Tagore and The Indian Renaissance

TAGORE AND THE INDIAN RENAISSANCE! ¹

By K. R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR

It cannot be anyone’s “aim” to “perpetuate” the memory of Rabindranath Tagore! For, we are but little men to presume to perpetuate so great a man’s memory. His writings, the memory of his life, Visvabharati, the great institution that he created–these perpetuate Tagore’s memory as nothing else can. But there is one thing that we can do; there is one thing we ought to do. We can read Rabindranath’s works–such of them, at least, as are easily accessible in English or in our own regional languages–and we shall then feel thankful that, although ours has been in many ways a chequered history, although the cup of our discontent has filled to the brim, and perhaps spilled over even, the Time Spirit has nevertheless thrown up a few great men during the last 150 years, men of outstanding ability and striking personality, who have given new life to us, shown new directions of national evolution, and brought new hopes and visions to sustain us in our trials, and inspire us in our undertakings. It is our racial habit to call such men Rishis, and among the Rishisof the recent past none stands higher than Rabindranath Tagore.

As the years pass, we are apt to view Tagore as a figure of dim vast proportions, lost in the mists of legend. It is necessary to remember that he was no legend, but a real human being; that, for instance, he once visited the Andhra University campus to deliver two lectures under the Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar foundation; that the poet, playwright, novelist, patriot, prophet, did not exhaust the man. He was more than the sum of his achievements, and still the only Rabindranath, light-giver, life-giver, to those who were close to him and dear to him. We shall do him no justice if we treated him as an institution and as a legend, ignoring the fact that this evangelist of the Religion of Man was himself an arch-individualist, a trembling human being in all that he thought, felt, said and did. Let us raise the cry, “Ecce Homo! Behold the Man!” before we salute the Kavi, the Karmayogin, the Gurudev.

‘The Leonardo da Vinci of the Indian Renaissance’: so Professor D.S. Sarma has called Rabindranath. The description is apt: Tagore’s was as many-sided an achievement as Leonardo’s had been, and quite as rich, in fact richer. When after an icy season of blight and sterility, when at the end of the winter of our frustration and discomfiture, new life bursts upon us, at last, many are the sights we see, varied are the thrills we experience–there are the new sticky leaves, the ants return, the birds return, the ice-capped Himalayas send freshes to the rivers in the plains, hope returns, gaiety returns, life returns. In a nation’s history, new life means awakening in all the divers fields of life: in politics, economics and industry, in ethics, philosophy and religion, in art, education and social life. The whole aspect of life seems to change. It is the same country, the same people–yet everything is different. See the paddy fields before and after the monsoon: at one moment the stubble, at another the rich sheet of green. So it is with a nation’s cycles of blight and renewal.

The rounded fulness and splendour of ancient Indian culture may be inferred by us even at this distance of time. The elements that make for a full and free life were there in ample measure. Vitality, first of all: a great zest for life, a zest that knew no inhibitions, no timid exclusions. Second, an intellectual vigour, keen and constructive: analytical, no doubt, but not allergic to the processes of integration. And, third, a high spiritual awareness, mediating between the two, and making the most of them. Life, mind, spirit, a trinity of powers that made possible the great ancient Indian civilisation–the art and the literature, the forms of social and political organisation, the systems of philosophy and the codes of law and ethics. In course of time, de set in, and this civilisation stagnated. The power and the glory receded, the decline began, the fall seemed to be imminent. Invader after invader came: Islam came, and remained; the Cross came, and remained; the foreign soldier and the rapacious trader came, they remained, quarrelled among themselves, and gave a vicious violent twist to the nation’s life. Ruin and confusion reigned in the country. Vitality weakened; there was, as it were, a flight from life; intellect weakened and worked for the wrong ends; and spiritual awareness ceased or slumbered. In 1757, the Battle of Plassey was fought, and during the next fifty years we saw the veritable nadir our fortunes. It was mid-winter. Famine, disorder, corruption, moral apathy, were the outward manifestations of the hell that India had become, and, in the Miltonic phrase, “refuge none was found.” Such, at any rate, was the general picture. But, all the same, there were not wanting pockets of sanity, vitality, even spirituality, that managed somehow to survive this invasion of hell. For example, was during this dark dark period of our history that, in South India, Saint Tyagaraja, Muthuswami Diksbitar and Syama Sastri took Katnatak music to great heights, and turned their bhaktiinto imperishable song.

