Tagore’s voyage of discovery
By Vijayan Kannampilly

THE late Saul Steinberg once said that "the doodle is the brooding of the human hand". Every Indian art student would know that the art of Rabindranath Tagore was, sparked off by the doodlings he made in his literary manuscripts. Tagore’s calligraphy was exquisite and the doodles he made stemmed from his desire to turn ugly disordered deletions into order imposed by rhythm.

To a poet rhythm is natural. For Tagore who grew up in an environment of music, dance and poetry even before he wrote his first verse, this was more so. Though Tagore began to pursue the art of painting with passion only towards the last decades of his life, he had always attempted to sketch and to "dabble" with painting. The doodling on manuscript corrections too was an old habit. However, in 1924 the ‘manuscript correction’ took on a significantly unique form. This happened when he was working on the Puravi collection of poems while crossing the Atlantic from Cherbourg to Buenos Aires. During the long voyage Tagore was ill and despondent. This state of being perhaps explains the strange apparitions and forms that emerge from the Puravi doodlings.

Despite the fact that the doodlings began on manuscript pages, it would be silly to see them as a visual expression of a verbal creation. There is no such correspondence, and the schism between the verbal and the visual becomes very obvious as Tagore embarks on a voyage of discovery with pen, pigment and brush. The shores which he reaches and the experiences of the voyage itself are so very different from the rest of his more well-known literary works.

Tagore himself was aware of the differences. In a letter written two years before his death, he wrote: "the picture has about it a sense of brooding (remember Steinberg?) melancholy.... most of my pictures are like that — they lack laughter. I do not know why this should be so when I like a good laugh myself and love to make others laugh. Probably I have a touch of sadness deep down."

The "brooding melancholy" has been explored by many competent writers on Tagore. At the time of the early exhibitions of his works quite a few critics had advanced a psychoanalytic explanation of this strange art. While all these explorations and explanations have different degrees of merit, a more surer understanding would be to start from the irrefutable fact that the art of Tagore was a private, personal act unlike his literary, sociopolitical works and actions which were in and aimed at the public domain.

To be sure, Tagore had strongly-held views on art which differed with the ones held by his artist-nephews, Abanindranath and Gaganendranath. Yet, Tagore did not see himself as a professional artist. The power of his artistic creativity and the fame of his literary genius (more importantly, the latter) were what pushed his personal art into the public domain of exhibitions and reviews. But at the moment of creation they were always a personal pursuit for personal reasons. This is why Tagore’s art does not have an iota of sentimentalism. In his art, he is direct about all the anxieties and ambiguities which make up human life. While Tagore the poet touches upon many aspects of the human condition, Tagore the painter plunges fearlessly into its unfathomed depths.

The personal art of the poet stemmed from his disenchantment with the potency of words which "may indicate, but do not express (man’s) thought." The answer, is to "seek other languages-lines and colours, sounds and movements." This search for another language of expression began as doodlings to restore rhythm and order to manuscripts. But as the products of this near involuntary act began to take shape on the page their formlessness assumed multiple forms and their namelessness had many names.

Tagore, as is well known, did not accept the revivalist credo of Abanindranath. His outlook on art and other matters was universalist, in the fullest sense of the term, and profoundly critical of "the cult of selfish and short-sighted nationalism".

In the arena of art, Tagore believed that Indian artists should "vehemently deny their obligation to produce something that can be labelled as Indian art"; on the contrary, they had to broaden their outlook to encompass the arts of the world and enlarge upon it through their personal vision. To Tagore, "art is nothing other than man’s ceaseless endeavour to reach perfection... an attempt to beat the Creator at his own game." This insistence upon a personal vision which is one of the corner stones of modernity is what gives Tagore’s works their enduring appeal and make him the first true modern artist of India. They teach us that the problem of being an artist in India is to avoid becoming an Indian artist with a capital I"; especially in this age where swadeshi is coming full circle with a terrible vengeance.