Selected Poems Page 3

  Tagore moved in social, educational and political ideas. His father, religion apart, was conservative by temperament, with no desire to change institutions that had the stamp of legality, decency or honour on them; but Tagore always rebelled against rigid structures. He rebelled against school, to such an extent that from the age of fourteen, and after frequent changes of school, his family in despair consigned him to a haphazard series of tutors at home. When he came to create his own school at Santiniketan, though it went through many changes and compromises, his abiding aim was to break conventional educational moulds: to develop all aspects of a child’s personality rather than merely prepare him for exams and professions. He rebelled against the entire educational structure set up by the British, sending his son Rathindranath not to Oxford or Cambridge or the Inns of Court but to the University of Illinois to study agriculture, and founding a university of his own that was entirely independent of British funding or control. He never ceased to attack in his poems, stories, novels, plays and essays all forms of prejudice and bigotry – against women, or non-Hindus, or foreigners (including the British). He moved forward in his political ideals, to such an extent that nationalists were frequently annoyed by his refusal to be a chauvinist: even with Gandhi he differed, dreading the irrationality that was exploited by his civil disobedience campaigns, arguing that national independence meant nothing if it were not preceded by social and cultural renewal from within, fearing the emergence of an Indian nation state that would have those very nationalist, militarist and imperialist features that he deplored in the West. Sometimes his relentless search for new solutions, new patterns of human development, led him astray: he was misled by Mussolini at first, and in his report on Stalinist Russia in 1930, though it was not the glowing paean that some people have claimed it to be, he was not, alas, sufficiently aware of the human cost of the educational and social improvements that he admired there. But he never ceased to search, to think and to question: his faith in man demanded it.

  The movement was not merely cerebral, or confined to his experiment at Santiniketan. After his third visit to England in 1912, the publication of the English Gitanjali, the Nobel Prize in 1913 and sudden world fame, he moved unremittingly in a physical sense, all round India and all round the world. The list of dates on p. 13 of this book will show the scale of these tours (done by sea and land; only for his last, to Iran and Iraq in 1932, did he use an aeroplane). Their aim was to raise funds for his university, and to say things about the world and its future that he believed were important. They were gruelling, and frequently brought him to the point of nervous collapse – but a restlessness in him drove him on.

  This restlessness had always been in Tagore. Before his marriage in 1883 and after it, there had been frequent changes of abode; and at the very end of his life, when ill-health prevented him from travelling, he took to changing his living-place at Santiniketan, even having an experimental cottage built entirely of mud (because he was worried about the frequent fires in the thatched village houses) next to his grand house called Uttarāyan.

  In life, so too in his art. Tagore was a perpetual innovator, constantly creating new forms and styles in his poetry; working fundamental changes in Bengali vocal music; introducing novel kinds of drama, opera and ballet; exploring subjects from nursery-rhymes to science in his essays; evolving a unique style in the paintings and drawings that he produced in large quantities from 1928 on; above all, enormously expanding and altering the resources of the Bengali language. In this he was bringing to fruition the efforts of many writers previous to him. The development of Bengal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is also the development of its language. In 1800 – virtually no prose; poetry confined to religious subjects and restricted to two monotonous metres. But by 1900 – after the essays of Rammohan Roy and Isvarchandra Vidyasagar (1820–91), the epic poetry of Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824–73), the drama of Dinabandhu Mitra (1829–74), the novels of Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1838–94) and the lyrics of Biharilal Chakravarti (1834–94) – we have Rabindranath Tagore, a writer whose complete works were to run to thirty-two large volumes, covering almost every literary genre. He built on all their achievements, and went further: digging more deeply into Sanskrit (when he wanted a rich and complex diction) than even Madhusudan did; bringing prose closer to natural speech than Bankim had done; inventing a range of lyric metres and verse-forms that no writer before him in any modern Indian language had dreamed of. He was not alone; many other talents emerged during his lifetime. But no one could ignore him, and his achievement remains an almost oppressive legacy, too close still to its inheritors for it to be seen or assessed clearly.

