From the India Today archives (2008) | Rabindranath Tagore: At home in the world

(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated April 21, 2008)

Was Rabindranath Tagore as great as he is cracked up to be? This subversive question has been asked by plenty of people over the years—by westerners who became disillusioned with his self-translations, by non-Bengali Indians tired of the Bengali obsession with him, and even, dare one say it, by some Bengalis.

I myself have often privately asked it, testing him, so to speak, against other great poets. In the last couple of months, I have read through Homer, Virgil, Dante and Milton. But I’ve also, as always, been reading Tagore—his sermons collected in the volumes called Santiniketan, his writings on Christianity, and his songs—above all, his songs, listening to them, reading them, and translating them too, as I have now, after many years of resistance, found a song-translation method that satisfies me.

So the question has been in my mind quite frequently: Tagore was great, yes, but was he as great as Dante? My convinced and considered answer to the question is, yes, he was truly great. He is up there on Parnassus with the very greatest.

But why? What is there about Tagore that makes me, helplessly and with wonder and amazement, agree with the view of Nirad C. Chaudhuri—who was phenomenally well read and never one to come out with cliches—that Tagore was among the 20 greatest writers of all time?

One can list many factors. His extraordinary linguistic mastery, every sentence he wrote flowing from his pen with a seemingly effortless virtuosity that reminds me of the music of J.S. Bach. His range.

The fact that he was so much more than a poet—he was a novelist, writer of some of the best short stories ever written, a composer of songs whom Satyajit Ray rightly felt was the equal of Schubert, a painter, an educationist, and also of course a major participant in public affairs and the moulding of Independent India. But none of this, though true, goes to the heart of the matter.

In my recent reading, I have become increasingly aware of the way most great poets deal with ‘two sides’—with, at one extreme, the most cruel, most evil, most miserable things that human beings can do or experience, and at the other a transcendent, perfect existence that we long to attain.

In Dante and Milton the two sides are explicit: hell and heaven. The greatest poetry, in my view, arises from between those two extremes, from a mingling or meeting of hell and heaven as in Milton’s Garden of Eden, or in the Purgatorio that Dante and his guide Virgil must pass through on the way from hell to heaven.

Because Tagore was so clear in his mind that “the subject on which all my writings have dwelt” was “the joy of attaining the infinite within the finite”, he never made the mistake of limiting his focus either to hell or heaven. He said many times that he was neither a world-denier nor a monist: he was a dualist who found spiritual reality in the ‘khela’ of the human and divine.

When he defined art as “the response of man’s creative soul to the call of the Real”, he meant the real of the here and now, the imperfect real of history and society and human relationships, but also a real that was shot through with glimpses of perfection.

He knew—in the words of one of his greatest songs—“ache duhkho, ache mrityu, virahadahan lage/tabuo shanti, tabu ananda, tabu ananta jage (there is sorrow, there is death, there is the fire of separation. Yet peace, joy and eternity are awake).”

Everything that defined him stemmed from that awareness: his compassion, his social activism, his concern for the natural environment, his rapport with women and children—all the things that make him so relevant today.

Bengalis are right. Tagore was a “visvakavi” (world poet). Where I part company with some of my Bengali friends is that I think he exceeded even their conception of him, and in ways that over time will constantly surprise, disturb and challenge those who attempt to understand him fully. Though honoured with the title ‘Gurudev’, he was not the sort of guru who supplies us with dogma or ready-made answers.

—The writer was a poet, scholar of Bengali literature and a Tagore translator

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