Related News
Home » Opinion » Opinion Columns
Tagore was booed for hailing Oriental culture as China eyed West
By Wan Lixin |
September 16, 2009, Wednesday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
RECENTLY I read a little bit about Rabindranath Tagore, thanks to a documentary video made by my Indian colleague Bivash Mukherjee at his own cost.
Focused on the poet's China contacts in the 1920s, the documentary traced the residence Tagore stayed during his visits to Shanghai. It was poet Xu Zhimo's old-style residential complex, already sacrificed to the Yan'an Road elevated highway.
A translator of Tagore's poems Wu Yan, now over 90, said in the interview that rendering Tagore's poems gave him "enormous pleasures."
There is an ethereal beauty about Tagore, and how to convey that beauty is a great challenge.
China and India represent two of the four greatest ancient civilizations, and Chinese attitudes and outlooks have been somewhat shaped by Indian influences.
Last week I casually mentioned Xuanzang (602-664 AD), a Buddhist monk who made a westward pilgrimage to India, and my six-year-old son enthusiastically responded by naming several legendary figures who had accompanied the monk in his journey.
I found later that his knowledge had come solely from a noisy, iconoclastic Japanese cartoon dubbed in stilted Taiwan-accented Chinese.
In April 1924 when Tagore arrived in Shanghai for a lecture tour, he was openly critical of the inherent destructiveness of Western civilization with its cult of money and power.
He said he was here to pay tribute to traditional Chinese culture, buoyed by the hope that the spiritual wisdom of the East contained the antidote to the poison of modern Western influences.
Criticizing Shanghai as having fallen prey to industrialism and materialism, he exhorted Asians not to abandon their traditional culture.
Tagore said Europeans preferred to be dressed in short coats, while Asians are attired in long gowns ... and Europeans mistook Asian dress as a sign of barbarism.
Asians pursue spiritual peace, rather than material provisions, while many Europeans judge civilization against what they considered the perfection of the machine.
In his lecture "The Rule of the Giant and the Giant Killer" delivered in Beijing in May 1924, Tagore said that modern Western civilization, while appealing in its exterior, was spiritually void, with the Western powers now obsessed with machines, to be used against others.
His message could not have come at a more sensitive time.
Some Chinese scholars condemned Tagore for being a pacifist and an escapist.
Tagore was often heckled and booed during his lectures, and he was at first totally left in the dark about the intellectual debates over tradition and modernization swirling at the time.
That was soon after the May Fourth movement in 1919, a time of ferment and turmoil, when some scholars advocated abandoning Confucian classics in favor of vernacular literature and a new culture based on Western standards.
Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi, two of the most influential advocates for New Culture, demanded wholesale Westernization.
Chen called Tagore a "perverted believer" in the idealized East, in an article titled "Of What Kind of Stuff Is Tagore?"
But Tagore also found strong support in such noted scholars as Ku Hung-Ming and Liang Qichao, who pronounced mechanized, profit-seeking Western civilization already bankrupt, and said it could only be redeemed by the wisdom of the East.
Xu Zhimo, who served as Tagore's interpreter during his China trip, wrote, "Whenever I thought of our past glory, I doubt if the contemporary Chinese spiritual emptiness is but a nightmare, a delusion. Otherwise how can we account for the deadly silence of a nation with such glorious past?"
"We Chinese often style ourselves as a sleeping lion, which only betrays how our imagination has been corrupted, and in our hope for 'enriching the country and building up military might' we are aspiring to be cannibals and carnivores."
Tagore left China in bitterness.
If his vision for rejuvenating Oriental culture provoked vehement hostility at that time, we are so safely distanced from him today that we are likely to dismiss his views with gentle indifference.
Focused on the poet's China contacts in the 1920s, the documentary traced the residence Tagore stayed during his visits to Shanghai. It was poet Xu Zhimo's old-style residential complex, already sacrificed to the Yan'an Road elevated highway.
A translator of Tagore's poems Wu Yan, now over 90, said in the interview that rendering Tagore's poems gave him "enormous pleasures."
There is an ethereal beauty about Tagore, and how to convey that beauty is a great challenge.
China and India represent two of the four greatest ancient civilizations, and Chinese attitudes and outlooks have been somewhat shaped by Indian influences.
Last week I casually mentioned Xuanzang (602-664 AD), a Buddhist monk who made a westward pilgrimage to India, and my six-year-old son enthusiastically responded by naming several legendary figures who had accompanied the monk in his journey.
I found later that his knowledge had come solely from a noisy, iconoclastic Japanese cartoon dubbed in stilted Taiwan-accented Chinese.
In April 1924 when Tagore arrived in Shanghai for a lecture tour, he was openly critical of the inherent destructiveness of Western civilization with its cult of money and power.
He said he was here to pay tribute to traditional Chinese culture, buoyed by the hope that the spiritual wisdom of the East contained the antidote to the poison of modern Western influences.
Criticizing Shanghai as having fallen prey to industrialism and materialism, he exhorted Asians not to abandon their traditional culture.
Tagore said Europeans preferred to be dressed in short coats, while Asians are attired in long gowns ... and Europeans mistook Asian dress as a sign of barbarism.
Asians pursue spiritual peace, rather than material provisions, while many Europeans judge civilization against what they considered the perfection of the machine.
In his lecture "The Rule of the Giant and the Giant Killer" delivered in Beijing in May 1924, Tagore said that modern Western civilization, while appealing in its exterior, was spiritually void, with the Western powers now obsessed with machines, to be used against others.
His message could not have come at a more sensitive time.
Some Chinese scholars condemned Tagore for being a pacifist and an escapist.
Tagore was often heckled and booed during his lectures, and he was at first totally left in the dark about the intellectual debates over tradition and modernization swirling at the time.
That was soon after the May Fourth movement in 1919, a time of ferment and turmoil, when some scholars advocated abandoning Confucian classics in favor of vernacular literature and a new culture based on Western standards.
Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi, two of the most influential advocates for New Culture, demanded wholesale Westernization.
Chen called Tagore a "perverted believer" in the idealized East, in an article titled "Of What Kind of Stuff Is Tagore?"
But Tagore also found strong support in such noted scholars as Ku Hung-Ming and Liang Qichao, who pronounced mechanized, profit-seeking Western civilization already bankrupt, and said it could only be redeemed by the wisdom of the East.
Xu Zhimo, who served as Tagore's interpreter during his China trip, wrote, "Whenever I thought of our past glory, I doubt if the contemporary Chinese spiritual emptiness is but a nightmare, a delusion. Otherwise how can we account for the deadly silence of a nation with such glorious past?"
"We Chinese often style ourselves as a sleeping lion, which only betrays how our imagination has been corrupted, and in our hope for 'enriching the country and building up military might' we are aspiring to be cannibals and carnivores."
Tagore left China in bitterness.
If his vision for rejuvenating Oriental culture provoked vehement hostility at that time, we are so safely distanced from him today that we are likely to dismiss his views with gentle indifference.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
