Rabindranath Tagore: an appreciation in his centenary year

There are three main aspects discernible in the life and activity of Rabindranath Tagore, who was born in 1861 and died in 1941. He was a great Bengali poet, song writer, and playwright. He played an important part on the world stage as an international prophet and humanist, a mediator between Asian and European cultures. And at Santiniketan he established a rural university which was the experimental workshop for an attempt to knit together individual and communal development in Indian education, an institution with its roots in the soil of India, yet open to European influences. As a writer he produced long metaphysical poems, plays for his students to act in, and his most lasting achievement, scores of songs which are still sung in Bengal. As an international prophet he most aptly warned the Japanese against ‘Christian civilisation’. A revolutionary in the field of education he propounded his four cardinal principles:

• (a) freedom;
• (b) creative self-expression through arts and crafts;
• (c) active communion with nature;
• (d) direct relationship with the life of the community.

These principles, stated baldly, have the distressing vagueness with which New Zealand educators are only too familiar. Tagore’s generalities (with the exception perhaps of ‘active communion with nature’) can be found in ourpage 473 teachers’ Schemes, our school syllabuses, and our training-college lectures on educational theory.

In New Zealand the escape into generalities occurs for different reasons: but not so far different that we cannot sympathise with Tagore. An abstract, optimistic manifesto is one tangent which habitually offers comfort to the mind of any Indian writer or educator faced with prodigious social problems and the uneasy juxtaposition of Asian and European cultures in his country. If we take Tagore’s generalities at their face value, we will under-rate his knowledge and achievement. I will try to shed some light on his special difficulties, as a writer and as a man, and show his work in education as an attempted solution.

Tagore’s international reputation as a poet reached its high-water mark after the First World War; since then it has fallen to a very low ebb. There are two main reasons for this reversal. The first reason is plain enough after the event. His English translations were aimed at the post-Edwardian audience which found the works of Rupert Brooke, or the younger Yeats, or Bridges’ Testament of Beauty, exactly to its taste. The English literary currency was inflated. The blame for an atmosphere of ‘patchouli and rose water’ can hardly be laid at Tagore’s door. His English Gitanjali was reprinted twenty times in the first two years. The poet was awarded the Nobel Prize as well as an English knighthood.

The second factor is a more delicate one. Tagore had doubts about the quality of his translations. In 1921 he wrote as follows to his friend and biographer, Edward Thompson:

I timidly avoid all difficulties, which has the effect of making my translations smooth and thin . . . . When I began this career of falsifying my own coins, I did it in play. Now I am becoming frightened of its enormity and am willing to make a confession of my misdeeds . . . .

Why, then, did he not recall his translations? His publishers were partly to blame. They urged the poet to produce more and more English books; and he yielded out of altruism – all his profits went to the university at Santiniketan, which just then badly needed money. The writer was sacrificed on the altar of education. Furthermore, though he had a fluent command of English, Bengali was his mother tongue. It is possible that the labour of reproducing the nuances of Bengali in English was too great for him. He tried to side-step the difficulty by reading through batches of the original poems, and then writing down as much as he could remember of them, in English, in lines of varying length. The difference between his translations and a literal rendering from the original Bengali is very great. These are the last lines of the famous patriotic hymn, ‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high’, as Tagore translated them in the English Gitanjali:

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Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever widening thought and action –

Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.

The original, rendered literally, is a quite different statement –

Strike, Father! Merciless, strike with your own hand!
Into that Heaven wake this Indian land.

Similarly, here is an excerpt from Tagore’s ‘Fruit Gathering’:

I know that at the dim end of some day the sun will bid me its last farewell. Shepherds will play their pipes beneath the banyan trees, and cattle graze on the slope by the river, while my days will pass into the dark.

The contrast with the original is even more striking –

I know this day will pass,
This day will pass –
That one day, some day,
The dim sun with tender smiling
Will look into my face
His last farewell.
Beside the road the flute will sound,
The herds will graze on the river bank,
The children will play in their courtyards,
The birds will sing on,
Yet this day will pass,
This day will pass.

The herds on the river bank, the flute player in the roadside dust, the children shouting in the courtyards, are images drawn direct from the life of Bengal. In Tagore’s own translation they lose their distinct character. One would not guess that the force of his Bengali poetry comes from his use of the simplest vernacular.

As well as being a poet, Tagore had some talent as a painter, though not the ability of his nephew Abanindranath Tagore. His paintings developed by free association from doodlings in his manuscript. In this he anticipated that reliance on the subconscious mind which is part of modern methods of art teaching. Tagore had a genuine loathing for academic education. Describing his own schooldays he recalls, ‘We had to sit inert, like dead specimens of some museum, while lessons were pelted at us from on high, like hailstones on flowers. . . .’

