The idea of the human, which played a central role in the thought-world of Rabindranāth Tagore, was invoked by him in ‘Sabhyatār sangkat’ (‘Crisis in Civilization’, 1941), his last address in Santiniketan, to envisage a possible future on the other side of a global civilizational crisis:

Tagore did not live to see the full genocidal impact of the Nazi regime, but had he done, he might still not have endorsed the anti-humanist sweep of Adorno's famous observation on the silencing of poetry, the most refined expression of human language: ‘[T]o write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today.’ To revivify civilization cannot be anything but a human project; crisis, however deep, can only be contested in Rabindranath's thinking by the figure of the human. Yet the idea of the human, at least in its essentialist formulation, has been under severe pressure in recent times. The attack took its sustenance from Nietzsche, one of the first architects of the anti-humanist gesture.

In European modernity, the human, in its essentialist formulation, travels from Renaissance painters and thinkers to the Cartesian discovery of the centred cogito to the ethics of human dignity propounded by Kant. Each of these conceptions argues for a common presence of the human across histories and cultures, subverting the idea of difference. Nietzsche famously questioned this idea of ‘man as an aeterna veritas [eternal truth], as something constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things’ by noting the lack of historical sense in philosophers and concluding that there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths.

SCIENCE IN THE POET'S CHILDHOOD

In 1925, Rabindranāth Tagore wrote to Praphullachandra Rāy, the distinguished chemist: ‘I was sitting reading Scientific American when I noticed an envelope from the University College of Science [where Praphullachandra taught].’ How many poets read Scientific American as a pastime, one wonders. But for Rabindranath, it followed naturally from his childhood training and bent.

In the introductory epistle to his only book on science, Bishwaparichay (1937), Rabindranath describes how science had fascinated him since childhood. His science tutor would thrill him with simple demonstrations like making the convection currents in a heated glass of water visible by using fine sawdust. The differences thereby made visible between the layers of an apparently undifferentiated mass of water filled him with a sense of wonder. This was when he first realized that things we take as evident are, in fact, often not so. The discovery set him wondering forever.

The next wonder came when at the age of twelve he stayed with his father, Debendranāth, at Dalhousie in the Himalayas. At night, Debendranath would point out to him the constellations and the planets, telling him about their distances from the sun, their periods of revolution, and other such things. The fascinated boy began writing down what he learnt. He is thought to have penned his first long essay, on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, at the age of twelve and a half. It started to be published in serial form in Tattwabodhini patrikā, a journal established by Debendranath, but did not progress beyond the first instalment.

As he grew older, the young Rabindranath started reading every book on astronomy that he could lay his hands on, his favourite being Sir Robert Ball's work. He persisted even when the mathematics proved difficult. Then he discovered Thomas Huxley's essays on biology. Astronomy and biology became, and remained, the scientific subjects that fascinated him and found reflection in his mature writings, especially his poetry. These studies did not afford a rigorous grounding in science, but they helped him acquire a scientific mindset that served him well through his life without impairing his poetic genius. It led him to develop a distinctively new philosophy in which the tenets of modern science were seamlessly integrated with the ancient wisdom of the Upanishads.

It is the tears of the earth that keep her smiles in bloom.

The fallen petals that Rabindranāth gathers in the flower basket of Stray Birds are imbued with poignant insights into the nature of existence. Some of these aphorisms were composed during the First World War – ‘the war to end all wars’ – when a self-destructively ambitious, globally avaricious Europe was savaging itself over the division of the spoils of colonial conquest. The spectacle of violent nationalistic greed – a forerunner of today's warring world – prompted Tagore to write: ‘I thank thee that I am none of the wheels of power but I am one with the living creatures that are crushed by it.’ This expression of gratitude, which is equally a declaration of loyalties, is preceded by another valiantly humble line: ‘The stars are not afraid to appear like fireflies.’

Rabindranath is not an environmentalist as sometimes claimed. Some of his work – prominently the plays Muktadhāra and Raktakarabi – takes up, almost prophetically, environmental issues of great relevance in our own time, like giant dams and mining. But his fundamental commitment is to nothing less than the elusive simplicity of everyday sentience, ecological living and dying – something rendered remote, or even impossible, by the technocratic colonization of the planet in the twenty-first century. His poetry delivers what only poetry can: a mode of apprehension beyond scientific cognition, expressing what we are as against what we merely think about. It takes a poet to remind us of our myriad ecological responsibilities as speaking beings.

