RABINDRANATH TAGORE

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

(1861—1941)

We come to what may be described as the last great expression of World Literature for the present age — Rabindranath Tagore. Just a bare a generation has passed by now (1970) since his death in 1941, and mankind has to wait and see for the next great manifestation of the Universal in the field of literary expression in thought, beauty and power and in the realisation of the Unseen. Although humanity has been specially lucky in having at least three world figures during two centuries — 1750-1950, Goethe, Tolstoy and Tagore (in Literature, leaving aside world figures in Science, like e.g. Einstein), it would be hoping for too much to have a Shakespeare or a Tagore, a Goethe or a Tolstoy, every hundred years. But one cannot be either too optimistic or two pessimistic. The present chaotic condition of human society and of the mind of the masses, with the increasing population, with the narrowing down of the means of subsistence, and with new forms of political power (which are hardly conducive to the growth of man to his full stature as something more than a mere biological automation), seem to be undoing the work of centuries and millennia. The mentality of most of these political set-ups is confined to the material world only, sometimes putting their faith in brute force which is to be ruthlessly applied for the elimination of man’s right to think of himself; and in the name of ‘the rights of the masses’ (for which provision is sought to be made for adequate supply of panem et circenses, to keep the brute in man contented and unconcerned about things more abiding than the ephemeral), they are establishing worst forms of oligarchy and autocracy. Perhaps in the urgency of human history which transcends man-made ideologies and directives, the advent of the next great World Leader in thought and action is much nearer than we might imagine — a leader who might be able to help mankind in removing all the senseless and selfish ignorance, hypocrisy and falsehood which are masquerading as truth and justice and equity for man, and in putting a stop to most cruel forms of genocide which are being perpetrated in the name of Integration or International Fusion. Be it as it may, Rabindranath Tagore now stands before us as the embodiment of Intellectualism and Free Thought, of Universalism and Love of Humanity, of Imaginativeness, and of an Emotionalism which links itself up to the eternal Verities of human life, as well as of a Supreme feeling for Beauty and a Sense of the Ultimate Reality. His life and life’s work in literature and in so many other spheres showed all these— it was an expression of an uncommon type of ‘Activity of Thought.’

Rabindranath Tagore, like all great World Poets, belonged equally to his own country and to Humanity, like the Poets of the Rāmāyana and the Mahābhārata, like Kālidāsa and like Homar, Hesiod and the Greek Tragedians, like Shakespeare, Goethe and Tolstoy. He was born at a time when there was a most remarkable intellectual and spiritual renaissance in Bengal and India, under a great cultural and humanistic stimulus from the mind of Europe which spread its leaven to modernise the Indian mind through the medium of the English language. This language brought to India European thought, European science, European humanism and European spiritual values and the supreme morality of European social ideals. During the 25 years, from 1850 to 1875, to Bengal and India was vouchsafed, by “the compulsion of events in history’’, such a remarkable galaxy of poets and writers, thinkers, scientists, educationists, scholars, artists and adventuring spirits in the different walks of life (excepting in the Army and in foreign exploration, which were restricted for or virtually barred to Indians under British rule) as would be difficult to match anywhere in the world. We can only think of Greece of the 5th century B.C., and of Elizabethan England. For these 25 years, in Bengal, we are holding some birth-centenary or other (of some illustrious writer or thinker or benefactor of his people) every year, and in some years we are having more than one such centenary.

The impact of the European mind had already started its work in bringing in a new kind of enlightenment, which only fortified the great enquiring and scientific mind of ancient India as preserved in Sanskrit literature and as continued (in howsoever confused or weakened a form) in the orthodox Hindu tradition. Yōga or Addition of New Developments in or Forms of Thought and Experience from outside, which we did not have in India but which experience had shown to be beneficial to mankind; and Kshēma or Conservation of those Elements in our Hindu Way of Thought and Hindu Way of Life which were proved to be of value to us and which other people were also eager to accept — these were in the mental atmosphere of the intellectual leaders of Bengal and India from 1800, throughout almost the entire period of the 19th century, when Rabindranath Tagore had his early or formative period, from the eighties of the last century onwards.

Rabindranath’s life of 80 years was passed during a most stirring period of social, intellectual, political and spiritual ferment and change in India — a change which was consciously the work of the dynamic section of the intellectual leaders, and it was the work of a gifted people whose full unfettered development was regulated and restrained by the political control of British colonial exploitation and imperial aggrandisement. During this period, we have to note these facts in the intellectual and other domains. There was the spread of English education, which was enthusiastically taken up by the intelligentsia, and this was facilitated by the establishment of High English Schools all over the country, both by the British Government and by Indian enterprise, mostly from after 1840. The foundation of the three Universities at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in 1857 gave a great impetus to higher studies in European lore, and at the same time this led to a much wider study of Sanskrit, which, as the classical language par excellence for Indian students, was made compulsory for most Hindu students in the secondary stage who were to enter a college after passing the ‘Entrance Examination’, and it was also made obligatory during the first two years at college. Bengali literature flourished in new channels, and great names appeared from the second half of the 19th century— three of whom, besides Tagore and Swami Vivekananda, have become all-India figures, namely, Iswar Chandra Vidyāsāgar, Māikel (Michael) Madhusūdan Datta and Bankim Chandra Chatterji. The Brahmo Samaj as a rationalistic Hindu church was fully established. Girls’ education spread, and the marriages of Hindu widows as well as inter-caste marriages among Hindus were made legal. There was a revival of interest in Early Bengali literature as much as in Sanskrit studies. The press in both Bengali and English became a force in public life, in Bengal particularly, with daily papers like the Hindoo Patriot and the Amrita Bazar Patrika. A Bengali theatre (a sort of a national theatre, unique in India) came to be established, giving a number of actor-dramatists like Girish Chandra Ghosh and Amritalal Bose, whose achievements could be compared with those of the Elizabethean dramatists — actors and play-wrights. Indian administrators, who had to go to England to qualify for the higher Civil Service in their own country by passing in London the Indian Civil Service Examination, were coming up, giving men of such eminence as Satyendranath Tagore (elder brother of Rabindranath Tagore), Romesh Chunder Dutt, Anunodoram Borooah and Surendranath Banerji, who distinguished themselves in other domains of life as well. Bengali Barristers trained in England, side by side with Bengali “Ukils’’ (Vakils or Lawyers) with Indian University degrees in Law, and Bengali and other Indian Doctors with full qualifications according to the modern European standards, also took their place in a society, which was growing more and more modern, and up-to-date, and complex. Religious leaders, some orthodox, others progressive, also made their advent. Among them were two of the greatest names in the annals of India — Ramakrishna Paramahansa and Swami Vivekananda, who gave stress to the all-comprehensive and universal aspects of Hinduism, and to its great philosophical and spiritual ideals as in the Vedanta of the Upanishads. Maharshi Devendranath Tagore, father of Rabindranath, was another religious leader who integrated in himself the life of an Ideal Householder and a Man of God. And we had also the political leaders, like Raj Narayan Bose, Nabagopal Mitra, W C Bannerjee, Surendranath Bannerji, Lal Mohan Ghosh, Sisir Kumar Ghosh, and the rest, who began that organised struggle along peaceful lines for the economic and political emancipation of India through an all-India organisation like the Indian National Congress, which, after many vicissitudes, was responsible, among other things, for bringing about the independence of India. Other Indian leaders from all over the country stood side by with Bengal leaders in this national struggle for progress and freedom, and for both modernism and conservation.

Rabindranath Tagore, although in his boyhood he joined two schools, had no formal school or college education. But he had as good an education at home as it was possible in a rich family where he had an ideal father who was fully alive to his responsibilities for his sons’ future life and career. He took his full share in all the progressive movements, including the struggle launched by the Indian National Congress for political freedom. His life was not sensational but it was not free excitements. He never liked the irksomeness of formal schooling, so it was arranged for him to have a good training at home, with mathematics, elementary science, physiology and anatomy, history and geography, drawing and music besides Bengali and English being taught to him by masters at home. He also practised wrestling and gymnastics and riding. An early experience was when (after his initiation at the age of 12 as a Brahman boy into the Vedic religion and the great Gāyatrī prayer), he went with his father to the Punjab, visiting Amritsar, the centre of the Sikh faith, and sojourning among the forests and snows of the Himalayas around Dalhousie. This certainly extended his mental horizon and his susceptibility to the beauty and the grandeur of Nature, which was such an important trait in his poetic genius. During his Himalayan sojourn, his father regularly taught him Sanskrit, English and Astronomy. He lost his mother when he was about 14. At the age of 17, after a short stay at Ahmedabad with his second brother, Satyendranath Tagore (who had just returned from England as an officer of the Indian Civil Service), he was sent to England to study under the eyes of Satyendranath and his wife, who took him with them. He attended some classes in the University College, London (Henry Morley’s classes on English Literature), and he had his first glimpse of European life and ways as well as British politics. As one of a family of 15 brothers and sisters under a father who was a great man, and was quite a strict but benign patriarch, and a man of deep spirituality as well (for which his admiring countrymen who followed his lead in religion gave him the sobriquet of Maharshi or “the Great Sage’’), he was married quite early at the age of 22, and his wife, Mrinalini Devi was quite young — early marriages being the rule in those days. His wife belonged to a middle-class family. Three daughters and two sons were born of this marriage. Rabindranath proved to be an ideal husband and father, and his wife was a true helpmate in his work, particularly in connexion with the school he started in 1901. Mrinalini Devi was a lady of the old type, simple and loving and not too intellectual, yet understanding and fully appreciating her husband’s greatness, and she was successful in building a happy home for the poet, and was ready to suffer and sacrifice without thought of self for his ideals. When she died in 1902, 20 years after her marriage, Rabindranath wrote a most sincere and loving tribute to her memory in the form of a series of poems (Smaran “remembrance’’), which are among the finest of his poetical output. His father the Maharshi had already sent him (in 1890) to their family estates at Shilāidah by the great Padmā river in East Bengal, to administer them; and contrary to expectation or apprehension (for he had already made his name as a poet), he proved to be a capable manager of the family property, improving it in many ways and introducing a number of beneficient measures to better the condition of the tenants.

Tagore, with the permission and blessings of his father, had started in 1901 his famous open-air school at Santiniketan, then a small place, about 100 miles to the North-West of Calcutta. Plain living, in communion with Nature, with the classes being held (following the ancient Indian way) in the open, in the shade of trees, combined with the best of modern education available in India, with the background of Hindu (Vedic) faith and thought, was the ideal of his Brahmacharyāśrama. Santiniketan became his home for practically the whole of his life, and with his presence as a potent source of inspiration, Santiniketan became a quiet and peaceful but a most dynamic centre for all positive conservation and advance in Indian culture, including not only serious literary and humanistic studies with some science, but also Art and Music and Drama and Dancing.

In 1913, at the age of 52 Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature by the Swedish Academy, and he at once became a world celebrity. Before that he was easily the most popular poet and writer of his time among his own people in Bengal. Long before, in 1882, in his early youth, at a social gathering at the residence of Romesh Chunder Dutt, he received the blessings of Bankim Chandra Chatterji, who hailed him as the coming great Poet and Master Writer of Bengal. The money he received as prize for the award he used in helping rural rehabilitation in his family estate. In the meanwhile, volumes of poetry and other writings in Bengali (and in English) were coming out with steady regularity, and all this enhanced his reputation as a world poet and writer. His works were being translated into all the important languages of the world. He was very much in demand for his readings and his talks in the West and in America, and he as a great Internationalist was almost every year on the move, visiting country after country.

He had entered wholeheartedly in the political struggle in India from 1905 onwards, and this made him a persona non grata with the British government, he being held in suspicion. Government servants would not dare to send their children to his school. But amends were sought to be made in the eye of the civilised world by the British Government by giving him a knighthood after the Nobel award brought him world celebrity. This honour he discarded in 1919 after the brutal mass murder of hundreds of unarmed Indians by the orders of an English military officer at Jalianwalabagh in Amritsar, a monstrous deed which was condoned and even applauded by a large mass of British imperialists, both in India and in Britain.

In 1921, he founded, as an extension of his school, his famous International University of Visva-Bhāratī, a place where India was to meet the rest of the world for mutual benefit in the domains of intellectual, artistic and spiritual culture. This has been one of his great constructive works in life; and another such work, only less known, is the institution he named Śrīnikētan for training in agriculture and service for village uplift. Illustrious contemporaries of his in the different countries of the world, in the sphere of Ideas and of Activities of the Mind and Spirit, eminent persons in the Humanities and the Sciences, in Social Service and Administration, in Thought and Religion, came to have a great respect for him and to regard him as one of the World’s outstanding personalities. With a good many of them he had direct personal contact, and the rest gave an expression to the way in which Tagore had impressed them. Thus we may mention Romain Rolland, Albert Einstein, Benedetto Croce, Albert Schweitzer, George Bernard Shaw, Sylvian Lévi, H G Wells, Kakuzo Okakura, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Liang Chi-Chiao, HsÜ Shih, HsÜ Tsi-Mo, Yone Noguchi, Selma Lagerlof, W B Yeats, C F Andrews, Kostes Palamas, Johann Bojer, Masaharu Anesaki, Andrea Butenschon, Sir Gilbert Murray, Victoria Ocampo, President Sukarno, Raden Mas Noto Soeroto, Prince Damrong Rajanubhab, Nikolas Roerich, Bertrand Russel, Paul Valéry, Stefan Zweig, J Ph Vogel, J C Smuts, R Menendez Pidal, and quite a number of others; and in his own country, we have among his intimate friends and admirers, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Aurobindo Ghosh, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Praphulla Chandra Ray, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Ramendra Sundar Trivedi, Ramananda Chatterji, and most of the other great personalities; and many more, all of them in the fore-front of the intellectual, cultural and political life of man at the present age, would come in touch with him, for dialogues on the course of civilisation and humanistics through his works as much as through his travels, his talks and his personal contacts, Rabindranath Tagore has left his mark on the civilised and advanced mentality of the present age in a way which was not possible for any of his great predecessors in World Literature, in the days of restricted communication and still more restricted travel. An indefatigable Work Traveller, he was like a roving Odysseus of Culture and Internationalism; and as it was before the present jet age with a most rapid expansion of air travel most of his wanderings were by sea and land.

