The Essential Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore, Fakrul Alam, Radha Chakravarty, Fakrul Alam, Radha Chakravarty

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780674735224
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Collections littéraires asiatiques

The Essential Tagore showcases the genius of India's Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian Nobel Laureate and possibly the most prolific and diverse serious writer the world has ever known.Marking the 150th anniversary of Tagore's birth, this ambitious collection—the largest single volume of his work available in English—attempts to represent his extraordinary achievements in ten genres: poetry, songs, autobiographical works, letters, travel writings, prose, novels, short stories, humorous pieces, and plays. In addition to the newest translations in the modern idiom, it includes a sampling of works originally composed in English, his translations of his own works, three poems omitted from the published version of the English Gitanjali, and examples of his artwork.Tagore's writings are notable for their variety and innovation. His Sonar Tari signaled a distinctive turn toward the symbolic in Bengali poetry. "The Lord of Life, " from his collection Chitra, created controversy around his very personal concept of religion. Chokher Bali marked a decisive moment in the history of the Bengali novel because of the way it delved into the minds of men and women. The skits in Vyangakautuk mocked upper-class pretensions. Prose pieces such as "The Problem and the Cure" were lauded by nationalists, who also sang Tagore's patriotic songs.Translations for this volume were contributed by Tagore specialists and writers of international stature, including Amitav Ghosh, Amit Chaudhuri, and Sunetra Gupta.

1

Autobiography

“IT IS NOT EASY TO KNOW ONESELF. It is difficult to organize life’s various experiences into a unified whole,” muses the seventy-year-old Tagore in Atmaparichay (Self-Recognition, 1943), a collection of six introspective essays published posthumously. Although he did not write a formal autobiography, many of his lectures and writings are attempts to reconstruct the narrative of his personal development as a man and as a writer. Impelled by the desire to understand himself and his environment, Tagore is also self-conscious about the image he wants to present to the world.

In 1912, Tagore published Jibansmriti, with black-and-white sketches by his nephew Gaganendranath Tagore. Surendranath Tagore’s English translation of the work, My Reminiscences, was published by Macmillan in 1917. Here Tagore describes the early years of his life; his experiences of loneliness, love, and loss; and his emergence as a poet. In the process, he also introduces us to his family circle and paints a grim picture of the formal education against which he rebelled. With disarming simplicity, the text captures a child’s-eye view of a mysterious, fascinating world in which fantasy blends seamlessly with reality. In the passage describing his first encounters with death, the poignancy of grief proves to be liberating, offering a new, deeper insight into the beauty of life.

In April–May 1924, invited by Liang Chi-Chao, president of the University Lecture Association of Peking, Tagore delivered a series of lectures in China, which were later published as Talks in China (1925). “Autobiographical,” from this collection, is Tagore’s attempt to contextualize his life in relation to the broad historical trends of the time, and the personal and family influences that shaped his spirit in his formative years. In this piece, Tagore makes it clear that despite the many roles life has imposed on him, it is as a poet that he wants to be remembered.

In “My School,” a lecture published in The Modern Review in 1931, Tagore speaks of his other passion: the mission to revolutionize education by rearing young minds in harmony with nature. He describes the trauma of his own schooldays, his sense of liberation when he finally left school at thirteen, and the germination of his vision of a new form of education through his experiments with the school at Santiniketan. Here, as in his other autobiographical writings, his key concern is freedom of the mind.

Chhelebela (Boyhood Days) was published in 1940, shortly before Tagore’s death. Requested by Nityanandabinod Goswami, a literary scholar and teacher at Santiniketan, to write something for young readers, Tagore embarked on this delightful account of his childhood and adolescence, describing his experiences from his earliest recollections up to the time of his first visit to England in 1878. With an episodic structure that depends more on associations of memory than on chronological sequence, this impressionistic narrative captures the child’s wonder at the world around him and also offers a vivid picture of life during those times. He observes, but often feels excluded from, the sphere of adult activities, and thinks himself abandoned to a lonely and loveless existence. This solitariness is both a source of anguish and the wellspring of his creativity, for he compensates for his drab outer life by withdrawing into a vivid inner world created by his imagination. There are no ghosts in My Reminiscences, but in Boyhood Days, nature is a living presence, and magical spirits lurk around every corner. In his preface to Boyhood Days, Tagore says: “Some features of this book’s contents may be found also in Jibansmriti, my memoirs, but that has a different flavour—like the contrast between a lake and a waterfall. That was a story, while this is birdsong; that belongs to the fruit basket, this to the tree.” (Boyhood Days, 4).

