TAGORE
AND THE INDIAN RENAISSANCE! 1
It
cannot be anyone’s “aim” to “perpetuate” the memory of Rabindranath Tagore!
For, we are but little men to presume to perpetuate so great a man’s memory.
His writings, the memory of his life, Visvabharati,
the great institution that he created–these perpetuate Tagore’s memory as
nothing else can. But there is one thing that we can do; there is one thing we
ought to do. We can read Rabindranath’s works–such of them, at least, as are
easily accessible in English or in our own regional languages–and we shall then
feel thankful that, although ours has been in many ways a chequered
history, although the cup of our discontent has filled to the brim, and perhaps
spilled over even, the Time Spirit has nevertheless thrown up a few great men
during the last 150 years, men of outstanding ability and striking personality,
who have given new life to us, shown new directions of national evolution, and
brought new hopes and visions to sustain us in our trials, and inspire us in
our undertakings. It is our racial habit to call such men Rishis,
and among the Rishis of the recent
past none stands higher than Rabindranath Tagore.
As
the years pass, we are apt to view Tagore as a figure of dim vast proportions,
lost in the mists of legend. It is necessary to remember that he was no legend,
but a real human being; that, for instance, he once visited the Andhra
University campus to deliver two lectures under the Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar foundation; that the poet, playwright, novelist,
patriot, prophet, did not exhaust the man. He was more than the sum of his
achievements, and still the only Rabindranath, light-giver, life-giver, to
those who were close to him and dear to him. We shall do him no justice if we
treated him as an institution and as a legend, ignoring the fact that this
evangelist of the Religion of Man was himself an arch-individualist, a
trembling human being in all that he thought, felt, said and did. Let us raise
the cry, “Ecce Homo! Behold the Man!” before we salute the Kavi, the Karmayogin,
the Gurudev.
‘The
Leonardo da Vinci of the Indian Renaissance’: so
Professor D.S. Sarma has called Rabindranath. The description is apt: Tagore’s
was as many-sided an achievement as Leonardo’s had been, and quite as rich, in
fact richer. When after an icy season of blight and sterility, when at the end
of the winter of our frustration and discomfiture, new life bursts upon us, at
last, many are the sights we see, varied are the thrills we experience–there
are the new sticky leaves, the ants return, the birds return, the ice-capped
Himalayas send freshes to the rivers in the plains,
hope returns, gaiety returns, life returns. In a nation’s history, new life
means awakening in all the divers fields of life: in
politics, economics and industry, in ethics, philosophy and religion, in art,
education and social life. The whole aspect of life seems to change. It is the
same country, the same people–yet everything is different. See the paddy fields
before and after the monsoon: at one moment the stubble, at another the rich
sheet of green. So it is with a nation’s cycles of blight and renewal.
The
rounded fulness and splendour of ancient Indian
culture may be inferred by us even at this distance of time. The elements that
make for a full and free life were there in ample measure. Vitality, first of
all: a great zest for life, a zest that knew no inhibitions, no timid
exclusions. Second, an intellectual vigour, keen and
constructive: analytical, no doubt, but not allergic to the processes of
integration. And, third, a high spiritual awareness, mediating between the two,
and making the most of them. Life, mind, spirit, a trinity of powers that made
possible the great ancient Indian civilisation–the art and the literature, the
forms of social and political organisation, the systems of philosophy and the
codes of law and ethics. In course of time, de set in, and this civilisation
stagnated. The power and the glory receded, the decline began, the fall seemed to be imminent. Invader after invader came:
Islam came, and remained; the Cross came, and remained; the foreign soldier and
the rapacious trader came, they remained, quarrelled
among themselves, and gave a vicious violent twist to the nation’s life. Ruin
and confusion reigned in the country. Vitality weakened; there was, as it were,
a flight from life; intellect weakened and worked for the wrong ends; and
spiritual awareness ceased or slumbered. In 1757, the Battle of Plassey was fought, and during the next fifty years we saw
the veritable nadir our fortunes. It was mid-winter. Famine,
disorder, corruption, moral apathy, were the outward manifestations of
the hell that
The Western impact–by which we mean, not merely the
political action but also the coming of Western culture and the religion of
Christianity–made both for confusion and the possibility of new creation. The
advancing shield of the West indicated the holiness of Christ on one side, and
the power of the Machine on the other. The missionary and the soldier were thus
the two arms of the conquest of
Yet,
the Western impact, when the first shock was over, proved beneficial in many
ways. It put an end to the old apathy. It quickened the impulse to creation. It
introduced the critical spirit. It brought to our notice new forms of
literature, new forms of social and political organisation, and challenged us
to attempt readjustment and live, or to remain stubborn and perish. The battle
of the Indian renaissance was won (it was a long struggle, though) when we
decided to readjust and live. A vigorous cross-fertilisation,
a purposive transvaluation of values, was called for:
and it was forthcoming.
