Coming to Terms with Tagore

Hasan Immam

More deeply, town-bred souls are intrigued by what they see as a conjunction of opposites: modern academic activity, with all the good and bad that implies, amidst a natural semi-rural setting--as opposed to a landscaped campus--and the remnants of an ashram life. Many think it an impossible conjunction: they include diehard ashramites who knew Tagore in his lifetime, as well as city-bred academics catapulted here by accident of employment. Visva-Bharati bristles with people who will tell you that the place is moribund, neither an ashram nor a modern academic centre. I cannot tell: I do not belong here. But having visited regularly over the years, and having had opportunity to compare many other universities across the country, I am convinced that, whatever common or mundane distractions Visva-Bharati might wallow in, it still has a markedly uncommon dimension to its being. There is something special about the place.

What is special is not the trees and birds--some academically derelict universities have magnificent campuses--but the abiding presence, at least in remnant, of a vision of genius. Amazingly, no attempt has ever been made to assess the full impact of Rabindranath Tagore on the Bengali psyche: we swing between bardolatry and shallow sniping. Yet it seems fair to say that no poet in any land has so radically modified the sensibility of his people for all time to come. It is not a matter of being widely read or quoted, or of influencing later literature or formal thought; it is a question of how a race thinks and feels in every sphere of its being.

Some of that influence is at least recognized if not fully formulated: a certain refinement of sentiment and utterance, the classicizing of certain features of the Bengali landscape, a certain vein of exalted romanticism, the arguably unique merger of word and music in an extraordinary body of song. Tagore virtually worked these elements into the stuff of Bengali language and thought: so much so that when later writers have wished to revolt against these features, they have had to do so forcedly and self-consciously, acknowledging his authority even as they challenged it. If the Bengali language and psyche are now indeed being transformed, it is not owing to any literary movement but the impact of the Hindi cinema and, most recently, of the globalization of culture.

So compelling is this image of an elite, effete Tagore tradition that we tend to lose sight of the robust, gigantic, practical vision and achievement of the man. The world offers no other instance of a supremely great poet and thinker who also set up a major institution on the ground, developed it over 40 years, and left in it such seed for future growth that, another 57 years on, it continues to change not only the cultural but the economic and administrative map of the region. Of course it has itself changed radically in the process; of course some of the change might be undesirable; but the magnitude of the achievement is breathtaking. How many professed men of action, rulers or industrialists, have done as much?

And of course this practical vision and achievement existed in organic relation to his writings. The idiom of Tagore's writings, both prose and verse, changed and re-changed profoundly throughout his life, but invariably within the limits of the formal and elite--a striking contrast to his paintings, which burst the bounds of his formal artistic consciousness. This elegance of idiom has obscured the profound pragmatic concern of his writing, giving point and value to his poetic-philosophic perception of a secular this-worldly human-faced human-minded god.

We read Tagore's poetry and his fiction, but not--unless we are specialized scholars, and then not often--the prose writings on politics and society that, beneath a superficial datedness, still reach out like a whiplash to touch the Bengali psyche and the Indian polity. Out of his poetry, every educated Bengali knows the lines about the silent lonely weeping of spurned justice, the pale dumb witless lips that must be made to speak, the people who toil in fields and towns. But these set lines are read through the romantic haze with which we choose to invest Tagore, like a dentist's ether that lets us de-fang him.

So also the radical programme of village uplift and scientific agriculture that he envisaged for Sriniketan has in the wider Bengali imagination reduced itself to a few rites and feasts of tree-planting, ploughing or whatever--a matter of song, dance and ritual. These have become ominous preserves of politicians and public men. More generally, across Bengal and indeed India, innumerable speeches, hoardings and public announcements daily enshrine the letter of Tagore's work in order to mortally deny its spirit.

I am no longer talking of Visva-Bharati or Santineketan, but of Bengal and India. Closed round with the aura of his own exalted language, Tagore is in danger of becoming a class weapon of the elite and the establishment. Where he penetrates to the masses--as to some extent in his songs--it is still often as a constricting rather than a liberating influence.

As I write, I see a group of little children, on their way back from school, enter the compound where I am staying to gather firewood, cowdung and dropped fruit. They have regulation-issue satchels, the gift of some NGO; but their clothes are ragged, and only two are shod, on one foot each: they are sharing a pair of shoes. On the increasingly streamlined tourist trains to Santiniketan, far more deprived children are at this moment sweeping the carriage floors for a little loose change. It is late August: there has been no rain for a week ('How nice to have Puja weather so early, ' said a Calcutta lady I met here yesterday), and on un-irrigated fields here and elsewhere in southern Bengal, the rice shoots are withering in their beds. And what of Calcutta, that city of Tagore's birth with which he could never cut the umbilical cord? Open his works and you will read, as in a prophecy, searing analyses of how the city and the society view and conduct themselves to this day.

Tagore has not failed us, nor has Santiniketan failed Tagore. We have failed both by keeping them confined to a corner of Birbhum, a tourist spot and art centre of the mind. We dare not let his terrifying genius come too close to our lives and hearts.

Sukanta Chaudhuri teaches English at Jadavpur University. The above is one of his 'View from Calcutta' weekly column.