His constant presence in a changing world

While the world celebrated Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary on Friday, his home state is gearing up to honour him on the date of his birth, May 9, as per the Bengali calender

‘Tagore remains quite alive in the Spanish speaking world’

The radical liberal ideas that we encounter in Tagore’s works look refreshingly modern even by today’s standards. He was constantly experimenting with form (eg, ‘the novel of ideas’ as in Gora) and drew as much from Indian cultural forms as from his encounters with Western cultures, internalising everything in the process and revealing India to itself.

In fact, there is a recent UN document that hails Tagore as the key reference point for the notion of a “reconciled universal” of the 21st century. In other words, all humanity — not just jingoistic Bengalis —  should look to him in order to move forward and learn how he was capable of embracing the world while still rooted in his own soil, that is, being adaptable and resilient at the same time. This stands in sharp contrast to today’s fashionable multiculturalism, which leads to apparent widening of knowledge but only produces shallow minds.

Certainly he owed a huge debt to the Brahmo Samaj movement which created a very sophisticated notion of Upanishadic spirituality that is very appealing today because it doesn’t demand religious faith of any kind. Unfortunately, Tagore has not been disseminated effectively among the Indian youth outside Bengal and he may have even been forgotten in the Anglo-Saxon world.

But he remains very alive elsewhere, particularly in the Spanish-speaking world, where Tagore seems to be almost everyone’s favourite poet. This is even though only 5% of his works have been translated into Spanish.

In China, he is rated among the top ten thinkers to have influenced modern Chinese life. In the streets of Mexico or Havana, I have seen kids reciting his poems on demand, in Andalucia, singers singing flamenco to his lyrics. Tagore has left us enough to engage our minds for the next 500 years.

The writer is a professor of film appreciation, Whistling Woods International and director, Indo-Latin American Cultural Initiative
- Indranil Chakravarty

‘He was deeply rooted in the culture from which he emerged’

What is extraordinary about Rabindranath Tagore is that one can recover him anytime in history. So the notion of his relevance immediately ceases to be relevant.

Tagore’s poetry and paintings are a source of perennial aesthetic delight, not just for Bengalis but for anybody with an interest in creativity and literature, an interest that can never be specific to any particular century. Tagore’s ideas on education are also significant today, at a time when we’re increasingly defining our lives not by notions of work and success, but in our unique experiences of the world at large. This is very much in tune with Tagore’s belief that the four walls of a school were no better than that of a prison house.

But the one crucial way that Tagore can be thought of as our contemporary is to consider his views on the grand coming together of humanity. Here in the 21st century, Tagore would be very comfortable with the creative aspects of globalisation — he would welcome the unfamiliar, but at the same time display a capacity to cherish and celebrate his own culture and its traditions.

It is remarkable how perceptive he was to write, way back in the 19th century, of the inherent multiculturalism of Indian civilization, evident in the coming together of Dravidian and Aryan civilizations. Today, multiculturalism is no longer a question of geography. It is about a diverse group converging in a single space.

For Tagore, the moment something becomes larger than what it was born into is a moment of triumph. He has written brilliantly about the idea that any culture or community which feels it has everything it needs, is fundamentally limited.

He would see multiculturalism as a gift, not an ordeal or obstacle to be overcome. And that was essentially because Tagore was deeply rooted in the culture from which he emerged — he cherished his mother tongue, drew heavily from a traditional ethos as an artist and was inspired by the myriad landscapes that made up the place of his birth. Problems emerge when we begin to resent our origins, is something he would say.

The writer is an academician and director, Katha Centre for Film Studies    

Noted Bengali writer, Mani Shankar Mukherjee rues that translations of Tagore’s works have been scarce

It’s a pity that even 70 years after Tagore’s death, his entire body of work has not been collated in one tome as his ‘complete works’, especially his letters.  

It is also a matter of concern that we have failed to translate him properly in other Indian or Western languages. Most of the translations by Western scholars are woefully inadequate. The richness of the experience of reading Tagore directly in Bengali has thus remained a prerogative of the Bengalis only. To the rest of India, in most cases, one’s only acquaintance with Tagore has been restricted to the poem, Where the Mind is Without Fear.

Incidentally, translating his music poses an even more difficult challenge, since some of the spirit may be lost in translation. 

Even overseas, most scholars don’t know much about Tagore. And that’s a shortcoming on our part. I feel Bengalis living abroad should shoulder the responsibility of taking Tagore to the world. 
He received the Nobel Prize for Gitanjali based on its translation. So one can only imagine the power of his creative imagination. No one should be deprived of his writing because it is so universal and we can draw comfort from them.  

For me personally, he is my battery charger… whether in sadness or weariness, or even when I feel bereft of ideas, I turn to Tagore. At six feet, two inches, he stood tall. But his memory soars high, even after 150 years.