VIVEKANANDA AND TAGORE
K.
V. SURYANARAYANA MURTI
The
art of poetry carries with it a long tradition, which is an inexhaustible
legacy left by the passing writers to the springing poets, as Virginia Woolf says, in a very fine memorable sentence:
“Without
those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than
Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or
Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural
savagery of the tongue.”
Likewise,
the fact that philosophic musing in poetic rhythm–which is one of the peculiar
excellences of Indo-Anglian literature–has flowed
from Swami Vivekananda, one of the early pioneers the
Renaissance in
Narendranath Datta–later
known as Swami Vivekananda, an appellation bestowed
on him by his spiritual master Ramakrish Paramahamsa–visited
“There
he proved to be one of the most notable figures in the assembly. The
universality of his message captivated his huge audiences….Having offered him
the first world platform for his gospel of universal love and service to
mankind many have clasped his doctrine to their bosom.
Vedanta centres in most major American cities hold
his name in reverence.”
In
fact, countless intellectuals all over the world could hardly refrain from
saluting the sage for his gospel, including Indians, albeit later. All our
great men of the nineteenth century, in truth, could not gain local recognition
or influence until they were acclaimed as great by the West as Vivekananda himself records: “I travelled
twelve years all over India, finding no way to work for my countrymen, and that
is why I went to America.” And Nirad C. Chaudhuri affirms: “His countrymen welcomed him back as a
great Hindu only when the Parliament of Religions at
While
the principles of love, devotion to God and service to humanity find direct
expression in Vivekananda’s poetry, although limited
to about seventy pages in print, these traits receive more sublime poetic
treatment Tagore’s poetry. The poetic utterances of
the Swami, our very first cultural ambassador to the West, are fine fragments
of philosophy; they appear like excerpts from the Vedas, Upanishads, and Gita rendered in exquisite English. But Tagore’s
poetry, though embodying the same principles of love, service, and devotion,
has travelled through new paths of glory. The great
Nobel Laureate (in literature) of India has fused the native and foreign
elements–as Aurobindo puts it–in the crucible of his
imagination and succeeded in presenting a synthetic golden thought in verse in
foreign mould satisfying a world’s demand.
Under
pressure of tremendous hardships of effort and penance Vivekananda
realizes:
“Formulas of worship, control of
breath,
Science, philosophy, systems varied,
Relinquishment, possession, and the
like,
All these are but delusions of the
mind;
Love, Love, –that’s
the one thing, the sole treasure.”
And that Love, he
says, is the ferry that takes across the sea, in this whirl of life buffeted by
waves. Thus the sage conveys his gospel of love. This philosophy of love is
found celebrated in its myriad forms in Tagore’s
literary world. Rabindranath is essentially a poet of
love. He has celebrated, through his various works, the different phases of
love–love of the soul for the Supreme, man’s
love of his kinsmen, of nature, of humanity, of beasts, of all objects of God’s
creation, of freedom and patriotism, love of the lover for the beloved, and
finally, love of death–rendered either direct or in symbolic terms. The soul is
the replica of the universe. The entire universe with its manifold objects
including human beings is the handiwork of God. Love towards God’s creation and
service to mankind is service to Almighty; it is the path to the “One Shrine,
Divine”–a familiar thought of
Indian philosophy. These various phases of love are like the VIBGYOR colours constituting the White Radiance, the Divine. Of all
the various phases of love, worship of the Superme is
the supreme. This, indeed, is the keynote of Tagore’s
philosophy. Though Gitanjali in its English
garb has been published first, one can scarcely deny the fact that The
Gardener poems belong to an early period of his literary career in which
the various phases of love are found embedded in their embryonic stage. These poems
are more mundane. But the underlying meaning, the love of God, is quite clear
and free from obscurity; upstairs sans the steps to ascend. The latent meaning
of devotion is unmistakably evident, which like a golden thread binds together
all the scattered pearls of fine songs in the same way, for instance, as the
latent unity of impression binds together the various episodes of the knights
in Spenser’s epic, The Faerie Queene. These
various phases of love embedded in their embryonic state in The Gardener,
Tagore develops either in isolation or often in
combination, blended with many an aspect of didactic value, later in his other
master literary works of art–whether it is poetry, play, fiction, or short
story. In other words The Gardener is the microcosm to the macrocosm of Tagore’s literary world inasmuch as the sonnets–to
speak in terms of Wilson Knight’s interpretation–are
the matrix out of which Shakespeare’s plays were woven.