  I have tried, in this book, to be true to the spirit of movement in Tagore: not only through a selection that is chronological and which spans almost his whole career, but by trying in the English verse-forms I have used to convey that spirit. The constantly changing verse-forms require equal inventiveness in the translator, and I have tried many things: lines based on syllable or accent as well as metre; verses based on half-rhyme as well as rhyme. Sometimes I have been traditional, just as Tagore was traditional at times; sometimes I have produced forms that I believe are new to English poetry. In my notes I have tried to relate the restlessness and movement in Tagore’s poetry – seen in its purest form in the poems from balāka (1916) on, in which he used varying line-lengths, spreading out across the page – to his deepest ideas and intuitions: his sense of the khelā or play of the universe, of a process at work in Nature and man that involves ceaseless change through time, but which also remains tuned to an underlying and unchanging harmony.

  He moves not

  Tagore was a radical in the true sense, always trying to get to the root of things: but there were strains of traditionalism in him that separated him from other groups of Bengalis to whom the term ‘radical’ might more readily be applied. With terrorism he would have nothing to do: his one dip into subversive politics was a short-lived secret society called the Sanjivani Sabha, founded by his elder brother Jyotirindranath in 1876, recalled with amusement in My Reminiscences. But there was another very important current in nineteenth-century Bengal that was alien to Tagore – one that had its source in the radical group of students that clustered round a charismatic young Eurasian teacher called Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809–31) at Hindu College in the late 1820s. Derozio’s ideas can be traced, via his own schoolmasters in Calcutta, to the Scottish Enlightenment, to Hume and Reid and Dugald Stewart. He was perhaps not as revolutionary as some nationalist historians have wished to make out: he was certainly unfairly sacked from Hindu College in 1831. His students moved in various directions – one to the Christian ministry (Krishnamohan Banerji), one to journalism and satirical fiction (Pyarichand Mitra), one to Brahmoism (Ramtanu Lahiri) – but he left behind a legacy of free-thinking, agnosticism and pragmatism that can even be traced through to the socialist politicians who dominate West Bengal today. By the time Tagore was born, ‘Young Bengal’, as Derozio’s group was called, had mellowed, and Hindu College had been absorbed into the Government educational system; but there is a very real temperamental gulf between Tagore and the kind of attitudes that inspired the group’s more notorious escapades: their deliberate bating of the orthodox by the eating of beef; their contempt for missionaries; their bibulousness. Tagore was quite a dandy in his early twenties, an aesthete whose dress and demeanour attracted some ridicule; and the diary he wrote of his first visit to England in 1878 – the Brighton balls and musical evenings, the flirtatious séances with the daughters of his London guardians Dr and Mrs Scott – is ample evidence that the grey-bearded, long-robed poet was young once. But drinking parties, or revolt (like his great predecessor the epic poet Michael Madhusudan Datta) against arranged marriage? Never. Seriousness and traditionalism had some hold on him from boyhood.

  This traditionalism could sometimes extend to quite surprisingly orthodox practices. Having been married off to a ten-year-old almost illiterate member
of the peculiar Tagore family caste (they were Pirali Brahmins, a group that had supposedly lost caste generations ago through smelling – not even eating – some Muslim food), Tagore followed suit by marrying off his daughters Bela and Rani in 1901 when they were only fourteen and twelve respectively. Debendranath also adhered to practices such as the upanayan or sacred-thread investiture for Brahmins: Tagore went through it when he was eleven, and his own sons went through it too. But generally of course Brahmoism was anti-orthodox, and the essential cultural tradition to which Tagore belonged went back to Rammohan Roy. Tagore left the Brahmo church in his twenties; and it would be entirely wrong to describe him as a ‘Brahmo writer’. But to Rammohan Roy and his legacy he remained loyal throughout his life. He wrote on him several times: the very last address that he wrote, read out in the Mandir (temple) at Santiniketan in early 1941 when Tagore was too weak to read it himself, was on this great ‘Father of Modern India’; and in an important essay of 1925 on ‘The Cult of the Charka’, a criticism of Gandhi’s spinning-cult, he replied painfully to Gandhi’s charge that Rammohan Roy was ‘a pygmy’ compared to some of the other great men of India.

