But Rabindranath, in his own reckoning, is a poet in the first place. In many of his letters, Rabindranath almost characteristically did not sign his name at the end, but instead simply wrote ‘Kobi.’ At eight, he first tried to compose a poem. And even at eighty-one — just a few hours before his death — he tried to compose nothing but a poem, his very last poem, one that he ended up dictating to someone.

   Rabindranath’s first collection of poems called Kobikahini appeared in 1878, while his last volume of poems Janmodiney, published during his lifetime, appeared in 1941 — the year of his death. This journey from Kobikahini to Janmodiney — a journey that eventfully spanned nearly seventy years, a journey that produced more than sixty collections of poems — was certainly one of a poet who also productively traversed numerous other territories with nothing short of superb consequences, broadening not only our literary but also our discursive horizon.

     2.
   Within the discursive horizon in question, one can readily locate Rabindranath Tagore’s first major work Manoshi, published in 1890. It is a volume of poems that — like Michael Madhusudan Dutta’s groundbreaking literary epic called Meghnadbadh Kavya — inaugurated a new phase in the history of Bangla poetry. It is interesting that Madhusudan’s epic appeared in 1861, the very year in which Rabindranath himself was born.

   True, Madhusudan exercised a tremendous impact on the subsequent generations of poets. It is not usually known that as many as two hundred epics were attempted in Bangla after Madhusudan, although none of those epics could actually achieve the richness and rigor of Madhusudan’s Meghnadbadh — a monumental work in the history of Bangla literature. It is in this sense that Madhusudan had a large but a weak following.

   But Rabindranath’s Manoshi decisively revived, reshaped, and renewed the lyrical tradition in Bangla poetry, simultaneously linking up the very conjuncture of his poetic production with a vibrant lyrical tradition running from the Charyapada, through medieval Vaishnava lyrics and Chandidas, to Lalon Fakir and Biharilal Chakravorty. Indeed, because of Tagore’s unprecedentedly consequential interventions, it is the lyrical — not the epical — that has hitherto dominated Bangla poetry.

     3.
   Poetry remains at the forefront of Rabindranath’s entire oeuvre.

   And Rabindranath characteristically celebrates the poetic in virtually every instance. On Rabindranath’s seventieth birthday, the popular Bengali fiction-writer Sarat Chandra Chattyapaddhay characterized Rabindranath as a ‘sovereign poet.’ For Rabindranath, indeed, poetry is ubiquitous. One can certainly invoke numerous essays of Rabindranath in order to account for his pronounced insistence on the poetic as a ubiquitous force. But, for now, suffice it to recall his famous piece called ‘Chandidas and Vidyapati’ — a piece devoted to his two most favorite poets, medieval Bengali poets — a piece in which Rabindranath calls attention to the notion of the poetic itself.

   So, like Chandidas and Vidyapati, the poetic for Rabindranath resides in the very power to enter life itself—the life of the self, the life of the other, and the life of nature. This triangular interaction—always aiming at some kind of grand unification, mostly animated by the Upanishads-mediated spirit of Unity — characterizes at least part of Rabindranath’s own poetics. And, of course, alienation is mostly alien to this poetics, although it is true that some of his last poems — included, for instance, in Shesh Lekha — seem to be registering certain tropes of alienation, at least marking a kind of ‘modernist’ moment in Bangla literature.

   But what comes to characterize Rabindranath’s poetics is the Hegel-mediated notion of Ëinfuhlung — one that literally means ‘in-feeling,’ one that emphasizes and even idealizes empathy and union, unlike the German playwright-theorist Bertolt Brecht’s epic-theatrical notion of Verfremdung (which means alienation). Indeed, Rabindranath is famous—some even say that he is notoriously famous — for what is by now an established hermeneutic code in mainstream Rabindranath criticism: oikkya-chetana.

     4.
   Rabindranath’s Upanishadian oikkya-chetana — principle of Unity, that is — prompts him to forge connections among apparently different genres and forms. But, still, it is the poetic that seems to be dominating in virtually every case. In fact, it is characteristic of Rabindranath to weave the poetic into the discourses of fiction, non-fiction, plays, and even essays. Think of his novel Shesher Kabita, or think of his short-story ‘Ekratri,’ or think of such plays as Dakghar and Raktakorobi and Raja, to cite just a few works at random, not to mention Chitrangada. Of course, there are some essays in which Rabindranath Tagore exemplarily enacts a transaction between the prosaic and the poetic such that the borderlines between the two begin to blur.

