TAGORE: ACHIEVEMENT AND REPUTATION

Rabindranāth Tagore is the most widely renowned writer of modern India. In a career spanning more than six decades, he wrote poems, songs, plays, novels, short stories, essays, memoirs, and travelogues, besides a vast number of letters. He wrote primarily in Bengali, but his writings in English, including self-translations, fill four large volumes. Virtually no other major Indian writer has been so prolific. His Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 – still the only award to an Indian – was cherished by his compatriots as being, among other things, a validation of India's cultural standing and even a sort of (post)colonial triumph. Tagore became a national icon, one of a trinity together with Mahātma Gāndhi and Jawāharl l Nehru, despite the fact that not only did he not join Gandhi's movement for freedom, but engaged in public controversy with him in 1921. Already in 1917, his lectures titled Nationalism had denounced all forms of nationalism as both selfish and self-destructive.

Such apparent disengagement from worldly issues reinforced his image as a man of transcendent spiritual vision, an impression already generated by his first slim volume in English translation, Gitanjali: Song Offerings (1912), which sufficed to win him the Nobel Prize. In the West, even more than in India, he was seen as a sage and prophet of universal brotherhood, travelling far and wide to preach his message of love and harmony. He seemed to build on and outdo Vivekānanda's pioneering assertion of Indian spirituality at Chicago in 1893. For his admirers, Tagore was not merely a writer, not even only a guru or spiritual guide, but a gurudev, with the aura of a deva or (demi)god. The institution he founded in Santiniketan was at core an āshrama, a holy retreat. He inspired a reverence not remotely commanded by any other writer in modern times unless, like Sri Arabinda (Aurobindo), they acquired an overriding identity as a spiritual leader.

These matters have a bearing on the nature and extent of Tagore's literary influence, which this essay proposes to examine. Tagore wrote numerous works, especially fiction, political essays, and travelogues, which have little overt spiritual content.

Rabindranāth Thākur (Tagore) has been a recognized figure in world literature for a hundred years and more, but the language that unlocked his genius has also hampered his global reception. Bengali is the world's seventh most widely spoken language but not a ‘world language’ in its cultural reach. The extent of Rabindranath's output has also told against him. The standard edition of his Bengali works runs to thirty-three large volumes and is still incomplete; his English works to four yet larger volumes but is also incomplete. Only a fraction of the Bengali writings has been translated into English, often (starting with his own versions) with more than the inevitable loss in translating great literature. Renderings in other languages, including most Indian ones, have been made from these English versions more often than not.

Thus when Bengalis claim for Tagore a place beside Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, their claim is predictably ascribed to cultural chauvinism, especially as shades of such chauvinism are sometimes quite apparent. His early international reputation subsided in a matter of decades. Even in India, his effective impact outside Bengal came to decline, despite the iconic status ensured by the Nobel Prize and continuing to this day. He has received some fresh attention since the late twentieth century, often for his writings and activities in other fields rather than his core literary output. However, the sweep and depth of his total achievement has scarcely been addressed – even across the entire body of scholarly work, let alone in a single exercise.

His non-literary enterprises, active and contemplative, would each have made the reputation of a lesser man: music, dance, and painting; social, historical, and political thought, with an impressive record of activism; radical thinking on education and rural development, embodied in an institution that started as a makeshift school with five students and is today a major university. Through his travels no less than his writings, he acquired standing as a global intellectual, if thereby often reducing himself to the figure of a spiritualist and ‘oriental sage’. More lastingly and materially, his historic association has transformed a remote Bengal village into a thriving academic centre, tourist destination, and, yet more improbably, an economic and administrative hub. Even Shakespeare's impact on Stratford-upon-Avon has not been transformative in so many ways.

The overwhelmingly lopsided critical attention given to Tagore's poetry and fiction, and to a lesser extent his essays, paintings, philosophical discourses, and educational experiments, has submerged assessment of his equally outstanding achievements in the performing arts, specifically theatre and dance. And despite the fulfilment of his own prophecy about his songs outliving all his other creations in popularity, hardly any booklength scholarly analysis of his extraordinary output in music has appeared in English. The present chapter limits its scope to Tagore's plays, but that automatically embraces his work in dance as well, since his choreographic contributions formed an integral part of their productions.

