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Indian writer in Shanghai waxes poetic on Tagore
By Sudeep Sen |
October 21, 2011, Friday
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AS part of this year's theme "The Future of East and West" for the 2011 Shanghai Writers Association International Fellow's Program, I cannot as an Indian writer and artist think of a more appropriate Indo-Chinese bilateral connection - than that of our Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore and China.
He was a Bengali poet, novelist, dramatist, artist, actor, calligrapher, and social philosopher - in short, a true polymath and Renaissance man.
Tagore and his extended family had visited China several times and made long-lasting friendships with many Chinese people such as Puyi (the last emperor of China) and Xu Zhimo (poet/interpreter).
His Chinese counterparts visited him in Kolkata and Santiniketan in West Bengal.
His interest in classical Chinese poetry is well documented. He was a visionary who paved the way for the future of East and West, much ahead of his times.
This year, as we celebrate Tagore's 150th birth anniversary, the following is my personal literary and cultural response to Kobi-Guru (poet-guru).
My emotional and aural response to Tagore's poetry were slow in coming - especially his own English translations of the 1913 Nobel prize-winning Gitanjali/Song Offerings - in spite of being buoyed by a glowing introduction by W.B. Yeats, a poet whose pitch-perfect and sometimes sardonic English poetry I quietly admired.
Tagore's nectar-dripping 'o'er-floweth-the-cup' nasal-lyrical style seemed incongruous and anachronistic and uncool (albeit perhaps misplaced). Intellectually however, I was always keenly engaged with Tagore's wider art - in particular his wide-ranging master skills in the fine arts, theater dance-drama, and short fiction.
Growing up in a Bengali family in metropolitan Delhi in the leafy neighborhood of Chittaranjan Park's probashi-Bangla diasporic topography, one could not possibly avoid Tagore.
He was everywhere - his music, his poetry, local shops and houses bearing his stamp, symbol, nomenclature and even his name; his sculptures emblazoned in the form of bronze busts; his demi-god-like status; and more.
As a child, I had the task of fetching milk from Mother Dairy every evening. And as I walked past the houses in my neighborhood, carrying my large aluminium pail almost grazing the tarmac, sonorous sounds of children practicing Rabindra Sangeet and their footsteps learning Tagore's folk-dance were audible.
At the time of course I didn't think much of all that beyond the fact that they were part of an everyday ritual.
Of those days, I have sometimes provocatively and irreverently said, "Tagore was pouring out of every orifice."
This was often not appreciated by hardcore Bengalis who, perhaps missing the irony, sought to misguidedly reprimand me. All this was in my childhood, young adulthood, and possibly a little beyond that. At that age, I suppose as a fashionable act of adolescent rebellion, I perhaps even shunned Tagore.
Cultural osmosis
But what is obvious, especially now as a practicing poet/literary editor/critic/translator, how much Bengali culture - and by its curious extension, also Tagore - subtly influenced me through the process of cultural osmosis in the received environment in which I was growing up.
This is not to say that the other languages, literatures, political ideas and philosophies weren't discussed in my home and among my grandparents, parents, friends, and their circles. They variously infected and informed me as well - and I am grateful for that.
Also, I grew up with three mother-tongues - Bangla, Hindi and English - like many other Indians of my generation who are at least trilingual or more. So my loyalties were not necessarily monolithically fixed to the idea of Bengaliness, albeit a very important and significant strand in my tissue-system.
I was always a devout admirer of Jibanananda Das and Kazi Nazrul Islam's poetry over and above Tagore's; and admitting that was almost sacrilegious. I found their precise tactility, un-Victorian-Augustan phrase-making, use of contemporary idiom, the power of their oral structure, and in general, the best aspects of Modernism, much more appealing at the time.
But equally, I also loved and worshipped Milton and Shakespeare, Pushkin and Tolstoy, Ghalib and Faiz, Neruda and Paz, Verlaine-Baudelaire-Rimbaud-Celan.
In fact, when I think of the past, the list seems precociously expansive though delightfully centrifugal.
To be continued.
