On May 7, Rabindranath Tagore, had he lived, would have turned 154. Despite earning international acclaim and a Nobel Prize for the English translation of his Bengali poetry in 1913, Tagore was a staunch endorser of regional languages.
On his visit to Chennai, then Madras, in October 1934 as part of a fund-raising endeavour for his university Viswa-Bharathi, Tagore was beset with a peculiar problem — of being lost in translation.
Attending a reception organised by the Women’s Indian Association at Egmore, Tagore confessed to have not understood the address as it was delivered in Tamil. According to The Hindu , in spite of the speech being translated to English, he said, “It is most unfortunate that they who belonged to the same country are separated by different languages. The love for the motherland though is universal and knows no difference of language. ”
The issue of language, which would consume the State a couple of decades later, also came up in a spirited discussion with Fine Arts students in the following days. While discussing how the vernacular can be revitalised in popular art forms, he encouraged young students to embrace the easily understandable regional language rather than the rigidly structured classical languages. He further advised writers to shed their reservations about the colloquial tongue conforming to classical grammar rules. To strengthen his case, he went on to admonish people in south India for using ‘too much English to the detriment of vernaculars.’ He said: “In Bengal, except for very Anglicised people, English is used only in writing; otherwise in conversation, everybody speaks only Bengali. “
When one member pointed out that it was only because of English that he was able to understand them, the poet retorted, “Leave me alone; I am living in the far north, but how about among yourselves.” Way back in 1934, even as the struggle for independence was peaking, Tagore’s observations seemed almost prescient considering the linguistic debates that would dominate the country in the years to come.