In Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, the intruder in the Kirsanov household, Bazarov, makes it amply clear that he disapproves of authority. Facts, he receives favourably, he tells Paul Petrovitch, but will not permit anyone or anything to claim sovereignty over his self. Bazarov is, fundamentally, his own supreme ruler. Not so Amiya Dev, who is convinced that without Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali language would be, at best, a curio from a foregone era and not the self-assured and cacophonous living creature that it is. In his Rereading Tagore, he unambiguously submits that “of all writers Tagore was one of the greatest, and the most prolific…” Rabindranath Tagore is central to Dev’s anthology of essays which, otherwise lacks thematic unity (something he concedes in his prefatory remarks); the pieces cover as disparate and unconnected works as Gora, Tagore’s writings on Sikhism, and compositions from his travels outside the subcontinent.
Dev’s rereading of Rabindranath’s last novella Char Adhyay does not have the appearance of a fresh comprehension. Titled ‘Ideal and Waste: Char Adhyay Reread’, it cites the familiar trope of revolution devouring its children (A l’exemple de Saturne, la révolution dévore ses enfants) and, predictably, talks about the figure of Brahmabandhav Upadhyay (1861-1907), a Vedantic scholar-sanyasin who experimented with Brahmoism, Protestantism and Catholicism before returning to Hinduism just before the Swadeshi period. He attempts to reset the story to our times which he ends with a rather fanciful conjecture, namely, a protesting Gandhi fasting to restore the soundness of his loved one’s minds falling victim to a suicide attack.
Amiya Dev
Rereading Tagore
Niyogi Books, 2018
Dev also revisits the novel Gora and, given the enormous size of the work, is quite elaborate in his inspection of it. Not unexpectedly, he spends a fair amount of time examining the eponymous character Gourmohan, or Gora. He, ultimately, catalogues Gora as a Hindutvavadi. This is an anachronism as the story is set in the Bengal of the 1880s and was published in the first decade of the last century. Brahmabandhav Upadhyay, too, is a Hindutvavadi. Recall that Vinayak Damodar Savarkar formulated the doctrine of Hindutva only in the 1920s – a decade after the publication of Gora and Upadhyay’s passing. This manner of reading which retrofits ideologies on to yesteryear’s ideologues – both unreal and real – is remarkably akin to the doings of a certain political party which has, in the past, laid claim to the legacies of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Swami Vivekananda, to name but two.
Dev is accurate when he notes that “[W]hat Tagore [was] looking for [was] the universe manifest in the individual.” Perhaps that was what drew him to the – it might seem an odd label to give to the founder of a major religious tradition – ‘non-sectarian’ Guru Nanak. His account in ‘Tagore and Sikhism’ is exhaustive for he considers all of the essays and poems that Rabindranath wrote whose subject matter was Sikhism, including those for the magazine Balak. We know that his father, Debendranath (who had a comprehensive knowledge of the Guru Granth Sahib), would take young Rabindranath to the Sri Harmandir Sahib, or the Golden Temple, every evening for prayers when they holidayed in Amritsar in 1873. The poet’s writings on Sikhism, of course, followed those daily trips which, evidently, left a profound impression on him.
Two images which came to mind when studying this chapter were a photograph of Rabindranath Tagore posing with the Sikh community of Shanghai, China outside their gurudwara in 1924 (or ‘29 but, very probably, ‘24) and another taken at the gurudwara on Second Avenue in Vancouver, Canada in April 1929 which features, apart from Tagore and local Sikhs, Reverend Charles Freer Andrews. Incidentally, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi stayed at the same Hotel Vancouver where Tagore was hosted in 1929 when they visited the city in November 1949. They also paid a visit to the very same gurudwara on Second Avenue.
Nehru sounded typically Tagorean when, in The Discovery of India, he wrote: “No, one may not lose faith in man. God we may deny, but what hope is there for us if we deny man and thus reduce everything to futility?” A few years before, after Europe hauled our lot into another world war ‘which twice in [his] lifetime ha[d] brought untold sorrow to mankind’, Rabindranath had had the following message to give: “As I look around I see the crumbling ruins of a proud civilisation [Europe] strewn like a vast heap of futility. And yet I shall not commit the grievous sin of losing faith in Man.” Dev records Tagore’s exasperation as registered in his Crisis in Civilisation from which the aforementioned lines are extracted.
In his discussion of Rabindranath Tagore’s poems, Dev makes the standard error of suggesting that the poet won the Nobel Prize in Literature for Gitanjali only. Michael Collins in Empire, Nationalism and the Postcolonial World alerts us to Harald Hjärne, Chairman of the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy the year Tagore was awarded the prize, stating that, in addition to Gitanjali, The Gardener and Glimpses of Bengal Life were the other works of the poet which had caught the attention of the committee. Also, Dev’s suggestion of the tacky quality of Tagore’s poems in translation leaves something of import unsaid. It was the English rather than the Bengali volume of Gitanjali, or Song Offerings, that first received thunderous applause and near-universal acclaim while many who pored over his poems at home declared that he wrote in ‘bad Bengali.’ Then there are things the author says that should not be said at all. Here I am thinking of Dev’s assertion that Tagore was “a Goethe in the Indian dress.”
“God we may deny…” expressed Jawaharlal Nehru. “Far better is atheism than religious infatuation. That darkens the mind and keeps the soul in a dungeon” was the sentiment Rabindranath Tagore carried with him to America from his visit to the Soviet Union. Tagore travelled widely visiting as many as, by my count, 33 countries. Dev is detailed in his documentation of Tagore’s travel writings. He lists and unpicks Java Jatrir Patra, or Letters of a Traveller to Java; Europe Prabasir Patra, or Letters of a Sojourner in Europe; Europe Jatrir Dairy, or Diary of a Traveller to Europe; Japan Jatri, or Traveller to Japan; Pashchim Jatrir Diary, or Diary of a Traveller to the West; Russiar Chithi, or Letters from Russia; and Parasye, or In Persia.
Dev reminds us of Tagore’s key observations in Java which chronicle Indonesia’s kinship with India and the cultural heritage of ‘Muslim’ Java and ‘Hindu’ Bali – both cut from the same cloth. In Persia, Rabindranath becomes certain that – to use Dev’s wording – “Europe needs [Asia] as much as Asia needs Europe.” At the same time, Dev is attentive to the imitative tendencies of an ‘emerging Asia.’ It was Tagore’s belief that a fallen Europe would be, in due course, redeemed by an ungrudging Asia. But, as Dev breaks it to us, Asia today is more disposed to be “the West’s double” than anything else.
Arko Dasgupta is with the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University.