Vivekananda sees God in
every living nerve and hence hails the love of all life and service to humanity
as the best worship of the Omnipotent:
“These
are His manifold forms before thee,
Rejecting
them, where seekest thou for God?
Who
loves all beings without distinction,
He
indeed is worshipping best his God.”
and
in another poem The Living God he derides the fools who worship mute
idols leaving the living God uncared for:
“Ye
fools! who neglect the living
God,
And
His infinite reflections with which the world is full
While
ye run after imaginary shadows,
That
lead alone to fights and quarrels,
His
worship, the only visible!
Break
all other idols!”
This principle of
service to, or worship of, the living God is expressed
by Tagore quite frequently in his own ingenious way:
this is, in particular, the central theme of his early play Sanyasi,
which Tagore considered “an introduction to the
whole of my future work.” The second song in The Gardener expresses the
same idea in symbol, or what the Sanskrit aestheticians call dhwani:
“They
all have need for me, and I have no time to brood over the after-life.”
There is a song in Gitanjali too that scoffs at blind worship:
“Leave
this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this
lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine
eyes and see thy God is not before thee;”
Tagore advocates that God is
there, “where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones;” so meet Him in these toiling
common men and “stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.” The service to
God should hardly isolate one from the service to man, even “the poorest, and
lowliest, and lost.” In Sacrifice he abhors idol-worship and
animal-sacrifice in the name of religion and ritual and preaches love for all
beings, a theme which even Aurobindo uses in his Perseus The Deliverer.
“He
prayeth well, who loveth
well
Both
man and bird and beast.”
Vivekananda holds his own
views anent physical beauty. He feels:
“This
outward presentation is of order gross,
As
hair on human brow; Aye! very gross.”
And
hence he condemns physical beauty and attraction:
“What
stirring of emotions! How many
Hot
sighs of love; And warm tears coursing down!
The
bimba–red lips of the youthful fair,
The
two blue eyes–two oceans of
feelings;
The
two hands eager to advance–love’s cage–
In
which the heart, like a bird, lies captive.”
“Truth
never comes where lust and fame and greed
Of
gain reside. No man who thinks of woman
As
his wife can ever perfect be;”
But
Tagore goes farther ahead. In one exquisite song (49)
of The Gardener he writes:
“I
hold her hands and press her to my breast.
I
try to grasp the beauty; it eludes me,
Leaving only the body in my hands.
How
can the body touch the flower which only the spirit may touch?”
–symbolically
representing the soul’s disgust of earthly beauty and physical attraction and
its love of the Divine–an idea developed at length in his famous lyric play Chitra, wherein Tagore
stresses that real love is the union of hearts; not physical attraction, which
when Arjuna realizes, he rejoices saying, “Beloved,
my life is full,” finally. In his Introduction to an English version of Kalidasa’s Sakuntala Tagore writes:
“In
truth there are two unions in Sakuntala; and
the motif of the play is the progress from the earlier union of the first Act,
with its earthly unstable beauty and romance, to the higher union in the
heavenly hermitage of eternal bliss described in the last Act…..to elevate love
from the sphere of physical beauty to the eternal heavens of moral beauty.”
This
is what we find in Chitra too and
Professor Iyengar aptly describes Chitra
as a succinct Tagorean version of Kalidasa’s Sakuntala. In
Chandalika this physical attraction of
the heroine, Prakriti, towards Ananda,
the Buddha’s youngest and best-loved disciple, results in spiritual rebirth,
culminating in Ananda.
Narendranath
invokes the Sanyasi in his The Song of the Sannyasin:
“Wake
up the note! the song that had its birth
Far
off, where worldly taint could never reach;
In
mountain caves, and glades of forest deep,
Whose
calm no sigh for lust or wealth or fame
Could
ever dare to break; where rolled the stream
Of
knowledge, truth, and bliss that follows both.
Sing
high that note, Sannyasin bold! Say–
‘Om Tat Sat,
He
is a staunch worshipper of “Kali” and hence in his Kali The Mother says:
“Who
dares misery love,
and hug the form of Death,
Dance
in Destruction’s dance,
To
him the Mother comes.”
In
My Play Is Done he prays Her:
“Let
never more delusive dreams veil off Thy face from me.
My
play is done, OMother, break my chains and make me
free!”
He
is a passionate devotee and disciple of his spiritual master Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. To him there is no difference between the two;
they are the two faces of the same precious Gold Coin, the ultimate One. In his
Vedantic Song of the Free, he presents his
self-realisation by deep-rooted devotion:
“Before
the sun, the moon, the earth,
Before
the stars or comets free,
Before
e’en Time has had its birth
I
was, I am and I will be!
