TAGORE’S VISION OF INDIA AND THE WORLD
In India, and especially in Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore is revered not only as a great poet but also as an important thinker whose ideas are still worth pondering and considering. The excellence of his poetry led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, the first non-European to be so honored. Moreover, his essays on literature, culture, society, politics, philosophy, religion, and education have been widely recognized and highly influential in India. He has also been celebrated as a writer of short stories, novels, plays, and songs as well as an acclaimed painter. In 1901, he founded a university in Shantiniketan to carry out his educational ideals as well as give people from abroad the chance to appreciate Indian society and culture. In addition, he visited Europe, South America, North America, Japan, China, and Southeast Asia as an ambassador not only of Indian spiritual culture but also as an advocate of world peace and one world.
As the economist Amartya Sen has pointed out, Tagore is no longer read much in the West, even though he was lionized in Europe when his poetry first appeared in English translation. As Sen has also noted, a huge barrier to the effective appreciation of Tagore’s literary work is the sheer difficulty of translating it from the original Bengali. But his vast nonfiction output has equally met with a lack of appreciation in the West. Part of this is due to his reputation in the West as a romantic and spiritual poet whose outlook fits badly with a scientific and technological age.
Tagore’s Trips to China and Japan
Tagore had twice met Kakuzo Okakura, the art critic who had brought Japanese attention back to the glories of its traditional culture. Okakura, the author of The Book of Tea, impressed upon Tagore the many spiritual and artistic links among Asian countries and he pushed Tagore toward the notion of an Asian mind. But Okakura was a nationalist who saw Japan as the cultural leader of a united Asia.
They both thought there was a deep fellowship among Asian peoples. Tagore based his pan-Asian idea on their shared outlook which he saw as primarily spiritual. In contrast, Okakura traced the historical dimension of their interaction and held that the streams of Asian spirituality and aesthetics were still present in Japan which preserved the essence of Asian culture and represented its most complete realization.
In Tagore’s view, Eastern civilization has its own path, not political in nature but rather social. Eastern peoples, unlike the Western type, were not warlike and technologically adept. Tagore saw them as spiritual and attuned to the depths of human relations. In contrast, modern civilization with its political, technological, and commercial character, was poised to swallow up Asia’s spiritual civilization
Tagore’s trips to China and Japan led to a rude awakening. In China, the influential writers and public figures of the 1920s were not all politically oriented, although those directly influenced by the May Fourth movement surely were. There were romantic poets like Xu Zhimo who sought to uplift the spirit of Chinese people with his poetry. It was Xu who helped make the arrangements for his visit to China in 1924 and who served as interpreter at most of Tagore’s lectures.
Tagore warned against imitating Western civilization whose materialism would dig the grave of ancient Asian ways of life. Tagore held out hope for a united Asian spiritual culture built upon aesthetic values and individuals capable of sacrifice rather than motivated by greed. Tagore attracted large crowds and there were many others besides Xu who were attracted to his message of universal love and brotherhood, closeness to nature, the importance of literary culture, the cultivation of the individual through education, nonviolent protest, and local development.
Mao Zedong was alarmed by the prospect of Chinese youth turning away from violent revolution and militancy under the spell of Tagore and his Chinese disciples. Mounting a furious campaign against Tagore, Chinese communists mocked him for being trapped in the past. His appeal to love and light was criticized as apolitical and irrelevant. Radical Chinese students rejected Tagore’s praise for traditional China, since the old order suppressed women, promoted extreme obedience within the family, failed to feed its peasants, and produced apathy among its population.
In his two trips to Japan in 1916 and 1924, Tagore’s message also received mixed responses. He encountered nationalist glorification of Japanese modernity and praise for its imperial conquests. He was lionized by Japanese people for being the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for literature, but was looked down on as the voice of a country unable to escape colonial subjection. His message of universal love and spiritual development fell mostly on deaf ears. Tagore obviously underestimated the enthusiasm for accumulating wealth and power in both China and Japan.
