In commemoration of Tagore one hundred & fiftieth Birthday
Human race is the only one race in the world
Monaem Sarker
Rabindranath Tagore used to assert boldly “There is only one race in the world that is the human race. He loved India, no doubt, but it was nothing but an idea. He said, “I love India but my India is an idea and not a geographical expression. Therefore, I am not a patriot. I shall seek my compatriots all over the world.”
But it does not mean that Tagore was a rootless cosmopolitan. The famous British writer J.A. Spender has rightly observed, “Tagore is always an Indian patriot and he has rightly resented what is wounding to the pride of self-respect of his countrymen, but his thoughts travel beyond patriotism to the unity of the spirit in which alone there can be peace and reconciliation for nations or individuals. In this he had been a true citizen of the world, teaching not an Eastern or an Indian doctrine, but the one human truth of which mankind everywhere stands in urgent need to-day.”1
The peoples of the East and the West must join together and learn from each other. Lapses made by India or any other power should not place permanent barriers. The power of human spirit is always permanent.
The poet had always been looking after his true home. In a letter to his Argentinean friend Victoria Ocampo on 13 January 1925 wrote Tagore, “My true home is there where from my surroundings comes the call to me to bring out the best that I have, for that inevitably leads me to the touch with the universal. My mind must have a nest to which the voice of the sky can descend freely, the sky that has no other allurements but light and freedom. Whenever there is the least sign of the nest becoming a jealous rival of the sky, my mind, like a migrant bird, tries to take its flight to a distant shore.”2
Tagore’s wandering of the world and his open mind in accepting new ideas has widened his mental horizon that made him really the universal man. As a true inheritor of the teachings of Raja Ram Mohan Roy he sincerely wanted synthesis between the East and the West. It seems that he sought his compatriots and his true abode all over the world. However his principal motives of traveling had also been his curiosity to know a new country, its ancient heritage and modern development as well as to spread Indian culture. Since 1920 another motive of his foreign tour dominated was to raise funds for his beloved international university Visva-Bharati.
In 1912 at the age of fifty-one he visited the United States of America at the persuasion of his son who studied in the USA. The poet visited the country five times spending altogether seventeen months there. His American tour has been one of the important chapters of his eventful life.
The United States of America had also attracted him for various reasons. Some American writers and thinkers impressed him. He was influenced by reading the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin at his boyhood. At his mature age Tagore appreciated the writings of Emerson and Whitman. He told an American journalist, “I love your Emerson. In his work one finds much that is of India.” Whitman’s poems, according to him, were “deeply imbued with Eastern ideas and feelings.”
A few lines of Whitman’s “Passage to India” testify it. “O we can wait no longer; we too take ship O soul. Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to soul. Amid the wafting winds (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, O soul.) Caroling free, singing our song of God. Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration.”
Tagore was basically a poet but he had also intruded into active politics for a short period during the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal. But he left active politics disillusioned and confined himself mostly in writing and constructive works. But his heart had always been with rural India. He believed that the regeneration of the country was possible by improving of agriculture and cottage industries. He advocated the program of reconstruction of India villages in “Swadeshi Samaj” in which the priority was on the improvement of agriculture, cottage industries and co-operation.
During the British rule Indian traditional cottage industries were destroyed by the impact of the industrial revolution of England. By the discriminatory policy of an alien ruler. India became almost a supplier of raw materials and market for British industrial goods. In consequence of de-industrialization millions of Indian artisans were thrown out of employment and crowded in agriculture. In this context. Swadeshi or using of country-made goods was one of the slogans of the Swadeshi Movement. The study of science and industry in foreign country was advocated during the Movement in order to make the country strong and self-reliant. A concerted attempt was also made by the nationalists in Bengal to send students in Japan or America to study science, agriculture and technology.
Tagore showed his practical interest on America in this period. America had already earned world-wide recognition by its spectacular advance in agriculture and science. The University of Illinois became renowned as an advanced centre in the study of agricultural science. That may be a reason of sending his only son Rathindranath to USA to study agricultural science. He preferred Oxford or Cambridge to Illinois. The study of agricultural science was almost unknown to middle class Bengali families. In that respect Tagore seems to be a pioneer. Along with his son, he had also sent his son-in-law and a son of his friend to Illinois.
Rathindranath, his son testifies that during the Swadeshi movement, “father had felt that the key to Swaraj lay in improving the economic condition of the masses living in the villages of India. Uplift of the villagers cannot be achieved without improving the unscientific methods of agriculture. This thought must have led him to send me and my friend Santosh Majumdar (in 1906), and afterwards my brother-in-law, Nagen Ganguli, to the USA, to study agriculture.”3
Rathindranath adds further: “An association had been formed to help students to go to foreign countries to study science and industry. Father heard that the first batch of students would be sailing for Japan and the USA very soon. He asked us to get ready to join this party. We were to go on to the USA and study in the University which provided training in agriculture.” “Most of them, wanted to acquire the technical knowledge and skill needed for modern industry and aspired to revive trade and commerce in India.” 4
Rathindranath studied agricultural science in the University of Illinois from 1906 to 1909.
