Article from guardian newspaper UK
Rabindranath Tagore was a global phenomenon, so why is he neglected?
Is his poetry any good? The answer for anyone who can't read Bengali must be: don't know. No translation is up to the job
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Rabindranath Tagore became the embodiment of how the west wanted to see the east. Photograph: Hulton Archive
Rabindranath Tagore was born 150 years ago today. This weekend
festivities and seminars are being held in his honour across the world.
In London, the BFI is hosting a season of films inspired by his work;
last night his fellow Bengali (and fellow Nobel laureate) Amartya Sen
gave a talk at the British Museum; a two-day conference at the
University of London will, among other things, examine his legacy in the
Netherlands, Poland and Germany.
I consulted two dictionaries of
quotations, the Oxford and Penguin, to check the most memorable lines of
this poet, novelist, essayist, song and short story writer. Not a
single entry. They skipped from Tacitus to Hippolyte Taine as if there
was nothing in Tagore's collected works (28 thick books, even with his
2,500 songs published separately) that ever had stuck in anyone's mind,
or was so pithily expressed that it deserved to; as if what had come out
of Tagore's pen was a kind of oriental ectoplasm, floating high above
our materialist western heads, and ungraspable. In fact, I could
remember one line clearly enough, and vaguely remember a whole stanza.
The first is how he described the Taj Mahal: like "a teardrop on the
face of eternity". The second is the inscription Wilfred Owen's mother
found in her dead son's pocketbook: "When I go from hence, let this be
my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable." But I owe this
knowledge to (a) a tourist guide in Agra, and (b) to a biography.
Reading Tagore himself had nothing to do with it.
True, writers
can't be ranked merely by their quotability, but Tagore's neglect is
extraordinary. No other language group reveres a writer as 250 million
Bengali-speakers do Tagore. Shakespeare and Dickens don't come into
the picture; the popularity of Burns in Scotland 100 years ago may be
his nearest equivalent in Britain. Every Bengali will know some Tagore,
even if they can't read or write and the words come from a popular song
or the national anthem (those of both India and Bangladesh use his
verse). The visitor to Bengal can easily find some comedy in the mass
adoration. Years ago, trying to penetrate a layer of Kolkata
bureaucracy, I spent hours listening to bureaucrats on the subject of
Tagore – "his translations into English are like embroidery seen from
the back," one said – while getting nowhere with the unrelated topic I
was meant to be investigating. Then again, love of literature can slide
into fetishism, and from there, obscenity. When Tagore died in 1941, the
huge crowd around his funeral cortege plucked hairs from his head. At
the cremation pyre, mourners burst through the cordon before the body
had been completely consumed by fire, searching for bones and keepsakes.
It's
hard to think of any other writer anywhere who has aroused this level
of fervour, but Tagore might still be seen as a purely local phenomenon,
a curiosity and irrelevance to the world beyond Bengal. Except that he
wasn't. In 1913 he won the Nobel prize for literature,
the first non-European to win a Nobel. The story is well known. In 1912
he sailed from India to England with a collection of English
translations – the 100 or so poems that became the anthology Gitanjali,
or "song offerings". He lost the manuscript on the London tube.
Famously, it was found in a left luggage office. Then – decisively – WB
Yeats met Tagore, read his poems and became his passionate advocate
(while pencilling in suggestions for improvements).
Events moved
at breathtaking speed. Tagore had arrived in London in June, he had his
anthology published by Macmillan with an introduction by Yeats in the
following March, and on 13 November 1913 he was awarded the Nobel.
Before he left Kolkata he knew one person in London, the painter William
Rothenstein. Two years later he was a global phenomenon. The notion
that literary prizes secure reputations and sell books is modern
publishing wisdom, but nothing compares with what the Nobel did for
Tagore a century ago. Gitanjali found a vast audience in its many
editions. In the tremulous months before the first world war, as well as
during the war, its spiritual message and reverence for the natural
world struck a chord. It contains the lines Owen wrote in his
pocketbook, and soon had translations in many other languages, including
French, by Andr Gide, and Russian, by Boris Pasternak.
