Reminiscences
Tagore at Oxford . . . . . .
This article by Shahid Suhrawardy, a scholar and diplomat, first appeared in the Calcutta Municipal Gazette in 1941. Star Literature reproduces it in the interest of its readers . The first part appeared last week.
Whilst I was casting and re-casting the speech I was to make, posturing in the presence of my closet friend in my rooms, two circumstances made my task easier. Firstly, we heard that the Poet had already been invited by Manchester College to come and address a gathering there and that he had consented. So I had only to request him to divide his time between them and us when he came over. Secondly, the Poet's son and daughter-in-law were visiting Oxford and some of us were asked by 'Mullickda' to luncheon to meet them. 'Mullickda' was the doyen of the Indian student community not only in years, but also in material prosperity. He did not live at college or in digs, as all of us did, but in a large boarding-house on Woodstock Road, where, according to report, he was being cruelly rooked. He was the naivest and best of men, exceedingly generous to all of us, paying up our debts and spoiling us with gifts. Nevertheless, his lunches were extremely boring because of that flair of his, which he has retained till this day, of gathering round an abundant table men and women the most incompatible in taste and temperament. He was already promulgating some sort of a philosophic doctrine of his own backed by lavish hospitality and no wonder in that city of large leisures he was drawing to himself people of widely divergent types. ## Inspite of the great affection we all, and particularly I, had for him, I accepted his invitation with an inward fear at the prospect of being wedged in, as had happened before, between a lean clergyman from Pusey House bent on saving my soul and the fast-extinguishing charms of the widow of a defunct professor. Therefore this particular luncheon turned out to be such a delightful surprise. Incongruous people there certainly were present but the grace of Pratima Devi and the spontaneous urbanity of Rathi Babu gently smoothed down all the angles and for a short while we were happily enveloped in the kindly atmosphere of a Bengal home. I shall always be thankful to 'Mulickda' for the opportunity he gave me of knowing these noble persons for whom my affection has since then ever been on the increase. Coupled with the gratitude which I like many others feel towards them for their unchanging kindness and goodness is my great admiration for that fine and rare talent for decorative art on the stage which makes Pratima Devi unique among our artists. On arriving at Paddington station I took a taxi to Chelsea where the Poet and his suite were putting up in a big house. I was introduced into a large-sized room where I first saw the Poet. He was sitting on a divan and along the walls there were many chairs occupied by men and women, Indian, British and continental, who sat in rapt silence, as in a prayer-hall. In one corner of the room an Englishwoman was modeling the Poet's head in clay whilst in another a fierce young man, a Pole perhaps, was sketching, as I saw from a corner of my eye, the fine folds of his robe. The windows were wide-open on to the Embankment and I do not now remember if incense was burning in that room, but if it was not, it ought to have been because the atmosphere was so charged with awe and admiration. My visit was formal as the Oxford programme had already been fixed upon by Rathi Babu. Disconcerted as I felt at the collusive silence of the place, I was a little relieved at the thought that the invitation I had brought need not, by being communicated in words, strike a harsh note in that stillness. At that time I thought that the Poet's immobility and his closed eyes were due to his posing for the artists in the room, but since I have understood better for he possessed the rare quality of being able to withdraw within himself at will and relapse without effort into the statuesque. That capacity for complete aloofness in the midst of contacts, that sudden communion with the inner life in the intervals of spoken words, that faculty of abstracting oneself from one's surroundings, he shared with the prophets and the visionaries. Such men one may come to know very well and yet never be familiar with.
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