The
history of modern India may be said to begin with Raja Rammohun
Roy, for he was, in very truth, our great pathfinder, an idealist coupled with
a shrewd man of affairs, a visionary and a builder who really deserved the
title of ‘Father of Modern India’. Rammohun was a
self-made man, with a purpose in his life and an unfaltering sense of
direction. While still young, he left the East India Company’s service, and
chose to be a servant of the nation. He then carried his mission to England,
made the appropriate contacts, and moved the powers that be to do the right
thing by India. Whether in India or in England, he was restlessly active, and
there was not a department of life–religion, social reform, education,
journalism, public administration, legislation–which did not receive the
beneficial impact of his personality. He was no unbeliever but a devout Hindu,
yet his Hinduism went back to the pristine purity of the Vedas, leaping over
the unhealthy encrustations of the intervening centuries. He was a sturdy
nationalist, but he also wisely saw that it was not in obscurantism, but in the
assimilation of Western knowledge and techniques, that our progress would lie.
He even pleaded for “settlement in India by Europeans” and recommended that
“educated men of character and capital should now be permitted and encouraged
to settle in India.” The qualifications are masterly: not any Englishmen,
but educated Englishmen of character and capital! The
plight of the Indian widows, the darkness of superstition, the miasma of
ignorance, the general backwardness of the country, all stirred him to action:
and writing and speaking–whether in Bengali or in English–was to him a form of
action. By 1823 he had fully matured, sharpened his dialectical instruments,
tested his friends, and re-thought his ends and means. Some disillusion he had
no doubt experienced during his ‘experiments with truth’ (in the Gandhian
phrase), but it had also given a new dimension to his experience, and a
mellowness to his intelligence. Being a staunch advocate of English education,
he asked Lord Amherst to consider the India of his day as being similar to the
Europe before the time of Lord Bacon, and begged that the funds set apart for
education might be usefully spent “by employing a few gentlemen of talent and
learning educated in Europe and providing a college furnished with the
necessary books, instruments and other apparatus”. Again, the qualifications
are masterly: there is the emphasis on the right teaching personnel, on books,
on instruments “and other apparatus”. If, twelve years later, in 1835, Lord
William Bentinck resolved to employ the funds available
for education on English education alone, the credit goes both to Rammohun Roy’s vision and persistence and Macaulay’s emphasis and determination. For the rest, Rammohun was an intensely religious man, and he felt that
quintessential Hinduism was of a piece with quintessential Christianity or
Islam. He looked under the bewildering edifices of dogma, ritual, and
philosophical dialectics, and sought the foundations of the great faiths, which
seemed to him identical, and on these he wished to raise his Brahma Samaj, rather as Akbar had done in his day in his own way.
As Mahadev Govind Ranade has pointed out, Rammohun
“aspired only to establish harmony between men’s accepted faith and their
practical observances by a strict monolatrous worship
of the One Supreme Soul, a worship of the heart and not of the hands, a
sacrifice of self and not of the possessions of the self”. Humanity was no mass
that he viewed in the abstract, but a collection of individuals, each of whom
mattered as a unique piece of trembling humanity. Hence the war he waged
against the monstrous custom of sati, and hence too his anxious regard
for the rights of women and the rights of the depressed of all kinds. By
precept, and by example, he advanced the causes he held dear all along the
front, and in him the renaissance in India found its first prophet, the first
of our latter-day Mahapurushas.
