Calcutta (32 page)

The Tagores were vigorous Hindus with a reforming streak in everything they touched. Dwarkanath worked with Rammohan Roy for free trade and a free press, went to England, and returned with the Member of Parliament George Thompson to campaign for the spread of education in Bengal and more opportunities for Indians in Government service. Debendranath was almost a founding member of the reformist Hindu Brahmo Samaj and once despatched four Brahmins to Benares to inquire whether the Vedas were infallible. At the same time he spent a great deal of energy in fighting the missionary instincts of Christianity, starting the Hindu Charitable Institution, a free school for middle-class Hindu boys who would there be shielded from the influence of Serampore and its brothers in Christ. The Tagores wanted to see a reformed Hinduism, not one vitiated by outsiders or by apostates; Prassanakumar Tagore, lawyer and founding Fellow of Calcutta University, was one of the Hindu College directors who sacked young DeRozio from its teaching staff for his blasphemous ways; and Debendranath was so strict in his observances that he once forbade his cousin Jnanendramohan to address the Brahmo Samaj in English, just as he once refused to accept a letter from a son-in-law because it had been written in the same language. The movement of the Bengali bhadralok from ingratiation and willing acceptance of the British to
suspicion
and then hostility is clearly outlined in the history of the Tagores who, indeed, were generally to be found setting the bhadralok pace. In 1830 Prassanakumar was publicly
forecasting
a day fairly soon when distinctions between conquerors and
conquered would disappear and Indians would be accepted as fellow subjects of the Crown. By 1867 Debendranath had started the Hindu Mela to encourage Bengali pride, fellow to the recently formed Society for the Promotion of National Feeling Among the Educated Natives of Bengal, both of which were anticipating the boycottery of the swadeshi movement by two or three decades.

With their wealth, their reforming zeal and their nationalism, the Tagores were also preposterously, accomplished as well as interested. Dwarkanath and Prassanakumar were among the first Indians to be admitted to the erudite Asiatic Society in 1829, nearly half a century after it was opened. Debendranath
composed
a Sanskrit grammar. His eldest son Dwijendranath was a mathematician, a philosopher, a writer in prose and poetry and a very decent flautist; he also invented Bengali shorthand. Dwijendranath’s nephew Balendranath was the first recognized critic of Bengali art, but died young before he could fulfil even greater promise. This century has seen a Tagore painter, a Tagore Professor of Fine Arts at the university and a Tagore musicologist. All this, and Rabindranath Tagore as well.

When this greatest of the Tagores was born in 1861,
Debendranath
had already produced seven sons and the polymathic Dwijendranath was twenty-one years old. Within a dozen years the new boy was getting into the family stride for by then, it is said, he had translated the first scene from
Macbeth
for a teacher at the missionary St Xavier’s college he was attending. Given Debrendranath’s suspicion of proselytisers it is surprising that Tagore was ever allowed near these Jesuits, but he was soon
withdrawn
and placed in the hands of his brothers in that rigorous Bengali household up the Chitpore Road, where Western
manners
and speech were totally taboo. From them he learned most things, from music to wrestling, and started composing early in his teens; and he curiously imitated Chatterton by publishing a series of poems not under his own name, but as the Padavali of Bhanu Singha – a deception that was never recognized until Tagore himself acknowledged it much later in life. When he was seventeen he sailed for England with his second brother
Satyendranath
(the Tagore who broke the ICS examination barrier) and for the next eighteen months he attended lectures in English
literature at London University, wrote a sentimental verse drama called ‘The Broken Heart’, and made friends with many English. When he got home he plunged into his literary profession by
demolishing
poor Michael Madhusudan Datta’s major work in a critical essay; and then went on to write a series of considerable poems himself that marked him, among cultured Bengalis, as someone to watch.

He was in his early thirties when his father switched him onto another tack of the Tagores, by sending him to look after their estates at Silaida, many miles from Calcutta, near the River Padma; and there, when he wasn’t settling tenant disputes and boating round the property, Tagore was editing a literary journal in an old indigo planter’s hut. By the turn of the century, having added novels and plays to his music and his verse, being already loaded with honour and reputation in Bengal (though India as a whole waited for the world’s acclaim before adding its own), he retreated to another family home in the country, which his father had built for religious meditation as much as anything.

