India’s greatest polymath: Tagore
Today, 7 May, is Rabindranath Tagore’s birth anniversary. Tagore was a Bengali poet, short-story writer, song composer, playwriter, essayist, musician, painter, actor-producer-director, educator, patriot, and social reformer.
He was, above all, India’s greatest polymath. Here’s a tribute.
One of the most astoundingly productive Indian was Rabindranath Tagore (1861- 1941). Fondly known as Gurudev, Tagore was a Bengali poet, short-story writer, song composer, playwriter, essayist, musician, painter, actor-producer-director, educator, patriot, and social reformer. Rabindra’s grandfather, Dwarkanath Tagore, was an industrialist who ran banking, insurance, and shipping companies in partnership with British traders, and was the first Indian businessman to meet Queen Victoria in England. His businesses, spanning jute mills, coal mines, tea plantations, and indigo, among others, made him among one of India’s richest. Yet he had a sensibility for arts, music and literature, and ensured that his family was steep in Indian values and western ideals. His son and Rabindra’s father, Debendranath Tagore, wasn’t particularly interested in business and was of ascetic bent of mind, and with the influence of Raja Ram Mohan Roy became the true spiritual heir of the Brahmo Samaj. To his followers he was Maharishi, the great sage.
Rabindra, the fourteenth and the youngest son of Debendranath and Sharada Moni, was born at a household which, though with several business interests and large land ownership, was always buzzing with music, theatre, arts and culture. Debendranath’s eldest son, Dwijendranath, was a poet, philosopher, and mathematician. His second son, Satyendranath, translated Geeta and the Meghadoot in Bangali verses and became the first Indian member in the Civil Service. The fifth son, Jyotirindranath, was a born musician and a playwriter. Debendranath’s daughter, Swarnakumari, was the first woman novelist and the first women to edit a journal in India.[1] It was a household that hummed with artistic activities.
Never comfortable with the formal schooling, Rabindra was homeschooled by his elder brothers and looked after by the family servants. But his real education started at age 12 when he accompanied his father on a long trip to the Himalayas. That’s where he discovered his fondness for nature, learned singing devotional songs, and by hearted Ramayana in Sanskrit. At 13, Rabindra’s first book of verses, Kabi-Kahini, came out, and at 16, his essays appeared frequently in a magazine called Bharati. His first opera, Valmiki-Pratibha, was staged in the family mansion and had a deep influence on the great literary figure of the time, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.
Rabindra was supposed to pursue higher education at the London University in England but was called back to Calcutta by his father to look after the expansive family estate in East Bengal, now Bangladesh. In the heart of rural Bengal and around the river Padma is where Rabindra developed a deeper understanding of human plight and pain, and that shaped his world views and literary work for rest of his life.
Rabindra’s life was beset with numerous tragedies. At age 14, he lost his mother, Sharada Devi. His elder brother’s wife, Kadambari Devi, was like his mother-figure, but that relationship too was severed in 1884, when she committed suicide. Rabindra, aged 23, sunk into depression thereafter. In 1902, he lost his wife, a pillar of support amid all the life’s longings. Nine months later, his second daughter, Renuka, passed away. In 1905, Rabindra lost his father and his spiritual anchor, Debendranath. In 1907, his youngest son, Samindra, then 7, succumbed to cholera. These losses were channelized through the artistic melancholy in Rabindra’s creativity and in his quest for deeper truth.
Though deprived of formal education, Rabindra was keen on giving his children a different kind of learning, where nature is the teacher and which is built on the foundations of Indian culture, while borrowing from the western ideas. In 1901, Tagore started a Brahmacharya Ashram, an experimental school at Shantiniketan, a place Maharshi Debendranath Tagore established in 1863. The fully residential school would have classes being taught under the trees, students exposed to a wide range of subjects, where arts and music would be compulsory, and where east meets the west. Drawing from the foundations of nature, Tagore paid attention to holistic development and character building of students, at a time when mainstream education was very much rote learning based.
