Asian and African Studies XIV, 1 (2010), pp.

17–36

UDK: 930.85(5+6)
COPYRIGHT ©: WILLIAM RADICE

Sum ergo cogito: Tagore as a Thinker and Tagore as a Poet,

and the Relationship between the Two

William RADICE∗

Abstract
With special attention to Tagore’s two plays Bisarjan and Acalāyatan the paper considers to
what extent Tagore’s thought as expounded in his lectures and essays in English and Bengali is
relevant to the understanding of his literary works. Are there dangers in reading his works
through the filter of his ideas and ideals? Would his creative works seem different if we
pretended that his discursive writings did not exist? The paper addresses such questions in
order to suggest a fresh approach to Tagore in his 150th anniversary year (2011).
Keywords: Tagore, Tagore’s thought, Tagore’s paintings, Tagore’s plays, Sacrifice,
Acālayatan

The folio of paintings and hand-written verses Chitralipi is among Rabindranath

Tagore’s very last creative works. Published in 1940, the year before he died, its
contents may date from various earlier times, but unified by the poet’s frail
handwriting in both Bengali and English it comes across powerfully as an enigmatic
late testament. Leafing through it as I thought about this lecture, I was struck by two
verses in particular, with their accompanying paintings:

The black and white threads

weave the destiny of man

into a mystery of entanglements. (Tagore 1940a: 18)1

∗
William Radice, Senior Lecturer in the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London,
London, UK. E-mail: r@soas.ac.uk
1
In Bengali:
ghatBanāy bedanāy mānusBe cirakāl

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William RADICE: Sum ergo cogito…

and

The dark takes form

in the heart of the white

and reveals it. (Tagore 1940a: 26) 2

These kabitikā (brief poems3) express something of the same bafflement that I feel on
attempting to write this paper on my proposed theme, though the second one gives me
hope that light may eventually be revealed by the daunting and confusing darkness it
contains. I am trying, as the 150th anniversary of Tagore’s birth approaches, to come
up with new ideas and a fresh approach, and it is not easy. I want a new approach not
just because I am temperamentally averse to recycling clichés and old ideas, but
because in my reading of books and articles about Tagore I constantly come across
statements that I disagree with. I am, however, only at the beginning of this arduous
process of reassessment and questioning of old assumptions. If in this paper you find
just tentative, speculative first steps, you must forgive me. One has to start somewhere.
Let me begin with three things that I have recently read that instantly made me
think, “No, that can’t be right.” The first is from Flavia Arzeni’s recent book, An
Education in Happiness: The Lessons of Hesse and Tagore, published in Italian in
2008 and in English the following year.4 The book is an elegantly written and well-
intentioned account of Hesse and Tagore as idealistic thinkers and writers, who have
lessons for us all about how to live a balanced life in harmony with nature and free of
materialism and selfishness. In a chapter about Tagore’s paintings called Which art to
choose?, Arzeni writes:

What is most surprising, apart from the sheer mass of the work, is that it went in a
completely different, indeed radically opposed direction to that which he pursued
in his literary work. In his poetry, as in his prose, Tagore always kept to the model
of beauty and harmony which he himself advocated and which he expressed
faithfully in both content and style. His painting seems to come from a different
world, as if it were the product of someone else’s mind. His visual universe is
dark, often anguished, his self-portraits cruel and grotesque, his figures disturbing,

sādākālo suto diye cāridike bonā hay jāl.

se jāle parBeche gāDthā asamBkhya itihās
jāni nā jagat-porBā kena e prakāś aprakāś.
2
asīm sādāy kālo yabe parBe
srBsBtBī sīmāy bāDdhā,
takhan to sei kālor rūpei
āpnāke pāy sādā.
3
The term I use in my book: Rabindranath Tagore: Particles, Jottings, Sparks: The Collected Brief
Poems (2001). A new edition is forthcoming from Penguin India (in print).
4
Pushkin Press, London, 2009. Translated by Howard Curtis.

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 Asian and African Studies XIV, 1 (2010), pp. 17–36

his landscapes crepuscular. Parallels could be drawn, with some justification, with
certain styles of the European avant-garde, especially German expressionism.
(Arzeni 2009: 178–179)

