06/20/11
Why Rabindranath Tagore Still Matters Amartya Sen
In his book Raga Mala, Ravi Shankar, the great
musician, argues that had Rabindranath Tagore “been born in the West he would
now be [as] revered as Shakespeare and Goethe.” This is a strong claim, and it
calls attention to some greatness in this quintessentially Bengali
writer—identified by a fellow Bengali—that might not be readily echoed in the
wider world today, especially in the West. For the Bengali public, Tagore has
been, and remains, an altogether exceptional literary figure, towering over all
others. His poems, songs, novels, short stories, critical essays, and other
writings have vastly enriched the cultural environment in which hundreds of
millions of people live in the Bengali-speaking world, whether in Bangladesh or
in India. Something of that glory is acknowledged in India outside Bengal as
well, and even in some other parts of Asia, including China and Japan, but in
the rest of the world, especially in Europe and America, Tagore is clearly not a
household name.And yet the enthusiasm and excitement that Tagore’s writings created in Europe and America in the early years of the twentieth century were quite remarkable. Gitanjali, a selection of his poems for which Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, was published in English translation in London in March 1913 and was reprinted ten times by the time the award was announced in November. For many years Tagore was the rage in many European countries. His public appearances were always packed with people wanting to hear him. But then the Tagore tide ebbed, and by the 1930s the huge excitement was all over. Indeed, by 1937, Graham Greene was able to remark, “As for Rabindranath Tagore, I cannot believe that anyone but Mr. Yeats can still take his poems very seriously.”
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