Book review: Imre Bangha (Ed.) Tagore. Beyond His Language

A striking contradiction marks Rabindranath Tagore’s reception in world literature. His rapid and phenomenal popularity in Europe and America in the inter-war period has steeply declined ever since, with little of it remaining today. This despite, or even because of Tagore’s resounding presence, not so much in the national memory of India that ceremonially commemorates the author of its national anthem, but in the life of Bengalis, both in India and Bangladesh, as a pervasive referent.

Bengal’s Tagore-obsession is indexed to his vast literary corpus which introduced a new public language to encounter and confront the rapid transitions of colonial modernity that first broke on its shores. Under his creative supervision, the Bengali language found release from Sanskrit-inflected elitism and exclusive pedantic and pedagogic deployment, allowing for self-reflexive thought and expressive articulation. Structuring and mediating access to the very real modern world, the language became synonymous with Tagore himself. For the complementary dip in his global fortunes, however, Bengalis themselves have been commonly blamed. Their overzealousness in protecting and preserving the purity of Tagorean aesthetics, quite contrary to the poet’s own individualistic and idiosyncratic forays into standardised forms and styles of composition, converted him into a community-owned intellectual property. This sentimentalism, although seldom invoked to celebrate the unity and identity of a linguistic nation parsed by a bloodied partition, has more often been associated with a middle-class bias against Tagore’s popular appropriation.

The intriguing title of Bangha’s edited book conveys the exhaustion that many feel about Tagore’s stultifying iconicity, both in cloistered academic spaces and wider public culture. The volume results from a conference, one of several held to mark the poet’s 150th birth anniversary and coinciding centenary of his Nobel Prize. It is simultaneously indicative of an abiding interest in the poet, prompted also by today’s global climate of xenophobic populism and Tagore’s vehement denunciation of nationalism in the turbulent war years.

Yet, what remains of Tagore when taken beyond his language and literature? The thematic imperative has not meant the same for all contributors. Rather, a productive tension on the correct way of retrieving and reappraising Tagore as a global figure runs through the book’s four parts. Cutting across the divide, attention is drawn to forms other than the literary that are less explored and yet profoundly used by Tagore to channel his creative outbursts. Befitting Tagore’s multi-hued genius, the book includes articles and interviews not only of seasoned academics, but also artists, novelists and a fashion designer.

One group of authors has plucked Tagore out of Bengal to discuss him in various spatio-temporal contexts. Their diverse entry points fall within what I call a reception–influence–relevance complex. Looking at the history of translation of Tagore’s works into foreign languages and their publication and sale, Bangha offers an objective comparison of their popularity in various countries and regions in different periods of time. Within a more nationalist framework, Bordas presents a detailed study of Tagore’s varying reception and influence in Romanian culture. The unique geographical focus along with the artistic fields covered recalls the extent of Tagore’s international impact. Similarly, Serebriany focusses on Tagore in Russia, with particular attention to political reasons behind the poet’s rise and fall of fame. Through a close reading of the long-standing, sporadic exchanges between Tagore and the celebrated French writer Romain Rolland, Bhattacharya shows how even in the high noon of jingoistic nationalism, affective communities of intellectuals could transcend narrow political boundaries.

The creative genre of paintings and sketches, which Tagore used late in his life, has received fulsome treatment by Adhikary and Kowshik, two artists of great renown. Adhikary argues that more than Tagore’s literary creations, his art-form was truly global, as it found a home in the modern art movements of Europe. Kowshik offers a rich personal narrative of how training in Santiniketan by Tagore’s direct disciples was deeply formative for his artist-parents and several others from outside Bengal. Equally, Bethlenfalvy recounts the imprint that the university-town and Tagore himself left on the experiences of two Hungarian women artists. Lal, Pande and Gokhale, in more contemporary accounts, reveal how Tagorean aesthetics continue to be relevant for creators working in different areas today.

A smaller albeit formidable group of scholars, comprising Radice and Dyson, raises important questions regarding the usefulness of reception studies while examining Tagore’s ideas. Radice’s remarks are straightforward: ‘Why should we bother at all about how Tagore was perceived in this or that country? What does it add to our knowledge of Tagore and to our understanding of his works?’ (p. 47). Dyson, while admitting the limitations of previous scholarship, additionally cautions that the ‘world beyond Bengal needs to reorient itself, unlearning some of the old habits’ (p. 141). Alluding clearly to the oriental fetishisation that Tagore was subjected to in the West before his steady oblivion, Dyson sees an identical pattern in simply ‘remaining stuck in the narratives from the past, which often tells us more about the receiving cultures than about Tagore himself’ (p. 141). Under a title somewhat reactive to the rest of the book, ‘Tagore in Context’, Dyson neither advocates provincialising Tagore nor his instrumental application to present global problems. To her, Tagore both as a creative thinker and doer is very obviously global, yet his ideas cannot be completely severed from the modern Bengali culture which he helped institute, and which is a living and thriving world till date.