The Western impact–by which we mean, not merely the political action but also the coming of Western culture and the religion of Christianity–made both for confusion and the possibility of new creation. The advancing shield of the West indicated the holiness of Christ on one side, and the power of the Machine on the other. The missionary and the soldier were thus the two arms of the conquest of India by the West, though the actual beneficiary was only the trader. Was it surprising that many Indians thought in the first flush that, if India was to survive in the competitive modern world, it was necessary not only to adopt Western knowledge and technology but also to accept the religion of the West?

Yet, the Western impact, when the first shock was over, proved beneficial in many ways. It put an end to the old apathy. It quickened the impulse to creation. It introduced the critical spirit. It brought to our notice new forms of literature, new forms of social and political organisation, and challenged us to attempt readjustment and live, or to remain stubborn and perish. The battle of the Indian renaissance was won (it was a long struggle, though) when we decided to readjust and live. A vigorous cross-fertilisation, a purposive transvaluation of values, was called for: and it was forthcoming.

The history of modern India may be said to begin with Raja Rammohun Roy, for he was, in very truth, our great pathfinder, an idealist coupled with a shrewd man of affairs, a visionary and a builder who really deserved the title of ‘Father of Modern India’. Rammohun was a self-made man, with a purpose in his life and an unfaltering sense of direction. While still young, he left the East India Company’s service, and chose to be a servant of the nation. He then carried his mission to England, made the appropriate contacts, and moved the powers that be to do the right thing by India. Whether in India or in England, he was restlessly active, and there was not a department of life–religion, social reform, education, journalism, public administration, legislation–which did not receive the beneficial impact of his personality. He was no unbeliever but a devout Hindu, yet his Hinduism went to the pristine purity of the Vedas, leaping over the unhealthy encrustations of the intervening centuries. He was a sturdy nationalist, but he also wisely saw that it was not in obscurantism, but in the assimilation of Western knowledge and techniques, that our progress would lie. He even pleaded for “settlement in India by Europeans” and recommended that “educated men of character and capital should now be permitted and encouraged to settle in India.” The qualifications are masterly: not any Englishmen, but educated Englishmen of character and capital! The plight of the Indian widows, the darkness of superstition, the miasma of ignorance, the general wardness of the country, all stirred him to action: and writing and speaking–whether in Bengali or in English–was to him a form of action. By 1823 he had fully matured, sharpened his dialectical instruments, tested his friends, and re-thought his ends and means. Some disillusion he had no doubt experienced during his ‘experiments with truth’ (in the Gandhian phrase), but it had also given a new dimension to his experience, and a mellowness to his intelligence. Being a staunch advocate of English education, he asked Lord Amherst to consider the India of his day as being similar to the Europe before the time of Lord Bacon, and begged that the funds set apart for education might be usefully spent “by employing a few gentlemen of talent and learning educated in Europe and providing a college furnished with the necessary books, instruments and other apparatus”. Again, the qualifications are masterly: there is the emphasis on the right teaching personnel, on books, on instruments “and other apparatus”. If, twelve years later, in 1835, Lord William Bentinck resolved to employ the funds available for education on English education alone, the credit goes both to Rammohun Roy’s vision and persistence and Macaulay’s emphasis and determination. For the rest, Rammohun was an intensely religious man, and he felt that quintessential Hinduism was of a piece with quintessential Christianity or Islam. He looked under the bewildering edifices of dogma, ritual, and philosophical dialectics, and sought the foundations of the great faiths, which seemed to him identical, and on these he wished to raise his Brahma Samaj, rather as Akbar had done in his day in his own way. As Mahadev Govind Ranade has pointed out, Rammohun “aspired only to establish harmony between men’s accepted faith and their practical observances by a strict monolatrous worship of the One Supreme Soul, a worship of the heart and not of the hands, a sacrifice of self and not of the possessions of the self”. Humanity was no mass that he viewed in the abstract, but a collection of individuals, each of whom mattered as a unique piece of trembling humanity. Hence the war he waged against the monstrous custom of sati, and hence too his anxious regard for the rights of women and the rights of the depressed of all kinds. By precept, and by example, he advanced the causes he held dear all along the front, and in him the renaissance in India found its first prophet, the first of our latter-day Mahapurushas.

