Dutta, Krishna; Andrew Robinson;
Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-minded Man
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 1997, 512 pages
ISBN 0747530866, 9780747530862
topics: | biography | tagore | bengal
At Bengali political and social gatherings in the 1890s, not a word of the speeches would be in Bengali, and everyone would dress impeccably in the English manner. ... Once [Tagore] and three nephews set off for a party dressed in dhoti and chadar with long-nosed Punjabi sandals... [but legs were covered] with socially acceptable stockings. However, ... Rabindranath pulled off his stockings saying, 'Why keep them? Let us be really nationalistic.'... [Abanindranath wrote later] "It was really bad turning up in Indian clothes, but to appear with bare legs was really too much! Especially before ladies!" p.121 [About Russia, Sept 1930] ... they have made a mould for their education system -- and human beings cannot endure being cast in a mould. If an educational theory does not correspond with the law of living minds, either the mould will shatter or the minds will be paralysed and men will become automata. - p.122
[Tagore's children: Bela, Rathindranath, Renuka, Mira and Somindranath. Bela was married when she was 15 and Renuka at 10... although Rabindranath was strongly opposed to child marriage.] In Bela's case his decision was perhaps excusable, at least as far as her age was concerned, but in Renuka's it most certainly was not. - 130 [When Mrinalini died] Rabindranath did not nurse Mrinalini for two months day and night, as loyally claimed by his biographer Kripalini, he remained absorbed in the running of the school, often away from Jorasanko. After she died he showed no visible emotion and soon returned to Shantiniketan. ... [In the series of poems, Smaran] his grief was notably impersonal and generalized. - p. 137 --- I am by nature unsocial -- human intimacy is unbearable to me. Unless I have a lot of space around me in all directions I cannot unpack my mind, mentally stretch my arms and legs. p.147 --- [Tagore was reading a book by lamplight] the moment I extinguished the flame, moonlight burst through the open window and flooded the boat. It was like a shock to an infatuated man. The glare from a satanic little lamp had been mocking an infinite radiance. What on earth had I been hoping to find in the empty wordiness of that book? The heavens had been waiting for me soundlessly outside all the time. Had I chanced to miss them and gone off to bed in darkness, they would not have made the slightest protest . . . - Letter to Indira Devi, Dec 1895, p.152 I am beginning to envy the birds that sing so gladly and go without honour. - Letter to Rothenstein, after the Nobel, Dec 1913, p.159 the East and the West ever touch each other like twin gems in the circlet of humanity, they had met long before Kipling was born and will meet long after his name is forgotten. - p.161 [on expressing oneself in a foreign tongue] a mind with an aristocratic code of honour that chooses to remain dumb rather tnan send out its thoughts dressed in rags. - letter to Victoria Ocampo, p. 179
A younger group of writers were trying to to escape from the penumbra of
Rabindranath, often by tilting at him and his work. In 1928 he decided to
call a meeting of writers at Jorasanko and hear them debate the issues.
... Tagore did not speak. [Among those present was Nirad Chaudhuri,
recounted in Thy hand, great anarch, p. 228-9] p. 281
---
Gandhi's favourite song: [jIbana Jakhan shukAye jAy / karuNAdhArAy eso]
In September 1932, Gandhi launched his fast against the Communal Award -
dividing the electorate into hindus, muslims, europeans and the
untouchables. Tagore, despite being 61 years old then - decided to visit
him in distant Poona. There Gandhi broke his fast, after discussions with
Ambedkar ("the Poona pact"), and Gandhi had some orange juice, squeezed by
a fifteen-year old girl called Indira Nehru. Tagore was then asked to sing
"one of his Bengali songs, the Mahatma's particular favourite. It was from
Gitanjali: 'When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a
shower of mercy . . .' Tagore duly sang it, but not correctly, for he
discovered he had forgottten the melody." [p. 306-307].
---
The so-called educated classes had come to regard themselves as a
completely separate caste, he said, by virtue of having been taught in
English; they looked down upon the rest of India as 'untouchables.' To
them, the word 'country' had come to mean the educated classes only,
'as if a peacock were all feathers or an elephant all tusks.' - p.310
According to the [Iso]Upanishad the reconciliation of the
contradiction between tapasya (austerity) and ananda (joyfulness) is
at the root of creation - and Mahatmaji is the prophet of tapasya and
I am the poet of Ananda. - Tagore to Gandhi disciple Miraben, p.311/449
[Tagore visited a Bedouin camp in the desert.] The chief told him,
'Our prophet has said that a true Muslim is he by whose words and
deeds not the least of his brother-men may ever come to any harm..'
Tagore noted: 'I was startled into recognizing in his words the voice
of essential humanity.' -p.317
The world is full of paradoxes and one of them is this: far
horizons, vaulted skies, black storm-clouds and profound feelings - in
other words, where infinitude is manifest - are most truly witnessed
by one person; a multitude makes them seem petty and distracting.
The thing about flying creatures that has struck me from my earliest
years is the effortlessness of their motion... it seemed to me [the
kites soaring above] were flying for the sheer joy ... Earthly motion
always seems to require effort; gravity reigns supreme and there is no
getting rid of its burden.
Now comes an age in which man has lifted the burdens of earth into
he air. ... His progress is not in harmony with the wind but in
opposition to it, importing the spirit of conflict from the mundane
world into the empyrean. Its sound is not that of a bird singing, but
of a raging beast: the earth, having conquered the air, bellows its
victory.
As [the flying machine ] goes higher and higher ... the signs that
tell us the earth is real are gradually obiliterated and a
three-dimensional picture is flattened into two-dimensional
lines. ... Thus deprived of its substantiality, the earth's hold on
our mind and heart is loosened. And it is borne in on me how such
aloofness can become terrible, when man finds it expedient to rain
destruction on the vagueness below. Who is the slayer and who the
slain? Who is kin and who is stranger? This travesty of the teaching
of the Bhagavad Gita is raised on high by the flying machine.
---
[The christian chaplain of a British air force in Baghdad tells him
of their bombing operation on some Sheikh villages.] Christ
acknowledged all mankind to be the children of his Father; but for the
modern Christian both father and children have receded into the
shadows, unrecognizable from the elevation of his bombarding plane --
for which reason these blows are dealt at the very heart of Christ
himself. - p.126
Liang Chi Chao, historian, president of Beijing Universities Association,
in welcome address to Tagore (Talks in China, intro, p.572, v.2)
[During AD 67-789, twenty-four Hindu scholars, and thirteen from
Kashmir, visited China.] Our scholars, who went to India to study,
during the period from the Western Tsin to the Tang dynasties (265-790
AD) numbered 187... Among the most famous from India were Tamolosa
(Dharma-raksha), Chu Shien (Buddha-bhadra), and Chen Ti (Jina-bhadra),
and from China, Fa Hien, Yuan Chuang, and I Tsing. -p.573
The pagoda is purely Indian in origin; we never had anything like it
before the days of Indian influence. We cannot imagine the West Lake
in Hangchow without its two pagodas... The oldest piece of
architecture in Peking is the pagoda in front of the temple Tien Nien
(Heavenly Peace). - p.575
--- end excerpts
Kirkus: A beautifully written life of India's once-famous Nobel laureate who is now nlargely unknown to Western readers. In the first half of the 20th century, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was widely known in the West as a mediator between Eastern and Western culture. His poems, plays, paintings, and music remain enormously influential in India, especially in Bengal. Dutta, a Calcutta-born teacher now living in England, and Robinson, literary editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement, assume that Western readers need a complete reintroduction to Tagore. The result is a leisurely, life-and-times biography written from a detached, objective point of view and full of useful explanatory detail. Dutta and Robinson balance the cultural, political, family, and religious influences on Tagore without settling on any one as predominant. ... the authors are also sensitive to Tagore's contradictions. A beneficiary of British rule, he agonized over the plight of peasants on his family estates but never questioned the legitimacy of private ownership. He supported British rule until the national movement made it unfashionable. After embracing nationalism, he distanced himself, not only from violent extremists, but from political mainstreamers such as Gandhi. The book becomes livelier when the authors lose patience with Tagore, particularly over his hypocrisy in advocating rights for women that he never extended to the women of his own family.