Exchange Value Nobel Transactions and Rabindranath Tagore

Rajesh Sharma Professor of English Punjabi University, Patiala Nearly eight years after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913, Rabindranath Tagore delivered his Acceptance Speech in Stockholm on 26 May 1921. The year 1921 is remembered for Benito Mussolinis fascists winning 29 seats in the Italian Parliament, the coal miners in Britain going on strike, the US Congress curbing immigration through a national quota system, and the South African white government enacting the infamous Natives Land Act which prevented black people from holding land except in certain designated areas. The world was in turmoil, torn by conflicts of race and class. How did Tagore respond to the turmoil? And did he? Read with the Nobel Committee Chairman Harald Hjrnes Presentation Speech of 10 December 1913, Tagores discourse reads like a guide map to the political unconscious of Gitanjali. * The Swedish Academys citation notes that the Prize was awarded to Rabindranath Tagore "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West" (italics mine) ("The Nobel Prize in Literature 1913"). The logic of appropriation could not have been more explicit. And Bengali is not even so much as mentioned. Tagores acknowledgement, telegraphed by him and reportedly read out by Mr. Clive, British Charg d'Affaires, at the Nobel Banquet at Grand Htel, Stockholm on 10 December 1913, went like this: I beg to convey to the Swedish Academy my grateful appreciation of the breadth of understanding which has brought the distant near, and has made a stranger a brother ("Rabindranath Tagore - Banquet Speech").

His grateful appreciation of the breadth of understanding rings ironic today. Could he have meant it to be ironic? Coming from a craftsman of language, his ceremonial politeness sounds excessive. But the poet was perhaps alert, as the polite fraternal noises indicate, to the politics of estrangement and distancing that was already gathering momentum and would culminate in the Nazi death camps a few years later. * Harald Hjrnes speech is packed with significances. For him, Tagore is an AngloIndian poet and Gitanjali a collection of religious poems. The book in a real and full sense, has belonged to English literature. The proud poets strangeness begins to be chipped away right from the outset. Soon after, his poetic art is incorporated into the British imperial project: Quite independently of any knowledge of his Bengali poetry, irrespective, too, of differences of religious faiths, literary schools, or party aims, Tagore has been hailed from various quarters as a new and admirable master of that poetic art which has been a never-failing concomitant of the expansion of British civilization ever since the days of Queen Elizabeth. (italics mine) One cannot but admire Hjrnes foresight: long before Edward Said and others, he was able to see the insidious bond between culture and imperialism. Gradually and steadily he then proceeds to add a Christian theological dimension to his appropriation of the poet and his Gitanjali. Tagores aim is, according to him, to discover the true relation between faith and thought. Assuming that the diversity of civilizations is essentially defined by religious identities and, consequently, by conflict (a thesis updated lately by Samuel P. Huntington), Hjrne hopes that Christianity will one day unify the world. For him, the significance of Tagores poetry lies precisely in advancing this project. To quote Hjrne:

We do know, however, that the poets motivation extends to the effort of reconciling two spheres of civilization widely separated, which above all is the characteristic mark of our present epoch and constitutes its most important task and problem. The true inwardness of this work is most clearly and purely revealed in the efforts exerted in the Christian mission-field throughout the world. In the name of reconciling two spheres of civilization, Hjrne thus aligns Tagores poetry with the Christian missionary project which operates, in his opinion, [inwardly]. It may be noted that he does this after having proclaimed Gitanjali as an ally in the imperial project. His next thesis is no less striking for its ingenuity: Christian missionary activity has been instrumental in reviving vernacular languages languishing under the weight of an artificial tradition: More especially, the preaching of the Christian religion has provided in many places the first definite impulse toward a revival and regeneration of the vernacular language, i.e., its liberation from the bondage of an artificial tradition, and consequently also toward a development of its capacity for nurturing and sustaining a vein of living and natural poetry. The colonial invention of the Sanskrit/bhasha opposition receives a felicitous delivery in Hjrnes noble hands. For Hjrne, Tagores essential credentials include that he is the son of a man who was a follower of Brahmo Samaj, a religious community which is not to again cite his words dipped in scorn - a sect of the ancient Hindu type but has been founded under the influence of the Christian doctrine and which interprets native Hindu traditions in tune with the spirit and import of the Christian faith: Rabindranaths father was one of the leading and most zealous members of a religious community to which his son still belongs. That body, known by the name of Brahmo Samaj, did not arise as a sect of the ancient Hindu type, with

the purpose of spreading the worship of some particular godhead as superior to all others. Rather, it was founded in the early part of the nineteenth century by an enlightened and influential man who had been much impressed by the doctrines of Christianity, which he had studied also in England. He endeavoured to give to the native Hindu traditions, handed down from the past, an interpretation in agreement with what he conceived to be the spirit and import of the Christian faith. A few more paragraphs, and the scorn spills over: He is, however, as far removed as anyone in our midst from all that we are accustomed to hear dispensed and purveyed in the market places as Oriental philosophy, from painful dreams about the transmigration of souls and the impersonal karma, from the pantheistic, and in reality abstract, belief that is usually regarded as peculiarly characteristic of the higher civilization in India. This purveyor of the flowering of vernacular languages under Christian missionary inspiration has, however, only revulsion for the varied expressions of peoples culture: Ever since the Middle Ages, influenced in some measure by the Christian and other foreign religions, bhakti has sought the ideals of its faith in the different phases of Hinduism, varied in character but each to all intents monotheistic in conception. All those higher forms of faith have disappeared or have been depraved past recognition, choked by the superabundant growth of that mixture of cults that has attracted to its banner all those Indian peoples who lacked an adequate power of resistance to its blandishments. (italics mine) Hjrnes metaphors are reminiscent of Hamlets Denmark, [the] unweeded garden, / That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely.1 The cults, instead of being seen as growing out of the lived conditions of the Indian peoples, are
1