ECOLOGY AND COSMOLOGY, LIFE AND DEATH

Rabindranath's ecological vision is impossible to grasp unless one recognizes the cosmology in which it lives. He experiences life in wholes larger than his mortal self, feeling and thinking holistically in the most generous and expansive sense of even that inclusive term. This enables him to understand human life and death, as well as our place in nature and the broader scheme of things, in an ecological key. In varied genres of creativity, he demonstrates what it means not just to think but to live and die ecologically, never forgetting the power of nature within and around us.

This essay examines Rabindranāth's views on women, gender, patriarchy, and the family, situating them in the ideas and practices of social reform in nineteenth-century Bengal. Rabindranath aimed to create new values and practices among colonized peoples and thus usher in a new age. The condition of women in brahminical families in Bengal forms an important part of this decolonizing agenda and the social critique underlying it.

Social reform, a modernist project in nineteenth-century Bengal, was vigorously contested by revivalist and traditionalist Hindu orthodoxy. The reformers were concerned with both religious and everyday life, but they focused most intently on family mores centred on brahminical patriarchy and ordering of gender. This contestation, resulting from the encounter between British capitalist colonialism and pre-capitalist Bengali society, gave rise to new social formations, creating new professional and trading classes (the bhadralok) and new forms of consciousness.

The results were varied, embracing all aspects of life. Colonial capitalism engendered a new state apparatus. This created a third space, that of civil society, comprising both the urban middle classes and a new land-owning rural gentry created by the Permanent Settlement (1793). This social space lay outside the immediate purview of the state and the economy, but was created through the interaction of the two. The central institution of civil society was the family, structured by brahminical patriarchy with its distinctive casteist character and gender values. Both reform and revivalism operated within this civil society, giving rise to serious controversies; yet the two trends could not be kept entirely apart. Reformers like Rabindranath, advocating a foundational social change, had to negotiate these complexities. Thus his critique of gender, patriarchy, family norms, and the condition of women could not follow a linear path.

Describing his educational experiment in Santiniketan, Rabindranāth Tagore has indicated that he started with the intention of creating an educational system that was connected to life's totality, and that the institution had grown with his own ‘mind and life’. Accordingly, this overview of Tagore's educational theory and practice will follow the unfolding of his educational experiment in Santiniketan in conjunction with the personal growth of his rich and multifaceted life and personality. It will explore the ways in which his educational theory and method evolved and were affected by an ever-widening sense of inclusivity that developed as a result of his poetic sensitivity to nature and the arts, as well as his experiences with colonial education, aggressive nationalism, international travels, and Gāndhi's Noncooperation Movement, among other factors.

Tagore would appear to hold a distinctive position among educators as being the only internationally renowned poet and artist to create an educational system. His profound sensitivity to nature and special connection to the creative arts, as well as his strategies for developing global networks of cooperation, give him a special position in educational theory. His role in the history of international education will be considered, as well as his methods for developing creativity and awareness in the Santiniketan students through outdoor classes in a beautiful natural setting, along with music, seasonal festivals, dance dramas, student publications, and global interconnection.

Rabindranath's first major address on education,‘Shikshār herpher’ (The Vicissitudes of Education), delivered in 1892, was one of the first comprehensive critiques of English-medium education in India. It lays out a number of the educational ideals that would later play a part in his Santiniketan experiment. The address provides a strong critique of Englishmedium education and the disassociation that results from learning in a foreign curriculum, where the language and images are disconnected from a Bengali environment. A child's linguistic medium, argues Rabindranath, should be associated with his/her social and cultural environment.

