Selected Poems (Tagore, Rabindranath) Read online

  About Tagore

  For fuller bibliographies, see the books by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson.

  Chatterjee, Bhabatosh, Rabindranath Tagore and Modern Sensibility (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  Chaudhuri, Nirad C., Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India 1921–1952 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1987), especially Book 2, Chapter 5, pp. 595–636: ‘Tagore; the lost great man of India’.

  Das Gupta, Uma (ed.), A Difficult Friendship: Letters of Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore 1913–1940 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (London: Bloomsbury, 1995; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996).

  Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson (eds.), Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore, with a foreword by Amartya Sen (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). A wide-ranging selection, combining English letters with letters translated from Bengali and with extensive notes and commentary; an essay on Tagore and Einstein by Dipankar Home and Andrew Robinson is included in an appendix.

  Dyson, Ketaki Kushari, In Your Blossoming Flower-Garden: Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria Ocampo (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1988).

  Fraser, Bashabi (ed.), The Geddes-Tagore Correspondence (Edinburgh: The Edinburgh Review 109, 2002; Kolkata: Visva-Bharati (The Tagore-Geddes Correspondence), 2004).

  Hogan, Patrick Colm and Lalita Pandit (eds.), Rabindranath Tagore: Universality and Tradition (Cranbury, NJ, London, UK and Mississauga, Ontario: Associated University Presses, 2003). Includes essays on Tagore and nationalism, education, science, Yeats, Satyajit Ray, Gora and Jane Austen, Janusz Korczak, etc.

  Kripalani, Krishna, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (London: Oxford University Press, and New York: Grove Press, 1962; revised edn, Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1980).

  Kundu, Kalyan, Sakti Bhattacharya and Kalyan Sircar (eds.), Imagining Tagore: Rabindranath Tagore and the British Press (1912–1941) (Kolkata: Sahitya Samsad in collaboration with The Tagore Centre UK, 2000).

  Lago, Mary M. (ed.), Imperfect Encounter: Letters of William Rothenstein and Rabindranath Tagore 1911–1941 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972).

  Lago, Mary and Ronald Warwick (eds.), Rabindranath Tagore: Perspectives in Time (London: Macmillan, 1989). Includes essays on Tagore’s Western career, his short stories, his educational ideals, Tagore and Elmhirst, Tagore’s paintings, Tagore and Western composers, etc.

  O’Connell, Kathleen M., Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet as Educator (Kolkata: Visva-Bharati, 2002).

  Radice, William, Poetry and Community: Lectures and Essays 1991–2001 (New Delhi: DC Publishers, 2003). Includes essays on translating Tagore, and on Tagore and the Nobel Prize.

  Radice, William, ‘Rabindranath Tagore’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 53 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  Ray, Sibnarayan, From the Broken Nest to Visva-Bharati: Six Exploratory Essays on Rabindranath (Kolkata: Renaissance Publishers, 2001).

  Robinson, Andrew, The Art of Rabindranath Tagore, with a foreword by Satyajit Ray (London: André Deutsch, 1989).

  Sahitya Akademi (ed.), Rabindranath Tagore 1861–1961: A Centenary Volume (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1961, reprinted 1986). Introduction by Jawaharlal Nehru; memoirs by several of Tagore’s associates; essays on all aspects of Tagore’s life and work; essays on Tagore in other lands; bibliography of Tagore’s Bengali and English works (with dates); very useful chronicle of his life compiled by Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee (Tagore’s biographer in Bengali) and Kshitis Roy.

  Thompson, Edward, Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1926; second edn 1948; new edn with an introduction by Harish Trivedi, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989).

  Chronology

  1858

  The British Crown takes over the Government of India, following the Mutiny of 1857.

  1861

  Tagore born in Calcutta, in the family house at Jorasanko.

  1873

  Goes with his father Debendranath Tagore on a tour of the Western Himalayas.

  1875

  His mother dies.

  1877

  Starts to publish regularly in his family’s monthly journal, bhārati.

  1878

  First visit to England.

  1880

  His book sandhyá sangīt (Evening Songs) acclaimed by Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the leading writer of the day.

  1883

  Controversy over Lord Ripon’s Ilbert bill, to permit Indian judges to try Englishmen, intensifies antagonism between British and Indians. Tagore marries.

  1884

  His sister-in-law Kadambari commits suicide.

  1885

  First Indian National Congress meets at Bombay.

  1886

  Tagore’s daughter Madhurilata (Bela) born.

  1888

  His son Rathindranath born.

  1890

  His father puts him in charge of the family estates.

  Second, brief visit to England.

  Starts to write prolifically for a new family journal, sādhanā.

  1898

  Sedition Bill; arrest of Bal Gangadhar Tilak; Tagore reads his paper kantha-rodh (The Throttled) at a public meeting in Calcutta.

  1901

  Marriage of his elder daughters Bela and Renuka (Rani).

  Inauguration of the Santiniketan School.

  1902

  His wife dies.

  1903

  Rani dies.

  1904

  Satischandra Ray, his assistant at Santiniketan dies.

