Has Tagore’s global fame diminished over time? - GetBengal story
No other language group reveres a writer as 250 million Bengali-speakers do Tagore. 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.”
The above is an excerpt from a 2011 article in the widely respected UK publication The Guardian, written by the late Ian Jack, a renowned writer, editor and columnist. This particular piece was intended as a tribute to Tagore on his 150th anniversary, and grappled with the question of why a global phenomenon like Rabindranath Tagore was so “neglected”.
Reading the article 13 years later, Jack seems to have had a point. While internationally celebrated during his lifetime, Tagore’s global reputation as a spiritualist, visionary, and man of letters seems to have faded with every passing decade, reducing him to almost a local phenomenon, a giant among Bengalis but virtually unknown to the rest of the world.
Are we Bengalis responsible for this obscurity? Have we let the world forget the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize? In 1912, when Tagore sailed for England with a collection of English translations of 100 or so poems, nobody could have imagined that within a year, he would have become one of the most famous Indians in Europe.
Also read : The Tagorean vision which India forgot
Those 100 poems became the Gitanjali, an anthology published by Macmillan with an introduction by W.B. Yeats in March 1913. And on November 13, 1913, Tagore was awarded the Nobel. As Jack points out in his article, “Before he left Kolkata he knew one person in London, the painter William Rothenstein. Two years later he was a global phenomenon.”
As reputations go, Tagore’s in Europe of the time leaves little to ask for. Gitanjali in its English avatar found a huge audience in a continent bracing for World War I (1914-19). Famously, lines from the Gitanjali (‘when I leave, let these be my parting words: what my eyes have seen, what my life received, are unsurpassable’) were found inscribed in the pocketbook of Wilfred Owen, the young English soldier-poet who died in battle in France in 1918. And the English version soon had translations in many other languages, including French by André Gide, and Russian by Boris Pasternak, themselves literary giants of the time.
Yet another contemporary source who wrote of the international fame that came to Tagore post-Gitanjali was Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy – forever infamous in India for his involvement in the Kolkata riots of 1946. A student at Oxford in 1913, Suhrawardy was among the handful of Bengalis who actually met Tagore.
As he described it in his article for the Tagore Special Supplement of the Calcutta Municipal Gazette published after the poet’s death, Suhrawardy was asked to approach Tagore in London on behalf of the Oxford Majliss, a group of young Indian students who had acquired a somewhat unsavoury reputation for brashness and arrogance.
“So it is quite intelligible if, given our reputation, we were a little afraid that the Poet might not accept our invitation. I was asked to proceed to London and explain to him, should occasion arise, that as far as he was concerned, we had transformed ourselves into a domesticated herd of antelopes.”
Happily for the young men, Tagore did accept their invitation, but that is a story for another day. The upshot remains that the household name that Tagore became in the 1920s and 30s across Europe and other parts of the world ought to have ensured his fame for decades to come. That that is still not the case ought to be cause for concern.