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark. 1.2.135-37.

viewed as descending from outside like so many Satanic inventions for seducing the gullible. Unable to deal with Tagores native roots, Hjrne disposes of the issue in a disjointed sentence in which the clauses do not carry even the fig leaf of logical relations: Even though Tagore may have borrowed one or another note from the orchestral symphonies of his native predecessors, yet he treads upon firmer ground in this age that draws the peoples of the earth closer together along paths of peace, and of strife too, to joint and collective responsibilities, and that spends its own energies in dispatching greetings and good wishes far over land and sea. (italics mine) In the absence of a logical force that could hold his assertions together, the speakers oration implodes in a trail of inanities. * Tagore responded magnanimously servilely, some would allege to Hjrnes Presentation Speech. He opens his Acceptance Speech with an expression of gratitude for acknowledging my work and rewarding me (84). The speech is cast in an unequal dialectic of you and me, with the former valorized. In the second paragraph, Tagore switches to the narrative mode, recollecting the moments when the news of the award reached him. And he wonders why only he has been chosen: I asked myself the question what the reason could be of my poems being accepted and honoured by the West in spite of my belonging to a different race. (86). This is the moment when a postcolonial critique can raise its thoughtful head like a seed sprouting. The unsuspecting poet lets the moment pass, overwhelmed with gratitude: I felt humble at the moment (86). He now evokes his youthful days spent in utmost seclusion in the solitude of an obscure Bengal village by the river Ganges in a boat-house (86). He had the company of wild ducks and the Himalayan lakes but, curiously, no people. And he draws a tentative line between our poets and your Western poets: the latter possibly have no such

experience of seclusion, for seclusion itself has no place in the Western world (87). Thoreau was 28 when he went into the Western worlds best known seclusion, not much older than Tagore who was about 25 when he was staying in a boat-house (86). A jump cut takes the narrative to a time when my heart felt a longing to do some work for my fellow-beings. (87). This is the beginning of Shantiniketan. Of course, Tagores objective here is rooted in his experience of secluded communion with nature: My object in starting this institution was to give the children of men full freedom and joy, of life and of communion with nature (88). However, one wonders whether the poets quest for freedom was not at some level a displaced quest for the freedom that the Indians were seeking, with a burst of vigour in this particular year, from the British Empire. The Prince of Wales visit, the Non-cooperation Movement and the Khilafat Movement marked 1921 as a special year in Indias political calendar. The Empire must have found the freedom of Tagores contemplation safer and more likeable. Gitanjali was composed in an atmosphere of innocent joy that nature and the company of children provided in Shantiniketan, until Tagore again felt impelled to come out and meet the heart of the large world (88-89). This coming out was to be my pilgrimage, he remarks (90). Looking back, he sees his retreat into seclusion and his service to fellow creatures as a kind of [providential] preparation for the pilgrimage. A mystical and mythicizing vocabulary enters his discourse from now on. He speaks of the Humanity of the West and claims that the present age belongs to the Western man with his superabundance of energy (90). Indeed, his last wish is now to come to the West and meet the man of the secret shrine where the Divine presence has his dwelling, his temple. One feels that a universalist theology of the Great Western Man is being put together, with a mixture of political naivet and poetic exuberance: And I thought that the Divine man with all his powers and aspirations of life is dwelling in the West (90). Standing before this Divine man, Tagore feels overwhelmed by the miracle that he should be accepted by the West; and not just accepted, but accepted as one of its own poets (91). In the opposite swing of a see-saw movement, Tagore now praises the spiritual Humanity of the East as against the materialist West. To a reader acquainted with the

history of famines in colonial India, Tagores metaphors appear gruesomely laced with irony. In a bizarre reversal of the real, the children of the West [are] famished and hungry (92). Moreover: Do they not expect their food to come from her, and their rest for the night when they are tired? And are they to be disappointed? (92). Not that Tagore does not perceive the East-West conflict. But he avoids confronting it head on. The feeling of resentment between the East and the West must be pacified, he says (98). The magnanimity sits uncomfortably with extreme diffidence: And I feel ashamed and shy when standing before you I do so now. But I will only say that I am thankful to God that he has given me this great opportunity, that I have been an instrument to bring together, to unite the hearts of the East and the West. (98) In rejecting the rejection of the West in a time of political unrest in India, Tagore seems to point unambiguously in the direction of a critique of emerging fascisms (99). Yet his loose equation of nationalities and religions with races underscores the potential risks of a lack of rigour that often afflicts the discursive mixtures of poetry and politics. He describes the Chinese, the Japanese, the Persians, the Dravidians, the Mohammadans and the Hindoos all as races (93; 99).

Works Cited Hjrne, Harald. Presentation Speech. The Nobel Prize "Nobelprize.org". Nobelprize.org. 12 Jul 2012 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1913/press.html. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

"Rabindranath Tagore - Banquet Speech". Nobelprize.org. 21 Apr 2012 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1913/tagorespeech.html Tagore, Rabindranath. The Nobel Acceptance Speech. Gitanjali. New Delhi: Rupa, 2011. 84-101. "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1913". Nobelprize.org. 21 Apr 2012 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1913/