Rammohun’s work was continued by
Prince Dwaraknath Tagore and his son Maharshi Debendranath Tagore. Dwaraknath,
the poet’s grandfather, was an intrepid and royal figure. Max Muller tells us
that Dwaraknath, when he visited Paris in 1844, gave
a grand party and “placed a shawl on the shoulders of each lady as she left the
room”; and, while in England, he erected, a tomb over the ashes of Rammohun Roy at Bristol where he had died in 1833. Debendranath was an austerer
figure, and he found that the enthusiasm for English and Western culture had
gone to the heads of many young men, the “Derozio
men” as they were called in Bengal, who were at once violently pro-British and
no less violently anti-Indian. They thought, in Surendranath
Bannerjee’s words, that “everything English was
good–even the drinking of brandy was a virtue; everything not English was to be
viewed with suspicion”. Debendranath wished to stem
the tide, and went from house to house, from morning till evening, entreating
Hindu parents not to send their children to missionary schools but only to
native schools. Presently, when in 1857 he met Keshub
Chandra Sen, the Brahma Samaj became a power once again. But Keshub
found himself more and more attracted to Christ and Christ’s Gospel, though he
always tried to give it a Hindu colouring, and this
in time brought about a split in the Samaj, Keshub organising his own Church
in 1866 and going his own way. Keshub too paid a
visit to England, and made a great impression upon people by the eloquence of
his preaching. Max Muller found him “perfectly tranquil even when most in
earnest”, and others have classed him, as an orator, with Gladstone and Gambetta. Meantime, Debendranath
kept the Brahma Samaj going on conservative lines,
with Anand Mohan Bose and Akshaya
Kumar Datta as his principal lieutenants. In later
times, Rabindranath himself tried to close the ranks between the two wings of
the Samaj, but without much success. Judged by mere
numbers, neither the original Brahma Samaj nor either
of its sub-sects had what may be called an impressive following, but the
quality of the leadership they gave to Bengal and to India was most
distinguished in many walks of life.
Not
Bengal only, but other regions in India also were participating in this
ferment, this careering towards new horizons. In the Punjab, Dayananda Sarasvati founded the Arya Samaj. While the leaders of
the Brahma Samaj had tried in their different ways to
effect a marriage of India and the West, to build a bridge between Hindu
spirituality and Western thought, Dayanand wanted
only a return to Vedic simplicity, clarity and burning purity, and pleaded for
a determined elimination of the accumulated accretions of the ages. Stuti (praise), prarthana
(prayer), and upasana (community) were to be the means of
realization, while even the non-Hindu was to be proselytised,
if he desired, through suddhi (purification),
sangathan (union) and vidya (education). In Bombay, on the other
hand, religious reform took the shape of the Prarthana
Samaj, less eclectic than the Brahma Samaj, and less militant
than the Arya Samaj. The leading spirits of the movement were Ranade and Telang, and they were
guided as much by the prophets and saints of Maharashtra in their religious
life as by the speeches of Gladstone, Cobden, Bright, Clarkson and Wilberforce
in their political and social thought. In Madras, while the new education was
taking rapid strides, and a generation of eminent lawyers, jurists, and
administrators was coming up, the shifting of the Theosophical Society to Adyar in 1878 had something of a national significance. If
the Brahma Samaj was an Indian attempt to link the
indigenous and Western springs of spirituality, the Theosophical Society was a
western attempt to drink deep in the springs of Eastern mystical thought.