Literature, to Rabindranāth Tagore, is an expression of being-in-relation. According to him, affective bonds with truth lead to relations of reciprocity where one wants to give back to the world in equal measure what one has received, piling up the offerings with ‘word and voice, brush and hone’. What, we wonder today, could be the implications of his idealistic standpoint across borders, in the context of global reception? This essay will take up the question and situate it within the matrix of interliterary communication from several perspectives. It will focus on the various premises of communicative acts with relation to literature in multiple reading communities, and the consequent areas of interaction involving hermeneutic impulses in approaching the texts. It will then take up areas of mutuality and transformation, the function and value of Tagore's texts in different cultures, instances of non-communication, and, finally, shifts in the mechanism of transfer in the contemporary context. This study will help us to look at the dynamics of interliterary communication in the global context, framed by organizational structures on the one hand and, on the other, by literature's ability to create its own relations and extend in many directions, generating semantic and cultural tensions as well as resolutions.

There are layers of interculturality at the core of Tagore's literary work. Before looking at his communication with the wider world, we need to briefly consider the meaning and function of his oeuvre in its immediate cultural milieu. He produced an immense body of work in almost every conceivable verbal genre. But to his own people, he is primarily a poet, and his greatest gift to them, across socio-economic groups, is a major corpus of song poems. His community found in his works a new language for a meaningful, layered, and sophisticated expression of the many varied moments of its intimate experiences, and it is this that has ensured his lasting living presence among the people of Bengal. At the same time, he played an important role in the life of the nation and was drawn into larger civilizational questions in complex circumstances during and between the two Great Wars.

A UNIQUE GENRE

Rabindrasangit is unique as a musical genre in three respects. First, here high poetry blends seamlessly into high music, producing a new synthesis, a third entity. It is this x-factor, going beyond a mere match of lyric and tune, that differentiates Rabindrasangit from any other musical genre. Several notable contemporaries of Tagore like Dwijendralāl Rāy, Atulprasād Sen, Rajanikānta Sen, and Kāzi Nazrul Islām have achieved an impressive combination of beautiful words and appropriate notes, each in his own way. But only in Rabindrasangit do we find this special communion of poetry and music, each influencing the other and losing its exclusive identity in the process.

Second, in purely musical terms, disparate elements mingle imperceptibly to form a new integral whole. The dramatist Dwijendralal Ray, who was well versed in Hindustāni classical music, wrote perceptively to Tagore on 25 March 1896, before an unfortunate rift in their relationship:

This is why highly trained classical singers often find it difficult to render Tagore's apparently simple songs: the ‘spices’ cause the main melody to deviate arbitrarily from the standard structure of a rāga. Some even try to ‘correct’ the ‘untrained’ Tagore, thereby robbing Rabindrasangit of its essence. Needless to say, Tagore has been widely charged with impairing the rigour and purity of the structures of classical music.

THE PROLIFIC ENGLISH WRITER

Many readers of Rabindranāth Tagore might be surprised by the extent of this Bengali author's English writings. Outside the two Bengals, those who know of his Nobel Prize know also of the English Gitanjali, the book largely responsible for it. Some might also know of the misleadingly titled and unrepresentative Macmillan volume, Collected Poems and Plays. However, many people will be astonished by the four folio-sized Sahitya Akademi volumes, The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, with over 3,200 pages of text. And even these are not comprehensive in their coverage.

The extent seems even more astonishing when one considers that Tagore started writing regularly in English only in his fifties. In fact, the English Gitanjali (1912) was his first real creative venture in the language. Its spectacular success led to more volumes of poetry in English to meet the demand in the West. It also resulted in a substantial correspondence in English with eminent admirers from across the globe. His growing fame made him an international celebrity by the mid-1910s. He began to deliver speeches and lectures all over the world, of course in English, which too ended up in print. He also engaged in public conversations and spoke up for many causes internationally in English.

Extent apart, the range of his English writings becomes apparent from a glance at the four volumes of English Writings. Volume 1 comprises poems, chiefly ‘translations’ diverging from the Bengali to varying degrees, but a few entirely original compositions (sometimes with later Bengali versions). Many poems are patchworks, recalling snatches of Bengali (often from more than one original) alongside passages that seem original to the English.