I should also emphasize at the outset that Tagore did not just write his plays; he acted in and directed them, composed all their songs and music, and designed and choreographed many of them. To read them only as texts consciously blindsides oneself from all these activities. He reiterated the primacy of their performatory dimensions time and again. About his very first drama, Bālmiki-pratibhā (The Emergence of Vālmiki's Genius, 1881), he stressed that it ‘is not a composition which will bear being read. Its significance is lost if it is not heard sung and seen acted.’ Towards the end of his career, he introduced his dance drama Chandālik (The Chandāl's Daughter, 1938) with virtually identical words: ‘It needs to be kept in mind that this play is to be seen and heard, but not read.’ By analogy, we can quote from his similar comments about songs. In his autobiography he observed, ‘I am always reluctant to publish books of the words of songs, for therein the soul must needs be lacking.’ In a characteristically poetic simile, he wrote about Bāul songs, ‘the best part of a song is missed when the tune is absent; for thereby its movement and its colour are lost, and it becomes like a butterfly whose wings have been plucked.’ It has become the norm in drama criticism to explicate play texts with a constant eye on their onstage visualization, leaving behind the old method of treating them exclusively as literature, like poetry and fiction. There can be no better exemplar of this than Tagore's huge dramatic corpus, of over seventy scripts and libretti.

The word bhakti, as a common noun, means the intense love that one feels for one's god, the supreme attachment to a divinity. This god may be the formless Absolute, infinite, and eternal – nirguna, without attributes or qualities. The devotee may also address devotion towards a god made manifest in human form, with a name and a mythology. The god is then saguna, with attributes and qualities.

In Bengal, Vishnu's incarnation Krishna has always been the object of the deepest religious fervour. At the end of the twelfth century, the poet Jayadeva composed the Gita govinda in Sanskrit in honour of Krishna-Govinda. Jayadeva was the initiator of a devotion to Krishna that coloured the whole of eastern Indian Vaishnavism with its emotional quality and lyrical beauty. Later, Vaishnavite poetry of a very high order was also composed in Bengali and in Brajabuli, an artificial language mixing Maithili and Bengali. The poets mostly wrote about Krishna's love affair with Rādhā, his beloved, and his play with the other gopis, or cowherd women, on the banks of the Yamunā. The eroticism was imbued with spiritual and mystical meaning.

These love poems composed during the medieval period, mostly during and after the life of the great mystic Shrikrishna Chaitanya (1486–1534), did not fail to move the young Rabindranāth. As a young man, he was moved to joy on reading a collection of ancient lyric poems composed by the poets of the Vaishnav sect. He writes:

At the age of sixteen, he composed a number of poems, in the same vein an language as the medieval Vaishnav lyrics, which were collected (along with a few later pieces) as Bhanusingha thākurer padābali (1884). He published eight of the poems anonymously in the family magazine Bhārati in 1877–8 (and a few later), giving the impression that they had been composed by an ancient poet named Bhānusingha.

A MESSAGE FROM THE KING

A darkness, impenetrably dense, was about to descend.

13 June 1940. The next day, the Nazi army would occupy Paris. As though to send out a call to the threatened population, a call full of trepidation but also with the hope of deliverance, the French translation of a Bengali play was broadcast on French radio.

That is not all. In March 1942, the Nazis established their first extermination camp, surpassing in cruelty the concentration camps in operation since 1933. Leaving no exit route, the extermination camp was, by definition, a ‘non-place’. But among those about to enter these waiting rooms of death, the same Bengali play, on a wait for death of a very different kind, found an audience. It was staged in Polish on 18 July 1942 in a Jewish orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto just before its children went to the gas chamber. Translated five times into Polish till date, the play still retains a place in ‘collective Polish remembering’.

A peculiar chemistry of emotions must have been at work. Else how could a drama full of indomitable optimism become so compelling at a time when destruction proceeded so rapidly as to make a mockery of the very idea of death? The clue to the paradox lies in the figure of a child: a child simultaneously restive and immobilized.

The play was Rabindranāth Tagore's Dākghar (1912), translated by Debabrata Mukhopādhyāy (Devabrata Mukerjea) as The Post Office. Its child protagonist (whose very name, Amal, means ‘pure’) is terminally ill and confined indoors, yet deeply drawn to the world outside: ‘I would rather go about and see everything that there is.’ Sitting by his window, Amal watches a new building come up across the road. He learns it is a dākghar, a post office set up by the king. He is attracted by the word dāk, which in Bengali means both ‘call’ and ‘letter’: he longs to receive a letter with a call from the king. Rabindranath spoke of the genesis of Dākghar in a 1915 talk at Santiniketan. He observed that the play had no story as such: it was a prose lyric. He was driven to write it by the premonition of a catastrophe, perhaps his own death. Writing the play came as a great relief.

