the High Priest of Internationalism.

No one can be truly international who is not also most
intensely national, in the first instance. The truth of this
statement is amply borne out in the life of Rabindranath.
We see it also in the case of all other great poets and thinkers
of the world, like Homer, Virgil, Kalidasa, Shakespeare,
Goethe. So Rabindranath too was a staunch Nationalist,
and an Indian, and an Indian too whose mother-tongue was
Bengali. He had never been, nor could he ever been a chau
vinist (Dr. Suniti Kumar Chatterji in Tagore Centenary
Volume, p. 122.).

Yet his writings are a sure key to an understanding of the

Soul of India. It was he who punned on his own name and that
of Sri Aurobindo and said: 'Now Rabindra (Sun) is offering
his Namaskara to Aravind (Lotus) !'
Hamilton Mabie said, 'The western who are called upon to
formulate a Far Eastern policy ought to be required to take an
examination in Tagore's Sadhana and The King of the Dark
Chamber' (Introduction to B.K. Roy's Rabindranath Tagore:
The Man and his Poetry, 1915).
Tagore denounced his Knighthood after the Jalian-Wallah
Bagh massacre. He raised his voice always against all injustice.
When he went to Italy, he wanted to meet Croce in jail. He
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 INDIAN LITERATURE

issued a statement against Mussolini, which Poplo di Ital

later criticized.
In British days, Tagore was a political suspect, a Baara
mmbari! Ezra Pound, who was a victim of persecution complex
himself, narrated in Rapallo, to Krishna Kripalani, the noted
biographer of Tagore in English, in 1959: 'Rabindranath, whose
words on numerous occasions are worthy of record, once told me,
'In my country I am suspect Number 12 class B'. Kripalani
adds in footnote (on p. 204) "He has himself related how once
when a family acquaintance had gone to the Joranenko Police
Station in Calcutta to report a theft, an intelligence agent came
in and reported to the Chief on duty, 'Rabindra Nath Tagore,
class B, number 12 has arrived in Calcutta from Bolpur.'
Tagore must have told this story to Ezra Pound whom he came
to know in London some years later."
Every noble cause had his blessings. There are numerous
examples in his life and in his writings of great leaders of India—
Gandhi, Subhash or Nehru—seeking his blessings. Though he
did not agree fully with Gandhi's programme of burning
foreign goods, or burdening the young with the responsibility of
earning through learning in Basic Education, he wrote a poem to
Gandhi when the latter visited his Ashram. In fact village
industries and self-sufficiency were preached by Tagore much
earlier than Gandhi took it up.
He was at heart a patriot. Songs in Swadesh Sangeet are
eloquent enough. When the British authorities put a ban on
organised protest against the internment of Annie Besant, Tagore
publicly voiced his strong reaction in his 1917 address at Calcutta
(.Kartar Ichhaya Karma, in Kalankar, translated in English
"Thou Shalt Obey" in Modern Review, September 1917, later
in Towards Universal Man as Thy Masters Will Be Done).
In a letter, dated October 26, 1917, to Rothenstein, Tagore
openly accused Europe of naked aggression on 'No Nations'
of Asia: "The rapid growth of nationalism in Europe
begins with her period of exploration and exploitation. Its
brilliance shines in contrast upon the dark background of the
subjection of other peoples. Certainly it is based upon the
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 tagore: oriental and modern

idea of competition, conflict and conquest, and

co-operation."
Extreme rightists in Europe became furious w
denunciation of nationalism. In early 1921 A
in Germany called Tagore a 'British paid agent'
the hands of the Bolshevist Conspiracy against th
In February 1938, Rabindranath Tagore com
famous poem Africa (Patraput) :

You are hidden, alas, under a black veil,

which obscures your human dignity
to the darkened vision of contempt.
With man traps stole upon you those hunters
whose fierceness was keener than the fangs of you wolve
whose pride ws blinder than your blighted forests.
The savage greed of the civilized stripped naked
its unashamed inhumanity.
You wept and your cry was smothered
Your forest trails became muddy with tears and blood
while the nailed books of the robbers left their indelible p
along the history of your indignity.
And all the time across the sea.

Church bells were ringing in their towns and villages,

the children were lulled in their mother's arms
and poets sang to Beauty.