Rabindranath was always torn between town and country; when he had established his own home, much less restrictive than his father’s, he once wrote ‘When in the village I become an Indian. The moment I go to Calcutta I become a European. Who knows which is my truer self?’ At Santiniketan he now built a school which was to evolve into a university, as a protest against an education system which he feared and despised as yet another industrial manufacture alien to the Indian tradition and destructive of the human spirit; his students here were taught the brotherhood of man in the open air. And in the next few years he composed the series of songs published as the collection
Gitanjali
.

The Tagore political strain reclaimed him now. There had been a time in adolescence when he and his brother
Jyotirindranath
had belonged to a secret society vowed to destroy India’s enemies by force, when sophisticated young Bengalis were full of Mazzini and talk of emulating the Italian Carbonari. But now politics were mature and very serious indeed; Lord Curzon was upon the land. Tagore became the high-priest of swadeshi, battling with the British in print and on platforms,
ceremoniously 
tying the coloured rakhi cord round the wrists of all good men and true to emphasize their brotherhood, helping to run the shops that might break the thraldom of Manchester and Dundee. At the Calcutta Congress of 1911 (which Ramsay MacDonald would have presided over had his wife not just died) the
delegates
sang Tagore’s specially-composed anthem ‘Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka’ for the first time, as all Indians were to sing it on national occasions from 1947 onwards. This was, for him, a climactic moment in politics. By 1921 he had started to distrust, with bhadralok aloofness, Gandhi’s cotton-spinning culture, and made a series of speeches in the city attacking the Mahatma’s anti-intellectualism and narrowness of view. He had already told his good friend, the missionary C. F. Andrews, that ‘Our present struggle to alienate our heart and mind from the West is an attempt at spiritual suicide’, and he was not to take part in
political
life again, though he was writing with political awareness until he died in 1941.

Maybe the Nobel prize in 1913 had given Tagore pause to think. It could never have bought him, but it took him to Europe again to mix with a range of thinkers that he could not have encountered in person before. The King of England was to give him a knighthood and Calcutta University was to make him a doctor of literature, but the Nobel committee pushed him into the arms of Croce and Gide, Schweitzer and Russell and many minds like them. In spite of the apparently windy mysticism of the
Gitanjali
(for Tagore, it is said, comes very badly out of
translation
, and this work, in any case, was intended to be heard with music that few Westerners have ever appreciated) W. B. Yeats was quite overcome with emotion when he read the verses in front of their author at a gathering in Hampstead, and even Ezra Pound, who was also present, said he felt a barbarian
before
them. Tagore was embraced on all sides as some kind of Messiah from the East and, indeed, he somewhat looked the part for he was deeply bearded and he wore a form of long cassock when abroad; though at a dinner one night George Bernard Shaw, who did not venerate other people easily, inquired of his immediate neighbour whether this guest of honour was old
Bluebeard
, and wondered how many wives he had. When the
triumphal
tour was finished Tagore came home to make, a little later, the grandest gesture any man could manage. He returned his knighthood to the King Emperor’s Viceroy with a
contemptuous
letter explaining that he could not tolerate such a bauble from a people who were now clamouring with sympathy and subscribing
£
26,000 for their poor General Dyer, who had just been removed from his command after massacring 379 Indians at the Jallianwalla Bagh in Amritsar. Then this most
distinguished
of all the Tagores decided, in his sixties, that he must learn the principles of painting; and proceeded over the next twenty years to produce some of the most celebrated art in modern India, vividly colourful compositions with a touch of Paul Klee about them. At bottom he remained what he had always been, what was equally a caste mark of the bhadralok as a whole, what is perhaps at the heart of a particularly Bengali dilemma. He was a man caught at a cultural crossroads,
forswearing
one minute what he took to be destructive elements from the West, and at the next, desperately afraid of alienation from them.