The
success turned everyone's heads, including Tagore's. He became the most
prominent embodiment of how the west wanted to see the east – sagelike,
mystical, descending from some less developed but perhaps more innocent
civilisation; above all, exotic. He looked the part, with his white
robes and flowing beard and hair, and sometimes overplayed it. Of
course, the truth was more complicated. The Tagores were among Kolkata's
most influential families. They'd prospered in their role as middle men
to the East India Company, whose servants named them Tagore because it
was more easily pronounced than the Bengali title, Thakur. The west
wasn't strange to them. Rabindranath's grandfather, Dwarkanath, owned
steam tug companies and coal mines, became a favourite of Queen
Victoria's and died in England (his tombstone is in Kensal Green
cemetery). As for the poet himself, this was his third visit to London.
On his first, he'd heard the music hall songs and folk tunes that he
later incorporated into his distinctive musical genre, rabindra sangeet.
More
than anything, what Tagore stood for was a synthesis of east and west.
He admired the European intellect and felt betrayed when Britain's
conduct in India let down the ideal. His western enthusiasts, however,
saw what they wanted to see. First, he was an exotic fashion and then he
was not. "Damn Tagore," wrote Yeats in 1935, blaming the "sentimental
rubbish" of his later books for ruining his reputation. "An Indian has
written to ask what I think of Rabindrum [sic] Tagore," wrote Philip
Larkin to his friend Robert Conquest in 1956. "Feel like sending him a
telegram: 'f**k all. Larkin.'"
Is his poetry
any good? The answer for anyone who can't read Bengali must be: don't
know. No translation (according to Bengalis) lives up to the job, and at
their worst, they can read like In Memoriam notices: "Faith is the bird
that feels the light when the dawn is still dark" is among the better
lines. Translator William Radice thinks that Tagore's willingness to
tackle the big questions, heart on sleeve, has made him vulnerable to
"philistinism or contempt". That may be so – see Larkin – but perhaps
the time has come for us to forget Tagore was ever a poet, and think of
his more intelligible achievements. These are many. He was a fine
essayist; an educationist who founded a university; an opponent of the
terrorism that then plagued Bengal; a secularist amid religious
divisions; an agricultural improver and ecologist; a critical
nationalist. In his fiction,
he showed an understanding of women – their discontents and dilemmas in
a patriarchal society – that was ahead of its time. On his 150th
anniversary, we shouldn't resist two cheers, at least.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/07/rabindranath-tagore-why-was-he-neglected
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Economic times...
A tribute to Rabindranath Tagore: Nation to celebrate his 150th birth anniversary
May 6, 2011, 01.15am IST
"Creation is not repetition, or correspondence in every particular
between the object and its artistic presentation. The world of reality
is all around us. When I look at this phenomenon with my artist's eye,
things are revealed in a different light which I try and recapture in my
picture - call them realistic or not. There is a world of dreams and
fantasies which exists only in a man's imagination. If I can but depict
this in my pictures I can beat the Creator at His own game."
--
Rabindranath TagoreIn 1916 he was known as The King of the Dark Chamber, in a Macmillan
hardcover that had a frontispiece portrait by famed friend William
Rothenstein. Now nearly a century away on 8 May at the
NGMA in
Delhi, when the nation will celebrates Tagore's 150 birth centenary, curator
Ela Dutt
dips into the NGMA collection and comes up with a tribute to Tagore.
Art lovers can rejoice, for here are the three Tagores - Rabindranath,
Abanindranath and
Gagendranath.
The world that Rabindranath revealed in his works was one of
self-reflexive evolution, where the images themselves were in the
process of taking shape, as was his art. Gagendranath's works brim with
romance and Abanindranath's pice de rsistance is Meeting at the
Staircase.
Rabindranath Tagore's paintings were
displayed publicly for the first time in Paris in 1930, followed by an
exhibition in Calcutta in 1931. At about the same time he began to
create portraits. By about 1932 Tagore became interested in
self-portraits and it is believed that a number of works in this suite
date from about this period. As with many of his other self-portraits,
the Study in Face has a prophet-like serenity mixed with a sense of
inner anguish.