The variety of his activities may just be touched upon, as that will give an idea about the wide range of his interests. His achievement as a Poet and Writer, as a Teacher and Thought-leader (as indicating the special class of great men to which he belonged in the first instance) is discussed later. Over and above being a Poet and a Writer, he was one of the greatest Masters of his times in India. His place in the annals of Indian Music is in the line of musical geniuses and singers of medieval and modern India who have directed the course of music in the country from the 12th century onwards — like Śankarānanda Sarawariyā, Mahādéva Rāo, Vivéka-swāmi, Gopāla Nāyaka, Amīr Khusrau, Haridāsa-swāmī, Muhammad Ghaus, Tāna-séna, Baijū Bāwarā, Shōrī Miyān, Purandara-dāsa and Tyāga-rāja. Drawing upon the classical music of Hindu India as well as the folk-melodies of Bengal like the Bāul and the Bhātiyālī, and transmuting it all by his own personal touch, he created a new school of Indian singing, now known as Ravīndra-Sangīta. He is one of the four great masters in Indian music in recent centuries, viz. Tāna-sēna, Purandara-dāsa, Tyāga-rāja and Rabindranath Tagore. He has left about 2000 songs on various subjects : Nature and the Seasons, Love in various forms and moods, Devotion, Love of Country, and Life in general. To each of these songs he has given its melody, and from this point of composers of India. In lyric poetry Rabindranath Tagore is supreme, and the content as well the literary form of his songs couched in most exquisite Bengali wonderfully keep pace with the melody which Tagore has given to them: the words and the melody seem to be inextricably wedded to each other. In his school, he made provision for the teaching of classical Indian music, but folk music got a great patron in him, and its place became exalted through his work.

Rabindranath was fully appreciative of European music in all its greatness and depth of expression and nobility and power. He was deeply interested in the introduction of Western harmony in our Indian music, which is basically melodiac. He did not succeed in this attempt, in spite of some experiments, primarily because of some fundamental differences in the two systems. Besides, the acknowledged greatness and technical perfection of Indian music were a natural source of its resistance to foreign influences; and further, unlike what has happened in Japan, the average Indian had not yet acquired a taste for what has still remained for him the exotic music of the West.

Rabindranath Tagore wrote a number of Dramas, which were of various types, and these were all acting dramas, not merely dramas to read and ponder over. He himself was a votary of the historionic art from his early youth, and took part in dramatic performances in family and intimate friendly gatherings. He acquired a great name in this, and later in life he used to direct the performance of his own plays by the students of his school, and by others. In the matter of costume and stage décor he had his own original ideas, and Santiniketan artists like Nandalal Bose and Surendranath Kar followed him in this. The Dance also drew his attention. It was Rabindranath Tagore who discovered for himself and for the Indian people the beauty and simplicity of the traditional dances of Manipur and the folk-dances of Bengal. Through his students, both women and men, a most beautiful style of Indian dancing, which was both ancient or traditional and modern, was evolved in Santiniketan. This we find in his dances-dramas like Māyār Khēlā, Vālmīki-Pratibhā, Chitrān˜gadā, Śyāmā, Natīr Pūja, and Chandālikā. Uday Sankar, the greatest name in the Dance in Modern India, received inspiration from Tagore also. Dance, as Rabindranath said, was the music of the body, and he had a reverent attitude for the Dance also, which could be a form of worship. In Japan, the Nō Dances had impressed him very much; and while visiting Java and Bali, the classical dances, largely of Hindu origin in these islands of Indonesia, the Bedaya and the Sérimpi of the Hindu-Javanese courts, for example, and the various dances of Bali, were a revelation of beauty for Rabindranath’s sensitive mind. He sent Santideva Ghosh, one of his pupils at Santiniketan, who was an expert in the art of the Dance, to seek inspiration and obtain ideas in Indonesia, Japan and Ceylon in this art.

Tagore always had an interest in Drawing and Painting. Abanindranath Tagore, the leader of the Movement for the Revival of Indian Art which started round about 1904, was a nephew of the Poet, and in their family house at Jorasanko in Calcutta there was established a noteworthy Centre of Art. Unfortunately, no great painter took up the task of illustrating the novels, stories and poems of Rabindranath, although they present so many fine subjects for pictorial representation. It was only Abanindranath Tagore who drew some pen-and-ink sketches illustrating a few of his poems in the early days (e.g. his romantic poem Chitrān˜gadā, the romantic lyric Bimbavatī, and Nadī or “the River’’), and later on, Nandalal Bose also essayed drawing illustrations for some of Rabindranath’s lyrics. It is inexplicable why other outstanding Artists of Bengal never took up seriously the task of illustrating at length Tagore’s works both in prose and verse. Possibly they found that it would be too different a task for them. Rabindranath himself late in his life took to painting. He made drawings and paintings of a number of heads, and a large number of symbolic paintings and drawings emanated from his pen and brush.

Kakuzo Okakura, the Japanese writer and artist who revived the ancient art tradition in Japan, had come to stay with the Tagores, and two Japanese artists later arrived in Calcutta and did some of their work there, like Yokoyama Taikwan and Shunso Hishida. In 1939 came to Santiniketan the Chinese artist Ju Pé-on (HsÜ Pei-hung) at Tagore’s invitation; and Rabindranath liked the work of Kosetsu Nosu, the Japanese Master who painted the frescoes on the life of Buddha in the new temple at Sarnath in Benaras. Rabindranath was a great admirer of Chinese and Japanese painting, and when he was in these countries, he had copies made of some big-sized master-pieces-screens and scrolls of Nature and Man’s life. The Art School at Santiniketan became a focus for India’s artistic life, before Indian artists succumbed to the fata morgana of modernistic and abstract art. Yet Rabindranath was not fanatical in his art tastes and affiliation. He developed his own form of plastic art through painting and line drawings, which began from the “doodles’’ he would indulge in on the pages of his manuscript while he was composing and correcting his poems. He let his pen and his brush have their own way, and then his pictures began to take recognisable forms — of typical head-studies, realistic and each with its character, and symbolical compositions with trees and foliage, flowers and clouds, and human figures, single or in groups. Some are just symphonies of colour — as in abstract art. Others are intricate fantasies in line. But of about 2000 pictures he has left, each one has a chracter — he began to make pictures seriously as a part of his artistic expression only after he was 70, and he kept it up until almost the time of his death. He is thus easily one of the most noteworthy modern or modernistic artists of India.

Tagore also had an interest in Architecture. It was under his inspiration that in the hands of Surendranath Kar, teacher in the Santi-niketan Art School, quite a distinctive school of domestic and civil architecture developed in Santiniketan. The Santiniketan buildings made in this style are quite charming. There is an atmosphere of solidness with romance about their beauty of straight lines, with some fascination about them with their pavilions on ground floor and top floor, their garden seats, their pergolas. The house known as Udayana, where the poet lived for many years, looks like a medieval building, with the inequal height of its galleries and rooms, its halls and verandas; and it is strangely like a medieval Rajput castle, and yet it is not in that style — it is novel and original and at the same time it is not cut off from the beauty of traditional North Indian architecture. All this beauty evoked in the plastic arts is also of Tagore’s inspiration : it is a reflex of the pictorial beauty in a good deal of his narrative and romantic as well as mystic poetry.

Over and above being a Writer and a Poet he was an Educationist, and quite early in his life, round about his fortieth year, with the blessings of his father, the saintly Devendranath Tagore, he started that open-air school, the unique Brahmacharyā-Śrama at Santiniketan. Not only he was the founder and organiser of the school, but he was all along an enthusiastic and a successful teacher, who earned the love of his pupils, teaching them both English and Bengali literature and Sanskrit language, and giving talks on elementary science before the school children. He wrote popular text books to teach English, Bengali and Sanskrit, and Science. This school gave the inspiration to similar institutions in many parts of India, and in some foreign countries also, like Ireland, Holland and Java. The ideology as well as the practical aspects of a University of the ordinary type were something which he did not approve of, and therefore he tried to implement his own ideals of education, which were in the first instance to allow the students full freedom in developing their faculties in an atmosphere of Nature and open life. This school later on he expanded into that rather unique creation of his, the International University of ViŚva-Bhāratī, which has now been taken over by the Government of India. Here his idea was to create a centre for a harmonious study and for a mutual acceptance of the permanent and universal elements in the different cultures which Humanity has evolved in different countries and under different environments. It was to be a centre for a Higher Humanism embracing all peoples and cultures, on the background of the Indian Philosophy of Life and the Reality and the Indian Experience. Physical Science as much as was necessary for the fullest achievement this ideal was to be studied, but not Science merely for the sake of its gadgets which brought comfort and convenience and material success, but no idealism of understanding or realisation.

After this we have to think of Rabindranath Tagore as a Social and Economic Rehabilitator. He was not a mere theoretician, but he had also a strong inclination towards the practical and the useful. Side by side with the school at Santiniketan, he started a sister institute close to Santiniketan, which he called Srīnikētan. This was an Institution for Rural Economic and Cultural Development, and there he started a number of village crafts for their revival and expansion within an atmosphere of progressive development. This Sriniketan has been doing its good work as a very effective way of helping the village people in maintaining the beauty as well as the usefulness of their crafts and in giving training to a number of young students in the organisation of village uplift work. He gave all the money he obtained from the Nobel Prize to help the economic rehabilitation of his tenants in East Bengal through co-operation in banking.

Then, we have Rabindranath as One of the Great Leaders of the Indian People in Politics. One should say that his Politics was something more than mere politics. He wanted freedom of the entire body-politic not only from foreign domination but also from the soul-killing ideologies which were coming with the new forces in the country, not always forces for the good. He took a leading part, at the time of the partition of Bengal, in the Swadeshi Movement. Always a supporter of the cause of the oppressed and the down-trodden, with the hatred of sham and hypocrisy, he stood against such atrocities as the Jalianwalabagh massacre, out of protest for which he abjured the knighthood which the British Government had conferred on him (1918). He had an Ideal India in his mind, and he invoked this great India of his dreams in many a noble composition in poetry and in prose.

His great song the ‘‘Jana-gana-mana-Adhināyaka, jaya hē Bhārata-bhāgya-Vidhātā’’ (“Supreme Director of the Minds of the People, and of the Nation : Hail, O Dispenser of India’s Fate!’’), since adopted as the National Anthem of Free India, is a beautiful expression of the Ideal and the all-inclusive aspects of his Patriotism, which he never separated from a faith in the Godhead as the Ultimate Truth and the Arbiter of Man’s Destiny.

Rabindranath became a great friend and admirer of the other great Son of India, Mahatma Gandhi. They were both ardent freedom-fighters and workers for the emancipation of the masses, and the each followed his own line of action.

But in spite of this divergence, they never ceased to have love and esteem for each other all through. Rabindranath and Mahatma Gandhi felt attracted towards each other from 1918, and Mahatma Gandhi came with his family to stay at Santiniketan for some time after his return from South Africa. They presented a harmony of contrasts. After Mahatma Gandhi had developed his ideology of Non-cooperation, and with it sought to inaugurate, as a practical aspect of it, the boycott and burning of British goods, Rabindranath could not accept this negative aspect of Gandhiji’s ideology, and his reaction was not favourable, although his elder brother the venerable Dwijendranath Tagore tried to win him over to it. Rabindranath forever remained the great Internationalist, as well as believer in intellectual freedom and freedom of conviction in politics and in religion, whereas Mahatma Gandhi was an exponent of discipline and of restricted thinking within a doctrine.

Thus we have in Rabindranath Tagore not only a writer and poet but also an educationist, a social and economic reformer and rehabilitator, and political leader of his highest type with vision, a musician and a composer, and a dramatic producer as well as a plastic artist — a painter. He was also a keen student of science, and wrote some excellent books to teach science to young people. But that which has given what may be called a universal character and exaltation to his personality and his achievement as a poet is his rÔle as a mystic and a sage, and as a Devotional Writer and a Religious Teacher. There have been poets who have sung about man and his life — about his love and hate, his joys and sorrows, his hopes and fears, his aspiration and his despair, and his success and failure — with equal, and perhaps in some cases with greater ardour and conviction. Rabindranath’s compositions in this line certainly make him one of the greatest Poets or Singers of Man. But the deeper vein of mystic perception and experience, as well as his success in bringing to his readers, as a sage and a seer, a glimpse of what he had himself perceived and experienced, is something unique.

About this Internationalism, this matter has to be mentioned because Rabindranath was equally great as a Patriot and as an Internationalist. Indeed, he alone can be a true internationalist, to repeat once more the great saying, who is most intensely national; just as the most English of writers in the English language, William Shakespeare, is at the same time the most universal of poets. He has a legitimate pride in the past of his people, and at the same time he always recalled with humility how it was given to India to serve humanity in the domains of intellectual, material as well as spiritual culture. But there was not the slightest note of Jingoism or Chauvinism in this love of his country, in its greatness as well as in its littleness; and he regarded his motherland, with all her special gifts, to be just as good and great as any other country. The ideology of “my country (or my people), right or wrong’’ was farthest from his mind. As with Mahatma Gandhi, with Rabindranath also, adherence to Truth was vitally important. In fact, in his patriotism there was no narrowness, no exclusiveness — it was all-embracing in its ideals and ways. As he himself wrote on one occasion to Dina-bandhu C. F. Andrews : “the Complete Man must never be sacrificed to the patriotic man, or even the moral man. To me, humanity is rich and large and many-sided’’.