  1905

  svadeśī agitation against Lord Curzon’s proposal to partition Bengal, with Tagore playing a leading part.

  His father dies.

  1907

  His younger son Samindra dies.

  1908

  Thirty-five revolutionary conspirators in Bombay and Bengal arrested.

  1909

  Indian Councils Act, increasing power of provincial councils, attempts to meet Indian political aspirations.

  1910

  Bengali gitāñjali published.

  1912

  Third visit to England; first visit to America; publication of the English Gitanjali.

  1913

  Tagore awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  1914

  230,000 Indian troops join the first winter campaign of the Great War.

  1915

  Tagore’s first meeting with Gandhi.

  He receives a knighthood.

  1916

  Home Rule League formed by Annie Besant and B. G. Tilak.

  Tagore goes to Japan and the USA; lectures on Nationalism and Personality.

  1917

  E. S. Montagu, Secretary of State, declares the development of self-government in India to be official policy.

  Tagore reads his poem ‘India’s Prayer’ at the Indian National Congress in Calcutta.

  1918

  Rowlatt Act against Sedition provokes Gandhi’s first civil disobedience campaign.

  Tagore’s eldest daughter Bela dies.

  German-Indian Conspiracy Trial in San Francisco implicates him: he sends a telegram to President Wilson asking for protection ‘against such lying calumny’.

  1919

  Gen. Reginald Dyer’s Amritsar Massacre; Tagore returns his knighthood.

  1920

  Death of Tilak leaves Gandhi undisputed leader of the nationalist movement. Tagore travels to London, France, Holland, America.

  1921

  Back to London, France, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, Germany again, Austria, Czechoslovakia.

  After meeting with Gandhi in Calcutta, Tagore detaches himself from the Swaraj (home rule) campaign.

  Visva-Bharati, his university at Santiniketan, inaugurated.

  1922

  Gandhi sentenced to six years imprisonment.

  Tagore tours West and Sou
th India.

  1923

  Congress Party under Motilal Nehru and C. R. Das ends its boycott of elections to the legislatures established by the Government of India Act (1919).

  1924

  Tagore travels to China and Japan.

  After only two months at home, sails for South America: stays with

  Victoria Ocampo in Buenos Aires.

  1925

  Returns via Italy.

  Gandhi visits Santiniketan; Tagore again refuses to be actively involved in Swaraj, or in the charka (spinning) cult.

  Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act crushes new terrorist campaign in Bengal.

  1926

  Tagore travels to Italy, Switzerland (staying with Romain Rolland at Villeneuve), Austria, England, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany (meets Einstein), Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Greece, Egypt.

  1927

  Extensive tour of South-east Asia.

  1928

  Starts painting.

  1929

  To Canada, Japan, Saigon.

  1930

  To England (via France) to deliver Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford (The Religion of Man); to Germany, Switzerland, Russia, back to Germany, USA.

  Exhibitions of his paintings in Birmingham, London and several European capitals.

  Gandhi’s ‘salt-march’ from Ahmedabad to the coast inaugurates new civil disobedience campaign.

  1932

  Tagore travels (by air) to Iran and Iraq.

  His only grandson Nitindra dies.

  Gandhi declares fast-unto-death in jail in Poona; later breaks his fast with Tagore at his bedside.

  1934–6

  Tours of Ceylon and India with a dance-troupe from Santiniketan

  1935

  Government of India Act emerges from Round Table Conferences of 1930–32, with all-India Federation and provincial autonomy as its main aims.

  1937

  Tagore delivers Convocation Address to Calcutta University, in Bengali.

  Starts Department of Chinese Studies at Visva-Bharati.

  Congress Party ministries formed in most states.

  Tagore falls seriously ill in September.

  1939

  Congress ministries resign on grounds that the British Government has failed to make an acceptable declaration of its war aims.

  1940

  Tagore’s last meeting with Gandhi, at Santiniketan.

  Death of C. F. Andrews, Tagore’s staunch friend and supporter at Santiniketan.

  Oxford University holds special Convocation at Santiniketan to confer Doctorate on Tagore.

  Muslim League under Jinnah demands separate state for Muslims.

  1941

  Tagore dies in Calcutta.

  1942

  Congress Party calls on Britain to ‘quit India’ immediately.

  1946

  Congress forms interim Government under Jawaharlal Nehru.

  1947

  Viscount Mountbatten announces partition: India and Pakistan become independent dominions.

  1948

  Assassination of Gandhi.

  1950

  India is declared a Republic.

  Introduction

  When someone from the Western world tries to write about some aspect of India, one of his difficulties is that his habits of thought and ways of writing will not necessarily fit the subject he is describing. Brooding on this problem, I was suddenly struck by a verse from the āśā Upanisad. It consists of six propositions, linked by most translators into pairs:

  It stirs and it stirs not; it is far, and likewise near.

  It is inside of all this, and it is outside of all this.

  (Max Müller)

  He moves, and he moves not. He is far, and he is near.

  He is within all, and he is outside all.