Volume 2 collects ten plays, four short stories, prose essays compiled in volume form, and talks from his visits to Japan and China in the 1910s and 1920s. The other two volumes are truly, as subtitled, miscellanies. They encompass essays, again sometimes in volume-length collections; lectures and addresses delivered in India and abroad; and occasional and miscellaneous texts – letters, speeches, tributes, prefaces, reviews, and musings, with more poems and plays, not to mention the Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Rabindranāth started writing critical and analytic pieces on literature and art from the very outset of his career. His first published prose composition, in 1876, was a review of three contemporary poetical works. From that time till his death in 1941, his critical writings appeared in a steady stream alongside his creative works. In June 1941, some two months before his demise, he wrote his last critical essay ‘Satya o bāstab’ (Truth and Reality), first published in the journal Prabāsi as ‘Sāhitya, shilpa’ (Literature, Art). His critical essays comprise some hundred items. There are also countless remarks and discussions of literature and art in his poems, novels, short stories, and plays, even his letters and diaries.

Despite this abundance of material, there are some problems in understanding Tagore's views on the subject. The first and most fundamental might well be his distinctive style of writing. In 1881, he wrote in the essay ‘Sangit o kabitā’ (Music and Poetry): ‘Reason at its height finds expression in prose, emotion at its height in poetry.’ However, he did not always follow this precept in his own work. Buddhadeb Basu (Buddhadeva Bose) once remarked that ‘Rabindranath could not fully reconcile the roles of poet and prose writer: … the clash between the two has done harm to his novels.’ The harm to his critical writings might have been greater, as they often do not embody the clear reasoned discourse we might expect.

For example, in 1926, at the convention of Bengali writers living outside Bengal, Amal Hom attacked the upcoming young writers, especially Modernists associated with the journal Kallol, as ‘vacuous and lacking in taste’. Needless to say, those writers were vocal in their defence. As the protests mounted, Rabindranath (some say at the behest of Amal Hom and his supporters) wrote two essays admonishing the Modernists, ‘Sāhityadharma’ (The Inherent Nature of Literature) and ‘Sāhitye nabatwa’ (Novelty in Literature). The first wraps its critical message in an allegorical tale. A king's son, a general's son, and a merchant's son set out in search of a princess, or rather ‘a truth called a princess’. The general's son has the mind of a detective.

Rabindranāth Thākur (Tagore) practised nearly every literary form, but his primary mode is lyric poetry. He defines his artistic persona in its terms: all his other work takes its bearings from it. He wrote no epics, virtually no long poems of any kind. Of some 4,500 poetical items, nearly 2,200 are songs, and many more song-like though not set to music.

The poems cover an extraordinary formal range. Traditional Bengali verse-forms like the payār couplet appear along with blank verse and the sonnet, derived from the West though assimilated in Bengali by Rabindranath's day. There is a huge range of lyric stanza-forms. His later poetry employs a distinctive type of irregular couplets as well as vers libre. This variety contrasts markedly with the uniform style and structure of Rabindranath's own English versions, couched in a formalized, somewhat archaic poetic prose. They hold no clue to the formal energy and versatility of the originals.

The English selection also creates the misleading image of a largely religious or spiritual poet. Undoubtedly, a sustained vein of philosophic spirituality runs through his poetry. He wrote many hymns for the Brahmo Samaj, the reformed Hindu community to which his family belonged. His poetry shows profound assimilation of the Vedas and Upanishads. But it mostly upholds no doctrinal religion and is often incompatible with any. He consistently finds a spirit immanent in nature and human life. The interaction of the natural with the supra-natural is presented in many veins, from the theistic to a kind of refined animism.

A great many poems address human matters pure and simple, human love above all. His own art is a regular theme. There is some political poetry, from local satire to fierce attacks on the global order. Many poems concern the inner life and external situation of women, complementing his fiction and essays on the subject. There is an unsuspected amount of humour, whimsy, and nonsense.

Rabindranath's poetry comprises a whole universe of themes and concerns. This chapter is a very brief overview of a vast, hugely varied, mostly untranslated, and intellectually complex body of poetry. That poetry does not evolve in a straight graph.