Ting Hsi Lin wrote: 'Tagore had a great love for the
Eastern peoples, and he had great hopes for China. When the
Japanese imperialists invaded China, he strongly conducted the
deplorable crimes they committed in our country. Even when
he was on his death-bed he was still concerned about the war of
resistance waged by the Chinese people. He never lost hope in
the National Liberation movements of the oppressed people of
the East." (Ind. Lit. Vol. 4, p. 67).
Tagore was grounded in the Indian tradition, mythology and
folklore. He wrote poems on Shivaji and Banda Bir and
Shajahan. He owed much to Kabirand Dadu, to Aul and Baul
songs as verified by Edward Dinock's studies. Rgveda hymn
Madhu Vata Rtayate Madhu Ksharanti Sindha Vah Madhvirnahsantvo

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 INDIAN LITERATURE

SadhihAdhv Naktamutoaaso its echo in Tagore's famous last poem

E Dyulok Madhumay, Madhumay Prithivir Dhuli

Antare Niyechhi Ami Tuli
Ei Maha Mantrakani

Charitartha jivaner barti

(Honeyed the heavens, honeyed the dust of the Earth: this is

the great fulfilling chant of life I have received and treasured in
my heart (Arogya, 14 February 1941, six months before his death).
One of Tagore's poems has the boldness and austerity of a
Rgvedic hymn:

The first days' Sun

asked

at the new manifestation of being

Who are you?
No answer came.
Year after year went by
the last Sun of the day
the last question utters
on the western seashore
in the silent evening
Who are you?
He gets no answer.

Tagore wrote long poems, dance-dramas and plays on

Ramayana, Mahabharata and Buddhist themes : Valmiki-Pratibha
(in which he himself acted as Valmiki), Gandharir Avedan, Karna
Kunti Samvad, Abhisar, Chandalika and so on. He was deeply
interested in ancient Indian philosophy and aesthetics.
When Aldous Huxley came to India in 1961 to attend the
International Seminar at the occasion of Tagore Centenary,
I had the privilege to attending on him. Aldous Huxley was
very much intrigued by Tagore's phrase: 'Man must be vitally
savage but mentally civilized." He commented,

Besides being a poet, a politician ond an educator, Tagore

was a mystic—a mystic, I would say, of the 'Tantrik'school,
.a mystic of the kind who does not wish to achieve liberation

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 tagore: oriental and modern

outside the world, but aspires to achieve it w

world. He aspired to see the absolute within the
the infinite in the finite object, eternity wit
moment of time.

This aspect of Tagore's acceptance of life in its fullness—Deli

verance is not for me in renunciation—is Vaishnava in origin.
There was a continuity in his thought-current and Schwietzer
could not quite reconcile it in his Development of Indian Thought.
where he refers to life—and—world negation and life and world
affirmation. In Indian philosophy such references to opposites
are common. In spite of Tagore's Brahmo background and love
for the Abstract, Nataraj images abound in his later works.
Let us see how he reacted to Western Poetry.
Tagore Centenary Volume, includes two excellent studies which
should be read by every student of Tagore and West These are :
(1) Western Influence on the Poetry of Tagore by Taraknath Sen
(2) Tagore in the West by Pierre Fallon

From these studies one learns that the deep influence on

Tagore was of Shakespeare and Goethe and though he was
called Shelley of Bengal he was nearer to Keats. There are
other influences too but rather far fetched, of the Metaphysical
poets, of Browning, of Walt Whitman and even T. S. Eliot.
I would just list some of these parallels and leave conclusions to
readers of this article :
( 1 ) In one of his lines Tagore uses an English word 'posterity'
as a part of his Bengali text:

Man chale jay chinhavihin posterityr pathe

(Samayhara in Akasha Pradip)
(Mind goes to the unmarked path of posterity)

(2) Kaler jatrar dwani Shunite ki paolTari rath nityai udhao.

(Do you hear the sound of the March of Time, whose chariot
is ever on the move?) Compare with Andrew Marvell's

But at my back I always hear

Time's winged chariot hurrying near.