Tagore financed the school by selling the copyrights to his books. Further, his wife, Mrinalini Devi, sold her wedding jewellery. He diverted his entire Nobel Prize money and even took loans for building and running the institution. In 1921, Shantiniketan was expanded into Vishva-Bharati, inviting scholars, researchers and students from across the world. Some of its notable alumnus include Indira Gandhi, Amartya Sen, and Satyajit Ray. Over the years, Tagore travelled to more than 30 countries to share his insights about the experimental school and raise funds. He was an icon to the western world, at par with Mahatma Gandhi. In fact, it was Tagore who gave Gandhi the title ‘Mahatma’. In later years, Gandhi took on the financial ownership of running Vishva-Bharati, allowing Tagore to focus on his creative work.
Tagore’s productivity was staggering. In his lifetime, Tagore published 50 volumes of poetry comprising over 2000 poems, wrote two-dozen plays, including musicals and dance dramas, released 17 volumes of short stories, eight novels, four novellas and numerous essays on social, political and religious issues, and edited literary journals. Dozens of his works are adapted and produced as films in Bollywood, the more famous ones include Kabuliwala, Do Bigha Zamin, Charulata, Lekin, and Chokher Bali. One of his several creations, Gitanjali, reached the western shores in 1911, and in 1913, Tagore became the first person outside of Europe to get a Nobel Prize for Literature.
Tagore produced his greatest work after winning the Nobel, a rarity by itself, for most people work up to the summit. One of Tagore’s songs, Jana Gana Man, is India’s National Anthem, and another creation, Amar Sonar Bangla, is that of Bangladesh. Tagore birthed an entirely new form of music, called Rabindra Sangeet, with over 2200 songs that he wrote and composed. Of these, almost 850 songs he composed after crossing 70. Some of the famous taals created by Tagore include Ardha Jhap, Jhampak, Sasthi, Rupakra, Nabataal, Ekadoshi, and Nabapancha. The melodies of Rabindra Sangeet are very much a part of Indian cinema till this very day.
Tagore picked painting at the age 60. At first, he drew plant vines and other embellishments in his letters and stories and over years got onto canvas and portraits. Over the next twenty years, he created more than 3000 paintings, and these were exhibited in two-dozen countries. He wrote and painted well into his 80th birthday. And when he died, he left behind a heritage which few can match.
Just as you may surmise that you have understood the intellectual giant that Tagore was, here I am leaving you with a conversation.
On 14 July 1930, Tagore met Einstein at the latter’s home in the outskirts of Berlin. The dialogue between the two Nobel Laureates went something like this:
EINSTEIN: Our natural point of view in regard to the existence of truth apart from humanity cannot be explained or proved, but it is a belief which nobody can lack — no primitive beings even. We attribute to Truth a super-human objectivity; it is indispensable for us, this reality which is independent of our existence and our experience and our mind — though we cannot say what it means.
TAGORE: Science has proved that the table as a solid object is an appearance and therefore that which the human mind perceives as a table would not exist if that mind were naught. At the same time it must be admitted that the fact, that the ultimate physical reality is nothing but a multitude of separate revolving centres of electric force, also belongs to the human mind.
In the apprehension of Truth there is an eternal conflict between the universal human mind and the same mind confined in the individual. The perpetual process of reconciliation is being carried on in our science, philosophy, in our ethics. In any case, if there be any Truth absolutely unrelated to humanity then for us it is absolutely non-existing.
It is not difficult to imagine a mind to which the sequence of things happens not in space but only in time like the sequence of notes in music. For such a mind such conception of reality is akin to the musical reality in which Pythagorean geometry can have no meaning. There is the reality of paper, infinitely different from the reality of literature. For the kind of mind possessed by the moth which eats that paper literature is absolutely non-existent, yet for Man’s mind literature has a greater value of Truth than the paper itself. In a similar manner if there be some Truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings.
Do you realize in the dialogue the convergence of Advaita Vedanta and quantum mechanics? If not, I suggest you read the full interview.[2] Here is Tagore holding his own in front of the greatest minds of the 20th century.
But, more importantly, can you name another Indian with this prodigious impact across fields?
Creativity, as it turns out, stems from productivity plus variety.
[1] Documentary Central, ‘Famous Documentary by Satyajit Ray on Rabindranath Tagore’, Youtube.com, 10 February 2010, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o74hLBY0-ZM
[2] Maria Popova, ‘When Einstein Met Tagore: A Remarkable Meeting of Minds on the Edge of Science and Spirituality’, The Marginalian, 27 April 2012, available at https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/04/27/when-einstein-met-tagore/