Wait for Tomorrow!

Writing of Tagore, E. M. Forster said in 1919, "He is a good writer. All must assent to this minimum. But how good? To that there can be no answer until the adoration and the reaction all adoration entails have passed away, until the mass of sacrifices has been cleared up, and Beauty can pronounce across the subsiding dust." One cannot take objection to such a general statement as this. The function of a genuine critic is to wait and weigh in the balance before pronouncing anything of abiding value. The writer, too, has to weather the storms of his maiden voyage. For it is only when he proves himself seaworthy that there will be many to embark upon him.

But further scrutiny of Forster’s words shows their definite bearing upon this particular Poet. The adoration, he refers to, is presumably that of the early admirers of the Poet in England like William Rothenstein, W. B. Yeats, Earnest Rhys, Henry Nevinson, May Sinclair and others, whose blood Rabindranath’s verses stirred as nothing had for years. Such adoration must surely have increased with the award of the Nobel Prize to the Poet. "The reaction all adoration entails" seems also a fact. Else the critic could not have been aware of it. Those that share such reactions do not always know why. At times they are sensible of their own prejudices. They may know as well that like all prejudices this one must be unreasoning.

Forsters in this part of the Indian continent are none too rare. They are out to detect the ‘Babu sentence’ in the Poet’s own English translations from the Bengalee. They cannot at all bear the feeling of a poet he frequently instills in them. There always lurks a suspicion in their bosoms that much that is published in this name neither clear nor understandable. Even an occasional satisfaction is experienced if anybody cries out that Rabindranath is an overpraised Bengalee mystic.

Three decades have elapsed since Tagore’s name attained a wider significance in the international horizon. Many of his earlier and boyhood writings too have begun to see the light of day with the tremendous ovation given to his mature thoughts. People there are who are fond of desultory reading, and hence fail to receive the true intimations of Tagore’s rich heritage or the rare fruitage of his endeavours. They can never know the time when ‘Beauty can pronounce across the subsiding dust.’

Much of our ignorance of or calculated indifference to Tagore’s genius is born of the slow-eating materialism that has come to stay with us. In the wake of our Western contact, things of the spirit have receded to the ground, and what little we appreciate as poetry has nothing in it to feed our inner cravings. "No poet seems to me as famous in Europe as he is among us", wrote Yeats of Tagore in his introduction to the Gitanjali in English. There need be no doubt as to the sincerity embedded in that remark. Europe is yet to discover one like Rabindranath full of a supreme culture and tradition ‘where poetry and religion are the same thing’.

It is not as if Tagore lived in a dreamland of his own creation. He was only too sensible of the hard realities of the times. He knew why poetry has lost much of its hold on men’s imagination. But it requires superior courage to divine he cause. As Tagore has said, ‘I am hopelessly born in the age of the busy printing press–a belated Kalidasa,’ and to add, addressing poetry itself, ‘And you, my love, are utterly modern.’ The meaning is very clear. The Poet deplores the dire fate, which has overtaken poetry when printed and ‘banished into the greyness of the tuneless papers.’ For, who can gainsay the truth that we ‘never have the chance to listen with halfshut eyes to the murmur of metre.’ If at all poetry still makes ‘her journey to her tryst of hearts’, it is only in the midst of hurry and hustle of ‘a desperate age’. Who cares for poems that are only for listening ears? We listlessly turn the pages of a book of verses, sitting in our easy chairs and hardly realising what beauty may get lost in a book densely packed with print.

To know Tagore fully we needs must hear his Bengalee lyrics recited. These songs in the original are said to be ‘full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour and of metrical invention’. Alas, that we know not what they are! But to know the Poet enough, to feel the greatness of his thoughts and vision, his English translations are more than sufficient. None not even the fastidious among us, can deny the fresh skies and ‘pastures new’ into which he takes us. Sublimity of thought and feeling finds in him a constant source for its power.

"Infinite is your wealth, but it is your wish to receive it in small measure, to receive it through me from my little lands."

"That is why you have made me rich with your riches and have come to my door yourself, though my door is shut."

"You will not drive in your Chariot, swifter than thought, but it is your wish to come down on the dust and walk with me step by step."¹

Noble words these, and addressed to his God, they wring our hearts’ sympathies. There is no mysticism to shroud the directness of these lines. They undoubtedly bear the beauty of the Psalms, the profundity of the Upanishads and the plaintive sweetness of the Tamil Thevarams.

Others might say what they like of him. Indians, nurtured in the philosophy of the Gita and steeped in the poetry of Valmiki and Kalidasa, can hardly miss in him both that religion and that poetry, that have come down to them from the immemorial past. Perhaps the much English-educated amidst us, who feel they know their Shelley and their Keats much better than their Tagore, will be slow to recognise Beauty pronouncing across the subsiding dust. To them we apply the corrective, which the poet applies to the traducers of his own God:

"They call you mad. Wait for tomorrow and keep silent.
They throw dust upon your head. Wait for tomorrow.
They will bring their wreath.
They sit apart in their high seat. Wait for tomorrow.
They will come down and bend their head."²

We wonder, has not that tomorrow come already!

1 Poems by Rabindranath Tagore (Visvabharati publication), p. 53