‘China hasn’t had anyone like Rabindranath Tagore’

Chinese historian Prof Tan Chung’s upcoming book speaks of China’s love affair with Rabindranath Tagore, which continues to this day. On the eve of Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary this week, the Padma Bhushan winner tells DNA how Tagore inspired two large literary movements in China.

In 1929, when Professor Tan Chung was born in Malaya near Singapore, his mother took him to Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan. Professor Chung’s father, the scholar Tan Yun-Shan, had been invited there by Tagore.

Cheena Bhavan was established at Santiniketan in Tan Yun-Shan’s honour. “Not that I have memories of being held by Tagore, but I was later told that he gave me the name Ashok when he first held me,” smiles Prof Chung, 81.

Prof Chung, who is an authority on Chinese history, also holds India close to his heart. After spending his first 25 years his China, he moved to India and pioneered Chinese cultural studies here. Over the decades, he has been head of the department of Chinese and Japanese Studies at Delhi University, and chairperson of the Centre for Afro-Asian Languages and Centre for East Asian Languages of Jawaharlal Nehru University. Prof Chung also helped create the unit of East Asian Studies in the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi, and was awarded the Padma Bhushan award this year.

Prof Chung’s new book aims to give its readers an insight into Tagore’s influence on Chinese literature. The first in a series, the book is a result of an agreement between Sage Publications India and Central Compilation and Translation Press, China.

“You cannot imagine how Tagore gripped minds in China after he won the Nobel prize in 1913. Asians were demoralised with the state of affairs then and suddenly a man from a colony of the whites won the prize,” says Prof Chung. He still recollects with excitement how Gitanjali charged up an entire nation then. Poets in China, he says, were waiting to create a new school in poetry and Tagore was god-sent. “Gitanjali gave birth to a new literary movement — poets began writing short, simple poems, just like Tagore did. Of course, Walt Whitman and WB Yeats were great influences, too. But there was a certain pride that Chinese poets experienced about Tagore and his achievement.”

After Tagore visited China in 1923, the “Tagore fever” was at its peak and a new school took shape — The Cresent Moon School, named after Tagore’s famous poem with the same name. “The true force behind the The Cresent Moon School was Xu Zhimo, who was Tagore’s host and interpreter during the latter’s visit.

Tagore gave Zhimo the name Susima and they were very close friends.” A paper published by Prof Chung speaks of how Zhimo even changed his home in China to suit the Indian way of living — furnished without tables and chairs, only carpets and cushions. Zhimo also wore an Indian cap at Tagore’s functions. “Had Zhimo not died rather young and tragically in an accident, he would have go on to become a great poet,” says Chung.

China’s love affair with Tagore isn’t just a thing of the past. Prof Chung says Tagore is still very much alive in China. “Three years ago, his collected works were published in China and exhibitions were held. The response was unprecedented, and till date, people are buying those books and trying to understand the man. It must make you wonder why Tagore has such influence on the Chinese. I’ll have to say it is his love for harmony that makes the Chinese so curious about him. China has never had a figure like him, who speaks so poignantly about a harmonious society and humanism.

Chinese writers mostly write on revolutionary ideas. Our readers there have rarely read someone who writes on love and friendship like Tagore did.”