Rabindranath Tagore – 150th Birth Anniversary
Tagore was concerned with the enlightenment of Bengal whose culture was painfully starting a revival; he was concerned with the national – the wider issue of the independence of India and what role a multicultural India would play in the world. He was also concerned with a universal consciousness, of the relation between the human and the divine, a relationship which concerns all – everywhere.
As he wrote “ I was born in 1861. It was a great period in our history of Bengal. Just about that time the currents of three movements had met in the life of our country.” One current was religious – the Brahmo Samaj – founded by Raja Rammohan Roy (1774-1833) in which his family was active. Brahmo Samaj’s humanistic aim was to reopen the channel of spiritual life which, for Tagore, had been obstructed for many years by the sands and the debris of creeds, caste and external practices. For Tagore, to be human is to try to go beyond oneself, to join with a greater sphere of life in sacrifice, love, and friendship. Tagore wrote “Men must find and feel and represent in all their creative works, man the eternal, the creator…For reality is the truth of man, who belongs to all times. Man is eager that his feeling for what is real to him must never die; it must find an imperishable form.”
Thus Tagore was interested in all the religious currents in Bengal, devotional Hinduism, the popular and mystic currents of Islam as expressed by the Bauls whose poetry he transformed into songs. He was also interested in the Christian currents present in Bengal with the English, especially those Protestant currents which combined social reform with faith. As he wrote concerning the influence of Christianity on Mahatma Gandhi “As before, the genius of India has taken from her aggressors the most spiritually significant principle of their culture and fashioned of it a new message of hope for mankind. There is in Christianity the great doctrine that God became man in order to save humanity by taking the burden of its sin and suffering on Himself. That the starving must be fed, the ragged clad, has been emphasized by Christianity as no other religion has done…And to our great good fortune, Gandhi was able to receive this teaching of Christ in a living way. It was fortunate that he had not to learn of Christianity through professional experts, but should have found in Tolstoy a teacher who realized the value of non-violence through the multifarious experience of his own life struggles. For it was this great gift from Europe that our country had all along been awaiting.”
The second current was literary. It was an effort by Tagore and other poets and writers such as Bankim Chandra Chatterji (1838-1894) to awaken the Bengali language from its stereotyped style and limitations of language. His was an effort to bring the ordinary speech of Bengal into poetic form. He had had intimate contact with village life in Bengal early in his life as his family had estates with many villages. Later in 1922 he created a center for rural development and reform “Sriniketan” along side an innovative school “Santiniketan” started in 1901.