![]() The book under review, an anthology of twenty-two articles
derived from a conference proceedings marking Rabindranath Tagore’s
sesquicentennial birth anniversary in 2011, contains a variety of perspectives,
quite apposite for a subject like the “myriad-minded” poet, but, by the same
token, it is also a mixed bag—some intellectually inspiring and challenging and
a few apparently hastily conceived and composed and hence marginal—albeit
nearly every one of them attempting to present an original view without, as can
be found in Kolkata’s book market, rehashing the clichéd paean for the Poet
Laureate of the World in mellifluous prose.
The first essay by Udaya Narayana Singh “Tagore Redrawing the Boundaries: In Other Words, Crossing the
Limits of Language,” and those under
Part III: “Discovering the Unknown” and Part IV: “Nation, ‘No-Nation’ and
Beyond Nationalism” are quite engaging and illuminating, especially the ones by
Amrit Sen and Ramakrishna Bhattacharya. In
his concise critique of Tagore’s concerns for silence and communications
through language Singh refers to the poet’s putative influence on Ludwig
Wittgenstein and his effort to effect a synthesis of “Oriental knowledge
system…and the Western thought” (10). As
he concludes, Rabindranath’s literary, philosophical, spiritual, educational,
and aesthetic repertoire furnish a rich reserve of wisdom and inspiration for
“the beginning of global modernity” (10). Sen’s close reading of Tagore’s
texts—prose as well as poetry—to explicate the latter’s understanding of travel
as pilgrimage [tῑrtha ] is a
model of “glossing” reminiscent of the scholarly enterprises by the literati of
the Italian Renaissance. Bhattacharya’s illuminating
demonstration of Tagore’s transition from the popularly acclaimed upholder of
Indian ascetic tradition and values to the harbinger of secular modernism
during his Persian travels and not just following his sojourn to the Soviet
Union is of signal importance for Tagore scholars and students. Subhoranjan
Dasgupta’s excellent critique of Tagore’s ideas of nationalism yet falls short of being critical. His reading of Tagore’s novel Gorā (1910) prompts him to conclude
that “there is no contradiction between condemnation of nationalism and [an]
ardent expression of love for one’s own country” (101). It is of course well
known that the poet’s patriotism attaches itself to people and their social
relationships rather than the territory. But Dasgupta does not interrogate
Tagore’s skewed understanding of nation state or state as such. Tagore overlooked the existence of state [rāştra] and rule of law [ḍaṇḍanῑti] in ancient India that constituted the
subject matter of Kauṭilya’s (c.
350-275 BCE) Arthaśāstra. Tagore further ignored the contribution of
European nation states to art, culture, economy, and social development. The
quintessential humanist in him felt outraged by the barbarism of his
contemporary Europe.[1]
Nevertheless, Dasgupta’s concluding suggestion for a “simultaneous reading of
[Rabindranath’s] texts Nationalism and
Gorā” with a view to appreciating the “adequate point counterpoint” in
his nationalism-patriotism conundrum is judiciously made. By the same token, Indra Nath
Choudhuri’s painstaking analysis of Tagore’s concept of universal nationalism
or universal humanism compels attention even when it does not, indeed cannot, command
wholesale endorsement. Unfortunately, there are serious lapses in Choudhuri’s
otherwise densely referenced essay: lamentable neglect of a number of
insightful works on Tagore’s universalism in Bengali as well as in English and
his erratic referencing. For example, Jean Paul Sartre, Samuel Huntington,
Thomas Mann, Diogenes (not Diagenes, as printed), Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques
Derrida, or Edmund Husserl are named, and even some of them briefly discussed,
in the article (but not listed in the Bibliography), though with startling results. Diogenes, who is credited with coining the
term cosmopolites, is mentioned
having “said in 421 BC [italics mine], ‘I am a citizen of the world’” (107) nearly
a decade before he is supposed to have been born (either 412 or 404 BC). Then, George Steiner’s quotes from his Errata: An Examined Life are referenced
as Claude Steiner and Paul Perry, Achieving
Emotional Literacy (124). Next, his
use of the phrase vasudhaiva kuṭamvakaṁ
as Vedic wisdom is confusing at best.
