ALSO BY KRISHNA DUTTA RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Rabindranath Tagore's Glimpses ofBengal (translator)

Rabindranath Tagore's Selected Short Stories (translator) The Myriad-Minded Man
ALSO BY ANDREW ROBINSON
Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye
The Art ofRabindranath Tagore

Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson

ALSO BY BOTH AUTHORS
Noon in Calcutta: Short Stories from Bengal (editors/translators)

BLOOMSBURY
 --~

Introduction

I have this paradox in my nature that when I begin to enjoy my success I

grow weary of it in the depth of my mind.
letter to Edward Thompson,
Shantiniketan, 1921

his is an ambivalent book. It has to be, whichever way onc views

T Rabindranath Tagore, more than half a century after his death. Seen from
the West, Tagore appears to have come out of nowhere in 1912 and collected a
Nobel prize without the least effort; to have travelled the world and enjoyed a
worldwide homage for over two decades not granted to any other writer this
century; and then to have evanesced until he is barely more than a name. But
seen from Bengal he looks very different. Before 1912, Rabindranath was
rejected by many, perhaps the majority, of Bengalis as being a product of west-
ern influence; for the rest of his life he experienced a unique blend of vilification
and homage; and only after his death in 1941 was he canonized as Bengal's
greatest creative artist and raised to the Olympian pedestal he now occupies. No
writer, living or dead} is today more actively worshipped in Bengal than
Rabindranath Tagore.
From his own point of view, Tagore's predicament was even more contradic-
tory. As an idealist - which he remained to the last - he reserved his highest
admiration for the humane spirit of the West he had first encountered in the lib-
eralism of nineteenth-century English literature and politics. 'Whatever may be
the outward aspect of Europe's power, I have no doubt that at its core is the
power of the spirit', he said before leaving Bengal in 1912. Like some other
highly educated Bengalis of his time, until about 1920 Tagore believed British
rule in India to be providential, necessary for the reform of a moribund, degen-
erate society. But as a patriot, particularly after 1900, he needed to believe in the
persistence of ancient India's spiritual values in contemporary India. In 1912,
through his poems Gitanjali (Song Ojfirings), translated by himself, and
through his personal presence in England - where people were even reminded
of Christ - these two beliefs became harmonized in his mind. For a few brief
2 RABINDRANATH TAG ORE
years he brought East and West into receptive emotional and intellectual con-
tact. Thereafter, with the First World War, the upsurge of the Indian nationalist
movement, its suppression by the imperial government, and the popularity of
the non-cooperation movement led by Gandhi, neither belief proved tenable.
Both, however, continued to coexist in Tagore's mind. As a direct consequence,
he found himself obliged to defend Indian spirituality when abroad, and the spirit
of the West when in India. Not surprisingly he felt inwardly torn and often tor-
tured.
But before we delve further into his own ambivalence, here arc three stories
of Tagore's one-time fame in the West, each illustrating a different aspect.
In August 1920, while he was in England, Tagore received the following let-
tef from an Englishwoman:
Dear Sir Rabindranath
I have been trying to find courage to write to you ever since I heard that you
were in London - but the desire to tell you something is finding its way into
this letter today. The letter may never reach you, for I do not know how to
address it, tho' I feel sure your name upon the envelope will be sufficient. It is
nearly two years ago, that my dear eldest son went out to the War for the last
time and the day he said Goodbye to me - we were looking together across
the sun-glorified sea - looking towards France with breaking hearts - when
he, my poet son, said those wonderful words of yours - beginning at 'When I
go from hence, let this be my parting word' - and when his pocket book came
back to me - I found these words written in his dear writing - with your
name beneath. Would it be asking too much of you, to tell me what book I
should find the whole poem in?
The writer was Susan Owen, mother of Wilfred Owen. The verse was from
Gilanjali. That Wilfred Owen truly did cherish it, is shown by the fact that he
wrote it on the back of a message form in early 1917, eighteen months before he
said goodbye to his mother in August 1918. [p1.33]
The second story was told in 1961, the centenary of Tagore's birth, by the
German playwright Carl Zuckmayer, who, like Owen, fought in the First World
War. He heard the story from a friend, a sergeant in the German army's medical
corps. An Indian soldier in a Gurkha regiment of the British army had been
taken prisoner and wounded in both legs. Only amputation of one of the legs
could save the soldier's life - and the chief surgeon wanted the man's consent or
at least some sign of trust. But neither the Indian soldier nor the German med-
ical "fficers had much command of English; and the soldier of course spoke no
German. The more they tried to talk to him, the more anxious and scared he
INTRODUCTION 3
became - he had probably heard frightful stories about enemy treatment of
prisoners. At last, Zuckmayer's friend thought of the only Indian words he
knew. Bending down to the sweating soldier he whispered: Rabindranath
Tagore! Rabindranath Tagore! Rabindranath Tagore! 'After he had said it three
times the Indian seemed to understand. His face relaxed, a shy little smile came
into his eyes, then he closed them, his fear was gone, and he nodded weakly his
consent and confidence to the enemy doctors.'
The third story dates from the Second World War. It happened in the Warsaw
Ghetto, in an orphanage headed by the writer and educator Janusz Korczak.
Despite offers from friends, Korczak refused to leave the ghetto without 'his'
children. On 15 July 1942 he produced his last play with them, ignoring SS