Rabindranath was born in Bengal, and his mother-tongue was Bengali. Like most of the educated people in Bengal, and in other parts of India, he also acquired a good command over English. His knowledge of English was not acquired at school, but by wide reading at home. He was well-read in Sanskrit (particularly the Rāmāyana and the Mahābhārata, the Upanishads, Kālidāsa and the great classical writers, and some Buddhist literature), in Bengali and in English literatures. His literary output naturally was through his mother-tongue. It was latterly, only after his 50th year, a little before the time when he received the Nobel Prize, that he began to employ English also, as his other medium of expression; and he achieved, for a non-English person, a unique distinction in it. Although rightly described as a poet of Bengali, he did not in the first instance belong to Bengal alone. He was of course most intimately of Bengal, but he belonged to the rest of India as well. He was living at a time when the Indian people re-discovered the unique glory of Indian as a single cultural and political unit. The conception of Bhārata-Mātā or “Mother India’’, without any reference to or bias towards a particular state or province or linguistic area, came to be well-established in India in the imagination and ideology of the great leaders of thought and literature in the country, particularly in Bengal, from the second half of the last century. One of the high priests of this cult of Indian Nationalism (after the idea was established in Bengal through the exertions of poets, thinkers and writers like Rangalal Banerji, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Swami Vivekananda and others) was Rabindranath Tagore himself, just as in Maharashtra we have Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Mahadev Govind Ranade and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. His poetry is replete with the atmosphere of Bengal, no doubt. But India, with her Himalayas (on which he had composed a fine set of poems), and her vastness from Kashmir to Tamizhakam and Manipur to Sindh, and Kerala, is always looming large. He admired Sivaji, because under the inspiration of the Guru Samartha Rāma-dāsa, Sivaji wanted to unify in one entity “an India which was fragmented, torn to pieces, and scattered’’ (khanda, chinna, viksipta Bhārata). At the same time he may be said in a way to have re-discovered the soul and personality of Ancient India as well : and in this, he was quite pan-Indian. We were accustomed to see Ancient India through the obscuring veil of Medieval India. What Ancient India was like in her great periods in history, e.g. in the age of the Vedas, of the Upanishads, and of the Mahābhārata, of Buddha and of Kālidāsa, was practically lost to us during the last few centuries. Bankim Chandra Chatterji tried to find out the historical Krishna, in his true glory as a Great Man or as a Full Man, from under the mass of flowers, tulasī leaves and sandal paste which faith had piled up high around his personality and obscured this personality in its true human grandeur, and had transformed it into that of a God of many miracles and super-earthly wonders: and Bankim Chandra was in a way successful when he tried to give us a glimpse of the Historical Krishna who lay buried under the mass of Puranic and other stories and legends. In a similar way, the true atmospheres of the times of Kālidāsa, of Buddha, of the historical Krishna as in the Mahābhārata, and of the hermitages of the sages in the Upanishad period, were all revealed through his unique reconstructive imagination by Rabindranath. Archaeology has come to help in this field only much later. This was a discovery which he made so very convincing and appealing in some of his most beautiful poetry and other literature, and it passed on to literatures in other languages of India, like Hindi for example. A new and a most human interpretation of the Ancient Hindu World as enshrined in Sanskrit literature was one of his great contributions. Witness, for example, the beautiful and penetrating studies collected in one volume as Prācīna Sāhitya (“Ancient Literature’’), where he has studies of the ancient Indian epics in their true character as national literature, of Kālidāsa, of Bānabhatta, of the Buddhist (Pali) Dhamma-pada; and in this book we have that exquisite article, Kāvyē Upēksitā, the heroines who were ignored by the Sanskrit poets, like Urmilā, wife of Lakshmana in the Rāmāyana, like Anasūyā and Priyamyadā, companions of Śakuntalā, and like Patralēkhā in Bāna’s Kādambarī. The artist Abanindranath Tagore, Rabindranath’s nephew, has given in his paintings a pictorial expression to the spirit of Ancient India in our Old Sanskrit literature as revealed by the poet; and Abanindranath in this line became quite a force in the artistic consciousness and renaissance of the rest of India: witness, for example, his exquisite early miniatures on themes from the Ritu-samhāra and Mēgha-dūta of Kālidāsa, his little masterpiece Buddha and Sujātā, and his illustrations of Krishna and Radha as depicted in Medieval Bengali Vaishnava lyrics, and a whole series of other pictures, unique and thoroughly convincing in the beauty and sincerity of their naturalness and their Indianess which we find also in Rabindranath.

Then, Rabindranath looked upon the history of India as a single entity, as one process. His poems on the Sikh heroes are throbbing with life, patriotism and religious faith. His famous poems on Sivaji hold forth the ideal of this great leader of the Hindu people in Maharashtra, who was inspired by the philosophical thought and by the religious ardour and faith of his Master Samartha Rāma-dāsa. His other poems on Maratha and Rajput history and chivalry, and his poem on some of the saints of India — these are sufficient testimony to a mind alert and sensitive to whatever has been great and noble and glorious in the history of India as a whole.

He was an indefatigable world traveller, and in the five continents he had visited most of the great countries, and a number of little ones also. His human sympathy, and the popularity of his works which preceded him, brought for him newer and newer friends with whom his relations were close and cordial. Besides, he had travelled throughout the whole of India as well, and had sojourned in many a nook and corner in the North, South-West and East of India. Whatever place he visited has been uniformly celebrated by some beautiful work of prose or poetry which he composed there, and through his pen the scenic and other beauties of these places as well as their historic associations have generally been an honoured place in literature.

A cursory survey of his life would thus reveal Rabindranath to be like a diamond with many facets. There was hardly any normal venue or avocation of man—excepting highly specialised military and technical and other scientific lines—in which Rabindranath did not make his make. Hence we could see that his mind, his will, his achievements were almost all-embracing : viŚvan-dhara and yugan-dhara, “holding all, and holding the age’’, as the Sanskrit expressions say. It would be difficult to find a man of his calibre who can be described as having been a true universalist. But among such men, one would think of Goethe and Leonardo da Vinci, Al-Bīrūnī and Aristotle. The combination of the scientific spirit with the mystic thinkers of the world who were not divorced from the practical in life : the sages of the Upanishads, Krishna, Buddha, Lao-tse, Zarathushtra, Socrates, Euripides.

Rabindranath lived for 80 years, from 1861 to 1941. For man, this is quite the normal span of life, which generally does not exceed 100 years. But during these 80 years he may be said to have achieved more than what a number of men together would be able to do. For instance, let us take the extent of his total output in literature. My friend Professor Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, the statistician, had roughly computed, some five years before Rabindranath passed away, that the total number of lines that he had written up to that time easily comprised over 75,000 in verse, and he had written some three times that amount in prose. That would make quite a formidable mass of literary production; and what is very remarkable for all this mass is the astoundingly high quality of most of what he wrote. It was not that he was a pedestrian writer who would produce only common-place things without the light of inspiration in them. He was certainly not a banal or humdrum writer. In him the precious metal was not to be laboriously extracted from huge masses of dross or inferior ore. Among writers and scholars of Telugu, there are four Sanskrit expressions which in a brief and telling manner give the crux in the matter of literary appeal: drāksā-pāka, kadalí-pāka, nārikēla-pāka, and pāsāna-pāka — “grape-taste, banana-taste, coconut-taste and pebble-taste’’. Some literary compositions are crystal clear and their flavour can immediately be tasted, like putting a grape into one’s mouth — their appeal is obvious. Other ones are like the banana, which is first to be peeled before it can be enjoyed. And there are literary works which must be first understood after some careful study and preparation, and then they can be appreciated, like the coconut, in which the milk and kernel are hidden within the copra and the hard shell. And finally we have works which have nothing to give, like pebbles put inside one’s mouth. Rabindranath unquestionably belongs to the first type—the simplicity and lucidity of his lines go hand in hand with the profundity and truth of his ideas—and their outward brilliance only enhances the beauty of the inner thought.

Among the greatest literary productions of the human genius are certain works which come up to a huge suze, as it has been noted before. These are in some cases the creation not of a single individual, but of an entire people, giving out its experiences and its message to the world—not through one single poet or thinker but through a series of writers and thinkers who in some cases have merged their personalities into a single one in a flourishing age through a number of centuries. The Sanskrit Mahābhārata which comes up to about 20,00,000 lines, is a work of this type. It was not the creation of a single writer, namely, Vyāsa, as it generally supposed to be. But it was the literary output of the ancient Brahmanical Hindu people (whenever Aryān or non-Aryān in their origin), and this great work took several centuries, close upon a millenium, from before 500 B.C. to the middle of the 1st millennium A.D., to take its present shape. Other books of the same type are the Hebrew Bible and the Arabian Nights. There are also cases of single writers achieving an astonishing feat in producing a vast mass of literature. Thus we have seen that Firdausi, the national poet of Persia, who composed his great epic, the Shāh-nāmāh, in 60,000 lines, was one of them; and this huge poem was almost entirely his work. But behind this magnum opus is the concentrated epic-romantic literary tradition of Iran and its people for nearly 2,000 years. William Shakespeare, with his two scores of dramas, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, with the mass of poetry and prose which he wrote, and Lev Tolstoy with his epic novels, short stories, essays and other works, are other instances of single writers producing great literature which was as valuable in content as it was comprehensive in extent. Rabindranath Tagore is to be mentioned with these Titans in the domain of literature. To this, we are also to add his achievements in other fields of action already enumerated above.

The Sanskrit critic RājaŚekhara of the 9th century declared that genius was of two kinds, creative and reflective (pratibhā tu dvividhā : kārayitrí, bhāvayitrí ca). Rabindranath’s genius was one which found expression in both these forms. His writings were creative, with their own beauty and power and ability to move people. They were also reflective, in which the beauty and depth of his thought in understanding and interpreting life and literature find adequate expression in the force and naturalness of his style. Religion is the attempt to find out the relation between the finite and the infinite, and from this aspect we have to consider the mass of devotional writings, sermons and talks (apart from his mystic poems) which Rabindranath Tagore has left for us. Frequently, they are amplifications and expositions of the Upanishads; but like every true religious thinker, he has his own contributions to make, the result of his own experience and thinking. These compositions of his have served one great purpose of literature that men like—in bringing happiness and strength and solace to his readers.

There are two aspects in any piece of literary composition, and both are equally important. They are the form and the spirit, or the outward expression and the inward content. A good deal in poetry, particularly, depends upon the peculiar beauty and force of the language in which it is written. This is the outward beauty; but the beauty of thorough or intensity of feeling or passion or sublimation of an idea—these are the things which form the soul of a poem. A man who can read the writings of a great poet in the original language has access to both the sides, and he can form a full appreciation. But when a poet is translated into another language, the full beauty of form will naturally not be there—it will be lost a good deal. But the inner spirit will always be there, to shine and illumine and to create a permanent effect on the mind of man. So there must be something universal in great poetry or great literature if it is to be appreciated by all and sundry—by people of other languages and environments. Rabindranath certainly stands this test. On one occasion, Bengali ladies of Calcutta met Rabindranath and told him that they regarded him as the poet of a Bengali household—his treatment of Bengali life was so true and intimate that he could be described as being a very part of it. They claimed for him a place in “the kitchen-room of a Bengali household’’—he was so much within the life of the Bengali people. At the same time, an admirer of his from distant Finland, Professor, J N Reuter of Helsinki, said, in some Sanskrit verses composed by him, that the poet, like the sun (the poet’s name, in Sanskrit Ravi—in Bengali pronunciation Rabi or Robi—means “the Sun’’, Rabindra or Ravindra = Ravi + Indra signifying “the Sun and the Thunder-God,’’ Rabindra-nath also meaning in brief “Sun-Lord’’:), rises in the East, but he lightens up the entire sky, and for this the Sun, Rabindra, is specially honoured in the countries of the North. Professor Reuter wrote (in 1931) :

na karkicit kila Prācī Pratīcyā san˙-gamisy˙ati:

Purastād vai Ravis tūdyan Pratīcīm apy arōcayat;

Daksinām apy Udīcīn˜ca vy-abhāsayad Urukramah;

tat pūjyasē, Ravīndra, tvam Uttarasyām viśēsatah.

So in this way we can see that Rabindranath, who has joined the East to the West, is quite the Universal Man in his appeal to all the sections of humanity in different countries and climes. He is of the soil of Bengal and India, but like the skylark, he soars high into the heavens, and fills up the sky with the vibrating melody of his song.

Among modern writers, Rabindranath has been one of the most widely translated. Owing to religious reasons, the Hebrew Bible is unquestionably the most translated book in the world. The great writers of humanity have also been honoured by being translated into a variety of languages. Shakespeare is one such writer, and there are the great leaders of thought and literature in ancient and modern Europe whose works are available in scores of languages. A representative portion of Rabindranath’s works is similarly available now in all the advanced languages of the world. In most cases, they have been translated from the English versions, which either he himself made or which were made by others. In a good number of instances, however, these translations were made direct from the original Bengali into a variety of foreign languages, like, for example, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Czech, Chinese, Japanese and Persian: and of course into Indian languages, into most of them. As time passes and his influence grows, such translations will be available in other languages also.