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 INDIAN LITERATURE

(3) William Watson's 'the bridal of earth and sky' : Dharanir

gaganer milaner chhanda (Shravanagatha)
(To the rhythm of the union of earth and sky)
(4) Tagore in Vanavani's preface refers to the second
of the four questions of Kenopanishad: Kena pranah prathama
praiti yuktah (By whom was life, the first of things, urged int
motion? But the critic who only knew Bergson related it to th
influence of his elan vital.
(5) Kachegele rupakothakare palayan (Hridayer dhan in Manasi)
(Beauty flies, one knows not where, when you go near her).
'Beauty is not yet possessed, it cannot be handled. It is
properly not in form, but in the mind. It instantly deserts
possession, and flies to an object in the horizon' (Emerson.)
(6) Dr. Srikumar Banerji compares Shelley and Rabindranath
{Presidency College Magazine,, Calcutta, Sept. 1925) and shows
the differences, while Dr. Edward Thompson speaks of the
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty as a 'swaying' influence! Ode
to West Wind is comparable to Tagore's Varshashesli and
Vaishakh, similarly Ode To Night may remind of Ratri. Skylark
has similarities with the opening stanza of Kalpana:
Achhe shudhu pakha a che maha nabhaanganjusha disha hara
nibid timir ankaj/ore vihanga ore vihanga mor/ ekhan andha bandha
koro na pakha//
(Only the wings are there, and the unbounded spaces of the sky,
dawn abandoned, engulfed in darkness ? O my bird, O blind
bird, do not furl your wings even now.)
(7) Keats and Rabindernath have many similar lines.
Ode to A Nightingale is referred to by Tagore many times. As
late as two years before his death he calls up the ode once again
and one entire stanza in Parichaya in Sanai turns on it. His
phrase Na Shona Sangeet may recall 'unheard melodies'
of the Ode on a Grecian Urn. The opening lines of Urvashi by
Tagore:
Nah Mata nah Kanya Nah Vadhu Tumi Sundari Urvashi
(Neither a mother nor a daughter nor a wife, O beautiful
Urvashi) recalls La Belle Dame Sans Merci and the Eternal
Woman or Ewige Weibliche of Goethe.)

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 tagore: oriental and modern

Dr. Sen also elaborates on Tagore's meritcal in

his use of enjambement in rhymed couplets and r
compares them extensively with such usage in K
(8) But Shakespeare had a deep impress on Tag
He had translated Macbeth in Bengali when h
years old. He wrote a poem on Shakespeare,
England in 1916. Jibaner Jvar in Mrtyur P
patra, 1885) is like Shakespeare's 'life's fitful fe
his collection of essays on literary criticism, com
Kalidasa and Shakespeare figure prominently.
(9) He had great regard for the American
Whitman, as is apparent from his comments
referred to his 'prose-poems' in his lecture a
University in 1934 which was later on published
(Prosody). He translated some lines of Whitman i
Lokenath Bhattacharya thinks that the motto of
is like Whitman's, I contain multitudes'! (Span,
(10) As for the moderns he translated a sel
Eliot's Journey of the Magi in Shishutirtha. It is th
which he has referred in his only poem The Child directly
written in English. This poem was composed after seeing the
Oberammergauru passion play on the night of 20 July 1930, in
a Munich Hotel where he was staying. This was rendered later
in Bengali by him as Shishutirtha.
(11) "Tagore played with paradoxes" (Robert Frost,
Poetry, November 1961).
Though there are references in Tagore's poetry to modernist
images like 'the day is bandaged like a crippled leg' (Sanai) or
'asthmatic wheeze of the wind" ( Janmadine) and his later poems
do refer again and again to the Rudra mood—-the 'horror' and
'Angst' of the moderns—as in an image of Nataraj standing
solitary and silent behind hundreds of extinguished stars; Tagore
was not enamoured of the modernists, neither in western poetry
nor in their poor imitation in Bengali. He observed: 'A dis
interested mind in the best vehicle of science as well as for Art.
Modern Europe has got it in her science, but not in her litera
ture.')