   Indeed, Rabindranath is famous for producing both poetic prose and prosaic poetry, including what none other than Bankimchandra Chatterjee had first called goddya kobita or prose-poems in Bangla literature. Also, some art-critics, who have detected what they call ‘the bubbles of the unconscious’ in Rabindranath’s works of painting, have also found in them at least some poetic registers and resonances, refracted from those poems that are particularly dominated by visual images. Even in Rabindranath’s poetics and aesthetics — even at the formal level — one thus sees that what the metaphysics of art accentuates as ‘Unity’ can certainly bring together or blend different formal, generic, and thematic elements. But, then, one also sees that this Unity does not come to mean equality as such; that this Unity is never a neatly resolved one or a completely achieved one; and that this Unity may even involve some form of violence, one’s well-meaning predilection for that very Unity notwithstanding. We will later briefly interrogate this very issue of Unity on a political level.

     5.
   One thing that — in my reckoning — characterizes Rabindranath’s entire work and world is his will-to-articulation. And this will-to-articulation prompts and enables Rabindranath to seek and find words, notes, lines, even silences, genres, forms, media, and, yes, all kinds of practices — signifying or not. Even what we call ‘thought’ and what Rabindranath himself calls dhyan are modes of articulation or signifying practices — ones that cannot, however, be dissociated from the world in which Rabindranath himself lived or acted or articulated.

   This is, of course, not to suggest that a writer’s world just neatly comes to determine a writer’s work as such. There are in fact complex lines of mediation — there are therefore connections, however tangential — between the word and the world, between the writer and his/her work and world. ‘The articulated is also worlded,’ as Rabindranath himself at least mildly indicated in several essays he wrote on language and literature. His well-known emphasis on the word sahit as the root of sahittya is by no means pointless; it underlines the act of making connections as a crucial literary or signifying practice. In fact, Rabindranath anticipates the famous injunction of EM Forster — ‘Only connect’ — although, as history tells us, the act of making connections is neither an innocent nor a safe one.

     6.
   Much has been written about Rabindranath over a period of sixty-six years since his death, while readers and critics were by no means silent — were rather vocal — about Rabindranath’s work even during his lifetime. In fact, one can rightly speak of a massive critical industry cashing in on the very Rabindranath phenomenon that continues to attract readings and re-readings. And my purpose here is not to provide an overview of his life and work, nor do I mean to offer a comprehensive critical evaluation of Rabindranath. Rather, I intend to take up a few issues vis-à-vis certain positions that Rabindranath articulates in some of his prose-works — issues that remain usually submerged or buried beneath the ritual of canonizing or even deifying Rabindranath.

   7.
   Rabindranath Tagore spent half of his life in the nineteenth century (1861-1900) and another half in the twentieth (1900-1941). Indeed, just a few years before Rabindranath was born, in 1857, the first anti-colonial armed struggle for national liberation took place in British India — a movement that was more than a ‘Sepoy Mutiny,’ a highly misleading, even ahistorical characterization that emanated from the British and their lackeys. And, indeed, that movement turned out to be a material force, spreading like fire and thus increasingly involving the insurrectionary participation of the masses — the peasantry in particular. Of course, just a year before this movement, the famous Saontal Rebellion took place.

   In fact, one can trace a long history of all kinds of subaltern movements against British colonialism and the zamindar class created by the British themselves. One can also simultaneously trace a history of brutal British repression of such movements — a history of colonial exploitation, oppression, tyranny, and violence. And colonial violence already assumed different forms — physical, political, economic, cultural, and even epistemic.

     8.
   Rabindranath was born at that explosive and violent conjuncture, while he himself witnessed the rise of a parasitic middle-class, the consolidation of a colonial educational system and a colonial bureaucracy, and the politics of Congress characteristically promoting the agendas of the British-dominated national ‘bourgeois’ and feudal zamindar classes at the expense of the colonized majority

   At the international level, of course, capitalism — British, European, and even American — began to morph into monopoly capitalism or imperialism itself, the arc of whose development Lenin plotted and theorized with superb political rigor and efficacy in his classic work called Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism towards the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, all such moments and milieu variously surrounded the life and work of Rabindranath Tagore.

