The first Asian to be named for the Nobel Prize was India’s Rabindranath Tagore. A hundred years ago this month when the announcement was first made, the world held its breath. The search began for the true Tagore, which continues
Most people are unaware that Rabindranath Tagore was at the lowest point of his personal life in 1913. He was 52 and cut off from society. His wife and two of his three children had died over the previous decade — one more was to follow in 1918. Nirad C. Chaudhuri writes that his alienation began with a sense of being alone. He hardly had a readership with which there could be a two-way rapport.
Wrote Nirad in Thy hand great anarch: India 1921-1952 (london, 1987) “It has been the misfortune of every great Bengali writer to be above their readership. What they get is first a small number of admirers who worship him as a Guru without understanding him fully. Then as they acquire reputation by showing literary ability, they get detractors of a particularly malevolent type for they are normally other literary men. Behind these two restricted groups, stand the large literary public who read for amusement and also seek amusement in the rivalry of writers.”
In an essay which Rabindranath himself wrote in 1894, he articulated much the same: “The influence of ideas has not penetrated into the inner being of our countrymen, despite the fact that they read so much English literature. Indeed, they never had any hunger for these, no mental body has ever taken shape in their material body. Therefore, they have very little of that necessity which is called mental.”
Jealousy’s victim
Tagore was a victim of jealousy from his contemporaries. There was a reason for this. He was put off by the Bengali tendency to blindly worship talented writers. He shunned large groups. He pined for friendship with equals, not chelas.
Tagore’s aloofness angered contemporary intellectuals. They were particularly malignant because his fortuitous birth in one of the leading families of Bengal gave him social position, wealth and, of course, good looks. Nirad writes:
“A friend of mine told me that he once asked a Bengali critic of those days, who was by no means a writer of ordinary caliber why he and others like him had such a grievance against Tagore who had brought nothing but glory and honour to his people. He said: ‘Shall I tell you the plain truthIJ We thought he and we were playmates in the same team, but suddenly discovered that he was very much above us. That, we could not tolerate.’”
In 1998 I had done an article in India Today on the scurrilous tradition of the journalism that followed nineteenth century babu society. There were numerous tabloids devoted to nothing but lampooning people and spreading malicious stories. Few writers got attacked more than Rabindranath. His enemies called him a “vulgar poet” for writing about relationships which were unconventional. One even commented Rahindranath’s informal education was evident in the poor grammar which his writings manifested and that his poetry was all gabble.
But Rabindranath himself never descended to polemics. He wrote in 1893: “That even if I produced the better argument, people thought I had lost. In desperation I wrote an article on good taste, and realised soon enough that I had made a mistake, for it is not as easy to satirise a ridiculous thing as it is to do so over a really good thing. Simians can very easily make mocking grimaces at humans, but humans can never compete successfully. So, they put good taste to flight by showing their grinning teeth.”
Road to prize
Rabindranath was scheduled to travel to England for medical treatment in early 1912 but fell ill. So he went instead to his family’s zamindari estate by the river Padma and used the time to translate his poems into English. To most this seemed curious because Rabindranath treated the English language with disdain even though he had mastery over it. When he recovered and set sail for England he took these translations with him and worked on some more on the ship. On landing in England, he put these into a suitcase, which got lost in the london Underground, but thankfully was recovered later from the lost-and-found office.
The English painter, William Rothenstein, called on Tagore. Having heard of his popularity while in India earlier, Rothenstein borrowed the translated poems from Tagore and he was quite impressed. So he handed them over to William Butler Yeats, the famous poet. Yeats was simply enchanted.
Thus began the presentation of Rabindranath to the literary society of london. Ezra Pound, May Sinclair, Ernest Rhys, Alice Meynell, HW Nevinson, Charles Trevelyan (who had served earlier in India as a colonial administrator), AH Fox Strangways and others flocked to Yeat’s house in london to hear the works of a mystical poet from the East. It was Yeats, and not Tagore, who read them out.
After that Tagore met the leading literary figures of the day — George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, John Masefield and the rest. Since commercial publication was impossible, the India Society of london printed about 750 copies. Yeats and his friends took special pains to edit the translations without disturbing the natural flow of Tagore’s expressions.
