Why Tagore Matters?: Online Talk at National Law University, Delhi by Nibir K. Ghosh

 

Tagore Class

 

National Law University, Delhi

16^th November, 2023

Why Tagore Matters?

Nibir K. Ghosh

Warm Greetings to Prof. Prasanshu and dear students:

It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to share my love for Tagore as an artist, a humanist and as a source of inspiration with my young friends in the midst of abundant greenery all around.

At the beginning of the 56-minute documentary film, Rabindranath Tagore, made by Satyajit Ray to mark the first centenary of Tagore’s birth in 1961, Ray announces in a voice over:

“On August 7, 1941, in Calcutta, a man died. His mortal remains perished, but he left behind him a heritage which no fire could consume. It was a heritage of words and music and poetry, of ideas and of ideals and it has the power to move us today and in the days to come. We, who owe him so much, salute his memory… ”

Living in an apartment a km away from the Taj, I often happily recall, the following lines from Rabindranath Tagore’s testimony to the monument of love and beauty:

 

You allowed your kingly power to vanish, Shajahan,

but your wish was to make imperishable a tear-drop of love.

Time has no pity for the human heart,

he laughs at its sad struggle to remember.
You allured him with beauty, made
him captive, and crowned the formless
death with fadeless form…
Though empires crumble to dust, and centuries

are lost in shadows, the marble still sighs to the stars,

- "I remember" (Lover’s Gift 7).

 

If Tagore (1861-1941) could compose such an exquisitely beautiful lyric to animate the “perpetual silence of stone,” one could well imagine his infinite capacity to render into eternal songs the more pulsating and vibrant voice of human life in all its manifestations.

 

When Satyajit Ray, accompanied by his mother at the age of six, first met Tagore at Santiniketan and gave him a notebook for his autograph, Tagore wrote a short poem for him in Bengali. The lines translated into English read thus: “Many a time/ Have I travelled many a mile/ to nations far away/ I've gone to see the mountains,/ the oceans I've been to view./ But I failed to notice with my two eyes wide open/ What lay not two steps from my home:/ On a sheaf of paddy grain/  A shining drop of dew.”

If my young friends here grasp the true essence of this short poem, I am sure you won’t need to look for ‘How to Succeed’ books.

 

It is no small matter that Tagore may be the only one ever to have authored the national anthems of two different countries, India and Bangladesh.

In an era where Samuel Huntington’s thesis emphasizing the “clash of civilizations” seems to be true, it is a relief to go back to Tagore and his view of religion: “My religion is a poet’s religion, and neither that of an orthodox man of piety nor that of a theologian…. My religion is my life ~ it is growing with my growth ~it has never been grafted on me from outside.”

Like the Sufi saints, especially Kabir, Tagore shows his dislike for orthodox and fundamentalist views of worship marked by rituals and superstitions. He records in his Gitanjali:

Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut?

Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones.

He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust.

Put of thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!

Tagore’s views on nationalism are universal in nature. He was a great patriot but he asserted, “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.” In a pamphlet under the title Crisis in Civilization, he tells us how to maintain the distinction between opposing Western imperialism and rejecting Western civilization. Tagore wanted to assert India’s right to be independent without denying the importance of what India could learn – freely and profitably – from other cultures.

Though Tagore himself had dropped out of school early, largely out of boredom, and had never bothered to earn a diploma, Tagore was concerned not only that there be wider opportunities for education across the country (especially in rural areas where schools were few), but also that the schools themselves be more lively and enjoyable. He wrote extensively on how schools should be made more attractive to boys and girls and thus more productive. The emphasis on his own co-educational school at Santiniketan was on self-motivation rather than on discipline, and on fostering intellectual curiosity rather than competitive excellence.

It is worth mentioning to the students of Law here how Tagore insisted on open debate on every issue, and distrusted conclusions based on a mechanical formula, no matter how attractive that formula might seem in isolation. Only through the clear stream of reason, he told us, we can we transform the idea of freedom from “narrow domestic walls” to a space “where the Mind is without fear and the head is held high.”

 

When one finds himself/herself lost in the depth of despair, even a line like, “Jodi tor daak shune keo na aashe, tobe ekla cholo re” (When no one heeds your call for support, move on alone,” can inspire us beyond imagination.

Thank You!

Copyright Nibir K. Ghosh 16 November 2023.