Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali Rabindranāth Ṭhākur; 7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) was a Bengali poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, composer, painter, educator and philosopher — the dominant figure of modern Bengali culture and one of the most versatile creative artists of the twentieth century. In 1913 he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, for Gitanjali (“Song Offerings”). He wrote some 2,000 songs (Rabindra Sangeet), including the national anthems of India and Bangladesh; novels such as Gora, The Home and the World and Chokher Bali; more than ninety short stories; plays such as The Post Office; and essays on religion, education, politics and culture. He founded a school and later a university, Visva-Bharati, at Santiniketan, as a meeting place of the world’s cultures. His philosophy — a humanist reinterpretation of the The Upaniṣads, in which the infinite is realised in the finite, God in human creativity and love — made him a sage to his contemporaries in India and abroad; his critique of nationalism and his debates with Gandhi and Einstein remain classics of modern thought.

Life

Jorasanko

Tagore was born in Calcutta at Jorasanko, the mansion of one of the richest and most cultured families of Bengal. His grandfather Dwarkanath Tagore was a merchant prince; his father Debendranath Tagore was a leader of the Brahmo Samāj, the reformed Hindu movement that worshipped a formless God on the basis of the Upaniṣads. Rabindranath, the youngest of thirteen surviving children, grew up in a household full of music, theatre, literature and debate; his siblings included the first Indian member of the Indian Civil Service, a philosopher, a novelist and a composer. He hated school and was educated mostly at home. He began writing poetry at eight and published his first collection at sixteen, under the pseudonym “Bhānusiṃha”, in imitation of medieval Vaiṣṇava poets. He studied briefly in England (1878–80).

Shilaidaha and Santiniketan

In the 1890s he managed the family estates at Shilaidaha in East Bengal, travelling on a houseboat on the Padma river among the peasants and fishermen, an experience that gave him the material of his greatest short stories (Galpaguchchha) and a lifelong concern for rural reconstruction. In 1901 he founded a school at Santiniketan (“abode of peace”), his father’s ashram in rural Bengal, where children were taught outdoors under the trees, through nature, music, art and freedom. Between 1902 and 1907 he lost his wife, a daughter, his father and his youngest son; grief deepened his poetry.

The Nobel Prize

In 1912 he translated some of his Bengali devotional poems into English prose and took them to London, where they were read by the painter William Rothenstein, the poet W. B. Yeats — who wrote an enthusiastic introduction — and Ezra Pound. Gitanjali: Song Offerings was published by the India Society in 1912 and won the Nobel Prize in 1913. Tagore became a world celebrity, lecturing in Europe, America, Japan, China and Latin America.

Against nationalism

During the First World War he lectured in Japan and America against nationalism (Nationalism, 1917), arguing that the modern nation-state was “organised selfishness”, a machine of commerce and war that destroyed the human spirit; he urged Japan not to imitate the West. In 1919, after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, he renounced the knighthood he had been given in 1915. In 1921 he founded Visva-Bharati university, with the motto “where the world makes a home in a single nest” (yatra viśvaṃ bhavatyekanīḍam).

Last years

In his sixties he took up painting, producing some 2,500 works, exhibited in Paris, Berlin and Moscow. His last years were darkened by the rise of fascism and the coming of war. His final essay, Crisis in Civilization (1941), condemned British rule and European civilisation, but ended with hope: “I shall not commit the grievous sin of losing faith in Man.” He died at Jorasanko on 7 August 1941.

Thought

The religion of man

Tagore’s philosophy, set out in Sādhanā (1913), Personality (1917) and The Religion of Man (his Hibbert Lectures at Oxford, 1930), is a humanist reading of the Upaniṣads. Brahman is not to be found by renouncing the world but by realising the infinite in the finite: in nature, in love, in human creativity and relationships. “Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight” (Naivedya). God is the “Supreme Person” whose joy is expressed in creation and in whom human personality finds its fulfilment; humanity itself is divine in its striving for truth, beauty and goodness. He called this “the religion of man”. He was close to the Bāuls, the wandering minstrels of Bengal, whose songs of the “man of the heart” (maner mānuṣ) he collected and loved.

Tagore and Einstein

In July 1930 Tagore met Albert Einstein in Berlin. Their recorded conversation turned on the nature of truth. Einstein held that truth is independent of human beings: “I cannot prove that my conception is right, but that is my religion.” Tagore argued that truth, and beauty, are realised only through the human mind: “This world is a human world… If there be some truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings.” Einstein replied: “Then I am more religious than you are!”

Tagore and Gandhi

Tagore admired Mahatma Gandhi — it was Tagore who popularised the title “Mahatma” — but disagreed with him publicly. He criticised the non-cooperation movement for its negativity, the burning of foreign cloth as destructive, the charkhā as a mindless cult that could not solve India’s problems, and Gandhi’s claim that the 1934 Bihar earthquake was divine punishment for untouchability as superstition. Gandhi answered with respect. Their exchanges (1915–41) are among the great dialogues of modern India.

Education

At Santiniketan, Tagore tried to create an education in freedom, close to nature, rich in arts, and open to the world. “The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.”

Works

• Poetry: Mānasī (1890), Sonār Tarī (1894), Gītāñjali (Bengali, 1910), Balākā (1916), Punaśca (1932), Śeṣ Lekhā (1941).
• Songs: over 2,000, setting his own words; Rabindra Sangeet is a genre of its own, central to Bengali culture. “Ekla chalo re” — “If no one answers your call, walk alone” — was Gandhi’s favourite.
• Novels: Chokher Bāli (1903), Gorā (1910), Ghare Bāire (The Home and the World, 1916, filmed by Satyajit Ray), Śeṣer Kabitā (1929).
• Short stories: “The Postmaster”, “Kabuliwala”, “Hungry Stones”, “The Living and the Dead” — the founding works of the Bengali short story.
• Plays: Dākghar (The Post Office, 1912), staged by Janusz Korczak with the orphans of the Warsaw ghetto in 1942, shortly before they were sent to Treblinka; Raktakarabī (Red Oleanders).
• Essays: Nationalism (1917), The Religion of Man (1931), Crisis in Civilization (1941).

Legacy

Tagore transformed Bengali literature and music and is revered in Bengal on both sides of the border as no other writer is in India; his birthday, Pochishe Boishakh, is a festival. His songs are sung daily; his anthem opens every Indian public occasion. Abroad, his reputation, after the enthusiasm of 1913, declined as the mystical sage of Yeats’s introduction faded; it has been revived by better translations and by readers like Amartya Sen, who studied at Santiniketan and has championed Tagore’s reasoned humanism and anti-nationalism.

Tagore in conversation

“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high… into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake” — the most quoted poem of modern India. And for anyone standing alone for something: ekla chalo re — walk alone.