‘Tagore, a hugely important thinker even today’
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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.’ These
ideas and the broad visions underlying them make Tagore
a hugely important thinker even today.
What is it about Tagore people know least?
Since Tagore was presented by his early champions in the
West, such as W B Yeats and Ezra Pound, as a kind of
‘Eastern mystic’, people in the West — and through the
Western influence also people elsewhere — often think of
him in terms of mysticism and other-worldliness. But he
was deeply involved in rational assessment of the world
and its problems. People elsewhere often have very little
knowledge of Tagore’s commitment to critical reasoning
and to the importance of human freedom.
Tagore argued for the courage to depart from traditional
beliefs whenever reasoning demanded that. There is a nice
little short story of Tagore, called Kartar Bhoot (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 tyrant when he
lived, but became enormously more so after he died. The
story describes how ridiculously restrained people’s lives
became when the dead leader’s past recommendations get
frozen into inflexible commands, without his being able to
offer any exceptions. With their impossibly difficult lives,
when the members of the group pray to the dead leader to
liberate them from their bondage, the leader reminds them
that he exists only in their mind and they are free to liberate themselves whenever they wished. Tagore had a real
horror of being bound by the past, beyond the reach of
present reasoning. While tradition is very important, nothing was beyond the reach of reasoning. Tagore’s robust
championing of reason is not much known in the world
outside Bangladesh and India.
Tagore’s insistence on open-minded reasoning also influenced his ideas on education. He wanted to welcome
knowledge from everywhere in the world, and in the school
he set up in Santiniketan, where I was privileged to study,
there was a huge effort to make students aware of the richness of cultural and intellectual developments across the
world. His knowledge-oriented understanding of the world
also made him appreciate very early that education was the
most important element in the development of a country.
In his assessment of Japan’s economic development, Tagore
separated out the role that the advancement of school education had played in Japan’s remarkable development — an
analysis that would be echoed much later in the literature
on economic development.
What is your favorite Tagore book and poem and why?
This is a very difficult question for me to answer, since I
like both his poetical work and prose writings so much.
Among the novels, perhaps my favorite is Gora, which is
really a deep and sympathetic critique of communitarian
identity. The story is wonderful and full of beautiful
moments and many startling turns. But there is also a powerful basic theme. An orphaned Irish infant whose parents
were killed during the Mutiny of 1857 is brought up in a
middle-class Bengali Hindu family, without his knowing
his own ancestry… He grows up as quite a fanatic exponent
of traditional Hindu culture — unlike the family in which
he had been adopted and raised — and this he combines
with great sympathy for the masses who, Gora thinks, do
not get adequate respect from the snooty, Westernized
upper and middle classes — the ‘bhadraloks’ — who tend to
dismiss the masses — in Gora’s view — as superstitious
people with obsolete views. Gora’s rhetoric in defense both
of traditional Hinduism and of the underdogs of the society is powerful and brilliant. When he learns at last about
his own foreign ancestry, he suddenly recognizes that
REUTERS
Childen at an outdoor school in
Santiniketan, West Bengal. At
Santiniketan, a voluntary initiative
helping tribal children to read and
write Bengali is so popular it needs
a second building
World), which has many
themes, but which ultimately
is a critique of narrowly
defined nationalism. Satyajit
Ray made a great film of that
novel.
The poems are harder to
choose from, since there are so
many of them and so hard to
rank. One of his lovely poems,
There are so many great poems that I cannot easily
choose one or two from them. I would have similar difficulty in choosing between Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets,
each of which I love.
JO YONG-HAK/REU TERS
Indian President Pratibha Patil, right, offers flowers at a memorial to Rabindranath Tagore during her
visit to Seoul, South Korea, July 25
access to the temples he so eulogized has just been barred
for him as a ‘foreign born’. He also recognizes there are different kinds of restrictions that narrow down the lives of
people from different backgrounds. He has to learn to combine his egalitarian instincts without championing the narrowness of communal and other sectarian identities, and
this he attempts, helped greatly by his very open-minded
girl friend, with a new understanding of human beings.
Next to Gora, I would place Ghare Baire (Home and the
