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Rabindranath Tagore India (1861 - 1941) Timeline Yoga / Hindu Poems by Rabindranath Tagore Books - Links |
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Life
He was born on May 7, 1861, in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta, the youngest of thirteen surviving children in one of the most remarkable families in Bengal. His grandfather Dwarkanath had been a merchant prince; his father, Debendranath, was known as the Maharshi, the great sage, and led the Brahmo Samaj — the reform movement that had turned back to the Upanishads for a formless, imageless God and set aside caste ritual and idol worship. The house was full of musicians, playwrights, philosophers and magazines. Rabindranath grew up inside a living argument about what religion was for.
It was also a lonely childhood. He was raised largely by servants — he later called it, wryly, a kind of servocracy — with his father away for long stretches and his mother, Sarada Devi, absorbed in an enormous household. She died in March 1875, when he was thirteen. In *My Reminiscences* he admits that the grief did not arrive at once; it came later, at the thought that she would never again come through that particular door.
Two years before that, at eleven, he had been taken away by his father for four months — to Santiniketan, to Amritsar, and finally up to Dalhousie in the Himalayas. At the Golden Temple he heard the Sikhs singing and never forgot it. In the mountains he rose before light to learn Sanskrit verses from the Upanishads at his father's side. It was the first time the family religion stopped being furniture and became something he was actually doing.
At sixteen he pulled off a small literary fraud. He produced a sheaf of devotional poems in archaic Bengali, attributed them to Bhanusimha, a seventeenth-century Vaishnava poet whose manuscripts had supposedly just come to light, and watched the scholars accept them. It is worth noticing what that means: his first religious poems were written in costume, in someone else's voice, because the longing in them was not yet his to claim. Sent to England in 1878 to become a barrister, he studied nothing in particular, read Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne, and came home after less than two years without a degree and without apology.
Then, in 1882, came the morning that changed everything — a sunrise seen from a veranda on Sudder Street that split his life into before and after.
In December 1883 he married Mrinalini Devi. Four months later, in April 1884, Kadambari Devi — his brother Jyotirindranath's wife, and the companion of his youth, his first reader and sharpest critic — took her own life at twenty-four. He was writing toward her, in one way or another, for the rest of his life.
In 1890 his father sent him out to manage the family estates at Shilaidaha, on the Padma river in what is now Bangladesh. He stayed, on and off, for a decade — much of it on a houseboat, drifting, watching the water and the villages. He collected token rents, sat with farmers, and listened to the wandering Baul singers of the district. Those years made him. Then, in 1901, he founded a school at Santiniketan: classes held outdoors under the trees, a marble prayer hall, a library, a garden.
What followed was a run of loss that would have broken most people. His wife Mrinalini died in 1902; his daughter Renuka in 1903; his father in 1905; his youngest son, Samindranath, of cholera in 1907. His daughter Bela died in 1918. The Bengali Gitanjali (1910) rose directly out of that ground.
In 1912, sailing to England and unwell, he began putting the songs into English prose to occupy himself — nothing more ambitious than that. W. B. Yeats read the pages and was undone by them. The India Society published the little book in November 1912; the Nobel Prize came a year later, in November 1913.
Knighted in 1915, he gave the honor back after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of April 1919, writing to the Viceroy that "badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of my countrymen."
The last decades were restless and enormous. He built Visva-Bharati into a university in 1921 and added a rural reconstruction institute at Sriniketan the following year. He traveled to more than thirty countries, delivered the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford in 1930, argued with Einstein about the nature of reality, denounced Mussolini in print after meeting him, and publicly rebuked Gandhi in 1934 for calling the Bihar earthquake divine punishment. In his late sixties he took up painting and produced thousands of images. He died on August 7, 1941, at eighty, in an upstairs room of the Jorasanko house where he had been born.
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Spiritual Context
Tagore inherited a religion and then had to find out whether it was true.
What he inherited was unusually good raw material: the Brahmo Samaj's austere monotheism, drawn straight from the Upanishads — one reality, without form, present everywhere, not to be housed in an image. But it was his father's, and for years it stayed his father's.
The morning that made it his own came in 1882, at 10 Sudder Street in Calcutta, where he was living with his brother and Kadambari. He was standing on the veranda at sunrise, looking at the tops of the trees, when — as he later put it in My Reminiscences — "a covering seemed to fall away from my eyes, and I found the world bathed in a wonderful radiance, with waves of beauty and joy swelling on every side." Nothing was trivial after that; nothing was ugly. The same day he wrote Nirjharer Swapnabhanga — "The Awakening of the Waterfall" — a poem that comes down the page like water breaking out of ice. It fed the whole of Prabhat Sangit (Morning Songs) in 1883.
And then — this is the part that makes him trustworthy — it faded. He says so plainly. The radiance stayed with him for some days, dimmed, and was gone by the time he reached Darjeeling. Everything afterward is the work of a man who has seen something once and refuses either to forget it or to pretend he still has it.
The Padma years gave that vision a human face. Drifting on the river in the 1890s, Tagore came to know the songs of the Bauls — the wandering, half-mad, deliberately casteless minstrels of Bengal who belong to no religion and borrow from all of them. Through a village postmaster named Gagan Harkara he encountered the songs of the great Baul, Lalon. What the Bauls sing about is the moner manush, the man of the heart: God not above the world but hidden inside the human being, to be found nowhere else and by no shortcut. That idea went straight into the marrow of Tagore's work, and he never disguised the debt. When he stood up at Oxford in 1930 to deliver the Hibbert Lectures — the height of his fame, the most establishment platform imaginable — he built his argument toward the divinity of man and the humanity of God, and then appended to the published book a section on the Baul singers of Bengal. He gave the last word to illiterate villagers.
