It feels right that the Folio Society edition of the Gitanjali, published 112 years after its first outing, should begin with the original introduction by WB Yeats. It’s as much part of the book as the poems are. It is a reminder of the possibilities that existed in 1912, possibilities that widened and enriched the trajectory of modern poetry and the reach of a new intercultural world only beginning to be discovered. In his introduction, Yeats is trying to express the fascination, wonder, and problem of encountering the Gitanjali for the first time: he wants to do the near-impossible – to place Tagore historically and not give in to romanticisation. Yeats is acutely aware, at every moment, that he himself belongs to a particular movement in history; he does his best, as he starts his introduction, not to consign Tagore to a place outside it.
The first questions he asks the “distinguished Bengali doctor” with whom he has a conversation about Tagore are related to how one might think of “world literature”. What can one safely take as givens? Tagore would have conceivably, at some point, asked himself the same questions – except, like James Baldwin or Jorge Luis Borges, he already knows more, from the vantage point of his Bengali modernity, about Yeats than Yeats could possibly discover about him. “I know no German,” Yeats says to his Bengali companion,
yet if a translation of a German poet had moved me, I would go to the British Museum and find books in English that would tell me something of his life, and of the history of his thought. But though these prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years, I shall not know anything of his life, and of the movements of thought that have made them possible, if some Indian traveller will not tell me.
This problem remains with us today. If anything, Tagore and his time – the “history of his thought” – have become more unknowable because of the thorough erasure of, and the lack of engagement with, in the last three decades, the experience of modernity in all its contradictoriness, so that now it stands only for a period in Western history, or occupies its fringes as “non-Western modernity”: a corrective or counter-measure. To engage with Tagore or Bengali poetry is not, however, an attempt at decolonisation: it is to abandon the ideas of the East, and of India, which Yeats will, later in the introduction, have to fall back on.
In order to reframe the questions that arise from his encounter with the Gitanjali, Yeats does subtly undermine the dichotomy of “East” and “West” by challenging the separations we make between modernity (the period in which Yeats and the doctor are located) and other epochs that we see as being anterior to the modern:
An Englishman living in London in the reign of Richard the Second, had he been shown translations from Petrarch or from Dante, would have found no books to answer his questions, but would have questioned some Florentine banker or Lombard merchant as I question you. For all I know, so abundant and simple is this poetry, the new Renaissance has been born in your country and I shall never know of it except by hearsay.
This extraordinary moment of imaginative extrapolation and juxtaposition is also a moment of great poignancy. Yeats’s acknowledgement – of the impossibility of knowing a tradition and history – ends up being more suggestive of the singularity of that tradition than any kind of prior knowledge of it might be. Yeats, without realising it, is echoing what the thirty-year-old Tagore had written in 1891 about his encounter with the poet who mattered to him most, the 4th-century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa and his long poem, the Meghadutam, or “Cloud-Messenger”, which belongs, imaginatively, to the rainy season. It’s during the rains that Tagore wrote his 1891 essay:
From Ramagiri to the Himalayas ran a long stretch of ancient India over which life used to flow to the slow, measured mandakranta metre of the Meghadutam. We are banished from that India, not just during the rain but for all time . . . We can only send our imagination there, never reach it in the flesh. (Trans. Bhawani-Prasad Chattopadhyay)
“I shall never know of it except by hearsay,” says Yeats, because he finds himself – in relation to Tagore and, presumably, “world literature” – in the same position an Englishman would have been discovering Dante in the fourteenth century: starting from scratch, and, as a result, prompting a new beginning that research and information (“the British Museum”) alone can’t provide: “We can only send our imagination there, never reach it in the flesh.” Tagore can, and does, claim Kalidasa as his own (as Yeats can’t Tagore), but his grasp on the Sanskrit poet and the inheritance he embodies is equally anguished and uncertain. The intimation of the unknowable in relation to literary tradition – the feeling that no category, work, or author is a given or pre-decided – situates both Yeats and Tagore in the unfolding of modern poetry in the new, transcultural world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and puts them in a conversation with each other.