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 INDIAN LITERATURE

Tagore knew the pitfalls and limitations of both East and

West very well. Tagore was deeply rooted in Indian tradition
but it did not mean that he was not aware of its weaknesses. On
10 March 1915 when Gandhi visited Santiniketan and admoni
shed the Ashramites to do their own scavenging themselves and
not have in their refectory separate seats for Brahmins and
Harijans. Tagore said that he did not wish to compel the
Brahmin students to dine with Harijans. But he had deep
compassion for the Santhal in Birbhum—Santhal woman's face
repeatedly occurs in his old-age paintings.
In the Golden Book presented to Tagore when he was seventy,
Grace refers to the masculine prose form and the feminine
poetic form. Tagore was a worshipper of an Ardhanari-Natesh
vara—so beautifully painted by Nandalal Bose.
Such a prolific writer who wrote 16,000 pages during his life
time quite naturally repeated himself occasionally. I will quote
an appreciation from a 'modernist' pioneer in Bengali poetry.
"What Tagore did was to repeat in verse what he had said in
prose, and vice versa; in him the two forms not only complement
each other but are sometimes almost inter-changeable. Lest
the aeolytes of modernism should regard this as heretical, I
hasten to adduce the example of Charles Baudelaire—the prime
source of modern poetry—who enriched his prose by borrowing
phrases, imagery and at times whole stanzas from his verse—all
this is Tagore's practice but where it differs from Baudelaire is
also important. Instances are not lacking where, using the
same substance, Tagore is terse in prose and prolix in verse,
while the prose of Baudelaire's essays is playful and even diffuse
and his verse intensely concentrated." (Buddhadeva Bose in
Tagore Centenary Volume , p. 106)
With age Tagore became suspicious of the so-called fashion
able modernists, who were only revelling in lampooning and satire.
In an article entitled Sahityer Adhunikata (Modernity in
Literature) first published in Parichay (1934-35) Tagore cate
gorically said :

I have accepted the English literature of the past with

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 tagore: oriental and modern

gladness. Not only have I got delight from it bu

the path of my life. Its influence has not yet gon
mind. But I am not facing the impregnability of
door Europe as far as my acquaintance with mode
literature goes. Its unintelligibility seems to me as
ungenerous. It has been born in the hard soil
scepticism. It does not seem to possess such p
would enable it to send out an open-hearted
outside its own home. It would, however, be unjust to
say there are no exceptions. (Indian Literature, Vol. VI,
No. 1, 1963).

But if one reads Tagore's poems in Punashcha, unfortunately

not available in English translation, many of his writings are
very modern in their outlook and form: To the College Girl
in College Street, he entreats:

At least you will find my verses

a good companion to your cigarette smoking

Like every great poet, Tagore's problem was also a dual

one : reconciliation with self, and reconciliation with the World.
Nature no longer valid as 'the mother to whom I look to like a
sick child' (in the dedication to Sir J.C. Bose in Chhinnapatra).
But there was no where else to go, but to go 'back to Natrue'.
This was the dilemma ever intriguing, ever escaping a final
solution. A Yaksha Prashna indeed:
In Chithipatra V, quoted by Pramathanath Bishi, is an auto
biographical reflection in one of the letters by Tagore : "I do not
really know which is more powerful within me, a love that is
replete with happiness as well as misery, the joy of meetings
and partings, or a desire to roam without definite direction in
search of beauty. I think the desire for beauty is spiritual,
indifferent to home and humanity, directed towards the formless.
And the love is of the order of man, concerned with that which
has form. One is Shelley's Skylark, the other Wordsworth's
Skylark." Of a reverse order is the Urdu poet's reaction:
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 INDIAN LITERATURE

Ishq kahta hai alam se juda ho jao

Husan kahta hai jahan jao nay a alam hai
(Love says, be indifferent to the world. Beauty says wherev
you go, there is a new world).

Madhav Tulian, the Marathi romantic poet, in one of h

ghazals, lamented 'Beauty here is ephemeral ; why should I bu
any house? I shall wander on this earth eternally searching fo
the beauty sublime':