  The tenets of Rammohan Roy from which Tagore never moved throughout his life were: contempt for idolatry and externalized, ritualistic religion; a belief that the truth of Hinduism lay in the Vedānta philosophy of the Upanisads, with its recognition of only one true God; and a desire to bring the various religions of the world together, to extract their shared and quintessential meaning. Tagore’s rationalism – profound and unswerving for all his poetic fervour – was Rammohan’s: it inspired in him the same hatred of intolerance and injustice and tyranny, and it also gave him a life-long interest in science. Some historians have identified Rammohan Roy with the ‘orientalist’ educational policy of the East India company up to 1835, its promotion of Oriental learning in Fort William College – for this policy had its roots in the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment and in particular the work of the pioneering Oriental scholar Sir William Jones. But in fact Rammohan believed that India needed Western science and learning – he wrote a famous letter to the Governor General Lord Amherst in 1823, condemning a Government proposal to establish a Sanskrit College in Calcutta. In his universalism, his belief that India must learn from the West as well as from her own heritage, we see his real debt to the Enlightenment, and the real nature of his influence on Tagore, who saw likewise.

  Rammohan formed connections with Unitarianism in India, America and England (where, like Tagore’s grandfather Dwarkanath, he died, in Bristol in 1833); and when Tagore was in America for the first time in 1912–13, staying with his son Rathindranath at Urbana, Illinois, it was a Unitarian minister who asked Tagore to give, at various Unitarian chapels, the lectures that he later delivered at Harvard and published as Sādhanā (The Realization of Life), 1913. If ‘Unitarian’ were not a term that has become restricted to a particular sect, it would be a useful word for the tendency in Tagore that was opposite to the ‘progress’ described in the first section of this Introduction: for just as Tagore’s life was a continual progress, a continual moving forward, it was also a search for unity, for a stability of belief and moral principle to give meaning and order to everything he did.

  This ‘Unitarian’ tendency had two complementary directions. On the one hand there was the syncretism in Tagore, a faith in the unity of man and the world that was patterned on his deep religious sense of a harmony underlying all things. This was what inspired the messianic role he took upon himself after he was made world-famous by the Nobel Prize: the defiant lectures against Nationalism in the Japan of 1916; the less-than-happy attempt to preach pan-Asianism in the turbulent China of 1924; the friendships with Romain Rolland (originating in a request from Rolland for Tagore to be a signatory to his ‘Declaration of Independence of the Spirit’ in 1919) and with Einstein; the noble attempt to create a ‘universal Indian’ university – Visva-Bharati – that would bring together not only the different cultures and languages of India, but scholars and learning from all over the world. This kind of syncretism goes directly back to Rammohan Roy, and it is what Tagore has left behind in the West as his abiding memory – faint though it is now, and not always advantageous to him, for the world does not suffer idealists gladly. But there was another direction to the Unitarian tendency, and here Tagore was very different from Rammohan.

  Rammohan’s One God was an abstraction, the pure, impersonal Brahman of the Vedānta. He was a prosaic man, analytical rather than imaginative. Tagore’s religion, however, was a poet’s religion: the unity of God and his creation was the unity of a creative personality, who revealed himself to Tagore as a personal jīban-debatā, a ‘life-god’; and just as God governs and penetrates and harmonizes all aspects of an endlessly varied universe, so this jīban-debatā governed and penetrated and harmonized Tagore’s own varied creative activities. Personality, at the human level, can only be realized through locale, through the immediate culture and language and land to which one belongs. Rammohan was a Bengali by birth, but there was nothing specifically Bengali about him (though he pioneered Bengali discursive prose). Tagore, however, is inseparable from his Bengali background. This was the basic trouble with what the West saw of him: they got the universal message, which because it came to them detached from Tagore’s background appeared to many insipid or gutless; they saw the all-Indian, all-world figure, not the Bengali; they read the poetry in English – a language that was being steadily eroded and etiolated by its very universal currency – not in the poet’s mother tongue.

