Page 136 - DENG202_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_III
P. 136

Unit 10: Beggarly Heart by Rabindranath Tagore




          of Tagore, who was constantly expressing his admiration for the person whom he called, uniquely,  Notes
          “the world poet,” has testified that Tagore had altogether transformed the Bengali language.
          In many different ways, Tagore’s writings reshaped and reconstructed modern Bengali in a way
          that only a handful of innovative Bengali writers had done before him, going back all the way,
          a thousand years earlier, to the authors of Charyapad, the Buddhist literary classics that first
          established the distinctive features of early modern Bengali.
          Not only is language a part of the story in the contrast between Tagore’s appreciation at home
          and the indifference to him abroad, but a related component of the story lies in the extraordinary
          importance and unusual place of language in Bengali culture in general. The Bengali language
          has had an amazingly powerful influence on the identity of Bengalis as a group, on both sides of
          the political boundary between Bangladesh and India. In fact, the politically separatist campaign
          in what was East Pakistan that led to the war for independence, and eventually to the formation
          of the new secular state of Bangladesh in 1971, was pioneered by the bhasha andolon, the
          “language movement” in defence of the Bengali language.
          The movement started on February 21, 1952, only a few years after the partition of the
          subcontinent, with a large demonstration at Dhaka University in what was then the capital of
          East Pakistan (and now of Bangladesh), when the police gunned down a number of demonstrators.
          This turned out to be a decisive moment in the history of what would later become Bangladesh.
          February 21 is celebrated each year in Bangladesh as the Language Movement Day, and this has
          resonance across the world, since UNESCO declared that day as the International Mother
          Language Day. Language has served as a very powerful uniting identity for Muslims and Hindus
          in Bengal, and this sense of shared belonging has had a profound impact on the politics of
          Bengal, including its commitment to secularism on both sides of the border in the post-partition
          world.
          The extraordinary combination of Tagore’s language and themes has had a captivating influence
          on his Bengali readers. Many Bengalis express their astonishment at the fact that people outside
          Bengal could fail to appreciate and enjoy Tagore’s writings; and that incomprehension is at least
          partly due to underestimating the difference that language can make. E.M. Forster noted the
          barrier of language, as early as 1919, when Tagore was still in vogue, in reviewing the translation
          of one of Tagore’s great Bengali novels, Ghare Baire, translated in English as The Home and the
          World (Satyajit Ray would later make it into a fine film.) Forster confessed that he could not
          make himself like the English version of the novel that he read. “The theme is so beautiful,” he
          remarked, but the charms have “vanished in translation.”
          Therefore, the importance of language provides a clue to the eclipse of Tagore in the West, but
          it cannot be the whole story. For one thing, Tagore’s nonfictional prose writings also have a
          gripping hold on the attention of Bengalis and of other Indians, but they are not seen abroad in
          a similarly admiring way at all. This is so despite the fact that these writings are much easier to
          translate: indeed, Tagore himself often presented these essays in very effective English about
          which it would be hard to grumble. In his essays and his lectures, Tagore developed ideas on a
          remarkably wide variety of subjects—on politics, on culture, on society, on education; and
          while they are regularly quoted in his homeland, they are very rarely invoked now outside
          Bangladesh and India. There has to be something other than the barrier of language in the lack
          of world attention to Tagore. In addition, this raises the larger question: how relevant, how
          important are Tagore’s general ideas?
          Perhaps the central issues that moved Tagore most are the importance of open-minded reasoning
          and the celebration of human freedom. This placed him in a somewhat distinct category from
          some of his great compatriots. Tagore admired Gandhi immensely, expressed his admiration of
          his leadership repeatedly, and did more than perhaps anyone else in insisting that he be described
          as “Mahatma”—the great soul. And yet Tagore frequently disagreed with Gandhi whenever he
          thought that the latter’s reasoning did not go far enough. They would often argue with each
          other quite emphatically.



                                           LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY                                   131
   131   132   133   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141