Yeats, an Irishman, as a 14th-century Englishman; the Bengali doctor as a Florentine banker or Lombard merchant – this estranging realigning of the relationship of the self to the milieu of the past and present at once unsettled and defined Tagore’s late 19th-century landscape. His 1895 short story “Kshudito Pashan” (‘The Hungry Stones’) follows the recurrent nightly transformation of a Bengali tax collector – who’s temporarily occupying a Mughal-era mansion – into a Mughal personage who is haunted by an invisible beloved and the palace’s history. The reality of the late 19th and early 20th century was probably no more stable than the world the tax collector finds himself occupying, and this instability allows Tagore to access history non-sequentially in the story. Yeats’s opening paragraphs, too, are informed by a powerful inkling of non-sequential history – of the Europe of Dante and Petrarch becoming immediately present to him through his discovery of the Gitanjali. And, in a sentence, we travel from the world of the Lombard merchant to the present: “For all I know…the new Renaissance has been born in your country and I shall never know of it except by hearsay.”
This extraordinary observation, locating Tagore not in civilisational heritage but in a contemporary cultural shift, points to a modernity that is lost sight of the moment it is glimpsed. Yeats’s historically acute speculation captures the Bengali epoch – called in 1907 by the scholar Shibnath Shastri the nabajagaran or “new awakening” (the term “Renaissance” would be put to use only around four decades later by the Marxist historian Susobhan Sarkar in Notes on the Bengal Renaissance). By the late 1960s, Sarkar had revised his own views; Bengali Marxists had begun objecting to the term “Renaissance” for the cultural shifts that marked 19th-century Bengal for both being inaccurate and carrying too much hubris: it had failed to be the European Renaissance. But of course, it had: Tagore, if anything, was involved in a counter-movement to the Renaissance in Europe. His instincts are anti-monumental, non-representational, spatial, and provisional. The Bengal Renaissance is an anti-Renaissance, the work of a new cultural aristocracy of misfits: it was not, unlike the one that happened in Europe, a phenomenon emanating from a great centre of power. It was created by a new, rootless, derecognised elite that lived in Calcutta, the hub of Britain’s imperial project – a second-class citizenry.
The “original” Gitanjali was published in 1910. The word is a misnomer: not only is the English Gitanjali you’re holding in your hands actually a version of a Bengali book of songs of the same name, it is partly an invention, in that the English book is made up of poems/songs from at least four different books and only shares some songs in common with the Bengali collection. What Schoenberg said about John Cage – “He is not a composer, but he is an inventor of genius” – can also be used, rephrased, for Tagore: “He is not only a songwriter, he is an inventor of genius.” Tagore couldn’t have imagined how a particularly provisional text like the Gitanjali would come to dominate his work in the wider world: how it would be taken completely seriously, embraced and then dismissed, and placed far away from the playfulness that informed all his creative work.
What is Tagore’s achievement as a Bengali songwriter? It is to be the first major creator, possibly anywhere, of the art-song. What came to America in the 1960s emerged in Bengal about a hundred years earlier: a new kind of song that would borrow from folk and devotional music, from classical traditions and also from the music of other cultures, but would be none of these things. The modern Bengali song would be situated on its own terms in the new realm of “art”. Tagore’s achievement here is without parallel, though his contemporaries – DL Ray, Nazrul Islam, Rajanikanta, Atul Prasad – are significant for their formative contributions to the genre. Tagore writes songs about love, yes, and about the natural world and the numinous: but he’s also excited by the pre-existing musical forms and conventions in which he finds these subjects located. He wants to borrow from these and translate them into art-song – to something that’s finite in shape (his Bengali songs are short, and don’t lend themselves to improvisation), exact, inflected by a multiplicity of cultural registers, and which has, strictly speaking, no home except in art.
Tagore’s Bengali songs are unprecedented in their preoccupation with superfluity, objectless excess, and an intense sense of limitlessness. We’ll find this tendency running through the English Gitanjali, too, however couched it may seem to be in a language of piety. The opening line of the first song is a shock, and brings immediately to our attention – if we don’t get too distracted by the thys, thous, and thees – the radical truths available to this imagination: “Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure.” Not “Thou art endless”, as we would expect from a reverential utterance, but “Thou hast made me endless”. This is not reverence or worship, but celebration and invocation as a way of radically rethinking the usual relationship between deity and devotee.