Rabindranath, the writer and the man of multifarious activities, is just a complement of Rabindranath, the Man. But the living and personal aspect of Rabindranath will of course be lost to the future ages; and those who lived with him and had the good fortune of meeting him face to face and talking to him, were in possession of the knowledge of certain features in the human side of his personality which from the very nature of the case will lie buried for ever. Only here and there some intimate sketches, studies or accounts of how he lived and moved about and what he thought and said and what he did in his daily avocations, and the observations and obiter dicta which he made, would show that fleeting aspect of his character. Fortunately there are a few books of this type in Bengali, and also in English, where we can see Rabindranath the Man—just the ordinary natural Man, with his fancies, foibles and occasional! weaknesses and even little failure—as distinct from the Universal Man, the all-embracing genius. He was, to start with, a most excellent conversationalist with a wonderful sense of humour. He could enter with gusto in making fun of the foolishnesses and the lapses of the people round about him with an abundant fund of humour in which there was not the slightest trace of malice or contempt. His repartees and his bons mots are all worthy of being recorded, and some have also been recorded.

Taking full note of the multiple personality of Tagore, we have still to say that he is known to the world primarily as a poet and a writer. The world does not know the other aspects of his personality. And Rabindranath himself used to say that he wished to be remembered primarily as a poet and as a singer. His literary output has been, as noted before, quite enormous, for a single man. His works in prose and verse, in their entirety, will take their stand worthily beside the Rāmāyana and the Mahābhārata, the ancient Greek Epics and Homerica and Hesiod and the Tragic Poets, the Hebrew Bible the Shāh-nāmāh, and beside Shakespeare and Geothe. From the year 1878 up to his death in 1941, for 63 years came out regularly from his pen a continuous stream of writings in verse and prose in the form of over 175 separate books, and the flow of the stream has continued even after his death, when some 25 new works with unpublished material, and a further 20 works which were recasts or reactions or dramatisations of old writings made by the poet himself, were published in book form. This is in itself a fairly long list for a single life. The complete works of Tagore as officially published by the Visva-Bharati University comes up to 27 volumes (the Ravíndra-Racanāvalí, 1939-1964), with two additional volumes of earlier writings which the poet did not publish again (1940-41). This long tale of some 200 separate books comprises his significant contribution to literature in both poetry and prose. In Poetry, we have his Poems and Songs and Lyrics,—poems, narrative and descriptive, subjective and introspective, besides romantic and mystic compositions which reach some of the highest levels of poetic expression in human speech. Then there are dramas, over 60 of them, which may be classed as regular plays in the current modern style, historico-romantic, in prose and verse, mystic plays in prose, musical dramas and dance-dramas, social comedies, farces and light plays. His prose writings include a number of short stories, the finest in Bengali or in any language, and his novels both long and short (Tagore has about dozen great novels to his credit—and all these are significant in their ideals and in characterisation and plot, and most fully convincing in their psychology and realism). His novels and short stories form a true replica of contemporary Bengali life in all its aspects, and several of these short stories are supreme in literature. His other prose writings consist of Essays, literary, social and otherwise; Accounts of his wide travels and experiences of other peoples and cultures; Sermons and Discourses, mainly on Upanishadic texts and concepts, forming his contribution to philosophical and devotional literature; and besides, his Humorous Writings.

There is thus hardly any branch of literature at the present day that he did not touch and adorn. His studies of ancient Indian life and thought in literature, and his evocation of the age of the Upanishads and Mahābhārata, of Buddha and of Kalidasa, of classical India before 1,000 A.D., and of the great period of early medieval India, were unique in their intuitive expression of truth and beauty on the background of this history. We have been enabled by Rabindranath, through his poems and prose, to rehabilitate for ourselves the truth and beauty, the romance and the spirituality of ancient Hindu India, which was so long, before Rabindranath Tagore came with the magic wand of his knowledge and his imagination, covered up by the jungle-like accretions of medievalism. The convincing verisimilitude of his poetic and his scholarly reconstruction of ancient India is something which seems to visualise a great glory which has passed away forever but which has come to live again for us.

Rabindranath’s poetry of love and life and ordinary human experience is throbbing with the warmth of an intense realisation. Few poets in the long tale of the world’s best in the poetry of love can be said to equal Tagore in his poems dealing with the great sentiment of love in all its manifestation—the dawn of love on either side; the exquisite tenderness of love between a happy husband and wife, who have come to realise their identity of being; the pangs of separation; and the love of an earthly couple which is a reflex of man’s love for God and God’s love for man, as it has been glimpsed or sensed by the mystics of faith. Tagore’s love-poetry is however not merely etherial—it soars in the highest esthetical sphere—but physical attraction as the basis of human love, with the call of the flesh, is not forgotten. It is sublimation of man and woman’s love, and it is also sensuous in its appeal—the senses are there, and implications of sex. But good taste and artistic finesse never make the poet forget the proprieties—there is never any blatant wallowing in sex and sex-appeal, which is, by some “progressive’’ poets and other writers, considered to be the soul of realism. Love is something holy, because it transcends the earth, although it is of the earth. In fact, in a way Tagore’s love-poetry and his mystic poetry of Union or Commerce with the Ultimate Reality converge in the most profound of his poems.

And in this context, we have to mention that great concept of Rabindranath’s, which may be considered one of his special and characteristic contributions to the mystic poetry of the world—the corner-stone of his Realisation of the Ultimate through Beauty and Love—his conception of the Jīvana-Dēvatā.

The Sanskrit expression Jīvana-Dēvatā can be Englished as Life-Godhead and Latined as Vita-Deitas (can it be Hellenised as Bios-kai-Theos?). This concept is so beautiful and so unique, and since in a way it forms the crux or central idea of Rabindranath’s mystic concept of life and the Unseen Reality, suffused as it is by his sense of love and beauty, that it requires some detailed consideration.

It is in a way his vision of the Divinity that is in Life, or all Life, or all Life as an expression of the Divinity that is behind it and is encompasing it. The poet never ignored Life : he was in love with it, with all the good, the evil that are in it. Life and Nature in their beauty and their joy, with their shadows notwithstanding, had sort of intoxicated him—he was so full of them. At the same time, as a Mystic and a Man of Faith, he could sense the Reality that is behind life, and could obtain glimpses and visions of it, and even come in close and intimate personal relationship with it. Life as a Force, and Nature with Beauty, and Joy with Suffering, as well as his own Intimate Personal Life were not a separate or detached entity from the Supreme Reality, the Godhead or Divinity. They are inextricably linked up with each other. This is the ancient Indian Vedanta concept—All Life and Being, and whatever presents itself before us, are really one; and for him who understands his Basic Unity, there is no Sorrow and no Delusion (tatra kō mōhah, kah Ś ōkah ēkatvam anupaŚyatah). As the Old Sanskrit work, the Yōga-Vāśistha Rāmāyana says :

yad idam drŚyatē kinˉcid, drŚya-jālam, purō-gatam,

param brahmaiva tad viddhi, ajarāmaram avyayam:

“Whatever is seen, objects which are in front of us and are visualised, know all that to be the Supreme—ageless, deathless, without change.’’

The Divinity that is in our vital mundane existence, or the Life that is the abode of the Godhead—this poetic and mystic thought becomes Pygmalion’s Marble Statue transformed into living romance when the spark of the poet’s genius breathes life into it. In this way, one of the most remarkable mystic figures, one may so say, shines out of the poetic world of Rabindranath Tagore, in the form of a young woman. This is a figure comparable to what we see in the Cosmic Myths of the ancient Indian and Greek religion, in all their beauty and their grandeur—namely, Rabindranath’s Jívana-Dēvatā has been conceived as a goddess-like woman who is still human, and who seems to be personal and intimate, and at the same time she is transcendent; and she has become like a new form of the Indian Ushas and Uravasī, and Śrí, and Umā, and of the Greek Aphroditē and Artemis. She is the ‘Ever-Woman-like’, ‘the Eternal Feminine’ of Goethe, who draws us upwards (das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan). The poet’s profound and passionate prayer has in a way been responded to by his Jívana-Dēvatā herself, by revealing herself to him and by incarnating herself as it were in his personal consciousness and experience. This we can see from one great series of his poems which largely overlap his poems of devotion and praise and self-abnegation. We are reminded of the prayer voiced by the famous poet of Urdu, Muhammad Iqbal, when in his Sufistic mood he said—

kabhī, at Muntazar-e-haqīqat, nazar ā, libās-e-majār mēn˙ :

“O thou that are waited upon by the Truth, Do thou come within my sight, in the garment of an allegory’’.

This figure of Jívana-Dēvatā in its various forms and environments is appearing again and again in Rabindranath’s poetry, and it may be said that this is the central conception for the mystico-romantic poetry of Rabindranath. A figure comparable to Rabindranath’s Jívana-Dēvatā may be found only in Sufi literature, where the Supreme has been conceived of as the ma‘shūqah or the Beloved Sweetheart of the universe. And yet the Sufi concept has not been so very much individualised and humanised. The lady who inspires the knight to deeds of chivalry—to love and service as well as to heroism and fighting—in medieval European romance, has some faint resemblance to the Sufi ma‘shūqah and to Rabindranath’s Jívana-Dēvatā. We are at times reminded of the incorporeal presence of the goddess Artemis as in Euripides’s drama of Hippolytos. Goethe’s Helen as the inspirer of Faust, in the second part of his great epic drama, also can be recalled in this connexion. Then there is Beatrice of Dante, both in the Vita Nuova and in the Paradiso of the Divina Commedia of this medieval poet of Roman-Catholic allegory and mysticism. But Beatrice is the sublimation of an earthly and a living person into something like a spiritual inspirer and guide, whereas Rabindranath’s Jívana-Dēvatā is both a cosmic and a mundane force which envelopes the poet’s life and being.

Rabindranath’s Jívana-Dēvatā has inspired as well as played with the poet all through his life. She is a woman dwelling after, beyond this world of ours, who in her various moods met the poet and participated so to say in the drama of his life. In one of his beautiful earlier poems, named Mānasa Sundari (“the Lovely One within the Mind’’), which is a fairly long one, and which was composed over 70 years ago, the poet is addressing his Jívana-Dēvatā as the ideal beauty in his inner consciousness. As the poet is imagining it, she came to him as a little girl, his childhood’s playmate, from a world which was a neighbour of this earth, and she would come down to this world and meet him, a boy, who was a son of this earth, and they used to spend their childhood in innocent child-like joy and play. From this contact he would be obtaining glimpses of the universe with all its variety and richness and beauty. Then he realised one day, after he had grown up, as a sudden and unexpected and most happy discovery, that this little girl, who was his playmate in his boyhood, was transformed into the sweetheart and bride of his youth, and she revealed herself afresh as the young wife in his home. All the happiness of love as between a young couple he imagines was his through this union with the ideal of his mind, the Mānasa-Sundarí. She again is, paradoxically enough, the very woman whose face he cannot see, although he is yearning all the while to meet here eye to eye. But sometimes in a playful mood she lifts her veil and reveals herself, and with the poet it is a flash of vision which shows her and makes him realise that he had known here through all his existence. And yet she seemed so elusive, so etheral, and so divine. She is both the World’s Desire—ViŚva-Vāsanā—and at the same time she is the Bride of his Soul. In one of these poems (called Sōnār Tarí or “the Boat of Gold’’, 1891), the poet depicts himself as a young farmer who has gathered in his rich-harvest, and he is wistfully waiting, he does not know for whom, by the river flooded by the monsoon rains. Then a woman comes in a boat singing a song, and the poet asks her to help him in piling up in the boat all the gathered rice, the result of his labour on the soil; and the unknown lady paddles away, taking with her his life’s fulfilment, so to say, leafing him alone on the shore. In another exquisite lyric (Niruddēśa-Yātrā, or “the Voyage to the Unknown’’, 1893), the poet is sailing towards the West in search of something far away and unknown, his only companion in the boat being the same unknown young woman. She had called him away from his home in the morning, and he does not know who she is and where she is taking him. They have sailed on all the day. The shadows of the evening are falling, and the evening sun mounts his funeral pyre in a blaze of fire. He cannot see her face, although she is smiling, silent and mysterious; and yet he cannot but follow her, as through the call of an inexorable fate. When the black shades of Night will cover the golden light in the Evening Śky, he will be able to see here clearly any more—there will be only the moan of the sea, and the fragrance of her body wafted in the sea-breeze, and her floating hair touching him—and he will not be able to see her silent smile; and in an agony he will have to call upon her to come closer and touch him—and that will be the consummation of his quest. A long narrative poem, one of the finest in any language (Sindhu-Pārē, or “by the Ocean’’, 1895) gives the story of a veiled lady on horseback who in winter-time at the dead of the night came with a led horse and called the poet from his sleep, and the poet like one enchanted got up and mounted the other horse, unable to resist this call although he would have liked to stay back. The horse on which the poet rode seemed to be made with “the smoke from the cremation ground”. The two then galloped on the back of the two horses, he not understanding anything and not able to say anything properly; and after they had left the town, skirting the kings palace with its dozing guardsmen and the houses with people sleeping, the road seemed to be unending, and the night also seemed to have no end. The wind sang in their ears as they rode on, until finally when the moon had set they came to the shore of the sea, where there was a marvellous place carved in the living rock, opening its mouth like a cavern. The lady got down from the horse and the poet also followed her, and they both went inside this palace and came to a big hall cut within the rock. There were pillars of stone which were carved him ornamentations, and on the walls of the cave-palace there were figures of marvellous appearance—wonderful women, and foliage of all kinds. Lamps of gold were swinging from gold chains from the ceiling. The lady came and sat down upon a little canopied bed. There were marvellous figures of women riding on lions on either side. But not a soul was to be seen in that wide hall, and the least sound reverberated in echoes within the empty hall. The lady made a sign to the poet to sit beside her on the bed. He felt that his body had become cold as ice, and his blood began to tingle with strains of fear. Suddenly there was a burst of music of lutes and flutes, and pollens and flowers began to be scattered over their heads. The light in the lamps shone with twice their brilliance, and within her veil the woman laughed out, loud and sweet, and the vast room began to echo with that laughter. The poet was bewildered, and then he with his hands folded in respect cried out that he was a stranger and she should not like a heartless woman torment him in this manner. At this the woman struck a golden wand on the floor, and the vast room became darkened with massed of incense-smoke. A hundred conch-shells were sounded, together with the joyous cry of women as at a festival. Then an old Brahman entered with auspicious grains of paddy and blades a dūrvā grass in his hand, and following him were two rows of women of the Kirāta tribe carrying flower-garlands and chowries and vases of sacred water. They all kept quiet, while the old Brahman began to make calculations with a piece of chalk on the floor, drawing over so many circles and figures; and finally he declared that the auspicious moment for the wedding had come. Then there was a wedding, and the old Brahman repeated the sacred texts, and the women scattered flowers and handfuls of pop-rice (lājān˜jali) confetti on the couple. The unknown lady offered her soft warm hand, which the poet took in his, and his own hand was cold as ice through fear. The old Brahman then departed, after giving his blessings, with all the women following him. Only one young girl led them to a bridal chamber, which was a marvellous room adorned with jewelled gold and silver stuffs and bright with lights of all colours from scented oils in standing lamps. The bride then sat down on the nuptial bed of flowers, spread like a dream, on a high bank adorned with jewels. But she still kept her face veiled. In sorrow and anguish the poet cried aloud for a sight of her face:

āmi kahilām—sab dēkhilām, tōmārē dēkhi-ni Śudhu—

“I said—I have seen all, but only Thee I have not seen.”