Rammohun’s work was continued by Prince Dwaraknath Tagore and his son Maharshi Debendranath Tagore. Dwaraknath, the poet’s grandfather, was an intrepid and royal figure. Max Muller tells us that Dwaraknath, when he visited Paris in 1844, gave a grand party and “placed a shawl on the shoulders of each lady as she left the room”; and, while in England, he erected, a tomb over the ashes of Rammohun Roy at Bristol where he had died in 1833. Debendranath was an austerer figure, and he found that the enthusiasm for English and Western culture had gone to the heads of many young men, the “Derozio men” as they were called in Bengal, who were at once violently pro-British and no less violently anti-Indian. They thought, in Surendranath Bannerjee’s words, that “everything English was good–even the drinking of brandy was a virtue; everything not English was to be viewed with suspicion”. Debendranath wished to stem the tide, and went from house to house, from morning till evening, entreating Hindu parents not to send their children to missionary schools but only to native schools. Presently, when in 1857 he met Keshub Chandra Sen, the Brahma Samaj became a power once again. But Keshub found himself more and more attracted to Christ and Christ’s Gospel, though he always tried to give it a Hindu colouring, and this in time brought about a split in the Samaj, Keshub organising his own Church in 1866 and going his own way. Keshub too paid a visit to England, and made a great impression upon people by the eloquence of his preaching. Max Muller found him “perfectly tranquil even when most in earnest”, and others have classed him, as an orator, with Gladstone and Gambetta. Meantime, Debendranath kept the Brahma Samaj going on conservative lines, with Anand Mohan Bose and Akshaya Kumar Datta as his principal lieutenants. In later times, Rabindranath himself tried to close the ranks between the two wings of the Samaj, but without much success. Judged by mere numbers, neither the original Brahma Samaj nor either of its sub-sects had what may be called an impressive following, but the quality of the leadership they gave to Bengal and to India was most distinguished in many walks of life.

Not Bengal only, but other regions in India also were participating in this ferment, this careering towards new horizons. In the Punjab, Dayananda Sarasvati founded the Arya Samaj. While the leaders of the Brahma Samaj had tried in their different ways to effect a marriage of India and the West, to build a bridge between Hindu spirituality and Western thought, Dayanand wanted only a return to Vedic simplicity, clarity and burning purity, and pleaded for a determined elimination of the accumulated accretions of the ages. Stuti(praise), prarthana(prayer), and upasana (community) were to be the means of realization, while even the non-Hindu was to be proselytised, if he desired, through suddhi(purification), sangathan(union) and vidya(education). In Bombay, on the other hand, religious reform took the shape of the Prarthana Samaj, less eclectic than the Brahma Samaj, and less militant than the Arya Samaj. The leading spirits of the movement were Ranade and Telang, and they were guided as much by the prophets and saints of Maharashtra in their religious life as by the speeches of Gladstone, Cobden, Bright, Clarkson and Wilberforce in their political and social thought. In Madras, while the new education was taking rapid strides, and a generation of eminent lawyers, jurists, and administrators was coming up, the shifting of the Theosophical Society to Adyar in 1878 had something of a national significance. If the Brahma Samaj was an Indian attempt to link the indigenous and Western springs of spirituality, the Theosophical Society was a western attempt to drink deep in the springs of Eastern mystical thought.

