Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

 

Rabindranath Tagore

(1861-1941)

 

Tagore was a many- sided genius and a source of inspiration to millions of modern India. He was a prolific writer and a pioneer in many fields. He was a poet, dramatist, actor and producer; he was a musician and a painter; he was an educationist, a practical idealist who turned his dreams into reality at Shanti Niketan; he was a social reformer, philosopher, prophet of a new age and a planner of rural reconstruction; he was a nationalist, education theorist and experimenter; he was a novelist and short story writer and a critic of literature; he even made occasional incursions into national politics but remained essentially an internationalist; he was an integral whole , the Rishi , the Gurudeva as Gandhiji called him. Tagore’s active literary career was spread over a period of sixty-five years. Probably he wrote the lyrics and songs which continue to be sung to this day wherever Bengali is spoken. He wrote and travelled and lectured untiringly. He is an outstanding name in modern Indian literature in English as he was the one who first gained for modern Indian a place on the world literary scenario.

Rabindranath Tagore, the youngest of seven sons of Maharshi Debendra Nath, was born on 6th May, 1861 in the ancestral mansion, Jorasanko in central Calcutta. He was surrounded by affluence and aristocratic culture and hardly could spend any time with his mother who was busy looking after a huge family. Under his father’s instruction the children led a rather Spartan life. In the due course he was sent to a school but the formal education did not suit him and in the end, he became a drop out. He enjoyed the literary inheritance of Madhusudan, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, and Bankim Chandra who were his forerunners. In such creative atmosphere he could breathe an air of hope and infinite possibility.

As a child he was drawn to Bengali Vaishnava singers and to Indian devotional poetry in general. At the age of fifteen or earlier he began writing, and by 1875 his first efforts in prose and poetry began to appear in print. He had written about 7,000 lines of verse before he was eighteen. During his visit to England, he was deeply influenced by the Romantic poets – Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth – and the great Victorians, Tennyson and Browning. He also admired Shakespeare.

On December 9, 1883, Tagore was married to Mrinalini Devi Raichaudhari, the daughter of one of the junior officers of the family estate. He had two sons and three daughters. For some times Tagore worked as a secretary of Brahmo Samaj. Rabindranath was an effective landlord besides being the lord of poetry also.

In 1883 he stared writing plays and at the same time he identified himself with the national movement but he was too individualist to follow any orthodox path. Often, he retired to Shanti Niketan, which owed its origins to Tagore’s father, the Maharshi, for literary creativity, education and meditation. Later on, the place became the focal center of a new experiment in living, where the culture of the East and the West bridged the dichotomy. He recommended that the “deep association” and cooperation, rather than segregation, is the answer the existing serious problems. In 1890 Tagore moved to East Bengal (now Bangladesh) and it was the most productive period of his life. In 1902 Tagore founded a school outside Calcutta, Visvabharti, which was dedicated to emerging Western and India philosophy and education. It became a university in 1921. Unfortunately, Tagore’s wife died in 1902, next year one of his daughters died and in 1907 he lost his younger son.

However, at fifty Tagore had already a surprising output to his credit – poems, novels, short stories, a history of India, text books and treatises on pedagogy. The masses had accepted him as a bard, a national poet as the commemoration meeting held in Calcutta on 28th Jan. 1912 proved. At this juncture Tagore started translating his own lyrics into English. His translation soon captured the attention of various scholars in England and all this facilitated the publication of Gitanjali in 1912 with W.B. Yeats’ memorable Introduction. The news did not come altogether as a surprise. He is reported to have said: “I shall never have peace again. …The bird in the nest has found his sky.”