orders forbidding Jews to perform works by Aryan authors. It was The Post
Office, Tagore's most famous play (which Radio France had broadcast in June
1940, the evening before Paris fell). The central character is a dying boy, bedrid-
den on doctor's orders, who is made to believe that a king will visit him and grant
his dearest wish. When after the performance Korczak was asked why he chose
this play, he answered that 'eventually one had to learn to accept serenely the
angel of death,' in the words of Bruno Bettelheim. In August 1942, Korczak and
the children were taken to Treblinka and gassed: today their grave is marked by a
rock, the only rock among all the rock-graves ofTreblinka to bear a human name.
The Owen story may be said to show the power of Tagore in person; the
Zuckmayer story the power of his name; the Korczak story the power of his
writing. A biography of Tagore must take into account all three aspects of
Tagore's reputation and their ramifications. These can be astonishing. In 1935,
for instance, Tagore received a letter from Count Michael Tolstoy, a son of the
writer, which began: 'You were my father's friend and shared his way of think-
ing. Knowing how highly my father valued and respected your literary and
philosophical work and achievement, I venture to write to you ... ' But Leo
_ Tolstoy, who died in 1910, never read Tagore, far less corresponded with him;
and Tagore felt no particular affinity for Tolstoy's works!
Almost all Tagore's contacts with writers and others outside India are
marked by this air of unreality, to a greater or lesser extent. They were 'imper-
fect encounters', to borrow the title of Tagore's thirty-year correspondence
with Sir William Rothenstein, the artist who introduced Tagore to literary
London in 1912.
The most celebrated of these encounters was undoubtedly with W. R Yeats.
In his Introduction to Gitanjali, Yeats wrote ecstatically:
these prose translations ... have stirred my blood as nothing has for
years ... These lyrics ... display in their thought a world I have dreamed of
4 RABINDRANATH TAGORE
all my life long. The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the
growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes.
He had just spent some weeks helping Tagore to revise his translations for pub-
lication.
But by 1917, after giving further assistance, Yeats was writing to Macmillan,
Tagore's publishers:
After Gitanjali and The Gardener and The Crescent Moon (exhaustively
revised by Sturge Moore), and a couple of plays and perhaps Sadhana [philo-
sophical lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1913], nothing more
should have been published except the long autobiography ... , a most valu-
able and rich work . .. These later poems are drowning his reputation.
And in 1935, a few years before his death, in a letter to Rothenstein Yeats
delivered this broadside against Tagore:
Damn Tagore. We got out three good books, Sturge Moore and I, and then,
because he thought it more important to see and know English than to be a
great poet, he brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation.
Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English. Nobody can write
with music and style in a language not learned in childhood and ever since
the language of his thought. I shall return to the question of Tagore but not
yet - I shall return to it because he has published, in recent [years], and in
English, prose books of great beauty, and these books have been ignored
because of the eclipse of his reputation as a poet . ..
Yeats never did return to Tagore, but he published seven of Tagore's poems (five
from Gitanjali) in The Oxford Book ofModern Verse the following year.
His ambivalence was shared by the poets who have translated Tagore, who
included three subsequent Nobel laureates, Andre Gide, Juan Ramon Jimenez
and Boris Pasternak. Jimenez, his Spanish translator, dropped Tagore in the early
1920s after twenty-two books and became sensitive to suggestions that Tagore
had influenced his own poetry. But in later life, walking one day on a beach in
Puerto Rico, his self-exiled home, Jimenez bent down and scooped up the foam
from a wave. 'These are Tagore's ashes,' he said. 'Why could they not have come
here from the Ganges flowing along the waters of the world? For it was my hand
that helped to give our Spanish form to the rhythm of his immense heart.'
Anna Akhmatova, while translating Tagore into Russian in the mid-1960s,
made caustic gibes at the poems. But having finished, she declared: 'He's a
INTRODUCTION 5
great poet, I can see that now. It's not only a matter of individual lines which
have real genius, or individual poems ... but that mighty flow of poetry which
takes its strength from Hinduism as from the Ganges, and is called
Rabindranath Tagore.'
Tagore himself, it must be said, was fully - painfully - aware of the difficul-
ties of translation, and of his incapacity to tackle them properly. He said so again
and again to literary friends whose first language was English. An early instance
was his letter to Ezra Pound of February 1913. (Pound had come to know
Tagore through Yeats and was for some months even more enthusiastic, com-
paring Tagore with Dante in a weighty review of Gitanjali.) Tagore had sent
Pound some translations -later to form part of The Gardener (the book after
Gitanjali) - and Pound said he had detected in them a whiff of didacticism that
would soon put him off Tagore's works. Tagore replied:
I had my misgivings ... But I must say they [the poems] have not been pur-
posely made moral, they are not to guide people to [the] right path. They
merely express the enjoyment of some aspects of life which happen to be
morally good. They give you some outlook upon life which has a vastness
that transcends all ordinary purposes of life and stirs imagination. I am sure
in the original there is nothing that savours of pulpit. Perhaps you miss that
sense of enjoyment in the English rendering and bereft of their music and
suggestiveness oflanguage they appear as merely didactic.
While this last sentence is certainly true, there was much more to the collapse
of Tagore's reputation in translation than languages and their atmospheres.