But none of these movements–neither the Brahma Samaj nor the Theosophical Society, neither the Arya Samaj nor the Prarthan Samaj, neither the literary renaissance under the inspired leadership of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee nor the movement for social reform initiated by intellectual gladiators like Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar–was a really effective answer to the ‘challenge’ from the West. It was now that Ramakrishna Paramahamsa occurred in Bengal, and people saw in this “self-illumined ecstatic and mystic, without a single trace or touch of the alien thought or education upon him,” a true embodiment of human unity through god-realisation. When Ramakrishna pass away in 1886, his chief disciple, Swami Vivekananda, established the Ramakrishna Mission, and in other ways also played an intrepid St. Paul to the Paramahamsa. The obscured soul of India had come out at last in a blaze of glory, and there was no danger now that Indians would surrender wholly to the values of the West. We had still to learn many things from the West–science, technology, organisation, the critical temper, democracy–but all had to be built on the soul’s purity and strength. Ramakrishna sent rain to our roots, and created conditions for growth in terms of our own svabhavaand svadharma. The impulse from the West was not to be withstood. As Gokhale remarked, “We could not remain outside this influence even if we would. We would not so remain if we could.” While purposively responding to the influence, it was also necessary that we should not become rootless creatures. Sri Ramakrishna saved us from that fate.

Such, in broad outline, was the course of the Indian renaissance in the 19th century: Rabindranath was born on 6 May 1861, in Bengal, in the Tagore family. In other words, he was by his very birth caught in the mid-current of the renaissance. The youngest of the seven sons of Maharshi Debendranath, affluence and aristocratic culture surrounded him, and as a boy he grew up keenly alive and awake to the world of man and nature around him. He had no regular schooling, nor did he go through the usual academic grind. He had, however, profound regard for some of the Jesuit Fathers of St. Xavier’s, Calcutta. Rabindranath’s forerunners in literature–Madhusudan Dutt, Iswar Chandra and Bankim–had given Bengali poetry, prose and fiction a great start among the modern Indian languages. It was an atmosphere of expectancy, and Rabindranath eagerly breathed this air of infinite possibility. At 15 or earlier he had begun lisping in numbers, and by 1875 his first efforts in prose and verse had begun to appear in print. He was drawn to the Bengali Vaishnava singers, and indeed to Indian devotional poetry in general. A visit to England followed. The English romantics–Keats, Shelley and Woidsworth–and the great Victorians–Tennyson and Browning–exercised a potent influence on him. He was absorbed in Shakespeare. He read Sir Thomas Browne. Tagore was not a systematic or voracious reader, but, like Shakespeare, although he read at random, he turned to capital use what had come his way. He wrote lyrics with astonishing facility, and his fecundity was amazing. He had written 7000 lines of verse before he was eighteen, and the pace was maintained for the greater part of his life, and, when he died on 7 August 1941, he left behind him about 300,000 lines of verse, probably a world record!

It was in 1883 that Tagore wrote his first play, later translated into English as Sanyasi. Henceforth, poems and plays, stories, novels, and essays flowed unceasingly from his pen. For a time, during the ‘Partition of Bengal’ agitation, Tagore was involved in politics, but then he was too much of an individualist–too much of a humanist too–to be a demagogue and to court the glare of political opinion and action. While the nationalists were angry because he was not nationalist enough, Government was secretly suspicious of his moves and aims. He was ill at ease, he often retired to the peace of Shantiniketan and lost himself in either the frenzy of literary creation or the tasks of creative education.