Rabindranāth's encounter with a larger world, beyond his own country, began at a very early age and continued all through his life. Hence the interrelation between his political thought and his view of the world is an exciting but challenging issue, for at least two reasons. First, Tagore was not a political activist, nor did he attach primary importance to politics in his thought. Hence apart from his lectures collected as Nationalism, delivered as the First World War was approaching its end, there is hardly any other text where he reflects exclusively on politics. The importance of this text notwithstanding, it is perhaps time to consider his political standpoint from other angles, by looking at many other sources that are not primarily political. Among these are his essays, mostly in Bengali, and his lectures and addresses delivered abroad in the period between the two World Wars. During this time he travelled extensively to both the East and the West, following the award of the Nobel Prize in 1913 and his desperate search for funds for his dream project of Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan.

Second, there is a methodological dimension to this exercise, which in turn is twofold. At one level, Tagore was a product of Indian and specifically Upanishadic tradition together with Western modernity, a mix that characterized the Tagore family. At another level, he was writing as a colonized subject in British India, experiencing colonial rule at first hand and the responses it evoked at various levels in his own country. He therefore had two rather easy options open before him. The first was to accept British rule in a spirit of servility like any ‘brown sahib’ of his day; the second, to completely reject the West, turning instead to nationalism or uncritical nativism. Tagore took neither of these two paths. His position on colonialism, more specifically on colonial modernity, was mediated through a total worldview evolving since his youth.

Tagore's contemporaries viewed India on an existential level through their lived experience of colonialism, and hence often resorted to nationalism by rejecting the West; but for Tagore the global citizen, the East–West binary was methodologically irrelevant.

Rabindranāth's collection of poems Shesh saptak appeared on the poet's seventy-fourth birthday, 25 Vaishākh 1342 (8 May 1935). Anticipating the pre-planned date of publication, he writes in poem #43:

Rabindranath lived another six years after writing this poem. There was no slackening of his creative powers during this period. More flowers were added to the garland even after his death. The flowers are not all of the same colour, size, or scent. They do not even always match each other when viewed side by side.

Rabindranath's close associate W.W. Pearson tells an anecdote about Tagore and Gāndhi. He asked both of them the same two questions: what did they consider their greatest virtue and greatest vice? Gandhi returned an evasive answer. Tagore's was both pungent and profound: to both questions, he replied, ‘Inconsistency.’

This could not have been said in jest. It is neither possible nor desirable for a man who lived to be eighty, whose life testified to unmatched creativity, vast experience, and unending stimuli, to be entirely consistent. His views changed over time, as did his sense of values: that was only natural. But more than that, his actions and utterances sometimes seem truly inconsistent or even self-contradictory.

Rabindranath first went to England in 1878 in order to qualify for the Indian Civil Service like his elder brother Satyendran th or else to be a barrister.

Rabindranāth Tagore, the first non-European Nobel laureate in literature, had a long life (1861–1941) that may be divided into two almost equal phases in two very different eras. The first phase relates to the emergence of colonial and political modernity in Bengal; the second to an age of wars, revolutions, and what he termed a ‘crisis in civilization’. Tagore was influenced by Western modernity from his formative years, yet he came to condemn the engulfing evils of Western colonialism and militant nationalism. The attack, however, was in a constructive spirit, admitting the benefits of engagement with the West: ‘As our encounter with the British has warmed our heart up, the dying forces of our lives are getting conscious again.’

THE INHERITANCE

The impact of Western rationalism led educated Indians, with support from some Europeans, to think of reconstructing society. Major social reforms like the regulation banning sati or widow-burning (1829) and the Hindu Widows Remarriage Act (1856) had taken place before Rabindranath's birth, and institutions for female education set up. But benevolence was hardly the goal of the colonial agenda. The East India Company drained India's wealth for individual and collective profit. Its economic policy forced Indians to supply raw materials cheaply to England and buy back finished products at a higher price. Indigenous craftsmen were robbed of their livelihood to provide cheap labour in the new colonial city of Calcutta (now Kolkata). Lord Cornwallis's Permanent Settlement Act (1793), which permanently impoverished India's peasantry, had its earliest and most pernicious impact in Bengal. Rabindranath observed that the colonial rulers looked upon India as an ‘eternal pet-cow in their royal barn’.

Historians often talk about the ‘Bengal Renaissance’ of the nineteenth century, but like many terms drawn from Western intellectual idiom, its application is problematic. Some early Marxist scholars have stigmatized the period as an age of compradors, Rabindranath and his forefathers among them. By this view, a particular class of Indians, mostly upper-class English educated Bengali Hindus, improved their lot socially and economically in this period: it was a Renaissance for them and them only.