Behind language lay the daunting disparity in cultures. In 1913, Occident and
Orient were more distant than today. For some readers of Gitanjali, such as
Yeats, this provoked curiosity; for others, such as Andre Gide, it was a matter of
·active indifference. 'What I admire in Gitanjali is that it is not encumbered with
mythology . . . it is not at all necessary to make preparations fo~ reading it',
wrote Gide in his preface. 'No doubt it can be interesting to discover in what
respects this book belongs to the traditions of ancient India; but it is much more
interesting to consider in what respects it appeals to us.' Besides Gitanjali, Gide
translated into French only The Post Office - nothing else by Tagore. When
Tagore's autobiography My Reminiscences appeared in English in 1917, Gide
read it and noted in his journal: 'But that Indian Orient is not made for me.' For
Yeats, by contrast, this book was 'most valuable and rich' - an opinion he per-
sisted in until his death.
Over the years a peculiar, unique situation developed. For many readers,
Tagore became an honorary European who wrote in English - or even Spanish.
 RABINDRANATH TAGORE
6
(In Spain and South America, and even sometimes in England, he is pronounced
'Tago,,?) His Collected Poems and Plays, published by Macmillan in 1936 and
still available, contains not the merest hint that the contents are translations, let
alone that they were written in Bengali. A well-known biography ofT S. Eliot,
published in 1984, states curiously that Eliot was 'the sixth Briton' to receive
the Nobel prize - Kipling, Tagore, Yeats, Shaw and Galsworthy being his pre-
decessors. And in 1993, in a British parliamentary debate, a speaker asserted
confidently that the English language was 'not only the language of Shakespeare
and the Romantic poets, but also the language of James Joyce, Rabindranath
Tagore and of Hemingway, and many African writers today'!
Tagore in person was less easy to annex. Sometimes he was treated as a
European; more often as a representative of mystic India; seldom as a Bengali.
George Bernard Shaw 'Europeanized' him, joking to William Rothenstein's
wife in 1913: 'Old Bluebeard, how many wives has he got, I wonder!' Jacob
Epstein 'Indianized' him, sculpting a lugubrious bust in 1926 and remarking
cattily in his memoirs that Tagore in person contradicted his Gitanjali: 'I am he
that sitteth among the poorest, the loneliest, and the lost.' Actually, said Epstein
(who had grossly misquoted the original poem), Tagore 'was conducted about
like a holy man ... and if he needed anything only one word of command
escaped him to his disci pies ... It has been remarked that my bust of him rests
upon his beard, an unconscious piece of symbolism. J William Rothenstein, who
drew an exquisite series of pencil portraits of Tagore both in India and in
London, felt quite differently to Epstein [p1.31]- but his friend Max
Beerbohm, prefacing a hook of Rothenstein's Tagore portraits, struck a note of
criticism similar to Epstein's, if more subtly condescending:
Most men are not at all like themselves. The test of fine portraiture is in its
power to reconcile the appearance with the reality - to show through the sit-
ter's surface what he or she indeed is. I take it that Tagore was for
Rothenstein a comparatively simple theme.
Shaw's comparison with Bluebeard, though amusing, was misjudged - as
Shaw realized when he met Tagore again in later life. Nor was Tagore some sort
of precursor ofBhagwan Shri Rajneesh, as Epstein implied, though he could on
occasions appear to be so. (In this case, he perhaps instinctively distrusted the
acerbic Epstein, and wore a mask over his real self) A glance at some of the
many self-portraits that Tagore painted in old age, gives an inkling of his inner
complexity. In one series, he has over-inked his own sage photograph, beard and
all, to make twelve transmogrified faces, several of them distinctly zany, one a
kind of monster (a touch of Bluebeard), another a woman. None of the twelve
INTRODUCTION 7
suggests either the tranquillity of Rothenstein's drawings, or the spiritual van-
ity of Epstein's bust. [pl.44]
'The West sees an ineffective dreamer, v dignified and calm. Reality sees a
restless, versatile spirit, of feminine contradictoriness', complained a frustrated
Edward Thompson, Tagore's first major western biographer, who had known
Tagore in Bengal, writing to a Bengali friend in 1920.
'There's no literary news here,' wrote the poet Philip Larkin from Hull to a
poet-friend in London in 1956, 'except that an Indian has written to ask what I
think of Rabindrum Tagore: feel like sending him a telegram "FUCK ALL
LARKIN".'
'But why should the West care?' asked Satyajit Ray in 1963, speaking of west-
ern attitudes to Indian cinema in general, and, by extension, his own film
adaptations of Tagore. Twenty years later Ray added: 'the cultural gap between
East and West is too wide for a handful of films to reduce it. It can happen only
when critics back it up with study on other levels as well. But where is the
time ... ? And where is the compulsion?'
The only valid counter to Ray's doubts is the one given by Rabindranath
Tagore's grandfather, 'Prince' Dwarkanath Tagore, a century and a haIf ago. In
1846, he was staying in Paris in the best suite of apartments in one of the best
hotels. Here the young Friedrich Max Muller, later the most celebrated
Orienta list of the nineteenth century, sought Dwarkanath out. Having dis-
cussed their shared taste for European music, Max Muller made a repeated
request to hear an authentic specimen of Indian music. At last Dwarkanath
yielded, played a piece on the piano and sang; but Max Muller could find in the
music neither melody, nor rhythm, nor harmony. When he said so, Dwarkanath
replied:
You are all alike; if anything seems strange to you and does not {'lease you at
once, you turn away. When I first heard Italian music, it was no music to me
at all; but I went on and on, till I began to like it, or what you call understand
it. It is the same with everything else. You may say our religion is no religion,