   And, of course, during the second half of Rabindranath’s life, history stubbornly shifted gears. The first World War as a result of fierce inter-capitalist rivalries; the Russian Revolution of 1917 that gave rise to the first working-class state as well as heady socialist experiments, while inspiring and influencing many other working-class movements, including even national liberation movements across the colonized world; the national liberation movement in British India itself; and the brewing and growth of the Chinese Revolution throughout the 1920s and 1930s all constituted some of the crucial historical moments, whose rhythms and pressures variously inflected or affected the world in which Rabindranath himself lived and worked.

     9.
   By no means an ‘aestheticist’ in the narrow sense of the term, but politically engaged and historically grounded in some profoundly significant ways, Rabindranath Tagore actively responded to certain conjunctural pressures of his time. His numerous political, social, educational, and philosophical essays amply attest to the point I’ve just made. Indeed, on more occasion than one, he directly took part in hard political activities, while he even addressed a few mass gatherings in British India.

   One often cites the case of his rejection of the British knighthood in protest against the colonial massacre in Amritsar. Even when Gandhi seemed silent and Chittyaranjan did not move forward in the face of the massacre in question, it was none other than Rabindranath Tagore who protested in his own way the naked brutality of British colonialism itself.

   Yet that protest and many other anti-colonial positions Rabindranath articulates in his work do not seem adequately strong or fundamental in character and content. I think it is important to emphasize that his own class location and what might be called his own ‘class unconscious,’ his Upanishadian oikkya-chetana, his unity-seeking metaphysics and aesthetics, and his brand of humanism heavily influenced by Western liberalism (Tagore was one of the first and foremost liberals that British India produced after Raja Rammohan) variously inform his responses to and resistances against colonialism.

  
   10.
   In fact, Tagore’s entire oeuvre is marked by both tensions and transactions with colonialism — more transactions than tensions, as some critics would have us believe. Numerous essays written by Rabindranath can be cited to see the point in question, but one can particularly check out such essays as ‘Samajved,’ ‘Prachya o Pratichya,’ ‘Purbo o Pashchim,’ and even ‘Savyatar Sankat.’ These essays indicate that while it immensely pains Rabindranath to see the brutality of Western colonialism, his belief in the possibilities of so-called Western ‘civilization’ remains more or less intact.

   In certain instances, Rabindranath even uncritically embraces the West with his humanist ardor, eliding or short-circuiting all unequal power-relations that obtain and operate among different sites and subjects. We know that the rhetoric of Western humanism itself—in the name of love and compassion and thus warmly embracing everyone on our planet—has historically ignored the actual sites of material contradictions and inequalities in an attempt to pacify or even preclude the possibilities of social uprisings against the oppressor. It is difficult to say that Tagore, in at least some of his works, has really been able to exorcise the ghost of Western humanism that still keeps re-centering the West itself in a number of guises.

   Indeed, the specters of colonialism keep haunting him. For instance, in his essay ‘Purbo o Pashchim’ — an essay written after his rejection of the British knighthood — Rabindranath emphasizes the issue of humanity’s ‘grand union’ in the context of British India, while urging us to make our relationship with the West and the British a fruitful one — not by revolting against them but by embracing them in our own interest. He even deploys the by-now-well-known colonialist metaphor of ‘light’ to describe the ‘civilizing’ role of the West in our life.

   I think this particular essay ‘Purbo o Pashchim,’ among others, can easily be pressed into the service of today’s neo-liberal, neo-assimilationist project called US multiculturalism, one that emphasizes the grand union of all cultures. But, of course, the overall position that Rabindranath Tagore enunciates in the essay vis-à-vis the West by no means represents the totality of his positions and practices. There are other gaps, absences, and silences in his discursive engagements, while also there are telling moments of anti-colonial articulation and pronouncements that together turn Rabindranath into a highly contradictory and complex figure, who, nevertheless, continues to open up spaces of promises and possibilities for us.

By  Dr Azfar Hussain
(Dr Azfar Hussain taught English, cultural studies, and comparative ethnic studies at Washington State University and Bowling Green State University in the United States before his recent move to North South University, Dhaka, where he teaches English.)

Resource:
New Age, August 3-9, 2007
http://www.newagebd.com/2007/aug/03/aug03/xtra_also3.html