Rabindranath Tagore was a great poet, writer and philosopher. His works popularized Indian cultural thoughts in many parts of the world. He is the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize. Though famous as a poet, he also wrote novels, short stories, dramas, articles, essays and was a painter too. His songs, known as Rabindrasangeet are very popular in Bengal. He was a social reformer, patriot and humanitarian.
Tagorewas bornin 1861into a wealthy family in Calcutta. He was the ninthson of Debenadranath and Sarada Devi. (Rajaji, it is said, used to cite this fact in jocular opposition to family planning!) Though he went to some schools, he never liked conventional methods of learning. After sometime, he went to the University College in England. His first book of poems was ftabiftahini(tale of a poet) published in 1878. In 1882, he wrote Sandhya Sangeet. He married Bhabatarini Devi in 1883. Chitrangada was his famous dance drama. In 1901 he took the editorial charge of the magazine Bangadarshan and joined the freedom movement. He strongly protested Lord Curzon’s decision to divide Bengal on the basis of religion. He wrote several national songs and joined protests. He introduced the Rakhibandhan ceremony, symbolizing the underlying unity in undivided Bengal.
In 1912, he went to Europe again. On way to London he translated some poems from Gitanjali into English. He gave them to William Rothenstein, a noted British painter, who passed those onto Yeats and other English poets. India Society of London published Gitanjali (song offerings) containing 103 translated poems of Tagore. Yeats wrote the introduction for this book and Rothenstein did a pencil sketch for the cover page. The book created a sensation in English literary world. From England, Tagore went on a lecture tour of America. In November of 1913, the Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to Tagore for Gitanjali. He received Knighthood in 1915.
Tagore toured extensively in the country, delivering lectures and enthusing people. In 1919, he wrote a historic letter to Lord Chelmsford repudiating his Knighthood in protest against the massacre at Jalianwalabag, Punjab. In 1920 he went to Gandhiji’s Sabarmati Ashram. He again went on tour to Europe. 1n 1921, he established Vishwabharati University. He gave all his money from Nobel Prize and royalty money from his books to this University. In 1940 Oxford University
arranged a special ceremony in Santiniketan to honour him with a Doctorate of Literature. Tagore passed away in August, 1941 in his ancestral home in Calcutta.
Rabindranath Tagore was essentially a poet and visionary with a cosmopolitan culture. His contributions to national life covered various aspects. Now, we will briefly outline the various facets of hiswork.
Tagore is the poet of modern India, conscious of her destiny and national culture. His poetry resonated ideas of national regeneration and hope.
Give me the strength never to disown the poor Or bend my knees before insolent might.
But his national philosophy is not sectarian or narrow-minded. He was aware of the insularity of the older phases of Indian tradition. He does not blow the national trumpet nor magnify the virtues of India and the vices of other countries. He feared that it will lead to jingoism.
The following long citation from his poem beautifully invokes his vision of independent India.
Where the mind iswithout fear andthe head is held high, Where knowledge is free,
Where the world has not been broken up by narrow domestic walls, Where words come out from the depth of truth,
Wherethe clearstreamof reason has not lost its way in the drearydesert sand of deadhabit, Wherethemindis ledforwardby Thee intoever-wideningthought andaction —
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake!
Tagore’s motto is: “cultivate the spirit of invincible optimism; believe in life; live worthy of life.”
Tagore was a social reformer. Having adopted the Brahmo Samaj, he and his family had broken away from caste, purdah and the spirit of religious insularity. He regards caste and nationality as incompatible with each other. While politics aims at national solidarity, caste creates endless distinctions. “A great national unification implies, therefore, a great revolt against caste trammels, a strong impulse towards reconciliation of conflicting interests, the mutualcomposing of differences, rhythmic heart-beats as the resultof engagingincommonpursuits as brothers,co-equals. In India,caste isthegreatestobstruction in thepathway of reform”.
In his essays and his lectures, Tagore dwelt on a remarkably wide variety of subjects–on politics, on culture, on society, on education. In an essay written on the 150th anniversary of Tagore, Amartya Sen probes into the decline of interest in Tagore in the west, and Tagore’s differences with Gandhiji. He traces the differences to Tagore’s attachment to open-minded reasoning and to human freedom. Tagore admired Gandhi immensely, often praised his leadership, and insisted that he be called “Mahatma”–the great soul.
