India after Rabindranath Tagore

Sumit Mitra writes:

• India is not yet quite clear about Tagore’s status in public life. He surely can’t be the Poet Laureate as that’s indeed a government job, or a “stipendiary poet”, as Edward Gibbon described it when he identified Petrarch as the first to hold that title. But is Tagore India’s National Poet, in the sense that Neruda is of Chile, or Shakespeare of Britain? In popular discourse he is indeed one of India’s several ‘national poets’, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Subramanya Bharathi being among the others. But none of these men, Tagore included, is held by popular acclaim as representative of the identity and belief of India’s national culture.
• In fact, to many in Delhi, Bharathi is not much beyond the name of a prominent road, despite the Tamil poet having spent years in Varanasi to appreciate India’s cultural diversity. And poor Bankim is remembered outside his Bengal as the man who composed the ‘rival’ national anthem, ‘Vande Mataram’, his more material identity as the father of modern Bengali prose being relegated to obscurity. In India’s babel, if Tagore is best recognised among his fellow National Poets it is because of him being the composer of Jana Gana Mana, the national anthem. Linguistic division has turned India’s national culture into a mere phrase. It is rather hypocritical, therefore, to claim that Tagore occupies a similar place on the mind of the average Indian as Cervantes does with the Spaniard, or Kazi Nazrul Islam with the Bangladeshi.
• In strictly political terms, one wonders if there were more disagreements between Washington and Moscow in the height of the Cold War. Gandhi, it seems in retrospect, was not quite familiar with the evolution of Tagore’s works, from a sectarian and nationalist phase when he was under his father Maharshi Debendranath’s (died 1905) influence, towards an internationalist outlook and an infinitely more tolerant view of the West than Gandhi’s. He no doubt coined the term Mahatma for Gandhi and possibly liked him too. But Gandhi made the blunder of taking him for a swadeshi supporter. Gandhi was the messiah of Independence but Tagore saw its dark underbelly and left its vivid account in his novel, The Home and the World, which was made into a gripping film by Satyajit Ray in another age, in short stories, poems, and in an essay poignantly titled, ‘The Cult of the Charka’.