When Rabindranath was fifty, a commemoration meeting was held in Calcutta in January 1912, and it was clear that the Bengali race as a whole had risen to do homage to their great poet. It was verily an overwhelming experience to him, and the function almost left him prostrate for a time. As an escape from this exhaustion, Tagore started translating into English some of his own Bengali lyrics. Presently, while on his way to England, he returned to the translations again and again, and when he landed in London he had quite a little collection on hand. This bunch of prose renderings soon came to the knowledge of Rothenstein, the painter and later of W. B. Yeats, May Sinclair, C. F. Andrews, Henry Nevinson, and others. Their enthusiasm facilitated the publication of Gitanjaliwith Yeats’s celebrated Introduction in the course of which he said–

“I have carried the manuscript of these translations with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger should see how much it moved me. These lyrics...display in their thought a world I have dreamt of all my life long….As the generations pass, travellers will hum them on the railway and men rowing upon rivers. Lovers, while they await one another, shall find, in murmuring them, this love of God a magic gulf wherein their own bitter passion may bathe and renew its youth...”

Tagore returned to Shantiniketan, and there, in November 1913, he heard the news of the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to him, Henceforth, he was not merely the poet of Bengal, but of all India.

The phenomenal success of Gitanjali ensured the publication of other volumes of translations also in quick succession, though a collected edition of his poems and plays appeared only in 1936. In the meantime, he had founded the Viwwabharati University at Shantiniketan in 1920. To collect funds for it, he toured incessantly, and became a sort of unofficial ambassador, visiting the countries of the East and West, and raising India’s prestige everywhere. While not entangling himself in politics, he maintained friendly relations with Gandhiji and Jawaharlal Nehru. As the years passed, he became more and more a legendary figure; in his flowing beard and immaculate white robes, he looked rather like a Rishi of Upanishadic times. He had a certain spiritual affinity with Sri Aurobindo, and he lavished much love on Subhas Bose. While standing aloof and detached, Tagore nevertheless kept close to the nation’s heart. And when he died, it was as though an age had come to an end.

Tagore declined to subscribe to the facile heresy that the East and the West were irreconcilable opposites. He would neither countenance a brazen mimicry of the West nor a blind revival of India’s past. New life could emerge only through a creative fusion of the old and the new, the living past and the puissant present. Tagore’s father wrote in 1884 to Max Muller:

“There are branches of knowledge and art in which the is deficient, and which she must learn from foreign sources. But there are other things, all her own, and even your enlightened countrymen may turn with pleasure and profit to a leaf or two out of the books of the East to learn something new, to get glimpse of vistas of thought with which they are not familiar.”

Like his father, Tagore too felt that the West and the East had much to teach each other. Human values were essentially the same in West and the East, and our aim should be to promote, more and more mutual understanding, and so to end, once and for all, the seeming dichotomy.

In politics, again, Tagore held a middle course. During the opening years of the present century, the air was rent by conflicting cries. The old Congress, wedded to Moderatism, recoiled from the new Extremism, the extreme nationalism, the cult of the bomb, the movement of boycott, the burning of foreign cloth. Tagore’s patriotism was the patriotism of a humanist and a poet, not that of a fanatic nationalist. Humanist values were more to him than power values, the ‘spirit of man’ more than the power and the glory of the nation. He was suspicious of violent political action, and of the passions unleashed by it, and there is a prophetic quality in his poem, The Child, inspired by Gandhi’s march to Dandi to launch Salt Satyagraha. Tagore felt, again and again, that, if we did not hold human values as paramount, we would be surely degrading and ultimately destroying ourselves.