When writing in English on Rabindranath Tagore's thoughts on religion, most scholars prefer to focus on his 1930 Hibbert lectures at Oxford, published as The Religion of Man. His second major work on religion, Mānusher dharma, the Kamal Lectures at Calcutta University (1933), is an expansion rather than merely a translation of the former as its synonymous title might be taken to imply. The poet's ideas on the religion of humanity did not come to a standstill at this point: he continued to develop his ideas through the rest of his life. Some scholars even believe that he ultimately became an atheist, having arrived at a human-centric ‘religion of Man’ towards the end of his life. Others think his position can be interpreted either for or against atheism. There were shifts in his position both before and after the Hibbert lectures. He was constantly engaging with new ideas and insights across an expanding horizon of lived experience. All of this was factored into his religious sensibility without any break in continuity.

When the Brahmo Samaj, known as a neo-Vedantic institution, split into the Ādi Brahmo Samaj and the Bhāratvarshiya Brahmo Samaj in 1866, Rabindranath was five years old. His father Debendranāth Tagore led the Adi Brahmo Samaj. This group claimed that they were Hindus and that their reading of the Vedas was the authentic one, unlike the convoluted interpretation of orthodox practising Hindus of that period. Debendranath contributed to the development of a monotheistic religion based on the philosophy of the Upanishads. Rabindranath was initiated to the Upanishadic teachings by his father at an early age: he actively participated in all the religious activities conducted by his father at the Samāj. In 1884, at the age of twenty-three, he was appointed secretary of the Adi Brahmo Samaj. This started the first phase of his public engagement with religion. During this period his thoughts were traditional, with hardly any trace of individuality.

As secretary of the Adi Brahmo Samaj, Rabindranath was drawn into various debates of the time. A major debate took place with Bankimchandra Chattopādhyāy (Chatterjee), the leading novelist, thinker, and public intellectual of the day. Bankimchandra argued that truth is related to the welfare of the people. What is not conducive to the welfare of the people is false, even though it may outwardly appear to be true.

Rabindranāth Tagore's writings on history cover three chief areas of interest. One is his philosophy of history, particularly in the context of free will and determinism. Here he basically asks the question: Is a human being and a citizen a free agent, or is he an instrument of the historical forces of his times? A second area covers issues arising out of historical narrative: events, personalities, and the long-term course of history. Here his chief focus of interest is the history of Indian civilization, but some of the most valuable discussions relate to global history, European civilization in particular. The third area extends beyond history to historiography: Tagore is critical of the colonial school of writing and offers his own interpretive approach. These three strands are interwoven and cannot be studied in isolation from each other. They are necessarily combined in the account that follows.

We must also bear in mind that Tagore was essentially a poet, and his perception of history finds expression not only in his discursive prose but also in his poetry, fiction, and literary criticism. There was a time in India when works of history were written in verse. In Tagore's poems based on historical annals and legends, most memorably collected in Kathā o kāhini (1908), one can discern traces of that centuries-old tradition. He sourced many verse-tales from Buddhist legends in texts such as the Avadānashataka, Bodhisattva-avadāna, Mahāvastu, and Divyāvad namālā. On another plane, he imbibed and extended the nascent nationalism that found soil in the history of the Sikhs and the Marāthās, and the historical legends and folk traditions of Rājasthān. Perhaps more importantly, he found a major source of inspiration for his poems and songs, with actual formal models, in the medieval saintly traditions associated with Kabir, Tulsidās, and others, and the Vaishnavite poetry and culture of Mithil and Bengal.

In an essay on the historical novel (‘Aitihāsik upanyās’), Tagore observes that a disconnect between actual history and fiction based on history is natural and inevitable. He quotes the English historian E. Augustus Freeman's comment that if anyone wishes to learn about European history at the time of the Crusades, he must studiously avoid reading Scott's Ivanhoe. Tagore recognized the educational value of historical tales and dramas.

Rabindranāth Tagore was born and brought up in a city: Calcutta, now Kolkata, the erstwhile second city of the British empire. He belonged to the third generation of a propertied family. His grandfather ‘Prince’ Dwārakānāth Tagore built up the family fortune in the modern sense of the term. Dwarakanath's eldest son, Debendran th, was Rabindranath's father. It is well known that Rabindranath never felt close to his grandfather in spirit. He felt greater affinity with his philosophic father: the two had a warm relationship over some forty years.

Young Rabi was brought up on disciplinarian but markedly unorthodox lines. The child's unusual nature made him resist institutional education. He was almost entirely taught at home in many fields – general education, science, music, painting – but in an unconventional way, neither ordered nor complete, nor even always rigorous. This recipe for disaster turned out wonderfully well in his case. It conditioned him to break conventions, as evident in all his creative work: poetry, music, painting, theatre, and even dance.