This idea – of a disjunction between Tagore’s paintings and his literary works – is not
new. I was aware of it when I wrote the Introduction to my Penguin Selected Poems of
Tagore, in which I called the paintings “something of an embarrassment to the Tagore
cult,” though I went on to say, “The element in Tagore that found its clearest and most
unfettered expression in his paintings was always present in him.” (Radice 1985: 83) I
thought then, and I think even more strongly now, that the notion of a disjunction, of
‘two Tagores’ as Arzeni (2009: 179) puts it, is wrong. I do not believe that a creative
genius can ever be entirely different in one genre or medium from how he is in another,
as the brain and imagination he employs will be the same. The verses and paintings in
Chitralipi, brought so movingly together in a single volume, are alone sufficient to
refute the idea.
The second statement that brought me up short recently was in Partha Mitter’s
admirable book on 20th-century Indian art, The Triumph of Modernism. There is a
section on Tagore’s paintings and on the ‘vision of art and the community’ that was
promoted at Santiniketan, which I mostly found perceptive and informative. But I was
taken aback when Mitter comes on to the erotic elements in Tagore’s paintings, and
writes of the painting Untitled Cowering Nude Woman: “One of his strangest
paintings is of a submissive androgynous figure that hints at an ambigous sexuality
which none of his literary works ever does.” (Mitter 2007: 77) Androgyny? Ambiguity?
Is not the whole universe of Tagore’s songs, in which gender is seldom explicit
(thanks partly to there being no gender in Bengali pronouns) full of it? In new
translation of Gitanjali I am currently doing, I have to be alert to constant shifts of
voice from male to female. Take poem No. 26, in which a strange figure comes and
plays a veena while the poet sleeps but does not wake up. I first made the figure
female because of the associations between the veena and the goddess Saraswati and
also the references to perfume ‘filling the dark’. When I turned to Tagore’s own
translation I found he had made the figure male (and cut out the perfume). But Bengali
friends have explained to me that the speaker has to be female and the visitor male,
because the speaker describes herself as hatabhāginī (unfortunate, miserable) – a
female adjectival form; and the word I understood as ‘perfume’ (gandha) is not as
specific as that, and could indeed mean ‘scent of his body’ or maybe just ‘aura’. In this
poem, Tagore is drawing on the Bengali Vishnava tradition in which songs of
‘yearning’ (biraha) are usually addressed by Radha to Krishna. 5 But when these

5
Like many poems in Gitanjali, No. 26 is actually a song. I read my draft translation of it at the Evening
of Poetry in Celebration of Rabindranath Tagore, Jazz Club Gajo, Ljubljana, 20th March 2010 that

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William RADICE: Sum ergo cogito…

mysterious, sensed-but-not-fully-seen figures are identifiable – as they often are – with

Tagore’s concept of the jīban-debatā, the ‘life-deity’ guiding and harmonizing
everything that he did, then the gender can be very fluid. As Reba Som (2009) rightly
says in her recent book on Tagore’s songs, Rabindranath Tagore: The Singer and the
Song, “Rabindranath’s jeevan devata appeared to him in different forms – masculine
and feminine. In the first few years it was feminine, which came to him quite
naturally.” (Som 2009: 71)
Reba Som’s book is a most valuable contribution, the first book on Tagore in
English that focuses throughout on his songs. I learnt a great deal from it, and agreed
with most of her analysis. I very much liked, for example, the way in which she finds
in Chitralipi ‘deep resonances of several songs of Tagore’. (Som 2009: 161–164) But
when I read her chapter on Gitanjali, I found myself thinking strongly that this was
not the book I was currently experiencing through the creative act of translation. In
fairness to Rebadi, she is describing here how Gitanjali was perceived and received,
and is certainly aware that there was plenty that was not understood well, particularly
the profound relationship the book has with music. Nevertheless, it is tempting to
assume from her account that the understanding of Gitanjali in 1912–1913 was
broadly correct:

To a reserved British people Tagore’s simple lyrics touched deeply their

emotional core. Rathindranath recalled how Tagore’s poetry readings would be
greeted by an ‘almost painful silence’ but then would come the flurry of
congratulatory letters the next day. One such letter was by May Sinclair dated 8
July 1912, who wrote: ‘You have put into English, which is absolutely transparent
in its perfection, things it is despaired of ever seeing written in English at all or in
any Western language.’ Stopford Brooke wrote to Tagore about the Gitanjali
poems, ‘they make for peace, peace breathing from love and they create for us,
too storm-tossed in this modern world, a quiet refuge... It is well for us to have a
book which, without denouncing us, leads us into meadows or peace and love and
refreshes us where we are weary.’ (Som 2009: 108)

Simple lyrics? A quiet refuge? The most recent poem in Gitanjali that I have
translated, No. 27, begins in my version:

Where’s the light, the light?

Ignite it with the fire of longing

The lamp is there, but no flame

followed the Symposium for which this paper was written. The audience seemed happy with my
translation, but may have been puzzled that in Tagore’s own version – which I also read – the genders
were different. The Bengali participants afterwards convinced me that Tagore was right and I was wrong.

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 Asian and African Studies XIV, 1 (2010), pp. 17–36

What is this doom on my brow?

Death would be preferable

Light the lamp with the fire of longing. (Radice in print)

and ends

Where’s the light, the light?