Tagore’s Hopes for India
Tagore was a very high-profile intellectual both in India and abroad who formulated influential notions of Asian spiritual unity. His orientation seems more relevant today than it did in the 1920s, since we have begun to prioritize spiritual and ecological concerns. This contrasts with the early stages of Asian modernization when economic growth was celebrated and the traditional spirituality was on the defensive. The limits of a materialistic civilization have come strongly into view as the advance of modern civilization leads to a decline of aesthetic appreciation and poetic grace. As a result, people begin to ache for what has been lost in the process.
India appeared to possess the kind of spiritual culture in the 1970s that was no longer vibrant in China and Japan. But 40 years later, India seems to be taking the same road toward materialism as China and Japan. Just as worrisome, the expansive and inclusive spirituality celebrated by Tagore has given way to Hindu nationalism and heightened aggressiveness toward Pakistan and Indian Muslims. After independence, in the name of democracy and economic development, India became a highly centralized state that tightly controlled people’s lives and brutally suppressed dissent, especially in regions like Kashmir. It could no longer be said, as Tagore once believed, that India’s lack of nationalistic spirit provided a positive contrast to the militant nationalism of prewar Japan.
In this light, Tagore’s hope for a spiritual Asian civilization that could balance the Western drive toward the acquisition of wealth and power was naïve. Economic growth in the world is driven more now by India and East Asia than by the United States or Europe. Tagore’s idea of a world division of labor between Asian spirituality and Western materialism clearly had no basis in reality. Revealingly, the eminent economist Amartya Sen has celebrated Tagore for his upholding of reason and as a proponent of freedom, while downplaying his advocacy of Indian spiritual and aesthetic values and opposition to Western materialism. Sen contrasts Tagore’s acceptance of modern technology and modern education with Gandhi’s recommendations for India to preserve its rural past with all its superstitions and poverty.
It can be safely concluded that Tagore’s misperception of India’s more immediate destiny reveals a major shortcoming of his vision. But the jury is still out on whether India at some future time will make a significant contribution to the world’s spiritual culture.
Critique of European Civilization
Tagore’s place in the creation of postcolonial Asia was spelled out in Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire (2012). Mishra notes that Tagore was the product of a family influenced by the Bengal Renaissance so that he was both proud of his own cultural traditions and comfortable with European ideas. He did not blindly oppose Western influence and Western science. At the same time, he parted company with Bengalis of Western education who renounced India’s Asianness in order to become more like Europeans. His critique of European civilization was based on the failure of European nations to act in accordance with universal ideals. The West promoted enlightenment notions of freedom and equality; yet, in practice, these were denied to the colonized peoples of places like India. While Tagore did not condemn modern civilization in the manner of Gandhi, he strongly criticized Western imperialism.
Along these lines, Tagore suggested that India reconstruct traditional religious teachings and reject the soulless materialism of the West. So Mishra places him along with Liang Qichao and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani as a member of the first generation of Asian intellectuals who sensitively and intelligently responded to Western colonization, both political and mental. Their ideas led to momentous changes that have decisively altered the face of Asia. They came into prominence as emotional resentment against Western dominance and worries about the state of their own people spilled over into large-scale nationalist and liberation movements and the construction of new nations in Asia.
Tagore was similar to Gandhi and Aurobindo in his recognition that the Western Enlightenment with its scientific worldview placed politics in the service of economic prosperity, subordinated humans to the industrial machine, and banished religious and ethical concerns from the public realm. Each of these great visionaries asserted that a civilization worthy of respect must be founded on spiritual and moral awareness. All three agreed that spiritually influential leaders must provide guidance in the more mundane areas such as culture and political economy as well. Since many of the great saints of India have avoided such involvement in the world and have viewed it as the terrain of maya, Tagore’s participation in the debates and struggles of the time is noteworthy for an Indian spiritual figure.
Tagore’s Contemporary Relevance
Tagore’s time will come again. He will be rediscovered as an impressive icon for the new spiritual awareness that is emerging. His attempt to navigate between narrow nationalism and idolatry of the West was largely successful. Even in the heat of the anti-British campaigns during the independence movement, he resisted the temptation to blindly support patriotic firebrands willing to use violence. Tagore knew that the final resting place of the soul must be humanity and not patriotism. He would have opposed the contemporary nationalist program in India of aggressive development of nuclear weapons and the marginalization of Muslims.
