Page 139 - DENG202_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_III

Elective English—III

Notes However, a part of the answer to the puzzle of the Western misunderstanding of Tagore can be
found, I think, in the peculiar position in which Europe was placed when Tagore’s poems
became such a rage in the West. Tagore received his Nobel Prize only a year before the start in
Europe of World War I, which was fought with unbelievable brutality. The slaughter in that war
made many intellectuals and literary figures in Europe turn to insights coming from elsewhere,
and Tagore’s voice seemed too many, at the time, to fit the need splendidly. When, for example,
the pocket book of Wilfred Owen, the great anti-war poet, was recovered from the battlefield in
which he had died, his mother, Susan Owen, found in it a prominent display of Tagore’s poetry.
The poem of Tagore with which Wilfred said good-bye before leaving for the battlefield
(it began, “When I go from hence, let this be my parting word”) was very much there, as Susan
wrote to Tagore, with those words “written in his dear writing—with your name beneath.”

Tagore soon became identified in Europe as a sage with a teaching—a teaching that could, quite
possibly, save Europe from the dire predicament of war and disaffection in which it recurrently
found itself in the early twentieth century. This was very different from the many-sided creative
artist and emphatically reasoned thinker that people at home found in Tagore. Even as Tagore
urged his countrymen to wake up from blind belief and turn to reason, Yeats was describing
Tagore’s voice in thoroughly mystical terms: “we have met our own image ... or heard, perhaps
for the first time in literature, our voice as in a dream.” There is a huge gulf there.
Tagore argued for the courage to depart from traditional beliefs whenever reason demanded it.
There is a nice little story by Tagore called “Kartar Bhoot,” or “The Ghost of the Leader,”
illustrating this point. A wise and highly respected leader who received unquestioned admiration
from a community had become, in effect, a kind of tyrant when he lived, and enormously more
so after, he died. The story describes how ridiculously restrained people’s lives became when
the dead leader’s recommendations are frozen into inflexible commands. In their impossibly
difficult lives, when the members of the community pray to the dead leader to liberate them
from their bondage, the leader reminds them that he exists only in their minds—that they are
free to liberate themselves whenever they so decide. Tagore had a real horror of being bound by
the past, beyond the reach of present reasoning.
Yet Tagore himself did not do much to resist the wrongly conceived reputation as a mystical
sage that was being thrust upon him. Even though he wrote to his friend C.F. Andrews in 1920,
at the height of his adulation as an Eastern messiah, “these people ... are like drunkards who are
afraid of their lucid intervals,” he played along without much public protest. There was some
tension within Tagore’s self-perception, which allowed him to entertain the belief that the East
had a real message for the West. This conviction fitted rather badly with the rest of his reasoned
commitments and convictions. There was also a serious mismatch between the kind of religiosity
that the Western intellectuals came to attribute to Tagore (Graham Greene thought that he had
seen in Tagore “what Chesterton calls ‘the bright pebbly eyes’ of the Theosophists”) and the
form that Tagore’s religious beliefs actually took. One of his poems (I am taking the liberty of
translating the lines into simple English, away from the biblical English that Tagore had been
persuaded to use) perhaps best represents his religious inclinations:

Leave this chanting and singing and
telling of beads!
Whom do you worship in this lonely
dark corner of a temple with doors
all shut?
Open your eyes and see your God
is not before you!
He is there where the tiller is tilling
the hard ground and where the
path maker is breaking stones.

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