our poetry is no poetry, our philosophy no philosophy. We try to understand
and appreciate whatever Europe has produced, but do not imagine that
therefore we despise what India has produced. If you studied our music as we
do yours, you would find that there is melody, rhythm, and harmony in it,
quite as much as in yours. And if you would study our poetry, our religion,
and our philosophy, you would find that we are not what you call heathens or
miscreants, but know as much of the Unknowable as you do, and have seen
perhaps even deeper into it than you have.
 RABINDRANATH TAGORE
8
Dwarkanath Tagore was a remarkable man. In Calcutta, a city of merchants
second only to London in the British Empire, he was the leading businessman
and philanthropist, India's first industrial entrepreneur. In Europe, he was 'the
Oriental Croesus', welcomed by Queen Victoria, King Louis-Philippe and
Charles Dickens, and granted the Freedom of the city of Edinburgh. But nei-
ther in Europe, nor, more significantly, in Bengal, is Dwarkanath now much
remembered. He has been consciously written out of the Tagore story by
Bengalis. And the first to do so was the Tagore family itself
Rabindranath in mid-life was said to have burned most of his grandfather's
personal correspondence. Certainly references to Dwarkanath in his volumi-
nous works are extremely rare. The charge against him, though never clearly
articulated by his grandson, seems to have been that he was far too commercial
in outlook; and secondly that he was a lackey of the colonial authorities. He
dealt, for instance, in opium, sending it in clippers to China; and he paid a ful-
some tribute to the East India Company when in London. But in disowning
Dwarkanath, Rabindranath not only did an injustice to his grandfather (who
was a complex figure, definitely no toady), he also distorted his own relationship
with both Britain and Bengal. Too often, against his own instincts and experi-
ence, Rabindranath deluded himself that Britain was essentially commercial in
outlook and Bengal essentially spiritual. He thus tended to divide English peo-
ple into a handful untainted by commercialism, such as Rothenstein and
Yeats - and the rest, shopkeeping John Bulls anxious only for profit out of
India. He never fully accepted that even in his high-minded friend Rothenstein,
there was, so to speak, a touch of Larkin.
In Bengal, the delusion brought him approbation when he boosted Bengal
abroad, but vituperation when he tried to make Bengalis live up to his ideal. His
speeches and writings on this subject were never less than direct, often satirical
and sometimes ferocious. In 1917, he told a Calcutta audience (in Bengali):
We all live in the same town, under the same municipality, but with this dif-
ference: the Indians acquiesce, while the Europeans do not . .. We ... throw
up our hands, sigh heavily, and say, 'The Master's will be done'. We give the
Master a thousand names, such as father, elder brother, police inspector,
priest, pundit, Sitala [goddess of smallpox], Manasa [goddess of snakes],
Olabibi [goddess of cholera], Dakshin Ray [tiger-god], and the heavenly bod-
ies, Sani, Mangal, Rahu and Ketu. We smash our own power into a thousand
bits and cast them to the winds . .. National self-respect is making us turn
our faces forwards to the world and demand political authority, but it is also
making us turn our faces backwards to our country and demand that in all
religious, social, and even personal matters we do not move one step against
INTRODUCTION 9
the Master's will. This is what I call the revival of Hinduism. National self-
respect is ordering us to perform an impossible task: to keep one of our eyes
wide open and the other one closed in sleep.
Thousands of Bengalis were turned away from this lecture for lack of space.
When it was repeated in a large theatre, mounted police had to be called because
the crowd was so great. Rabindrimath's Bengali audiences probably seldom
agreed with his lectures - but they were never indifferent to them. A section of
the press kept him under constant fire, frequently descending into mud-sling-
ing; one newspaper even alleged that Rabindranath had syphilis. 'Few writers
have been more scurrilously abused [than Tagore]', wrote Nirad Chaudhuri,
the leading critic of modern Bengal. It was this abuse, in part, Chaudhuri
claimed, that forced Rabindranath to look westwards for appreciation in 1912.
Today, in Calcutta (and elsewhere in Bengal), the attacks have been replaced
by eulogies. In the public prints, and often in private too, Rabindranath is now a
god. Even intellectuals worship him. 'It is perhaps true to say that no man in the
whole range of known history can rival his all-comprehending genius, equally
splendid in thought, in creation and in action.' This statement by a prominent
Bengali scholar appeared in a 1967 biography of Tagore written in English. But
actual experience of today's Bengal proves - another Bengali scholar honestly
admitted - that 'the average Bengali's first-hand acquaintance' with Tagore's
work 'is generally limited to his songs.' One is frequently tempted to agree with
Chaudhuri that Tagore, in Bengal, 'has become nothing more than the holy
mascot of Bengali provincial vanity.'
He is found everywhere in Bengali life - and yet he is lost. This is literally true
in the case of his family mansion, located in the old and congested Jorasanko
district of north Calcutta, which in 1961 became a museum and university.
To get there, ask not for the Thakur Bari (Tagore House), the museum's
Bengali curator quietly advises - ask instead for Ganesh Talkies the nearest
.
cmemahall.
'
The condition of the Jorasanko house is dismal. A vital portion, originally
constructed for 'Prince' Dwarkanath's dazzling receptions and later the home
ofIndia's first modern art movement, was demolished in the 1950s to make way
for a nondescript building in Tagore's memory. Though efforts to restore the
remainder, the major portion, have been made for three decades, both nation-
ally and internationally (by UNESCO), the condition remains unworthy of a
building that stands in relation to modern Indian history somewhat as Blenheim