In economics, too, Tagore differed both from the ‘Charkha School’ and the impatient modernistic school: differed, that is to say, from Gandhiji as well as Jawaharlal. Tagore pleaded, not for a bare life, nor for a hectic luxurious life, but for a beautiful and full life. He did not share Gandhi’s belief that the Charkha would prove an easy solvent to our economic ills, and he also instinctively shrank from machinery and gigantism. He saw man being more and more pitted against the machine, humanity against ruthless power; and in his great play, Mukta Dhara, he articulated, in Mr. Satyavrata Mukerjee’s words, an “eloquent protest against the onslaught of machinery on the ancient ramparts of man’s individual freedom.” Human values must e paramount; else we shall maim and destroy ourselves.
Tagore’s life-long interest in education flowed mainly from his keen dissatisfaction with the lifeless commercialised education of our time, and he strove to make Shantiniketan and Sriniketan the focal points of a new experiment in living, an integral experience in creative education. Shantiniketan as a home for retirement and meditation, as an Ashram for cultural and spiritual realisation, owed its origin to Tagore’s father, the Maharshi. But the poet turned Shantiniketan the near-by Sriniketan into educational centres of unique potency. The cultures of the East were to be brought together, and a living relationship was to be attempted between the West and the East. In other words, the East was first to find its own soul, and then help the world to transmute the seeming West-East dichotomy into transcendent unity, and so establish a broad base for human understading and action. Further, the cultural life was to be related to the life of the community, and education was to include vocational training as well. Above all, harmony was to be the keynote of all the activities in Shantiniketan and Sriniketan. When the school became a university in 1920, an international team of dedicated scholars and artists began the valiant attempt to enact the drama of human unity and humane understanding. Almost echoing his own father’s words, Rabindranath once declared:

“We must recognise that it is providential that the West has come to India, and yet some one must show the East to the West, and convince the West that the East has her contribution to make to the history of civilisation. India is no beggar to the West. And yet, even though the West may think she is, I am not for thrusting off Western civilisation and becoming segregated in our independence. Let us have a deep association.”

Visvabharati was to be the living symbol of that deep association. Writing of it, Dr. C. Reddy once aptly exclaimed: “What perfect insight does it not show into the nature of university education, which should be research and creation and the development of personality, and not, as the government universities are, distributing channels for the scanty, muddy, slow, belated flow of Western knowledge and discoveries!”

Not the least of the striking featurcs of the university that grew under Tagore’s fostering care at Shantiniketan was the integral view of education that made art, literature, philosophy, religion, intellectual discipline, vocational guidance and intimacy with Nature independent, each receiving from, yet enriching, the others, and all contributing to the full and harmonious efflorescence of the human personality. Art and literature were not ‘extras’ but had a vital role to play in human life. And life without religion–in its quintessential nectarean sense–was life without meaning, and was savourless like a dish without salt. And so art and literature, at their most profound moments, became God-conscious, became ‘religious’ in fact. When the human mind tried to grapple with these relations, the filiations between life and art and literature and religion, there resulted the systems of aesthetics, poetics, ethics and philosophy. But man cannot live–cannot live long or live happily–without religion, without something of a God consciousness.

In a lecture delivered in America, Tagore boldly declared:

“In India, the greater part of our literature is religious because God with us is not a distant God; he belongs to our homes as well as to our temples...He is the chief guest whom we honour. In seasons of flowers and fruits, in the coming of the rain, in the fulness of the autumn, we see the hem of His mantle and hear His footsteps. We worship Him in all the true objects of our worship, and love Him wherever our love is true. In the woman who is good we feel Him, in the man who is true we know Him, in our children He is born again and again, the Eternal Child. Therefore, religious songs are our love songs, and our domestic occurrences, such as the birth of a son, or the coming of a daughter from her husband’s house to her parents and her departure again, are woven in our literature as a drama whose counterpart is the divine.”

God is with us, all of us, all the time, not least when most we seem to feel His absence or failure; and we serve Him, we cannot choose but serve Him, we make an offering to Him of our successes and failures, the good in us and even the evil in us; and only that labour is not in vain that is undertaken as an offering to the Divine. And when we can labour no more, and offer to Him the fruits of our labour no more, we know that we must cease to be, and are content that it should be so. God is indeed within, He is the Charioteer who is guiding the human car adroitly through the embattled ways of the world. Tagore called Him his Jivan Devata, “the Lord of my life”, and apostrophised Him thus:

Thou, who art the innermost spring or my being,
art thou pleased,
Lord of my Life?
For I gave to thee my cup
filled with all the pain and delight
that the crushed grapes of my heart surrendered.
I wove with the rhythms of colours and songs the cover for thy bed,
and with the molten gold of my desires
I fashioned playthings for thy passing hours...
But have my days come to their end at last,
Lord of my Life,
while my arms round thee grow limp,
my kisses losing their truth?
Then break up the meeting of this languid day.
Renew the old in me in fresh forms of delight;
and let the wedding come once again
in a ceremony of life.

