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 into the Tagore family of Calcutta, leaders of the Brahmo Samaj, the nineteenth-century reform movement that rejected image-worship and caste in favour of a single formless God, drawing on the Upanishads and on Unitarian contact with the West. 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.

His was a deliberately syncretic mind. He drew the bhakti devotional current of medieval India into modern verse, and in 1915 published, with the English mystic Evelyn Underhill, a rendering of the songs of Kabir — the fifteenth-century weaver-poet who spoke of God beyond the divisions of Hindu and Muslim. 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. Tagore travelled widely, lectured on what he called the religion of man, and founded at Santiniketan a school and later a university meant to join Indian learning to the world’s.

Scholarship has long noted the gap between the two Tagores. The English Gitanjali, praised by W. B. 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. He grew impatient with that image himself, and with the nationalism rising around him, which he criticised as another idol. 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.

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

→ Related: Gnosis