Palace does to British history or Monticello to United States history. The main
reason in recent years would appear to be that Tagore was not a Communist: the
10 RABINDRANATH TAGORE
government of Bengal, Communist since the mid-1970s, has therefore dragged
its feet about restoration.
The neglect reflects Tagore's ambivalence too. Though he was born in the
Jorasanko house, lived there until he was almost thirty, and wrote vividly of his
childhood and youth there, he disliked both the building and the city and left
them both when he had the choice, settling finally in a poor rural area about a
hundred miles north-west of Calcutta. Here, at Shantiniketan (the 'Abode of
Peace'), on an almost bare tract of land, he founded a school (in 1901) and,
twenty years later, a university and an 'institute for rural reconstruction' in a
nearby village. In 1951, ten years after his death, the institutions were taken over
by the central government of independent India, which continues to run them.
Not even the kindest critic of Tagore's institutions could deny that they have
faults. Whatever their past achievements under Tagore himself - and those
were substantial, in painting and music and in the study of oriental languages,
in the training of workers in rural development and in the education of some
remarkable individuals (such as Satyajit Ray and Indira Gandhi) - today the
institutions cannot be taken seriously in any field. While the spirit ofRabindranath
is still perceptible in the beauty of the setting, it has utterly deserted his institu-
tions. Even while he lived, it was a will-o'-the-wisp.
As a founder of institutions Tagore was ambivalent. 'I do not put my faith in
any new institutions, but in the individuals all over the world who think clearly,
feel nobly and act rightly', he wrote at the very time he started his university. One
of these individuals was (Sir) Patrick Geddes, the Scots pioneer of town and
regional planning. Geddes was in India for a while and offered his help to Tagore.
In 1922 Geddes requested him to define his dream more clearly. Tagore replied:
I find it rather difficult to answer your question because my ... work in
Shantiniketan has been from first to last a growth, which has had to meet all
the obstacles and obstructions due to shortage of funds, paucity of workers,
obtuseness in those who were called upon to carry out my ideal . .. In writ-
ing my stories I hardly ever have a distinct plot in my mind. I start with some
general emotional motive which goes on creating its story form very often
forgetting in the process its ... original boundaries. If I had in the com-
mencement a definite outline which I was merely to fill in, it would certainly
bore me - for I need the constant stimulation of surprises . .. The same
thing happened with my Shantiniketan Institution. I merely started with this
one simple idea that education should never be dissociated from life.
This was good as a principle, springing as it did from Tagore's abhorrence of
almost all formal education in India - including his own in Calcutta in the
INTRODUCTION II
1860s and 70s (he never matriculated, let alone took a university degree); but
less good when applied to a large institution. A steady stream of distinguished
visitors made their way to Shantiniketan from 1913 onwards (starting with
Ramsay MacDonald); indeed Mahatma Gandhi insisted to foreigners visiting
him in India that they see Shantiniketan. Most of them went away impressed by
the idea, but unconverted by the actuality.
One who was there in 1945, four years after Tagore's death, was E. M. Forster.
To his hosts Forster said charmingly: 'I am not here to pass any verdict on India
nor do I fortunately carry the white man's burden on my shoulder. All that I
carry round my neck is the pleasant light burden of a lovely garland of marigold,
which, I feel, is the symbol of your love and friendship.' To an English friend he
was more frank: 'we went over for a night to [the1Shrine. It was less shriney than
I expected, indeed there were some sensible remarks about the Passed Master.
Much kindness, and my two companions (Muslims) were moved, as was I. I am
afraid that the place does not cut much ice now, except as through the elderly and
theosophic. The educational side of it is too casual.'
Of course Forster could not meet Tagore. Indira Gandhi, who was at
Shantiniketan in 1934-35, shared Forster's scepticism about the educational
standard - as did her father Jawaharlal Nehru - but she felt compensated by
Tagore's presence. Looking back from an English girls' public school a year and
a half later, she wrote to her father: 'In the very atmosphere there, his spirit
seemed to roam and hover over one and follow one with a loving though deep
watchfulness.' Then she added (rather precociously for a nineteen year old),
'And this spirit, I feel, has greatly influenced my life and thought ... '
Both Nehru and his daughter, each of whom was for many years the chancel-
lor of Tagore's university, were genuinely affected by Tagore's spirit - much
more than by his writings, which they read in English translation. (Nehru almost
never quoted them; Indira Gandhi only occasionally.) It probably encouraged
Nehru in his greatest political blunder: his profound conviction ofIndo-Chinese
unity (which Tagore had believed in), prior to India's war with China in 1962.
But it may also have nagged at Indira Gandhi's conscience during her suppres-
sion ofIndian democracy in 1975-77. As she once informed the Convocation at
Shantiniketan: 'If democracy is to survive, we need a large body of mature indi-
viduals who are bound together by great objectives, voluntarily accepted.'
This is a concise definition of the ideal Tagore dedicated much of the second
half of his life to instilling into his fellow countrymen. But, as usual with
Tagore, the ideal and his instinct were at war. His temperament was aristocratic,
his personal relationships, even with Bengalis, constantly strained; in fact he
had few friends, those he had were not lifelong, and his family life was, for
the most part, tragic. Whatever his ideals, as a human being Tagore was a
 INTRODUCTION 13
12 RABINDRANATH TAGORE