He is still a great weight in Calcutta. The Rabindra Bharati University there is dedicated entirely to expounding his
philosophy
of gentle humanism. Every night, some hall in the city is packed with middle-class people to whom his music means as much as Mozart’s means to the citizens of Salzburg. Every day, the pilgrims dawdle round the rambling red brick house of Jorasanko, high up the Chitpore Road, to marvel at those
late-flowering
paintings, to peer at samples of the elongated English handwriting, to see one photograph after another of Tagore with Einstein, Tagore with Romain Rolland, Tagore with Gandhiji, Tagore with almost everyone who counted for anything in the universal world of culture in the first few decades of the
twentieth
century. This is part of their heritage and they cannot, will not, forget it. As for the Tagore heritage at large, there is plenty of that in Calcutta as well. There is a Tagore villa up the river, near the Dakhineswar temple, a cross between the Marble Palace and the Tollygunge Club, whose owner some time ago was reported to be thinking of filling the large ornamental pool with Hooghly mud so that he could start farming lobsters. Another Tagore residence has now left the family but it remains as one of
their most priceless monuments, a full-blooded piece of Scottish Baronial complete with rounded turrets and castellated
battlements
, built by Jatindsamohan Tagore in 1896, just after he had been knighted and had decided to exercise his ennobled right to dwell in his own castle. There is a Tagore Chemical Works up at Baranagar to maintain the family remnant in funds. There are twenty-five Tagores listed in the telephone book. And, just to show that the clan can keep pace with Calcutta wherever she may go, there is a Tagore commanding a Communist party which may only have a membership of one; and a Tagore who not long ago contributed to the Sex Special of a local film
magazine
(‘Boldest Attempt on the Subject Ever Made in India’). She seems the first female Tagore to have been more than an
appendage
to a husband.

The most inexplicable thing about the people who have
produced
the Tagores and so many other outstanding figures in modern Indian history, is how on earth they could also have been so outsmarted and outmanoeuvred so many times by so many other people until they can, with some justification, claim that they have been almost dispossessed in their own chief city. For time and again outsiders have remarked on the brightness of the Bengali; they have discovered that it can be highly unpleasant to get in the way of his national and regional aspirations. The Bengali is by no means lacking in self-confidence, he upholds a perfectly handsome image of himself. Twice within the past few years, social scientists have set out to discover just what the
cosmopolitan
peoples of Calcutta think of each other and a synopsis of the two samples has come to some fascinating conclusions. The Bengali, it seems, regards the Bihari above all else as shabby. He looks down on the Assamese as provincial, the Oriya as cowardly and backward, and the Muslim (for this is exclusively Hindu sampling) as cruel and quarrelsome. The Marwari is business minded, selfish, opportunist, greedy and narrowminded in that order. The Nepali comes out very well as courageous and dutiful and the South Indian is presentably gentle and progressive. The Bengali sees himself more than anything as a gentle fellow but after that he is a literary chap, he is hospitable, he is peace-loving and he is patriotic.

Curiously, no one else regards him as any of these things. Canvass all the other sub-species of the race in Calcutta, and you find that they all think of the Bengali first and foremost as a man with an inbred craving for an office job, in administration if possible; after that they see him as cowardly, jealous, selfish and quarrelsome. It is widely rumoured that when a businessman in Bombay, Madras or Delhi is told by his employer that he and his family must spend their next few years at the Calcutta office, there are groans in the household at the news, not merely because Calcutta is physically a trying place to live in. It is mostly because they don’t much want to get mixed up with the cocky Bengali on his home ground. If only they knew the agonies of this stereotype, as he sits among his friends in the Coffee House off Chittaranjan Avenue, with English phrases like ‘political
expediency
’ and ‘revolutionary cadres’ streaming out of his Bengali torrent across the grubby tables and the slopping tea-cups, while his city and its great nobility decays around him. Only just up the road is a passing but symbolic monument to this moment in Calcutta’s history; the house of Keshub Chandra Sen, no less, dilapidated and nearly collapsed, with its frontage raddled by the tattered display of gaudy cinema advertisements.