Always the urge is from the human to the divine, to seize life without fear, and to temper it and transform it, to cross the gulf that seems to separate man from God. Tagore used a familiar but wonderfully appropriate simile to describe this spiritual adventure of discovery and realisalion. It comes at the end of the lecture on ‘Man’ that he gave in the Andhra University:

“The student, after much effort and time, first learns the alphabet, then the spelling, then the grammar; he wastes paper and ink scribbling incomplete and meaningless sentences, he uses and discards much acquisition of materials; at last when as poet he is able to write his first utterance, that very moment, in that composition, all his inexpressible accumulations of words first find their glimmer of a significance. In the great evolution of the Universe we have found its first significance in a cell of life, then in an animal, then in man. From the outer universe gradually we come to the inner realm and one by one the gates of freedom are unbarred. When the screen is lifted on the appearance of Man on earth, we realise the great and mysterious truth of relatedness, of the supreme unity of all that is….We can only pray, let sorrow come if it has to come, let there be death, let there be loss, but let man declare across all space and time ‘I am He’.”

It is the language of the Vedic Rishis, of the Upanishadic seers. And it sums up, in truly memorable accents, Tagore’s ‘Religion of Man’, and projects before us his splendorous vision of the great destiny of man.

Tagore holds a central place in the Indian renaissance. He joined it in its mid-career, re-defined its aims, and consolidated its foundations. At a time when the East and West, the Old and New, the claims of revelation-grounded religion and science-grounded reason the pull of romantic or Dionysian adventure and exuberance and the attraction of classical or Apollonian grace and poise,–when these seemed to wrangle, taking extreme positions. Tagore came as a harmoniser, and strove to build a durable bridge of understanding between man and nature, man and machine, and man and god. Tagore not only spanned the ages of Indian history with his harmonies, he also tried to annul the yawning divide of culture, the antinomy between what Sir Charles Snow has called the two cultures, the humanistic wisdom and the scientific knowledge. The reconciliation, the fusion and the transcendence are to be attempted and realised, not in a committee room or a psychological laboratory, but rather in the heart and soul of man. Tagore had his trials, no doubt: his moments of uncertainty and exasperation. He was no monster of perfection, and he could not always write at the top of his form. But take him all in all, he was a Titan force in life and letters, and his example gave us Indians, gave all Asians in fact, self-respect and self-confidence, and showed the way to self-mastery and self-realisation. Although no ascetic preaching a flight from life, he cared not to think only of comfort, and he had no truck with the weights and measures of the market-place. He returned his knighthood when he felt that it but irked and burned him, he did not hesitate to differ openly from Gandhiji when be launched his non-co-operation movement, or from the Japanese poet, Yone Noguchi, when Japan entered upon a career of blazen aggression. While he was thus not afraid of contention, while he did not refrain from any necessary expression of dissidence, his preference nevertheless was for a life of culture and contemplation, for the creative tasks of peace and harmony. He tirelessly pursued the ideal of Beauty, and Beauty was to him also Love, Truth, Goodness and Power. In a poem like his Urvashi–surely, one of the supremely beautiful poems in world literature–we are vouchsafed the very vision of the Nymph, we see Urvashi bursting into view, just as Aphrodite rose from the foam, swaying and mastering and melting the beholders. In poem or play, or story or novel, in reminiscence or exegesis, or exhortation or prophecy, Tagore is essentially an integrated force, of a piece always, whether as a poet or as a prophet, and the total impact of his many-sided personality is exciting as well as enduring. He is our Leonardo da Vinci, without a doubt. He is more. He is Kavi, Karma-yogi, Bhakta and the great Acharya. We salute him, and cherish his memory–always.

¹ Lecture delivered in the Andhra University on 4 November 1959: the first of four lectures organised by the English Association in connection with the forthcoming Tagore Centenary Celebrations.