In Nov. 1913, Tagore returned to India to Shanti Niketan and heard the news of the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to him. In Shanti Niketan and Sri Niketan, harmony was the keynote of all the activities. These institutions later grew to be the Visvabharti University where the international team of dedicated scholars attempted to create an environment totally congenial to enact the drama of human unity and humane understanding. He did not involve himself intimately with the political currents in India. Whenever the political climate bothered him, he returned to this place for the cultivation of the inner spiritual solace. The phenomenal success of Gitanjali encouraged him to bring out more volumes of English translation and even some original writing in English, for example, Poems, The Crescent Moon, The Gardener, Fruit-Gathering, Lover’s Gift, Crossing, The Fugitive and Other Poems etc. and many plays. He left behind an immense mass of prose writing in Bengali as well as in English. There are the novels and short stories, lectures and essays on a variety of subjects.

Between 1916 and 1934, Tagore travelled widely. In 1919, following the Amritsar massacre of 400 Indian demonstrators by the British troops, Tagore renounced his Knighthood conferred on him in 1915 by the British King George V. He visited England again in 1920. It was an ill-timed visit because of his rejection of then Knighthood. He went over to Paris, where he met Bergson and others. He lectured in Netherland but when he reached America there was studied indifference everywhere. Things improved when, on the way back, he visited Switzerland. He had a splendid welcome in Germany where his sixtieth birthday was celebrated with fanfare. In Copenhagen, he was greeted with a torchlight procession. Though he enjoyed extensive travelling and meeting people but his mind was on other things as well. He was deeply concerned with the increasing dehumanization of life in an industrial society based on a manipulation of resources, human and non-human. Tagore was on the side of Life and Nature.

Meanwhile an invitation to China was accepted. This helped Tagore to open up the closed cultural contacts between the two countries. Soon after he had to visit Peru to participate in its Independence Day celebrations but due to sudden illness he could not participate in the function. In May 1925 Mahatma Gandhi came to Shanti Niketan and then two Italian scholars visited bearing the gifts from Signor Mussolini. Tagore became delighted that his institution was becoming International and he acknowledged the gifts. He was busy delivering lectures and visiting places like Dacca, Italy, England, Norway and Germany. When he returned to India in December 1926, the communal riots loomed large. Tagore had often toyed with the idea of renewing India’s lost cultural contact with the Far East so he visited Singapore, Malaya, Java, Borneo, Sumatra and Indonesia. An invitation by the National Council of Education took him to Canada, where he spoke on “The Philosophy of Leisure.” Due to health problem his lecture at Oxford was postponed but he had taken up a new hobby that is painting. He participated in an exhibition in Paris and then in Berlin. The Russian Government had invited him along with a group of people and was much impressed by the progress of education and cooperatives.

After a short visit to America, where his paintings were exhibited in New York, he came back to India. His seventieth birthday was held throughout the country despite the fact that the national scene looked bleak as the Second Round Table Conference had ended in smoke, Gandhi was arrested. Personal tragedy of his only grandson’s death in Germany was a hard blow. Lecture tours and writing novels and poetry persisted despite the losses and shocks. In April 1940 Gandhi came to Shanti Niketan and Tagore pleaded for the preservation of Vishwa-Bharti. On August 7, the Oxford University conferred on him the degree of D.Litt. at Shanti Niketan itself. For the next few months, he was bedridden still the writings continued because he kept faith till the end and stated “I shall not commit the grievous sin of losing faith in Man.” Only hours before he passed away on August 7, 1941, he dictated his last poem.

Tagore’s Concept of Art and Poetry

Tagore wrote over one thousand poems, eight volumes of short stories, almost two dozen plays and playlets, eight novels, and many books and essays on philosophy, religion, education and social topics. Besides, he loved Bengali music immensely. He composed more than two thousand songs and lyrics. Two of them became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. In 1920 he even began painting. Many of his paintings can be seen in the museums today, especially in India where he is considered the greatest figure of all times. It is enough to prove that Tagore was a renaissance man who is known throughout the world as the poet of Gitanjali. Its English translation done by Tagore himself with an Introduction by W.B. Yeats was brought out in 1912. It is the English translation of Gitanjali that won him the prestigious Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. Precisely speaking it is a collection of songs Tagore composed between 1907 and 1910. The English translation is not literal and comprehensive. Besides many poems of original Bengali Gitanjali, it has several lyrics from Naivedya Kheya and Gitmalya.

