Rabindranath Tagore in the twenty-first century
Literary Editor's note: Dr. Fakrul Alam, author, translator and academic, presented a paper at the First International Literary conference organized by Bangla Academy on 27 June 2011. We bring to our readers the first part of the paper. The second will appear next week.
Some years ago, I came across this brief and beautiful but very sad poem by the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh (1906-67) titled "Wet Evening in April":
The birds sang in the wet trees
And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him
The melancholy
Imagine my surprise and even shock at coming across a poem that reminded me, as it would any other educated Bengali, of Rabindranath Tagore's wonderful poem, "Aji Hote Shoto Borsho Pore". Compare, if you will, the buoyant opening lines of his poem in my translation, titled, "A Hundred Years from Now" with Kavanagh's haunting threnody for himself:
A hundred years from now
Who could you be
Reading my poem curiously
A hundred years from now!
How can I transmit to you who are so far away
A bit of the joy I feel this day,
At this new spring dawn
The beauty of flowers this day
Songbirds that keep chirping away
Of the crimson glow of the setting sun,
How can I lave them all with my love,
And hope you will make them your own
A hundred years from now?
The difference between Kavanagh's poem and Rabindranath's could not be more strikingthe Irish poet is all despondency; the weather, clearly, has palled his consciousness completely. The Bengali poet, on the other hand, is inspired by the advent of a beautiful spring day and bent on spreading his happiness across centuries. For him, spring a hundred years from now will hopefully be as stirring as was the day in Phalgun in the Bengali year 1302 (1895 A.D.) when he felt inspired to write the poem. This inspirational quality, I would like to suggest at the outset of this paper about Rabindranath's importance in our time, is what makes Rabindranath Tagore so very indispensable for us all in the twenty-first century. More than any other poet or cultural figure in the Bengali language, Rabindranath has proved to be a perpetual fountain of joy, indeed, the fountainhead of the impulse we have even in this day and age of conurbation and commodification of everything in Bangladesh to treasure the beauty of our seasons, our countryside, our language, our culture and our people through sheer immersion in them. No one has savored our spring or monsoon or sharat or early autumn like him and no one, certainly, has written so eloquently about taking sustenance from nature or finding in it a source of transcendence from the finite world to the infinite one. There is a principle of immanence at work herethe land and people of Bengal are immanent in him and he is immanent in us and our creative endeavors.
This is another way of saying that Rabindranath is necessary for us as we strive to become Bangladeshis in our hearts and souls. Anyone who knows about the birth of the nation will remember the crucial part he played in the formation of our national identity in the nineteen-sixties and in our war of liberation. His one hundred birth anniversary in 1961 was a vital rallying point for all Bengalis steadfastly pursuing the path to independence and his patriotic songs were of course a constant source of strength during our war of liberation. As the twentieth century came to an end and fundamentalism tried to rear its ugly head in our soil once more, his music and writing invariably proved to be inspirationalwhether in Pahela Boisakh events or in cultural festivals. And as we move forward in this the second decade of the twentieth century it is not only our national anthem that will continue to inspire us in Bangladesh with the mythos of a Bengal of gold; we keep finding encouragement from many other of Rabindranath's songs and poems. After all, they always exhort us to have faith in our country, savor its beauty and feel blessed because we have been born in this land. They tell us to pursue virtuous action for its sake and learn to sacrifice and toil for it. Needless to say, the language that we take such pride in and that was the ultimate determiner of our national identity was to an immense extent his creation. As we move forward in this century, striving to make the language the perfect vehicle for our creative impulses, he will be the model that we will have to follow no matter which genre we choose to work in, the archetype that will set the pattern for all our future artistic endeavors.
But these are all too obvious aspects of Rabindranath's works that have kept sustaining us as we move forward into the twenty-first century. What I feel will make him even more crucial in this stage of our national identity formation is his complex take on nationalism itself. On the one hand, I believe, it is his thoughts on the evils of nationalization masquerading as globalization, that is to say, as the vehicle for virulent and insatiable late capitalism that we will find essential in arming ourselves against the insidious workings of multinationals, or of what Hardt and Negri have diagnosed as empire in their book of that name.
Rabindranath's prophetic words in the series of lectures that he assembled in the volume that he titled Nationalism alert us again and again to the recent avatars of neo-imperialism and have a resonance that makes him very much our contemporary. On the other hand, Rabindranath is crucial for us whenever we blind ourselves or hem ourselves in walls created by linguistic or religious prejudices. Alert to what is unquestionably the obverse of expansionism, he warns us about the evils of parochialism, retrogressive nationalisms, and fundamentalisms of any kind.
