Rabindranath Tagore

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Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a Bengali poet, songwriter, painter, and educator who became, in 1913, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is read in the West chiefly through Gitanjali, the slim book of prose-poem translations he made of his own Bengali devotional songs; in Bengal he is something larger and harder to translate — the author of the language’s modern literature, of thousands of songs still sung, and of two national anthems.

He was born on 7 May 1861 into the Tagore family of Jorasanko in Calcutta, a household at the center of the Brahmo Samaj, the nineteenth-century reform movement that rejected image-worship and caste in favor of a single formless God, drawing on the Upanishads and on Unitarian contact with the West. The inheritance was direct and personal. His grandfather Dwarkanath was the merchant-prince who bankrolled the early movement; his father Debendranath took organizational custody of the Samaj after the death of its founder Ram Mohan Roy in 1833, established the Tattvabodhini Sabha in 1839, and distilled the movement’s confessional manual, the Bengali Brahmo Dharma, in 1850 — an anthology of Upanishadic verses arranged for worship without idol or rite. The boy grew up inside a family that had made the imageless God a daily discipline.

The Jorasanko house was also one of the great workshops of nineteenth-century Bengal: a household of painters, composers, scholars, and editors in which the Bengali language was being remade into a modern literature, and Rabindranath, the youngest of many children, was schooled less by institutions — he disliked them and left them early — than by the family’s restless creative ferment. He began publishing verse as a boy, edited journals, and by his thirties had set the terms of modern Bengali poetry, fiction, and song; the floating years on the river estates, where he administered the family’s lands and listened to the boatmen and the wandering singers, gave him the short stories and the lyrics that made him, in his own language, a founder rather than an ornament. The Western reception would later meet only the last and smallest fraction of this work, translated and transfigured. That inheritance shaped him without confining him. His religious sense was less a doctrine than a temper: a conviction, stated again and again in the songs, that the infinite is not reached by withdrawal from the world but found within it — in a river, a lamp, a beggar at the door, the ordinary face of another person. He distrusted asceticism and the renunciate’s turn away from life; the divine he addressed was a presence to be met in the midst of things, sometimes as lover, sometimes as the silent listener to whom the poems are sung.

The book the West read

The Gitanjali that made Tagore a global name was not the Bengali Gitanjali. In 1912, in England and in failing health, he made his own English prose renderings of some fifty-three of the original Bengali songs, padded out with poems drawn from other collections, and the painter William Rothenstein placed the manuscript before W. B. Yeats. Yeats was captivated; he wrote an introduction in the high devotional register of his own enthusiasm, the India Society issued a limited edition in November 1912, and Macmillan brought out the trade volume in March 1913 as Gitanjali (Song Offerings). Within a year the Swedish Academy had given Tagore the prize, citing the freshness and beauty of verse he had rendered into his own English — making him, at fifty-two, the first laureate from outside Europe. The book moved through translation after translation; Tagore became, for a Europe exhausted by its own machinery and soon by the war, the figure of an unworldly Eastern sage, robed and white-haired, who had brought word of an older serenity. The image was a translation effect. The English songs, smoothed into a uniform tone of yearning, gave little sense of the formal restlessness, the irony, and the sheer range of the Bengali poet behind them, and the introduction Yeats supplied fixed that misreading at the threshold of the work.