The God of his poems has a name he coined himself: Jivan Devata, the Lord of his life. Not a monarch and not an abstraction — a presence that is lover, friend, guest, master and stranger by turns, who lives his life through him and who is sometimes maddeningly late in arriving. This is why Gitanjali reads as both prayer and love poetry, and why it never resolves into doctrine.
He had no patience for renunciation as a spiritual career, and none at all for piety that turns its back on the world. Gitanjali 11 is as close to a manifesto as he wrote:
Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!
He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the path-maker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!
That is the whole of his religion in four sentences — and it is also why his politics and his mysticism were never separable. The man who wrote that was the same man who handed back a knighthood.
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The Poetry
Most of his poetry is song. Tagore wrote well over two thousand of them, words and music together, and in Bengal they are not literature but common property — sung at weddings and funerals, on the radio, by people who could not name the collection they come from. Reading him only on the page is like reading a hymn book and thinking you have heard the singing.
What you notice first in the poems is how close he stands to the one he is addressing. There is almost no distance in them, and almost no formality. The beloved is expected — a lamp is lit, a room is swept, and then there is waiting, and the waiting itself becomes the poem. He is unembarrassed by longing, unembarrassed by joy, and entirely willing to sound small: "Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life."
Then there is the weather. Very little of his work happens indoors. Rain, rivers, boats, the first storm of the monsoon, a road going somewhere, a flute heard from across a field — these are not decoration but the actual furniture of his spiritual life, and they come from the decade on the Padma.
And there is his refusal to make death an enemy. Having buried a wife, a father and three children, he wrote some of the most untroubled poems about dying in any language — not consolation exactly, more a kind of courtesy extended to the last guest.
What a reader should listen for is the intimacy. He is not describing God. He is talking to someone.
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Translations
Tagore's own English versions — Gitanjali: Song Offerings (1912), and the volumes that followed — are the ones the world fell in love with, but they are transcreations, not translations. He turned tightly rhymed and metered Bengali lyrics into unrhymed English prose, cut and recombined freely, and drew the 103 pieces of Song Offerings not only from the Bengali Gitanjali but from half a dozen other books. He also reached for a King James solemnity — thee, thou, hath — that the Bengali does not have. The result is beautiful and it is genuinely his, but it is a softer, more churchly, more archaic poet than the one Bengali readers know, and it is the main reason his Western reputation cooled for decades after the Nobel.
For readers who want to hear the other Tagore:
- William Radice, Selected Poems (Penguin, 1985) — the translation that reopened Tagore in English; keeps the muscle and the form.
- Ketaki Kushari Dyson, I Won't Let You Go (Bloodaxe) — widely regarded as the closest anyone has come to the musicality and the sensuous Bengali-ness of the originals.
- Tony K. Stewart and Chase Twichell, The Lover of God (Copper Canyon, 2003) — the Bhanusimha poems, the teenage forgery, rendered as the passionate Vaishnava love poetry it always was.
- Joe Winter, Song Offerings — a verse translation of the Bengali *Gitanjali* that restores the rhyme and meter Tagore himself abandoned in English.
- Wendy Barker and Saranindranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore: Final Poems — the last work, written as he was dying.
Poems by Rabindranath Tagore
- Accept me, my lord, accept me for this while
- I touch God in my song
- On many an idle day have I grieved over lost time (from Gitanjali)
- (1) Thou hast made me endless (from Gitanjali)
- (38) I want thee, only thee (from Gitanjali)
- (63) Thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not (from Gitanjali)
- (75) Thy gifts to us mortals fulfil all our needs (from Gitanjali)
- (80) I am like a remnant of a cloud of autumn (from Gitanjali)
- (84) It is the pang of separation that spreads throughout the world (from Gitanjali)
- (101) Ever in my life have I sought thee with my songs (from Gitanjali)
- (103) In one salutation to thee, my God (from Gitanjali)
- He's there among the scented trees (from The Lover of God)
- Listen, can you hear it? (from The Lover of God)
- Who are You, who keeps my heart awake? (from The Lover of God)
- Your flute plays the exact notes of my pain. (from The Lover of God)
Recommended Books: Rabindranath Tagore
Related Links
Rabindranath Tagore
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rtagore.htm
A good biography online.
Biography of Rabindranath Tagore
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Louvre/2618/rabi/rabiintro.htm
A brief biography and several selected poems
Tagore and His India
http://nobelprize.org/literature/articles/sen/
An intelligent article about Tagore, exploring his association with mysticism, his mixed feelings toward religion, and the struggle for independence from the British Empire.
Rabindranath Tagore
http://www.parabaas.com/rabindranath/
Several excellent articles on Rabindranath Tagore.
Sacred Texts: Tagore
http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/tagore/index.htm
Several Tagore poems online.
The Spiritual Bee - Free books by Tagore
http://www.spiritualbee.com/free-spiritual-books/
A very nice resource of several collections of Tagore's poetry and other writings, available for download for free - including Glimpses of Bengal, Sadhana, The Fugitive, The Gardener, and Gitanjali.