In his brilliant lecture, "Nationalism in the West" Rabindranath is very prescient about empire. The west, he says, has "evolved a perfect organization of power" through state machinery dedicated to relentless expansionism (170). Many years before Michel Foucault, he alerted us to the carceral society created by agencies fomented by imperialism such as "the military organization, the magisterial offices, the police, the Criminal Investigation Department, [and] the secret spy system" (171). Comparing the law and order set up of the imperial state graphically to the maws of an insatiable and pitiless machine, he warns us of the "steam roller effect" it creates, "it is tight, it regulates our steps with a closed up system, within which our feet have only the slightest liberty to make their own adjustments" (171-72). Prophetically, he warns his western audience of something that we should not forget in the east as we adopt western disciplinary formations even as we mimic their democratic organizations: "while the spirit of the west marches under its banner of freedom, the Nation of the west forges its iron chains of organization which are the most relentless and unbreakable that have ever been manufactured in the whole history of man" (172). In what is often something of a jeremiad on nationalism and its evils, Rabindranath points out how once such instruments of domination and surveillance have been set in motion, the state must give itself up to ceaseless extension of its powers. This will not only result in empowering the security forces at home till they become draconian in their dealings but also create increasing friction in international relations. The lesson to be learned from imperial structures in general and the first world war in particular, he feels, is that national states that have molded themselves into machines of power are bound to "strain their physical, moral and intellectual resources to the utmost to defeat one another in the wrestling match of powerlessness" (173). But that is in their part of the world. For the rest of the world the state apparatuses of the national state have also become instruments of death-in-life. He berates the powers that are in the west thus: "Can you put yourselves into the position of the peoples, who seem to have been doomed to an eternal damnation of their own humanity, who not only must suffer continual curtailment of their manhood, but even raise their voices in paeans of praise for the benignity of a mechanical apparatus in its interminable parody of providence?" ((174).
But what makes Rabindranath's Nationalism lectures even more relevant in Bangladesh in our time is the message they have for us when we blind ourselves to the downside of excessive national self- absorption. What he is saying in them is that when we cut ourselves off completely through chauvinism and obscurantism from the west or let our prejudice overcome our judgment in perpetuating divisiveness and rancor within ourselves because of racial, religious or national prejudice we stifle our own capacity of growth and become ossified. In his reading of history this is not how the subcontinent was traditionally in its internal or international relations. We do well to remind ourselves here that central to Rabindranath's conception of humanity is the coming together of all races. It is the proud history of the subcontinent, he feels, to have welded together "into one body various races" (456) He exhorts his countrymen moreover to discard the "education which teaches them that a country is greater than the ideals of humanity" (456). This point reminds me of what Buddhadev Bose has written somewhere or the other: Rabindranath was incapable of writing a song as D. L. Roy did where the lyrics began with the lines" Amon Deshti Kothai Khuje Pabe Na Ko Tumi/Shokol Desher Rani She Je Amar Jonmo Bhumi" (Nowhere you will get a country like mine/It is the queen of all countries"). Not for Rabindranath a patriotism that would cut a country or people from the rest of humanity or that would exalt one nation or race above another, although of course, this and every thing else that he wrote does not negate the pride that he had in India's achievements. As he puts it pithily in this lecture, while we cannot forget that "India is no beggar of the West" (457), we should also remember that nationalism is as great a "menace" for us in the east as it is in the west (458). Moreover, to rest on past laurels is dangerous, and therefore the man who has inculcated in us the mythos of "shonar bangla" also warns us that patriotic prejudice and societal inertia can conspire to create "a general paralysis" of the "living nature" of India (463).
What Rabindranath teaches us again and again then is to take the best of all cultures as we move forward in time, whether in our own lives or in our national development. In one of his autobiographical essays he implies that it has been his great fortune to have been born when "the currents of three movements"Hindu, Muslim and western-- had met" in the "life" of his country (93). He goes on to imply in the same piece that it was an advantage to have been reared in an "atmosphere of new ideas" and to have grown up, at a time when a "literary revolution" was taking place in Bengal, and people were beginning to "assert their own personality" (40). In other words, he suggests, he was a beneficiary of the rediscovery of the Indian past as well as exposure to enlightenment ideals that came to India from the west in the nineteenth century.
As we move further and further into the twenty-first century, then, Rabindranath can teach us not to block progressive ideals emanating from the west. However, he is also sure that we must be alert so that we can choose only the best from the world beyond our borders. To be uncritical, either about the west or about our heritage would be stifling. In his powerful essay, "The Cult of the Chakra", he takes issue with Mahatma Gandhi because he feels that excessive preoccupation with the weaving wheel even as a symbol of anti-colonial resistance can send the wrong signals to the people of India. Weaving would then become merely an antidote to western tools of progress and would lead to a sterile valorization of past methods. As Rabindranath puts it, "the all-embracing poverty which has overwhelmed our country cannot be removed by working with our hands to the neglect of science" (542). And he goes on to declare, "if we are willfully blind to the grand vision of whirling forces which science has revealed, the charka will cease to have any message for us" for the spinning wheel "will no longer talk to us of progress" (ibid). To Rabindranath the issue is a clear one: whether in the west or in the east, we should not be blinded by "pugnacious nationalism" (544). Both in individual actions and in international relations the greatest danger comes from "the separateness of self-interest"; the path to pursue, in fact, should be based on the co-operative principle. Or as he puts it so pithily a little later in the same essay, "in separation is bondage, in union is liberation" (145).
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