Then she slowly lifted up her veil, while there seemed to be mocking laughter all round, like the music of the waters in the fountains. Looking at her face the poet was startled to find his Jívana-Dēvatā there too—that same sweet face, that same gentle smile, those same eyes filled with ambrosia which had always made him laugh and cry and had always eluded him—it played with him day and night in all his joys and his sorrows. That well-known face showed itself to him suddenly in this unknown place. With tears flowing down from his eyes, tears which refused to stop, he sat down on the ground and began to rain kisses on her lotus-soft feet. The flute went on playing with a strange sad melody, with a sort of pain which brought happiness to his soul: and the woman continued to smile in that vast silent room.

Here we have a very charming poetic account of his Jívana-Dēvatā, his ideal in life which had been playing with him always and eluding him. Another very well-known poem, entitled Rātrē ō Prabhātē (“In the Night and at Dawn’’) in the Citrā (1895), is in two sections, and this poem is more mundane in nature. Here also we can imagine his adventure with the Jívana-Dēvatā. In the first section of this poem she is depicted in the role of the sweetheart-wife, with the poet as here ardent lover-husband, engrossed in their love-play in the night—she is here as a sort of Aphroditē Pandēmos; and in the other section of the poem, at dawn she is the auspicious lady of the house—she has taken here bath and is culling flowers for the morning worship, thus bringing with the early morning an atmosphere of holiness and joy she is the wife as the ministering angle of the home in a higher sublimated sphere, like an Aphroditē Ouraneia. This poem, strangely enough, seems to have been anticipated in its spirit over 2500 years ago in that magnificient specimen of early Hellenic art by an unknown master-sculptor of Greece of the 5th Century B.C.—the two seated figures, one of a naked young woman playing on a flute, and the other of the veiled young matron lighting the evening lamp, figures which are complementary to each other, decorating the two arms of the Ludovisi throne in stone, with Aphroditē helped out of the waters at the back, which is now in the National Museum in the palace of Diocletian in Rome.

Below I give a translation of one of these typical Jívana-Dēvatā poems from the collection known as Utsarga (“Dedication’’, or “Offering’’, first published in 1903, Poem No. 6). The poet himself had adapted a portion of this poem in his English Gitanjali.

I have boasted among men that I know you. Many have seen you in different guises in pictures painted by me. Many of them come and call me and say, ‘Who is she?’ I do not find words for what I should say. ‘What do I know’—I only say, ‘What do I know?’ (āmi ki jāni?). But you only smile when you hear this; and they find fault with me, I don’t know why.

I have sung of tales about you in many a song. I could not hide the hidden message within my soul. So many of them have called me and asked—‘Is there any meaning in all that you sing?’ I do not find words for what I should say. I only say, ‘What meaning do I know?’ They laugh at me in scorn, while you sit there, softly smiling.

Tell me, how could I say that I don’t know you, I don’t recognise you? At time you peep and look at me, at times you pass out of my ken. In the moon-lit night, under the full moon, I have seen your veil to drop, and for twinkle of the eye I have been able to get a glimpse of you. And then my heart suddenly would be throbbing, my eyes without any reason would be full, and I could feel that for an instant you had placed your feet in my heart.

Time and often I have tried to hold you with the strings, of my words; and forever and ever I have tried to keep you a captive in the melody of my songs. I have spread the golden nets of my verse, I have filled my flute with soft dulcet notes. But still forever this fear rises in me—have you allowed yourself to be captured by me? But I don’t want that, do whatever you like, You need not let me hold you forever, only charm my heart; and whether I know you or not, may only my soul he elated with joy.

Another poem in the same series (No. 38) is in a higher key. The poet’s Jívana-Dēvatā here is identifiable with God, whose cosmic sport sways the universe, and deals with the life and death of man. Far, far away, sitting apart in solitary loneliness, the Jívana-Dēvatā indulges in her līlā, her divine sport, and forever she is playing on, with the suns and moons as her playthings. Man’s life she takes from her right hand into her left, and from her left hand into her right; and who knows what she does when she hides her own playthings herself? Nothing is lost in this universe. It is the supreme who is playing with herself a game of dice. Here we have an echo of the idea expressed in the Bhāgavata Purāna that the Supreme is like a young boy, playing with himself, and the result of this sport is creation, continuance, destruction and regeneration.

In this series of Jīvana-Dēvatā poems we have that great Ode to Urvaśī (1895), a poem unique of its kind, which would recall some of the choruses of A C Swinburne’s Greek dramas. (Three very fine translations of this magnificent and trancedentally beautiful poem, in its 8 stanzas of 9 lines each, have come out in English, by Roby Datta, Nagendranath Gupta and John Thompson.) A selection of these Jīvana-Dēvatā poems would be a wreath of flowers of rare beauty and unequalled fragrance in the anthology of the world’s mystico-romantic literature.

The Jīvana-Dēvatā presents to us the quintessence of Rabindranath’s aspirations for a visualisation of the Beauty and the Romance of Being. A whole series of poems composed mostly in his young age and early manhood, and some even during the years of his middle and old age, celebrates his Jīvana-Dēvatā. We may make special mention of the series of poems in two of his greatest earlier verse-books, the Sōnār Tarī (“the Boat of Gold’’, 1891) and Citrā (“the Wonderfully Beautiful One’’, 1896); and here we have a concentration, so to say, of his early Jīvana-Dēvatā poems. And we have also a number of equally exquisite compositions of the same order scattered throughout his later works, like Kalpanā (“Imagination’’, 1900), Ksanikā (“the Instantaneous’’ or “the Flitting one’’, 1900), Utsarga (“Dedication’’, 1903), Kheyā (“Crossing the River’’, 1906), Purabī (“She of the East’’, 1924, particularly that most beautiful and suggestive poem in it the Līlāsan˙ginī or “Companion in Play’’) and Mahuā (“The Mahuā or Madhūka Flower’’, 1934), as well as isolated poems in other works. Here in these poems of Tagore, the romantic glamour of the Elizabethan lyrists, the sweetness of Keats, the fervour of Shelly and the grace of Coleridge, and the impetuosity of Swinburne would often seem to join hands with the grandeur of the sage-poets of the Vedas and of the Greek tragedians and lyrisists, as well as with the mystic approach of the Arabic and Iranian poets of Sufiism; and we find also in the background a feeling for Nature as in early Chinese poetry, and this is something far more profound.

The Jīvana-Dēvatā concept of Rabindranath, so bewildering and baffling for us to understand (and even Rabindranath himself spoke about his own bafflement), was something which was with him to his last days. The beauty with the elusive character of this phenomenal world—of Nature, of Māyā, or the Illusion of World-Magic (which is not merely Magic or Mirage), plays with us, captivates us, holds us in thrall in her meshes, and in this way, it acts as a golden veil hiding the Ultimate Truth from our sight. The Magic World of the Jívana-Dēvatā thus in a way seems to act as a barrier for the vision of the Truth of Being to those who succumb to the spell of her charms, which thus become a hallucination. But those high-souled men who after frustration and suffering can pierce through the veil which this Temptress has hung around us, through the false imaginings and notions and attitudes and conceptions which are engendered within us—the men who can rise superior to these blandishments of Her who is also the great Reality; for such men there is the revelation of the Great Light. Man thus can attain to the Reality by his sufferings and exertions in the path of this quest, only when the false idols of our mundane and limited convictions (which we hold so dear and which we think are absolutely correct and true) are removed, and the spirit is thus made ready for the Truth. The last poem that Rabindranath composed (on the morning of undent things he left for us : and this poem tell us how finally he solved the enigma of the Jívana-DēvJuly 30, 1941, just a full week before the day of his passing away on August 7, 1941), is one of the profoatā. It runs this—

Tōmār srstir path rēkhēcha ākīrna kari’

vicitra chalanā-jālē,

hē Chalanāmayī !

mithyā viŚwāsēr phāmd pētēcha nipun hātē

saral jīvanē.

ēi pravancanā diyē Mahattwērē karecha cihnita;

tār tarē rākha-ni gōpan rātri.

tomār jyōtiska tārē

jē path dèkhāy

sē jē tār antarēr path,

sē jē cira-swaccha,

sahaj viŚwāsē sē jē

karē tārē cira-samujjwal.

bāhirē kutil hōk, antarē sē rju —

ēi niyē tāhār gaurav;

lokē tārē bale vidambita :

Satyērē sē pāy

āpan ālōkē dhauta antarē antarē.

kichutē pārē nā tārē pravancitē,

Ś ēs puraskār niyē jāy sē jē

āpan bhāndārē.

anāyāsē jē pērēchē chalanā sahitē,

se pāy tōmār hātē

Śāntir aksay adhikār.

The path of your creation you have scattered with nets

of wondrous deceptions,

O Woman full of Deceit !

With a skillful hand you have spread the snare of false

beliefs within in this simple life;

With beguilement you have marked Greatness

itself—

For this (Greatness) you have not set apart the

Hidden Night.

You heavenly lights, for him, shows the path—

that is the path of his inner being,

which is ever translucent;

with inborn faith he

makes it ever brilliant.

He may be crooked outwardly, but inwardly he is

straight, and in this is his glory;

the world may call him deceived.

He finds the Truth

in his innermost being, washed by his own light.

Nothing can beguile him;

and receiving his last meed, he goes

to his own treasure-house.

He who has been able easily to bear your deception

receives from your hand

the imperishable title to Peace.

Albert Einstein as a scientist spoke of a “Cosmic Religious Feeling’’. He wrote: “It is very difficult to explain this feeling to any one who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvellous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. He looks upon individual existence as a prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole … The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image … But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past … His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.

Einstein’s religion poses that there is one Single Entity which embraces everything, and that this Single Entity is endowed with Supreme Intelligence, and Man’s only religious “service’’ with reference to this Supreme Reality can partake of the nature of a “Rapturous Amazement’’. This reminds us of the Upanishadic Vedanta, which poses the Unseen Reality as Sat, “That Which Is,’’ as the Only Entity or Existence embracing the entire Cosmos; also as ānanda or Source of all Bliss. There is full accord with Rabindranath’s views and convictions about the World and the Divinity, although at a certain period in his life he appeared to have been also interested in Positivism. He also believed that Being was a continuous or eternal Becoming, as it has been expressed in the mystic Bāul Song of Bengali—

viŚwa-kamal calchē je phuti’,

ō sē phuti phuti, tār phōtar nā hay śēs :

“This Lotus of Cosmos for ever goes on blooming :

It is as if it will burst out in full bloom right now, but

there is no end to its full blossoming.’’

In the words of the Īśa Upanishad, for example, Nature and Life form the golden vessel that covers up the face of Turth: and Pushan, or God who tends Man and the Universe, is asked to remove this vessel, so that we may see That, which is Its essential Nature is Turth:

hiranmayēna pātrēna satyasyāpihitam mukham :

tat tvam, Pusa, apāvrnu,—Satya-dharmāya dṛṣtayē;

and the Divinity (conceived as Pushan or the Nourisher, Ekarshi or the Unique Sage, Yama or the Controller, Sūrya or the Giver of Light, and Prājāpatya or Lordship over the Progeny of Men) is asked to spread out the rays of light and withdraw the brilliance, from Nature and World, “so that I might see the True Form within, even the Form which is full of Happiness—for I, though a man, am in essence the same as that Supreme Person’’ :

Puanna, ēkarṣ ē, Yama, Sūrya, Prājāpatya:

uyūha raŚmīn, samūha tējah;

yaat tē rūpam kalyānatamam, lat tē paŚyāmi:

yō’sāv asāu Puruṣaḥ, sōham asmi.

Can we not take Rabindranath’s Jívana-Dēvatā, the Divinity or Godhead as manifest in Life, to be the same as the Vessel of Gold, and the Brilliance, which cover the face of Truth and dazzle us, which is after all another aspect of the Supreme Reality, as the later is the only Entity embracing everything?

