I Won't Let You Go (4 page)

Indian achievements are not an easy subject to introduce to a Western audience. A vague awareness of the Indian subcontinent as the homeland of an ancient civilisation is indeed diffused in the minds of the educated Western public, and a more active interest exists in limited circles, members of which are aware of India as a land of many races and languages, and as the nursery of some of the world’s major religions. But these things are countered by ambivalent images projected by the media and popular
publications
: of a land of contrasts between riches and poverty, of palaces and slums, bazaars and beggars, elephants and rickshaws, holy men and sacred cows, a land whose main claim to importance is that it was the theatre of imperial British activities in the recent past, but which is now an ex-colonial nation struggling hard to “develop” itself, a member of that hapless ‘Third World’, the
performance
of which in any field of human activity is almost never to be taken seriously by the side of the West’s own achievements, especially the achievements of that part of the West which likes to think of itself as ‘the advanced industrial nations’. To an audience bombarded by such images, and possibly further confused by the rhetoric of this or that pundit who from time to time appropriates the sole right to “interpret” India to outsiders, how does one begin to suggest that India may have given the world one of the greatest poets of modern times, that he was, in fact, born in Calcutta, a city whose very name evokes the most negative associations in most Western minds? How does one establish an appropriate
context
in which such a figure may be introduced?

One fruitful approach to the subject is via a route which brings the West itself into the picture, a quick effort of “awareness
raising
”, drawing attention to the nexus that has existed between India and the West in historical times, and to the important role that India has played over the centuries in a number of those developments, economic, social, political, intellectual, and artistic, that the West takes for granted in modern times.

Elements have been contributed by India to the development of European civilisation from the earliest times, through material goods, orally transmitted lore, translated texts, and religious and philosophical ideas brought over by merchants ever since the establishment of contact between Greece and India in the 4th
century
B.C. India very probably contributed to the doctrine of
divine incarnation on which the edifice of Christianity rests. The fables of the
Panchatantra
reached Europe through a chain of translations, reincarnating themselves in many European
languages
, including English, and the famous French versions of La Fontaine. The mathematics of Europe most certainly derived benefit from the decimal system of notation which the Arabs brought to Europe from India. The kitchens of Europe were enriched by pepper, ginger, sugar, and rice – all these words are of Indian origin – and the looms of India satisfied the Roman
aristocracy’s
needs for muslin drapery. Lured by spices, textiles, precious stones, and other luxury items, European traders came to India by the overland route, and the contribution made by this commerce to the flowering of the Italian Renaissance could not have been insignificant. Then it was their anxiety to reach India by sea, avoiding the Middle East, that led not only to the
discovery
of the sea-route to the East via the Cape of Good Hope, but also to the European discovery of the New World. The
manufacture
of cotton fabrics established itself in Britain, first by learning from, then strangling, the equivalent industry in India. Not only did India provide some of the capital that enabled the Industrial Revolution to take off in Britain, but many of the basic patterns of the new British textile industries, from checks and floral prints to the tear-drop or Paisley motif, also came from India. Daily living was spiced up by curries and cleansed by the exotic habit of bathing the whole body and hair. The very word
shampoo
, now current in so many European languages, is of Indian origin…

The scene of many cultural confrontations since the earliest times, India became, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the ground of an East-West encounter on a grand scale,
generating
more than one movement which could be called a renaissance, the ripples of which are still travelling outwards today. The European Enlightenment’s discovery of India’s ancient history, languages, religious traditions, and cultural heritage in general, the discovery that there was such a thing as an Indo-European family of languages, led to the emergence of Europe’s modern Oriental scholarship, the growth of comparative studies in philology, mythology, and religion, changing Europe’s intellectual horizon for all times, directing eyes beyond the Judaeo-Christian
framework
and opening doors to the liberal thinking of modern times. Parallel to that, there was an Indian discovery of Western thought and learning, starting with the response of the Bengali
intelligentsia
to Western education. As a result of these two events
working together, there was a notable intellectual ferment and
cultural
revival in India, beginning in Bengal and spreading to the rest of the subcontinent. Some of the movements and personalities associated with this re-awakening have had world-wide impact. Democratic self-government was supposed by many theorisers to be for white nations only, not for Asiatics who were used to ‘Oriental despotism’; so when the Indian elite claimed it for their country, their daring and creative leap of aspiration became a model for non-white nations. The Indian struggle for
independence
from colonial rule gave the impetus and inspiration to the process of internal and external decolonisation in many other areas of the world. Gandhian influences have worked on prominent activists and movements of our times like Martin Luther King, the peace movement, and the Green movement. Less well-known, outside restricted specialist circles, is the contribution made to twentieth-century revolutionary thinking by that remarkable
personality
, M.N. Roy, who participated in revolutionary movements in India, Mexico, Germany, the USSR and China, founded the Communist Party of Mexico, worked alongside Lenin, and founded the radical humanist movement of India. It is also well worth remembering that during the period of British rule in India
certain
issues of social reform which were major battles in Britain were won in India with less struggle. For instance, the first women to graduate from Calcutta University did so in 1883, just five years after the permission to hold an official degree was given to women by London University, but decades before such
permission
was granted by either Oxford or Cambridge.
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In archaeology, anthropology, geology, geodesy and surveying, zoology, botany, ornithology, and other disciplines, notable advances were made because of the opportunities for work that the Indian subcontinent presented in these areas.