Kabir, and the poetry of the formless

His was a deliberately syncretic mind. He drew the devotional bhakti current of medieval India — surveyed under the bhakti movement — into modern verse, and in 1915 published, with the English mystic Evelyn Underhill, One Hundred Poems of Kabir, a rendering of the songs of Kabir — the fifteenth-century weaver-poet of the nirguna sant tradition who sang of a God beyond the divisions of Hindu and Muslim, neither in the temple nor in the mosque but within. The choice was characteristic: Kabir’s refusal of sectarian boundary matched Tagore’s own, and the collaboration set Indian devotional poetry beside the vocabulary of Western mysticism. Underhill’s introduction — the same hand that had introduced his father’s autobiography to English readers a year before — drew Kabir into a comparative typology that ran through Eckhart and the Persian Sufis, noting that the weaver “never adopted the life of the professional ascetic” and lived “from out of the heart of the common life.” The sentence might have described Tagore’s own program. The poems Tagore worked from were not the critical Kabir of the manuscript recensions — the Adi Granth, the Kabir-Granthavali, the Bijak, which diverge sharply in register and theology — but a set of Bengali oral transcripts collected by his Santiniketan colleague Kshitimohan Sen, and later scholarship has been blunt that the result is in large part Tagore’s own poetry, the abrasive and polemical Kabir planed down to a gentler music. The Kabir most Western readers have met is the Tagore-Underhill Kabir. The judgment cuts two ways: it marks the cost of the rendering and the reach of it, for the formless God who is neither here nor there but within was the one Tagore had been raised to address.

The Bauls and the religion of man

Closer to home, and deeper in him, were the Bauls of Bengal — the wandering singer-mystics who braid Vaishnava-Sahajiya, Sufi-Fakir, and yogic threads and who seek the divine, the moner manush or “Man of the Heart,” not in scripture or temple but inside the living body. Tagore met them as a young man managing the family estates at Shilaidaha and Kushtia, on the river country of the Padma, and their songs entered him as no doctrine had. He collected Baul and Lalan material, published it in the Calcutta monthly Prabasi, and kept a manuscript of Lalan’s songs that is preserved to this day at Santiniketan. The tune that carries Amar Shonar Bangla — the song he wrote in 1905, later the national anthem of Bangladesh — came from a Baul melody of the postal runner Gagan Harkara, “Where shall I find the Man of my Heart?” The Baul’s interior God, sought in the body and named without name, he folded into the idea he came to call the religion of man.

That idea received its fullest statement in the Hibbert Lectures he delivered at Manchester College, Oxford, in May 1930, published the following year as The Religion of Man. Its thesis was the divinity of the human and the humanity of the divine: not a God enthroned above the world but a presence realized in and between persons, an indwelling jivan devata, the life-deity, whose home is the human heart. An appendix gathered his account of the Baul singers; another preserved his conversation with Albert Einstein on the nature of reality, two men talking past and toward each other across the divide of physics and song. The lectures are the philosophical prose around a conviction the poems had already sung. They also mark the temptation built into the position: the gentle, humanist Baul of Tagore’s telling is partly Tagore’s own construction, the song’s lyrical surface lifted clear of the harder, body-centered discipline the Bauls guard beneath it.

Santiniketan and the world’s nest

Tagore traveled the globe — Europe, the Americas, Japan, China, the Soviet Union, Persia — lecturing and reading, a one-man embassy of an India he wanted understood as a partner in a shared human culture rather than a curiosity. The tours were not always met as he hoped: he went to Japan and to the United States preaching against the worship of the nation, and audiences who had come for the serene sage of Gitanjali were unsettled to find a man who told them the modern nation-state was a machine that ground the human spirit. He used the prize money and the lecture fees for a single durable project. At Santiniketan, the abode of peace his father had founded as a meditation retreat, he opened in 1901 an experimental school under the open air, where lessons were held beneath the trees and the arts were treated as the center of education rather than its decoration, and in 1921 expanded it into Visva-Bharati, a university whose name carried his program in a phrase: where the world makes its home in a single nest. He meant Indian learning joined to the world’s, not walled against it — Chinese and Persian and European studies set beside Sanskrit and Bengali, a deliberate refusal of the cultural isolation he saw nationalism producing on every side. The same instinct shaped his politics. Knighted in 1915, he renounced the knighthood in 1919 in protest at the massacre of unarmed civilians at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar — and in the lectures gathered as Nationalism (1917) he turned on the nation itself, the organized self-interest of the modern state, as a new idolatry more dangerous than the image-worship his ancestors had renounced. He would not exchange the imageless God for a flag.