Te the Sthire Na Charuta

Bandhu Kashala Geh Mee
Hudkit Charv Gabhirtz
Hinden Bhuvar Nehmee

Beauty and love are not always compatible or interchange

able. The romantic yearning of 'looking before and after
and pining for what is not' begins and ends in wonder and
Kambdi rahi Kalai (the quivering wrist) in Bhai Vir Singh's
poem on the vanishing dream. The ever enlarging horizon
makes the voyage of the ancient mariner modern. But in the
Indian context Romanticism is not the same as in English, French
or German. Here our classical tradition was not anti-Romantic.
Kalidasa was both a classicist and romantic. He influenced
Tagore deeply.
Tagore influenced Romantic renaissance in Indian poetry
in the twenties and thirties. Gitanjali was translated in hundred
ways. Prose poems were a rage. Hindi, Chhayavad, Kannada
Geleyar Gumpu movement with Bendre, Gokak and Mugali;
Marathi Rava Kirana Mandai and its seven poets; Sabuj (The
Greens) in Oriya were some of the counterparts. Platonic love,
desire to go back to the source, to countryside and folksongs,
interest in medieval ballads were all a part of this movement.
'Nirala' translated a hundred poems of Tagore in Hindi. There is
recent Ph.D. thesis in Hindi on the influence of Tagore on Pant
and other modern poets. V.K. Gokak wrote in his Tagore and
Modern Indian Poetry: 'Vallathol of Kerala is traditional, yet
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 tagore: oriental and modern

modern. Bharati of Tamilnad, Riaz of Urdu, Ma

Kashmir, Baikunthanath of Orissa, Krishna Shastri
Tambe of Maharashtra, Kurup of Kerala all took
from Tagore'. Akbar Allahabadi exclaimed that
picture bore a close resemblance to the ragini named
Ajaib and Piara Singh Padam separately translate
from English into Punjabi; there was also an early
of the Gardener. Actually one should collect th
available on Tagore in Indian languages.
Modernity in poetry affects verse form. Amiy
varti, who was a close associate of Tagore remarked
free verse in his essay on the Imagery and Verse forms
(Indian Literature, Vol. 4, 1961, p. 41): 'Tagore neve
examined the difference between the Whitmanesque
meandering, resonant and powerful in its spread—not
and the French vers libre brought into English in its
reality by the imagists under Hulme and Ezra Poun
later poetry is mostly written in free verse. The poe
of an overflow than a gathering of recognizable unit
while they must have enriched the subsoil of Bengal
individually the poems (of Bithika, Patraput and Sh
are not memorable or artistically valid.'
A comparative assessment of innovations in verse
Indian languages following or imitating Tagore has
probed and established.
Sisir Kumar Ghosh, reviewing Abu Sayeed Ayyub
nikata 0 Rabindranath in Indian Literature (July-Septem
remarked: What is remarkable in Tagore's poetry o
phase is not a merger in the Eternal but a tension be
and timeless. Tagore's double crisis, so to speak this
bhakta mulyabodh, and the preference for 'moments
bliss: Tapasya, austerity the poet had confessed was n
his temperament.' (pp. 18-19).
Saroj N. Ray wrote in his article 'Tagore as a
Critic': 'The Modern Bengali critics found fault wit
poetry as escapist and unreal. Tagore, therefore
question: What is real? To the modernist write
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 INDIAN LITERATURE

seamy side of life is real, the ugliness of the slum, the orgies of th
pub and the sores of society. The new generation of Beng
writers with a leftist bias attacked him as an aristocrat who had
never known the grim realities of life surrounding him, the squa
lor of a big industrial city like Calcutta, the miseries of the
pavement and the horrors of the slums. He of course resented
the charge that he was an aristocrat but admitted in a later poem
that there were many things of which he was ignorant, subjects
which he bequeathed to the posterity for poetic treatment. He
refused nevertheless to accept what was passed off as reality by
the new school.' [Indian Literature, Vol.4, 1961, p. 157-58).
For Tagore, beauty in literature was like Vidyapati's Radha
as described by her lover Krishna:

Janam avadhi tava rup niharelu

nay an na tripit bhel
(For countless ages I see your beauty
but my eyes are never quenched)

It is something like Enobarbus' description of Cleopatra's beauty:

'Age cannot wither her not custom stale her infinite variety.'
His paintings marked the beginning of Expressionism. Thou
gh in 1930 they were exhibited in Moscow and Paris and hailed,
people in India could nor appreciate them till 1937, as Tagore
himself wrote to Rothenstein. Critics like O.C. Gangoly and
A.K. Coomaraswamyrecognisedtheirstature. Nandlal Bosefound
in them 'qualities of freshness and vigour which makes the old
new. We need to be re-educated If Rabindranath seems
rough and destructive, it is because he is breaking the ground
anew for us that our future flowers may be more surely assured
of the sap.'
Modern poets and artists now have to ask themselves this
question: 'Tagore passed away in 1941. Do we really deserve
to be called his inheritors?'

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