On casual reading Gitanjali appears to lack organic unity and the songs tend to be independent poems. However, in the songs there is a sustained emotional, thematic unity like the sonnets of Shakespeare and that lends a note of integrity to the text. Tagore combined the traditional poetic culture with western ideas. So much so that he earned the epitaph of “The Bengali Shelley.” Like the Romantics he wrote in the common language of the people – something could not be easily accepted among the Indian critics and scholars.

Tagore expounded his views on art and poetry in his lectures on philosophy and art published under the titles Sadhana, The Religion of an Artist, Lectures and Addresses, The Religion of Man, Personality, Creative Unity and Nationalism. He attributed high concept of aims and functions of art and poetry and in this respect he stands with the great poets and critics like Longinus, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Mathew Arnold. Besides, the Upanishads and the Sanskrit poetics influenced him greatly and he cherished a belief that art should aim at realizing a relation between the world and the soul. He said that “art is the response of man’s creative soul to the call of the Real.” The realization of harmony, of feeling of oneness with the eternal is accomplished through personality and man’s personality finds powerful expression in art and poetry. Hence the content it expresses is emotionally tinged and it enriches human life by sublimating or illuminating feeling. In this sense poetry leads us to higher and healthier ways than those of the world, and interprets to us the moods of nature and the mystery of God.

Tagore rejects the concept of art for art’s sake and believes that the aim of art is to bring to light the ultimate reality. He repeatedly asserts that harmony which is the soul of poetry deals with truth by establishing an emotional relationship with it. In other words, Tagore emphasized that poetry reveals the poetic truth which is not the mass of material like the truth of science but lies in the universal relatedness. Man has “a fund of emotional energy” and poetry enables him and emancipates his soul from materialism which militates against beauty and goodness and creates harmony between man and ultimate reality.

In “The Religion of an Artist” Tagore remarks: “Life is perpetually creative because it contains in itself that surplus which ever overflows the boundaries of the immediate time and space, restlessly pursuing its adventure of expression in varied forms of self-realization.” Thus, the poet or the artist reveals himself and not his objects, and the reality consists not in facts but in the harmony of facts which tends to be the source of joy. Tagore believed that poetry, like other fine arts, is communication. The experience, which lived in the mind of the author, must live again in the mind of the reader. The whole experience must be given, transplanted from one mind to another. In this sense, the poet expresses his personality which is the sum of his integrated emotions and ideas. This further means that in poetry “thought and art” are one.

According to Tagore, imagination plays a cardinal role in exhibiting truly the Reality by combing the sensuous and the spiritual, the finite and the infinite, the particular and the universal in the poet’s consciousness. In a way the poet realizes through his art “his own extension.” His views on poetry are conspicuously marked with sublimity and deep human concerns as the poet has to reveal to man the ultimate truths about life and the world, and has to emancipate him from dogma and from reasoning so that he can see the beauty of human heart.

