LOOKING back today to the middle of the nineteenth century, we feel compelled to admit that something exceptional occurred with the emergence of Bengali as a literary language. Disturbingly, we still know very little of this moment, partly because an easeful way of looking at colonial history (according to which modernity comes from elsewhere, bringing with it, to literature, certain genres and practices) has saved us from engaging too strenuously with the question of how and why things changed when they did. For instance, I don’t think we still have a proper genealogy of the word ‘sahitya’, which we’ve been using for more than a century to mean ‘literature’ and ‘literary tradition’ in the modern, secular sense, and not to mean, as it once did in the Indian languages, ‘literary content’ or ‘literary meaning’.

Tagore’s own etymological gloss on the word asks us to look at its root, ‘sahit’ (‘to be with’), so turning literature into a social, companionable thing. It’s pretty certain, though, that ‘sahitya’, as we understand it, is not a timeless Indian verity (for that, we should perhaps look up the word ‘kavya’), but a contingent, humanist construct, just as ‘Indianness’ and the modern Bengali language are. It’s also certain that the emergence of Bengali didn’t only have to do with nationalism, but with it becoming – in lieu of English – a respectable vehicle for cosmopolitan self-expression by the 1860s. It’s the latter development that didn’t quite take place in Ireland and Wales with regard to Gaelic and Welsh; and nationalism alone (of which there was no shortage in Ireland) didn’t succeed in turning those languages into viable literatures, or prevent them from becoming, essentially, curios.

In Ireland, it’s the English language that became the medium through which the modern formulated his or her ambivalence and self-division, so giving Irish literature and diction its shifting registers in English; while Gaelic, largely associated with identity and nation became – with a few striking exceptions – an unusable artefact. Something quite different, and exceptional, happened in Bengali colonial modernity, with the Bengali language not only emerging from a conviction about identity, but an intimation of distance; from not just the wellspring of race, but from disjunction and severance. These essentially cosmopolitan contraries always animate Tagore’s language.

I used the word ‘curio’ earlier deliberately, in order to recall Buddhadeva Bose’s unfair but revealing attack on Indian poets writing in English in the sixties, where he accused them of producing, by choosing not to write in the mother-tongue, not poems but ‘curios’. In one sense, Bose is right. It’s the English language that has risked, recurrently, becoming, in India, a sort of Gaelic: not because, as Bose would have it, it was a foreign or colonial tongue, but because, like Gaelic, it bore too notionally the burden of identity and nationality. The relative and paradoxical freedom from this burden in the emergence of modern Bengali gave it its special air of play and potential.

In other, fundamental ways, Bose was wrong. The poets he attacked had based their achievement on a cunning with which they’d sabotaged and complicated the possibility of a pan-Indian tradition; they too were writing, in their way, in a vernacular. In fact, it was the long poem that Bose held up as the great exemplary Indian English poem, Savitri by Sri Aurobindo, that the shrewd Nissim Ezekiel pointed out was the actual curio for, presumably, its faux ‘high’ cultural atmosphere of the Orient as well as of the English canon (it was composed in iambic).

It should be pointed out that Tagore’s English translation of Gitanjali would be – for Indian poets writing in English like Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra – yet another Gaelic artefact to bypass or circumvent. In his brief memoir, ‘Partial Recall’, Mehrotra quotes, with little indulgence toward his youthful self, from the ambitious and sonorous pastiche of that Gitanjali which he produced as a teenager.

 

The fact that ‘literature’ – specifically ‘English literature’ – was a university discipline first invented for the colonies is a fact that’s fairly well-known today. In the 1880s, English Literature became an object of study leading to a degree at Calcutta University, well before any such development had taken place elsewhere, let alone Oxford or Cambridge. But the incursion of English and European literary texts into Bengal had begun a century earlier; nor can ‘literature’ be seen, simply, as an instrument of imperialist pedagogy from 1820s onwards (when it first surfaces as a taught discipline in Calcutta). By the early nineteenth century, Bengalis, especially when naming literary and cultural societies, were reflecting on what ‘literature’, or, in Bengali, ‘sahitya’, might be – great texts of all kinds, or a different way of approaching and valuing texts?

 

A significant historical narrative is contained in the evolution of the word ‘sahitya’ into its present-day meaning. What seems pretty sure is that it wasn’t a word just lying around, ready to slip into its contemporary, secular role; nor is it a simple translation of the word ‘literature’, though it means much the same thing from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. That is, it’s neither a purely Indian (whatever that may be) or colonial term, but one that keeps abreast of these dichotomies till they start to waver.

Tagore, in his first essay on the subject in 1889, defines it in negatives: ‘The essence of literature does not allow itself to be trapped within a definition. It is like the essence of life: we know what it cannot exist without, but what it is we do not know.’ These are the words of a poet who’s come into his own at a cusp in history. Perhaps the specificity of Tagore’s problem, and the duress of the historical moment he’s speaking in and of, would become clearer if the key word were left untranslated: ‘The essence of sahitya does not allow itself to be trapped etc.’ But the translator, Sukanta Chaudhuri, doesn’t do so because he presumes Tagore has already leapt towards the sense in which that word operates today; and, in part, he’s right.

By 1889, Tagore’s readers have definitely begun to recognise – in spite of the strangeness of the sentences I’ve quoted – the literary. Yet one must keep in mind the strangeness of the time. Tagore’s complex and difficult position as a modern Indian, a colonial subject, an elite cosmopolitan, an inheritor and inventor of eastern civilisational values, and as a progeny of the Enlightenment allows him to partake of the exclusive secular ethos of ‘literature’, but also to view it from the outside, as a process. You feel more than once as you gaze back on that crucial period that you’re over-familiar with its outlines, and also that you’re only on the verge of understanding it.

 

Tagore has been such a fountainhead of nationalist pride, such a static emblem, ever since one can remember that we forget that he was clearly aware, as a writer, of living in a unique and transformative time. There is, in Tagore, a constant acknowledgement of the power of the past, and of the canonical riches of Indian tradition, and constant enquiry about the terms in which these are available to us. In this, he’s different from either the Hindu reformers or the Indian nationalists, for whom tradition has an integrity and wholeness, and is a given to be improved upon or invoked in the services of politics and identity. For Tagore, tradition is at once contemporary and immediate, and inaccessible and disjunctive. As a result, contrary emotions permeate his great essay on the 4th century Kalidasa’s poem on the rainy season, Meghadutam (‘The Cloud-Messenger’):

From Ramgiri to the Himalayas ran a long stretch of ancient India over which life used to flow to the slow, measured mandrakanta metre of the Meghadutam. We are banished from that India, not just during the rains but for all time. Gone is Dasharna with its groves hedged with ketaki plants where, before the onset of the rains, the birds among the roadside trees fed on household scraps and busily built their nests, while in the jaam copse on the outskirts of the village, the fruit ripened to a colour dark as the clouds.

 

The intimation of contemporaneity here is astonishingly suburban; it has to do with nature, yes, but nature viewed from the point of view of the town and the ebb and flow of domesticity: the ‘household scraps’ the birds feed on, the ripening jaam which will be collected and brought home to the family. Kalidasa is not a naive poet; he is a court sophisticate, an urban sensibility, already viewing the natural at one remove. The loss experienced here, then – ‘We are banished from that India, not just during the rains but for all time’ – is a double, even a multiple, one: which India, exactly, are we banished from?

This paradox – to do with immediacy, recognisability, and absolute inaccessibility – is also the subject of Tagore’s own poem, Meghdut, which records the experience of rereading Kalidasa’s eponymous poem, describing how the reader comes to inhabit – and Tagore’s poem is filled with images of human activity and habitation – Kalidasa’s world as he reads, and becomes an exile from it once the poem is over.

Tagore’s fascination and absorption in heritage could have made him an elegist, or a poet who turned from the physical life of the present to contemplate the ruins of the past: the trajectory that was, for instance, to a certain extent T.S. Eliot’s. But, oddly, this is not the case. Tagore’s way of suggesting that he lives in a unique moment in history is to embrace change as a fundamental constituent of existence – indeed, as a crucial constituent of diction, imagination, and craft. ‘In order to find you anew, I lose you every moment/o beloved treasure’: in this line (from a song) and others like it, Tagore embraces accident – he weds contingency to the modernist’s love of the moment, the here and now. The latter – as in the Joycean epiphany – heightens the quotidian: Tagore’s welcoming of contingency introduces an element of risk to the epiphany and the image, of the possibility of any imaginable consequence – including an intuition of the divine.

Tagore’s apotheosis, in this manner, of his historical moment, his here and now, is not a surreptitious celebration of the colonial history he was born into, but of the fact that no historical period can be contained within its canonical definition: accident and chance ensure that its outcomes are unpredictable and life-transforming.

 

This embrace of life, of chance, of play, makes Tagore stand out in the intellectual and moral ethos of late romanticism and modernism – an ethos with which Tagore shares several obsessions (time, memory, the moment, the nature of reality, poetic form), but whose metaphysics he constantly refutes. By ‘metaphysics’ I mean, here, a system whereby value and meaning have their source elsewhere, somewhere ‘beyond’ the experienced world – whether it’s European civilisation, antiquity, the Celtic twilight, or some other lost world. The present, severed from its organic resources in that past, becomes degraded and splintered, and yet continues to be haunted, even burnished, by what it has lost.

I think Tagore is deeply interested in this metaphysics in the context of Bengal, and it runs through his songs, with their momentary scenes, encounters, and revelations, where any hint of transcendence is qualified by the temporal and the fragmentary; this metaphysics is partly invoked as incantation in the refrain from the poem ‘Balaka’, or ‘The Wild Geese’: ‘Hethha noi, hethha noi, onno konokhane!’ (‘Not here, not here – elsewhere!’) But there is also – in the same oeuvre, often in the very same songs and poems – the Tagore of whom I’ve become more and more aware, the near-contemporary of Nietzsche’s, who, like the latter, makes a break with that ‘elsewhere’, and constructs a sustained argument against it in song, and in the terms that life and desire give him: ‘I’ve become infinite:/such is the consequence of your play./Emptying me, you replenish/me with new life once again.’

 

This, in many ways, is an astonishing and audacious assertion, all the more striking for being entirely self-aware about its audacity (this is a tonal characteristic Tagore shares with Nietzsche): and the oeuvre is full of such assertions, running counter to both romanticism’s backward glance and his own ‘Not here, not here’ refrain. It marks him out, like D.H. Lawrence, as a writer embodying a radical historical break. The lines I’ve tried to reproduce in English are among the most difficult to translate from the work of this largely untranslatable poet. They (in Tagore’s own English) are also among his most famous, being the opening lines of the first song in the English Gitanjali.

In Tagore’s English prose-poem version: ‘Thou hast made me end-less, such is thy pleasure.’ All sorts of echoes adorn the next two lines in Tagore’s English – ‘This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again...’ and ‘This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales’ – placing the song now in the context of a psalm-like, New Testament sweetness (‘this frail vessel’) and now in an English arcadia (‘little flute of a reed... hills and dales’). The words are removed, in effect, from the radical moment they inhabit in the Bengali.

The original – ‘Amare tumi ashesh korechho/emoni leela taba’ – is remarkable, as I’ve said, on many levels. The word ‘leela’ can be translated as divine play: Hindu philosophy sees divine play as childlike and solipsistic, and the creation and destruction of the universe, and of man, among its various corollaries. Tagore translates the word as ‘pleasure’, to denote the primacy of delight and desire, rather than moral design, in divine creation.

Among the unintended, almost inadvertent, results of that play, the song has it, is man’s immortality, or ‘infinity’ (my word), or ‘endlessness’ (Tagore’s). And so the centrality of the human is bestowed upon her or him by divinity, certainly, but not by design or according to a legible purpose: in this way, Tagore introduces the notion of chance and coincidence into the story of man’s emergence, and removes the human narrative from its familiar logical movement (an ascent or a decline) from the past to the present, from tradition to modernity.

 

Radical claims abound in the songs and poems. Also in the Gitanjali is the song beginning (in my translation): ‘To the festival of creation I have had an invitation:/Blessed, blessed is human life!’ In Tagore’s English prose-poem, though, the song’s declaration is more modest: ‘I have had my invitation to this world’s festival, and thus my life has been blessed.’ This is almost Christian: a muttering of grace. The Bengali is far more unsettling: it has ‘human life’ (manab jiban) instead of the prayerful ‘my life’: it is more triumphal. Again, alongside the celebration of the occurrence of life and consciousness is the deliberate celebration of contingency: an invitation is always a bonus and a gift; you can’t really expect it or plan for it or demand it. And, once more, the two lines, with their narrative of cause and effect, are structured to invoke logic and, at once, to mock it.

In the earlier song, Tagore writes as if he knows that the self’s infinity or endlessness should be a natural consequence of divine play, while also knowing very well there’s absolutely no logical reason for the one to lead to the other. In the second song, the progression, from discovering the invitation to the festival of existence to the assertion that human life is ‘blessed’ (dhanya), is presented seamlessly, although we know there’s actually no good reason why the second should follow from the first. (In the English version, which adds a ‘thus’ that’s absent in the Bengali, the progression in the first line is far more acceptable.)

 

But why should divine play lead to the speaker’s belief in his own infinitude? Why should his being invited to earthly existence be a cause of joy for all human life? There’s a logical structure to the way these statements develop, but it’s a structure that conceals a deep arbitrariness. The second song strongly implies, in its movement from the first line to the second in Bengali, a ‘thus’ or ‘therefore’ or ‘tai’, without being able to quite justify or explain that powerful implication. The English translation, by adding a ‘thus’, and substituting ‘human life’ with ‘my life’, simply dispenses with that mysterious tension, and diminishes the audacity of the opening. We, as listeners of the Bengali song, are moved and unsettled, but ask, in the end, for no justification: it’s almost as if we know that, in Tagore’s world, anything is possible.

Much of Tagore’s work, then, is preoccupied with – indeed, mesmerised by – coincidence and possibility. It’s a preoccupation that seems to go against the closure and yearning of ‘Not here, not here, elsewhere’, because one can never predict when or where that moment of possibility will occur. One of the songs I’ve translated for this volume, ‘The sky full of the sun and stars, the world full of life,/ in the midst of this, I find myself -/so, surprised, my song awakens’, is, again, a paean to coincidence – and a refutation of metaphysics, of a higher purpose (whatever that might be), according to whose design existence or consciousness might find its proper meaning and arrangement.

 

I have translated Tagore’s word ‘bismaye’ as ‘surprised’, though it could plausibly be rendered as ‘in wonder’. The role of the naive or nature poet, or even a certain kind of romantic, is to wonder at the real, at the universe; but the speaker in the song is not just transfixed by the beauty of the universe but by the happenstance that’s brought him to it: ‘in the midst of this, I find myself.’ This is what gives to the poet-mystic’s ‘bismay’ (his sense of wonder) the element of the unexpected, of surprise – the surprise of the time-traveller (expressed in the poem Meghdut) moving between worlds and phases of history.

Tagore’s peculiar lyric voice, with its curiously urgent apotheosis of the world, its constant note of arrival, can be partly understood through the trope of science fiction (one of whose recurrent themes is the sudden advent into new universes), or through the notion of rebirth and return; or both. This is an odd but powerful – and revealing – characteristic in the foremost artist to have emerged from a background of Brahmo reformism and the Bengali Enlightenment.

 

* Excerpted with permission from the author’s Introduction in The Essential Tagore, edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, Harvard University Press, 2011; courtesy Visva-Bharati University.