My Reminiscences and Boyhood Days should not be read as a truthful account of Tagore’s childhood, for not all details in these texts are factually accurate. Biographers point out, for instance, that the Tagores had two houses in Jorasanko, not one, and that the young Robi was not denied adequate clothing as he claims. Such distortions, gaps, and silences hint at Tagore’s reticence about certain private matters, such as tensions within the joint family, and his desire to underscore his loneliness, for which the lack of clothing becomes a metaphor. These memoirs are therefore best understood as “memory pictures,” or literary reconstructions of the past in which imagination and sentiment play as great a role as factual detail: “I do not know who has painted the pictures of my life imprinted on my memory. But whoever he is, he is an artist. He does not take up his brush simply to copy everything that happens; he retains or omits things just as he fancies; he makes many a big thing small and small thing big . . . In short, his task is to paint pictures, not to write history” (My Reminiscences, 17). Tagore’s autobiographical writings blur the distinction between fiction and history. That is their special charm.

Autobiographical

I was born in 1861: that is not an important date of history, but it belongs to a great period of our history in Bengal. You do not know perhaps that we have our places of pilgrimage in those spots where the rivers meet in confluence, the rivers which to us are the symbols of the spirit of life in nature, and which in their meeting present emblems of the meeting of spirits, the meeting of ideals. Just about the time I was born the currents of three movements had met in the life of our country.

One of these movements was religious, introduced by a very great-hearted man of gigantic intelligence, Raja Rammohan Roy. It was revolutionary, for he tried to re-open the channel of spiritual life which had been obstructed for many years by the sands and debris of creeds that were formal and materialistic, fixed in external practices lacking spiritual significance.

There was a great fight between him and the orthodox who suspected every living idea that was dynamic. People who cling to an ancient past have their pride in the antiquity of their accumulations, in the sublimity of time-honored walls around them. They grow nervous and angry when some great spirit, some lover of truth, breaks open their enclosure and floods it with the sunshine of thought and the breath of life. Ideas cause movement and all movements forward they consider to be a menace against their warehouse security.

This was happening about the time I was born. I am proud to say that my father was one of the great leaders of that movement, a movement for whose sake he suffered ostracism and braved social indignities. I was born in this atmosphere of the advent of new ideas, which at the same time were old, older than all the things of which that age was proud.

There was a second movement equally important. A certain great man, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee who, though much older than myself, was my contemporary and lived long enough for me to see him, was the first pioneer in the literary revolution which happened in Bengal about that time.

Our self-expression must find its freedom not only in spiritual ideas but in literary manifestations. But our literature had allowed its creative life to vanish. It lacked movement and was fettered by a rhetoric rigid as death. This man was brave enough to go against the orthodoxy which believed in the security of tombstones and in that perfection which can only belong to the lifeless. He lifted the dead weight of ponderous forms from our language and with a touch of his magic wand aroused our literature from her age-long sleep. What a vision of beauty she revealed to us when she awoke in the fullness of her strength and grace.

There was yet another movement started about this time in my country which was called National. It was not fully political, but it began to give voice to the mind of our people trying to assert their own personality. It was a voice of indignation at the humiliation constantly heaped upon us by people who were not oriental, and who had, especially at that time, the habit of sharply dividing the human world into the good and the bad according to what was similar to their life and what was different.

This contemptuous spirit of separateness was perpetually hurting us and causing great damage to our own world of culture. It generated in the young men of our country distrust of all things that had come to them as an inheritance from their past. The old Indian pictures and other works of art were laughed at by our students in imitation of the laughter of their European schoolmasters. . . .

The spirit of revolt had just awakened when I was born and some people were already trying to stem the tide. This movement had its leaders in my own family, in my brothers and cousins, and they stood up to save the people’s mind from being insulted and ignored by the people themselves.

We have to find some basis that is universal, that is eternal, and we have to discover those things which have an everlasting value. The national movement was started to proclaim that we must not be indiscriminate in our rejection of the past. This was not a reactionary movement but a revolutionary one, because it set out with a great courage to deny and to oppose all pride in mere borrowings.

These three movements were on foot and in all three the members of my own family took active part. We were ostracized because of our heterodox opinions about religion and therefore we enjoyed the freedom of the outcaste. We had to build our own world with our own thoughts and energy of mind. We had to build it from the foundation, and therefore had to seek the foundation that was firm.

We cannot create foundations, but we can build a superstructure. These two must go together, the giving of expression to new life and the seeking of foundations which must be in the heart of the people themselves. Those who believe that life consists in change because change implies movement, should remember that there must be an underlying thread of unity or the change, being unmeaning, will cause conflict and clash. This thread of unity must not be of the outside, but in our own soul.

As I say, I was born and brought up in an atmosphere of the confluence of three movements, all of which were revolutionary. I was born in a family which had to live its own life, which led me from my young days to seek guidance for my own self-expression in my own inner standard of judgment. The medium of expression doubtless was my mother tongue. But the language which belonged to the people had to be modulated according to the urging which I as an individual had . . .

