Tagore opposed the establishment of
Between backwaters and barricades May 2011
Over-adulation of Tagore has much to do with Bengali anxiety about rationality.
As the paeans of praise begin to sound across the world on the occasion of Rabindranath Tagore's 150th birth anniversary, it is, ironically, unlikely that there will be a searching examination of either his writing or his historical contribution. Instead, all we are likely to get is a stream of undiluted praise.
Why Tagore is today imagined without any flaw whatsoever is a question that will probably have to wait for his bicentennial. This is hardly surprising: Tagore is next only to god in the eyes of the Bengali middle class, both in India and Bangladesh. Doubtless, his role and contribution is something that goes far beyond literature, and he has a cultural status that is enjoyed by few anywhere around the world. As the poetic mind behind the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh, his stature and achievement are beyond question. But the reverence shown towards him, particularly by Bangladeshis, can nevertheless be unnerving.
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| Among the deities: Terracotta busts for sale in West Bengal Photo: Paul Ancheta |
Tagore is not imagined only as a poet and literary personality, but as a fountain of total wisdom, the archetypal mahaguru. He is not kavidev (great poet) but gurudev (great teacher), and his poems are considered the vehicles of his infinite understanding of all matters. It is not just his literary output that is worshipped, however, but everything he did or said. As a very senior academic and author once told me, 'In my eyes, he can do no wrong.'
Tagore belonged to the 'enlightened collaborator' class that was essential to both the construction of the Bengali middle class as well as British rule in India. His intellectual and cultural sire was Raja Rammohan Roy, the founder of Western liberalism in India, who had also made an appeal to the British people to come as settlers to India and not just rule as colonisers – to take the region to 'greater heights'. Tagore's views were largely a vernacular translation of Western values. Fittingly, Roy died and was buried in England.
The Tagore family's wealth came from trade with the British. The new vision brought in by the Bengali Renaissance led a long line of Bengalis to seek education in London, adopt ersatz versions of British customs, and generally to alienate themselves from the vernacular-speaking masses. Tagore was like most other members of the Brahmo Samaj (the monotheistic cult founded by Raja Rammohan Roy), completely unfamiliar with the Islamic faith or the Muslim faithful. This was only natural, given that Bengali Muslims were not part of the class to which Tagore belonged. In fact, the peasantry was mostly Muslim, including in the Tagore estates in modern-day Bangladesh. They must have been a mysterious body of people to him, culturally distant from the milieu in which he grew up.
Mohandas v Rabindranath
At the time, the Muslims of Bengal were split into two groups. One was the anachronistic and culturally alienated sharif class, which ostensibly swore by 'Islamic' soil anywhere and everywhere. They were particularly enamoured of the distant Khilafat of Turkey and the holy sands of Saudi Arabia. The remainder were members of the vast peasantry, wretchedly poor and unable to forge any identity beyond that of the tiller and breeder.
Tagore's nationalism largely began with the Swadeshi movement of the babus and bhadralok of Kolkata, triggered by the first partition of Bengal, in 1905. They were worried that their traditional professional privileges would be lost to the elite of the new province of East Bengal, principally Muslims. In the eyes of this group, nationalism was ethnically exclusive. There were only a few politicians – such as Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, the initiator of the Bengal Pact, a formula for sharing resources between Hindu and Muslim Bengalis – who saw beyond the narrow boundaries of the Swadeshi effort.
To his credit, Tagore wrote much against the partition of 1905. He gradually moved away from the constricted mental space of the class whom Joya Chatterji, in her book Bengal Divided, has accused of being the real force behind the partition of Bengal. But even if he had not succeeded in doing so, Tagore was an overarching presence, one who did not have to be politically correct to be adopted by those who were to become the most strident and robust, if not the most articulate, followers of Tagore – the Bengali Muslim middle class.
Bengali Muslim political culture was given its first impetus by the emergence of jute as a high-value agricultural product, which was eagerly sought by UK mills. This produced a rich peasant/farmer class, which in turn funded the education of that class's children, in an effort to gain middle-class footings. This class not only produced some of the most successful politicians, including Fazlul Haq, the first chief minister of undivided Bengal, but also its cultural stars, such as Nazrul Islam, Bangladesh's national poet. It is no coincidence that both were great admirers of Tagore.
There was also a general movement among Indian Muslims to obtain an education, in order to gain access to employment. This coincided with the British policy of providing them greater opportunities to counter the rising all-India nationalism increasingly headed by the overwhelmingly Hindu-led Congress party. In Bengal, this Muslim middle class was also much less confined by religious principles in their preference for their literature and arts. Tagore's Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1913, became a source of endless pride for all Bengalis, across all boundaries of political, religious and other identities.