of his time, Tagore had a clear conception of civil society, as something distinct
'ferociously egocentric individualist', as Nirad Chaudhuri put it. Satyajit Ray,
from and of stronger and more personal texture than political or economic
who knew Tagore personally as a student at Shantiniketan in 1940--42, found
structures', wrote E. P. Thompson in 1991, introducing a new edition of
him unapproachable: 'You could never get close to him.' When talking, 'he
Tagore's Nationalism.
never used a wrong word. If you recorded his normal conversation it would
He was not an analytical thinker, always an intuitive one who preferred a
sound like a prepared speech - the choice of words, the intonation, the inflec-
poetic analogy to a prosaic argument. Sometimes his thinking was inchoate, on
tion, everything was so incredibly perfect.'
occasions he could be chauvinistic (especially around the turn of the century),
but without exception he was courageous. In 1916, speaking in Japan and across
The sheer volume and diversity of Tagore's oeuvre in a creative life of over sixty
the USA, he eloquently warned each nation about the dangers of militaristic
years is enough to make one gasp. In Bengali, there are twenty-eight large vol-
nationalism, unbridled commercialism, and the love of technology for its own
umes consisting of poetry, dramas, operas, short stories, novels, essays and
sake. In 1919, by repudiating his knighthood, he became the first Indian to
diaries; and a similar number of (slimmer) volumes oftetters, still being edited
make a public gesture against the massacre at Amritsar. In the 1920s he stood up
and published. His songs, separately published, number nearly two and a half
to Gandhi and the non-cooperation movement with pungent rationality, and
thousand, his paintings and drawings over two thousand. A large fraction of all
earned from the Mahatma (a title Tagore first popularized) the grudging sobri-
tbis is still read, performed and studied in Bengal.
quet, 'Great Sentinel'. 'I regard the Poet', Gandhi said, 'as a sentinel warning
In translation, only a small fraction of this fraction can give pleasure compa-
us against the approach of enemies called Bigotry, Lethargy, Intolerance,
rable to that of great literature in tbe reader's own language. The best of tbe
Ignorance, Inertia and other members of that brood.'
short stories, letters and essays (including Tagore's memoirs) lead tbe field,
When Rabindranath was born in 1861, notions of racial inferiority and supe-
witb a handful of poems - perhaps as many as fifty - in tbe second place, one or
riority were engrained in educated minds eastern and western. By the time he
two novels (notably The Home and the World) coming a poor third, and the plays
died in 1941, such ideas were no longer respectable in democratic societies.
as non-starters, with the possible exception of The Post Office. The best of the
Tagore was among the pioneers of that global sea change in attitudes.
paintings - several hundred - are powerfully appealing (and suggestive of tbe
In foreseeing the need to apply western scientific expertise in what we would
untranslatable delicacies in the poetry). As Tagore remarked in Germany in
now call 'Third World development', Tagore was perhaps at the head of the
1930, 'My poetry is for my countrymen, my paintings are my gift to the West.'
field. His earliest efforts date back to the turn of the century and took place on
His songs, which have the deepest hold of all on Bengalis - not to mention
the Tagore estates in East Bengal (now Bangladesh). In 1921, with money from
India's film industry: Tagore could have made a fortune as a composer of film
the American heiress Dorothy Whitney Straight and unstinting effort by a
songs - do not really transplant to foreign soil. Their greatness lies in their per-
young British agricultural economist, Leonard Elmhirst (who later married
fect fusion of words and melody.
Straight), Tagore started a farm, the nucleus of his 'institute for rural recon-
Overall, to quote William Radice, the British translator who in the 1980s gave
struction' near his university. Although the institute had limited success it
some of Tagore's poetry a new lease of life in English, we can say that
influenced many in the government of independent India; it inspired ;he
Elmhirsts to buy Dartington Hall in England and to found the Dartington
Tagore's art is a vulnerable art. Nearly all his writings are vulnerable to criti-
Trust; and it left a legacy that became the ortbodoxy in successful development
cism, philistinism or contempt, because of his willingness to wear his heart
aid half a century later. In Tagore's scheme of development, the developer must
on his sleeve, to take on themes that other writers would find grandiose, sen-
strive to be in sympathy with the developing - imposed solutions and imported
timental or embarrassing, and his refusal to cloak his utterances in
technology do not last. 'It was not the Kingdom of tbe Expert in the midst of
cleverness, urbanity or double-talk.
the inept and ignorant which we wanted to establish - although the experts'
advice [is1valuable', Tagore chided Elmhirst in 1932. 'The villages are waiting
This is true of his Bengali writings, and, afortiori, of translations.
for the living touch of creative faith and not for the cold aloofness of science
The fundamental ideas that Tagore expressed in lectures before large audi-
which uses efficient machinery for extracting statistics'.
ences in the world's greatest universities between 1913 and 1930 survive both
Tagore insisted that science, which he studied and wrote about from an early
translation and, frequently, the severest scrutiny. 'More than any other thinker
 RABINDRANATH TAGORE
14
age, must, in its application to society, serve society, and not vice versa. This was
