Barbs for the bard: The vilification of Rabindranath Tagore

For the rest of India, a Bengali is the sum total of machher jhol and Rabindranath Tagore. Like all stereotypes, this too is borne out of ignorance. Understandably, the saffronites eyeing to wrest West Bengal from Trinamool Congress have targeted both these icons to inflict damage to a people's identity. Though history is not forthcoming about previous assaults on Bengal's culinary leanings, it is replete with instances of the Nobel laureate being criticised, lampooned, parodied and vilified. The memes currently doing the rounds have called Tagore 'characterless', 'anti-Hindu' and 'a pimp of the seculars and the British'. Had the bard been alive now — May 7 marks his 156th birth anniversary — he would have been pained but not entirely surprised by the behaviour of the new-age trolls. Many of these labels were in circulation when Tagore was alive. Throughout his life, he had to suffer malicious ignorance and envy alongside veneration. Paradoxically, despite the attempts at character assassination on the Internet, in West Bengal, all major political parties are trying to outdo each other to stake claims to Tagore's legacy.

Many of Tagore's contemporaries — some of whom were his harshest critics — had little understanding of his everlasting impact on Bengal's cultural landscape and psyche. In his 2011 review of the book The Essential Tagore, carried in New Republic magazine, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen wrote: "In many different ways, Tagore's writings reshaped and reconstructed modern Bengali in a way that only a handful of innovative Bengali writers had done before him, going back all the way, a thousand years earlier, to the authors of Charyapada, the Buddhist literary classics that first established the distinctive features of early modern Bengali."

Symbolism to syphilis

Yet, from the outset of Tagore's literary career, a section of the Bengali intelligentsia were up in arms about his literary style. One of his earliest critics, Kaliprasanna Kavyabisharad, accused him of peddling obscenity when the anthology of poems Kari o Komal (Sharps and Flats) was published in 1886. "The mention of kiss and women's breasts had incensed an orthodox society imbued with Victorian values," says Manabendra Mukhopadhyay, associate professor, department of Bengali, Visva-Bharati University, which Tagore founded in 1921. Kavyabisharad wrote a booklet of poems titled Mithe Kora (Sweet and Strong) under a pseudonym in 1888 in which he took a dig at Tagore's poems on passion. "More importantly," says Mukhopadhyay, "it revealed the literary class' inability to grasp his symbolism, metaphors and poetic diction, his championing of subjectivity in verse."

All along, Tagore had to create his own reader base amid various kinds of opposition with the tone and substance of criticisms taking many turns. The poet Dwijendralal Roy was particularly vituperative. "In a play titled Ananda Bidaye, written in 1912, which he wasn't allowed to stage, Roy berated Tagore's privileged upbringing and socio-economic standing, signalling a new low in literary offensive," says Mukhopadhyay.

"But, the lowest of the low was yet to come. It happened sometime in the 1920s when a fringe magazine, Abatar, told its readers that Rabindranath had contracted syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease," reveals the Tagore scholar.

Fearless spirit

Though the Nobel Prize in 1913 swelled the ranks of his admirers and brought about a ceasefire, the truce was short-lived. Streer Patra (The Wife's Letter), his famous short story highlighting the suffering and neglect of women in a patriarchal society was panned for being unrealistic. His critics contended that the protagonist couldn't be a Hindu woman, and even if a married woman chose to follow in the character's footsteps, where would she go, which society would accept her?

Patriot Bipin Chandra Pal of the Lal-Bal-Pal triumvirate — the other two being Lala Lajpat Rai and Bal Gangadhar Tilak — who fashioned himself as a realist, found Streer Patra lacking pragmatism. "His detractors didn't have the bandwidth to realise that Tagore was a humanist far ahead of his times," says Mukhopadhyay. "They didn't miss the opportunity to attack Gitanjali when it was first published in Bengali in 1910. One Upendranath Kar expressed his puerile disapproval in the booklet Gitanjali Shamalochona (Pratibad)."

