Rabindranath Tagore and “World Literature”

Outside of the 300 million people conversant with the Bengali language in Bangladesh, India and their considerable diasporas, Rabindranath Tagore’s name is known to those who follow the ebbs and currents of international literary prizes and the trends they fashion. In 1913, this poet of undivided, British-ruled India, writing in what was still an emergent literature in a vernacular language, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Passing over Thomas Hardy for the signal honour, the Swedish committee awarded the prize to Gitanjali (Song Offerings), a collection of 103 poems and assorted bits of writing, translated into English by Tagore himself and reprinted by Macmillan ten times between March and November 1913 before the award of the Nobel (Dutta and Robinson 2009, 185, 167). ¹ Cheered on enthusiastically by W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and William Rothenstein, Tagore was to have an extraordinary international influence on and enduring encounters with intellectuals from Germany to Russia, from Argentina to Japan. ² Tagore’s reputation in these circles is a curious one, reminiscent of some others who hail from contexts where poetry and piety, the sacred and the secular, are deemed to go hand in hand. The names of Rumi and Kahlil Gibran come to mind. Like them, Tagore shot to fame on the basis of mystical, metaphysical poetry, and, like them, his reputation has suffered ever since from his reception in these terms. ³ Hailed as an Eastern seer and prophet who would bring to the West the esoteric wisdom of the East, Tagore also fitted in well with the mandate of idealism that the Nobel demanded. Obviously, the committee “had not the foggiest notion that in far-off Bengal Tagore was a polemical critic of religious, social and political orthodoxy” (Dutta and Robinson 2009, 185). Remarking on “how startling Tagore’s incursion was into the various languages of the twentieth century”, Amit Chaudhuri contends that Tagore was perhaps the modern world’s “first international literary celebrity” (quoted in Tagore 2011, xx). However, in 1993, E. P. Thompson, the historian of British radical movements, observed, “The West is still, after half a century, groping in the half-light to discern the features of Tagore’s genius” (quoted in Dutta and Robinson 2009, v). The year 2011 was the 150th anniversary of the Nobel Laureate’s birth, and while the poet was honoured with much fanfare in Latin America and Asia, Ian Jack in the Guardian asked, “Rabindranath Tagore was a global phenomenon, so why is he neglected?”