Uma Das Gupta :
There were various stages in the development of Rabindranath’s humanism. His deepening experience in relating to man and nature gave him his two most persistent drives in life : to bring joy and creativity and alternative values for a sustainable future to urban education, and to bring scientific education and self-reliance to the rural people. It was in Santiniketan in rural southern Bengal that he first began to integrate those strands. Santiniketan was discovered by his father as a serene spot during the Maharshi’s travels in that region. In 1861 Maharshi Debendranath bought some land from his friend the Sinhas of Raipur and built a garden house on it in 1863. He named the house ‘Santiniketan’, an abode of peace. In 1887 he established a Trust Deed for Santiniketan which provided for a hall of prayer, an annual village fair and a school.
Rabindranath founded Santiniketan school in 1901. It was a dynamic experiment to build up a living connection between city and village. The students who came to the Santiniketan school were from urban families while the school itself was surrounded by villages. Rabindranath felt for an ignorant and helpless humanity in rural East Bengal and it became an inspiration and a spiritual force in serving his country by creating a holistic education at the most basic level.
He was greatly concerned with the cultural domination that was increasingly becoming a divisive force between city and village in early modern India. The newly emerging professional middle class of Indian society were taking their leave of their village homes and settling in the city. Caste hierarchy was being strengthened by the hegemony of a colonial English education. To Rabindranath that was a more urgent problem than the lack of political freedom. He railed against the injustice of the common man’s subservience to the prevailing social system and the indifference of the Indian National Congress in this regard. He wrote :
“Whenever I realize the hypnotic hold which this gigantic system of cold-blooded repression has taken on the minds of our people whose social body it has so completely entwined in its endless coils that the free expression of manhood even under the direst necessity has become almost an impossibility. The only remedy that suggests itself to me and which even at the risk of uttering a truism I cannot but repeat, is – to educate them out of their trance.
Rabindranath did not take the route of accusing foreign rule for our social malaise even though he blamed the colonial English education for enhancing the malaise. He argued that foreign rule was a symptom and not a cause. He even hoped that the new ideas of humanism from the West would rejuvenate us to look inwards and reverse the process by examining the radical and reform movements in our own history. At Santiniketan the anniversaries of great men of thought and action, who belonged to India’s multiple cultures, and to the world, were celebrated through prayer and discourses. Anniversaries of the Buddha, the Christ, of Prophet Mohammad, of Chaitanya and Rammohan Roy were built into the school calendar. He believed that such an education would enable us to find ‘our own true place in the world’.
Rabindranath turned his full attention to the Santiniketan school after withdrawing from the Swadeshi Movement of 1904-1905 which he had joined with great patriotic fervour. Till then he held his faith in the traditional Hindu Samaj but came in for a rude shock when he realized that, true to orthodoxy, the Hindu Samaj would not take the Muslims into its fold. He gave powerful expression to his disillusionment in the novel Gora while writing and serializing it during the years 1907-1909.
The novel’s hero ‘Gora’ was an orphan boy of Irish parents brought up by a Brahmin family as their own child. The boy grew up to be a fiercely patriotic young man and a defender of orthodox Hinduism. But when Gora finally discovered his foreign origins he also realised he would be rejected by orthodox Hindu society where he had invested his trust and his social commitment. That became his wake up call about the need to be an Indian without caste or creed. At the end of the novel we have ‘Gora’ saying :
Today I am really an Indian! In me there is no longer any opposition between Hindu, Musalman, and Christian. Today every caste is my caste, the food of all is my food !
Rabindranath hit out against national chauvinism with that novel. Amid growing perplexities of the social, educational and political problems in his times, his mind had been turning to the past to discover in the history of India a central ideal for regulating our life and work. He expressed his inclusive humanism in a song with these words :
Day and night, thy voice goes out from land to land,
Calling Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains
Round thy throne
And Parsees, Musalmans and Christians.
Offerings are brought to thy shrine by
East and the West
to be woven in a garland of love.
