Gurudev

S. Jagadisan & M. S. Nagarajan

Influences: “I was born in 1861. That is not an important date of history, but it belongs to a great period of our history in Bengal.” So said Rabindranath Tagore in a lecture entitled “My Life” delivered in China in 1924. Two broad influences – Time Spirit and individual personalities – moulded Tagore. Bengal in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was the meeting ground of many tendencies and forces. It was at once a period of conflict and promise. The traditional ideas of the East clashed with the new Western thought. Tagore belonged to a creative minority, who attempted a synthesis of Eastern ideals and Western thought. While they did not submit to the domination of Western culture, they were alive to the defects in Indian society. They were the builders of the New India.

Three events of far-reaching importance which took place in the second half of the nineteenth century had a cumulative influence on Tagore. The first of these movements was religious in character and the moving spirit behind it was Raja Rammohan Roy, the chief pioneer of the Indian Renaissance. His main effort was to rescue Hinduism from the ‘sands and debris’ of creeds, dogma and ritual. Roy has been acclaimed as Tagore’s ‘spiritual progenitor’. With the death of Rammohan Roy, the mantle of cultural leadership fell on Tagore’s father. Tagore was born in a family in which affluence was combined with artistic talent and cultural and literary tradition. He inherited from his father a composite culture which included the elements of Sufism and Hinduism.

The second movement to affect Tagore was the literary movement spearheaded by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. Bankim Chandra breathed new life into literature and ‘with a touch of his magic wand aroused our literature from her age long sleep’. He also focussed attention on the glory of our ancient culture. The third influence was the national movement which found expression in the voice of freedom and the spirit of revolt. The Tagore family were deeply involved in this triple movement of tremendous significance.

The Upanishads, Buddism, Classical Sanskrit, the English Romantic poets, the Vaishnava poets and saint singers were the other vital influences which were assimilated and integrated by Tagore. The Upanishads cast a spell on him and formed his spiritual nourishment. The spirit of compassion enshrined in the Buddha fascinated him. The Vaishnava poets Vidyapathi and Chandidas taught him that God and man belong to each other. The appeal of the classical Sanskrit poets Vyasa, Valmiki and Kalidasa was inescapable. Togore preserved an unflinching loyalty to Bengali and employed it as his medium to communicate his vision, thoughts and ideas which sustained him.

Education: Tagore had no regular schooling and the academic grind at the Oriental Seminary, Normal School and St Xavier’s College left him cold. Besides the schedule at school, he had tutors to teach him at home. “ I went to school but it did not interfere with my education.” said Mark Twain and this was true of Tagore too. His real education started when he went with his father on a tour of the Himalayas. He was encouraged to read for himself and roam about in the midst of Nature. He lost himself in the beauty and grandeur of the Himalayan landscape. This tour and the study of the Upanishads generated in him a meditative and mystical frame of mind and love of the ashram and tapovana. It formed an important formative influence on the young Tagore.

Gitanjali and Nobel Prize: For a year and a half from 1878, Tagore stayed in England. He attended lectures on English Literature at the London University, but did not qualify for any degree. It was during his visit in 1912 that he shot into fame. He had taken with him a translation of his poems. A group of friends William Rothenstein, an artist, W. B. Yeats, Ernest Rhys, the Editor of Everyman’s Library and C. F. Andrews were quick to recognize his poetic genius. The collection of these poems under the title Gitanjali with an introduction by W. B. Yeats established him as a poet and earned him the Nobel Prize in 1913. “ I have carried the manuscript of these translations with me for days, reading in railway trains or on top of omnibuses or in restaurants and I have often had to close lest some stranger should see how it moved me. These lyrics display in their thought a world which I have dreamt of all my life long” (W. B. Yeats).