It occurs in the Mahopanişad attached
to the Sāmaveda (sometimes
referenced as attached to the Atharvaveda,
which is likely a confusion at best or mistake at worst), but Choudhuri’s
nebulous “Vedic discourse” is somewhat misleading. Surprisingly, Choudhuri never bothers to examine the spiritual
font of Tagore’s concept of Biśvajῑban.[2]
Yet I must consider Choudhuri’s work as a scholarly critique by an insider (“emic” cf. Thomas Newland et al., eds. Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate, Sage Publications,
1990). Ana Jelnikar argues persuasively that Tagore’s idea of universalism achieves
two objectives: “deconstruct the dominant binary logic of modernities so as to
reposition India and the individual in a global framework” (292) and transform
the “the historical fact of colonial rule and its injustices” and use the
latter “creatively to the long-term advantage of the Indian people” (291). This is what Jelnikar labels, a la Ernesto Laclau, “the new
universal,” which she discovers in Rabindranath’s enigmatic poem Sonār Tarῑ by means of her insightful
hermeneutics (301). Complementing
this essay, there is an interesting perspective on Tagore’s being “at home in
the world” through place/space dynamics provided by Debarati Bandyopadhyay’s intelligently
and imaginatively argued and crafted contribution “Tagore, Environment and
Ecology: A Place-Space Dynamics” (305-16).
Amartya Mukhopadhyay’s essay, despite an impressive
array of citations from (mostly) European and (a few) Asian scholars, arrives at
a simple, albeit commonsensical, conclusion that Tagore’s praise for “’the
differences of arrangements in Japanese and British ships,’ so that in the
former ‘there was a space for the flow of humanity through even the rules of
work’” as “a celebration of ‘bhinnatā’
or cultural pluralism, and the key to Tagore’s search for the ’emic’ [sic]
nation” (149) is pretty obscure, even obfuscating. Then, “Nation of the
West” meaning Pax Britannica [borrowed
from Edward Gibbon’s Pax Romana
designating the period of relative calm and peace in the Mediterranean world
during the reign of the first emperor Caesar Augustus], is not quite meaningful
(129). Mukhopadhyay’s another perplexing expression verging on the oxymoron is
“Tagore’s profoundly anti-national nationalism” (148). The anthology’s four carefully argued
and written chapters include Sudeshna Chakravarti’s “Rabindranath and the
Bengal Partition of 1905: Community, Class and Gender,” Sanjukta Dasgupta’s “Bengali at Home, English
in the World,” Uma Dasgupta’s “Rabindranath’s Experiments with Education,
Community and Nation at His Santiniketan Institutions,” and Tutun Mukherjee’s
“Rabindranath Tagore and the Uncanny.” Chakravarti provides an analysis of Ghare Baire and its historical setting
the Svadeśῑ movement a la the Partition of Bengal free from
theories—postcolonial, postmodern, or subaltern. Her narrative flows easily in her flawless
prose that is at once clear, cogent, and concise. Dasgupta
demonstrates Tagore’s agency in translating his work and his disarming
admission (a definitive mark of his personal integrity and sincerity) to his
own limitations in this respect in his letter to James Cousins (176-77). Nevertheless, Tagore’s command of the
language of the metropolitan master is gloriously manifest in his celebrated
missive to Lord Chelmsford, Viceroy of India, conveying a dignified surrender
of his “foreign shine”[3]
with what Dasgupta wittily interjects, “a Parthian shot” at the end (182). Uma Dasgupta’s piece is based partly on her
well-known earlier studies (see, e.g., the review of three of her books by Ana Jelnikar in Parabaas). and thus carries all the qualities and insights of
her prodigious research. However, she has not taken into consideration, with
the sole exception of Michael Collins’s fine work (284-85), a number of studies
on the theme of Tagore’s ideas of education too numerous to mention here. Apart from the format of her paper still
retaining its “conference presentation” mode (not her fault), it is insightful
and helpful for an appreciation of Tagore’s ideas of universalism that
undergirds his concept of viśvabhāratῑ.