Ignite it with the fire of longing

Clouds thunder, wind howls

Time passes, but this deep night,

Black as a whetstone, doesn’t pass

Light love’s lamp with my breath

Ignite it with the fire of longing (Radice in print)

For anyone feeling ‘too storm-tossed in this modern world’, this is hardly going to be
the right poem.
To understand why I felt dissatisfied by this and the previous two characterizations
of Tagore, I need some kind of working hypothesis as to why people got him wrong –
and continue to get him wrong: why they find the paintings at odds with the literary
works; why they seem to assume that the literary works are simpler (and less
ambiguous) than they are; why they think – even if they know that his novels, say, are
complex – that in Gitanjali we find nothing but simplicity, harmony and calm.6
In Tagore’s lifetime, quite a lot can be attributed to his extraordinary aura and
charisma. When people met him, they felt – as with Mahatma Gandhi – that they were
in the presence of someone of immense inner balance and self-control. They did not
seem to understand that for both Tagore and Gandhi life was an unending struggle, a

6
In This Song of Mine has Thrown Away All Ornaments, my Rabindranath Tagore Memorial Lecture for
the Netaji Subhas Open University, Calcutta, 2 December 2009 (NSOU, Calcutta, forthcoming), I
considered and rejected what I called ‘Gitanjali exceptionalism’, the notion that whatever the
complexities of Tagore’s other works, Gitanjali stands apart. I quoted, for example, Michael Collins’s
view (in a draft article he sent me, based on his Oxford D.Phil thesis) that “Yeats assumed that the
devotional Vedantic poetry of Gitanjali was all there was to Tagore.” I think Dr Collins is right about
Yeats but wrong about Gitanjali.

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William RADICE: Sum ergo cogito…

relentless sādhanā, in which glimpses of the absolute perfection and truth that both so
deeply craved came rarely and fleetingly. Of course that aura lives on, though with
Gandhi knowledge of his inner battles and torments is quite widespread now, thanks to
the labours of innumerable biographers. But I do not think that the Gurudev aura alone
is enough to account for the problem in the perception of Tagore that I am trying to
probe. Much more significant, I suspect, is the enormous corpus of writings in both
Bengali and English in which Tagore expounded his religious, philosophical, ethical
and aesthetic ideas.
Tagore was unusual, but not unique, in being a creative writer who was also a
thinker, and gave many talks, lectures, sermons that were later published in journals or
ultimately in books. Add to these all the carefully crafted letters that he wrote, his
responses to reviews, and the conversations and interviews with him that were written
down, and you have a formidable intellectual oeuvre, on top of many volumes of
poetry, fiction and drama. Quite a large proportion of this was in English, giving it
immediate international accessibility, and in recent times many of his discursive
writings in Bengali have been translated, and brought out especially by Oxford
University Press in Delhi in the Tagore series edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri. Essays
and speeches that before were somewhat scattered were in the 1990s brought together
by Sisir Kumar Das (1996) in the third volume of his massive, Sahitya Akademi
edition of Tagore’s English works. In 2007 a fourth volume, 811 pages long, was
added, edited by Nityapriya Ghosh.
Let us compare this situation with two other writers of equivalent greatness and
copiousness, Leo Tolstoy and William Shakespeare. In a recent article in the Times
Literary Supplement on two films based on Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata and Last
Station, the writer and critic A. N. Wilson wrote:

The story he wrote, The Kreutzer Sonata, represented, in the words of his
biographer Aylmer Maude, the fact that ‘he had returned to art’. After years in
which he had written nothing but pacifist or vegetarian tracts, ‘his train has at last
come out of the tunnel’. It was an age since the man who wrote War and Peace
had given up art in favour of preaching. In that time, Tolstoy had slowly turned
himself and his family into characters not from his own fiction but from
Dostoevsky, eaten up with irrational passions and hatreds and religious obsessions.
The Kreutzer Sonata, being the frenzied account of a wife-murderer muttered
aloud during an overnight train journey, is the most Dostoevskian of Tolstoy’s
writings, though naturally the way it was written, and the gospel it preached, were
flavoured with his own unmistakable pungency. (Wilson 2010: 17)

Although Tolstoy was certainly not without influence as a thinker, having a profound
effect on Gandhi, and carrying off what A. N. Wilson rightly describes as “the twin
trick of being one of the greatest novelists ever, and the conscience of the Western