Tagore on Art: There are two activities common to human beings and animals – self-preservation and perpetuation of the species. The animals limit themselves to these two activities. Human beings have a surplus energy left after fulfilling these two basic functions. They are capable of going beyond the two activities and directing the surplus energy along creative channels. Tagore considers the impulses behind Art. Exuberance of emotional energy is one such impulse. Human beings feel their personality intensely and Art springs from that consciousness. The surplus of emotional energy finds expression in Art. The edifice of civilization is built on this surplus. “When there is an element of the superfluous in our heart’s relationship with the world, Art has its birth. When our heart is fully awakened in love or other emotions, our personality is in full tide. Then it feels the longing to express itself for the very sake of expression. Then comes Art”. Our deep emotional and aesthetic response to sunrise is different from the bare information about the phenomenon of sunrise, since it is not the fact of the sunrise, but its relation to ourselves that interests us. It is enough for a religious man to worship, but his religious personality overflows and craves for self-expression, hence the temple, ceremonies and rituals. “The spires of our temples try to kiss the stars and the notes of our music to fathom the depth of the ineffable. The building of man’s true world - the living world of beauty and truth – is the function of Art. The efflux of the consciousness of his personality requires an outlet for expression. Therefore in Art man reveals himself and not his objects.”

Tagore, the Educationist: Tagore’s early education did not help him relate himself to our cultural tradition or social life. He developed a system of education which would result in the synthesis of the head and the heart. The personality of the children should be exposed to Nature to receive nourishment. The children should be in close and constant contact with Nature to sustain themselves emotionally and spiritually. Education is a continuous process and takes place where there is a meeting of the minds of the teacher and the students. For Tagore, the teacher is a preceptor whose living example is more important and influential than his learning or scholarship. Shantiniketan and Viswa Bharati embody Tagore’s vision as an educationist.

Tagore’s Works: Tagore was a prolific writer. The volume and range of his creative output are incredible. He was novelist, short-story writer, poet, dramatist, philosopher, painter, critic, musician and autobiographer. His lectures in India and abroad have been collected under various titles. Creative writing, Personality, Sadhana and The Religion of Man (Habbert Lectures at Oxford). His writings and lectures are informed by his deep philosophic vision. De Quincey distinguishes between literature of knowledge and literature of power. The former imparts factual information and feeds the mind. The latter- to use an expression of Longinus – transports or elevates. Sri Aurobindo defines poetry of the highest order as mantra. Its effect is the same as that of soul-stirring, soul-elevating scriptural incantation or a cascade of melody. We are lifted out of ourselves to a new level of experience and perception and are filled with rapture. Tagore’s writings are charged with this power.

Concern for the Human Race: It should not be imagined that Tagore, the mystic and philosopher, lived in an ivory tower. He did not hesitate to record his response to the ills afflicting the world in general and India in particular. He surrendered the knighthood conferred on him by the British Government to lodge his protest against the outrage committed in Jallianwallah Bagh. The following lines from his play Natirpuja set against the Buddhist background express his agony at the war torn, violence ridden world.

The world today is wild with the delirium of hatred

The conflicts are cruel, and unceasing in anguish

Crooked are its paths, tangled its bonds of greed

All creatures are crying for a new birth of thine

Oh thou of boundless of life……

O Serene, O free

In thine immeasurable mercy and goodness

Wipe away all dark stains from the heart of the earth.

In his lecture “Construction Versus Creation.” Tagore concedes that Science has conferred blessings. But its potential for destruction outweighs its benefits. Scientific power has brought the world to the edge of a precipice. Tagore voices his concern for the human race:

Must the sword rule forever and not the sceptre? We feel the withering fierceness of the spirit of modern civilization, because it beats directly against our human sensibility; and it is we of the Eastern hemisphere who have the right to say that those who represent this great age of opportunities are furiously building their doom by their renouncement of the divine ideal of personality, for the ultimate in man is not in his intellect or material wealth: it is in his imagination of sympathy, in his illumination of heart, in his activities of self-sacrifice, in his capacity for extending love far and wide across all barriers of caste and colour, in his realizing this world not as a storehouse of mechanical power, but a habitation of man’s soul with its eternal music of beauty and its inner light of a divine presence.

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