Tagore's birth anniversary
Rabindranath Tagore's 148th birth anniversary is being celebrated with full fervour in Bangladesh, West Bengal and other places abroad where the Bengali Diaspora now extends. There will be a lot of justifiable encomia and tributes for this great poet and personage of Bengal. I would like to say a few words about why I think that after Gitajanli and the Nobel Prize (1913), by the 1920s there was a distinct cooling off regarding Tagore in English literary circles.
There were basically two reasons. First it was his knighthood ( conferred in June 1915) which he renounced after the Amritsar massacre (1919). The British government to my knowledge did not officially cancel the knighthood, and many still referred to him as 'Sir Rabindranath'. This put his erstwhile friends when he visited England later in a quandary as to how to address him. With close friends, or non British, ( like WB Yeats, or GB Shaw etc. who were Irish) it did not matter much, but even William Rothenstein was not as enthusiastic. The situation was further complicated when a debate in parliament was raging on the Amritasar massacre, and the House was divided mostly in favour of General O'Dwyer who was in charge and perpetrated the massacre. Robert Bridges ( the English poet laureate) declined to meet Tagore, offering one excuse or another, although in 1912 he invited Tagore to his home near Oxford for tea and invited also an oxford student from Bengal to meet Tagore , whose name was Hussain Shahid Suhrawardy.
Perhaps the second reason was more important which is that suddenly books (Prose, poems, plays and essays etc) in English were being published by Macmillan apparently written by Rabindranath Tagore without any acknowledgement or statement that these were translations from his Bengali work. I have such a copy of his full length novel Gora published by Macmillan (1924). Although India was the Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire, and Calcutta its second largest city it must have touched a raw nerve, especially as the only other writer in English who won the Nobel Prize was Rudyard Kipling ( 1907, and he also wrote mainly about India). There appeared to be an encroachment on the hallowed ground of English poetry with the likes of Milton, Shakespeare and the Romantic poets. W.B Yeats (who himself won the Nobel Prize in 1923) wrote a letter to Rothenstein in 1935 which expresses the sentiment quite clearly:
“ We got out three good books and then, because he thought it more important to see and know English than to be a great poet, he brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation. Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English. Nobody can write with music and style in a language not learned in childhood and ever since the language of his thought. I shall return to the question of Tagore but not yet I shall return to it because he has published in recent years, and in English prose books of great beauty, and these books have been ignored because of the eclipse of his reputation as a poet.”
Of course the situation ( of who writes poetry in English) is quite different now, about hundred years after Tagore's winning Nobel Prize.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments