In the tremulous months before the first world war, as well as during the war, its spiritual message and reverence for the natural world struck a chord. Gitanjali found a vast audience in its many editions. The notion that literary prizes secure reputations and sell books is modern publishing wisdom, but nothing compares with what the Nobel did for Tagore a century ago. Two years later he was a global phenomenon. Before he left Kolkata he knew one person in London, the painter William Rothenstein. Tagore had arrived in London in June, he had his anthology published by Macmillan with an introduction by Yeats in the following March, and on 13 November 1913 he was awarded the Nobel. Then – decisively – WB Yeats met Tagore, read his poems and became his passionate advocate (while pencilling in suggestions for improvements).Įvents moved at breathtaking speed. Famously, it was found in a left luggage office. He lost the manuscript on the London tube.
In 1912 he sailed from India to England with a collection of English translations – the 100 or so poems that became the anthology Gitanjali, or "song offerings". In 1913 he won the Nobel prize for literature, the first non-European to win a Nobel. It's hard to think of any other writer anywhere who has aroused this level of fervour, but Tagore might still be seen as a purely local phenomenon, a curiosity and irrelevance to the world beyond Bengal. At the cremation pyre, mourners burst through the cordon before the body had been completely consumed by fire, searching for bones and keepsakes. When Tagore died in 1941, the huge crowd around his funeral cortege plucked hairs from his head. Then again, love of literature can slide into fetishism, and from there, obscenity. Years ago, trying to penetrate a layer of Kolkata bureaucracy, I spent hours listening to bureaucrats on the subject of Tagore – "his translations into English are like embroidery seen from the back," one said – while getting nowhere with the unrelated topic I was meant to be investigating. The visitor to Bengal can easily find some comedy in the mass adoration. Every Bengali will know some Tagore, even if they can't read or write and the words come from a popular song or the national anthem (those of both India and Bangladesh use his verse). Shakespeare and Dickens don't come into the picture the popularity of Burns in Scotland 100 years ago may be his nearest equivalent in Britain. No other language group reveres a writer as 250 million Bengali-speakers do Tagore. True, writers can't be ranked merely by their quotability, but Tagore's neglect is extraordinary. Reading Tagore himself had nothing to do with it. The second is the inscription Wilfred Owen's mother found in her dead son's pocketbook: "When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable." But I owe this knowledge to (a) a tourist guide in Agra, and (b) to a biography. The first is how he described the Taj Mahal: like "a teardrop on the face of eternity". In fact, I could remember one line clearly enough, and vaguely remember a whole stanza. They skipped from Tacitus to Hippolyte Taine as if there was nothing in Tagore's collected works (28 thick books, even with his 2,500 songs published separately) that ever had stuck in anyone's mind, or was so pithily expressed that it deserved to as if what had come out of Tagore's pen was a kind of oriental ectoplasm, floating high above our materialist western heads, and ungraspable.
I consulted two dictionaries of quotations, the Oxford and Penguin, to check the most memorable lines of this poet, novelist, essayist, song and short story writer. In London, the BFI is hosting a season of films inspired by his work last night his fellow Bengali (and fellow Nobel laureate) Amartya Sen gave a talk at the British Museum a two-day conference at the University of London will, among other things, examine his legacy in the Netherlands, Poland and Germany. This weekend festivities and seminars are being held in his honour across the world.
R abindranath Tagore was born 150 years ago today.
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