Tagore points out in his book, Personality, that “enjoyment is the essence of literature.” Therefore “A poet is a true poet when he can make his personal idea joyful to all men.” It is the “picture” or the visual imagery and “music” which the poet uses through language to add joy to experience. In his concept of joy, he seems to have been influenced by the Upanishads and aimed to achieve something beyond joy through poetry. Tagore was deeply immersed with the idea of art as form which includes proportion, rhythm, and unity of various elements. He says: “The rhythm of Beauty is the inner spirit, whose outer body is social organization.” Defining rhythm Tagore writes in “The Religion of an Artist”: What is rhythm? It is the movement generated and regulated by harmonious restriction. This is the creative force in the hand of the artist. So long as words remain in uncadenced prose form they do not give any lasting feeling of reality. The moment they are taken and put into rhythm they vibrate into a radiance. It is the same with a rose… The rose appears to me to be still, but because of its meter of composition it has a lyric of movement within that stillness which is the same as the dynamic quality of a picture that has perfect harmony. Without rhythm and unity art would be meaningless even if it achieves harmony of parts. Rhythm reveals in art the universal quality, the mantric power which conveys the emotional atmosphere, without which experience cannot live. About meter Tagore remarked: Meter alone does not make poetry. The essence of poetry lies in delight it gives. Meter is an aid to it and introduces us to the knowledge of it. It is a firm faith of Tagore that like all arts poetry is related with life and world. It reveals great thoughts, universal truths and communicates the message of the Divine. Its aim is to impart “knowledge through emotions” which are purged of the personal bias. They become the glorious heritage of mankind as he affirms in Personality: The artist finds out the unique, the individual, which is yet in the heart of the universal.

Tagore: A Poet of Western Romantic and Eastern Mystical Tradition

Tagore is, in many ways, influenced by the romantic tradition of the West. The most significant aspect of romanticism, particularly that of early nineteenth – century English literature, is a new and intense faith in the imagination. This is as true of Rabindranath Tagore as of Wordsworth and Coleridge, or Tennyson and Browning. The recorded fact that Rabindranath, as a young man was especially fond of Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley and Browning, lends weight to this literary assumption.

Although romanticism in Tagore is not purely a product of the impact of English poets, it is actually a combination of many diverse elements of the East and the West. Many particular as well as general elements of romanticism forge the link between Tagore and nineteenth century British romantic poets. Rabindranath and the romantic poets turned away from reason to imagination and intuition. Rabindranath’s romantic imagination does not dwell upon the mundane, banal actualities of existence, but as in Blake and Bridges, on the visions of the mysterious universe and the Creator. Rabindranath, in his passionate search for the divine life, expresses the Devotee’s intense experiences of pain, perplexity, and joy.

In portraying a harmonious and joyous relationship between Man and nature, in relying upon the authenticity of intuition rather than reason or sense-impression, in mystically visualizing the essential unity in the midst of diversity, and in the divine spirit that “rolls through all things”. Wordsworth displays a greater affinity of spirit with Rabindranath than any other English poet.

The oriental mystic thinks that the world is all Maya and illusion, and tries to pierce through this deceptive curtain and look beyond into the transcendental reality. Tagore’s understanding of this reality, of our transcendental union with the eternal and divine being, apart from its specific Eastern element, bears a close resemblance to Wordsworth’s perception of the divine. Rabindranath, like Keats, was not content with merely expressing the accepted moral truths. His contemplative imagination discerned truth in beauty. Rabindranath in his lecture on “The Sense of Beauty” actually quotes Keats in expounding his own ideas regarding the relationship of Truth and Beauty.

Rabindranath, in Gitanjali and several other poems has sung of the relationship between our being and infinitude. In Gitanjali, Rabindranath writes:

“He (God) is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the path-maker is breaking the stones. He is with them in sun and shower, and his garment is covered with dust…...Meet him and stand by him in toil and in the sweat of thy brow.”

If in his mystical rendering of the transcendental unity, Rabindranath recalls the ideas poetically expressed by Wordsworth, in his passionate singing of and devotion to the idea of liberty he shows an affinity of spirit with Shelley and Byron. Although Tagore does not clearly attempt to fit the doctrines of evolution and other scientific ideas into his transcendental scheme, as Walt Whitman does, he nevertheless comes close to Whitman in expressing his impatience with the stark and bare facts of science. Tagore reveals his sense of impatience with the dry details of astronomy by quoting Walt Whitman’s well-known poem “When I heard the learned astronomer.” His comments on Whitman’s poem clearly indicate his relationship with the spirit of the great American poet. Tagore writes: “The prosody of the stars can be explained in the classroom by diagrams, but the poetry of the stars is in the silent meeting of soul with soul….” The affinity of the spirit between Walt Whitman and Tagore strikes a much deeper note. Whitman is a singer and prophet of American democracy while Tagore is the singer of Indian Renaissance and of his country’s political fate. For instance, Tagore wrote a number of poems inspired by the threat of partition of Bengal in 1905-09.

