Tagore’s Views on Aesthetics

Rabindranath Tagore’s Views
on Aesthetics

BY Dewan Bahadur K. S. RAMASWAMI SASTRI, B.A., B.L., Vellore.

Rabindranath Tagore says in one of the Songs in the Gitanjali:

“Mirth spreads from leaf to leaf, my darling, and gladness without measure. The heaven’s river has drowned its banks and the flood of joy is abroad.”

What is the heaven’s river full of the flood of joy? It is Ananda or Bliss which is at the core of all being. Pure integral Ananda or Bliss is the bliss of spiritual realisation. The refraction of the white light of Ananda into the multi-tinted splendors of Art is aesthetic delight. This is the quintessential teaching of Indian Aesthetics and it is the teaching of Tagore as well. Though the Indian is called a pessimist, he has always felt and said that bliss is the central core of consciousness and that consciousness is the central Core of life. Tagore says about his intimate experience of this bliss-aspect of life:

“In the mornings every now and then, a kind of unspeakable joy without any cause, used to overflow my heart……All the beauty, sweetness, and scent of this world……all these used to make me feel the presence of a dimly recognised being, assuming so many forms just to keep me company.”

He says again:

“A singular glory covered the entire universe, for me–bliss and beauty seemed to ripple all over the world.”

Indian aestheticians add to this concept of Ananda the concepts of rasa and dhvani (aesthetic emotion and aesthetic suggestiveness). It is only when we have a perfect fusion of imagination and emotion and suggestiveness that we can have the highest aesthetic effects in any of the arts. Beauty, though seen with the physical eyes, reveals her sweetest ravishment only to the inner eye. Tagore says in The Gardener:

“I hold her hands and press her to my breast.
I try to fill my arms with her loveliness,
to plunder her sweet smile with kisses,
to drink her dark glances with my eyes.
Ah, but where is it? Who can strain the
blue from the sky?
I try to grasp the beauty; it eludes me
leaving only the body in my hands.
Baffled and weary I come .
How can the body touch the flower
which only the spirit may touch?”

He says again:

“We, therefore, see that all that the artist is anxious for is to express this invisible and inexpressible within, lying in the heart of the visible and the tangible without………..The invisible and the inner beauty of the universe is a thing of the heart, and the artist knows it as such.”

The artist is, therefore, a realiser and revealer of truth, which is the inner reality as distinguished from outer fact. Tagore says:

“In as much as art restrains ‘reality’, it lets in truth, which is greater then ‘reality’. The professional artist is a mere witness to ‘reality’, while the real artist is a witness to truth. We see the productions of the one with our corporeal eyes, and of the other with the deeper eye of contemplation. And to see anything in contemplation requires, first and foremost, that the obsession of the senses be curbed strongly and this declaration be made to all outward forms that they are never ultimate or final, never an end but always means to an end.”

In a very famous essay an What is Art Tagore points out that man is higher than the animals because his knowledge is not exhausted be search for food and his love is not circumscribed by sex-love and love of offspring. He says:

“Man has a fund of emotional energy which is not all occupied with his self-preservation. This surplus seeks its outlet in the creation of Art, for man’s civilisation is built upon his surplus.”

He says again:

“Our emotions are the gastric juices which transform this world of appearance into the more intimate world of sentiments. On the other hand, this outer world has its own juices, having their various qualities which excite our emotional activities. This is called in our Sanskrit rhetoric rasa, which signifies outer juices having their response in the inner juices of our emotions….Therefore, the Sanskrit rhetoricians say, in poetry we have to use words which have the proper taste–which do not merely talk but conjure up pictures and sing.”

The true principle of art is the principle of unity. Tagore refers to what he calls “the taste values” of art and makes us feel that, further, the artist combines what is individual with what is universal. Thus emotion and suggestiveness are of the essence of art; and art should express personality and should be thoroughly individual and yet completely universal. Another vital element in art is the element of realisation of truth through love and sympathy. Further, we have in it the creation of freedom and the freedom of creation. Tagore is very fond of two Upanishadic expressions–Shantam Shivam Sundaram (Peace, Auspiciousness and Beauty) and Ananda rupam amritam yad Vibhathi (that which shines in its blissful and immortal form.) He says:

“This building of man’s true world–the living world of truth and beauty–is the function of Art.”

I shall now refer to Tagore’s illuminating remarks on the various fine arts. He says about Indian music:

“Our music, as it were, moves above the incidents of daily life and, because of it, it is so full of detachment and tenderness–as if it were appointed to reveal the beauty of the innermost and unutterable mystery of the human heart and the world.”

He says further:

“Song is glorious in its own right; why should it accept the slavery of words? Song begins where words end. The inexplicable is the domain of music. It can say what words cannot, so that the less the words of the song disturb the song, the better.”

In regard to drama he pleads for romantic and creative idealism.

He says:

“If the Hindu spectator has not been too far infected with the greed for realism and the Hindu artist still has any respect for his craft and his skill, the best thing that they can do for themselves is to regain their freedom by making a clean sweep of the costly rubbish that has accumulated round about and is clogging the stage.”

He says again:

“Like the true wife who wants none other than her husband, the true poem, dramatic or otherwise, wants none other than the understanding mind. We all act to ourselves as we read a play, and the play which cannot be sufficiently interpreted by such invisible acting has never yet gained the laurel for its author.”

Tagore says that each art should express its own innate glory and should not borrow effects from other arts. Music overweighted with words, poetry merely melodious, over-symbolical painting, and sculpture seeking to express movement, miss their true purpose and loveliness. Tagore says about poesy that her glory is to be the bride of God.

“My song has put off her adornments, she has no pride of dress or decoration. Ornaments would drown thy whispers; they would come between Thee and me; their jingling would drown thy whispers.”

In short, Art is the gate of Beauty leading to God.

“I touch by the edge of the far-spreading wing of my song Thy feet which I could never aspire to reach.”