Debt to be paid to Tagore
Speaking generally
By Chanchal Sarkar

ANOTHER birthday of Rabindranath Tagore came and went. By the Western calendar he was born on May 6. The Bengali calendar on that day stood at 25th Baisakh which, of course, falls on different days of the Western calendar in different years.

We are very good at forgetting our great or remembering them in a ritualistic manner with insincere rhetoric spouted by people with very little knowledge. Only Tagore doesn’t get forgotten. Certainly not in Bengal because the genius of that one man changed the language and what it could express. His versatility was staggering: Poems, novels, short stories, essays, dance-dramas, songs, satire, plays and travel books. His writing began in earnest around 1880 and lasted till 1941 and still people go back to read, act, sing and recite him.

Of course there are prissy newspaper articles by smart-alec journalists, based on "opinion surveys" that they have undertaken, saying that the young don’t read Tagore any more. This is just rubbish. The young don’t touch Shakespeare would be the parallel conclusion. That Greta Garbo is not worth watching is another. There are fine post-Tagore poets and novelists but they don’t ever start their journey without first expressing their debt to Tagore. Bernard Shaw once said, "Shakespeare was a greater man than I am but I am standing on his shoulders", that’s the kind of tribute the post-Tagoreans pay.

The things that Tagore spoke about 60 or 70 years ago are only being talked of now — the relationship between Asian countries like Japan, China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India drawing upon the art and culture of Asia and also Europe. In Asia he also included Persia. He spoke of a new concept of education of which Visva Bharati is a very pale shadow. He thought that Indians should not go to the West with an intellectual begging-bowl but be confident of their own creativity and have something to give the West, not just imitate and take.

His industriousness was fabulous. Weather did not worry him in the dry summer heat of Santiniketan and every day he wrote for some hours. Apart from his literary work his letters are prodigious in number and most of them have something thoughtful and original in them. His handwriting in Bengali was truly beautiful.

His travel schedule, too, was remarkable. He was not like the jetsetters of today whose visit could be for a few hours and at the most two or three days. Tagore travelled by air a few times in the thirties but he mainly went by ship and in a country he liked to spend near about a month to absorb as much as he could, to have time to meet the people worth meeting. And so he went to China, Japan, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Burma, Germany, Britain, Italy, Hungary, France, Switzerland, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Argentina, United States, Canada, and may be some other countries that I can’t remember. From all of them he wrote poems and letters. From Russia he wrote a remarkable set of letters which were published as Letters from Russia. All these and many others need to be read and re-read.

Gift of language

Considering Tagore’s gift to the Bengali language, what is happening to that language in Delhi is surprising. Many Bengali families in the capital today avoid Bengali altogether and the children neither learn nor speak it. Some do speak Bengali, but of a very inferior kind. Quite a lot of colleges in Delhi used to teach Bengali as a subject. As the teachers are retiring, the posts are being abolished.

Vivekananda Vihar in South Delhi has attempted teaching Bengali and also Rabindra Sangeet and dancing. There are no takers. Professor Jyotish Ghosh of Calcutta had devised a new method of teaching Bengali to non-Bengalis and there used to be one centre in Delhi. Even that is closed down. When Bengali-speaking Bangladesh and India are added together they form the single largest group. But it needs some vision to ride the horse of language to victory.

A tough time for the common man

Firmly do I believe that if a country cannot deliver postal letters in time, if its roads are so potholed that vehicles can hardly negotiate them, if its trains are unsafe, with marauders and terrorists, if its telephone subscribers often have to wait months before they get service and electricity bills are frequently wrong then that country will never make it to being a reliable and classy nation. What better condemnation do you need for a country that cannot provide water to its citizens? In Delhi the Municipal Corporation’s underdigs whisper and say that this year’s supply of water from the corporation will be one-fifth the last year’s. Just think of it.

Of course, the whole thing is laced with bribery as well. Without money the telephone linesmen don’t move. Once an Oxfam representative told me that his local postman held back his letters for several months because he wasn’t paid. When paid all the letters were brought out. We have experience that if once a wrong electricity bill is sent — say for an excessive amount — getting it corrected is quite impossible even if one spends months following it up. Bribery is the only rectifier. When water is short, bribery brings in a tanker. When a country’s administration treats its citizens with contempt like that and is unable to run the public utility system then that country and its people are in for a tough time except for the very rich who can afford to stuff pockets with banknotes.