It is against these rich, three-dimensional, historical realities, and not against a ragged, two-dimensional, hastily put together ‘Third World’ backdrop, that we should see the life and work of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), India’s greatest modern poet and the most brilliant creative genius of the Indian Renaissance. His life-span was roughly coeval with that of British imperial rule in India, his birth coming within three years of its formal
commencement
and his death just six years before its dissolution. He was born on 7 May 1861 at the Tagore family home in Jorasanko, Calcutta, into a rich and talented family that had already begun to make its mark on contemporary society. For the elite of undivided Bengal it was an exciting time, despite the British presence, and indeed partly because of the new things that were happening because of that very presence. The East India Company had been in power in Bengal for a hundred years. The British had just defused the challenge to their authority in India posed by the rebellion of 1857, eased the East India Company of its powers, and brought their Indian territories under the direct rule of the British crown. Calcutta was the centre of British power in India and the second most important city, after London, in the British Empire. The Tagores had become active participants in the
intellectual
and artistic reawakening which was rapidly gaining momentum and approaching its high noon.

The house at Jorasanko, Calcutta, where Tagore was born.

The name Tagore is an anglicised version of Thakur, the
t
being hard, cerebral, and aspirated, and is actually a surname that was acquired by the family only accidentally, the real family surname having been Kushari. In the last decade of the seventeenth century, Rabindranath’s ancestor Panchanan Kushari settled in
Gobindapur
, one of the three villages which went into the making of Calcutta, and earned his living by supplying provisions to the
foreign
ships which sailed up the Ganges. Being a brahmin, he was respectfully addressed by the locals as ‘Panchanan Thakur’, Thakur being something like ‘Sir’, and it was this honorific
addition 
to the first name (just like ‘Devi’ for women) which was taken by the foreign merchants to be a surname and which stuck to the family.
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The foundations of the family’s material prosperity were laid in the eighteenth century in the stewardship of European merchants, its rise going hand in hand with the rise of Calcutta as a
commercial
and political centre, the point from which the British were consolidating their power in the subcontinent. It was, as we have just seen, a brahmin family, but from a clan which had, at one stage of its history, in the fifteenth century, been forced to climb down some steps in the ladder of honour.
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This demoted rank gave the Tagores a distance from mainstream brahmin orthodoxy and an inclination to try out new ideas.

The family acquired special prestige under the dynamic
leadership
of Rabindranath’s grandfather, Dwarakanath Tagore (1794-1846), who acquired large landed estates, built up a substantial
business
empire, fraternised with the European community, and was generous in his public charities. A close friend of Rammohan Ray, one of the front-rank thinkers and activists of the Bengal
Renaissance
, Dwarakanath took an active interest in all the progressive causes of his time and was involved in the foundation and
patronage
of some of the major cultural and educational institutions of Calcutta, such as the Hindu College (which later became the Presidency College) and the Medical College. To break down the orthodox Hindu prejudice against the dissection of dead bodies, he would be personally present when medical students did their dissections. He became the first Indian member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which had been founded by the distinguished Orientalist Sir William Jones and which was responsible for the sponsorship of a great deal of scholarship in both the humanities and the sciences. Dwarakanath’s life-style and views were unorthodox enough to alienate his wife, Digambari Devi, who in the end lived apart from him. He defied the ban which the Hindu orthodoxy of the time had imposed on sea-voyages, travelled to Europe twice, met Max Müller in Paris, and Queen Victoria and her court, and actually died in London. His business empire did not survive him, but he left enough landed estates for the
comfortable
survival of the next two generations.

Dwarakanath’s eldest son, Debendranath (1817-1905), at first enjoyed the luxury in which he had been reared, but then came a reaction. He was devoted to his grandmother, at whose deathbed, as a young man, he had his first intense spiritual experience. He

wrote about it in later life in his autobiography, which is a Bengali classic. He revived the reformed Hindu sect known as the Brahmo Samaj, which had been founded by Rammohan Ray, but he did not share Rammohan’s keen interest in social reform. Compared to the views of other Indian radicals of the nineteenth century,
Debendranath’s
views on matters like caste rules and the role of women were more orthodox. The greatest love of his life was the
Upanishads
, the discovery of which was yet another spiritual revelation in his life, also recorded in his autobiography. An interesting character with a somewhat British-Victorian flavour, he combined within himself a level-headed businessman, a puritan with a stern sense of duty, a patriarch who fathered fifteen children, and an authentic spiritual searcher. His sense of duty made him take on his dead father’s business debts, though he had no legal obligation to do so, and pay everything off with scrupulous care over the years. The streak of austerity in his character might have been derived from his mother, who, as we have just seen, disapproved of her husband’s modern ways and was estranged from him.