Tagore, Rabindranath

TAGORE, RABINDRANATH (1861–1941), poet, novelist, playwright, composer, and spiritual leader, is best known as the winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature and one of India's greatest modern poets. Yet he was also a complex figure who embodied many of the deepest religious and political tensions of late colonial India. As his friend E. J. Thompson described him, Tagore had a kind of dual soul, torn between his love of solitude, contemplation, and art and his commitment to social action (Thompson, 1921).

Born in Kolkata to a wealthy Bengali Brāhmaṇ family, Tagore was the son of Debendranath Tagore, a leader in the influential Hindu reform movement known as the Brāhmo Samāj and a key figure in the "Bengal Renaissance" of the nineteenth century. Although he later became critical of the movement, the universalistic and humanistic ideals of the Brāhmo Samāj had a lasting impact on Rabindranath Tagore's thought.

Tagore was a poet from an early age, composing his first piece at age eight. He was not, however, a spirit to be restrained by conventional educational institutions, and he left school at fourteen to study at home. Though a lover of the great Sanskrit poets like Kalidasa and the devotional lyrics of the Bengal Vaiṣṇavas, Tagore was also deeply influenced by nineteenth-century English poets, perhaps above all by the English romantics like John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose reverence for nature and ideal of the creative artist can be seen throughout Tagore's work.

In 1890 Tagore took charge of the family estates in Shelidah (modern Bangladesh), where he came to admire the simple daily life, natural beauty, and folk culture of rural Bengal. Here he also first came into contact with the Baūls, a group of wandering spiritual "madmen" who reject the outward trappings of institutional religion and instead seek the indwelling "man of the heart," the elusive presence of the divine that dwells within every human body. The Baūls' iconoclastic "religion of man" (manusher dharma) had a lasting influence on Tagore's spiritual ideals. Called by some the "greatest of the Baūls," Tagore was a key figure in the popularization of Baūl music and spirituality as an icon of Bengali folk culture.

Tagore described his own spiritual vision as a "religion of the artist." Rejecting the rigidity and superficiality of institutional religions, including that of the Brāhmo Samāj, he based his "poet's religion" on a vision of the creative unity among God, humanity, and nature. Just as the One Divine Creator manifests himself in the infinite forms and beauty of nature, so too the individual artist reflects that diversity and returns it to divine unity through poetry, music, and art.

Tagore's literary output is astonishing in its breadth and diversity. In addition to poetry in various genres, he wrote novels, short stories, essays, political articles, and songs while also composing music and painting. He began translating his works into English, and his first attempt, Gitanjali (Song offerings; 1913), won the Noble Prize for Literature in 1913. Praised by W. B. Yeats as lyrics "expressing in thought a world I have dreamt of all my life," these songs helped give Tagore an international reputation and introduced Bengali literature to the world (Yeats 1913: xiii).

Unfortunately Tagore has so often been subject to hagiography and aesthetic idealization that it is often forgotten that he was, in his early life, also deeply involved in nationalist politics. As an active participant in the Swadeshi (Our Country) movement, he played an important role in the struggle for independence from British rule in the years up to 1907. He, however, grew disillusioned with the elitism and increasing violence of the movement and so gradually retreated from the political sphere into the inner domain of poetry, art, and spirituality.

This profound disillusionment with the violence of the nationalist movement and the retreat into an inner realm of spirituality is poignantly expressed in his novel The Home and the World (Ghare-bāire; 1919). One of Tagore's darkest works, it centers on the terrorist violence of 1907 and the ultimate failure of violent revolt as a means to independence. At the same time it also expresses Tagore's own ambivalent status, torn between home and world, between the inner realm of art and spirituality and the outward realm of public action.

Even after his withdrawal from political action Tagore continued to speak on social and political issues, if only in a sort of "antipolitical" way. In 1917, shocked by the horrors of World War I, Tagore also delivered a series of lectures in Japan and the United States that leveled a scathing attack on the "madness of nationalism" (Kopf 1979: 301). A monstrous and dehumanizing force spreading through the globe, nationalism had in Tagore's eyes only succeeded in stripping human beings of their individuality and ended in violent self-destruction.

In addition to his importance as a poet, artist, and political figure, Tagore was also deeply concerned with education. He founded Shantiniketan (the "abode of peace"), one of India's most original examples of alternative pedagogy. Dismayed by the stifling structures of traditional education in British India, Tagore turned instead to the model of the tapovanas or forest hermitages. Classes at Shantiniketan were held outdoors, in the shade of trees, emphasized the arts, and fostered the ideal of creative unity central to Tagore's own philosophy.

Tagore's influence remains evident in contemporary India not only in his homeland, where he is a cultural icon, but throughout the country and beyond. The composer of the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh, he is also one of the most widely published authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, perhaps his most lasting relevance lies in his encounters with religious violence and terrorism in colonial India. His reflections on the "madness of nationalism" are no less relevant for the twenty-first century, as religious violence has by no means ended but arguably only grown more intense and destructive. It is more than a little ironic that the same country that sings his lyrics in its national anthem should remain torn by the very religious nationalism that Tagore so deplored.

Bengali Religions; Hinduism; Poetry, Article on Indian Religious Poetry.

Tagore's works exist in many editions and translations, among them the Oxford Tagore translations (Oxford, U.K., 2002–2004) and the Rabindranath Tagore Omnibus (New Delhi, 2003). A thorough biography of Tagore in English is Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (New York, 1995). Older works include Edward John Thompson, Rabindranath Tagore: His Life and Work (Calcutta, India, 1921); and Krishna Kripalani, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (Calcutta, India, 1980). Useful discussions of Tagore's role in modern Indian religion and politics include David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, N.J., 1979); Stephen N. Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China, and India (Cambridge, U.K., 1970); and Hugh B. Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (Berkeley, Calif., 2003), chap. 3.