To an otherwise frothy year of celebrations of the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore, filled mostly with mundane, beaten-track rituals, going even to the ludicrous extent of playing Tagore songs all day long, seven days a week, at major road crossings in Kolkata, Amit Chaudhuri’s book lends a welcome touch of seriousness. When the fanfare is finally over in May, his book will remain, along with The Essential Tagore, a new anthology published in the US and India, Rabindra Chitravali, a four-volume collection of Tagore paintings, most of them published for the first time, and The Last Harvest, an international travelling exhibition of selected Tagore originals, as one of only a few really worthy outcomes of an otherwise vapid endeavour.
One would also have liked to see on this achievement list an international literary colloquium, in London, perhaps, or New York, which could have been a platform to reintroduce Tagore to the West, where, as Chaudhuri notes, the poet’s spectacular rise to fame was followed by his “shocking” banishment from the serious literary establishment. Sadly, nobody thought about it. On Tagore, without meaning to be a defence of the poet against his Western critics, serves that purpose in a limited way but very well.
In more ways than one, Tagore’s destiny outside India has been shaped by circumstances beyond his control. His overwhelming image as a messiah from the Orient in a war-torn West, certainly one of the factors that led to his Nobel, faded in appeal as the immediate trauma of war passed and peace and reconstruction brought up different concerns and preoccupations. Besides, his repertory in English, until lately, remained quite limited, within the narrow, familiar, and rather monotonous circle of Gitanjali, The Gardener and The Crescent Moon. Tagore’s non-Bengali readers, thus, had no idea of the amazing diversity of his range and the deep modernity of his message. Then there’s the matter of Western unfamiliarity with Tagore’s imageries, symbolisms and abstractions, which, when translated, often come across to readers as naive, irritating, even laughable.
Chaudhuri, an acclaimed writer himself of novels, poems and essays in English, makes a valuable attempt to reconstruct Tagore for the modern reader and rescue him, so to say, from both the cynicism of his Western critics and the emotionalism of his local admirers. It’s an attempt to return Tagore to the company in which he pre-eminently belongs — not of sages and philosophers, nor of icons to be worshipped like divinity, but of poets who were his peers or preceded and followed him.
The book is actually a collection of essays that Chaudhuri wrote at various times for various publications. But these are linked in a way that they read like a single thesis, describing how the author progressed from his early jettisoning of Tagore (though not his songs) to his eventual discovery of a poet who stands above his metaphysics as a pre-eminent celebrant of life.
But, while Tagore, in Chaudhuri’s view, is “still the greatest poet in our age of life’s inherent and inexhaustible justification, which is plainest in his songs and poems”, what makes this “life-urge” different and deeper, he argues, is Tagore’s belief in the role of chance in governing the universe and “the joy of unforeseen arrival”. It’s an unsettling experience, the author says, but one through which we come to recognise “our deepest unspoken urges and beliefs incarnated in the most surprising and incomparable language”.
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In that sense, reading the poet today, Chaudhuri feels Tagore belongs only partially, though deeply, in the category of the metaphysical. Tagore’s great power, he believes, derives from what’s called his polemic, shunning abstraction in favour of a direct perception of “lived life” and sounding the note of constant arrival and return. As the author puts it, “This embrace of life, of chance, of play, makes Tagore stand out in the intellectual and moral ethos of late romanticism and modernism — an ethos with which Tagore shares several obsessions (time, memory, the moment, the nature of reality, poetic form), but whose metaphysics he constantly refutes.”
Chaudhuri surely presents an interesting perspective, one that marks Tagore out as a truly modern poet whose appeal remains alive to his primary readers even 70 years after his death. The question, however, is how to make the world, long used to Tagore’s seer and philosopher persona, aware of his abiding modernist side? As Chaudhuri himself admits, attempts in the last decade to give readers a sense of Tagore’s vast range have not succeeded in altering Tagore’s reputation outside Bengal or broaden his readership to what has long been his constituency in the West: “Indophiles, amateur religious enthusiasts, and admirers of Kahlil Gibran.”
The problem here is fundamental, because translating Tagore into English isn’t like translating, say, Jimenez into English. It’s like translating an entirely different culture for readers who have no affinity with it, and might require, besides creative translation, often harsh editing of text and expression. That’s difficult. Only Tagore himself could have been his best judge, interpreter and editor. For anyone else to take that liberty would be inappropriate and injudicious, no matter how good his or her English may be.
ON TAGORE
Reading the poet today
Amit Chaudhuri
Penguin/Viking; 178 pages; Rs 399