As the new Bengali Muslims emerged, they were not burdened by a complete allegiance to a Muslim identity alone. They saw themselves as Bengalis, and their politics became increasingly Bengal-centred. Tagore, as a Bengali icon, became the new guiding light for all, from communists to the fervent faithful – the great provider of common identity to the educated of both communities. Language had already become a powerful glue, and the Nobel committee's approval of Tagore was also seen as implicit approval of the Bengali language. The class he spoke most clearly to, the eternal middle class, was now only too eager to sanctify this new deity.
In the somewhat backwaterish remnants of bhadralok culture in post-Independence West Bengal, Tagore devolved into a cultural icon that the middle class could set up in competition with the mountainous presence of Mohandas K Gandhi. In East Pakistan, on the other hand, the poet swelled in significance to become the sacred artefact that had to be defended against attacks by the non-Bengali rulers of Pakistan. Indeed, the latter cast him as the great subversive, seeing him as a non-Muslim and hence anti-Pakistani, a hero in India to boot, and of a stature that pitted him against Allama Iqbal, Pakistan's national poet. Not unexpectedly, then, the burgeoning Bengali nationalist movement in East Pakistan adopted Tagore as its holy mascot. Tagore was located as the most distant point from Karachi/Lahore/Islamabad, and hence the closest to the soul of Bengali nationalism in East Pakistan.
During the 1960s, the government of Pakistan forbade the playing of Tagore music in the media, and actively mounted a programme of censoring the poet. In response, inevitably, nearly all Bengali intellectuals (except for the extreme Islamic Pakistanis) fell in line behind the pro-Tagore forces. This was because there could be no construction of middle-class Bengali culture without him, its most important literary figure. For the first time, Tagore became an icon of cultural nationalism, which transformed into a robust political symbol of a people. The songs sung from the barricades in East Pakistan were often his songs. Tagore's finest hour was the independence of Bangladesh, in 1971, participated in by many of his ardent followers, including its leader, Mujibur Rahman.
Secular god
Today, Tagore is read by very few people in Bangladesh. Most Bangladeshis do not have time to do much reading, perhaps, but even those who do, tend not to read Tagore. But deep respect, even reverence, continues. Such sentiment is not difficult to understand, for this, the community's greatest poet, but how does one account for the blind adoration that seems to accompany this – a response usually reserved for saints, if not for god?
Bengali diffidence is legendary. Some of the reasons might be rooted in the collective psyche of a people who have historically been unable to run their lives according to their own will, in a land constantly dominated by foreigners. For millennia, a survival strategy of learning to cope with alien rulers through service as babus in their regimes robbed the resultant collaborator class of much self-respect. In such a milieu, critical thinking is rarely found. It is this lack of agency that is, perhaps, partly responsible for the region having a larger number of shrines, holy men, gurus, sadhus, deities and demons per square kilometre than anywhere else in the world. In their confusing and uncertain encounter with the rest of the world, Bengalis learned to respect the powerful and mistrust each other. Foreigners are all-powerful, know what is right, and have always been the gods who distribute their
favours capriciously.
So many factors combine to make Tagore the secular god of the educated, cultured Bengali, though, in fact, he never wrote about East Bengalis. He was a zamindar taxing East Bengali peasants, a Hindu-Brahmo spouting vague mysticism rather than Islam. He lived in Calcutta, far away from the muddy backwaters of rural Bengal. The list is endless. But Tagore did write about rural Bengal, spent time on the family estates in Kushtia (in present-day Bangladesh, along its western border), loved the rivers and, best of all, won the Nobel Prize. To the eyes of the eternally inter-faith Bangladeshi, always in search of holy miracles, he also looked like a holy pir. That was enough.
There are many reasons for the deification of the Gurudev, no longer an Indian Bengali but somehow now a Bangladeshi Tagore. But an extremist culture like that of Bangladesh always veers between hate and worship, and he is on the right side of history for a figure of worship. Be it in politics, where politicians are either saints or demons; or in literature, where Tagore is beyond any questioning; or the history of its liberation movement, where its heroes can by definition have done no wrong – Bangladeshi narratives are about a collective inability to experience rationality. It is as if by embracing questions and arguments, the magic of its cultural construction would be destroyed.
It is in this mental environment that Tagore survives, a mythical figure like a god come down from the Himalaya. The Bengali world is not under the control of Bengalis, and neither its rulers nor its harvests can be relied upon – and so the fantastic must reign. Everything has to exist in that chimerical world, because reality has never provided deliverance, and history, politics and poetry must always delivers fantasy. In such a domain, nothing is as it actually is, and everything is how it should be. Tagore, with his impossible greatness, the wisdom of the universe and acceptance by the entire world, is a triumph of Bengali unreality.
It has never been about Tagore; it has always been about us.
~ Afsan Chowdhury is a member of the editorial board for this magazine.
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