Tagore’s awareness of human unity is based on several experiences in which the individual ego no longer existed and there was only consciousness. This experience is best described as neither a sentimental notion nor a rational principle. It is something that Tagore knew that was closer to him than any observation of the external world or any product of thinking. This experience of the oneness of all that exists is at the heart of his creations. It animates his love of nature and humanity. It provides him with his unshakable conviction of the dignity and value of all that lives.
Tagore As Cultural Ambassador
Through Werner Heisenberg’s conversations with Tagore, the German physicist recognized that the systematic, relative, and impermanent qualities of the physical universe that confounded the understanding of contemporary physicists had long been understood and accepted within the Indian spiritual traditions. In a discussion with the British writer H.G. Wells, Tagore asserted that the East will assimilate physical science and then Western claims to racial superiority will be exposed as the outcome of a relatively brief advantage in wealth and material standards rather than as inherent superiority. And in his talk with the French writer Romain Rolland, Tagore criticized Indian spirituality for its intellectual laziness and superstitions. Modern science can help clear away the inessential and harmful beliefs in Indian religion that have accrued over the centuries, but once this is achieved, science itself must be humanized.
Tagore’s most complex intercultural interactions took place with Yeats who successfully promoted him for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. Tagore’s poetry deeply moved Yeats because the lyrics revealed a world that he had always dreamed about. It is a world where poetry and religion are one, the great poets are appreciated by the multitude, and the poetry comes from the earth and nature. It is not the strangeness of Tagore’s poetry that moved Yeats; rather, it is Tagore’s finding God in beautiful nature and in those we love that gives Yeats immense pleasure.
Yeats notes that in the West, we have long rejected the writings of saints who tell us we must forsake the world. In contrast, Tagore’s ability to evoke eternity and holiness in the moment links him with the Western tradition of simple voices like that of St. Francis and visionary poets like Blake. His worldly spirituality could be a healing balm for Western people caught up in the unending struggle for wealth and power.
Yeats does interpret Tagore’s spirituality as mystical. In so doing, Yeats falls in line with many Western views of the East that set apart the mystical East from the rational West. But he is clear that Tagore’s mysticism is far from being other-worldly. Tagore does not share the asceticism and pessimism about the world that Westerners have often seen as the distinguishing features of Indian spirituality. Here, Albert Schweitzer’s notion of Indian religion as world-negating and life-negating comes to mind. By recognizing Tagore’s love of life and of this world, Yeats is not perpetuating this common Western stereotype.
Yeats invokes Tagore’s spontaneity and celebration of children in nature as antidotes to the loss of soul that characterizes Western civilization. He is claiming that there is something deeply appealing in Tagore’s poetry that can nourish the sophisticated intellectuals of the West. There is a need for Tagore’s directness and simplicity coupled with his lyricism.
Tagore the Visionary
Tagore’s participation in the Bengal Renaissance demonstrates that he was no backward-looking traditionalist or advocate of a return to a natural life of innocence and purity. Instead, he ought to be appreciated as a visionary who perceived the outlines of a spiritual age and who described some of the challenges that would have to be faced. The creative abundance and spiritual depth of his work point to a state of being to which people in India and the rest of the world can aspire.
Tagore’s accomplishments make him an attractive figure and relevant to our historical predicament. He didn’t foresee the degree to which India would pursue economic growth and give up any claims to spiritual leadership in the world. Yet he did point out the potential contribution of a humanistic Indian spirituality to world civilization. On the very difficult issue of the relation between tradition and modernity, Tagore achieved a delicate balance that neither uncritically glorified Indian religious traditions nor negated the benefits of modern science.
Concerning the anti-colonial struggles, in the 1920s and afterwards Tagore insisted that Great Britain must give India independence and denied British claims to civilizational superiority. He did this without falling into the trap of militant nationalism that glorified violent struggle. Impressively, his own identity was made up of significant local and cosmopolitan components. His poetry was written in Bengali and he promoted Bengal’s rural development while serving as perhaps India’s most important cultural link to the rest of the world.