Thou bringest the hearts of all peoples
Into the harmony of one life,
Thou Dispenser of India’s destiny,
Victory, Victory, Victory to thee.
In 1918 Rabindranath began preparations to add ‘A Centre of Indian Culture’ to the Santiniketan school for the coordinated study of the various religious cultures that flowed into India’s history: Vedic, Puranic, Buddhist, Jain, Islamic, Sikh, Zoroastrian and Christian. Arrangements were made to study these contributions through the disciplines of philosophy, literature, art, music and dance. The name Visva-Bharati dates from that time and also its Sanskrit motto, yatra visvam bhavati eka nidam, taken from a Vedic text meaning ‘the-world-in-one-nest’. Officially, Visva-Bharati international university was inaugurated at Santiniketan in 1921.
He kept the model simple even though an ‘international’ university is a complex idea. He explained that he used the word for the sake of convenience. He wrote what was uppermost in his mind in the following words.
“I have taken courage to invite Europe to the fields of Bolpur. There will be a meeting of truths here.
I feel confident that they shall accept our invitation. What we have to ensure is that their hearts are not starved when they are with us”.
The idea of Visva-Bharati was to create a space for the meeting of the races through scholarly exchange and study of each other’s histories and cultures without opposing interests. It was to be a ‘pilgrimage’ to ‘behold the universe’ away from ‘narrow domestic walls’. It was hoped that these alternative values would help to build a new Indian personality free from the conflict of communities and capable of appreciating the many currents of the Indian cultural tradition along with the humanistic and liberal ideals of the West. The new Indian personality would belong neither to the East nor to the West, but be a reconciler of both. Rabindranath argued that Indians must understand themselves in this connected way to realize the nation’s unity within its diversity. He wrote :
“The India of modern days comprised not only the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain, whose common culture had its origin in India itself, but also the Mohammadan with his wonderful religious democracy of semitic origin and the Christian with his political democracy nurtured in Europe. There was also in India the Parsi from whom we had parted long ago outside the boundaries of India but who had come back to us again…
If Santiniketan was to become truly the guest house of India it had to be so comprehensive as to find room for each and all of these in its ripest scholarship …The treasures which these different religious cultures contained should be brought into practical use in relation to the modern world, not held apart and miserly hoarded.”
The final experiments at Visva-Bharati took form in 1922 with the establishment of an Institute of rural reconstruction named Sriniketan, abode of prosperity. Rabindranath insisted from the outset that an Indian education would be incomplete without a relationship with the village as the majority of Indians lived in the villages, and without inculcating a moral responsibility for their survival among the educated classes in India. The villages were kept out of the mainstream of Indian life and cut off from the advancement of knowledge where they needed it most. One such need was in the application of scientific agriculture which became one of Visva-Bharati’s goals for the Sriniketan programme of rural reconstruction.
Rabindranath argued forcefully that the poverty problem was not the most important, the problem of unhappiness was. Men can make ruthless use of wealth for the production and collection of things, he added, but happiness was beyond all competition and had to be the ultimate goal. He called upon everyone to collaborate in this effort, scholars and poets and musicians and artists. He warned that the urban populace would otherwise live like parasites, sucking life from the rural people and giving back nothing to them. Such exploitation, he emphasied, would gradually exhaust the ‘soil of life’ which needed constant replenishing through the cycle of receiving and giving back.
For a brief period Sriniketan blossomed into an inspiring environment with idealists and specialists from all over the world joining hands with the village people in bringing action and hope to their lives. Just what the founder of Visva-Bharati worked for.
Rabindranath travelled almost incessantly. He went several times to England, to Continental Europe, to the United States of America, to Japan, to Ceylon, to Egypt, to China, to Burma, to Argentina, to Russia, and to the countries of South East Asia. Explaining his migratory instinct he wrote to his younger daughter Mira :
“Having examined myself from within I know for certain that God did not create me for the life of a householder. That is perhaps why I am a constant traveller, and not able to set up home anywhere. The world has received me in its arms, I shall do the same with the world.”