Mukherjee expertly delineates the European
Enlightenment’s tension between scientific-utilitarian reason and Romantic
“unreason” and finds similar dialectics being played out in colonial Bengal
that served as springboard for Tagore’s short stories of the uncanny. Her concluding remarks on Tagore’s use of
language to describe the fantastic elucidate the significance of his oeuvre of this genre: “Tagore very deliberately
builds a narrative and rhetorical structure whose logical coherence is
continuously dismantled by ambiguous situations, equivocal utterances and
manifestation of the subliminal, indicating the limits of ordinary language
which tries to structure an extraordinary, incomparable and ungraspable
experience” (64). Similarly, Martin Kämpchen’s
“Rabindranath Tagore and Germany: An Overview” (15-24), Imre Bangha’s “Tagore’s
Reception and His Translations in Hungary” (25-37), and Blanka Knotková-Čapková’s
“Studying Rabindranath Thakur within the Czech Bengali Studies” (215-29) are
informative and helpful in appreciating Rabindranath’s connection with and
influence on the Central and East Central Europeans. It is amusing, albeit aggravating, to note
how an intellectual like Thomas Mann could be reminded of a “fine old English
lady” (23)—not very complimentary for the elderly English women either—upon
beholding the tall Indian bard sporting a flowing white beard of a Biblical
Methuselah or the God of Michelangelo’s murals in the Sistine Chapel. It is also revealing to note how in Eastern
Europe this “fine old English lady” became “the living representative of the
ancient Orient…an old man, a symbol of timeless East” (33). Knotková-Čapkova’s magisterial feminist
interpretation of Rabindranath’s poem “Vairāgya” in Caitālῑ (1896) is
not only a model of exercise in linguistics (219-25) but also an unmistakable
legacy of the pioneering Tagore scholar Professor Vincenc Lesný, who was a
personal friend of Tagore. However, as
we learn from Moon Moon Mazumdar’s “Tagore and Shillong: Between the Lines”
(230-50), the poet did not have much of an enthusiastic reception nearer home,
Assam, where he experienced some embarrassment with respect to his putative
Assamese origin, though Mazumdar’s desultory details fail to provide a cogent,
clear, and analytical narrative. The editors’ reminder in the
concluding paragraph of the Introduction (xix) helps readers to figure out the
causes for the truncated size of a few entries in the collection such as those
by Reba Som, Chinmoy Guha, and Malashri
Lal. Som, arguably a distinguished specialist in Rabῑndrasaṅgῑt, provides what may be considered a
preview or summary of her much acclaimed work Rabindranath Tagore: The Singer and His Song (2009) (reviewed by Bhaswati Ghosh in Parabaas), but as a
discreet scholarly article (262-75) it falls short of the genre. This is not to debunk or dismiss her essay (minus
the eight colored pictures that add little that is meaningful except appearing
as “padding”) but to underscore its inadequacy as a piece of discourse
comparable to other contributions that are fuller and richer in their contents
and contentions. Guha’s bane is, unfortunately, the
paucity of evidence for what he wishes to posit as “the hysterically beautiful”
(whatever that means) Countess Anna’s erotic overture to Tagore compared to
Victoria Ocampo’s a few years earlier (39).
The problem is the author furnishes virtually nothing as evidence except
de Noailles’s address to Tagore on the brochure describing his paintings
exhibited at Galerie Pigalle, Paris in May 1930. Apparently she writes in the concluding
section of this address to Tagore: “I love you and have more admiration for
you.” But far from what Guha surmises as her erotic attraction for
Rabindranath, this appears to be a purposive compensatory compliment, as it
were, after she had inflicted some sharp and patently unsavory reaction at his
paintings: “Why has Tagore, the great mystic, suddenly without knowing, set at
liberty that which in him scoffs, banters and perhaps despises?” She also adds that the poet’s “silent feet,
on the gravel,” made her think of her “imaginary” sins and of his “sublime
innocence.” The latent message of these
sentences seems to underscore the “fact” that her sins were imaginary, that is, not real, but his “innocence” (sounds like “naiveté”)
was (41)! Guha cites a stanza from Anna’s
poem “Hymns for Persephone” (without attribution) followed by five stanzas from
another piece “Different Kinds of Paradise,” insinuating a connection with
Tagore. After these enigmatic citations
he writes “Anna’s bag was full with greats”—as if de Noailles was some kind of
a body snatcher or body catcher somewhat akin to a cheledharā (42). And
finally Guha quotes a line from still another poem of Anna’s “in silence we
recline, not understanding why…” and claims “That’s what she admitted to Tagore,”
and concludes that “Her personal homage of love has remained immortal in those
illuminating words on Tagore’s paintings” (43).