Rathindranath held high opinion about the scientific education in the USA. He told Sudhindrnath Bose later in Lowa University “I believe that some of our young men ought to go to Japan to study Japanese art, which is really fine. But for scientific education they must come to the fountain-head, America.”5
Tagore advised them to know American life intimately without loosing their own identities.
Except England the United States of America was the only foreign country that Tagore traveled five times and spent seventeen months in total. His reception in the United States was not equally warm and cordial in all his visits. Keeping his eyes and mind open in his American visits he was able to observe both the positive and negative aspects of American life. While appreciating the positive aspects, he did not hesitate to condemn negative sides of American way of life. His last visit to the USA took place after his Russian tour in 1930. It gave him the opportunity to compare and contrast the two civilizations of mankind in the modern epoch. He did not hesitate a moment to express his mind openly what he thought to be true.
In his admiration of the bright sides of the United States he was quite eloquent. In 1913 he wrote America’s “great mission in the history of Western Civilization” and hoped that “it will hold up the torch of freedom before the world.” On his arrival in 1916 he declared: “This America is a wonder worker. Something new, something unique is going on here in the process of humanity... Here is (are) to be solved the problems of the human race, national, political, religious. Here will come the nationality of man.” He had also declared that America was “the best exponent of Western ideals of humanity,” a country which would solve “the problems of the human race, national, political, religious;” He believed that: “America has the figure of youth, and all that is best is Western civilization will eventually find lodgment here.” In 1920 he spoke of the ‘wonderful hunger and aspiration’ for higher things he found in individual American and in 1930 praised them collectively as ‘the great people of this earth’. His final message in 1940 christened the United States as ‘the last refuge of spiritual man”6. Some aspects of American was of life wee detestable to him. It seems to have grown in his inability to reconcile his expectations with that of practical reality in America.
Despite his initial shock seeing the negative side of American way of life, he did not lose faith on American people.
The poets are generally very sensitive. Tagore was not an exception. Before going to England, he had also harbored some kind of illusions about that country. “I had thought, “Tagore wrote, “that the island of England was so small and the inhabitations so dedicated to learning that, before I arrived there, I expected the country from one end to the other would echo and re-echo with the lyrical essays of Tennyson; and I also thought that wherever I might be in this narrow island, I would hear constantly Gladstone’s oratory, the explanation of the Vedas by Max Mueller, the scientific truth of Tindal, the profound thoughts of Carlyle and the philosophy of Bain. I was under the impression that wherever I would go I would find the old and the young drunk with the pleasure of ‘intellectual’ enjoyment. But I have been very disappointed in this.” 7
It seems that Tagore’s disillusionment with the United States arose out of clash of his imagination and the practical reality of America. It was not sudden but grew gradually confronted by the negative aspects of American way of life. It began from the beginning – on his arrival in the USA in 1912. He was rather surprised observing irrational attitude of a section of American intellectuals. His letter to Rothenstein on 14 February 1913 about Mrs. Harriet Moody reflects it. He expressed lack of ‘spiritual sanity and health’ of many American intellectuals. “I feel I have been of help to her – for she was gradually drifting towards the vague region of Christian Science and its allied cults which are in vogue here and which are so destructive of spiritual sanity and health,” writes he. His disillusionment about American increased during the last part of his second tour- in 1916-17. It was increased further during his third tour in 1920-21. Tagore wrote from New York in 1920. “In this country I live in the dungeon of the Castle of Bigness. My heart is starved... Here I feel everyday what a terrible nightmare it is for the human soul to bear this burden of the monster Arithmetic. It is incessantly drives its victims and yet leads them nowhere. It raises storms of battle which are for sowing broadest the seeds of future conflict.”8 He wrote further: “The whole world is suffering from this call of Devil-worship... and I can not tell you how deeply I am suffering, being surrounded in the country by endless ceremonials of this hideously profane cult. Everywhere there is an antipathy against Asia vented by a widespread campaign of calumny. Negroes are burnt alive, sometimes, merely because they tried to exercise their right to vote given to them by law. Germans are reviled. Conditions in Russia are deliberately misrepresented.”9
The intention of his latter visit to America was raising funds for his international University- Visva Bharati as well as to disseminate his ideals- the synthesis of the East and the West in the post-war world.