Tagore came close to acquiring the anti-national tag with the novel Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) where he questioned the excesses committed in the name of India's freedom struggle, particularly the Swadeshi movement. Tagore was accused of demoralising the youth by casting aspersions on the nationalistic fervour. Novelist Saratchandra Chattopadhyay took a gentle swipe at him when Ghare Baire was coming out in a serialised form in a magazine between 1915 and 1916.

In spite of his deep regard — it was Tagore who had conferred the title of Mahatma on Gandhi — his differences of opinion with the Father of the Nation over the importance of open-minded reasoning and celebration of human freedom didn't go down well with the Congress, especially in Bengal.

Tagore could see the pitfalls of the dominant political ideologies of his time. Though the West viewed him as a mystic, a sage from the Orient, he was a rationalist. And, as a true progressive, embodied a fearless spirit. His critique on Nationalism when he visited Japan and America in 1916-17 raised eyebrows at home and abroad. However, on the list of half-baked, least-informed accusations against Tagore, the Jana Gana Mana controversy ranks high and rages on even now as it fuels the 'pimp of the seculars and the British' rant. Back then and now, those levelling the charges try to drum up support on the basis of articles from the Anglo-Indian press, which was unanimous about a Tagore song being sung to commemorate King George V's visit to India. Prabodh Chandra Sen in his book India's National Anthem quotes Tagore to scotch the rumours. Tagore had said that anyone reading the entire poem would know that it wasn't written for a George V or George VI, or for that matter any monarchy.

A new era

To attribute servility and obsequience to Tagore, who gave up knighthood in protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, says a lot about the quality of research that gives credence to these invectives.

The whole cottage industry of criticisms that enjoyed pillorying Tagore while he was alive came from a society in churn, trying to wrestle with the principles of modernity. Sajanikanta Das, the editor of Shanibarer Chithi, a weekly literary magazine with a puritanical streak, needled Tagore with biting wit and sarcasm. In a letter to a confidante, expressing his anguish at these barbs, the poet had written: "It would be a matter of shame if I expected everyone to admire my works or my character; nor is there any reason in Bengal to entertain such expectations. But the comments against me have been spiteful — to the effect that there is a multitude of flatterers who surround me and sing my praises and deprive me of my capacity to see my own failings."

The quality of opposition improved with a new literary wave in the 1920s, ushered by a bunch of young poets and writers. "Termed as the Kallol era, its proponents, no doubt influenced by international literary trends, tried to move out of the Tagore shadow to dabble in realism, which they found 'missing' in Tagore's creation," says Jishu Chaudhuri, a veteran journalist. "While Tagore believed that the seeds of beauty and creation are embedded in destruction, the much younger lot chose to highlight reality as seen by the naked eyes. Some of them had contended that Tagore is finished, only to realise that even in his grand old age, the great man could pull off many literary rabbits out of his hat," says Chaudhuri.

Given the current political climate, attacking Tagore and undermining his legacy should be par for the course. "On one hand, the Hindutva brigade is baying for his blood in India and in neighbouring Bangladesh, Muslim fundamentalists are opposing the move to name a university after Tagore. Isn't it ironical that both these countries owe their national anthems to one of the finest intellectuals of the 20th century?" wonders eminent linguist and literary critic Pabitra Sarkar.

In a letter to a trusted aide towards the end of his life, a dejected and resigned Tagore had rued that while the West had failed to comprehend him, what rankled with him even more was his countrymen's utter lack of understanding and empathy for him.

Mukhopadhyay sums it up succinctly: "If more people, including the vast majority of Bengalis, take the trouble of reading and internalising Tagore instead of ridiculing him or putting him on a pedestal, the quality of engagement would improve drastically. Sadly, and this is especially true for Bengalis, he has almost become a status symbol, confined to the bookshelves and occasionally brought out only to be dusted."