Rabindranath’s Jívana-Dēvatā did not spring out from his poetic personality, like a fully-armed Athena issuing out of the head of Zeus. She who is Rabindranath’s Jívana-Dēvatā has been also the World’s Desire, and she has been sought to be captured within the imagination of the nations from high antiquity—ever since Man, to follow the beautiful suggestion of Anatole France, discovered the beauty of the smile in a woman’s face, and found in it a supreme aestheic value in life. The Vedi Ushās or Dawn Goddess is behind Rabindranath’s Jívana-Dēvatā. Ushaās, the beautiful young Goddess, radiantly smiling, is the beloved of the Sun-god (Sūryō dēvīm Usasam mary ōna yōsām abhy ēti páścāt “the Sungoes after the Goddess Dawn, like a Man after a Maid’’), and her loveliness has been celebrated by poets of the Vedas who were charmed with her as the harbinger of life and light, and inspirer of man in his life’s avocations. It is Ushas who stands before our ken like a fair woman bathing, who stands up and displays her white limbs (ēsā Śubhrā na tanvō vidānā urdhvêva snātī drŚayē nō asthāt). She had been seen like the bosom of a lovely young woman (upō adarŚi Śundhyavō na vaksah); she displays her breasts like a resplendent young woman standing in front of us and smiling (samsmayamānā yuvatih purasha āvir vaksāmsi krn usē vibhātī). It is she who awakens people and sends them about in their work. Like a loving wife, well-dressed, and, as if smiling, Ushas reveals her beauty before her husband (jāyêva patya uŚatī su-vāsāh Usāh hasrêva nir n ītēapsah); and, like a poet, she reveals things that we love (Nōdhāh iva āvir akrta priyāni). Then there is the beautiful Vedic conception of Urvaśī the divine Apsaras or Nymph, living among the waters, who was loved by the hero-king Purūravas : Purūravas who wooed and won her, but only to lose her after some time — she passing out of his ken “like the first of the Dawns’’ (prâkramisam Usasām agriyêva), and becoming for him “as difficult of attainment as the Wind’’ (durāpanā Vāta ivâham asmi). Urvaśī gives also a component element in the Jívana-Dēvatā idea : Urvaśī, the heavenly Nymph, who was a willing sweetheart in the Hero Purūravas’s love-play, and about whom the distracted husband finally cried out in anguish :

antarīksa-prām rajasō vimānīm

upa Śiksāmi Urvaśīm vaŚiṣt ̣haḥ :

upa tvā rātis sukrtasya tis thād;

ni vartasva, hrdayam tapyatē mē !̣

Full of yearning, I am looking for Urvaśī, Who fills all the spaces and measures the heavens; (and he then says in a vein of self-dedication)—May the benefits of my good deeds reach Thee; do Thou come back, my heart is burning.

Rabindranath is also calling for his Jívana-Dēvatā in her guise of Urvaśī, the heavenly nymph or goddess who is beyond all human relations, and yet for whom the heart of the whole world is filled with the poignant anguish of love, and even saints and sages place at her feet the merits acquired by them through their austerities and their penances — the attainments of their good deeds (muni-gan dhyān bhāngi’ dèy padē tapasyār phal).

Rabindranath was a close reader and admirer of medieval Sanskrit and Bengali poetry treating in exquisite dictions and lyrics the love of Radha and Krishna, which as he thought was earthly, human love sublimated into the spiritual plane — the love between man and woman being made the symbol of the yearning of man’s soul for God, and of God to possess man’s soul. He himself had published an excellent anthology of Medieval Bengali Vaishnava lyrics on this theme : and he was so much impressed by their poetry and beauty as to essay himself, when quite young, a number of poems, in the same style, and to give them out, as a young man’s plaisanterie, as genuine old compositions by a poet Bhānu-simha Thākura, which was a translation of his own name. Some senior scholars were even duped by this. In the conception of the Jívana-Dēvatā, there are undoubtedly some of the deepest and most beautiful ideas from this mass of Vaishnava love-lyrics: e.g. those composed by Jayadeva of Old Bengal, Vidyāpati of Mithila, and Chandi-dāsa Jn˜āna-dāsa, Gōvinda-dāsa and a few others of Medieval Bengal. Rabindranath’s poems like Maran (“Death’’) and PraŚna (“A Question’’), composed in his teens in the Braja-buli dialect of Middle Bengali Vaishnava lyric poetry and incorporated in Bhānu-simha Thākurer Padāvalī, may easily be considered to be among the finest of the Jívana-Dēvatā poems. The concept was thus something which always was in the poet’s mind, from his boyhood until the end of his life.

Apart from these India’s sources, which came to Rabindranath as part of his national cultural inheritance of Sanskrit (in the Vedas and the Upanishads, the Rāmāyana and the Mahābhārata, and Kālidasa, and the rest), through his studies of English literature also came to him the modern cultured mind’s heritage from the classical — the Hellenic world. Aphroditē and Artemis, both as cosmic forces, and as divinities of love and motherhood, of beauty and chastity, were there in Greek literature. With this literature Rabindranath had an indirect but a close and a very vital contact, through, that of English. Shelley and Keats and Browning and Swinburne as well as Tennyson and Matthew Arnold wafted into his soul both the fragrant breeze of the Greek lyric poets as well as the tumult and the calm of the tragedians of ancient Greece, along with the transcendent beauty as well as the cosmic aspect of the Greek myths in their purest or maturest period. Rabindranath’s conception and treatment certainly keep abreast with the best things of the Greek spirit, as it has suffused modern English literature in this direction.

In Rabindranath’s idea of Jívana-Dēvatā, it would appear to me that there is some indirect influence of the Greek conception of Aphroditē. In the conception of the early Greek poets — the dramatists and the lyric poets particularly — there is a revelation of Aphroditē as a divine force which is also the sublimation of all beauty and of human yearning and aspiration, and which is also expressing herself through all life. Aphroditē is the Goddess of both spiritual love and idealisation, and of physical attraction and desire. She is both prēman and kāma, using the Indian terms. She is a power which draws men to her, although she is a supernatural force which rises above all human relations; and at the same time she is the symbol of Universal or Cosmic Beauty. The name Aphroditē is looked upon as non-Hellenic, i.e. non-Indo-European, and her conception originally was akin to that of the great Mother-goddess who was the Supreme Divinity of the pre-Indo-European peoples of Greece and Asia Minor and the Near East. Greek Artemis, the Virgin goddess, who has been identified in part at least with the Iranian Ardvi Sūra Anāhita and the Mesopotamian Inanna or Ishtar, was similarly also a Mother-goddess, and she was worshipped as such as Artemis of Ephesos. But one is tempted also to think that the name Aphroditē is Indo-European and not Semitic or Aegean, and the name may be equated with a hypothetical Sanskrit form *Abhra-ditā or *Abhra-dattā, i.e. “Cloud-given, or the Gift of the Clouds’’, and in her origin she might have been a goddess or nymph moving through the waters, like the Indian Apsaras and the Greek Naiads. Greek poets like Sophocles and Euripides have sung in beautiful language of the cosmic force which lies behind this conception of Aphroditē. As examples we may quote one or two passages from the ancient Greek in English translation :

My Children, of a surety Cypris is

Not Cypris only, but bears many a name;

Death is her name, and Might imperishable,

And maniac Frenzy, and unallayed Desire,

And Lamentation loud. All is in her;

Impulse, and Quietude, and Energy;

For in the bosoms of all souls that breathe

This goddess is instilled. Who is not prey

For her? She penetrates the watery tribe

 Of fishes; She is in the four-legged breed

Of the dry land; in birds her wing bears sway,

In brutes, in mortals, in the Gods on high. Without spear,

Without sword, Cypris cuts short all counsels,

Both human and divine.

(From Sophocles, translated by Sir George Young).

She ranges with the stars of eve and morn,

She wanders in the heaving of the sea,

And all life lives form her.—Aye, this is she

That sows Love’s seed and brings Love’s fruit to birth;

And great Love’s brethern are all we on earth.

(From Euripides, translated by Gilbert Murray).

Among the fragments from the ancient Greek poetess Sappho (Psappha) there is that fine hymn to Aphroditē, and here and there in the beautiful lyric fragments from her, which Time has spared for us, there are passages suggesting the cosmic as well as the human aspects of Aphroditē.

After a new revival of the spirit of ancient Hellas in European literature took place during the second half of the last century, we have among some of the English poets a number of beautiful compositions giving powerful expression to this Greek sense of cosmic Beauty which is also in the heart of man, through the figure of Aphroditē and of the other great Greek divinities. We are specially reminded of the poems in the Hellenic spirit by Algernon Charles Swinburne, and one can also think of his poems like Hertha, The Last Oracle, and a few more, and particularly his tragedies in the ancient Greek style, his Atalanta in Calydon and Erechtheus. With a divine vision he seems to have penetrated into the soul of the ancient Greeks, and in exquisite metre and in noble language he has sung of the spirit of this Beauty which controls the whole universe. The great chorus on Love in Atalanta in Calydon has some points of agreement which Rabindranath’s poem of Urvaśī. It is to be mentioned that Rabindranath Tagore had read Swinburne, and among the English poets, Shelly and Swinburne perhaps had the greatest influence on and agreement with him in their aestheticism. It may be well worth comparing Swinburne and Rabindranath in this matter. But Rabindranath’s conception is more profound, and it takes Urvaśī, like his Jívana-Dēvatā, to the sphere of the Unseen Reality, beyond the Empyrean. A great genius like Rabindranath was all-seeing and all-embracing, and whatever he found great and noble in any form of literature, which came within his perception, he was quite capable of assimilating and sublimating. With the light of the genius and personality, he has made his very own the things that came within his knowledge and which accorded with his spirit. And it has been observed that “in literature a thing becomes his, who says it best’’.

His Jívana-Dēvatā is, as has been said before, also the “World’s Desire’’— ViŚva-Vāsanā — and in his beautiful poem Urvaśī, the idea of Urvaśī typifying the yearning of the human heart of supreme beauty, ageless and deathless, which also enthuses man with life and spirit and hope and aspiration, is thus a legacy from ancient India, from the Vedic period onwards. In Vedic literature Urvaśī retains a good deal of her primitive Indo-European character as a nymph of the waters, comparable to the Naiads (and Dryads) of Greek mythology. She is glorious in her naked unadorned beauty, even like the Vedic Ushās, the goddess of the Dawn, and like the Hellenic Aphroditē Anadyomenē, as visualised in classical Greek art as in the Cnidos image by Praxiteles. She and the other Apsarās are the companions of the Gandharvas, lesser gods of Vedic mythology, who specially had music and pleasure as their sphere; and they also ranged through the woods, in the track of the deer and forest denizens, and moved in the waters as Swan-maidens. The story of the love of Purūravas and Urvaśī is narrated as a drama in the Rig-Veda and as a prose tale in the Śatapatha Brāhmana. The story has all the glory of a primitive love epic. In later Sanskrit literature, Urvaśī was transformed into a heavenly dancing girl who adorned the court of Indra, the King of the gods. She was degenerated into a bayadere, dancing and singing in the durbar of a medieval Indian prince. As such, she was sought after by both Gods and Men, and there are a number of stories in the typical Puranic vein about this transformed Urvaśī. In this way, her original Indo-European character, preserved in Vedic and Ancient Greek literature, was gradually lost in the later Sanskrit. Urvaśī, the dancer in the court of Indra, and in later Hellenistic and Roman Venus, the divinity of physical love and beauty. The name no doubt is a contraction of a pre-Vedic from *Urvaśī, which would mean “She of Wide Desire’’, or “She who is desired by all in this Wide World’’. In Greek, the equivalent of this pre-Vedic expression would be *Euru-wekia (or *Eurekia). We can very well say that Urvaśī, as a manifestation of Rabindranath’s Jívana-Dēvatā, also is a reflex of the greek Aphroditē and Artemis as conceived in early Greek literature, coming of Rabindranath through the pathway of English poetry.

Then there was the very distinctive Muslim Sufi idea of the Supreme Spirit as the Beloved One—the Máshūqah or the Beloved or sweet-heart of the Individual Soul as much as of the Entire World. This point has been referred to before. Passage from the great Sufi poets of Arabic and Persian like the Arabic mystic poetess Rabi‘ah al-‘Adwaiyah, and Farīduddīn ‘Attār, Ibn al-‘Arabī, ‘Omar Khayyām, Jalāluddīn Rūmī and Hāfiz, might be quoted, which would be like echoes from or parallels to the poems on Jívana-Dēvatā by Rabindranath Tagore. Take, for example, passage like the following :

(i) “O my Lord, the stars are shining,

And the eyes of men are closed,

And kings have shut their doors

And every lover is alone with his beloved:

And here I am, alone with Three.’’

Ilāhī, ’anarat al-nujūm,wa nāmat al-‘uyūn …

wa yalqat al-mulūk abwābahā …

wa xalā kullu habīb bi-habībihi;

wa hāÓa maqāmi baina yadaik.

(From the Arabic of Rabi‘ah al-’Adwaiyah)

(ii) “O Thou Who into this bazaar hast come with

veiled face,

Hast drawn by Thine attraction all mankind to

follow Thee;

One ray from Thy fair countenance has lightened

all our race,

The harvest of Thy sowing has borne fruit on

every tree’’.

ay r ūē dar-kaūdidä-bāzār āmadä

xalq-e-badīn tilism giriftār āmadä

xalq-e-badīn tilism giriftār āmadä :

yak partau ū figandä jahān gŚtä pūr -cirāy :

yak tuxm kiŚtä īnhamä dar bār āmadä

(From the Persian of Farīduddīn ‘Attār)

(iii) “The full moon appeared in the night of Her hair,

and the black narcissus bedewed the rose.’’

tala ‘a-l-badru fī duǵ á-Ś-a‘ari,

wa saqā-l-warda narǵisu-l-hawari.