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 Asian and African Studies XIV, 1 (2010), pp. 17–36

world,” (Wilson 2010: 18) it has always been possible to enjoy his novels without
bothering much with his ‘preachings’, even if the two came together in a late work
such as The Kreutzer Sonata. Indeed, his two greatest novels were written before the
preaching started.7 With Tagore, it is much less easy to detach the creative works from
the discursive or didactic writings, not only because the two ran in parallel throughout
his long life, but also because he himself tended to comment on his works in terms of
the messages they conveyed, giving the strong impression that his prime purpose was
to convey, through poetry, fiction, drama and even songs, ideas that were presented
more abstractly elsewhere.
What about William Shakespeare? Although his plays are packed with ideas and
many of them have intellectual, moral or philosophic aspects that will engage critics
and directors for as long as his plays are studied or performed, he left behind no
discursive writings, letters, autobiography or diaries whatsoever. This seems to me to
have worked hugely to his advantage. It has forced actors, directors and critics to
focus wholly on the works themselves, without being distracted by what Shakespeare
himself may or may not have thought about them.
I have found myself asking recently, has the existence of such a vast discursive
Tagore oeuvre come between readers and his works? Has it promoted a tendency to
read his poems, songs, stories, novels and plays through the filter of his thought?
Might it be possible – and both refreshing and healthy – to pretend that the discursive
writings do not exist, in order to come closer to what the creative works actually are
and what they are actually saying?
I can think of two main reasons why a critical experiment of this kind is daunting
to contemplate. One is that Tagore the thinker has a unity and consistency – and a
broad simplicity and penetrability – that his infinitely complex and many-layered
creative works may lack. This is possibly a controversial view. In recent studies, much
has been made of Tagore’s variety and changeability as a thinker. Falvia Arzeni, for
example, writes:

Tagore was, in fact, a dazzling, enigmatic figure, an enlightened but profoundly

contradictory mind. One of his most authoritative biographers, Krishna Kripalani,
who knew him well when he was alive and married his granddaughter, has
recalled that once, when Tagore was already well advanced in years and laden
with honours and celebrity, he was asked what he considered his best quality.

7
It was, however, foreshadowed by the reflections on destiny and free will in the Epilogue to War and
Peace.

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William RADICE: Sum ergo cogito…

Tagore replied, ‘Inconsistency.’ When asked what was his greatest failing, he
replied, ‘The same’. (Arzeni 2009: 114)8

At the more academic end of the spectrum, Sumit Sarkar (1973) in his seminal study
of the Swadeshi movement, helps us to understand the evolution in Tagore’s political
ideas, and this has also been explored thoroughly by Ana Jelnikar (2009) in her recent
London University PhD thesis on the concept of universalism in Tagore and Srečko
Kosovel. Maybe in the sphere of politics or nationalism changeability and
inconsistency are only to be expected, because Tagore was responding to changing
circumstances and events. In Gandhi’s political ideas – on, for example, whether
Indians should support the British war effort in both the First and Second World Wars
– we also find inconsistency, for the same reason.
But in the religious, philosophical and ethical sphere we find, I believe – though it
would take another paper to argue this effectively – in Tagore (and in Gandhi) a
remarkable, unflinching unity and consistency. Moreover, it is possible to take almost
any essay, and lecture, any sermon from the two volumes entitled Śāntiniketan, and
find immediate connections with almost any of Tagore’s creative works. I did this
when I wrote the notes to my Penguin Selected Poems, connecting the poems with
Tagore’s main books of English essays and lectures, from Sādhanā (1913) to The
Religion of Man (1931). This is actually the easiest thing for an interpreter and critic
of Tagore to do. It is partly because I have done it myself in the past that I do not want
to do it again now.
The other reason why reading Tagore through the filter of his thought is tempting,
and the alternative – ignoring his ideas in favour of the creative works themselves – is
daunting, is one that to a Bengali native speaker will sound lame, but which no foreign
student of Tagore, however experienced and dedicated, can evade: namely that the
thoughts – even in translated versions of Bengali texts – are more ‘treatable’ and
accessible than poems, songs or plays, which for full and confident understanding
need close attention to the Bengali original. With novels, the foreigner can feel a little
more confident, and in my teaching at SOAS I do not have any compunction about
asking my students to write essays on Gora or The Home and the World without
reference to the original. But his short stories, being so lyrical and poetic, are more
problematic, and with poetry and song even the best translations leave the non-Bengali
reader uncertain whether he is really gaining access at all. Far easier, therefore, to
focus on Tagore as a thinker, and bring in his creative works only when they seem to
reflect or back up his abstract ideas.

8
In trying to account for the apparent disjuncture, between Tagore’s paintings and literary works, Arzeni
concludes that this “must be classed as just one of his many inconsistencies” (2009: 179).

