Rabindranath Through Western Eyes

[Maureen Quartaro]

Tagoregreatly admired Gandhi but he had many disagreements with him on a variety of subjects, including nationalism, patriotism, the importance of cultural exchange, the role of rationality and of science, and the nature of economic and social development. These differences, I shall argue, have a clear and consistent pattern, with Tagore pressing for more room for reasoning, and for a less traditionalist view, a greater interest in the rest of the world, and more respect for science and for objectivity generally.

How would Tagore have viewed the India of today? Would he see progress there, or wasted opportunity, perhaps even a betrayal of its promise and conviction? And, on a wider subject, how would he react to the spread of cultural separatism in the contemporary world?

His white hair flowed softly down both sides of his forehead; the tufts of hair under the temples also were long like two beards, and linking up with the hair on his cheeks, continued into his beard, so that he gave an impression, to the boy I was then, of some ancient Oriental wizard.7

Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut?

Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones.

He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust.

I have no sleep to-night. Ever and again I open my door and look out on the darkness, my friend!

I can see nothing before me. I wonder where lies thy path!

By what dim shore of the ink-black river, by what far edge of the frowning forest, through what mazy depth of gloom, art thou threading thy course to come to see me, my friend?

For Tagore it was of the highest importance that people be able to live, and reason, in freedom. His attitudes toward politics and culture, nationalism and internationalism, tradition and modernity, can all be seen in the light of this belief.11 Nothing, perhaps, expresses his values as clearly as a poem in Gitanjali:

Great as he is as a politician, as an organizer, as a leader of men, as a moral reformer, he is greater than all these as a man, because none of these aspects and activities limits his humanity. They are rather inspired and sustained by it.

We who often glorify our tendency to ignore reason, installing in its place blind faith, valuing it as spiritual, are ever paying for its cost with the obscuration of our mind and destiny. I blamed Mahatmaji for exploiting this irrational force of credulity in our people, which might have had a quick result [in creating] a superstructure, while sapping the foundation. Thus began my estimate of Mahatmaji, as the guide of our nation, and it is fortunate for me that it did not end there.

[Gandhiji] condemns sexual life as inconsistent with the moral progress of man, and has a horror of sex as great as that of the author of The Kreutzer Sonata, but, unlike Tolstoy, he betrays no abhorrence of the sex that tempts his kind. In fact, his tenderness for women is one of the noblest and most consistent traits of his character, and he counts among the women of his country some of his best and truest comrades in the great movement he is leading.

He would have been much happier with the postwar emergence of Japan as a peaceful power. Then, too, since he was not free of egotism, he would also have been pleased by the attention paid to his ideas by the novelist Yasunari Kawabata and others.25

With his high expectations of Britain, Tagore continued to be surprised by what he took to be a lack of official sympathy for international victims of aggression. He returned to this theme in the lecture he gave on his last birthday, in 1941:

While Japan was quietly devouring North China, her act of wanton aggression was ignored as a minor incident by the veterans of British diplomacy. We have also witnessed from this distance how actively the British statesmen acquiesced in the destruction of the Spanish Republic.

When Tagore visited Russia in 1930, he was much impressed by its development efforts and by what he saw as a real commitment to eliminate poverty and economic inequality. But what impressed him most was the expansion of basic education across the old Russian empire. In Letters from Russia, written in Bengali and published in 1931, he unfavorably compares the acceptance of widespread illiteracy in India by the British administration with Russian efforts to expand education:

Tagore was concerned not only that there be wider opportunities for education across the country (especially in rural areas where schools were few), but also that the schools themselves be more lively and enjoyable. He himself had dropped out of school early, largely out of boredom, and had never bothered to earn a diploma. He wrote extensively on how schools should be made more attractive to boys and girls and thus more productive. His own co-educational school at Santiniketan had many progressive features. The emphasis here was on self-motivation rather than on discipline, and on fostering intellectual curiosity rather than competitive excellence.

In view of his interest in childhood education, Tagore would not be consoled by the extraordinary expansion of university education, in which India sends to its universities six times as many people per unit of population as does China. Rather, he would be stunned that, in contrast to East and Southeast Asia, including China, half the adult population and two thirds of Indian women remain unable to read or write. Statistically reliable surveys indicate that even in the late 1980s, nearly half of the rural girls between the ages of twelve and fourteen did not attend any school for a single day of their lives.31

All the convergent influences of the world run through this society: Hindu, Moslem, Christian, secular; Stalinist, liberal, Maoist, democratic socialist, Gandhian. There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East that is not active in some Indian mind.33

Tagore would also oppose the cultural nationalism that has recently been gaining some ground in India, along with an exaggerated fear of the influence of the West. He was uncompromising in his belief that human beings could absorb quite different cultures in constructive ways:

Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin. 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. Therefore it hurts me deeply when the cry of rejection rings loud against the West in my country with the clamour that Western education can only injure us.

There is no doubt that the discord between the two wives affected the two husbands much more than it did their neighbors, but even the two brothers did not consider it to be a serious problem. The two brothers considered domestic life as a long journey on a bullock cart, and the ceaseless creaking noises and jerking movements of springless wheels, only a natural, necessary part of this journey.

The heat outside was stifling. In the evening there was a slight shower and heavy clouds still hung overhead; there was not a breath of wind in the air. The jungle around the house and the weeds had grown luxuriantly during the monsoon, and the thick, heavy smell of rotting vegetation from the water-logged jute fields stood like motionless walls around the house. A frog was croaking from the swamp behind the cowshed and the still evening sky was full with the sounds of crickets.

In the distance, the Padma, swollen with monsoon rains and overhung with new clouds, looked ominous. Nearby, the paddy fields were already flooded and the water lapped close to human habitations. The force of the sweeping waters had uprooted a few mango and jackfruit trees whose roots clawed the empty air like fingers desperately outspread to clutch something firm.

When the two brothers returned home in the evening, walking through mud and water, they saw Chandara, the wife of the younger brother, quietly lying down on the floor on the aanchal of her own sari. She had cried all afternoon, and towards evening had stopped and become still.

Radha, the wife of the older brother, was sitting on the threshold with a scowl on her face. Her one-and-a-half-year-old son was crying nearby. When the two entered, they saw a naked baby sleeping on its back in the courtyard.

Outside, it was very peaceful. The shepherds were returning home with their herds. The peasants who had gone to the sandbank on the other side to harvest the newly-ripened paddy, were returning home in groups of seven or eight, sitting in small boats with sheaves of paddy on their heads as payment for their labour.

Ramlochan from the Chatterjee household was calmly smoking a hook-ah after having mailed a letter at the village post office. He suddenly re-membered that Dukhi, his tenant, owed him a lot of back rent. He had promised to pay a part of it today. Having decided that Dukhi must have returned home now, Ramlochan threw his shawl over his shoulder, picked up his umbrella, and walked outside.

Chidam thought that he must proceed along the path he had already chosen for himself. He had himself given Ramlochan an account of what happened and the entire village now knew about it. He just did not know what would happen if he now broadcast a different story. He thought he might still be able to save his wife if he held on to his earlier version and garnished it with some additional information.

Chandara was no more than seventeen or eighteen. Her face was soft and round, her stature not very tall. There was such a lilt in her petite, lithe limbs that every movement seemed fluid and rhythmic. Like a newly-built boat, small and graceful, she moved with unhampered ease and speed. She was curious about everything in the world and had a sense of humour. She loved visiting her neighbors for a chat; on her way to the bathing ghat, she took in all that was worth noticing with her restless, bright, black eyes by parting slightly the aanchal end of her sari with two fingers.

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