From
dreams awake, from bonds be free!
Be
not afraid. This mystery,
My
shadow, cannot frighten me!
Know
once for all that I am He!”
These
aspects of a sublime spiritual vision, and the
realization of the existence of the Supreme are the dominant notes of Vivekananda’s poetry. And these notes are exquisitely
reflected in Tagore’s superbly-rendered Gitanjali later. The Gitanjali
poems, to speak in the words of Dr. Radhakrishnan,
are the offerings of the finite to the Infinite;” the imperfect decks itself in
beauty for the love of the perfect, which is the supreme phase of love. The
book conceives a life’s journey from birth to death of a passionate devotee who
rejoices in his intense devotion at every stage of life. In fact, it is Gitanjali that has made Tagore
a devotional poet.
Vivekananda, as
forerunner, was no less an ardent lover of peace and freedom than Tagore, which he had infused in his poetry long before. In
a very fine song, To the Fourth of July, the Swami has celebrated the
American Day of Independence; the freedom of other countries also he feels a
matter of rejoicing as the freedom of his own, which reflects his universal
love.
“All
hail to thee, thou Lord of Light!
A
welcome new to thee, today,
O
Sun! Today thou sheddest
Then
thou, propitious, rose to shed
The light of Freedom on mankind.”
The
Awakened India is replete with the buoyancy of the
spirit of freedom. How beautiful is his sermon of Peace rendered in
majestic rhythm!
“It
is sweet rest in music;
And
pause in sacred art;
The
silence between speaking;
Between
two fits of passion–
It
is the calm of heart.
To
it the tear-drop goes,
To spread the smiling form.
It
is the goal of life,
And Peace–its only home!”
But
Tagore handles this aspect, love of peace and
freedom, with greater poetic ability merging
it with devotion to God. In the ecstasy of his devotion he articulates a prayer
for the freedom of his country and peace thus:
“Where
the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where
knowledge is free;
Where
the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow
domestic walls;
Where
words come out from the depth of truth;
Where
tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where
the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into
the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where
the mind is led forward by thee into ever widening thought and action–
Into
that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”
These feelings of his
love of peace and freedom are but aspects of his philosophy of love and have
been wonderfully echoed in many of his works. The Home And The World–its
Bengali version written at an early stage of his literary career–echoes his
sermon of peace and freedom, and love of humanity and service, in combination
with other aspects of love and as such it is the finest of his novels. In other
words the book, along with The Gardener, offers the text of Tagore’s social, moral, political and spiritual philosophy.
Political fanaticism, harm to humanity and peace in the name of politics, blind
patriotism, distraction from the love of home–it
is these things that he derides strikingly in the novel; and he upholds
universal love. His much later work The Four Chapters too reflects most
of these ideas.
The
Post Office is the highlight of all Tagore’s
works, replete with the various aspects of love. It is particularly suffused
with mystic love. It is a many-faceted gem, well-polished, emitting the light
of his philosophy of love in its different hues. Superficially, this playlet of about an hour’s traffic appears to be an essay
on the psychology of a sick child, Amal, but it
presents the quintessence of Tagore’s philosophy of
love rendered with chiselled perfection in symbolic
terms. The child symbolizes the pure and innocent soul appreciating the various
aspects of love manifested in the various characters, finally led into an
ecstasy of divine mysticism, having realized the Creative Spirit behind this
physical perspective. The gospel of God’s compassion and redemption of aching
souls, laden with selfless devotion, is so powerfully suggested behind the
physical terms–‘King’, ‘post-office’,
‘Postman’, and his ‘Letters’.
Thus
we find that Swami Vivekananda is forerunner to Tagore not merely in visiting America and other western
countries but particularly in introducing Indian thought to the West in English
poetry. Of the two pioneers, John T. Reid observes:
“There
is some similarity between the experiences of Tagore
in America and those of Swami Vivekananda. Both
found their New World environment stimulating and odd at the same time. Both
had their difficulties in adjusting to it. But there is no doubt
that Tagore, whose poetry is known to thousands of
American admirers, and Vivekananda, left a vital
impression in the United States.”
Narendranath
has pronounced ‘Open sesame’ to the tradition of philosophic musing in English
poetry, an outstanding contribution of peculiar excellence to the Indo-Anglian Literature, which has effectively influenced Tagore and reached a climax in Aurobindo.
Although
his poetic output is limited, yet it is the minute seed to the mighty banyan of
Tagore’s love literature that lulled the world to
bliss under its shade.