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Tagore and the West:
Essays
in Appreciation
This admiration of Tagore’s writings and his problematic relation with the West is further debated in the papers compiled in Tagore and the West: Essays in Appreciation, which were presented at a National seminar on Tagore to celebrate his 150th birth anniversary. They cover areas of interest from Tagore’s westward turn to visual culture, from theatre to the poems of the last phase, and similarities between Tagore and Spinoza. The collection brings clear-headed, first-hand understanding to bear on the present juncture when a re-evaluation of Tagore is a significant pursuit of literary scholars. Taking up the issue of Tagore’s humanism, Anand Prakash in his Introduction to the Essays argues: "Human efforts can intervene to bring back spontaneity into unnatural happenings. Tagore believes in positive human endeavour to achieve intellectual and emotional equanimity in life. Poetry therefore becomes the symbol of the innermost being in man and expresses his spirit in a pure form." Girija Sharma’s contribution on the relevance of his plays to the social and religious problems in the country takes the argument further: "Tagore’s theatre is the theatre of protest and paradox. Many of his plays are a scathing attack on the dead and worn out conventions that have a paralysing hold on Indian society. He denounces such evils as ... religious bigotry, class and gender disparities and the caste system". Essays by Swati Ganguly, S.L. Paul and Deepti Sharma elaborate critically on the nuances of this idea with engaging perceptions.
It is relevant to underline the various complications that Tagore caused to the Western scholar in the early years of the twentieth century. There has been a certain dichotomy in his relationship with the west: on the one hand, an adulation based on the deeply ethereal content of his poetry and prose, and on the other, a virtual neglect towards the end of World War I for the very same "morbid" preoccupation with matters of the spirit. As D. H. Lawrence wrote in his letter to Ottoline Morrell in 1916, "This fraud of looking up to him – this wretched worship-of-Tagore attitude—is digusting." The literary sensation that he had become for Yeats and his contemporaries, a product of the "collectively overheated orientalist imagination", as his detractors would say, has to be separated from the real poet that Tagore was in order to stress the aesthetic aspect rather than the sensational. However, it is difficult and almost impossible to demarcate the two Tagores, one a poet sensationalised by the West, and the other who stood out in world poetry for his wit and his narrative gift. And more than anything, the fact that Tagore’s political involvement in India’s Independence movement which spurred him towards renouncing his knighthood because of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, made many in the West sit up and renew interest in him, especially now when they saw in him the blend of the private and the political. To have labelled him "ethereal" was to have missed the highly nationalist engagement of this great poet. It is interesting to see how Ezra Pound was smitten by him and how Yeats admired Tagore for his mysterious poetry that had the voice of "a whole people immeasurably strange to us." And yet the voice that Yeats heard was "our voice as in a dream," indicating that it was difficult for him to decide if Tagore was important because of the "familiarity" of his poetry or because of its mysterious dreamlike quality. Nevertheless, Yeats found within Tagore’s poetry the resonance of his own voice pushing him towards gathering inspiration from this great poet. It is apparent, however, that his writings did not fit in with the European canons of literary thought. "The Western view of Tagore has been rather uncritical, partly facile, largely uninformed" as argued cogently by Professor Dahiya, while "Tagore’s view of the West ... has been well considered and complex, having relation to the historical reality of the time as well as to the lofty vision of the poet." Out of this polemical relationship emerges Tagore’s breathtaking vision of a transnational civilisation, a vision of reality based on contingent multiplicity and a deep sense of humanism. His wholehearted ethical engagement and fidelity to truth makes reading Tagore an involving experience. Indeed, no one writes quite like him, so magnificently free.
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IN today’s world of
deepening contentions, we shall do well to remember, as Yeats
maintained, that "We write long books where no page perhaps has any
quality to make writing a pleasure `85 just as we fight and make money
and fill our heads with politics – all dull things in the doing –
while Mr. Tagore, like the Indian civilization itself, has been content
to discover the soul and surrender himself to its spontaneity."
Even as Yeats’ own bias for spontaneity and soul is noticed, his
criticism of materialist culture is clearly identifiable. It is for this
reason that he had high regard for Tagore’s "innocence,
simplicity, that one does not find elsewhere in literature."
The collection,
significantly, takes up the question of Tagore’s important engagement
with the Western world. Undeniably, the Bengal Renaissance became the
impetus behind Tagore’s literary creativity and living at a time when
India was passing through a cauldron of imperial impositions, "Tagore’s
attitude towards the West was neither of an Anglophile, for whom
everything Western was for the good of his country, nor of the fanatical
patriot, for whom everything British was for the ill of his nation.
Tagore always appreciated the culture and civilization of the West, but
he never failed to condemn the colonial hunger of England and other
European countries."