The two Tagores

Scholarship has long noted the gap between the two Tagores. The English Gitanjali, praised by Yeats and read in Europe as the voice of an unworldly Eastern sage, flattens the range of the Bengali original, where the same poet wrote satire, fiction, and sharp political prose; the saintly image that won him fame abroad obscured a restless, modern, often combative artist at home. The Bengali Tagore was a novelist of Gora and Ghare Baire (The Home and the World), a satirist, an essayist who quarreled with orthodoxy of every kind, a composer of some two thousand songs that constitute a genre of their own, Rabindrasangit, and — from around his sixtieth year — a painter of strange, dark, modernist canvases that look nothing like the serene sage of the photographs. Amartya Sen, in his 1997 essay Tagore and His India, argued that the mystic of the Western reception was a fabrication of Yeats’s introduction and of a Europe hungry for Eastern wisdom, and that the actual Tagore was a rationalist, an internationalist, and a critic at odds with much of what was admired in his name; the standard biography by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson takes its title, The Myriad-Minded Man, from the same recognition. He grew impatient with the saintly image himself, and with the nationalism rising around him, which he criticized as another idol.

His placement among the Indian thinkers the West discovered in his generation is worth marking, because it tells against the flattening. He was not a systematic metaphysician in the manner of the neo-Vedanta that Vivekananda carried to Chicago, nor a doctrinal expositor of Vedanta and Tantra; his religion stayed a poet’s religion, untheorized on principle, suspicious of any creed that would harden the living encounter into a system. Nor was he a perennialist after the fashion of his younger contemporary Ananda Coomaraswamy, who read the world’s sacred arts as the visible script of one underlying wisdom; Tagore admired the particular — this river, this song, this face — and was wary of the universal solvent that dissolves them into a single truth. Where Coomaraswamy looked for the one doctrine beneath the many forms, Tagore stayed with the forms. He died at Jorasanko on 7 August 1941, in the house where he was born, with most of the Bengali corpus still untranslated and the saintly Western reputation intact — two posthumous Tagores walking out of the same study, the sage the prize had crowned and the maker his own language still reads.

What the songs hold to — across the translations and the misreadings — is a single insistence: that the infinite is addressed in the second person, and addressed close at hand. The poems keep returning the divine to the things Tagore lived among — the river, the lamp, the unanswered knock at the door — and do not look past them for it.

Texts and scholarship

The English Gitanjali (Song Offerings), with Yeats’s introduction, is the work that carried Tagore into world literature; the public-domain text is held at Project Gutenberg. His and Underhill’s One Hundred Poems of Kabir (Macmillan, 1915) — both authors died in 1941, and the work passed into the public domain in the United States and Europe in the years around 2011–2012 — is reproduced in the archive’s own Songs of Kabir. The Religion of Man (the Hibbert Lectures of 1930, published in 1931) remains the central statement of his mature theology; the family’s Brahmo foundation is documented in his father Debendranath’s Brahmo Dharma and Autobiography, the latter issued by Macmillan in 1914 with an introduction by Evelyn Underhill. On the reception gap, the landmark essay is Amartya Sen’s Tagore and His India (The New York Review of Books, 1997); the comprehensive modern life is Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson’s Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (Bloomsbury, 1995). His critique of the nation is set out in Nationalism (1917), an extract of which is freely available. The scholarship on Tagore’s Kabir — Charlotte Vaudeville, Linda Hess, David Lorenzen — and on the Brahmo substrate behind him — David Kopf, Brian Hatcher — situates his devotional sources in their own traditions rather than absorbing them into his.

→ In the library: Tagore & Underhill — Songs of Kabir (1915)

→ Related: Gnosis · Brahmo Samaj · Evelyn Underhill · Bhakti Movement · Kabir Panth · Sant Tradition Nirguna Bhakti · Bauls Of Bengal · Ananda Coomaraswamy · Neo Vedanta · Hindu Vedanta Tantra