(Ibn al-‘Arabi : Arabic)

(iv) “A tender girl is She; the fair women were

confounded by Her, and Her radiance outshines

the moon.”

yādathun, tāhati-hisānu bi-hā,

wa-zahā nūru-hā ‘alā-qamari.

(Ibn al-‘Arabi)

(v) “If She enters into the mind, that imagination

wounds Her, can She be perceived by the eye?’’

’inna sarat fīd-d-amīri yaǵrahu-hā

Õálika-I-wahmu kayfa bi-l-basari.

(Ibn al-‘Arabi)

(vi)“She is a phantom of delight that melts away when

we think of Her; She is too subtle for the range of

vision’’.

lu‘bathun dikru-nā yuÕawwibu-

hālatufat ‘an masārihi-n-nāÕw ari.

(Ibn al-‘Arabi)

(vii) “The heaven of light is under the sole of Her foot;

Her diadem is beyond the spheres …..’’

falaku-n-nūri dūna ’axmasi-hā:tāǵu-

hā xāriǵun ‘ani-l-’akari.

(Ibn al-‘Arabi)

(viii) “This poem of mine is without rime;

I intend by it Her.’’

śī‘ruya hā Õa bilā qufiyathin :’

innamā qasdya minhu harfu-hā.

(Ibn al-‘Arabi)

(ix)“My night is radiant with Her face,

and my day is dark with Her hair.’’

fa-laytī min waǵhi-hā muŚriqun,

wa-yawmiya min Śa‘ri-hā yāsiqu.

(Ibn al-‘Arabi)

(x) “What a Bride is in the soul ! By the reflexion

of Her face,

may the world be freshened and coloured

like the two hands of the newly-married !’’

ci ‘arūsiy-ast dar jān, ki jahān, za ‘akas-i-rūyaŚ,

cū du dast-i-nau-‘arūsān tar u pūr-nigār bādā !

(from the Persian of Jalāuddīn Rūmī)

(xi) “I am Thy lute, on every vein (chord) of mine

Thou strikest the quill, and I vibrate !’’

man cog-i-tu-am, ba har rag-i-man

tu zaxmä zanī, man tantananam.

(Jalāluddīn Rumī)

These would show how the Iranian and Arab Sufi poets had created an atmosphere in the mystic perception of and union with the Supreme, which Rabindranath also shared. But everyone brings his own particular contribution, and Rabindranath also here brought in elements from his own mind and experience and his own environment. The Indian poet had no direct access to the Persian poets because he did not study Persian. But his father, Maharshi Devendranath Tagore, was a Persian scholar, and he loved Sufi poetry, though in a pious and devotional way : and he was not influenced by the Ma‘shūqah conception of the Supreme. Herein we do not have a case of direct contact, or of influence of the divine and mystic life of the Persian and Arabic Sufis on Tagore. But it was a case of his unconsciously approaching the point of view of the Sufi poets.

The Supreme Spirit as the Lover of the human soul has always been conceived in India as the PurushÔttama or the Supreme Male, the human soul being in the place of the bride of the Divine Spouse or Lover. Only in rare instances in ancient Indian parlance the Supreme is conceived as a Woman, Who is beloved of the human soul, and the human soul is Her lover and spouse. Witness, for example that well-known passage in the brihad-āranyaka Upanishad (IV, 3, 21) : “As a man who is in the embrance of his beloved wife knows nothing without or within (yathā priyayā striyā sam-parisvaktō bāhyam kin˜cana na vēda, nântaram), so is the person who is in the embrace of the Intelligent Self (Prajn˜āna ātman) knows nothing without or within’’. But in Muslim Sufi poetry, the Supreme is always the Passive Beloved, the Ma‘shūq or Ma‘shūqah, as an ephebe or as a young woman, and the human soul is the Active Lover, the ‘āshiq. This ideology, quite novel for India, was also the one which became integrated with Rabindranath’s Jívana-Dēvatā. It was in the artistic and romantic spirit, sensing the Eternal Feminine waiting for her beloved, as an idealisation of the Supreme Reality which we are blindly seeking in all our life and our soul, that Rabindranath’s poetic spirit created the figure of Jívana-Dēvatā.

Among our artists, no one has so far sought to depict the Jívana-Dēvatā of Rabindranath in line and colour, or to visualise her in stone or bronze or terra cotta. Rabindranath’s Jívana-Dēvatā, as she has been portrayed in his poems, would evoke the figure of a Babylonian Ishtar or an Egyptian Isis, a Hellenic Aphroditē or Artemis, and an Indian Ushās, Sri or Umā or the whole series of Sura-sundarīs and Dēva-kanyās celestial nymphs and daughters of the Gods in ancient Indian art. So also the figure of the Vedic Urvaśī can only evoke the representation of Aphroditē and of the Naiads and other nymphs in Greek art. In his playful fancy as an artist in line and colour, Rabindranath had essayed many kinds of figures, apart from his rovings in the domain of the fantastic and the grotesque, the realistic and the decorative—the evocation of fleeting moods through shapes in line and in colour, in the “doodles’’ which would come without seeking. But he took some special care in most of the faces he painted or drew. He had sought, in many a composition in this direction, to bring out some trait of human nature or character or other. And he has given us some charming figures and faces of young women. Most of them are dark or black women. Some of these faces, of both men and women, are sober and serious, and a few look saucy and mocking. But it would seem to me, and others also agree with me in this, that he took some special care in painting a coloured picture, depicting a veiled woman, which is quite remarkable in its spiritual quality. It is a wonderfully beautiful face, fair in complexion, ideally “Aryan’’ or “Causasian’’ in its features, long and slim in its refined loveliness, with grey eyes, and plain and simple without any adornment. Rabindranath took care to sign this picture (in Bengali), which he usually did not do. This picture (rather large in size, 22” × 20”), the dominating colour of which is pink and russet, is now in the Indian National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, and it has been reproduced in its original size in colours by the Museum. It has also been sought to be reproduced on the reverse in the Tagore Birth Centenary Plaque in bronze instituted in 1961 by the Asiatic Society of Calcutta (among the first awardees of this plaque were such eminent world-figures as Arnold Toynbee, Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, Bertrand A. W. Russell, Daisutsu Teitaro Suzoki, Niels H. D. Bohr, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Prof. Pouré Davoud of Tehran, Albert Schweizer and Nandalal Bose). We would love to think that there is the poet’s own attempt to give out to all and sundry, in the palpable form of a painting, his own vision of the Jívana-Dēvatā as a picture or portrait, under Her veil, forever elusive and mysterious, but living and beautiful, loving and disturbing with Her beauty and Her high seriousness not without a touch of playfulness, when She lets down her face-covering. It would appear he could not resist the temptation to bind Her up for once in fetters of line and colour—Her who be only an incorporeal idea: the plastic Artist in him for once getting the better of the poet, the garland-weaver of word-flowers.

Rabindranath’s concept of Jívana-Dēvatā has been sought to be explained in various ways, and has been the matter of some controversy among critics in Bengal. The English biographer of Rabindranath, Professor Edward Thompson, has discussed the earlier Jívana-Dēvatā poems (pp. 104 ff. in his “Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist’’, Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 1948), and he quotes Rabindranath as giving the poet’s own interpretation of Jívana-Dēvatā. “The idea, the poet told me, ‘has a double strand’.” There is the Vaishnava Idealism—always keeping the separateness of the self — and there is the Upanishadic Monism. God is wooing each individual; and God is also the ground-reality of all as in the Vedantist unification. When the Jívana-Dēvatā idea came to me, I felt an overwhelming joy—it seemed a discover, new with me — in this deepest self-seeking expression. I wished to sink into it, to give myself up wholly to it. Today (in 1922), I am on the same plane as my readers, and I am trying to find what the Jívana-Dēvatā and other poems in the two books Sōnār Tarī (“The Boat of Gold’’, 1894) and Chitrā (“The Wonderfully Beautiful, the Variegated’’, 1896), some excerpts from which are given below as being very much propos to the understanding of the poet’s ideas :

“During the seven years from 1894 to 1900 he published as many major volumes of verse, besides several of drama, stories and other prose writing. The first of these volumes of poetry is Sōnār Tarī (“The Golden Boat’’), taking its name from the first poem in the book.

“On a rainy day, when the clouds thunder in the sky, the poet is sitting disconsolate on the edge of his field over-looking the river. The golden boat approaches and he dimly recognises the figure at the helm. The harvest of his field has been gathered and he fills the boat with it. The boat goes on its way, no one knows where, and the poet is left behind on the bank, forlorn. There was a time when a storm of controversy raged in the literary circles of Bengal as to the real meaning of this poem. What is the Golden Boat and who is at its helm? The author himself tried to explain that the Boat symbolized for him Life which collects the harvest of our achievement and goes floating on the stream of time, leaving us behind. The Golden Boat reappears in the last poem of the book, but now the poet has been taken into the boat. His Museum, the Beloved of his dreams, his guardian angel, half-known and half-unknown is at the helm. He asks her again and again where she is taking him. She say nothing, but, half-smiling, points to the distant horizon where the sun is sinking in the west.

“There are several very long and beautiful poems in the book … One is on Mānas-Sundarī, the Beauty behind all beauty, his childhood’’ playmate, his youth’s dream, and now his very being …

“Much as these poems glow with passion, it is passion suffused with, an subdued by, reflection. This reflective element will henceforth be increasingly impressed on his poetry, the passion subdued will be the stronger, the thought subtler …

“Now he is achieving a calm detachment and is learning to discriminate between the self that imprisons and the self that liberates, between the self that separates and the self that units. What he lost in the flesh he will regain in the spirit and will find in the universal what he sought in the particular. What pain he must have gone through to achieve this reconciliation with himself can be appreciated only by those who have passed through the day-night of the soul. It is interesting to note that the manuscript of Sonār Tarī which is now in the Tagore Museum at Santiniketan carries the following quotation from Goethe in German :

Entbehren sollst du,

Sollst entbehren.

This is followed by the English rendering of the same :

Thou must do without,

do without ……..

“The Golden Boat was followed by a collection of poems published in 1896 under the title Chitrā. Many Bengali readers would consider the volume as the finest fruition of Tagore’s poetical genius. There is no doubt that some of the poems in this volume mark the highest achievement during this period, though his genius was like a mountain that revealed different peaks in different weathers. The key to the title of volume (Chitrā = the Variegated, the Many-sided) which also indicates general spirit and tenor of the poems in it may be sought in the very first poem (entitled Chitrā) where the poet addresses the Universal Spirit or Nature as the wondrous Lady whose beauty is manifest in a million forms. But though in the outside world her beauty overflows in many different sights, colours and sounds, within the mind she sits alone, unique — immanent and pervading.

“The Universal Spirit or God (or whatever term is employed to embody the concept of the Ultimate) is after all a pure abstraction. To establish any relation of intimacy with it, saints, mystics and poets — and philosophers too — have throughout the ages tried to particularize it as Father, Lord, Beloved, etc. Whether man is made in the image or God or not, God certainly has been conceived in the image of man. Tagore’s growing apprehension at this period of life of this Universal Spirit or Reality was intensely personal and he could only visualize it in terms of his own direct perception and need of it. He was, above everything else, a lover who saw beauty in the commonest things, who felt its touch in the outside world and felt it in his inmost being and knew that at some level of the subconscious or the superconscious the two were intimately linked. The same Spirit that suffused and ruled this vast universe dwelt within him and guided his life and genius. He called it Jívana-Dēvatā or Lord of my Life. In his famous poem of that title he says,

O my inmost Being, has your thirst been quenched by coming into my heart? I have curshed my heart, like grapes in the press, and filled your cup with a thousand pourings of joy and sorrow. I have melted the gold of my desires and made of it ever-new images of for your transient sport.

He goes on to confess his many limitations and failures and begs the Lord of his life to forgive them. ‘How can I, O Master-poet, sing adequately your music?’