It is pertinent to note that Romanticism in Rabindranath is observed in moving away from impersonal objectivity to an inwardly-felt individuality, from the old Sanskrit classical order to the new notion of intensity, from a self-conscious creative originality, from prosaic directness in expression to myth, image and symbol. As a poet Tagore sets for himself a definite objective, that is, to sing about the tremendous mystical experiences of the sages. These experiences, which can have no rational claims, and cannot be logically understood, have an irresistible appeal for him essentially because of the unique similarity between the sensibilities of the ancient sages and that of the poet who acknowledges that “in the depth of my unconsciousness rings the cry I want thee, only thee.” In Gitanjali he says:

“When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant my prayer that I may never lose touch of the one in the play of the many.”

Much of Tagore’s ideology came from the teaching of the Upanishads and his own beliefs that God can be found through personal purity and service to others. He stressed the need for new world order based on transnational values and ideas, and the faith in “the unity of consciousness.” Gitanjali is a great document of intuitive faith and reads like the Bhagwat Gita on the one hand and Psalms of the Old Testament on the other. It can be a synthesis of all that is best in the mystical experiences of the east and the west. As the biographical details confirm, the poet had heard the call of the “Ineffable Person” at a very young age and he took a vow to define the infinite possibilities of man and the innermost quest “to meet one day the life within.”, to unite with the “unbroken perfection.” Gitanjali’s first line is “Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure.”

Tagore was a pure poet and not a theorist who would formulate a rigid system to describe the mystical experiences which have for him a great emotive value. Unlike many mystics, who believe in the possibility of merging into the Absolute, Tagore always maintains a safe distance between “Thou and me.” He holds, “the Separative consciousness” in a song of Gitanjali where he had “caught sight of him that is /formless.” He listens to his “master” in utter amazement and calls Him “Life of my Life” in IV song and “my only friend, my best beloved” in song XXII. The series of songs in Gitanjali reverberate with such mystical experiences. Ultimately, he says in song XXXIV: “I am /bound with thy will, and thy purpose is carried out in / my life – and that is the fetter of thy love.”

He openly declares: “I will never shut the door of my senses.” Because “The delights of sight and hearing and touch will beat thy delight.” (LXXIII) Once this experience is attained, even the outer world unfolds new meanings. The whole world becomes “the open letter of Lord.” These experiences cannot be defined rationally or appreciated logically. Hence, he uses the expositions “I know not,” “I feel.”

The experiences through the senses gradually intensify the poet’s inner awakening. His expanded self includes life of all kinds outside self, of all emotional states, all conditions and situations and excludes nothing. Hence, the cry: “my king, thus didst press the signet of eternity upon many a feeling /moment of my life.” He perceives that the Universal life-spirit reflects in all the creation – near or far and “death dies in a burst of splendour, “as he says in XXXIV song of Fruit-Gathering. On such moments Tagore bows in his “silent salutation to thee” comprehending fully and distinctly that “From the words of the poet men take what meanings /please them; yet their lasting meaning points to thee.”

Thus, Romanticism in his work is related to his Vaishnava faith; he adheres to the doctrine of Bhakti; his intuitional awareness of the Divine, his mysticism, his idealism and his intense love of liberty. His poetry swings between two poles – a towering, rich, ennobling imagination and a deeply-felt, intense experience. The high, majestic quality of his imagination combined with his intense personal awareness and experience makes him a dreamer of dreams as well as a realistic champion of humanistic values. He is one of those great poets who not only visualized a kingdom of heaven above common humanity, but also transformed this kingdom of earth into a genuinely blissful place.