Actually this line occurs in her poem “Aftermath” and its subject matter
is lovemaking in which two lovers are experiencing orgasmic little death or
jouissance. It will take a quantum leap
of imagination to think of the pretty Anna fantasizing the old bearded Bengali bard
making love to her and thereafter lying with her “in silence,” thereby lighting
up the Countess’s soul (43). As for the soul,
Anna does not seem to care for it much as per her poem “The Soul and the Body”: “The soul was first conceived in
order to demean/the body, the domain of dream and reasoning…./For when it
stops, it marks the close of everything./....For I declare…that once our blood
is cold it is the end of all.”[4]
It would have been much better and safer
for the author to have attempted an account of Tagore’s experience in France of
which the encounter with the Countess is really no more than a footnote. It is also a pity that Professor Guha, a
distinguished prize-winning Gallic expert, does not choose to use the insights
of his senior Bengali counterpart Prithwindra Mukherjee, scholar, author and prize-winning
translator.[5] Malashri Lal’s “Tagore and the ‘Feminine’:
Impossible Loves and Possible Ideals,” apart from its incomprehensible subtitle,
has also the word feminine in quotes, apparently to no purpose. Lal’s prose calls for both editorial and
copy-editorial attention of which it was unfortunately deprived. In page 207, the author uses what is supposed
to be a Latin phrase “in Media Res”
(207). Actually the entire phrase should
be italicized including “in.” However, Lal transforms “medias” into “Media” whereas
the expression should be “in medias res.” Kadambari the natun bouṭhān becomes mejobou [Jnanadanandini, wife of Rabindranath’s mejda’’ Satyendranath] (212). The Rumanian-French Comtesse [Countess] Anna
de Noailles is transformed into “Duchess” Anna de Noailles (210). The prose of this piece shows warps and
colloquialisms with remarkable nonchalance such as “The sheaf of letters
exchanged between Rabindranath and Victoria would be a Freudian psychologist’s
delight but I am not quite into that
arena” (208; emphasis mine) or “The chair took on surreal and amorous
identities on canvas, Tagore occasionally showing shadowy human figures of
unidentified gender resting on it. Over
to Freudian psychologists again!” (211; emphasis mine). Probal
Dasgupta’s impassioned rhetoric communicating a complicated and wordy argument
for rescuing Tagore’s Naibedya collection
of poems from our “critical and commentarial neglect because we have allowed
certain irresolutions to hold us hostage” (the hostage taker here is that
veritable terrorist “nebulous awareness”) misses out on the simple basics. The meaning of naibedya, a tatsama Bengali word, means “offerings” or “aṅjali” or “arghya”—no doubt often a holy food or worshipful offerings for the
gods—but not “consecration” which implies a process of sacralization. Tagore’s naibedya
is not wafer and wine, the sacramental host of the Christian Mass (186)
possessing a salvific effect for the worshiper. Second, the author alleges a
non-existent (or nebulous) lack of scholarly interest for Tagore’s oeuvre of this category (Dasgupta’s “cycle”).
But what does he do to fill this “lamentable” gap? He emphasizes what he calls
“the theme of seeing a specific way of seeing” and interprets the line of poem
16 “bhakta kariche prabhur caraṇé/
jῑbansamarpan/Ore dῑn, tui joḍkaré/ kar tāhā daraśan””
[O the wretched one, fold your hands (in reverence) and behold the devotee
dedicate himself (his life) at the Lord’s feet] as “the ideal devotee’s
self-dedication (that) involves beholding his lord with a pure gaze” (188)]. In fact Dasgupta makes a great deal of gaze,
“gazing at the pure gaze” and then brings in Grice’s (that is, Paul Grice,
presumably) concept of “hermeneutic circle,” but Dasgupta neither supplies the full name of Grice nor references his
work (why not Martin Heidegger?) (189). Amidst a string of quotations from
the Naibedya, the author concludes
that “the fundamental theological problem Tagore sets out to solve in the book
of consecration is that of reconciling his own democratic, anti-authoritarian
convictions with the ‘fear of God’ motif he inherits from his dualist father”
(197). The author does not provide any
clue to Maharşi Debendranath’s theology of fear or to his so-called
“dualism”. He does not use his Ātmacarit nor his illustrious son’s
Chelebelā, Ātmaparicay, or Jῑbansmṛti. It
is also not clear why foreign philosophers or scholars not connected with
Tagore or his work should be invoked to understand the beauty or insights of Tagore’s
mystical musings. Did the
internationally educated distinguished linguist author prepare his presentation
for European, especially German, audience? (vide
his citing of passages in German after having referenced them in English
translation). In any case, the puzzling features of his presentation as printed
are three: it remains to be transformed
into an impersonal discourse from the lecture format where the speaker begins
with a rhetorical remark to the audience or puts a rhetorical question to
them. Second, the author’s sentences and