  Tagore was rooted to Bengal. He travelled all over the world, but no landscape could ever move him more than the flat, dry plain around his beloved Santiniketan. The rivers of East Bengal inspired much of the poetry of his thirties; but it was the drier West Bengal landscape, with its spaciousness of sky and simplicity of earth, that he came to regard as his home. Even the Himalayas – so important to his father, who took Tagore there when he was eleven years old – never meant as much to him. He belonged with the land, the flowers and the trees; the birds; the people – whom he cared for genuinely, not just romantically, combining his educational experiment at Santiniketan with an agricultural experiment at the neighbouring village of Santiniketan; the music, which he enriched immeasurably with his two thousand songs; and above all the language of Bengal. He may have moved to English at a particular phase in his life; but he never moved from Bengali. He insisted that Bengali should be the medium of instruction in Bengal’s schools, and wrote several essays and lectures on this theme. When he was invited in February 1937 to deliver the Convocation Address at Calcutta University, he made history by delivering it in Bengali. Back in 1895 he had made a similar stand at the Bengal Provincial Conference, demanding (unsuccessfully) that all business should be conducted in Bengali. His concern for the language went. far beyond the literary use he made of it. Near the end of his life, he wrote a technical treatise on the Bengali language, bāngla-bhāsa paricay (1938); when the Bangiya Sāhitya Pariad (Bengali Literary Academy) was founded in 1894, he provided a list of scientific and technical terms.

  The Bengali language, the fundamental unifying factor in all Tagore’s writing, binding him to one place and one time for all his restless travelling, cannot of course be present in a book of this kind. The difficulty that Western readers will have is that whereas if they read a translation from French, Italian, German or even Russian they are able to relate the text to a preconception of the original language – vague maybe, but real nonetheless – for a modern Indian language there can be no such aid. Sanskrit, after two centuries of Western scholarship, has conveyed its character to at least some foreigners; but the modern Indian languages have been unlearned, unstudied, unappreciated by outsiders. In the early days of the British presence in Bengal, there were enthusiasts. The Baptist missionary William Carey (1761–1843) is revered to this day in Bengal for his pioneering work: he and his colleagues at Serampore and Fort William were among the first writers of B
engali prose. But when Oriental learning ceased to be Government policy in India, and a bureaucracy and educational system based on English established itself after the assumption of the rule of India by the Crown in 1858, the language was barely learnt beyond the practical level, seldom to the level needed for the enjoyment of literature.

  One could list some of the characteristics of Bengali: its rich sound patterns, exploited to the full by Tagore; its elegantly economical and regular inflexional system; its abundance of vivid, onomatopoeic words (non-Sanskritic and probably very ancient); its eclecticism of vocabulary – Persian words often giving a colloquial alternative to a Sanskrit word, just as in English there is a choice between a Latin and an Anglo-Saxon word); the freedom with which it can draw on the immense resources of Sanskrit for its higher vocabulary; its subtle and inventive compound verbal expressions. One could also talk of some of its drawbacks: the cumbersome nature of some of its prose, over-Sanskritic in vocabulary, over-influenced by English in syntax; or the facile manner in which it can rhyme so easily in poetry. But what would all this serve? From the point of view of foreigners, in the final analysis Tagore’s writings cannot move from the language to which they belong; and the language is not one that many foreigners will probably ever learn.

  He is far

  Granted that translation, especially of poetry, is ultimately impossible, have foreigners had even the limited access to Tagore’s writing that translation can afford? Translations by native speakers have been done steadily over the years, sometimes well – I would single out Sheila Chatterji’s translation of Tagore’s late book of vers libre, syāmaī (1936, translation published by Visva-Bharati in 1955) as perhaps the best book of verse translation; and some of them have been published outside India (in particular Aurobindo Bose’s three books: A Flight of Swans, John Murray, 1955; The Herald of Spring, 1957; Wings of Death, 1960). Edward Thompson, whom I have already mentioned in my Preface, included quite large chunks of translation in his biography of Tagore, and also published a small pamphlet in his own Augustan Books of Poetry series in 1925. An anthology, mainly of short stories, came out in America in 1965 (The Housewarming and Other Selected Writings, translated by Mary Lago, Tarun Gupta and Amiya Chakravarti, Signet Classics). But none of these have been sufficient to displace the impression left behind by Tagore’s own translations, which are still available, in a volume that gives no information whatever about the original works, as the Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore, Macmillan, first edition 1936. This book is not as well known as it was, but it survives sufficiently for many people to have at least glanced through it; and they sometimes express surprise when they learn that Tagore wrote primarily in Bengali.