May 8, 2007
May 9 is Tagore's 146th birth anniversary
Rabindranath Tagore
His Work Will Live for Generations
If
one individual is to be singled out for representing the values and
traditions of India from the ancient times to the modern age, it
cannot be any one other than Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941).
He was the one person who incorporated the wisdom of the past,
reflected in the spiritual and intellectual attainments of the Vedas
and the Upanishads. Yet, he was never so immersed in India's
seemingly other-worldly heritage, underlined in the philosophical
concept of the world being an illusion (maya), as to negate
rationalism. To use a cliché, he combined the best of both worlds.
Tagore scored in this respect over his other great contemporary,
Mahatma Gandhi, for the Mahatma placed a far greater emphasis on the
spirit of renunciation marking a rejection of the Western industrial
civilization.
To a large extent, it is this attitude extolling the 'simple living,
high thinking' outlook that is still favored in India, even if it is
not infrequently identified with hypocrisy.
Tagore set his face against such a rule of thumb approach to life if
only because his horizon was much wider than Gandhi's. He had no
time for Gandhi's rejection of European machines and preference for
primitive Indian ones like the 'charkha', or the spinning wheel.
"If a man is stunted by big machines", Tagore wrote, "the danger of
being stunted by small machines must not be lost sight of. The
charkha in its proper place can do no harm ... but where ... it is
in the wrong place, then the thread can only be spun at the cost of
a great deal of the mind itself. The man is no less valuable than
the cotton thread."
Poet, thinker, playwright, novelist, writer of short stories, dance
dramas and songs, painter and educationist - Tagore's versatility
was matched only by his genius. Truly, he was Gurudev, the epitome
of the preceptor idealized in Indian myths and folklore.
Not surprisingly, Gandhi bestowed the title on Tagore - an honor
that befits him even today - just as Tagore called Gandhi the
Mahatma, recognizing the sterling qualities of a saint in the
politician, who is embroiled in the heat and dust of quotidian
battles.
It was left to Nehru to say that although Tagore and Gandhi were
"entirely different from each other, and yet both of them (were)
typical of India, both in the long line of India's great men".
If Tagore's legacy remains as relevant today as it was in his time,
the reason is that he cherished certain ideals that have come to
distinguish India in the present-day world. Hence, perhaps, the
statues, busts and university chairs named after him which dot the
world.
The first and foremost concept of Indian nationhood that he lauded
was its inclusiveness. He recounts in one of his poems how the
streams of Aryans, non-Aryans, Sakas, Huns, Pathans, Mughals et al
have merged to give India its distinctive identity. It is not
impossible that he developed this concept from a study of his own
family, which he regarded as a product of the "confluence of three
cultures, Hindu, Mohammedan and British".
It is this ideal of an integrated and vibrant multicultural society,
a rainbow nation, which India holds up today as the only valid model
which can ensure the survival and advancement of all. Otherwise, the
so-called civilizational clashes between ethnic, religious and
linguistic groups will tear the world apart.
It is perhaps just as well that the great man died before India
itself fell prey in 1947 to one such murderous conflict based on
religion. And, then, the broken nation saw another divisive conflict
in 1971 based on language and sub-nationalism, which led to the
creation of Bangladesh.
Tagore would probably have been even more mortified by the second
rupture because he came from that part of the subcontinent - East
Bengal. In his time, he witnessed the colonial rulers partition
Bengal in 1905, a traumatic upheaval for his Sonar Bangla.
Fittingly, it is his song of love and reverence for the land where
he was born (Amar Sonar Bangla) which is now the national
anthem of Bangladesh.
Tagore recognized the seeds of the conflicts that tore apart India
in Gandhi's use of religious symbols, both Hindu and Muslim as in
the concept of Ram Rajya and the exhortation in favor of the
Caliphate. He was as opposed to Gandhi's love for "small machines",
with their numbing effect on the mind, as to his idealization of
religious emblems, which can exert an equally stifling impact on the
largely illiterate masses.
"I blamed Mahatmaji", Tagore wrote, "for exploiting (the) irrational
force of credulity in our people." While Gandhi defended the Hindu
idols, as the English clergyman and admirer of India C.F. Andrews
recalled, "believing the masses (to be) incapable of raising
themselves immediately to abstract ideals", Tagore could not "bear
to see the people eternally treated as a child".
Many will see Tagore's depiction of the crafty politician mouthing
nationalistic slogans to mobilize the credulous in his novel Gharey
Bairey as a mirror image of the present political scene, just as his
prescient vision that a revolution devours its own children, as in
Char Adhyay, will be appreciated today although it was written in
the context of the much-lionized anti-British revolutionaries and
anarchists of his time.
Tagore wasn't without his critics at home and abroad. Even while
accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, he referred to the
"calumnies and insults" he had received from his countrymen. The
West, too, lost its interest soon enough. Graham Greene thought in
1937 "I cannot believe that anyone but Mr Yeats can still take his
(Tagore's) poems very seriously". And Yeats himself had come to the
conclusion by then that Tagore wrote "sentimental rubbish".
Notwithstanding these ups and downs, as in the life of all
individuals, big and small, Tagore's thinking had a stamp of
modernity which can act as guideposts for India and the world - just
as his song, "Ekla Chalo Re" (walk alone), inspired Gandhi
during the communal violence of 1946-47.
And nowhere is Tagore's modern outlook more evident than in his
paintings, with their remarkable stark originality, quite in
contrast to the mellifluous nature of his verse. Perhaps more than
any other aspect of his vast artistic output, it is in his paintings
that apparently depict his real self - "I am by nature a savage" -
that Tagore will live for generations.
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If
one individual is to be singled out for representing the values and
traditions of India from the ancient times to the modern age, it
cannot be any one other than Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). 