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 Asian and African Studies XIV, 1 (2010), pp. 17–36

Let me now take two of his creative works, his plays Bisarjan (Sacrifice, 1890,
1940b) and Acalāyatan (1912), try to understand their relationship to Tagore’s ideas,
consider whether his ideas are sufficient to explain all that is going on in these two
plays, and finally determine what gains in understanding would arise if we detached
them from his ideas altogether. My choice of these two particular works is rather
random: I happen to have read them both recently, the first because I was asked for a
scenario (a complete scene-by-scene summary) to be used by Tara Arts, London in a
workshop that may lead to a complete new translation and production, the second
because I was curious to know the original context of the song Ālo, āmar ālo (Light,
my light), which Tagore selected as poem No. 57 in Gitanjali and changed somewhat
in its tone and effect in his own English translation. (I will say more about that later.)
Both plays seem to me to lend themselves well to the testing of my basic hypothesis in
this paper, as by their very nature – their conflicts between characters, the arguments
they contain representing different ideologies and points of view – they are unlikely to
convey an unalloyed message or a single, unified philosophy.
Derived by Tagore from the first part (and from some later sections too) of his
novel RājarsBi (1887), Bisarjan was first published in 1890 and went through several
versions and editions before settling into the text as printed in the Rabīndra-
racanābalī. (for details, see Pal 1987: 132–133) It has been universally recognized as
one of Tagore’s most powerful and performable plays, known outside Bengal through
Tagore’s own (truncated) English version, Sacrifice (1917). 9 It presents the
consequences of a decision by Gobindamanikya, King of Tripura, to ban animal
sacrifice in the Kali temple in his kingdom. This brings him into conflict with his wife
Gunabati, who has been desperately making offerings to Kali in order to bring her the
child that she has been unable to conceive, and with Raghupati, chief Brahmin priest
of the temple. Jaysinha, Raghupati’s adopted son and assistant in the temple, finds
himself torn between loyalty to Raghupati and his love for Aparna, a beggar-girl who
has sought refuge in the temple and whose distress at the sacrifice of her pet goat
inspires Gobindamanikya to issue his edict against animal sacrifice. Raghupati
instigates a plot against the King involving the king’s younger brother Nakshatra Ray.
The overthrow of the King is, however, reversed when Jaysinha sacrifices his own life
not only to escape from his torment but also (though this may not be a conscious
motivation) to shock Raghupati and the Queen into seeing the cruelty and bigotry of
their orthodoxy, and the superior morality and deeper religious insight of
Gobindamanikya and Aparna.
It is not difficult to connect Bisarjan to Tagore’s most deeply held moral and
religious ideas, some of them derived from his Brahmo heritage and its rejection of
9
I compared the English version with the Bengali original in Visarjan and Sacrifice (1979: 10–32).

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William RADICE: Sum ergo cogito…

idolatry. In An Artist in Life: A Commentary on the Life and Works of Rabindranath

Tagore (1967), still one of the best books on Tagore in English and one which I
frequently turn to, Niharranjan Ray writes:

If proof were ever needed as to which side the contemporary ideologies in conflict
the poet’s sympathies lay, Visarjan gave it eloquently and once for all. They were
decidedly against hatred and violence, against social and religious bigotry, against
superstition and obscurantism, and squarely and committedly on the side of love
and humanity, of piety and non-violence, of reason and progress. Incidentally,
Visarjan was to be the first indictment of animal sacrifice as sanctioned by
Hinduism, and since the indictment took an aesthetic form it proved very effective.
The emotional and formal vigour of the drama came directly from the strength of
conviction and the depth of feeling of the author. (Ray 1967: 142–143)10

This is true, and such is the force of the play’s moral message that I await with some
trepidation the effect of a new production of the play, in these days when God-based
fanaticism presents such an international challenge and the appeal of Hindutva in India
is by no means dead.
But if the main dramatic point of the play is its moral message, then it needs to
leave its audience or readers with a feeling that the conflicts that it presents have been
resolved. Yes, in the final scene of the play both Gunabati and Raghupati see the light,
with Gunabati replacing Kali with her husband as her ‘only god’, and Raghupati
saying over Jaysinha’s self-slain body, “This is the last innocent blood in this sinful
temple. Jaysinha has extinguished the flame of bloodshed (himBsārakta-śikhā) with his
own blood.” The King is able to pronounce: “Sin has gone. The goddess has returned
in the form of my debī (i.e. my wife).”
But consider the cost of all this. Raghupati – along with the entire religious
orthodoxy that he represents – has lost all authority, power and status. Gunabati has
lost her defiance and independence of action, adopting at the end a stance of total
obedience to her husband – and she still has no child. Jaysinha has lost first his faith
and moral bearings and then his life. Aparna has lost the man she loves and – arguably,
and depending on how the play is acted – her sanity, with her final invitation to
Raghupati – “Come, father” being the last and most puzzling line in the play. Come to
what? Has Aparna become the embodiment of the ‘true’ goddess of love and
compassion, as opposed to the vengeful and illusory goddess Kali and thus the
goddess that Ragupati, acknowledging her as jananī amrBtamayī (Mother that is full of
nectar), must now serve? Is she in that case a human being any more, or merely a
symbol? At a human level, her apparent replacement of the man she loved by the

10
Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay in his Rabīndrajībanī (1988: 287) quotes similar ideas from Niharranjan
Ray’s Bengali book, Rabīndra-sāhityer bhūmikā (1951).