a conviction with a philosophical basis. In 1930, talking to Albert Einstein in
Germany, Tagore told him: 'This world is a human world - the scientific vie~
of it is also that of the scientific man. J Though Einstein did not agree, some dis-
tinguished scientists now see Tagore's point. One of them, Ilya Prigogine, a
Nobel laureate in chemistry, claimed in 1984: 'Curiously enough, the present
evolution of science is running in the direction stated by the great Indian poet.'
Tagore's faith in the unity of man and nature informed everything he did.
Dwelling on Shakespeare's plays, he commented that despite Shakespeare's
'great power as a dramatic poet', there was in him a 'gulf between Nature and
human nature owing to the tradition of his race and time. It cannot be said that
beauty of nature is ignored in his writings; only that he fails to recognize in them
the truth of the interpenetration of human life with the cosmic life of the world.'
A fascinating letter Rabindranath wrote to his niece Indira in 1892 goes further:
I feel that once upon a time I was at one with the rest of the earth, that grass
grew green upon me, that the autumn sun fell on me and under its rays the
warm scent of youth wafted from every pore of my far-flung evergreen body.
As my waters and mountains lay spread out through every land, dumbly
soaking up the radiance of a cloudless sky, an elixir oflife and joy was inartic-
ulately secreted from the immensity of my being. So it is that my feelings
seem to be those of our ancient planet, ever germinant and effiorescent,
shuddering with sun-kissed delight. The current of my consciousness
streams through each blade of grass, each sucking root, each sappy vein, and
breaks out in the waving fields of corn and in the rustling leaves of the palms.
I am impelled to give vent to this sense of having authentic ties of blood
and affection with the earth. But I know that most people will not understand
me and think my idea distinctly queer.
'No biography, however laboriously written, could ever give an adequate pic-
ture of such a complex personality as his" wrote Tagore's scientist son
Rathindranath in 1958. Tagore himself wrote famously, while reviewing a biog-
raphy of Tennyson in 1902, that you cannot find a poet in his life-story. The
comment appears as a kind of motto on the jacket of the latest Bengali biogra-
phy of Tagore, a work in progress. The biographer, Prashanta Kumar Paul, has
so far produced six densely-printed volumes, and, as of writing, has reached
only 1913 114. A colossus such as Rabindranath Tagore deserves no less. But a
biographer of Tagore writing in English must have a different readership in
mind, somewhat as Tagore himself did when he translated his works into
INTRODUCTION 15
English. One can aim primarily at non-Indians, or at Indians who are not
Bengalis, or at the large number of Bengalis who like to read seriously in
English. What one cannot do is to give equal attention to the interests of all
three groups. We have therefore had to make a choice. This book is for non-
Indians, for Indians who are not Bengalis, and for Bengalis - in that order.
There have been many biographies of Tagore in English. However, only two
are generally regarded as significant. The first, by Edward J. Thompson, a
Wesleyan missionary in Bengal, later lecturer in Bengali at Oxford University,
appeared in England in 1926, was revised in the mid-1940s, and was repub-
lished in India in 1991. Entitled Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist, it is
essentially a critical study of the poems and plays. Enlivened by interviews with
Tagore, quotations from his letters, some good translations and brilliant aperfus
from the author (who was a poet), it is vitiated by Thompson's focus on the least
translatable portion of Tagore's writings (i.e. poems and plays), his desire to
discuss every major work regardless of his own preferences, and by an element
of cultural blindness that allowed him to propose, in all sincerity, that
'European music may yet do for Indian music' what European literature had
unquestionably done for modern Bengali literature. As E. P. Thompson aptly
wrote in 1993, his father's book took shape within 'an extraordinary flux of neg-
ative and positive feelings'.
The second book, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biograpky, by Krishna Kripalani,
who worked with Tagore in the 1930s and married his granddaughter, first
appeared in England and the United States in 1962, and was revised and repub-
lished in Bengal in 1980. Though it connects Tagore's life with his literary and
artistic creations (which Thompson's book barely does), the primary focus
remains the oeuvre rather than the life. Here it can be useful. But the book has
two fundamental weaknesses, besides factual errors: a tendency to deify Tagore,
and a glorification of Indian nationalism typical of the immediate post-
Independence years in India. According to its introduction, Tagore's 'personal
life was as ,harmonious and noble as his verse is simple and beautiful.' This is
both misleading and grotesque (besides being sanctimonious); Kripalani, as a
member of Tagore's immediate circle, must have been acutely aware of the fal-
sity but too loyal to admit the truth.
Our primary focus is the man, not the oeuvre, We discuss Tagore's writings
and other artistic works frequently, occasionally extensively - but only in so far
as they illuminate his state of mind from year to year, month to month, some-
times day to day. We quote substantially only where we ourselves enjoy the work
in translation. We omit numerous works that a longer book would no doubt
have included. It is Tagore's personality - a favourite word of his - in all its
'myriad-mindedness' (Oxford's fine word when giving Tagore a degree in
16 RABINDRANATH TAGORE