His American tours constitute one of the important parts of his magnificent and eventful life. As a roaming representative of nationalist India Tagore roused the world consciousness in favor of India’s independence... “In the United States of American, in Germany, in France, in Italy, in the Scandinavian countries, and even in Great Britain, “wrote Taraknath Das, a veteran revolutionary operated from the USA Tagore “has roused the consciousness of some people to the fact that dwarfing the people of India through political and economic slavery caused by an alien domination and the lack of education of the people of India, which was once of giver of civilization to the world, is a distinct loss to the world at large. Rabindranath’s cultural activities, in some cases indirectly, helped those Indian statesmen and exiles, who are not narrow-minded isolationists and are trying to utilize world force in favor of Indian freedom, by establishing international political contact with free and independent nations.”10
There was a time when in Europe, shattered by the torment of the First World War, the name Rabindranath Tagore could evoke an enthusiasm bordering on idolatry. This is no longer the case. Today many people have perhaps heard the name but few will associate with him. The basis of foreign recognition has been fragile.
One cannot leave the temptation to compare and contrast with his European tours with that the USA. Perhaps he had received the greatest ovation from the German people unparalleled in his entire European tour. The Politico-social situation of Germany was quite different in post-war Germany. He actually had won over the hearts of the German people by offering solace to the vanquished nation through his message of peace and universal brotherhood. The situation of the USA was quite different in his different tours. Naturally comparison between them is quite unpractical.
Despite that many in the USA looked Tagore as a mystical and prophetic figure imbued with a mystery and religion of the East yet he was perhaps the first Indian writer to attract serious interest in the USA. The famous publishing concern McMillan published a popular edition of Gitanjali followed by Gardener and Crescent Moon. Macmillan’s advertisement for its new ‘Bolpur edition’ of Tagore’s works stated: “Great care has been taken with the physical appearance of the books... All together this edition promises to become the standard one of this distinguished poet and seer.” William Radice writes: “In 1916 Macmillan in New York published Stray Birds, a collection of 326 English aphorisms (The Term ‘aphorism’ is appropriate here, as they were all in prose, not verse.). It was a handsome book, with wistful colour frontispieces by William Pogany and elegant fleuron’s on the pages. While he was in American, Tagore had written to the Director of Macmillan in New York. George Brett: ‘I am sending you under cover by Registered Post the manuscript of a collection of short sayings and maxims in poetical form, which everyone who has seen them feels should be published before Christmas while I am still in this country. The title on the volume would be ‘Stray Birds and Withered Leaves” and should be published in an attractive form.”11
Rabindranath Tagore was a restless man. He was a world trotter. Owing to his wanderlust Tagore visited more than thirty countries on five continents between 1878 and 1932. His mental horizon was not confined in the land of his birth. As a true universal man he looked beyond the narrow limit of nationalism. Tagore’s criticism of patriotism is a persistent theme in his writings. As early as 1908, he put his position clear in a letter replying to the criticism of Abala Bose, the wife of a great Indian scientist, Jagadish Chandra Bose: “Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live.”
He could write therefore in Gitanjali:
“Thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not;
Thou hast given me sects in homes not my own.
Thou hast brought the distant near and made brothers
and sisters of strangers.”
Tagore therefore asserted boldly,
“There is only one race in the world,
That is the human race.”
In commemoration of Rabindranath Tagore one hundred & fiftieth Birthday United Nation can take up the slogan - Human Race is the only one race in the world. There should be no more war in the world to save the Humanity.
References:
1. J.A. Spender – A True Citizen of the World, Golden Book of Tagore.
2. Krishna Dutta & Andrew Robinson (Ed) – Rabindranath Tagore: An Anthology, London, 1999, p-179.
3. Rathindranath Tagore – ‘Father As I know Him’, in ‘Rabindranath Tagore: A Centenary Volume’, p-51
4. Rathindranath Tagore – On the Edges of Time, Calcutta – p-75
5. Sudhindrnath Bose – Fifteen Years in America, p-281
6. New York Times, 19 November 1916 & Stephen N. Hay – Rabindranath Tagore in America, American Quarterly, 1962.
7. Europe Prabasir Patra, second letter, Tagore’s Collected Works, Centenary Edition, 1961,Vol. X, pp-242-43 & Wilhelm Halbfass – India and Europe, State University of New York Press, 1988, pp-247-48.
8. 13 December 1920, Letter to Friend.
9. 8 February 1921, Letter to a Friend.
10. The Golden Book of Tagore, op. cit.
11. William Radice – Particles, Jottings, Sparks – The Collected Poems of Rabindranath Tagore, New Delhi, 2000, p13 & Prasanta Pal, Rabi Jibani, Vol. p-197.
18 October 2010