Of course there were many practical and pressing reasons for him to travel as much as he did besides the wanderlust. The reasons were, first, his family’s interventions; second, his own individual longing to break out of the isolation of being a mere provincial of British India; third, his great respect for Western literature; fourth, his admiration for the West’s humanism and for the liberal secular values of the West; fifth, his longing to reach out to a larger humanity with his poetry which led to his Nobel Prize and his transformation into a global citizen; sixth, his intensifying concern over war and conflict; seventh, his inner need to condemn the destructive nature of territorial and militant nationalism; finally, his deep-seated conviction in the spiritual and cultural meeting of the races at a centre which would be a gateway to the world’s learning that led to his founding of Visva-Bharati. He carried the message of Visva-Bharati’s universal ideals wherever he travelled.
His close association with world literature had widened his horizons from early on in life. In his family Goethe was read in German, Maupassant in French, Sakuntala in Sanskrit, Macbeth in English. Rabindranath absorbed every bit of that cosmopolitan air. At sixteen he wrote an analytical essay in Bengali on the possibility of material prosperity in Bengal with the title “Bangali-r asha o noirashyo” (Hope and Despair of Bengalis) where he argued for the need to build up a new civilisation through the meeting of East and West.
His inclination to embrace the world came from the confidence of his own solid education in his mother tongue and his grounding in the Indian cultural tradition both of which were also family gifts. It was indeed poetic justice that of all the Tagore family, Rabindranath was most in need of that confidence as he worked his way to find a delicate balance between his commitments to his country and to the world. This was particularly so after his award of the Nobel prize for literature in 1913 when he felt more and more at home in the world. He wrote :
“I have felt the meeting of the East and the West in my own individual life… It was the same feeling which I had when I listened to those in my family who recited verses from English literature and from the great poets of those days. Then also I felt as if a new prophet of the human world had been revealed to my mind.”
Rabindranath learned mostly by instinct. He never liked to learn conventionally, by practice. This was even more apparent in the last years of his life when he became a painter. He once fell very ill in 1937 and slipped into a coma. At the time his passion for painting was such that the first thing he did on regaining consciousness was to paint a landscape. He himself explained why painting was important to him as an altogether separate language of articulation. He wrote :
“A large part of man can never find its expression in the mere language of words. It must, therefore, seek for its expression other languages – lines and colours, sounds and movements. Through our mastery of these we not only make our whole nature articulate but also understand man in all his attempts to reveal his innermost being in every age and clime … It is the duty of every human being to master, at least to some extent, not only the language of the intellect, but also the language of the personality which is the language of Art.”
What also pleased him about his activity as a painter was that he could overcome the barrier of language through his paintings, when he travelled to different parts of the world and his ‘words’ needed the help of interpreters. But his art could speak without the medium of an interpreter. That did not mean questions were not asked about the ‘meaning’ of his paintings. Many asked if these pictures had a ‘mystic’ meaning. He did not himself want to see meaning in them nor did he want others to do so. He asserted that everything of this earth outside the human world was silent. The stars did not utter words, the planets and clouds and trees did not, nor the green grass and flowers. Why therefore should we tie meaning to art, he asked. When there was a Revivalist movement in art to link art with nationalism and some of his contemporaries were attempting to glorify the past through their art, Rabindranath spoke out against the idea and likened it to a ‘smothering of the soul’. He wrote :
“It is the element of unpredictability in art which seems to fascinate me strongly. The subject matter of a poem can be traced back to some dim thought in the mind. Once it leaves the matted crown of Siva, the stream of poetry flows along its measured course – well-defined by its two banks. 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. The more pronounced the form becomes the clearer becomes the picture to my conception. This creation of form is a source of wonder. If I were a finished artist I would probably have a preconceived idea to be made into a picture. This is not doubt a rewarding experience. But it is greater fund when the mind is seized upon by something outside of it, some surprise element which gradually evolves into an understandable shape.”