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 Asian and African Studies XIV, 1 (2010), pp. 17–36

‘father’ who was, by his bigotry, duplicity and cynicism, directly responsible for
Jaysinha’s suicide, seems quite unbelievable. Yet played with sufficient intensity –
hysteria? Irony? Ophelia-like madness? – I have no doubt that the departure of
Ragupati and Aparna at the very end of the play can, and will in the planned new
production, create an indelible effect. It is not an effect that can be reduced to a clear
moral message. But in great drama, morality is seldom clear, seldom black and white,
but a tangled mixture of the two.
That is what the verse from Chitralipi I quoted at the beginning tells us, and the
other verse that struck me, about the dark taking form in the heart of the white in order
to reveal it, seems equally relevant not to the message of Bisarjan but to its dramatic
effect.
Consider the moments in the play when challenging, disorientating negatives are
presented. Tagore often does this: key moments in his works – moments of maximum
turbulence and intensity – often come when he is saying that something “is not”.
Sometimes what is false is denied in order to assert what is true. One thinks of the
moment in his great poem Shah-Jahan in Balākā (1916) when he rounds on the
emperor for imagining that his dead beloved can be preserved forever in the beauty of
the Taj Mahal (“Lies! Lies! Who says you have not forgotten?/ Who says you have
not thrown open/ The cage that holds memory?” (Tagore 1985: 80)) Or of a similar
turning-point in Chabi (Picture), the famous poem in the same book about the
memory of his beloved sister-in-law Kadambari, when he says:

kī pralāp kahe kabi?

tumi chabi?

nahe, nahe, nao śudhu chabi.11 (Tagore 1942b: 13)

In Bisarjan, moments of denial come with both positive and negative effect. In Act 3
Scene 1, when Jaysinha challenges Raghupati to admit that he has manipulated the
crowd by turning the image of Kali round to make them think she has rejected them,
the Brahmin argues in a speech of violent nihilism that everything in this world
depends on falsehood and illusion, that words are not true, writing is not true, images
are not true, thought is not true, and that no one knows what truth is or where it is.
This sweeps Jaysinha into a ‘shoreless ocean’ of moral confusion in which “There is
no truth, no truth, no truth; everything is lies, lies, lies.” That is, of course, a false
perception: Tagore certainly does not want us to think that there is actually no such

11
What madness does the poet speak?
Are you a picture?
You are not, not, not just a picture!

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William RADICE: Sum ergo cogito…

thing as truth. But at the end of the play, after the death of Jaysinha, when Gunabati
asks Raghupati – her guru – to confirm whether the image of Kali contains the
goddess or not, his grief-stricken answers resonate with a shattering force that seems
to me too powerful to overcome wholly the play’s message that idolatry is false but
divinity is true:

Gunabati: Gurudeb, do not confuse me.

Tell me truly again. Is there no goddess?

Ragupati: No.

Gunabati: No goddess?

Raghupati: No.

Gaunabati: No goddess?

Then who is there?

Raghupati: No one is there. Nothing is there.

In reading these words, I am looking ahead to how they might play out on the stage in
a new production for our own age. Tagore’s message in the play may not be atheistic,
but among the many layers of his great play is a seam of pure scepticism. Any
contemporary audience will include a good number of people who do not believe in
God at all – any kind of god, whether expressed by an image or icon or not. That layer
may well connect more strongly with a twenty-first century audience than Tagore’s
desire in discursive writings and his creative works not to deny that God exists, but to
redefine what or who God is. His play – and this is true of most of his works – may
indeed be saying much more than its apparent ‘message’. And frankly, if what it said
was limited to a message, I do not think most people today would find Bisarjan either
relevant or interesting.
I am not enough of a Jungian to know whether the word ‘shadow’ is appropriate,
but for me one of the chief fascinations of Tagore the artist – as opposed to Tagore the
philosopher – is that for anything positive, in almost any work of his, a negative can
also be found: light has an undercurrent of dark, joy always has a substratum of
sorrow. One can argue that such mingling of opposites can also be found in his
philosophic writings, which are certainly full of an awareness of darkness as well as
light. In this paragraph from an address on ‘Truth’, for example, given in 1924 and
included in Volume Four of the Sahitya Akademi’s collected edition of Tagore’s
English writings:

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 Asian and African Studies XIV, 1 (2010), pp. 17–36