The author (www.sudeepsen.net) is a major new generation voice in world literature, and is now an international writer-in-residence at the Shanghai Writers Association. He was international writer-in-residence at the Scottish Poetry Library (Edinburgh) and visiting scholar at Harvard University. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
He was a Bengali poet, novelist, dramatist, artist, actor, calligrapher, and social philosopher - in short, a true polymath and Renaissance man.
Tagore and his extended family had visited China several times and made long-lasting friendships with many Chinese people such as Puyi (the last emperor of China) and Xu Zhimo (poet/interpreter).
His Chinese counterparts visited him in Kolkata and Santiniketan in West Bengal.
His interest in classical Chinese poetry is well documented. He was a visionary who paved the way for the future of East and West, much ahead of his times.
This year, as we celebrate Tagore's 150th birth anniversary, the following is my personal literary and cultural response to Kobi-Guru (poet-guru).
My emotional and aural response to Tagore's poetry were slow in coming - especially his own English translations of the 1913 Nobel prize-winning Gitanjali/Song Offerings - in spite of being buoyed by a glowing introduction by W.B. Yeats, a poet whose pitch-perfect and sometimes sardonic English poetry I quietly admired.
Tagore's nectar-dripping 'o'er-floweth-the-cup' nasal-lyrical style seemed incongruous and anachronistic and uncool (albeit perhaps misplaced). Intellectually however, I was always keenly engaged with Tagore's wider art - in particular his wide-ranging master skills in the fine arts, theater dance-drama, and short fiction.
Growing up in a Bengali family in metropolitan Delhi in the leafy neighborhood of Chittaranjan Park's probashi-Bangla diasporic topography, one could not possibly avoid Tagore.
He was everywhere - his music, his poetry, local shops and houses bearing his stamp, symbol, nomenclature and even his name; his sculptures emblazoned in the form of bronze busts; his demi-god-like status; and more.
As a child, I had the task of fetching milk from Mother Dairy every evening. And as I walked past the houses in my neighborhood, carrying my large aluminium pail almost grazing the tarmac, sonorous sounds of children practicing Rabindra Sangeet and their footsteps learning Tagore's folk-dance were audible.
At the time of course I didn't think much of all that beyond the fact that they were part of an everyday ritual.
Of those days, I have sometimes provocatively and irreverently said, "Tagore was pouring out of every orifice."
This was often not appreciated by hardcore Bengalis who, perhaps missing the irony, sought to misguidedly reprimand me. All this was in my childhood, young adulthood, and possibly a little beyond that. At that age, I suppose as a fashionable act of adolescent rebellion, I perhaps even shunned Tagore.
Cultural osmosis
But what is obvious, especially now as a practicing poet/literary editor/critic/translator, how much Bengali culture - and by its curious extension, also Tagore - subtly influenced me through the process of cultural osmosis in the received environment in which I was growing up.
This is not to say that the other languages, literatures, political ideas and philosophies weren't discussed in my home and among my grandparents, parents, friends, and their circles. They variously infected and informed me as well - and I am grateful for that.
Also, I grew up with three mother-tongues - Bangla, Hindi and English - like many other Indians of my generation who are at least trilingual or more. So my loyalties were not necessarily monolithically fixed to the idea of Bengaliness, albeit a very important and significant strand in my tissue-system.
I was always a devout admirer of Jibanananda Das and Kazi Nazrul Islam's poetry over and above Tagore's; and admitting that was almost sacrilegious. I found their precise tactility, un-Victorian-Augustan phrase-making, use of contemporary idiom, the power of their oral structure, and in general, the best aspects of Modernism, much more appealing at the time.
But equally, I also loved and worshipped Milton and Shakespeare, Pushkin and Tolstoy, Ghalib and Faiz, Neruda and Paz, Verlaine-Baudelaire-Rimbaud-Celan.
In fact, when I think of the past, the list seems precociously expansive though delightfully centrifugal.
To be continued.
The author (www.sudeepsen.net) is a major new generation voice in world literature, and is now an international writer-in-residence at the Shanghai Writers Association. He was international writer-in-residence at the Scottish Poetry Library (Edinburgh) and visiting scholar at Harvard University. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
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