But
none of these movements–neither the Brahma Samaj nor
the Theosophical Society, neither the Arya Samaj nor the Prarthan Samaj, neither the literary renaissance under the inspired
leadership of Bankim Chandra
Chatterjee nor the movement for social reform
initiated by intellectual gladiators like Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar–was a really
effective answer to the ‘challenge’ from the West. It was now that Ramakrishna Paramahamsa occurred in Bengal, and people saw in this
“self-illumined ecstatic and mystic, without a single trace or touch of the
alien thought or education upon him,” a true embodiment of human unity through
god-realisation. When Ramakrishna pass away in 1886, his chief disciple, Swami
Vivekananda, established the Ramakrishna Mission, and in other ways also played
an intrepid St. Paul to the Paramahamsa. The obscured
soul of India had come out at last in a blaze of glory, and there was no danger
now that Indians would surrender wholly to the values of the West. We had still
to learn many things from the West–science, technology, organisation, the
critical temper, democracy–but all had to be built on the soul’s purity and
strength. Ramakrishna sent rain to our roots, and created conditions for growth
in terms of our own svabhava and svadharma. The impulse from the West was not
to be withstood. As Gokhale remarked, “We could not remain outside this
influence even if we would. We would not so remain if we could.” While
purposively responding to the influence, it was also necessary that we should
not become rootless creatures. Sri Ramakrishna saved us from that fate.
Such,
in broad outline, was the course of the Indian renaissance in the 19th century:
Rabindranath was born on 6 May 1861, in Bengal, in the Tagore family. In other
words, he was by his very birth caught in the mid-current of the renaissance.
The youngest of the seven sons of Maharshi Debendranath,
affluence and aristocratic culture surrounded him, and as a boy he grew up
keenly alive and awake to the world of man and nature around him. He had no
regular schooling, nor did he go through the usual academic grind. He had,
however, profound regard for some of the Jesuit Fathers of St. Xavier’s,
Calcutta. Rabindranath’s forerunners in literature–Madhusudan Dutt, Iswar Chandra and Bankim–had given Bengali poetry, prose and fiction a great
start among the modern Indian languages. It was an atmosphere of expectancy,
and Rabindranath eagerly breathed this air of infinite possibility. At 15 or
earlier he had begun lisping in numbers, and by 1875 his first efforts in prose
and verse had begun to appear in print. He was drawn to the Bengali Vaishnava singers, and indeed to Indian devotional poetry
in general. A visit to England followed. The English romantics–Keats, Shelley
and Woidsworth–and the great Victorians–Tennyson and
Browning–exercised a potent influence on him. He was absorbed in Shakespeare.
He read Sir Thomas Browne. Tagore was not a systematic or voracious reader,
but, like Shakespeare, although he read at random, he turned to capital use
what had come his way. He wrote lyrics with astonishing facility, and his
fecundity was amazing. He had written 7000 lines of verse before he was
eighteen, and the pace was maintained for the greater part of his life, and,
when he died on 7 August 1941, he left behind him about 300,000 lines of verse,
probably a world record!
It
was in 1883 that Tagore wrote his first play, later translated into English as Sanyasi. Henceforth, poems and plays,
stories, novels, and essays flowed unceasingly from his pen. For a time, during
the ‘Partition of Bengal’ agitation, Tagore was involved in politics, but then
he was too much of an individualist–too much of a humanist too–to be a
demagogue and to court the glare of political opinion and action. While the
nationalists were angry because he was not nationalist enough, Government was
secretly suspicious of his moves and aims. He was ill at ease, he often retired
to the peace of Shantiniketan and lost himself in
either the frenzy of literary creation or the tasks of creative education.
When
Rabindranath was fifty, a commemoration meeting was held in Calcutta in January
1912, and it was clear that the Bengali race as a whole had risen to do homage
to their great poet. It was verily an overwhelming experience to him, and the
function almost left him prostrate for a time. As an escape from this
exhaustion, Tagore started translating into English some of his own Bengali
lyrics. Presently, while on his way to England, he returned to the translations
again and again, and when he landed in London he had quite a little collection
on hand. This bunch of prose renderings soon came to the knowledge of Rothenstein, the painter and later of W. B. Yeats, May Sinclair, C. F. Andrews, Henry Nevinson, and others. Their enthusiasm facilitated the
publication of Gitanjali with Yeats’s celebrated Introduction in the course of which he
said–
“I
have carried the manuscript of these translations with me for days, reading it
in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have
often had to close it lest some stranger should see how much it moved me. These
lyrics...display in their thought a world I have dreamt of all my life long….As
the generations pass, travellers will hum them on the
railway and men rowing upon rivers. Lovers, while they await one another, shall
find, in murmuring them, this love of God a magic gulf wherein their own bitter
passion may bathe and renew its youth...”