But Tagore frequently disagreed with Gandhi in matters over the need for adhering to logic and reason. Gandhi used the catastrophic Bihar earthquake of 1934 that killed many to further his fight against untouchability. He called the earthquake as “a divine chastisement sent by God for our sins,” in particular the sin of untouchability. Tagore protested, insisting that “it is all the more unfortunate because this kind of unscientific view of phenomena is too readily accepted by a large section of our countrymen.”
Gandhi advocated that everyone should use the charka–the primitive spinning wheel–thirty minutes a day. Tagore opposed this injunction. He disagreed with Gandhian economics. Tagore thought that in general modern technology reduced human drudgery and poverty. Nehru shared similar views. Tagore deprecated the spiritual argument for the spinning wheel: “The charka does not require anyone to think; one simply turns the wheel of the antiquated invention endlessly, using the minimum of judgment and stamina.”
According to Amartya Sen, Gandhi advocated, in the words of Thomas Malthus, ‘moral abstinence’ as the right method of birth control. Tagore championed family planning through preventive methods. Tagore was also concerned that Gandhi had “a horror of sex as great as that of the author of “The Kreutzer Sonata”.” And the two differed sharply on the role of modern medicine, which Gandhi distrusted. We should see such differences as arising from divergent world views.
TagorebecamefamousintheWest only as a romanticanda spiritualist.But hiswritingsconsistently emphasised the necessity of critical reasoning and of human freedom. These views guided Tagore’s ideas on education, including his insistence that education is the most important element in the development of a country. In his assessment of Japan’s economic development, he singled out the critical role of the advancement of school education. He observed that “the imposing tower of misery which today rests on the heart of India has its sole foundation in the absence of education.” He considered the transformative role of education as the central story in the development process.
Tagore devoted much of his life to advancing education in India and spreading it everywhere. Nothing absorbed as much of his time as the school in Santiniketan that he established. He was constantly raising money for this unusually progressive co-educational school. In his distinctive view of education, Tagore particularly emphasised the need for gathering knowledge from everywhere inthe world,and assessing it only by reasoned scrutiny. Students in Santiniketanweretaught about Europe, Africa, the USA, and Latin America, and other countries in Asia. Santiniketan had the first institute of Chinese studies in India; Judo was taught there hundred years ago.
Tagoreopposedthe religiousandcommunal thinkingthat wasgettingstrong.Hewasshocked by the violence provoked by the championing of a singular identity of people as members of one religion or another. He believed that determined extremists sow seeds of discord among common people: “interested groups led by ambition and outside instigation are today using the communal motive for destructive political ends.” Of course, some political scientists like Samuel Huntington now see the contemporary world as a “clash of civilizations” with “Muslim civilization,” “Hindu civilization,”
and “Western civilization,” defined largely on religiousgrounds, vehemently confronting eachother. Tagore was born into a family of wide culture, and “his reliance on reasoning and his emphasis on human freedom militated against a separatist and parochial understanding of social divisions”.
While he denied altogether the legitimacy of the Raj, Tagore was vocal in pointing out what Indians had gained from “discussions centred upon Shakespeare’s drama and Byron’s poetry and above all the large-hearted liberalism of nineteenth-century English politics.” The tragedy, as
Tagore saw it, came from the fact that what “was truly best in their own civilization, the upholding of dignity of human relationships, has no place in the British administration of this country.”
Tagore is undoubtedly a great poetic genius. His thoughts and values greatly influenced national leaders. From his perspectives, he sometimes differed from them. There is certain sublimity and nobility about his thought. But this created a sense of remoteness from everyday realities, particularly in political and social sphere. The setting of his thoughts seems too idealistic and abstract. Bertrand Russell rather uncharitably wrote that he did not like Tagore’s “mystic air,” with an inclination to spout “vague nonsense,” adding that the “sort of language that is admired by many Indians unfortunately doesnot, in fact,mean anything at all.” Russell was a hard–nosedanalytical philosopher. ‘Nonsense’ here is not too offensive; in philosophy, meaningless propositions are called nonsensical. As we saw, philosophers like Ayer consider literary propositions as meaningless in a logical sense.
Tagore was also at times criticized for underplaying the political aspects of independence struggle. For example, he commented that India’s problems are social than political. His moderate approaches to patriotism and his cosmopolitanism were sometimes misunderstood. These in no way detract from the great beauty of his poetry and the charm of its ideas. We close with this poem about God with its undercurrent of humanism and compassion:
Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads!
Whom do youworship in this lonely dark corner of a templewithdoors all shut?
Open your eyes and see your God is notbeforeyou!
He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the path maker is breaking stones.
He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust.