Rabindranath’s speech, ‘Shabhyatar Sankat’,¹ ends with a refusal to lose faith in Man. Through the gloom of the destruction that he saw all around him in April 1941, Rabindranath tried, even as he felt his own life ebbing away, to cling to hope. That cry of hope at the end of the piece is a declaration of the last article of his creed. The loss of faith in Man is a sin, he asserted. That cry notwithstanding, it would not be totally unfair to read the speech at a different level as a statement of disillusionment.

At the core of that disillusionment was the realization by 1941 that his faith in Europe was utterly bankrupt. He had, he says, believed early on in his life that civilization would be a precious gift from the very heart of Europe. Rabindranath was not alone in harbouring that faith. A belief that civilization had arrived in India piggy-back on British rule had a very long and distinguished lineage in the ideas of many of Rabindranath’s intellectual forbears. Rammohun Roy, whom Rabindranath practically hero-worshipped, welcomed British rule as a blessing of Divine Providence.² Through the 19th century, most of the prominent writers and thinkers of Bengal accepted British rule and the gifts of western education as agents of civilization. Even those like R.C. Dutt, who exposed the economic exploitation of British rule, were not free from the belief in Albion-Just.³ Faith in the civilizing mission of the British was, if you like, the illusion of the epoch for the literati of 19th century Bengal. Rabindranath, despite his obvious gifts, was no exception on this matter.

 

In the case of Rabindranath, this faith began to be shattered very early. In the 1890s, Rabindranath was attacking, in a series of articles, attitudes of white superiority and arrogance as well as government policies that displayed racial discrimination and ill-treatment of Indians.⁴ Even more significant was his participation in the Swadeshi movement, when, in the memorable words of Ezra Pound, Rabindranath sang Bengal into a nation.⁵ His contribution to the movement was actually much more than that.

In the words of the historian Sumit Sarkar: ‘It is Rabindranath Tagore rather than the professional politician who stands out as the most vivid and remarkable personality of those stirring 1905 days – participating in the rough and tumble of politics as never before and after, suggesting far-reaching schemes of autonomous rural development… [and] bestowing with the vision of a poet a rare beauty and imaginative appeal to the whole movement through his rakhi bandhan proposal.’⁶ Perhaps the most powerful expression of the breakdown of his faith in British rule and goodwill was the letter he wrote to the Viceroy of India in May 1919 to return the knighthood after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.⁷ 

 

In that letter, apart from condemning the immediate action of the government, Rabindranath described British rule as ‘a power which has the most terribly efficient organization for destruction of human lives.’ It was a power driven by the ‘passion of vengeance’ that could make ordinary Indians ‘suffer a degradation not fit for human beings’ and thus British rule denied its own ‘moral tradition’. These were subjects that surfaced in many of his letters and essays in the 1930s.⁸ Rabindranath returned to these themes when he spoke in April 1941 on what he perceived as a crisis in civilization. His critique was directed at Western/European civilization and more emphatically at British rule in India.

The 1941 speech, often seen as his last testament, completes the process of Rabindranath’s growing disillusionment with western civilization and its vehicle in India, British rule. Rabindranath admitted in this address that his initial fascination for things British had grown out of his profound admiration for English literature. But he had to come out of this appreciation of literature, and when he faced the reality that was India, he came to the realization that the standard-bearers of civilization could disown their own standards when it suited their own self-interest.

The poverty of the people of India, the absence of basic amenities like food, clothes, water, education and health made it evident that the so-called civilized race was utterly and contemptuously indifferent to the sufferings of millions of Indians. He was forced to admit to himself that in no other state with a modern administration had such neglect occurred. Rabindranath was no longer willing to describe British civilization as civilization. Referring to British civilization, he said, ‘if you can call it civilization’, just as Gandhi had once called western civilization as ‘what is known as civilization’.⁹ 

 

There was another grievous injury that British rule had perpetuated on India. British rule had divided the Indian people in a terrible and ruthless way. He found no parallel for this in any Muslim-ruled country outside India. This division – he called it a humiliating and uncivilized culmination of Indian history – would not have been possible, Rabindranath was convinced, without covert encouragement from high places. What India and Indians had been deprived of by British rule was evident. In return British rule had established with stick in hand what it called law and order. This was an external presence, a warder’s rule. This was incapable of invoking any kind of respect for western civilization. The latter had shown Indians power and not freedom; it had thus stifled India’s progress towards civilization by holding back what human beings value most and what can truly be called civilization.

Rabindranath did not stop with an account of his disillusionment with or his words of condemnation of British rule. He tried to contrast the impact of British rule in India with some other countries that had escaped the contamination of western civilization. His points of comparison are worth noting. He first cited the example of Japan, which had used machines to bring prosperity and progress to its people. He recalled the civilized administration in Japan. Yet a paragraph later, he referred to Japan’s aggression in North China. He did not stop to explain how this aggression could be reconciled with what he saw as civilized in Japan. Amartya Sen has pointed out that Tagore’s attitude to Japan was ambiguous and contradictory.¹⁰ His admiration for Japan’s progress did not stop him from criticizing what he called in a letter to a Japanese friend, Yone Noguchi, ‘the infallible right of Japan to bully other Asiatic nations.’

 

In another letter to Rash Behari Bose, the Indian revolutionary who then lived in Japan, Rabindranath wrote in 1937 that Japan ‘has now become itself a worse menace to the defenceless peoples of the East.’ Under the circumstances, he found it impossible around 1937-38 to ‘point out with pride the example of a great Japan.’¹¹ In 1941, he reverted to his admiration of Japan but it was tempered with criticism. The irony lay in the future since the destruction that caused Rabindranath so much anguish in April 1941 would be aggravated by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour which would unleash a chain of events that would lead to the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

His second example was the Soviet Union. His praise for the government and the political regime there was unqualified. He said he had seen in Moscow the outstanding and unstinting efforts made to spread education and healthcare among the common people. These efforts were helping to eradicate illiteracy, poverty and lack of self-esteem. He felt that the Soviet civilization had not created divisions between classes and sects and spread the purity of human relations across society. He was especially touched that there was no conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims in the allocation and distribution of the state’s resources. He was impressed by the ceaseless efforts of the Soviet state to empower the various nomadic Muslim tribes that lived in Russia. For these reasons, he felt the Soviet regime was not an intensely oppressive regime.

 

Any reader of these views of Rabindranath who is familiar with the record of the Soviet state will be astounded by these observations and assessment. It would be anachronistic to expect Rabindranath to have had the same level of knowledge about Soviet Russia as we have today.¹² Yet it could not have been unknown to him that in April 1941, the Soviet Union was in alliance with Nazi Germany, which many even in the 1930s thought embodied evil. It is entirely possible that he, like many others, was unaware of the killings carried out by Stalin in Poland after he had made the pact with Hitler. But there was enough evidence around even in 1941 of Stalin’s killings within Russia, of the Great Terror and of the Moscow Trials. The revelations about Stalin’s treatment of Jews, Muslims and other minorities were to come later. In fact, as recent research has shown, the Soviet regime was exactly the intensely oppressive machine which Rabindranath said it wasn’t.

 

In his letter renouncing his knighthood he had condemned British rule in India as being organized for the destruction of human life. The Soviet regime was many times better organized for the destruction of human lives than British rule in India. Stalin’s Russia was, most historians today believe, as much the embodiment of evil as Hitler’s Germany. It is tempting to believe that Rabindranath had accepted at face value what he had seen in Russia and had been taken in by the propaganda dished out by the government. He had erred on the side of credulity. If in 19th century Bengal, faith in British civilization had been the illusion of the epoch, in the thirties of the 20th century, the illusion among communists was blind faith in the Soviet Union and Stalin. Rabindranath seems to have shared this illusion despite his lack of ideological affinity with communists.

The two other examples were Persia and Afghanistan. The former, Rabindranath wrote, had freed itself from the grinding stone of two European powers and moved towards national renewal and self-sufficiency. He had seen there how the terrible competition between Muslims and Zoroastrians that had existed in the past had ceased completely. Persia had been able to do this because it had freed itself from the web of European conspiracy. Afghanistan, despite being backward in the field of education and social policy, was full of potential because of one reason only – because none of the European nations, proud of their civilization, had been able to overwhelm it. It is a cruel fact of contemporary history that both Iran and Afghanistan, within a few decades of Rabindranath’s 1941 address, would be the theatre of Islamic fanaticism.

In 1941, Rabindranath was filled with anguish and despair by the destruction he saw around him. He would have been equally pained and devastated if he had seen what history had in store for the four countries that he chose as counterpoints to western civilization and to the rule of the British in India. Jawaharlal Nehru was absolutely right when he noted in his prison diary immediately after Rabindranath’s death in August 1941: ‘Perhaps it is as well that [Tagore] died now and did not see the many horrors that are likely to descend in increasing measure on the world and on India. He had seen enough and he was infinitely sad and unhappy.’¹³ 

 

In April 1941, when this address was written, Rabindranath was too old, and considered too frail, to read it out in public. It was read out in his presence by Kshiti Mohan Sen. It should be mentioned that on the same occasion Rabindranath blessed the students and residents of Santiniketan in an address that he delivered himself.¹⁴ After having spoken and having heard Kshiti Mohan Sen reading out ‘Sabhyatar Sankat’, he told his innermost circle, half jokingly, ‘ Did you see what I can still do? I could have easily read out the ‘Sabhyatar Sankat’ essay and would have read it as well as Kshitibabu, but no one let me. After all, I wrote it and I should have had the right to read it out. They didn’t let me and that’s why deliberately I spoke ex tempore for so long and, see, nothing happened. Do you think my body is like yours?’¹⁵ 

‘Sabhyatar Sankat’ was almost immediately translated into English by two of Rabindranath’s close associates Kshitish Roy and Krishna Kripalani.¹⁶ A comparison between the Bengali text and the English translation reveals very odd and significant differences. One of the differences is startling. In five places in his address, Rabindranath used the word Musalman.¹⁷ But in the English translation in the case of all five occurrences, the word has been dropped. In fact, in the English version the word Muslim has not been used at all; in its stead, the translators used the term ‘major community’ (when talking of Iran) or avoided naming the religious community.

 

It is difficult to comprehend the reasons for this utterly unwarranted removal of a term, especially as Rabindranath was not referring to Muslims in any derogatory manner. The flag of political correctness can by no means be raised here. The deliberate elision needs to be noted especially as one of the points Rabindranath was making related to the divisions that British rule created in India between Hindus and Muslims, and the absence of such divisions in countries like Iran (where Muslims were a majority) and Russia (where Muslims were a minority). The erasure of Muslim from the relevant sentences somewhat takes away from the edge and directness of Rabindranath’s argument. In at least one place, the erasure leads to a crude distortion. In the English translation one reads the following, ‘I saw [in USSR] peoples and tribes, who, only the other day, were nomadic savages.’ In the original, there is no phrase that even remotely approximates to ‘nomadic savages’. Rabindranath had written bahusankhyak maruchar musalman jatir¹⁸ which translates as ‘many pastoral Muslim tribes or nationalities.’

 

The word savage is entirely the translators’ addition and so are the following few lines that occur immediately after the mention of ‘nomadic savages’: ‘Enormous sums are being spent on their education to expedite the process. When I see elsewhere some two hundred nationalities – which only a few years ago were at vastly different stages of development – marching ahead in peaceful progress and amity, and when I look about my own country and see a very highly evolved intellectual people drifting into the disorder of barbarism, I cannot help contrasting the two systems of government, one based on cooperation, the other on exploitation, which have made such contrary conditions possible.’¹⁹ By adding these sentences in the English translation, the translators endorse the so-called achievements of Soviet Russia in terms that are stronger than those in the Bengali. The English translation thus contains omissions, distortions and additions.

 

It is difficult to understand what made the translators introduce these changes in the English text and more importantly what made Rabindranath approve of the alterations and additions. The available evidence makes it very clear that Rabindranath saw and approved the translations and even made some emendations. The English translation was first published in The Modern Review in May 1941 under the title ‘Crisis of Civilization’, but in 1941 when Visva-Bharati published it as a separate booklet, it was called ‘Crisis in Civilization’.²⁰ The publication was preceded by the following editorial announcement: ‘The only authorized translation of the poet’s Bengali address ‘Sabhyatar Sankat’ read on the occasion of his recent birthday celebrations at Santiniketan, revised by himself.’²¹ 

Subsequent readers who read the essay in Bengali did not feel the need to look at the English version; and non-Bengali readers had no access to the original text; they rightly took the English rendering by Roy and Kripalani as the authorized translation since it carried the undeniable seal of Rabindranath’s approval. The typed manuscript of the English translation preserved in the archives in Rabindra Bhavan, Santiniketan show that Rabindranath went through the translation very carefully and made some emendations in his own hand. The shadow of an odd discomfort thus falls on the English translation of Rabindranth’s last testament. Moreover, no one noticed or commented upon the subtle shift in meaning involved in changing ‘Crisis of’ to ‘Crisis in’. The preposition ‘of’ seemed to suggest that civilization had reached a kind of crossroads. This sense was lost by the change in the preposition to ‘in’.

 

This essay will remain incomplete without the mention of a parting puzzle. Sometime around early April 1941, Rabindranath’s nephew Soumendranath provoked him by asking him to write a poem about the triumphs of Man, instead of singing only about the triumph of the machine.²² Rabindranath responded with a poem and indicated that this would be the song for the Bengali New Year, the same occasion for which the essay ‘Shabhyatar Sankat’ was written.

In a letter written in April, Amiya Chakravarty suggested to Rabindranath that the poem would be very appropriate at the end of the ‘Shabhyatar Sankat’ address since the poem also expressed faith in man that Rabindranath had asserted at the end of the speech. Chakravarty felt that the addition of the poem would help bring out the inner significance of the speech. He included in the letter his English translation of the poem. Rabindranath obviously liked the idea since when ‘Crisis of Civilization’ appeared in The Modern Review, the poem was included at the end with the note that the translator was Amiya Chakravarty.²³ The poem speaks about the coming of ‘The Great One’²⁴ and about the rise and renewal of humanity.

 

Thus a poem that had not been part of the original address came to be included in it. On the available evidence, it seems that Rabindranath had accepted the suggestion of Amiya Chakravarty. The question that scholars will have to answer is the following: Should the poem be considered a part of the Crisis in/of Civilization essay? Answers to the question will have to consider the fact that the Bengali text of ‘Sabhytar Sankat’ printed in the collection ‘Kalantar’ includes the poem Oi… mahamanab ashe but the English version printed in The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore does not.

The poem and the speech are important since they contained a vision, utopian perhaps, that enabled Rabindranath even at the very end of his life, despite illness and mental anguish, to engage in a last spurt of unforgettable creativity. The vision was deceptive but as Rabindranath wrote in the memorable last line of the very last poem he was to write, it was by enduring the deception that one got to win the imperishable right to peace.²⁵ 

 

* This essay could not have been written without the help and guidance of Sankha Ghosh. All errors and opinions are my responsibility.

Footnotes:

1. See Rabindra Rachanabali, vol 26, Visva-Bharati, Calcutta, 1948, pp. 635-41.

2. Rammohun wrote, ‘Divine Providence at last in its abundant mercy stirred up the English nation to break the yoke of those tyrants and to receive the oppressed natives of Bengal under its protection.’ See Sophia Dobson Collet, The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy, Calcutta (repr.), 1962, p. 431.

3. R.C. Dutt, Economic History of India Under British Rule, 2 vols, London (repr.), 1950.

4. See Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, Ranikhet (repr.), 2010, pp. 43-44.

5. Cited in S. Gopal, British Policy in India, 1858-1905, Cambridge, 1965, p. 274.

6. Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement, pp. 47-48.

7. The text of this letter is available in The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, vol. 3, edited by Sisir Kumar Das (Delhi, 1996), pp. 751-52; and also in Prasantakumar Pal, Rabijibani, vol. 7, 1914-1920 (Calcutta, 1997), pp. 418-19.

8. See for example the essay titled ‘Kalantar’ in the collection with the same name published by Visva-Bharati (Calcutta, 2010, repr.) pp. 11-24; also see ‘Chithi Patra’ published by Visva-Bharati, (Calcutta, 1974), especially p. 120.

9. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Hind Swaraj reprinted in Rudrangshu Mukherjee, The Penguin Gandhi Reader, New Delhi, 1993, p. 3.

10. Amartya Sen, ‘Tagore and His India’ in The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity, London, 2005, pp. 89-120.

11. Both letters are quoted by Sen, pp. 110-111.

12. The literature on Stalin’s Russia is huge but a good account of his atrocities is available in Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations, London, 1992. Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man, New York, 1996, p. 365 describe Rabindranath’s endorsement of the Soviet Union in this address as ‘the greatest blunder of his life.’

13. Quoted in Sen, Argumentative Indian, p. 93.

14. The text of this address is available in Chittaranjan Bandopadhyay (ed.), Rabindra-Prasanga, Ananda Bazar Patrika, 4 vols, Calcutta, 1994, iv, pp.103-04; and also in Pratima Thakur, Nirban, Calcutta, 1944, pp. 34-5. Pratima Thakur writes that the address was taken down by Pulin Bihari Sen.

15. This is narrated by Nirmal Kumari Mahalanobis in Baishe Sravan, Calcutta (repr.), 2011, p. 21 (my translation).

16. The English translation is available in Sisir Kumar Das, The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, vol. 3, pp. 722-726. That Roy and Kripalani were the translators is noted in Sudhamoyi Mukhopadhyay (ed.), Rabindra Rachanar Ingraji Anubad Suchi 2 vols, Bolpur, Santiniketan, 1978, ii, p. 31; and also in Mira Chattopadhyay (ed.), Rabindra Rachanar Ingreji Anubad Itibritta, 2 vols, Calcutta, 1993, ii, p. 112. Krishna Kripalani was married to Rabindranath’s grand-daughter, Nandita.

17. The word occurs four times in the 6th paragraph of the Bengali text (pp. 637-38) and once more in the 7th paragraph (p. 639).

18. These words occur in the 6th para on p. 637.

19. English Writings, vol. 3, p. 724.

20. This change is noted in Rabindra Rachanabali, published by the Government of West Bengal, Calcutta, 2001, vol. xvi, pp. 1242-43.

21. In a letter dated 6 May 1941 (letter no. 107) Amiya Chakravarty wrote to Rabindranath that he has received both the Bengali and the English versions of the address. In an earlier letter in April 1941, (letter no. 106), Chakravarty had appealed to Rabindranath to have a look at the English translation of the speech and to approve of it. See Naresh Guha (ed.), Kabir Chithi Kabike: Rabindranath ke Amiya Chakravarty, 1916-1941, Calcutta, 1995. Letter no. 107 is on p. 294 and letter no. 106 is on pp. 292-93.

22. See Santidev Ghosh, Rabindrasangeet, Calcutta, 1949, p. 283; the incident is also narrated in Samir Sengupta, Rabindranather Atmiyasajan, Calcutta, 2005, p. 340; as his source, Sengupta cites Maitreyee Devi, Swarger Kachhakachhi, Calcutta, 1981, p. 327.

23. See letter no. 106 cited above.

24. Amiya Chakravarty’s rendering of mahamanab had been ‘Supreme Man’. Rabindranath changed this to ‘The Great One’ when it was published in The Modern Review. See vol. xvi of the Rabindra Rachanabali, published by the Government of West Bengal, pp. 1242-43.

25. I have used Supriya Chaudhuri’s excellent translation. See Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Poems edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri, Oxford Tagore Translations, Delhi, 2004, p. 376.