"People often ask me about the meaning
of my pictures. I remain silent even as my pictures are. It is for them
to express and not to explain," Rabindranath Tagore said once. His early
paintings were rendered in monochromatic schemes, followed by two-toned
and three-toned drawings. Other than a pen the artist used his fingers,
bits of cotton wool and rag to daub, smudge and rub the inks to create
color tones of great depth and intensity. In many of his head studies as
well as the Dancing Lady studies, there is an underlying sense of
mysticism that has a mesmeric appeal.
Rabindranath's
heads and figures executed in a variety of styles have elicited the most
interest. Restrained yet restless, suggestive, bizarre and haunting,
these portraits are considered to be among his most memorable works.
"The pensive ovoid face of a woman with large unwavering, soulful eyes
was perhaps his most obsessive theme. Exhibited first in 1930, endless
variations of the same mood-image continued to emerge throughout. The
earlier ones were delicately modelled and opalescent, while the later
examples were excessively dramatic with intensely lit forehead,
exaggerated nose-ridge, painted in strong colours, bodied forth from a
primal gloom." (Robinson, The Art of Rabindranath Tagore, Calcutta,
1989)
There are a number of images that recall the
linguistic ardour of Rabindranath. Interestingly, the poet and
playwright began painting late in life as he was nearing 70. In a letter
from 1928 to Rani Mahalanobis he says: "The most important item in the
bulletin of my daily news, is my painting. I am hopelessly entangled in
the spell that the lines have cast all around me... I have almost
managed to forget that there used to be a time when I wrote poetry.
The subject matter of a poem can be traced back to some dim thought in
the mind...while painting, the process adopted by me is quite the
reverse. First, there is the hint of a line, then the line becomes a
form...this creation of form is an endless wonder. If I were a finished
artist, I probably would have followed a preconceived idea in making a
picture...but it is far more exciting when the mind is seized by
something outside of it, some compulsive surprise element gradually
assuming an understandable form."
At the NGMA, this
cachet of charismatic works will evince both interest and intrigue.
Heads and landscapes abound in this collection. It is a flashback to the
yesteryears, when the pace of life flowed like a river. There are a few
landscapes, which seem a direct translation of the breathtaking
Calcutta sunset. Rabindranath's words are emblematic. "I believe that
the vision of paradise is to be seen in the sunlight and the green of
the earth, in the beauty of the human face and the wealth of human life,
even in objects that are seemingly insignificant and unprepossessing."
This curation by Ela Dutt signifies the moot point of the act of
creation. It also leaves something to savour in the common thread that
runs through it. In more ways than one it configures Anand
Coomaraswamy's intention: "The artist, like a child, invents his own
techniques as he goes along; nothing has been allowed to interfere with
zest. The means are always adequate to the end in view: this end is not
'Art' with a capital A, on the one hand - nor, on the other, a merely
pathological self-expression; not art intended to improve our minds, nor
to provide for the artist himself an 'escape'; but without ulterior
motives, truly innocent, like the creation of a universe."
What intrigues even more is the fact that Rabindranath had once written
an article entitled 'My Pictures' in which he wrote: "The Universe ...
talks in the voice of pictures and dance...In a picture the artist
creates the language of undoubted reality, and we are satisfied that we
see. It may not be the representation of a beautiful woman but that of a
commonplace donkey or of something that has no external credential of
truth in nature but only in its own inner artistic significance."
The paper works are a sight to behold. Rabindranath is known to have
scribbled lines of poetry on the reverse of a paper work too. Last year
at Sotheby's a work had the inscription which read: "I saw in front of
me the vast field/of work extending to the horizon,/therein lies my
great freedom./In the evening I came and sat on/my balcony, The cage has
been/broken. The split chain still clings/onto the bird's leg. Movement
will/make it jingle."
This show echoes the vitality of
freedom, the mood of inspiration and the idea of artistic control being
equal and complimentary in the measures of artistic ferment. It also
reaffirms the truth that the role of a museum is not merely to collect
and stock art like stacks, but to encourage, and develop the study of
the fine arts, so as to nurture the application of arts to practical
life, to advance the general knowledge of kindred subjects, to furnish
popular and intellectual instruction in the service of society. You
could walk around this elegant Circle of Three Tagores and mull over the
poet Laureate's words: "The night is black/ Kindle the lamp of love/
With thy life and devotion."
@red-Did the nation REALLY celebrate??or atleast remembered him?? :@
