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Unit 10: Beggarly Heart by Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore became more and more anxious and disappointed about India and about the world in the Notes
years before his death, and he did not live to see the emergence of a secular Bangladesh, which
drew a part of its inspiration from his reasoned rejection of communal separatism. With its
independence, Bangladesh chose one of Tagore’s songs (“Amar Sonar Bangla”) as its national
anthem, making Tagore possibly the only person in human history that authored the national
anthems of two independent countries: India had already adopted another one of his songs as its
national anthem.
All this must be very confusing to those who see the contemporary world as a “clash of
civilizations”—with “Muslim civilization,” “Hindu civilization” and “Western civilization,”
defined largely on religious grounds, vehemently confronting each other. They would also be
confused by Tagore’s own description of his own cultural background: “a confluence of three
cultures, Hindu, Mohammedan, and British.” Rabindranath Tagore’s grandfather, Dwarkanath,
was well known for his command of Arabic and Persian, and Rabindranath grew up in a family
atmosphere in which a deep knowledge of Sanskrit and ancient Hindu texts was combined with
the study of Islamic traditions as well as Persian literature. It is not so much that Tagore tried to
produce a “synthesis” of the different religions (as the great Mughal emperor Akbar had
attempted for a time), but his reliance on reasoning and his emphasis on human freedom
militated against a separatist and parochial understanding of social divisions.
If Tagore’s voice was strong against communalism and religious sectarianism, he was no less
outspoken in his rejection of nationalism. He was critical of the display of excessive nationalism
in India, despite his persistent criticism of British imperialism. And notwithstanding his great
admiration for Japanese culture and history, he would chastise Japan late in his life for its
extreme nationalism and its mistreatment of China and east and Southeast Asia.
Tagore also went out of his way to dissociate the criticism of the Raj from any denunciation of
British people and British culture. Consider Gandhi’s famous witticism in reply to the question,
asked in England, about what he thought of British civilization: “It would be a good idea.”
There are some doubts about the authenticity of the story, but whether or not it is exactly
accurate, the purported remark did fit with Gandhi’s amused skepticism about claims of British
greatness. Those words could not have come from Tagore’s lips, even in jest. While he denied
altogether the legitimacy of the Raj, Tagore was vocal in pointing out what Indians had gained
from “discussions centred upon Shakespeare’s drama and Byron’s poetry and above all.... the
large-hearted liberalism of nineteenth-century English politics.” The tragedy, as Tagore saw it,
came from the fact that what “was truly best in their civilization, the upholding of dignity of
human relationships, has no place in the British administration of this country.”

Tagore saw the world as a vast give-and-take of ideas and innovations. He insisted, “Whatever
we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have
their origin.” He went on to proclaim, “I am proud of my humanity when I can acknowledge the
poets and artists of other countries as my own. Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the
great glories of man are mine.” The importance of such ideas has not diminished in the divisive
world in which we now live. If that gives at least a part of the answer to the question of why
Tagore still matters, it also puts into sharper focus the strangeness of the eclipse of Tagore in the
West after an initial outburst of enthusiasm.
In explaining what happened to Tagore in the West, it is important to see the one-sided way in
which his Western admirers presented him. This was partly related to the priorities of Tagore’s
principal sponsors in Europe, such as Yeats and Pound. They were dedicated to placing Tagore
in the light of a mystical religiosity that went sharply against the overall balance of Tagore’s
work. In Yeats’s case, his single-minded presentation included adding explanatory remarks to
the translation of Tagore’s poems to make sure that the reader got the religious point, eliminating
altogether the rich ambiguity of meaning in Tagore’s language between love of human beings
and love of God.

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