“Much controversy and ingenuity has been wasted by well-meaning critics in trying to explain or repudiate the validity of this conception of Jívana-Dēvatā, forgetting that all poets and men of destiny—indeed even ordinary men—have at times been aware of two selves within them, one that does, the other that watches and judges. Who has not at times, begged forgiveness of himself and promised to be truer to himself? If the poet’s sensibility is sharper and he is able to voice effectively what we all feel and cannot express —well, that’s exactly what is expected of a poet. Rabindranath has so much private and esoteric creed of feelings which we cannot all share. If there is any esoteric Rabindranath whose words are veiled in mystery, it is the creation of his critics. “Thy words are simple, my Master, but not theirs who talk of You.’’ (from pp. 163-167)

The concept of Jívana-Dēvatā is a many-hued and many-splendoured complex, and Rabindranath through whom this concept took form in poetry of supreme truth and beauty had declared that he was himself baffled by it, and could not categorize it, and he could not describe who was behind this Jívana-Dēvatā either, as we see from his own statements. But some people must try to find out the philosophy and the rationale behind it, and give what would only be, according to their own satisfaction, a ‘cogent and logical interpretation’ of something which seems to belong to this earth and is elusive at the same time. A fantastic note has recently been struck, in seeking to find in Jívana-Dēvatā the continuous and life-long idealisation of just one woman by the poet — a woman who was a living personality and who came into his life, as a close relation by marriage, when he was only 7 and passed out of it through the hand of Death when he was 22. She has been if we are to follow this “interpretation’’, almost like a Beatrice for an Indian Dante, or a Laura for an Indian Petrarca; —and this seems only to be seeking to read something which is only in the imagination of the ‘interpreter’, to create a problem which never existed; since the Poet’s own account of his relationship with her and his references to her, which are frequent enough in his writings, bring a totally different impression. This is in spite of the fact that some of his most intense poems (some written long after her death, during his mature old age even) indicate a deep attachment and respect and gratitude to her personality and her memory, and not what might be described as romantic love for her. In those days of child-marriage a century ago, when such a “marriage’’ was nothing more than a irrevocable betrothal, Rabindranath’s fifth elder brother Jyotirindranath Tagore (1849-1925), with whom the poet was in most intimate and affectionate terms all through, was married in 1868 at the age of 17 to Kadambari Devi, who was then quite a child, aged 9 (she lived from 1859 to 1884, passing away when she was not even fully 25 years). Rabindranath was only 7 when Kadambari Devi came to the Tagore family as a child-bride. He was a shy boy, and felt rather lonely as one of 15 children in a big family of 9 sons and 6 daughters (he being the last but one — and the eldest, a girl, had died in infancy), as his mother, with all that she had to do as the mistress of a large patriarchal family, could not give him the close attention which he would have liked. But during their teens, a very tender relationship grew up between the elder sister-in-law and the younger brother-in-law, in the established and approved tradition of the life in a Bengali joint-family which still largely holds; and this meant so much for the adolescent and sensitive Poet. Kadambari, as she grew up in the congenial cultural and literary atmosphere of the Tagore family, acted like an elder sister to the Poet; and she herself from her husband and his entourage developed literary and artisitic susceptibilities and talents of a remarkably high order, helping, though mostly behind the scenes, in her husband Jyotirindranath’s experiments in music and literature, and acting as the unseen inspirer of most of the social and artistic functions; and she was also largely responsible, by her criticisms and by her sympathy and understanding, for the unfoldment of Rabindranath’s early literary talents. The Poet’s mother died when he was only 14, Kadambari Devi, then 16, was already the mistress of her husband’s little mēnage within the Tagore mansion, presiding over the little coteric of littérateurs, musicians and composers, and artists consisting of her husband and a few of his intimate friends who were among the élite in the Cultural World of Calcutta at the time. As a responsible young daughter-in-law of the family, with her mother-in-law’s death she at once became the guardian angel for her younger brothers-in-law and the young boys and girls in the household, and mothered them in their daily life and study and play most tenderly for some years, according to Rabindranath’s own testimony in his Autobiography. The poet was deeply conscious of this rÔle of Kadambari Devi as his intellectual mentor and ministering angle in life, and he was expressed his profound affection for her in some exquisite poems, where some subtle influence from her personality in shaping his imaginative and spiritual being can very well be suggested. Late in life he also found occasion to refer to his sense of deep attachment and gratitude to her — so lasting was her impression upon his mind. He had dedicated to the memory of Kadambari Devi some of his early and most significant books of verse written during his age of 16 to 20. But all that does not warrant us in the assumption that the Jívana-Dēvatā concept, which was the dominant note in his poetry all through his life, was just a sublimation of his idealisation of this lady who helped to draw out the best in his literary sensibilities in his adolescence and early youth, and that there was nothing more in the shaping of this concept. Kadambari Devi’s death was as mysterious as it was tragic. She committed suicide on April 19, 1884 by taking opium. Why she did that has still remained a mystery, and will remain so. It has, however, been suggested that, as a spirited and over-sensitive woman, she did it in a pique because she had accidentally discovered (as it was stated by some ladies of the family) a bundle of letters while sending her husband’s clothes to the laundry. This made her feel that she was neglected by her husband for the sake of another woman, howsoever short-lived or temporary might have been this infatuation on his part. Some contemporary statements and references would seem to hint at this neglect as the reason. But it was paradoxical and incomprehensible, as their married life though childless, from all evidence was otherwise perfectly happy. Jyotirindranath was a literary and musical genius, and a worthy and a most loving brother of Rabindranath. But, as it has been said, even wise men may slip and fall. Rabindranath had already married, when he was 22, on December 9, 1883, only 4 months before Kadambari Devi’s death. It was also what would be called a “child-marriage’’. His wife Mrinalini Devi, as the future bride of Rabindranath, according to the old Bengali Hindu usage, was selected by his elder sisters-in-law, Jnanada-nandini Devi (the wife of Satyendranath Tagore) and Kadambari Devi, who both of them went to see the bride before further negotiations for the wedding; and Mrinalini was approved by his father also, though she was not yet fully 12. It was, however, a very happy marriage, and Rabindranath was an ideal husband; and Mrinalini Devi, with her dedication to her husband and his ideas and his work, was successful in making with their five children a most happy home for the poet, until her death in 1902, when she was sharing to the fullest in her husband’s work in running his experimental school, the open-air Brahmacharya Vidyālaya, at Santiniketan. Her untimely death brought out from the Poet a most tender and delicate expression of his love for his wife, in the form of a series of exquisite love elegies. [For a sober and not a problem-creating account of Rabindranath and Kadambari Devi’s relationship, see Parijan-Parivēśē Ravīndra-vikāś (“The Unfoldment of Rabindranath in the Environment of his Family’’) by Dr. Sukumar Sen (Calcutta University, 1962, pp. 68 f.) and Thākur-bārīr Kathā (“The Story of the Tagore Family’’) by Hiranmay Banerji (I.C.S.), former Vice-Chancellor of the Rabindra-Bharati University, Calcutta (1966, pp. 126 ff., esp. pp. 134 ff.). See also Jyotirindranath, by Dr. Susil Ray, “Jijnasa’’, Calcutta 1963, pp. 286, with portraits of Kadambari Devi (one drawn by her husband)]

For pure poetry, the mass of Rabindranath Tagore’s output in verse is among the noblest and most beautiful and aesthetically as well as spiritually among the most satisfying in the literature of the world. The content and the form keep perfect harmony with each other. The beauty of language is one of the supreme things in Rabindranath’s Muse. He has himself given renderings of selections from his verse compositions in English, and English speakers have accepted his translations as if they were original works, and have given them very great honour as compositions in English. But in his native Bengali, naturally there is an exquisiteness and a charm which native speakers alone can feel, and which cannot be adequately rendered for the benefit of those who do not read Bengali. The felicity of his language, as much as the beauty of the melody he has given to his songs, create also some sadness in the mind of those who understand the language and love it — that after all, with the changing times this language will also change, and future generations ere long will not be able to get all that we, the poet’s contemporaries, are able to get. The same thing can be said about Shakespeare’s countrymen at the present age. If Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar and Bankim Chandra Chatterji had found the Bengali language to be brass, they had left it as silver, and this silver was transmuted to pure gold by Rabindranath.

For a Bengali-knowing person, it would be impossible to convey in words the fervency of the aesthetic and spiritual appeal, the genuine unction and poignancy, the beauty and majesty as the case may be — the purely lyrical quality bringing about mental and emotional uplift — of Rabindranath’s songs when sung by an artiste with a divine voice and perfection in execution. We have quite a good few of these artistes, both men and women, and they are continuing the tradition of Tagore Songs (Rabindra-Sangīt) which goes back to the poet himself, his grand-nephew Dinendranath Tagore (1882-1935) being the first great conserver and disseminator of Tagore melodies.

The miracle in Tagore’s writings is the uniformly high level — and frequently an astonishingly high level — of most of all the huge mass he wrote in both verse and prose. A Rabindranath Tagore Anthology can easily be a very extensive work, and one may say that almost every line is pregnant with some profound thought or observation or can be called a gem of an epigram. His prose essays, his sermons, his prose poems are replete with profound observations, which meet with the needs of man. His criticism of life is never pessimistic or cruel, and he has a kindly humour which lights up his remarks with sympathy even when he is ill at ease with some personal character or some situation he is dealing with.

His dramas are among the greatest in Bengali, and his mystic dramas like Dāk-Ghar or “The Post Office’’, Rājā or “The King of the Dark Chamber’’, Mukta-dhārā “The Freed Waterfall’’, Rakta-Karavī “Red Oleanders’’, and Achalāyatan “The Abbey of Stagnancy’’ carry a very deep import for individual life and corporate society. His narrative or reflective tales in verse, like Pariśōdh, Abhisār, Dēvatār Grās, Vidāy-Abhiśāp, Gāndhārīr āvēdan, Naraka-vāsa, Karna-Kuntī-Samvāda, Phāmki, Nishkriti, Kāmeliyā, Sādhāran Mēyē etc. as much as his best short stories like Mēgh O Raudra or Chhuti have a poignancy, and intensity of humanity and of psychological insight which make them a “possession forever’’, as much as his longer reflective writings, in verse as well as prose. The ideals of India he has expressed in some of his beautiful poems, of which one (Bhārata-tīrtha) proclaims Universal Humanism as a supreme expression of the Indian spirit, and another has been made the National Anthem of India (Jana-gana-mana-Adhināyaka). His novels have given to world literature some of the finest psychological studies of men and women, from his earlier works like Chōkhēr Bali down to the works of his mature period like Gōrā, Sēshēr Kavitā, Yōgāyōg, Chār Adhyāy and the rest.

Rabindranath Tagore had his feet firmly planted on Mother Earth, even when he soared heavenwards on the wings of mystic perception and realisation. He loved men and women — he looked at them through the eyes, and could penetrate deep into their souls. Good or bad, they all attracted him with a sympathetic interest. In his poems and dramas, short stories and novels, and in other prose literature, he has given us quite a large gallery of characters, of men and women, who in their number and diversity of personality would rival those of Shakespeare, or of Tolstoy. Biman Bihari Majumdar in his excellent study (Heroines of Tagore: A Study in the Transformation of Indian Society, 1875-1941 : Calcutta 1968, page 345) has given a detailed study of 219 ‘heroines’ — of women young and mature, exceptional or ordinary (there are also a few more, though not so important) who with their men co-actors on the stage of life jostle round their creator Rabindranath; and Rabindranath stands serene and benevolent in the midst of the creations of his imagination and genius in his loving-kindness, as much as Shakespeare or Tolstoy, Vyāsa or the Greek epic and dramatic poets.

As in the case of the Rāmāyana and the Mahābhārata, of the Homeric poems and the Greek Tragedians, of the Hebrew Bible, of the Arthurian Cycle, of Shakespeare and Goethe and of some of the other great works and writers like the Celtic and Germanic heroic literature, of the Baltic dainas, of Persian and Arabic Sufi poetry, of Dante, of Moliére, there has commenced, even during Rabindranath’s lifetime, an extensive Tagore literature, studying the poet’s work in their ensemble and through separate works, to understand them and to evaluate their message and value of humanity. Scholars of Bengal familiar with the language and the background of Tagore naturally have taken the lead, and already many scores of works studying Tagore literature and Tagore ideology have come into existence in Bengali. Besides, there are also numerous works in English by Bengali and other Indian scholars, as well as by European and American writers, and Tagore studies in the other Indian languages and all the advanced languages of Europe and Asia are appearing. An unending stream of papers, monographs and books are following on, adding to the growing volume of Tagore Literature. At least two Universities in Bengal, the Visva-Bharati and the Rabindra-Bharati, with the Tagore Research Institute in Calcutta, are specialising in Tagore Studies. All this testifies to the ever-growing interest in Rabindranath Tagore, both in his own country and abroad.

Rabindranath’s is a personality which seems to be all-inclusive, and he has a message of cheer and hope as well as of sincere and serious thought for all sorts and conditions of men. He is thus emphatically universal, in his sympathy and in his appeal, and certainly he can be called, so far our age is considered, the culmination or the highest peak of literature which is both realistic, concerning itself with life, and at the same time reflective, occupying itself with the domain of the intellect and the spirit. The future may have still greater things in store for us : but in Rabindranath Tagore, more than in any other writer during recent centuries, we have the quality of both immanence and transcendence, and that is what makes his message to Humanity all-comprehending and universal.

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A Note on the name Rabindra-nath (see A Thanks giving, and p. 40, ante). The name is a compound of three Sanskrit words, Ravi, “The Sun or Sun-god, God of Light and Warmth and Heat’’, Indra, “the King of the Gods who wields the Thunder and brings Clouds and Rain’’, and Nātha, “Lord or Master’’. This style of names became very popular in Bengal from the middle of the 19th century; and similar names are in use in other parts of India, among Hindus and Sikhs. When the poet’s 64th birthday was celebrated in China in 1925, his Chinese friends made a seal in his name in jade, in which the name was translated by three Chinese characters carved in the stone in the ancient style of Chinese writing—Chu (from T’ien-chu, meaning “Heavenly Land’’, an old Chinese name for India), Chen (= Sun-rise) and Tan (= Thunder), Chu Chen-Tan signifying poetically “the Morning Sun-light and Thunder of India’’. This was in the ancient Chinese way of translating Sanskrit names which came with Buddhism.

The surname Tagore is an 18th century Anglicised form of the Indian term of respect Thākur, of uncertain origin (but supposed to be from the Turkish tegin “prince’’), which has been in use in India for some 1000 years, and it means (i) a Rajput or Warrior Chief in North India and (ii) a god, an image, the Supreme God, and also an inferior Br ā hman, a Br ā haman priest or cook. The family title (or, ‘Village Name’, Gānˉi-nām or Grāmika-nāma) of the Tagores of Calcutta, belonging to the Śāndilya clan, was kuŚārī, from the name of a village in Bengal (KuŚāgārika = “One who dwells in KuŚāgāra, the place of KuŚa grass’’). Tagore (Thākur) was a title of respect given to them in Calcutta where they settled in the 18th century.

Editor’s Note:

This book is a compilation of three lectures

that Sunitikumar delivered in Marzthxwrds University in 1963.