Is the “thou” a deity at all? What kind of deity or god feels “pleasure”? The capacity for pleasure is something we attribute to human beings, not God. Are we being introduced to the notion of some other kind of pleasure? Is this a creative force that’s indistinguishable from creation (in which case, it could participate in process and pleasure)? If creator and creation are in some way interchangeable, is the seeming separation between addresser and addressee an illusion produced, and also challenged, by the grammar, structure, and meaning of the line? The word in the Bengali song that Tagore translates as “pleasure” is leela: the childlike, unmindful, divine play of which the universe is an inadvertent consequence. The universe’s beauty – and man’s “endlessness” – happen, then, by chance: they did not comprise a premeditated end. Nevertheless, they delight the addressee, the “thou” – something the addressee appears to need reminding of, so unconscious do they seem to be of their actions. Right here, in the first line, we’re being asked to participate in a realignment in how we understand finitude, being human, and creation. Life – contrary to everything we know about it – is, the song claims, infinitely replenishable: “still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill”.
Although the language of the English Gitanjali is often archaic, its looseness making for a very different ethos from the compression and pressure that define the Bengali songs, there are lines everywhere that carry the imprint of the Bengali Tagore. “I know thou takest pleasure in my singing. I know that only as a singer I come before thy presence.” To sing is to break free of the boundaries and proprieties of purposeful thought, to revel in life and in being in the world, ignoring the rational mind’s caveat that there must first be an ostensible reason for doing so. Rationality tells us that the only way we can justify celebrating life is if we have the right to do so; song is about our unearned right to whatever is ours without our having to prove we deserve ownership. This radical and freeing possibility is what makes Tagore’s songs unique both in what they say and in how they embody their own liberating function. To sing is also to listen – to be transported by intense longing and desire (which is, after all, what listening is):
My heart longs to join in thy song, but vainly struggles for a voice. I would speak, but speech breaks not into song, and I cry out baffled. Ah, thou hast made my heart captive in the endless meshes of thy music, my master!
Although Tagore adds the word “holy” here (Song 3) in the fifth line despite there being no equivalent of the word in the Bengali – “the holy stream of thy music” – he is primarily interested not in religious devotion but in adoration. Through words like “master” and “he”, the English versions flirt dangerously with something like a Judaeo-Christian God. In Bengali, “he” would be the gender-neutral shé. In a modernist context, shé takes on a suggestive quality that’s at once erotic and not-quite-human, a third indeterminate gender that haunts the Indian languages (one could, here, invoke Eliot’s words in The Waste Land, “Who is the third who walks always beside you?”). If the addressee were male (as suggested by the word “master”), the half-forgotten residue of devotional, Radha-Krishna-adoring songwriting (which Tagore loved) would ensure that the singer, even if he were male by gender, was not entirely male by soul. The English translation occasionally reduces these inflections into a tone that’s more straightforwardly worshipful and gendered. It also takes our attention away from the fact that Tagore’s affirmation of song is an affirmation of contingency – the accident of existence; leela. English can make him sound world-denying and pious, which he is the opposite of. Tagore is unsettling precisely because he’s world-embracing.
This, then, is Tagore’s gift to us, or his “offering”. “Gitanjali” is one of Tagore’s many portmanteau coinages: geet is song, and anjali refers to the flowers you offer to the deity at the end of worship, often during festivities. It is an act of both momentary contemplation (you bow and close your eyes) and physical spontaneity (you throw the handful of flowers in the deity’s direction). There is no penitence or specific prayer attached: it’s a moment of celebration. Tagore secularises the idea of the anjali by turning it into a metaphor for the literary and the musical; the question of whom the songs are offered to remains open. For Tagore, the object seems redundant; the act of giving, or offering, is cherishable in and of itself. Giving what, though? Not kindness, or wisdom, or moral counsel, though the English translation sometimes comes across as one of these: “Life of my life, I shall ever try to keep my body pure, knowing that thy living touch is upon all my limbs” (Song 4).
The English Gitanjali is characterised by tension: there are a number of remarkable counter-statements in it that remind us that giving (and living) is disconnected from any kind of morality, or system of reward, human or theological. Song 16 opens with this extraordinary statement: “I have had my invitation to this world’s festival, and thus my life has been blessed.” In the Bengali song, this is even more radical: instead of “my life” (amar jiban), it reads as “human life”, or “life as humans know it” (manab jiban). And there’s no “thus” in the Bengali: no justification or logic to this sense of blessedness. It says, simply: “I am invited to the world’s festival, / blessed is human life.” On one level, this is outrageous; on another, true to everything we feel but dare not express. Tagore’s anjali – in the form of a new kind of art-song – is nothing and everything.
Excerpted with permission from Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore, introduction by Amit Chaudhuri, illustrations by Anagh Banerjee, Folio Society.