The impertinence of material things is extremely old. The revelation of spirit in man is truly modern: I am on its side, for I am modern. I have explained how I was born into a family which rebelled, which had faith in its loyalty to an inner ideal. If you want to reject me, you are free to do so. But I have my right as a revolutionary to carry the flag of freedom of spirit into the shrine of your idols,—material power and accumulation. . . .

II

When I began my career I was ridiculously young; in fact, I was the youngest of the writers of that time who had made themselves articulate. I had neither the protective armor of mature age, nor that of a respectable English education. So in my seclusion of contempt and qualified encouragement I had my freedom. Gradually I grew up in years, for which, however, I claim no credit. Gradually I cut my way through derision and occasional patronage into a recognition in which the proportion of praise and blame was very much like that of land and water on our earth.

If you ask me what gave me boldness, when I was young, I should say that one thing was my early acquaintance with the old Vaishnava poems of Bengal, full of the freedom of meter and courage of expression. I think I was only twelve when these poems first began to be re-printed. I surreptitiously got hold of copies from the desks of my elders. For the edification of the young I must confess that this was not right for a boy of my age. I should have been passing my examinations and not following a path that would lead to failure. I must also admit that the greater part of these lyrics was erotic and not quite suited to a boy just about to reach his teens. But my imagination was fully occupied with the beauty of their forms and the music of their words; and their breath, heavily laden with voluptuousness, passed over my mind without distracting it.

My vagabondage in the path of my literary career had another reason. My father was the leader of a new religious movement, a strict monotheism based upon the teachings of the Upanishads. My countrymen in Bengal thought him almost as bad as a Christian, if not worse. So we were completely ostracized, which probably saved me from another disaster, that of imitating our own past.

Most of the members of my family had some gift—some were artists, some poets, some musicians and the whole atmosphere of our home was permeated with the spirit of creation. I had a deep sense, almost from infancy, of the beauty of nature, an intimate feeling of companionship with the trees and the clouds, and felt in tune with the musical touch of the seasons in the air. At the same time I had a peculiar susceptibility to human kindness. All these craved expression, and naturally I wanted to give them my own expression. The very earnestness of my emotions yearned to be true to themselves though I was too immature to give their expression any perfection of form.

Since then I have gained a reputation in my country but a strong current of antagonism in a large section of my countrymen still persists. Some say that my poems do not spring from the heart of the national traditions; some complain that they are incomprehensible, others that they are unwholesome. In fact, I have never had complete acceptance from my own people, and that too has been a blessing; for nothing is so demoralizing as unqualified success.

This is the history of my career. I wish I could reveal it to you more clearly through the narration of my own work in my own language. I hope that will be possible some day or other. Languages are jealous. They do not give up their best treasures to those who try to deal with them through an intermediary belonging to an alien rival. You have to court them in person and dance attendance on them. Poems are not like gold or other substantial things that are transferable. You cannot receive the smiles and glances of your sweetheart through an attorney, however diligent and dutiful he may be. . . .

III

My religion essentially is a poet’s religion. Its touch comes to me through the same unseen and trackless channels as does the inspiration of my music. My religious life has followed the same mysterious line of growth as has my poetical life. Somehow they are wedded to each other, and though their betrothal had a long period of ceremony, it was kept secret from me. Then suddenly came a day when their union was revealed to me.

At that time I was living in a village. The day came with all its drifting trivialities of the usual commonplace. The ordinary work of my morning had come to its close and before going to take my bath I stood for a moment at my window, overlooking a market place on the bank of dry river bed. Suddenly I became conscious of a stirring of soul within me. My world of experience in a moment seemed to become lighted, and facts that were detached and dim found a great unity of meaning. The feeling which I had was like what a man, groping through a fog without knowing his destination, might feel when he suddenly discovers that he stands before his own house.

I remember the day in my childhood when, after the painful process of learning my Bengali alphabet, I unexpectedly came to the first simple combination of letters which gave me the words: “It rains, the leaves tremble.” I was thrilled with the delight of the picture which these words suggested to me. The unmeaning fragments lost their individual isolation and my mind revealed in the unity of a vision. In a similar manner, on that morning in the village, the facts of my life suddenly appeared to me in a luminous unity of truth. All things that had seemed like vagrant waves were revealed to my mind in relation to a boundless sea. From that time I have been able to maintain the faith that, in all my experience of nature or man, there is the fundamental truth of spiritual reality.

(From “Autobiographical,” Talks in China, 1925)

From Reminiscences

1

Contact with the outer world was virtually impossible for me no doubt, but perhaps for that very reason, I found it easy to relish the joys of the open air. If one has too many resources, the mind becomes lazy. It remains totally dependent on outward things, forgetting that it is the celebration of inner life that matters more in the festival of happiness. This is the first lesson human beings learn in their infancy. At that stage, their resources are meager ...