The idea and endeavour of Visva-Bharati thrived in its first two decades, the 1920s and the 1930s. Santiniketan became a hive of diverse communities. Rabindranath’s English biographer Edward Thompson, who had been visiting Santiniketan from 1913, wrote :
“If any foreigner desires to know how lovely is the heritage that India has received from her rishis and forest teachers, let him go to Santiniketan and be gathered into the arms of that friendliness which knows no distinction of creed or nationality.”
But Visva-Bharati’s future was uncertain. Rabindranath entrusted its preservation to Mahatma Gandhi. In his last letter to Gandhi on 2 February 1940 he wrote :
“Visva-Bharati is like a vessel carrying the cargo of my life’s best treasure and I hope it may claim special care from my countrymen for its preservation. Though national in its immediate aspect, it is international in its spirit offering to the best of its means India’s hospitality of culture to the rest of the world.”
Rabindranath died on 6 August 1941. To his utter shock the second world war broke out in his last years. That hurt the peace of even his far away rural hamlet.
His legacy is vast, from a great variety of the written form to song and music, to art, to pioneering work in the fields of education and rural reconstruction, to discourses on the nation-state, politics of power, militarism, war and decay of civilization. An intuitive historian and a humanist to boot he believed that India’s history grew out of a social civilization where every attempt was made to evolve a human adjustment of peoples and races. He viewed education holistically as a way to build a person’s values from childhood for the creation of a better world.
He saw the less welcome change that had come over his society in his lifetime. His own social class had undergone complete reorientation. They who had patronised jatra, kathakata, kirtan and other aids to folk education and folk entertainment had either left the village or lost their sense of brotherhood. The village folk were not able to benefit from what knowledge the city folk had acquired in the scientific age. Their life was no longer enlivened with music and ballads and tales. Torn by guilt over their misery he wrote :
“The moment came when I had to pull myself away from preoccupation with literature. For, the sight of the terrible poverty of the Indian masses grew inescapable. I realized that perhaps in no other modern state was there such a complete denial of the basic needs of living: food and clothing, education and health.”
The younger generation of modernist Bengali poets criticized his poetry for its omission of the consciousness of evil. They compared his work with Baudelaire and found him wanting. It is fair to suggest that Rabindranath held firm to his faith in the beauty and sublimity of life. He did not lose faith in man. But that is not to say there was no anguish in his poetry. He felt guilty that millions of his countrymen were so weighed down by their daily miseries to feel any beauty whatsoever from life. He felt circumscribed by the fact that he was not able to really reach out to them wholly, that he could not bridge the inherent distance. The aristocracy of his birth stood in the way. His poem ‘How little I know of this world’ is a self-examination of that tragedy.
“Come poet of the multitudes,
sing songs of obscure man,
reveal his unspoken soul,
soothe his humiliated heart,
restore life and song
to this dry land.
Resuscitate the failing hearts
of hidden men.
May your voice reflect
those standing bowed.
Let the one-stringed minstrel, also,
add his tune
to the great court anthem of the muse.
Come, poet of the new age,
lead me to those hearts
so far away, those hearts so near.
May they know themselves through you
whom I salute.”
A keen sense of his own failing perhaps made him utterly sympathetic and sensitive to Gandhi’s cause. He was full of hope and encouragement for Gandhi as a leader of the Indian masses. In ‘Prayaschitta’, an early play written in 1909, Rabindranath portrayed a saintly rebel called ‘Dhananjaya’ who argues for the need for ‘chittasuddhi’ or atonement by means of moral reparation and the removal of untouchability.
It is not easy to measure his legacy because it would mean different things to different people. There was not a great deal he or any one individual could do to bring change to an unequal and unjust world. But he was never indifferent to the need, nor was he indifferent to the task. He tried hard to make a difference with as much constructive work as was possible for him. Can we hope to make that his legacy in our individual lives?