It was Douglas Sturge Moore (1870-1944) who first recommended Rabindranath for the literary Nobel to the Swedish Academy. According to historical evidence with the Academy, they had in mind the French writer Emile Faguet in mind. But intervention by the Swedish poet Verner von Heidenstam swung the vote in Rabindranath’s favour.
It must be pointed out that Tagore was adjudged on the basis of the English translation of Gitanjali, and it so happened that only one writer in English had won the literary Nobel before him - the imperialist Rudyard Kipling. The translations which Tagore made in Gitanjalli were not remarkable for their form even if they were to be taken as plain English prose. Tagore’s Bengali poems are even today considered practically impossible to translate into English verse, but they could be presented as prose-poetry of the most complex form.
Nobel and after
In May 1913, when Tagore was towards the end of his long English sojourn, he hardly looked forward to resuming life in Bengal. He wrote to his neice (quoted by Nirad) “When I think that after my return I shall have to hear so much petty caviling from all sides, face so much opposition and animus, so much slander and humiliation, I feel I should like to let some more time pass so that I may remain aloof from that clamour as long as I can.”
He already knew that the Nobel was going to him, but he was reticent about it. When the news arrived of the decision in September the entire Indian intelligentsia erupted with celebration. This irritated the essentially private Rabindranath. He wrote to Rothenstein:
“The perfect whirlwind of public excitement it has given rise to is frightful. It is almost as bad as tying a tin can to a dog’s tail, making impossible for him to move without creating noise and collecting crowds all along. I am being smothered with telegrams and letters for the past few days and the people who never had any friendly feelings towards me nor ever read a line of my works is loudest in their protestation of joy.”
Reading these lines I was reminded of another “Nobel September”. In 1998, a day after Amartya Sen was named for the Economics Nobel, I remember a train for Shantiniketan with the purpose of doing an article for India Today on the Tagorean city which the famous economist called home. His mother lived there, in a large house filled with curios, books and framed photographs of the three families sired by his famous son. While boarding the train in Howrah station I bought the early morning train I bought a copy of an English-language paper which announced in banner headlines “Bengali and Indian wins Nobel”. It reflected the same poor taste which must have put off Rabindranath 65 years earlier.
The mass tendency of Bengali to bask in the reflected glory of a fellow Bengali without even the vaguest notion (leave alone understanding of) his works is a cultural flaw which still runs deep. As I watched the hordes that flocked to that little house in Shantiniketan that afternoon I wondered to myself how many had read Sen’s works. As for the glitterati which scrambled for his attention, their lifestyles violently opposed the theories of Sen. But that mattered to them was closeness to the ultimate hero.
Rabindranath was also the subject of a great crush. People groveled at his feet for a piece of his glory. He himself, in the words of biographer Andrew Biographer, who co-authored Rabindranath Tagore: the myriad minded man (london, 1995):
“Tagore felt there was a stupendous unreality about the homage that was plied on him. He was honoured for having been honoured by the Swedish Academy and not on his own account.”
Rabindranath could not go to Stockholm to receive the award. The ceremony was conducted at Calcutta’s famous Town Hall in December that year and the then British Viceroy, lord Hardinge, presented it to him.
Beyond the prize
Rabindranath Tagore continues to dominate the Bengali cultural scene 72 years after his death. He is the yardstick by which every creative artist, whether a poet, or a novelist, or a playright or song writer is judged. Every Bengali dreaming of being a poet or expressive person has got to hear in the course of his budding years, ‘May you be as great as Rabindranath’.
Honestly, it’s a paradigm which is unshakeable because it has not been erected by creators of literature but by misinformed bigots who link their national pride with the man. Pompous impresarios keep the fetish alive, mostly for commercial gain a wee bit of habit. For most Bengalis, Rabindranath’s greatest legacy is his melodious songs. They have no time for reading anything, leave alone Rabindranath’s prose and poetry which were composed in language largely redundant today.
The Mamata government has set up loudspeakers at every important crossing to ceaselessly play, from dawn till the last tramcar trundles into its yard after another profitless day, all the songs which make up life for Bengalis. When the practice started it was greeted with great mirth. With the self deprecation which marks Bengali humour, a leading journalist of the city told me “The greater the ignorance about Rabindranath and his works, his ideals and his vision, the louder the music gets.”