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Literary Review
Renaissance man
BEING reintroduced to Tagore is like awakening to a scene from childhood — something that was vague and musty in the subconscious is brought forth again like a memory with sudden, graceful clarity. Rabindranath Tagore was perhaps India's last true renaissance man — painter, poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, humanist, educator, songwriter, universal in his appeal and reach.
The recent publication of his works by Rupa has allowed for a rejuvenation of sorts to occur. For whatever reasons, Tagore has faded out of the imagination of the world with the exception of Bengal where he is revered and treated with almost God-like status. There was a time when he received worldwide homage; he was associated with the great thinkers of his age like Einstein, Shaw and Yeats, and in India, he was called "The Great Sentinel" and held up along with Gandhi. Despite all this — Nobel Prize winner, bearded mystic, myriad-minded man — Tagore has almost vanished. How could this have happened when he left behind him 28 volumes of prose, poetry, plays and lectures, over 2500 songs and over 2000 paintings and drawings? This reflects on the inadequacies of our publishers and schools for it is simply not enough to be able to sing the national anthem with gusto or quote a line from a famous poem. What is the essence of Tagore and more importantly, how can his work be applied to India today?
Tagore is best known for his poetry, plays and songs, and it is a delight to be able to read works like Chitra, The Waterfall, Lover's Gift, Shesh Lekha and The Crossing in the wonderfully compact and well-illustrated new editions. But from all of his published works, I turn to his World War I lectures on Nationalism which are so far-sighted in their philosophy, so relevant for India in these bewildering times where our ideas of patriotism, nationalism and secularism are being challenged.
In these essays Tagore attacks the very idea of the Nation, saying, "The Nation, with all its paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its flags and pious hymns, its blasphemous prayers in the churches, and the literary mock thunders of its patriotic bragging, cannot hide the fact that the Nation is the greatest evil for the Nation, that all its precautions are against it. I am not against one nation in particular, but against the general idea of all nations."
Tagore placed higher stock in humanity and freedom than in patriotism. He believed in the unity of nature and man and the synthesis of East and West. Perhaps he understood more clearly the delicate balance that countries with rich historical backgrounds, like India, China and Japan, must maintain in order to preserve and persevere despite the onslaught of western ideologies. "There is only one history," Tagore wrote, "The history of man."
He firmly believed that imitation was a source of weakness and that to imitate the West would be to hamper our true nature. His criticism of the West was severe: "It is the continual and stupendous dead pressure of the inhuman upon the living world under which the modern world is groaning," he wrote, but he also said that we cannot reject what the West has to offer. We cannot rely solely on our past to take us forward from the plateau of stagnation. He believed that a new path must be made where creation and imagination become the most important tools for growth.
"True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought and action," Tagore wrote. Perhaps this is what we need to encompass into the Indian psyche, that "Modernising is a mere affectation of modernism, just as an affectation of poesy is poetising."
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MAITRAYE DEVI'S Tagore by the Fireside is a portrayal of Tagore through the eyes of an ardent admirer who assiduously penned down every conversation, joke, proverb, poem and song that escaped the poet's lips during his four stays at the author's residence in Mungpu, a village in the Darjeeling district.
It is a handy bedside table book to have if not a fireside one. "The Poet" as she refers to him throughout, is recreated here in a charming way which highlights his sense of humour, his habits and physical gestures, his aura, things which are hard-pressed to come by on a mere reading of his literary works. The extraordinary thing about this book is that you can turn to any part of it and find that you have not missed the flow of continuity at all as no such flow really exists. Instead, it is a collection of vignettes, anecdotes and snippets of conversation, which seem to occur in a seamless, timeless fashion.
This book is very telling of a certain kind of life that existed in certain societies in Bengal in those times. Maitraye Devi remembers wonderful scenes for us: gatherings every evening for the poet's readings in lamplight, birthday celebrations under the chestnut tree, the reverential hush of voices when the poet began to speak, the hordes of people at the railway station come to catch a glimpse of the poet. There are some images of Tagore sitting alone for hours in a chair by the eastern side of the window with the sun bathing him in light, or Tagore lying awake in bed at night because he didn't want to disturb the servants, which are especially vivid and stirring.
The mood of this book changes from serious to light, from conversations on womanhood to theosophy to science to imagination to death to literature, from comments on events around the world to local gossip, from nostalgic and deeply reminiscent to joking banter. She divulges wonderful things — the fact that he knew the name of no flowers except the carnation and his delight with the new knowledge of names like geranium, jacaranda and lily. Sometimes the things she quotes sound so prepared and poetic that one might think all he had to do was open his mouth and have poetry pour out. So it is a comfort to know that no matter how great his way with words, he was as vulnerable to the cliché as the next man, saying things like, "No use crying over spilt milk," and "What is to go will go."
For all his accused aloofness, Tagore seems to have shared quite a lot with Devi. Particularly telling are the reminiscences of his year in a boat on the banks of the Padma when he wrote Manasi, the few references to the loss of his wife and children, the difficulties in setting up Visva Bharati and Shantiniketan and the renunciation of his knighthood after the Amritsar massacre. "To remain silent when the heart is brimming over with protest, because it is prudent; and to speak only when the moment seems opportune — that is not my way," he says.
By the end of the book we are glad that the author did not succumb to Tagore's advice when he quoted from his own Khanika in an effort to dissuade her from her constant recording, "Let end all that is to end, do not turn back to pick up the scattered flowers from the garland." Because it is a special thing to do — to collect the scraps of letters, the words of beauty and the sounds of poetry that we believe to be genius.
Shesh Lekha; Crossing; Lover's Gift; Chitra; The Waterfall; Nationalism; Rabindranath Tagore, Rupa and Co., 2002.
Tagore by the Fireside, Maitraye Devi, Rupa and Co., 2002.
TISHANI DOSHI
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