(abridged)
www.parabaas.com/rabindranath/articles/pTagore_Biography.html
There were various stages in the development of Rabindranath’s humanism. His deepening experience in relating to man and nature gave him his two most persistent drives in life : to bring joy and creativity and alternative values for a sustainable future to urban education, and to bring scientific education and self-reliance to the rural people. It was in Santiniketan in rural southern Bengal that he first began to integrate those strands. Santiniketan was discovered by his father as a serene spot during the Maharshi’s travels in that region. In 1861 Maharshi Debendranath bought some land from his friend the Sinhas of Raipur and built a garden house on it in 1863. He named the house ‘Santiniketan’, an abode of peace. In 1887 he established a Trust Deed for Santiniketan which provided for a hall of prayer, an annual village fair and a school.
Rabindranath founded Santiniketan school in 1901. It was a dynamic experiment to build up a living connection between city and village. The students who came to the Santiniketan school were from urban families while the school itself was surrounded by villages. Rabindranath felt for an ignorant and helpless humanity in rural East Bengal and it became an inspiration and a spiritual force in serving his country by creating a holistic education at the most basic level.
He was greatly concerned with the cultural domination that was increasingly becoming a divisive force between city and village in early modern India. The newly emerging professional middle class of Indian society were taking their leave of their village homes and settling in the city. Caste hierarchy was being strengthened by the hegemony of a colonial English education. To Rabindranath that was a more urgent problem than the lack of political freedom. He railed against the injustice of the common man’s subservience to the prevailing social system and the indifference of the Indian National Congress in this regard. He wrote :
“Whenever I realize the hypnotic hold which this gigantic system of cold-blooded repression has taken on the minds of our people whose social body it has so completely entwined in its endless coils that the free expression of manhood even under the direst necessity has become almost an impossibility. The only remedy that suggests itself to me and which even at the risk of uttering a truism I cannot but repeat, is – to educate them out of their trance.
Rabindranath did not take the route of accusing foreign rule for our social malaise even though he blamed the colonial English education for enhancing the malaise. He argued that foreign rule was a symptom and not a cause. He even hoped that the new ideas of humanism from the West would rejuvenate us to look inwards and reverse the process by examining the radical and reform movements in our own history. At Santiniketan the anniversaries of great men of thought and action, who belonged to India’s multiple cultures, and to the world, were celebrated through prayer and discourses. Anniversaries of the Buddha, the Christ, of Prophet Mohammad, of Chaitanya and Rammohan Roy were built into the school calendar. He believed that such an education would enable us to find ‘our own true place in the world’.
Rabindranath turned his full attention to the Santiniketan school after withdrawing from the Swadeshi Movement of 1904-1905 which he had joined with great patriotic fervour. Till then he held his faith in the traditional Hindu Samaj but came in for a rude shock when he realized that, true to orthodoxy, the Hindu Samaj would not take the Muslims into its fold. He gave powerful expression to his disillusionment in the novel Gora while writing and serializing it during the years 1907-1909.
The novel’s hero ‘Gora’ was an orphan boy of Irish parents brought up by a Brahmin family as their own child. The boy grew up to be a fiercely patriotic young man and a defender of orthodox Hinduism. But when Gora finally discovered his foreign origins he also realised he would be rejected by orthodox Hindu society where he had invested his trust and his social commitment. That became his wake up call about the need to be an Indian without caste or creed. At the end of the novel we have ‘Gora’ saying :
Today I am really an Indian! In me there is no longer any opposition between Hindu, Musalman, and Christian. Today every caste is my caste, the food of all is my food !
Rabindranath hit out against national chauvinism with that novel. Amid growing perplexities of the social, educational and political problems in his times, his mind had been turning to the past to discover in the history of India a central ideal for regulating our life and work. He expressed his inclusive humanism in a song with these words :
Day and night, thy voice goes out from land to land,
Calling Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains
Round thy throne
And Parsees, Musalmans and Christians.
Offerings are brought to thy shrine by
East and the West
to be woven in a garland of love.