This chapter concerns his ideas on rural welfare and development in India. It may appear a strange concern for a literary personality of Rabindranath's stature; even more that he should pursue it with the zest of an activist. In fact, his engagement with such action-oriented projects was part of a grander design for a complete and harmonious life in society as a whole. This made village work as creative for Rabindranath as writing poetry and composing music. They all contributed to his project of wholeness.

THE ESSENCE OF SHRI

I have mentioned the related concepts of wholeness and harmony. Rabindranath's life's project took shape as a comprehensive endeavour towards those goals, absorbing almost anything that came his way – many strands of thought and practice, derived from both East and West. The spirituality of Upanishadic tradition, acquired from family sources, fed an aesthetic consciousness that was, at the same time, deeply rooted in sociopolitical reality. But his abiding concern all through was the notion of shri, which can be defined as grace, harmony, and well-being informed by a sense of inner truth. This commitment to truth made him look critically at the ritualistic aspects of not only religious practices but all spheres of social and political life. Instead of heeding the mystic call of an inner voice, he directed a rational, critical gaze at the reality around him.

This essay is an attempt to understand Tagore's idea of emancipation, locating it against the trajectory of Indian philosophy. In both classical India and ancient Greece, philosophy had a distinctly practical motive. Although many issues come up for scrutiny in the Socratic dialogues, for example, one particular question has an overriding presence: the nature of the good life, and the superiority of a good life over other types of life. The classical Indian philosopher, in his turn, is preoccupied with the search for an ideal life that is not fraught with the vagaries of mundane existence. The ideal life is to be reached by breaking all shackles of material bondage and freeing oneself from suffering of all kinds (twenty-one kinds, for instance, in the Nyāya school of philosophy). Indian philosophy is thus moulded from the beginning by the search for an ideal life.

This practical motive has left a distinct mark on Indian philosophical speculation. Classical Indian philosophical theories never lost their touch with this ultimate goal of human life. This perhaps explains why Indian philosophy never had any concern with formal logic in the way Western philosophy has. The age-old debate in Western philosophical tradition between experience and reason as sources of knowledge is conspicuous by its absence in Indian philosophy. This can be explained by the Indian philosopher's attempt to treat epistemology as a branch of the psychology of knowledge. In India, we therefore have the kind of metaphysical speculation that is ‘almost a matter-of-fact study of reality’, where it is argued that reals are either perceived or inferred from perceptual data or known through some other accredited sources of knowledge. There are held to be reliable sources of apprehension even in matters of faith. And where normal inferential methods are not applicable, we can try to grasp the truths intuitively through some esoteric exercises.

This also explains why poetry and philosophy are never at war with each other, unlike in the West: a point forcefully made by Tagore in his presidential address to the first Indian Philosophical Congress in December 1925. From this perspective, Tagore can be placed very much in the tradition of Indian philosophical inquiry. In his philosophical essays, Tagore explores some of the fundamental metaphysical issues of Indian philosophy.

This chapter presents a survey of medieval Greek apocalyptic literature and consists of three parts, which outline typical characteristics of this literary genre, introduce a number of prominent Byzantine apocalyptic narratives, and sketch the manuscript transmission of each.

A volume on the Bible and literature affords an opportunity to explore the conjunction of these terms in relation to a writer whose great work Moby-Dick (1851) – the story of the hunting-down of a white whale by an obsessed sea captain – came to have, after Melville’s lifetime, a mythic role for his nation and for the Western world. Melville’s life (1819–91) spanned the nineteenth century and he was one of its outstanding thinkers. His work throughout is profoundly influenced by biblical texts. This essay, noting the influence of the Wisdom books of the Old Testament, highlights both their capacity to help Melville think through the problems of his age, and their influence on his understanding of the power of story and the capacities of language. After a brief account of Melville’s formative years, the essay considers a long passage from Moby-Dick for the complexity of its resonances with Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. A discussion of the role of Wisdom in Melville’s long dramatic poem Clarel follows, with emphasis on the book of Job. A late sketch, “Daniel Orme” offers, through the figure of Daniel, material for a final reflection on Melville’s role as thinker and visionary for his society.

The Book of Revelation sits in a distinctive place in the canon of the New Testament, with its relentless succession of apocalyptic imagery—but also sits in a distinctive place within apocalyptic literature as a whole. Making theological sense of it demands both discipline and imagination on the part of the reader, but also mastery of some technical issues (numerology, structure, and its use of imagery) which put it at a cultural distance from the contemporary reader.

This chapter examines the content of three obscure texts written in the tenth century and related to the biblical Apocalypse, and observes that their authors lacked millennial anxieties and utilized earlier exegetical writings.