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He assumed, as we do, a natural harmony, receptivity and initiative in children which tends to be crushed by drudgery and formality. Rebelling against the educational practice of his day, both British and indigenous, he found, however, different solutions from ours. His thoughts turned to the forest schools of ancient India, where students sat at the feet of their gurus and were instructed in the open air. From a very small beginning with only five pupils he built up the university at Santiniketan, which combines primary, post-primary, and university education in one institution. Santiniketan has been variously interpreted as the centre of an Indian Renaissance, as an international seat of learning where Hindu, Islamic, and European cultures meet and jostle on an equal footing, and as the mainspring of a social and economic movement for the uplift of Indian village life. The word ‘uplift’ is not incongruous; it is the word that Indians use freely at the present day; and it expresses both the Puritanism and the powerful communal endeavour of modern India. In Tagore’s opinion, an important part of the work of an Indian university was to gather accurate information about village conditions and discover how to use that knowledge to solve village problems. Sriniketan, an institute of rural reconstruction, allied to Santiniketan, was founded in 1922.

In this effort to make closer contact with the villagers, Tagore had moved a long way from his early conditioning. He had grown up in luxury and seclusion as the fourteenth child and youngest son of wealthy Calcutta parents. At the sudden death of his grandfather, Prince Dwarkanath, he was obliged to take over management of the family estate. His son, Rabindranath Tagore, has written – ‘In looking after the estates, Father had constantly to tour through many districts of rural Bengal, since our properties were over Nadia, Pabna, Faridpur, Rajshahi, Bogra, and even Cuttack in Orissa. . . .’

Tagore enjoyed journeying by water; and many of his songs were composed to the stroke of the paddles of the boatmen. One gains a picture, not unfamiliar in India, of a cultured Brahmin landlord, acquainted with Western customs, belonging to the small wealthy minority in a nation of the poor. It is greatly to Tagore’s credit that he was able to step outside the barriers of caste and money and approach the villagers on equal terms. In this he was at one with Gandhi, though they disagreed strongly on the issue of Indian nationalism, where Tagore’s view was non-partisan. He distrusted ‘an abstraction which is ready to ignore living reality’.

The ‘living reality’ with which Tagore was acquainted included both the humanism of England and Europe and the vigorous ever-changing life of the Bengal province:

Bengal is full of rivers, and our people are truly fond of them . . . . Groups of women with their earthen pots poised gracefully on their hips, coming down the ghats: children swimming boisterously, splashing water at each other: fishermen with their innumerable ingenious devices engaged inpage 476 trapping fish: peasants loading their harvest on to boats till the brims almost touch the level of the water . . . .

The description was written by his son; but this is the reality which lies behind Tagore’s work, both literary and educational. His abstract postulates can be re-interpreted in the context of the life of Bengal:

• (a) A psychological freedom already existed in the impoverished village communities. Tagore tried to expand the classroom situation to include it.
• (b) Creative self-expression through arts and crafts had never entirely vanished from India, even under British rule. Potters and boat-builders and makers of sandals remained in the villages. Tagore tried to canalise an already existing creative potential, especially through the medium of the dance.
• (c) Though Tagore’s expression of it may be unduly abstract and tinged with sentimentality, the active communion of the villagers with their natural habitat was an observable fact.
• (d) The direct relationship which he wished to establish between his school and the surrounding communities required only some courage and initiative. He did not have to build a new house, only to use the fabrics that lay ready to his hand.

The methods he chose were in accord with Hindu tradition. Santiniketan is a modern ashram, a Hindu centre for study and religious devotion. There is a danger inherent in the Hindu pattern. The ashram cannot exist without gurus, instructors, men regarded as holy by others; and to Western eyes it may seem that holiness can be acquired too cheaply in India. A poet, a teacher, a political leader, any person with unusual talents, some integrity, and a message to convey, can put on the cloak of the guru and gain a following. Gandhi knew the danger of this to the guru, and always advised his disciples to regard him simply as a fellow-searcher for truth and justice. How far Tagore was aware of the same danger it is difficult to say. By founding Santiniketan he became, no doubt unwillingly, an Indian cultural leader, a guru, and qualified for the title that Gandhi gave him – more binding than an English knighthood – of ‘The Sentinel’.

Santiniketan today is a thriving cultural centre. Music, the fine arts, and dance-drama play key roles in the curriculum. There are lectures and discussions on the principal religions, including Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. In the library there is a unique collection of Sanskrit and Bengali manuscripts. The university is coeducational. The day begins before dawn with prayers and hymns. The schedule includes classespage 477 in the morning and the afternoons, followed by meetings and discussions in the evening. As a rule classes are held in the open, under the trees, in gardens dotted with sculpture.

Such an institution could perhaps only exist in India. The Hindu view of life has been compared to the banyan tree, which extends itself indefinitely by dropping new aerial roots – an all-inclusive idealism which can venerate Gandhi, Lenin, and Christ, equally, without contradiction. To Westerners this kind of spirituality can be irritating; for we proceed on the assumption that some ideas, some beliefs, are true and others false, though we may argue strenuously which are which. I am inclined to think that the most important asset of Santiniketan is not its internationalism, but the links which it has maintained with Indian village life. The dances and the paintings have sprung from the soil of Bengal. But whether the students at Santiniketan achieve that creative freedom which Tagore hoped for, must remain an open question. The present cast of Indian education is authoritarian. No doubt, as in New Zealand, it depends on the integrity and insight of individual teachers.

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