Rabindranath was the scion of a land-owning family, but the privileged, protected ambience of his family mansion at Jorasanko, in the northern part of the burgeoning city of Kolkata, was not cut off from community life.

There is an account in R ni Chanda's book on Abanindranāth Tagore, Rabindran th's artist nephew, on Abanindranath's response to music. Listening to song after song, he would suddenly burst out: ‘Here are you all trying to construct Rabikā's biography, but his real biography is in his songs…. His whole life is contained in them. You will find his living image there among the words and the music.’ Much later, Niradchandra Chaudhuri seems to be saying something similar: if Tagore's songs are arranged by date, ‘one can construct his mental biography from them’.

The two observations sound much the same, but did the two speakers have the same thing in mind by the poet's ‘biography’? Abanindranath would listen to Tagore songs like ‘I can bear yet more blows’ or ‘Strike me more, still more, O lord’, or lines like ‘My sorrows are like a red lotus girding your feet’, and exclaim, ‘No, no, not that one, sing some other song. Rabika could say things like that, he had the courage; I don't. I can only say: I have borne enough, now raise me on high, make me a lamp in your temple.’ The idea of a ‘biography’ conveyed by such a remark (‘He had the courage’) seems very different from that of Niradchandra. The latter mines specific songs by Tagore for direct reflections of the poet's personal life.

He discovers, for instance, how ‘just as Chateaubriand could pass from France to Bengal, Rabindranath passed from Bengal to England’. Which is the song conveying this piece of biography? According to Niradchandra, it is ‘I know you, I know you, woman from a foreign land’. Niradchandra is well aware of the very different mystical insight behind its composition, as vouched by the poet himself in his reminiscences, but he does not place much reliance upon that account, as in his view, songs can only spring from sensory experience. The foreign woman, therefore, must be some blue-eyed blonde-haired beauty, not a cosmic or universal presence: if anyone thinks otherwise, ‘he cannot have seen a female form in his life, or felt the touch of a woman's body against his own’.

Rabindranāth Tagore believed that literature, if not all art, was free play (lilā) and led to joy (ānanda). Derived from the Upanishads and introduced to him by his deeply religious father, Debendranāth, these notions would later be fused with his own reading of Indian and Western texts. A phrase in the Mundaka upanishad (2:2:7), one that Tagore recalled on countless occasions, describes the infinite as the immortal manifested in joyous form: ānandarupamamritam yadvibhāti.

Play connects freedom with the joy we experience in what is functionally a surplus. Humans need the face for physical functions, but it is also the theatre of emotions. ‘Muscles are essential, and they have plenty of work. But we are enchanted only when the play of their movements expresses the body's music.’ Tagore said this in the 1924 address ‘Srishti’ (Creation) delivered at Calcutta University. Freedom, play, and joy are invoked in the same address: ‘This release from the fetters of fact into the world of abiding joy is no small freedom. Human beings composed songs and painted pictures to remind themselves of this freedom.’ He defended the idea of poetry as play with unperturbed humour in 1915, in reply to the social scientist Rādhākamal Mukhopādhyāy's attack on his literary thought and practice as indifferent to social reality and uncaring of human suffering. Radhakamal seemed annoyed that Tagore used words such as play (khelā), holiday (chhuti), and joy (ānanda) far too often in his writings. ‘If that is so’, answered Tagore in ‘Kabir kaiphiyat’ (The Poet's Defence), ‘one is to understand that I am possessed by some truth.’

Tagore also employed the word rasa in talking of art, though not always in the sense one finds in classical Sanskrit aesthetics. Rasa for him was not simply the eight affective ‘essences’, such as compassion or fury, mentioned in Bharata's manual Natyashāstra, and the ninth added to it by Abhinavagupta. For Tagore, any mixture of these or even a new rasa may lead to ānanda. Rasa in poetry is at its most intense when it pleases the ears and satisfies our intellect and emotions through its bhāva, that is, its feeling and idea. Tagore wrote something similar (without mentioning bhāva) to the younger poet Sudhindranāth Datta in July 1928.