Tagore and his India
by Amartya Sen*
This article was published on 28 August 2001.
Voice of Bengal
Rabindranath Tagore, who died in 1941 at the age of eighty, is a
towering figure in the millennium-old literature of Bengal. Anyone who
becomes familiar with this large and flourishing tradition will be
impressed by the power of Tagore’s presence in Bangladesh and in India.
His poetry as well as his novels, short stories, and essays are very
widely read, and the songs he composed reverberate around the eastern
part of India and throughout Bangladesh.
In contrast, in the rest of the world, especially in Europe and
America, the excitement that Tagore’s writings created in the early
years of the twentieth century has largely vanished. The enthusiasm with
which his work was once greeted was quite remarkable. Gitanjali,
a selection of his poetry for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1913, was published in English translation in London in
March of that year, and had been reprinted ten times by November, when
the award was announced. But he is not much read now in the West, and
already by 1937, Graham Greene was able to say: “As for Rabindranath
Tagore, I cannot believe that anyone but Mr. Yeats can still take his poems very seriously.”
The mystic
The contrast between Tagore’s commanding presence in Bengali
literature and culture, and his near-total eclipse in the rest of the
world, is perhaps less interesting than the distinction between the view
of Tagore as a deeply relevant and many-sided contemporary thinker in
Bangladesh and India, and his image in the West as a repetitive and
remote spiritualist. Graham Greene had, in fact, gone on to explain that
he associated Tagore “with what Chesterton calls ‘the bright pebbly
eyes’ of the Theosophists.” Certainly, an air of mysticism played some
part in the “selling” of Rabindranath Tagore to the West by Yeats, Ezra
Pound, and his other early champions. Even Anna Akhmatova, one of
Tagore’s few later admirers (who translated his poems into Russian in
the mid-1960s), talks of “that mighty flow of poetry which takes its
strength from Hinduism as from the Ganges, and is called Rabindranath
Tagore.”
An air of mysticism.
Confluence of cultures
Rabindranath did come from a Hindu family – one of the landed gentry
who owned estates mostly in what is now Bangladesh. But whatever wisdom
there might be in Akhmatova’s invoking of Hinduism and the Ganges, it
did not prevent the largely Muslim citizens of Bangladesh from having a
deep sense of identity with Tagore and his ideas. Nor did it stop the
newly independent Bangladesh from choosing one of Tagore’s songs – the
“Amar Sonar Bangla” which means “my golden Bengal” – as its national
anthem. This must be very confusing to those who see the contemporary
world as a “clash of civilizations” – with “the Muslim civilization,”
“the Hindu civilization,” and “the Western civilization,” each
forcefully confronting the others. They would also be confused by
Rabindranath Tagore’s own description of his Bengali family as the
product of “a confluence of three cultures: Hindu, Mohammedan, and
British”.1