Thou bringest the hearts of all peoples
Into the harmony of one life,
Thou Dispenser of India’s destiny,
Victory, Victory, Victory to thee.
In 1918 Rabindranath began preparations to add ‘A Centre of Indian Culture’ to the Santiniketan school for the coordinated study of the various religious cultures that flowed into India’s history: Vedic, Puranic, Buddhist, Jain, Islamic, Sikh, Zoroastrian and Christian. Arrangements were made to study these contributions through the disciplines of philosophy, literature, art, music and dance. The name Visva-Bharati dates from that time and also its Sanskrit motto, yatra visvam bhavati eka nidam, taken from a Vedic text meaning ‘the-world-in-one-nest’. Officially, Visva-Bharati international university was inaugurated at Santiniketan in 1921.
He kept the model simple even though an ‘international’ university is a complex idea. He explained that he used the word for the sake of convenience. He wrote what was uppermost in his mind in the following words.
“I have taken courage to invite Europe to the fields of Bolpur. There will be a meeting of truths here.
I feel confident that they shall accept our invitation. What we have to ensure is that their hearts are not starved when they are with us”.
The idea of Visva-Bharati was to create a space for the meeting of the races through scholarly exchange and study of each other’s histories and cultures without opposing interests. It was to be a ‘pilgrimage’ to ‘behold the universe’ away from ‘narrow domestic walls’. It was hoped that these alternative values would help to build a new Indian personality free from the conflict of communities and capable of appreciating the many currents of the Indian cultural tradition along with the humanistic and liberal ideals of the West. The new Indian personality would belong neither to the East nor to the West, but be a reconciler of both. Rabindranath argued that Indians must understand themselves in this connected way to realize the nation’s unity within its diversity. He wrote :
“The India of modern days comprised not only the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain, whose common culture had its origin in India itself, but also the Mohammadan with his wonderful religious democracy of semitic origin and the Christian with his political democracy nurtured in Europe. There was also in India the Parsi from whom we had parted long ago outside the boundaries of India but who had come back to us again…
If Santiniketan was to become truly the guest house of India it had to be so comprehensive as to find room for each and all of these in its ripest scholarship …The treasures which these different religious cultures contained should be brought into practical use in relation to the modern world, not held apart and miserly hoarded.”
The final experiments at Visva-Bharati took form in 1922 with the establishment of an Institute of rural reconstruction named Sriniketan, abode of prosperity. Rabindranath insisted from the outset that an Indian education would be incomplete without a relationship with the village as the majority of Indians lived in the villages, and without inculcating a moral responsibility for their survival among the educated classes in India. The villages were kept out of the mainstream of Indian life and cut off from the advancement of knowledge where they needed it most. One such need was in the application of scientific agriculture which became one of Visva-Bharati’s goals for the Sriniketan programme of rural reconstruction.
Rabindranath argued forcefully that the poverty problem was not the most important, the problem of unhappiness was. Men can make ruthless use of wealth for the production and collection of things, he added, but happiness was beyond all competition and had to be the ultimate goal. He called upon everyone to collaborate in this effort, scholars and poets and musicians and artists. He warned that the urban populace would otherwise live like parasites, sucking life from the rural people and giving back nothing to them. Such exploitation, he emphasied, would gradually exhaust the ‘soil of life’ which needed constant replenishing through the cycle of receiving and giving back.
For a brief period Sriniketan blossomed into an inspiring environment with idealists and specialists from all over the world joining hands with the village people in bringing action and hope to their lives. Just what the founder of Visva-Bharati worked for.
Rabindranath travelled almost incessantly. He went several times to England, to Continental Europe, to the United States of America, to Japan, to Ceylon, to Egypt, to China, to Burma, to Argentina, to Russia, and to the countries of South East Asia. Explaining his migratory instinct he wrote to his younger daughter Mira :
“Having examined myself from within I know for certain that God did not create me for the life of a householder. That is perhaps why I am a constant traveller, and not able to set up home anywhere. The world has received me in its arms, I shall do the same with the world.”