Tagore
returned to Shantiniketan, and there, in November
1913, he heard the news of the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to him,
Henceforth, he was not merely the poet of Bengal, but of all India.
The
phenomenal success of Gitanjali ensured the publication of other volumes
of translations also in quick succession, though a collected edition of his
poems and plays appeared only in 1936. In the meantime, he had founded the Viwwabharati University at Shantiniketan
in 1920. To collect funds for it, he toured incessantly, and became a sort of
unofficial ambassador, visiting the countries of the East and West, and raising
India’s prestige everywhere. While not entangling himself in politics, he
maintained friendly relations with Gandhiji and Jawaharlal Nehru. As the years
passed, he became more and more a legendary figure; in his flowing beard and
immaculate white robes, he looked rather like a Rishi of Upanishadic times. He had a certain spiritual affinity with
Sri Aurobindo, and he lavished much love on Subhas Bose.
While standing aloof and detached, Tagore nevertheless kept close to the
nation’s heart. And when he died, it was as though an age had come to an end.
Tagore
declined to subscribe to the facile heresy that the East and the West were
irreconcilable opposites. He would neither countenance a brazen mimicry of the
West nor a blind revival of India’s past. New life could emerge only through a
creative fusion of the old and the new, the living past and the puissant present.
Tagore’s father wrote in 1884 to Max Muller:
“There
are branches of knowledge and art in which the is deficient, and which she must
learn from foreign sources. But there are other things, all her own, and even
your enlightened countrymen may turn with pleasure and profit to a leaf or two
out of the books of the East to learn something new, to get glimpse of vistas
of thought with which they are not familiar.”
Like
his father, Tagore too felt that the West and the East had much to teach each
other. Human values were essentially the same in West and the East, and our aim
should be to promote, more and more mutual understanding, and so to end, once
and for all, the seeming dichotomy.
In
politics, again, Tagore held a middle course. During the opening years of the
present century, the air was rent by conflicting cries. The old Congress,
wedded to Moderatism, recoiled from the new
Extremism, the extreme nationalism, the cult of the bomb, the movement of
boycott, the burning of foreign cloth. Tagore’s patriotism was the patriotism
of a humanist and a poet, not that of a fanatic nationalist. Humanist values
were more to him than power values, the ‘spirit of man’ more than the power and
the glory of the nation. He was suspicious of violent political action, and of
the passions unleashed by it, and there is a prophetic quality in his poem, The
Child, inspired by Gandhi’s march to Dandi to
launch Salt Satyagraha. Tagore felt, again and again, that, if we did not hold
human values as paramount, we would be surely degrading and ultimately
destroying ourselves.
In
economics, too, Tagore differed both from the ‘Charkha
School’ and the impatient modernistic school: differed, that is to say, from
Gandhiji as well as Jawaharlal. Tagore pleaded, not for a bare life, nor for a
hectic luxurious life, but for a beautiful and full life. He did not share
Gandhi’s belief that the Charkha would prove an easy
solvent to our economic ills, and he also instinctively shrank from machinery
and gigantism. He saw man being more and more pitted against the machine,
humanity against ruthless power; and in his great play, Mukta
Dhara, he articulated, in Mr. Satyavrata
Mukerjee’s words, an “eloquent protest against the
onslaught of machinery on the ancient ramparts of man’s individual freedom.”
Human values must e paramount; else we shall maim and destroy ourselves.
