Who are you, reading curiously this poem of mine/ a hundred years from now?/ shall I be able to send to you --/ steeped in the love of my heart--/ the scent of a flower, / a bird-song’s note, / a spark of today’s blaze of colour / a hundred years from now?” (1996, from Chitra .)
The poet who penned these lines in the late 19th century, assuming confidently that he would still be read a 100 years after he wrote them, died on this day 75 years ago. Yet, he remains one of the most widely read Indian poets of all time,revered across the world as one of the greatest of modern minds. Rabindranath Tagore, the only Indian to have won the Nobel for literature, was of that very rare breed of genius that combines prolificity with the highest quality, diversity, depth, profound thought, and acute sensitivity.
There was hardly any category of writing that Tagore did not attempt and did not excel at, and his life’s work in literature consists of more than 1,000 poems, numerous short stories and novels, dramatic works, and many insightful essays on socio-political, philosophical and literary topics. Yet, all this could not exhaust the abundance of his creative energy: we also remember Tagore as the composer of more than 200 exquisite songs, as a painter who helped modernise Indian art, and as an educationist whose ideal of a freeing, cosmopolitan kind of learning culminated in the founding of the Visva-Bharati University.
In his poetry Tagore integrated, as in Gitanjali , a consummate artistry of form with matter that speaks powerfully to the most fundamental and the loftiest qualities of human nature. Every emotion of the heart was sounded with rare fidelity in uplifting, masterly verses that often communicate a sense of deep union among man, nature and the creator. In his prose, especially in his short stories, Tagore evinced a very evolved social and psychological understanding and a grace of language and form that were of the highest order.
Yet, it is not only as a great littérateur that India remembers Tagore. His contribution to social and political thought at a time when the country was grappling with the impact of colonisation was significant, so much so that contemporary historians consider him, along with the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar, to be one of the makers of modern India. Having easy access to a many-sided culture, European as well as Indian, and having an instinctual and experiential grasp of the primeval life of the land, Tagore attained, as it were, the James Joycean ideal of the Artist, forging in the smithy of his soul the consciousness of his race. Thus, the moderniser of Bengali verse and prose emerged also as the seer who helped recreate the sensibility of the Indian people at a time when the country was in changing, turbulent times.
The poet who gave us our national anthem, however, was not an uncritical sympathiser of the freedom struggle. His was a nationalism that did not preach hatred of the coloniser or exult in a simplified glorification of the Indian past. Nor was he blind to the social and cultural impact of the British influence on India. He championed, as in his famous novel The Home and the World , a patriotism that would steer clear of violence or radical, wasteful non-cooperation, one that would aim at sustainable evolution rather than divisive, destructive revolution. Rejecting British knighthood to protest the Jalianwala Bagh Massacre and initiating the rite of rakhi bandhan as a resistance to the Partition of Bengal, Tagore still remained a true cosmopolitan who wanted his home to be receptive to the winds of the world.
Today, when “narrow domestic walls” are emerging all over the globe, dividing people into ever smaller groups engaged in hating and fighting each other, Tagore’s message of integration, his lifelong pursuit of the larger, the higher and the universal,appears relevant. And for India — gripped by a narrow, strident ‘nationalism’ that seems to promote divisiveness and sectarianism — Tagore is the Gurudev whose voice must resonate: Where the mind is without fear, and the head is held high/ . . . / Where the world has not been broken up into fragments/ By narrow domestic walls/ . . . . /Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection/ . . . . / Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake .
Suparna Banerjee teaches English at Krishnath College, Berhampore.
