The significant anniversary of a dead writer often reveals as much about current tastes and fashions of critics and audiences as about the artist. So it is with Rabindranath Tagore.
These are the last days of the 150th birth anniversary of one of the most remarkable poets and thinkers produced by India, or indeed the world. Even that grand description does not do him justice. He was also a composer who provided the national anthem for not one but two countries (India and Bangladesh), the first Asian to win the Nobel prize for literature and the founder of a school and a university, both of which are still going, in Santiniketan, West Bengal. As the title of one excellent biography puts it, he was a myriad-minded man – the kind of figure a nation probably gets only once in its life (see also Goethe and Tolstoy). Yet the scant press coverage accorded to him this past year has, ironically, focused on why he is so neglected. "Who reads Rabindranath Tagore now?" sniffed the Times Literary Supplement last year.
An interesting question, but one that betrays its author's parochialism. Because the poet isn't ignored in his native Bengal, where middle-class family homes routinely contain some Tagoreana, whether a portrait, one of his own paintings, or CDs of Rabindrasangeet (his songs form a genre of their own). Publishers such as Harvard and Hesperus have brought out valuable editions of his work. And while the British literary calendar has not been bursting with Tagore celebrations, his anniversary has prompted festivals, concerts, revivals of his plays and, at Cumberland Lodge this Wednesday, a conference on his educational thought. Tagore may no longer have the (slightly suspect) popularity he gained among the likes of WB Yeats and Ezra Pound before the first world war, but he retains his devotees.
And rightly so. Thanks to translators such as William Radice and Ketaki Kushari Dyson, English readers can get a clearer sense of the pleasures in his work. With some historical imagination, they can also appreciate its achievement. Tagore was an Indian subject of a British monarch, adding to a literature dominated by Hindu mythologies. Yet rather than struggle within these personal and artistic constraints, he broke free of them. His work didn't reel off the deities, but revelled in human life and nature. Nor did his colonial status deter him from both criticising the British and urging Indians to learn from the west.
His life is thus an object lesson in how an artist, or anyone, can reimagine the possibilities handed down to them. Tagore has been logged in British cultural memory as a mystic, but he was too energetic, inventive, provocative for that. His 150th anniversary is as good a time as any for readers to rediscover just how various and interesting a man Tagore was.