Both Radice and Dyson alert us to the asymmetries and anachronisms that follow the employment of ‘global’ as a tool for analysis, be it as a geographical aggregate of national spaces or a theoretical device for abstraction. It risks privileging already entrenched spatial sites, temporal epochs and proper nouns in history. For example, in Serebriany’s article, unleashing Tagore from Bengal finally results in the conclusion that his popular novel ‘The Home and the World’ was ‘consciously or unconsciously emulated’ from Dostoevsky’s ‘The Possessed’ (p. 63). My suggestion is not that Tagore was uncontaminated by ‘outside’ influence, or that we have to recover sources that are more authentically indigenous. After all, Tagore (Bhattacharya, 1997: 68) was adequately confident of the originality of his ideas to boldly declare:

Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours wherever they might have their origin. I should feel proud of my humanity when I can acknowledge the poets and artists of other countries as mine own. Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of man are mine.

Creative work, born out of a compulsive and tedious search for truth, is a self-reflective, self-absorbing process, and not merely a final product over which ownership may be claimed once and for all, if only in betrayal of the proprietary logic of copyright laws.

Radice and Dyson are counted among the foremost translators of Tagore’s works. The exercise of translation necessarily entails an engagement with or exchange between more than one linguistic traditions. Unlike the viral global circulation of finance capital or big data, language is not simply a currency available for easy conversion and transaction but is constitutive of concrete life-worlds inhabited by real people that are often in conflict or collision with each other. Rather than a flight to transcendence, responsible translation therefore is a much more situated act of conversation and debate (Spivak, 2008). In my understanding, far from nativism, it is this translative modality of the global that Radice and Dyson have affirmatively gestured towards in their critique. Through a focussed reading of Tagore himself as a translator, Radice argues how the poet’s Bengali works served a vastly different function from their subsequent English translations. Composed in the immediacy of a spate of personal losses, Tagore’s Bengali compositions in ‘Gitanjali’ constitute a spontaneous outpouring of emotions responsive to proximate circumstances, whereas their English translations are much more systematic, as though signifying an overcoming and final healing of the self through creative mourning.

Other than English itself being a language foreign to Tagore, the necessary distance or closure from the object of grief was arguably provided by the purpose of global recognition that his translations were oriented to. Again, rather than splitting Tagore as a visual artist from the literary one, as done by Adhikary, Dyson discusses how Tagore’s angst arising from partial colour blindness got translated in his literary productions as expressive of special moods and temperaments. In Dyson’s interpretation, an awareness of this physiognomic distinction transforms the experience of reading the poet and evinces a profound meaningful unity in all of Tagore’s creations. Without multiple extrinsic references and citations, it has thus been possible for both these authors to deprovincialise Tagore by redirecting attention to his creative self and eclectic ways of world-making.

Unlike the globality of reception–influence studies which emphasises convergence and consensus by marking the travel itinerary of specific concepts or materials (textual, artefactual, etc.), translation as practised by Radice and Dyson, foregrounds departures and limits —aspects that inhibit, regulate or modify cross-medium/intercultural transition—as the more vital source of fresh ideas. Most importantly, in order to grasp the universal singularity of Tagore as a creative thinker, serious reckoning must be made of his own thought-world.

From Tagore’s quote above, it is amply clear that he was claiming a universality not mediated either by his Bengali or Indian or Asian identity, but via an artistic sensibility and a creative spirit which, even when shared with other great poets and artists of the world, was singularly his own. Whilst concurring with the contributors to this book about the necessity to revive Tagore from the stagnancy he has been pushed to, I think his proposed reconfiguration from a provincial to a global figure is an inadequate step forward. Rather, the transversal knowledge of Tagore produced by dedicated centres and cultural bodies today, spanning across regional–-national–global coordinates, must be short-circuited with queries and interventions from general disciplines like intellectual history and political thought to unlock the potential that his ideas truly contain. Tagore is rightly hailed as a crucial intellectual pace-setter for modern India, having left a deep imprint on some of its most accomplished political leaders. To keep the current of Tagore flowing, the comfort and conceit of ‘Tagore Studies’ must be interrupted with chance contacts and accidental diversions from academic fields that have typically ignored him. As one who accorded primacy to joy, playfulness and adventure in creation, Tagore must be challenged, thus, to be resurrected and reconstructed as a universal thinker.