Tagore worship

So this blog's title finally gets a chance to justify itself - by giving some aesthetic impressions of India, the land of the rasikas. Who are to be found in sufficient number here in Santiniketan, incidentally - most of them also devotees of Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet, composer, artist, and founder of the university.

The atmosphere surrounding the Tagore inheritance is peculiar, perhaps unique, being both very Indian and bearing curious parallels with the personality cults of European artistic figures. One could put it more bluntly, and say that to the average educated Bengali, Tagore is God. His creative output was indeed staggering, in quantity, quality and variety: he produced poems, songs, novels, plays, criticism, dance-dramas, Bengali primers, tracts on education, religion and philosophy, and in his last few years, paintings. He also came to occupy a virtually unique position as representative of Indian culture to the outside world during the early decades of the twentieth century: he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a fact Bengalis are inordinately proud of, although it is now regularly awarded to writers whose names are not exactly household knowledge; he undertook extensive lecture tours, cultivated friendships with Gandhi and Einstein, and saw it as his mission to bring East and West together. To confess to a Bengali that you do not know of him is like telling an Englishman you've never heard of Shakespeare, or worse; it would leave him shaking with horror and disbelief. And yet many Europeans, even the better-read ones, do know nothing about him - a fact that indicates not so much their reprehensible ignorance as how, despite boasting grandly of universal human values, many of the world's high cultural traditions continue to remain resolutely local in their appeal. To overcome that state of affairs takes work. And without wanting to make grand boasts myself, that's one reason I would give for being here.

The week of my arrival happened to be Rabindra Saptaha - "Rabindranath Week" - and featured daily events in the town's two major auditoria, the aircraft-hangar-sized Nataghar and the smaller Lipika (about the size of the Wigmore Hall, with a gently raked floor). In both, the majority of the audience sit on thin cloth or sacking spread on the ground, with VIPs sequestered in a section with plastic chairs. The Lipika event began with two Tagore songs for solo male and female voice, the accompaniment discreet and traditional; but most of the evening was taken up with lectures from two dignified speakers sitting garlanded at the edge of the stage. Almost as severe and white-bearded as Rabindranath himself, the appearance of the first seemed in my mind comically appropriate to the cries of "sadhu, sadhu" that echoed the end of his speech, and which are the traditional form of applause in Santiniketan. (The European equivalent would I suppose be "bravo", "bravo" - but coincidentally the same Bengali word also means "holy man".)

My Bengali was certainly not up to the task of comprehending the lectures, but I got a certain impression of their range and tone: general rather than specialist, but very serious, and filled with largely reverential oratory. The one sentence whose drift I could catch ran through a long, pause-laden anaphora, enumerating all Tagore's many individual talents before denying them all for the sake of his universal but unique personality: "Rabindranath was not A, Rabindranath was not B...not X, Y, Z -no, Rabindranath was Rabindranath." Said to mark a higher virtue and the highest truth of nineteenth-century humanist philosophy - as Goethe put it, "Personlichkeit ist hochstes Gut", personality is the greatest treasure of all - but also somewhat platitudinous, unless one is prepared to say how it does not hold true of everybody. And this combination, of unquestionably high ideals, high achievement, high culture, but also a lack of willingness to criticize and distinguish, or to leaven the tone where it might be necessary - this surely explains some of the negative reactions I have already read to Tagore and Santiniketan. They range from the scoffing of Vikram Seth in A Suitable Boy ("Robi Tagore/He's such a bore!" chants a Bengali teenager, to her pious mother's horror) to V. S. Naipaul's more nuanced perceptions of Santiniketan culture as "something Arcadian and very fragile, depending on a suspension of disbelief and criticism".

As Naipaul goes on to point out, it must have sustained itself partly through a simple beatification of its founding figure: the "simple Indian tourists" visit the town "not because they knew the poetry or the work of Rabindranath Tagore, but because they had heard of him as a holy man, and it was good to visit the shrines of such people". The Tagore statues one sees in the gardens here, tastefully monochrome and elongated to occasionally Giacomettian proportions, but in size and situation reminding one involuntarily of garden gnomes, hardly help to suppress the picture of an incongruous twentieth-century folk religion. One thinks - only in India! But on a deeper level this may not be true. Culturally, my suspicions - which will need careful and unprejudiced testing over the next few months - are that Santiniketan is in many respects a kind of Indian Bayreuth, preserving the memory of the Master and the forms of an artistic canon with a fierce, necessary, but ultimately self-restrictive loyalty. Even if this is so, and however far it is driven, mockery should not be the only response. Tagore and Wagner on different continents both produced some of the highest achievements of nineteenth-century Romantic culture in word and tone, something anyone ought to try and appreciate. Importantly, I think both also knew exactly how they had done it, with the help of which common traditions and values (both esoteric and popular). Perhaps that inner understanding is what one should strive to recreate today, for the sake of contemporary art as much as theirs. And meanwhile, a bit of humour might not go amiss: one only needs to read the memoirs of either figure to see they did not lack it themselves.

The real value of Tagore's legacy probably lies, not so much in the self-conscious cultural pride that he has given the Bengali middle classes, as in the extent to which his poetry and songs have been naturally reabsorbed, like rain, by the land on whose creative waters he drew. The second concert in the vast hall of the Nataghar, more populous and less reverential, gave me more of a taste of that: not soloists but school children singing en masse, their families encamped around the cavernous but bustling auditorium, chatting, hailing each other, trying to rein in their toddlers, singing along and taking photos of the folk dancers swarming on and off stage.



It had almost the atmosphere of a festival, being centred on enjoyment rather than reverence; and festival culture here is both a reflection of Tagore's wishes and the natural inclinations of the Bengalis. There will be plenty of it to enjoy and describe in the next few months.