  (Juan Mascaró)

  The Upanisads, some of which date back to the eighth century B.C., meant more to Rabindranath Tagore than any other literature; and the āśā Upanisad – expounded in detail in the second lecture of Personality (1917) – was particularly dear to him. The āsā Upanisad had been a revelation to his father, the religious reformer Debendranath Tagore, who describes in his autobiography how he found the first verse of the text by chance, on a loose page of a Sanskrit book fluttering past him. The verse that struck me is the fifth. It is about the nature of God, Brahman, and it attempts through its contradictions to describe the interplay of world and spirit, eternal and temporal, infinite and finite, transcendent and immanent which Tagore himself defined as the main subject of all his writings. It seemed to me, therefore, that the separate propositions in the verse would serve well as headings for the main sections of this Introduction. I shall be stretching their meaning far beyond what the seer who composed the āśā Upanisad intended; but I know of no better way in which to deal with the complexity and contradictions of Tagore’s life and work – a complexity compounded by the fact that this is not a book of his poems in the language in which they were written, but a book of translations.

  He moves

  Tagore was a child of nineteenth-century Bengal, of Calcutta, a place and a time to which nearly all the main cultural, political and economic features of modern India can be traced. If one were to sum up in a single word all the new ingredients that were added to India by her contact with a Western power, it would be ‘progress’. This is not to imply any value-judgement on the merits or otherwise of British imperial rule: it is merely that prior to the British presence, progress as an idea or an ideal did not really exist in India. By the 1830s, however, not only were the inhabitants of Bengal faced by a city, Calcutta, that had progressed from a tiny village on the east bank of the Hooghly to a ‘city of palaces’, a great commercial centre, capital of all the territories administered by the East India Company; they also found themselves increasingly swept into controversies about progress – educational progress, religious progress, legal and political progress, literary and linguistic progress. The Tagore family was at the centre of this sea-change. Tagore’s grandfather, Dwarkanath Tagore, had built up an immense family fortune, a network of agricultural, mining, trading and banking interests controlled through his firm, Carr, Tagore & Co. He came to be known as Prince Dwarkanath, renowned for his lavish way of life. Such a career would not have been possible without the British presence, and appropriately his death in 1846 came not in the land of his birth but in London, during a second visit to England (at a time when there was a strong taboo against Hindus making sea-voyages) in which he came into contact with the English nobility and Queen Victoria. But progress for Dwarkanath was not just commercial progress – he was involved in the foundation of many of Calcutta’s major institutions: the Hindu College, which became the centre of English education in Bengal; the Calcutta Medical College; the National Library; the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India; the Hindu Benevolent Institution; and so on.

  Dwarkanath was a friend of Rammohan Roy (1772–1833), pioneer among Indian religious and social reformers; and though he was himself quite traditional in his religious practices, he supported Rammohan’s religious reform society, the Brahmo Sabha (later, Brahmo Samaj), against attacks from the orthodox.

  The current of religious reform that ran right through nineteenth-century Bengal was what especially attracted Dwarkanath’s eldest son Debendranath, who disapproved of his father’s worldliness and sometimes clashed with him but who was no less concerned with Improvement, interpreted in a more austere and Victorian way. The family business collapsed after Dwarkanath’s death, and Debendranath inherited massive debts which took many years of frugal management to pay off; but landed estates had been left in trust to him and his two brothers and it was into a wealthy family, with a huge house in north Calcutta, that Tagore was born: a family that took it for granted that wealth and influence were to be used for the good of society, and for cultural enrichment.

  Dwarkanath had moved, in the direction of material prosperity and public munificence; Debe
ndranath moved, in the direction of inner self-realization and missionary zeal; Rabindranath – fourteenth of the fifteen children that his mother, in best Victorian fashion, bore for her husband – also moved, in a multiplicity of ways that differed from both his father and grandfather but which nevertheless owed something to both. From his father he inherited spiritual aspiration and a desire to do good in the world; from his grandfather he inherited a tremendous zest for life.

  Here are some of the ways in which Tagore moved throughout his long life.

  He moved in religion, away from the puritanical Brahmo church that his father had created along lines proposed by Rammohan Roy, and away from the Hindu revivalism that was very much in the air by the end of the nineteenth century. Neither Brahmoism nor revivalism left Tagore untouched: his father succeeded in making him Secretary of the Adi Brahmo Samaj for a while, and he composed many songs for it; and his earliest endeavours at Santiniketan – a boarding-school-cum-āśram modelled on the ancient Indian tapovana (forest hermitage) – were distinctly revivalist in character. But he moved away from both, to religious attitudes that owed something to the personalized devotion of medieval Bengali Vaisnavism, much to the poetry and grandeur of the Upanisads, and most to Tagore’s sense of his own creativity, a creativity that seemed a counterpart to the creativity of the universe as a whole. ‘The Religion of Man’ was what he called it; but ‘The Poet’s Religion’, the title he gave to the first lecture in Creative Unity (1922), would be a better name, since the religion is inseparable from his artistic theory and practice.