vocabulary are somewhat stilted. For example, he uses “nebulous” for the more
direct and simple “vague,” “reticence” for “unwillingness” or “deliberate
silence”, or “indifference,” “intervention” (not clear what the author is
“intervening” in and what is this action), “civilian space” (why this
unnecessary term of the barrack?), “thinking person” (suspiciously implying “homo sapiens” but apparently indicating “intellectuals” or “intelligentsia”) et cetera. Third and most important, the
author shows absolutely no sensitivity toward the basic minimum rules of
transliteration from Bengali or toward honoring the integrity of Bengali
orthography. It appears his
transliteration is not accidental but deliberate, in which case, he (or the
editors) ought to have provided a key in the Notes. Let me cite some examples: nirx [nῑḍ ], sangshay txutxiyaa [saṅgśay ṭuṭiyā], nitto [nitya],
monushshomarjaadaagarbo [manuşyamaryādāgarba],
shomaan [samān], khetre [kşetré], shangshaare more
raakhiaacho [saṁsāré moré rākhiācha]. The author seems to be impervious to the
differences between, hrasva-i and dῑrgha-ῑ, a (always replaced with
‘o’ understandably in consonance with the phonetics but totally violating the
orthography) and ā (long a), mūrdhanya-ṇa
(cerebral) and dantya-na (dental), mūrdhanya-şa (sibilant), dantya-sa (dental), and tālabya-śa (palatal) and
several others. His transliteration is
sure to appear as garbled at best and gibberish at worst to the uninitiated and
the unwary. However, in fairness to him,
it must be conceded that the fault lies really with the editors, who, when preparing
the manuscript for the press, looked the other way, or may not have bothered to
look at all. Amita Dutt Mookerjee’s excellent
but sadly truncated analysis of Tagore’s song and dance needed more
documentation of what and how he borrowed from Western dance style; we of
course know about the influence of European Romanticism on his lyrics and
poetry. She only discusses Tagore’s
borrowings from the classical Kathak dance
while making a passing reference to Maṇipurῑ
style. But these two instances
demonstrate Tagore’s use of dance style from outside of Bengal, albeit within
his own country, far from the West.
Shoma Chatterji’s paper is a laundry list of Tagore songs in films having
no thesis or argument. She, however, interjects a non sequitur paragraph on “Tagore, Mozart and Charulata.” (259-60). It should also be noted, pace Ms. Chatterji (253), that Tagore delivered the Hibbert
Lectures (not Hebart Lecture) at Oxford (not London) in 1930 (not 1933). This reviewer has a few suggestions
for the next edition, if any. The editors must formulate and follow rigorously a
uniform referencing style for all entries and provide a theoretical discussion
on the phrase “at home in the world” in the Introduction. Timothy Brennan’s fine monograph At Home in the World published by
Harvard University Press (1997) should make a helpful start for such a
discussion, which is necessary for avoiding a possible confusion with Tagore’s well-known
novel Home and the World (Gharé Bāiré). Also, scholars in
India ought to recognize and reckon with works on similar theme done by their
counterparts in India as well as in the diaspora. I thus find the puzzling
absence, inter alia, of Swarupa
Gupta’s “Religious Rendezvous: Encounters between Bengali Travellers and South
East Asians, c. 1916-1927” (Encounters,
2011) and Sugata Bose’s article in The
Indian Express (2010), “Rabindranath Tagore: At Home in the World,” or his
earlier acclaimed study A Hundred
Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Harvard University
Press, 2006) together with its review by Rajat K. Ray in Economic and Political Weekly ( 2006). [1] Narasingha
P. Sil, “Rabindranath Tagore’s Nationalist Thought: A Retrospect” in Mohammad
A. Quayum, ed., The Poet and His World:
Critical Essays on Rabindranath Tagore (New Delhi: Orient Blackburn, 2011),
168-84, here at 175-76. [2] See, especially, Niharranjan Ray, “Rabῑndranāth o Biśvajῑban” in idem, Bhāratῑya Aitiihya o Rabῑndranāth, 2vols. (Kolkata: Dey’s Publishing, 2004), II: 31-59. For an abridged English translation see Narasingha P. Sil, “Rabindranath and World-Life,” Parabaas, Webzine for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Bengal, New Jersey (August 2007) (accessed July 10, 2013). See also Arabinda Poddar, Rabῑndra Mānas (1957. Second ed. Kolkata: Pratyay, 1960) for an erudite and elegant critique of Tagore’s reliance on Upanişadic insights and ultramundane spiritual and aesthetic realization. [3] I borrow this phrase from Somjit Dutt, “A Foreign Shine and Assumed Gestures: The Ersatz Tagore of the West,” (Parabaas, July 2001; accessed July 10, 2013). [4] Anna de Noailles’s Blog:Eight Poems trans. by Sebastian Hayes. http://annadenoailles.com/category/philosophy (accessed July 7, 2013). [5] See his Vishvera Chokhe Rabindranath: Tributes to the Poet (Kolkata: Rupa & Co., 1991). This is the revised and enlarged version of his Farasider Chokhe Rabindranath (Kolkata: Rupa & Co., 1991). Published in Parabaas May, 2014
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