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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.
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