Tagore’s life-long interest in
education flowed mainly from his keen dissatisfaction with the lifeless commercialised education of our time, and he strove to make
Shantiniketan and Sriniketan
the focal points of a new experiment in living, an integral experience in
creative education. Shantiniketan as a home for
retirement and meditation, as an Ashram for cultural and spiritual realisation,
owed its origin to Tagore’s father, the Maharshi. But
the poet turned Shantiniketan the near-by Sriniketan into educational centres
of unique potency. The cultures of the East were to be brought together, and a
living relationship was to be attempted between the West and the East. In other
words, the East was first to find its own soul, and then help the world to
transmute the seeming West-East dichotomy into transcendent unity, and so
establish a broad base for human understading and
action. Further, the cultural life was to be related to the life of the
community, and education was to include vocational training as well. Above all,
harmony was to be the keynote of all the activities in Shantiniketan
and Sriniketan. When the school became a university
in 1920, an international team of dedicated scholars and artists began the
valiant attempt to enact the drama of human unity and humane understanding.
Almost echoing his own father’s words, Rabindranath once declared:
“We
must recognise that it is providential that the West
has come to India, and yet some one must show the East to the West, and
convince the West that the East has her contribution to make to the history of
civilisation. India is no beggar to the West. And yet, even though the West may
think she is, I am not for thrusting off Western civilisation
and becoming segregated in our independence. Let us have a deep association.”
Visvabharati was to be the living
symbol of that deep association. Writing of it, Dr. C. Reddy once aptly
exclaimed: “What perfect insight does it not show into the nature of university
education, which should be research and creation and the development of
personality, and not, as the government universities are, distributing channels
for the scanty, muddy, slow, belated flow of Western knowledge and discoveries!”
Not the least of the striking featurcs of the university that grew under Tagore’s fostering care at Shantiniketan was the integral view of education that made art, literature, philosophy, religion, intellectual discipline, vocational guidance and intimacy with Nature independent, each receiving from, yet enriching, the others, and all contributing to the full and harmonious efflorescence of the human personality. Art and literature were not ‘extras’ but had a vital role to play in human life. And life without religion–in its quintessential nectarean sense–was life without meaning, and was savourless like a dish without salt. And so art and literature, at their most profound moments, became God-conscious, became ‘religious’ in fact. When the human mind tried to grapple with these relations, the filiations between life and art and literature and religion, there resulted the systems of aesthetics, poetics, ethics and philosophy. But man cannot live–cannot live long or live happily–without religion, without something of a God consciousness.
In
a lecture delivered in America, Tagore boldly declared:
“In
India, the greater part of our literature is religious because God with us is
not a distant God; he belongs to our homes as well as to our temples...He is the
chief guest whom we honour. In seasons of flowers and
fruits, in the coming of the rain, in the fulness of
the autumn, we see the hem of His mantle and hear His footsteps. We worship Him
in all the true objects of our worship, and love Him wherever our love is true.
In the woman who is good we feel Him, in the man who is true we know Him, in
our children He is born again and again, the Eternal Child. Therefore,
religious songs are our love songs, and our domestic occurrences, such as the
birth of a son, or the coming of a daughter from her husband’s house to her
parents and her departure again, are woven in our literature as a drama whose
counterpart is the divine.”
God
is with us, all of us, all the time, not least when most we seem to feel His
absence or failure; and we serve Him, we cannot choose but serve Him, we make
an offering to Him of our successes and failures, the good in us and even the
evil in us; and only that labour is not in vain that
is undertaken as an offering to the Divine. And when we can labour
no more, and offer to Him the fruits of our labour no
more, we know that we must cease to be, and are content that it should be so.
God is indeed within, He is the Charioteer who is guiding the human car
adroitly through the embattled ways of the world. Tagore called Him his Jivan Devata, “the Lord of my
life”, and apostrophised Him thus:
Thou,
who art the innermost spring or my being,
art
thou pleased,
Lord
of my Life?
For
I gave to thee my cup
filled
with all the pain and delight
that
the crushed grapes of my heart surrendered.
I
wove with the rhythms of colours and songs the cover
for thy bed,
and
with the molten gold of my desires
I
fashioned playthings for thy passing hours...
But
have my days come to their end at last,
Lord
of my Life,
while
my arms round thee grow limp,
my
kisses losing their truth?
Then
break up the meeting of this languid day.
