The New Nation - Internet Edition

Mohammad Shahidul Islam

Rabindranath Tagore, being first Bengali and Asian, won Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 principally for his prose translations of Gitanjali (song offerings).

William Rothenstein, Tagore's friend, the noted English painter and art reviewer, was deeply fascinated to the South Asian poetic works. He especially was drawn to Gitanjali, Bengali for "song offerings." The delicate beauty and charm of these poems prompted Rothenstein to urge Tagore to translate them into English so more people in the West could experience them. Unenthusiastically, with much persuasion, Tagore let him have the notebook. The painter could not believe his eyes. The poems were incredible. He called his friend, the great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, also a Nobel Laureate (1923), and finally talked Yeats into looking at the hand scrawled notebook.

W.B. Yeats provided an introduction to Gitanjali; he writes that this volume "stirred my blood as nothing has for years." About the Bengali culture Yeats comments, "The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes."

The rest, as they say, is history. Yeats was enthralled. Thereafter, both the poetry and the man were an instant sensation, first in London literary circles, and soon thereafter in the entire world. His spiritual presence was awesome. His words evoked great beauty. Nobody had ever read anything like it.

A glimpse of the mysticism and sentimental beauty of Bengali culture were revealed to the West for the first time. Less than a year later, in 1913, Rabindranath received the Nobel Prize for literature. He was the first non-westerner to be so honored. Overnight he was famous and began world lecture tours promoting inter-cultural harmony and understanding. In 1915 he was knighted by the British King George V. When not traveling he remained at his family home outside of Calcutta, where he remained very active as a literary, spiritual and social-political force.

Yeats explains that Tagore's was "[a] tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing" and that it "has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble."

Yeats later wrote many poems based on Eastern concepts; although, their subtleties at times evaded him. Nevertheless, Yeats should be credited with advancing the West's interest and attraction to the spiritual nature of those concepts.

Also in the introduction, Yeats asserts, "If our life was not a continual warfare, we would not have taste, we would not know what is good, we would not find hearers and readers. Four-fifths of our energy is spent in this quarrel with bad taste, whether in our own minds or in the minds of others." This somewhat harsh assessment, no doubt, points out the mood of his era: Yeats' birth and death dates (1861-1939) sandwiches the Irish poet's life between two bloody Western wars, the American Civil War and World War II. Yeats also correctly measures Tagore's achievement when he tells us the Tagore's songs are not only respected and admired by scholars, but also they are sung in the fields by peasants. Yeats would have been astonished if his own poetry had been accepted by such a wide spectrum of the populace.

The following is an excerpt, Gitanjali poem (7):

My song has put off her adornments. She has no pride of dress and decoration. Ornaments would mar our union. They would come between thee and me. Their jingling would drown thy whispers. My poet's vanity dies in shame before thy sight. O Master Poet, I have sat down at thy feet. Only let me make my life simple and straight like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.

Tagore served as a spiritual and creative beacon to his countrymen, and indeed, the whole world. He used the funds from his writing and lecturing to expand upon the school he had founded in 1901 now known as Visva Bharati. The alternative to the poor system of education imposed by the British combined the best of traditional Hindu education with Western ideals. Tagore's multi-cultural educational efforts were an inspiration to many, including his friend, Count Hermann Keyserling of Estonia. Count Keyserling founded his own school in 1920 patterned upon Tagore's school, and the ancient universities which existed in Northern India under Buddhist rule over 2,000 years ago under the name School of Wisdom. Rabindranath Tagore led the opening program of the School of Wisdom in 1920, and participated in several of its programs thereafter.

Rabindranath Tagore's creative output tells us a lot about this Renaissance man. The variety, quality and quantity are unbelievable.

As a writer, Tagore primarily worked in Bengali, but after his success with Gitanjali, he translated many of his other works into English. He wrote over one thousand poems; eight volumes of short stories; almost two dozen plays and play-lets; eight novels; and many books and essays on philosophy, religion, education and social topics. Aside from words and drama, his other great love was music, Bengali style. He composed more than two thousand songs, both the music and lyrics. Two of them became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.