Of course there were many practical and pressing reasons for him to travel as much as he did besides the wanderlust. The reasons were, first, his family’s interventions; second, his own individual longing to break out of the isolation of being a mere provincial of British India; third, his great respect for Western literature; fourth, his admiration for the West’s humanism and for the liberal secular values of the West; fifth, his longing to reach out to a larger humanity with his poetry which led to his Nobel Prize and his transformation into a global citizen; sixth, his intensifying concern over war and conflict; seventh, his inner need to condemn the destructive nature of territorial and militant nationalism; finally, his deep-seated conviction in the spiritual and cultural meeting of the races at a centre which would be a gateway to the world’s learning that led to his founding of Visva-Bharati. He carried the message of Visva-Bharati’s universal ideals wherever he travelled.
His close association with world literature had widened his horizons from early on in life. In his family Goethe was read in German, Maupassant in French, Sakuntala in Sanskrit, Macbeth in English. Rabindranath absorbed every bit of that cosmopolitan air. At sixteen he wrote an analytical essay in Bengali on the possibility of material prosperity in Bengal with the title “Bangali-r asha o noirashyo” (Hope and Despair of Bengalis) where he argued for the need to build up a new civilisation through the meeting of East and West.
His inclination to embrace the world came from the confidence of his own solid education in his mother tongue and his grounding in the Indian cultural tradition both of which were also family gifts. It was indeed poetic justice that of all the Tagore family, Rabindranath was most in need of that confidence as he worked his way to find a delicate balance between his commitments to his country and to the world. This was particularly so after his award of the Nobel prize for literature in 1913 when he felt more and more at home in the world. He wrote :
“I have felt the meeting of the East and the West in my own individual life… It was the same feeling which I had when I listened to those in my family who recited verses from English literature and from the great poets of those days. Then also I felt as if a new prophet of the human world had been revealed to my mind.”
Rabindranath learned mostly by instinct. He never liked to learn conventionally, by practice. This was even more apparent in the last years of his life when he became a painter. He once fell very ill in 1937 and slipped into a coma. At the time his passion for painting was such that the first thing he did on regaining consciousness was to paint a landscape. He himself explained why painting was important to him as an altogether separate language of articulation. He wrote :
“A large part of man can never find its expression in the mere language of words. It must, therefore, seek for its expression other languages – lines and colours, sounds and movements. Through our mastery of these we not only make our whole nature articulate but also understand man in all his attempts to reveal his innermost being in every age and clime … It is the duty of every human being to master, at least to some extent, not only the language of the intellect, but also the language of the personality which is the language of Art.”
What also pleased him about his activity as a painter was that he could overcome the barrier of language through his paintings, when he travelled to different parts of the world and his ‘words’ needed the help of interpreters. But his art could speak without the medium of an interpreter. That did not mean questions were not asked about the ‘meaning’ of his paintings. Many asked if these pictures had a ‘mystic’ meaning. He did not himself want to see meaning in them nor did he want others to do so. He asserted that everything of this earth outside the human world was silent. The stars did not utter words, the planets and clouds and trees did not, nor the green grass and flowers. Why therefore should we tie meaning to art, he asked. When there was a Revivalist movement in art to link art with nationalism and some of his contemporaries were attempting to glorify the past through their art, Rabindranath spoke out against the idea and likened it to a ‘smothering of the soul’. He wrote :
“It is the element of unpredictability in art which seems to fascinate me strongly. The subject matter of a poem can be traced back to some dim thought in the mind. Once it leaves the matted crown of Siva, the stream of poetry flows along its measured course – well-defined by its two banks. 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. The more pronounced the form becomes the clearer becomes the picture to my conception. This creation of form is a source of wonder. If I were a finished artist I would probably have a preconceived idea to be made into a picture. This is not doubt a rewarding experience. But it is greater fund when the mind is seized upon by something outside of it, some surprise element which gradually evolves into an understandable shape.”
