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Elective English—IV

Notes faithfully; others newly blended elements of different ragas. Yet about nine-tenths of his work
was not bhanga gaan, the body of tunes revamped with “fresh value” from select Western,
Hindustani, Bengali folk and other regional flavours “external” to Tagore’s own ancestral culture.
Tagore influenced sitar maestro Vilayat Khan and sarodiyas Buddhadev Dasgupta and Amjad
Ali Khan. His songs are widely popular and undergird the Bengali ethos to an extent perhaps
rivalling Shakespeare’s impact on the English-speaking world. It is said that his songs are the
outcome of five centuries of Bengali literary churning and communal yearning. Dhan Gopal
Mukerji has said that these songs transcend the mundane to the aesthetic and express all ranges
and categories of human emotion. The poet gave voice to all—big or small, rich or poor. The
poor Ganges boatman and the rich landlord air their emotions in them. They birthed a distinctive
school of music whose practitioners can be fiercely traditional: novel interpretations have drawn
severe censure in both West Bengal and Bangladesh.

For Bengalis, the songs’ appeal, stemming from the combination of emotive strength and beauty
described as surpassing even Tagore’s poetry, was such that the Modern Review observed that
“[t]here is in Bengal no cultured home where Rabindranath’s songs are not sung or at least
attempted to be sung ... Even illiterate villagers sing his songs”. A. H. Fox Strangways of The
Observer introduced non-Bengalis to rabindrasangit in The Music of Hindostan, calling it a
“vehicle of a personality ... [that] go behind this or that system of music to that beauty of sound
which all systems put out their hands to seize.”
In 1971, Amar Shonar Bangla became the national anthem of Bangladesh. It was written—
ironically—to protest the 1905 Partition of Bengal along communal lines: lopping Muslim-
majority East Bengal from Hindu-dominated West Bengal was to avert a regional bloodbath.
Tagore saw the partition as a ploy to upend the independence movement, and he aimed to
rekindle Bengali unity and tar communalism. Jana Gana Mana was written in shadhu-bhasha, a
Sanskritised register of Bengali, and is the first of five stanzas of a Brahmo hymn that Tagore
composed. It was first sung in 1911 at a Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress and was
adopted in 1950 by the Constituent Assembly of the Republic of India as its national anthem.
10.2.2 Paintings

At sixty, Tagore took up drawing and painting; successful exhibitions of his many works—
which made a debut appearance in Paris upon encouragement by artists he met in the south of
France—were held throughout Europe. He was likely red-green color blind, resulting in works
that exhibited strange colour schemes and off-beat aesthetics. Tagore was influenced by scrimshaw
from northern New Ireland, Haida carvings from British Columbia, and woodcuts by Max
Pechstein. His artist’s eye for his handwriting were revealed in the simple artistic and rhythmic
leitmotifs embellishing the scribbles, cross-outs, and word layouts of his manuscripts. Some of
Tagore’s lyrics corresponded in a synesthetic sense with particular paintings.
The Last Harvest: Paintings of Rabindranath Tagore was an exhibition of Rabindranath Tagore’s
paintings to mark the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore. It was commissioned by
the Ministry of Culture, India and organised with NGMA Delhi as the nodal agency. It consisted
of 208 paintings drawn from the collections of Visva Bharati and the NGMA and presented
Tagore’s art in a very comprehensive way. The exhibition was curated by Art Historian R. Siva
Kumar. Within the 150th birth anniversary year it was conceived as three separate but similar
exhibitions, and travelled simultaneously in three circuits. The first selection was shown at
Museum of Asian Art, Berlin, Asia Society, New York, National Museum of Korea, Seoul, Victoria
and Albert Museum, London, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Petit Palais, Paris, Galleria
Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, National Visual Arts Gallery (Malaysia), Kuala Lumpur,
McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Ontario, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.

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