BY PROF. N. S. PHADKE

It is not easy to pay a satisfying tribute to the memory of a person like the late Rabindranath Tagore. His was not a simple personality. His was not a unilateral greatness that could be easily assessed. He was like a marvellously cut jewel emanating brilliance from a number of facets. He was a poet. He was a philosopher. He was an ardent educationalist. He was an artist–a keen lover of music, painting and dancing. He was a great short-story writer. He was an epoch-making novelist. And in everything that he said or wrote or did there was reflected the spirit of a staunch nationalism, and an uncompromising pride of his dear motherland. Tagore was thus a very complex personality–a rare synthesis of numerous excellences. The world will remember him as one of the greatest Indians of all time. Bengal will remember him as Guru Deb–the pioneer and champion of the renaissance of Bengal and the founder of Shanti Niketan. Personally, I shall cherish his memory as of a great novelist who made a very deep impression on my young mind, and who, along with a few others, indirectly contributed to the shaping of my own enthusiasm for literature.

Tagore’s name was not universally known even in Bengal before the award of the Nobel Prize. It was not surprising, therefore, that we in Maharashtra first heard of Tagore in connection with the Nobel Prize, and like most of the Marathi readers the first book of Tagore which I read was his Gitanjali. That book failed to make any impression on me. I state this not so much with a view to question the quality of the poems as to suggest that the common Marathi reader did not find anything new in the devotional and mystic tones of the verses and so was incapable of thrilling to its novelty. Reading the Gitanjali I could not help thinking that there was quite an abundance of such poetry in the writings of our own poet saints, and that therefore the only singular merit of the Gitanjali was that it was available in English and so reached a very vast audience out of India. Anyway the book left me cold. Rabindranath as a poet did not move me!

But when I began to read his novels it was a different story altogether. I got an increasing glimpse of the greatness of the man. In each one of his novels I could clearly see a master artist at work, depicting with soft tender touches the alluring beauty of young love, the sweet ripeness of attachment between husband and wife, the grandeur of lofty sentiments like religious devotion and national pride, the sublimity of human sorrow and grief. I had read the novels of Bankim Chandra before, and in recent years I have read Sarat Chandra Chatterji. But none of these held for me the fascination which I felt for Tagore. It was Rabindranath Tagore who first gave the really artistic and modern touch to the Bengalee novel. It was Tagore who brought to the fiction of modem Bengal the delicacy and richness of an artistic temperament, the charm of technical excellence, a flight of imagination and a soft maturity of sympathy which before him were not found in the Bengalee novel and after him have not yet been shown in that remarkable measure by any writer of Bengal.

Take, for instance, Tagore’s Chokherwali or his Noukadubi or Gour Mohan or Char Adhyaya. In each one of these you find such a delightfully clever interplay of diverse characters. You are brought face to face with such absorbing situations. You hear the music and rhythm of human sadness, ambitions, frustrations, joys, raptures, ecstasies. And towering above this busy traffic of characters and events you clearly see the personality of Tagore, a philosophic twinkle in his eye and a poetic smile on his face, eager to impart to you his own deep and broad understanding of the eternal drama that is human life!

I have always believed that the true function of a novelist is to make us truly human, to increase our capacity of response to the beauty of Nature and to the beauty of human association. The late Rabindranath Tagore fulfilled this function in a remarkable and exceptional way. Whenever I recollect his name my mind pays a silent tribute as to a great master of the craft to which I have devoted a great part of my own life, and my head bends in deep reverence as before the majesty of a lonely snow-capped mountain peak.

* A tribute paid on the occasion of the Rabindra Anniversary held by the Rabindra Parishad, Kolhapur.

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