The idea and endeavour of Visva-Bharati thrived in its first two decades, the 1920s and the 1930s. Santiniketan became a hive of diverse communities. Rabindranath’s English biographer Edward Thompson, who had been visiting Santiniketan from 1913, wrote :
“If any foreigner desires to know how lovely is the heritage that India has received from her rishis and forest teachers, let him go to Santiniketan and be gathered into the arms of that friendliness which knows no distinction of creed or nationality.”
But Visva-Bharati’s future was uncertain. Rabindranath entrusted its preservation to Mahatma Gandhi. In his last letter to Gandhi on 2 February 1940 he wrote :
“Visva-Bharati is like a vessel carrying the cargo of my life’s best treasure and I hope it may claim special care from my countrymen for its preservation. Though national in its immediate aspect, it is international in its spirit offering to the best of its means India’s hospitality of culture to the rest of the world.”
Rabindranath died on 6 August 1941. To his utter shock the second world war broke out in his last years. That hurt the peace of even his far away rural hamlet.
His legacy is vast, from a great variety of the written form to song and music, to art, to pioneering work in the fields of education and rural reconstruction, to discourses on the nation-state, politics of power, militarism, war and decay of civilization. An intuitive historian and a humanist to boot he believed that India’s history grew out of a social civilization where every attempt was made to evolve a human adjustment of peoples and races. He viewed education holistically as a way to build a person’s values from childhood for the creation of a better world.
He saw the less welcome change that had come over his society in his lifetime. His own social class had undergone complete reorientation. They who had patronised jatra, kathakata, kirtan and other aids to folk education and folk entertainment had either left the village or lost their sense of brotherhood. The village folk were not able to benefit from what knowledge the city folk had acquired in the scientific age. Their life was no longer enlivened with music and ballads and tales. Torn by guilt over their misery he wrote :
“The moment came when I had to pull myself away from preoccupation with literature. For, the sight of the terrible poverty of the Indian masses grew inescapable. I realized that perhaps in no other modern state was there such a complete denial of the basic needs of living: food and clothing, education and health.”
The younger generation of modernist Bengali poets criticized his poetry for its omission of the consciousness of evil. They compared his work with Baudelaire and found him wanting. It is fair to suggest that Rabindranath held firm to his faith in the beauty and sublimity of life. He did not lose faith in man. But that is not to say there was no anguish in his poetry. He felt guilty that millions of his countrymen were so weighed down by their daily miseries to feel any beauty whatsoever from life. He felt circumscribed by the fact that he was not able to really reach out to them wholly, that he could not bridge the inherent distance. The aristocracy of his birth stood in the way. His poem ‘How little I know of this world’ is a self-examination of that tragedy.
“Come poet of the multitudes,
sing songs of obscure man,
reveal his unspoken soul,
soothe his humiliated heart,
restore life and song
to this dry land.
Resuscitate the failing hearts
of hidden men.
May your voice reflect
those standing bowed.
Let the one-stringed minstrel, also,
add his tune
to the great court anthem of the muse.
Come, poet of the new age,
lead me to those hearts
so far away, those hearts so near.
May they know themselves through you
whom I salute.”
A keen sense of his own failing perhaps made him utterly sympathetic and sensitive to Gandhi’s cause. He was full of hope and encouragement for Gandhi as a leader of the Indian masses. In ‘Prayaschitta’, an early play written in 1909, Rabindranath portrayed a saintly rebel called ‘Dhananjaya’ who argues for the need for ‘chittasuddhi’ or atonement by means of moral reparation and the removal of untouchability.
It is not easy to measure his legacy because it would mean different things to different people. There was not a great deal he or any one individual could do to bring change to an unequal and unjust world. But he was never indifferent to the need, nor was he indifferent to the task. He tried hard to make a difference with as much constructive work as was possible for him. Can we hope to make that his legacy in our individual lives?
(abridged)
www.parabaas.com/rabindranath/articles/pTagore_Biography.html