Renew
the old in me in fresh forms of delight;
and
let the wedding come once again
in
a ceremony of life.
Always
the urge is from the human to the divine, to seize life without fear, and to
temper it and transform it, to cross the gulf that seems to separate man from
God. Tagore used a familiar but wonderfully appropriate simile to describe this
spiritual adventure of discovery and realisalion. It
comes at the end of the lecture on ‘Man’ that he gave in the Andhra University:
“The
student, after much effort and time, first learns the alphabet, then the
spelling, then the grammar; he wastes paper and ink scribbling incomplete and
meaningless sentences, he uses and discards much acquisition of materials; at
last when as poet he is able to write his first utterance, that very moment, in
that composition, all his inexpressible accumulations of words first find their
glimmer of a significance. In the great evolution of the Universe we have found
its first significance in a cell of life, then in an animal, then in man. From
the outer universe gradually we come to the inner realm and one by one the
gates of freedom are unbarred. When the screen is lifted on the appearance of
Man on earth, we realise the great and mysterious truth of relatedness, of the
supreme unity of all that is….We can only pray, let sorrow come if it has to
come, let there be death, let there be loss, but let man declare across all
space and time ‘I am He’.”
It
is the language of the Vedic Rishis, of the Upanishadic seers. And it sums up, in truly memorable
accents, Tagore’s ‘Religion of Man’, and projects before us his splendorous
vision of the great destiny of man.
Tagore holds a central
place in the Indian renaissance. He joined it in its mid-career, re-defined its
aims, and consolidated its foundations. At a time when the East and West, the
Old and New, the claims of revelation-grounded religion and science-grounded
reason the pull of romantic or Dionysian adventure and exuberance and the
attraction of classical or Apollonian grace and poise,–when these seemed to
wrangle, taking extreme positions. Tagore came as a harmoniser,
and strove to build a durable bridge of understanding between man and nature,
man and machine, and man and god. Tagore not only spanned the ages of Indian
history with his harmonies, he also tried to annul the yawning divide of
culture, the antinomy between what Sir Charles Snow has called the two
cultures, the humanistic wisdom and the scientific knowledge. The
reconciliation, the fusion and the transcendence are to be attempted and realised, not in a committee room or a psychological
laboratory, but rather in the heart and soul of man. Tagore had his trials, no
doubt: his moments of uncertainty and exasperation. He was no monster of
perfection, and he could not always write at the top of his form. But take him
all in all, he was a Titan force in life and letters, and his example gave us
Indians, gave all Asians in fact, self-respect and self-confidence, and showed
the way to self-mastery and self-realisation. Although no ascetic preaching a
flight from life, he cared not to think only of comfort, and he had no truck
with the weights and measures of the market-place. He returned his knighthood
when he felt that it but irked and burned him, he did not hesitate to differ
openly from Gandhiji when be launched his non-co-operation movement, or from
the Japanese poet, Yone Noguchi, when Japan entered
upon a career of blazen aggression. While he was thus
not afraid of contention, while he did not refrain from any necessary
expression of dissidence, his preference nevertheless was for a life of culture
and contemplation, for the creative tasks of peace and harmony. He tirelessly
pursued the ideal of Beauty, and Beauty was to him also Love, Truth, Goodness
and Power. In a poem like his Urvashi–surely,
one of the supremely beautiful poems in world literature–we are vouchsafed the
very vision of the Nymph, we see Urvashi bursting
into view, just as Aphrodite rose from the foam, swaying and mastering and
melting the beholders. In poem or play, or story or novel, in reminiscence or
exegesis, or exhortation or prophecy, Tagore is essentially an integrated force,
of a piece always, whether as a poet or as a prophet, and the total impact of
his many-sided personality is exciting as well as enduring. He is our Leonardo da Vinci, without a doubt. He is more. He is Kavi, Karma-yogi, Bhakta and the great Acharya.
We salute him, and cherish his memory–always.
1 Lecture
delivered in the Andhra University on 4 November 1959: the first of four
lectures organised by the English Association in
connection with the forthcoming Tagore Centenary Celebrations.