1940), that intrigues us as biographers; not his works per se, and certainly not
his relics. As so often with Tagore, he has himself encapsulated our feelings:

Ordinarily research scholars seem to ignore the fact that the past is of inter-
est to us only in so far as it was living and that unless they discover it for us in 1 The Tagores and 'Prince' Dwarkanath
such a way as to make us feel its life, we may admire them for their patience
and industry but will not be the wiser for their labours. I have often felt sad
that so much human talent and industry should disappear in the publication
of matter where bones keep on rattling without forming for us an outline of
the figure that once moved.
London, December 1993

'Iwas born in what was once the metropolis of British India,' Rabindranath
Tagore told an audience at Oxford University in 1930, when he was almost
seventy years old.

My ancestors came floating to Calcutta upon the earliest tide of the fluctuat-
ing fortune of the East India Company. The unconventional code of life for
our family has been a confluence of three cultures, Hindu, Mohammedan
and British. My grandfather belonged to that period when amplitude of
dress and courtesy and a generous leisure were gradually being clipped and
curtailed into Victorian manners ... I came to a world in which the modern
city-bred spirit of progress had just triumphed over the lush green life of our
ancient village community. Though the trampling process was almost com-
plete ... , something of the past lingered over the wreckage.

The Tagore family was always Hindu, but at the edge of the Hindu pale from
the start of their recorded history. Like some other well-known families of
Calcutta, they claim descent from five orthodox Brahmins said to have been
invited into Bengal by a Hindu king after he had taken Bengal from a Buddhist
ruler, possibly around AD 1000. But unlike these other families, the Tagores
became tainted by contact with Muslims - or so goes the most widely accepted
story of their ancestry.
It all began with a joke, some time in the fifteenth century when the Delhi
Sultanate controlled Bengal, before the rise of the Mughals. During Ramadan,
when Muslims fast, two brothers, Brahmins, were sitting in the court of
Mohammed Tahir Pir Ali, the vizier of the governor of Jessore. (Tessore lies
roughly half-way between Calcutta and Dhaka, and is now in Bangladesh.) Pir