It is to the person, who keeps his eyes solely fixed upon this aspect of the world
which is an increasing series of changes, that the world appears as delusion, as the
play of Kali, the black divinity of destruction. To such a one it becomes possible
for his dealings with this world to be superficial and heartless. The world being,
for him, an unmeaning progression of things and evolution that goes blindly
jumping from chance to chance on a haphazard path of survival, he can have no
scruple in gathering opportunity for himself, dealing cruel blows to others who
come in his way. He does not suspect that thereby he hurts his own truth, because
in the scheme of things, he recognises no such truth at all. A child can tear,
without compunction, the pages of a book for the purposes of his play, because for
him those pages have no serious truth. (Tagore 1924: 516)

This way of thinking is quite close to Ragupati’s nihilism, or to Jaysinha when in Act
2 Scene 3 he first joins in a Baul song about cutting all ties, and then calls on Aparna
to come away in a similar spirit, because “O Aparna, you and I are nothing that is true
at all – so let us be happy... let us go away for ever and float together over the world
like two pieces of weightless cloud in the empty sky!” But the difference is that, in his
address, Tagore is telling us about such ideas in order to reject them; in the play, the
ideas become part of the fabric of the drama. We cannot forget them or reject them
purely because the play’s message at the end tells us: they remain with us, as part of
our total experience of the play, just as Gunabati’s passionate defiance, Raghupati’s
malicious cynicism, or Jaysinha’s tragic suicide will stay with us. In Othello, Iago’s
malevolence is as real – and as lasting in our minds – as Othello’s gullibility and
Desdemona’s innocence. The tragedy cannot be reduced to a moral message about
trust or love. Nor can Bisarjan be reduced to a message about non-violence and
idolatry. Drama, literature, poetry do not work like that, and I suggest it is only the
ubiquitous and compelling presence of Tagore’s copious discursive writings that
encourages us to forget this basic fact.
Acalāyatan is a later play, first published in the journal Prabāsī in 1911 (Āśvin
1318) and in book form the following year. Derived (though not in any great detail)
from a story in Rajendralal Mitra’s book of 1882 on The Buddhist Literature of Nepal,
(see Pal 1993: 224) it is set in a rigidly orthodox ashram whose name ‘Acalāyatan’
suggests immobility. 12 It is not a tragedy like Bisarjan; indeed it seems to me
essentially a comedy, though it may be that awareness of its ‘message’ has blinded
some critics to its humour. Niharranjan Ray describes it as “a seriously satirical
allegory aiming a frontal attack on our meaningless and antiquated socio-religious
rites, beliefs and taboos, in a word, on our absurd Hindu orthodoxies” (Ray 1967: 177).
He goes on to complain that it is rather too didactic:

12
Acal (unmoving) + āyatan (abode, institution).

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William RADICE: Sum ergo cogito…

No one would object to a ‘message’ in a work of art so long as it is worked out in

a creative, that is, in an artistic manner. In Achalāyatan, however, the didactic
element is so loud and insistent that it affects the workmanship; the social
awareness, so real in the context of the times, is so powerful that it obtrudes on the
unity of design in the play. (Ray 1967: 178)

It did not strike me as quite like that when I read it, though, as with Bisarjan, it is
certainly not difficult to relate it to Tagore’s philosophic and religious writings.
Prasantakumar Pal links it not only to sermons in Śāntiniketan such as Sāmañjasya
(Balance), Karmayog (Karma yoga) and Brāhmasamājer sārthakatā (The significance
of the Brahmo Samaj) but to poems in Naibedya (1901) including the most famous
poem in the English Gitanjali, “Where the mind is without fear” (No. 35) with its
references to places (unlike the Acalāyatan ashram) “Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit.”
The temptation to read the play as a moral tract has been exacerbated by Tagore’s
own comments on it, in response to severe criticism by Professor Lalitkumar
Bandopadhyay that was published in the journal Prabāsī after the play itself appeared
there. Judging by Tagore’s lengthy rejoinders, reproduced in the Granthaparicay
section at the end of the volume of Tagore’s collected works that contains the play,
(Tagore 1942a: 504–511). Professor Bandopadhyay had objected to the play’s assault
on orthodoxy. Tagore replied: “It is a universal truth that, where rules and ‘rites’ (ācār)
overwhelm ‘religion’ (dharma) with their importance, they block the ‘human heart’
(mānusBer citta). The pain of this blocked heart is the subject of the play,13 and as a
corollary the ugliness of dry ritualism is inevitably conveyed.” (Tagore 1942a: 505)
Tagore goes on to take particular issue with the Professor’s charge that the play
implies the destruction of orthodoxy without anything constructive being put in its
place:

You ask what I am proposing. Can ‘just light, just love’ fill human stomachs?
That is, if the discipline of rites and rituals is removed, will man be fulfilled? If
that is so, why do we see in history no clear example of it? (Tagore 1942a: 506)

But the writer of Acalāyatan has himself decided to ask this same question. Does the
Guru of Acalāyatan end with a message of destruction? Does he not talk about
building? When Pancak wants to quickly sweep away all controls, does the Guru not
say, “No, that will not do – what has been torn down must be built up again in a better
way” (Tagore 1942a: 506).
Pancak and his elder brother Mahapancak represent opposed points of view in
Acalāyatan. Pancak is impatient with learning mantras and carrying out religious

13
Tagore actually uses the word kābya (poetry) here rather than nātBak (play).

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 Asian and African Studies XIV, 1 (2010), pp. 17–36

duties, whereas Mahapancak is a master of them. Pancak slips out of the ashram to
meet communities that lie beyond the grip of its orthodoxy: the ‘Shonpangshus’,
whose cheerful commitment to work is compared by Tagore’s biographer
Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay to a Western-style obsession with work for work’s sake,
(Mukhopadhyay 1988: 333)14 and the Darbhakas, a community of untouchables.15 In
their different ways, these two communities offer him an alternative to the stifling
regime inside the ashram, but he is not himself a revolutionary, merely a light-hearted
teaser of his brother for his strictness, and a mildly anarchic influence on the less
studious of the ashram’s pupils.
The cohesion of the ashram starts to break down when a boy called Subhadra
commits the heinous sin of opening a window in its wall in order to look outside. The
Upācarya (Deputy Minister) of the ashram, who is as strict in his orthodoxy as
Mahapancak, insists that Subhadra will have to atone for this with an awesomely
demanding and complicated penance that will be a deliberate threat to his life. The
Ācarya or Chief Minister, however, reveals liberal tendencies and puts a stop to the
penance, telling his colleagues that the ‘Guru’ of the ashram – who has not been seen
there for a very long time – will arrive soon to point the right way forward. The
Upācarya and his supporters start to machinate against the Ācarya, but the Guru
arrives before they can complete their overthrow of him. (This is similar to the way in
which the overthrow of King Gobindamanikya in Bisarjan is aborted.)

14
Prasantakumar Pal confirms the Western analogy, and says that when a revised version of the play was
published in 1918 under the new title Guru, ‘Shonpangshu’ was changed to ‘Yunak’, which by its
closeness to Yaban (a term for a Greek or Westerner, though later falsely applied to Muslims) made the
analogy more explicit. (Pal 1993: 227)
15
As regards the meaning and connotations of the names Tagore gave to these two communities, Ketaki
Kushari Dyson comments (private correspondence):

Shona in Skr means ‘red’ (hence śonita = blood). Pangshu as noun can be crumbling soil, dirt,
dust, ashes, but in Bengali it can also be an adjective meaning ‘pale, ashen’ and is more often
used as an adj. than as a noun, while the domesticated form pāś is the more common form of the
noun (thus chāi-pāś = dust and ashes, dirt, rubbish). So the whole word literally means ‘red and
ashen’ or ‘red and pale’. Shona (pronounced as end-stopped Shon in Bengali, Hindi etc) is also
the name of the river (often written Son in English-language maps), so the compound word
could also be broken down as ‘dust/sand of the Shon river’).

From the context of the play the Shonpangshus would seem to be an outcaste tribe living on the
margins of society. Perhaps ‘red and ashen’ would point towards an identification with
chandalas. There is also a faint suggestion of Tagore’s wry ‘colour humour’.

Darbha is the name of a grass, often identified with the ‘sacred’ kusha grass (the sharp grass
referred to in my maiden surname). So it stands for something lowly but sharp, with the
potential to become sacred. Darbhaka is also the name of a king or prince. In the play they also
seem to be a lowly community with radical potential. Both the Shonpangshus and the
Darbhakas are positive forces in the play, as differentiated from the people of the Acalāyatan.

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William RADICE: Sum ergo cogito…

Intriguingly, the Guru when he arrives turns out to be not only ‘Dadathakur’, the
free-spirited leader and preceptor of the Shonpangshus, but also the ‘Gosāi’ or
spiritual leader of the Darbhakas. The light and freedom that he brings unites all
communities, the orthodox, the foreign and the untouchables.
I only have time here to scratch the surface of this complex play, but what I find
particularly interesting and relevant to the argument of this paper is that the composite
Guru’s arrival is preceded by thunder, clouds and torrential rain, as well as the violent
destruction of the walls of ashram. Then as light pours in, ‘as if the whole sky is
rushing into this abode’, the boys of the ashram sing the song to the light that Pancak
has taught them – the song that Tagore made into No. 57 in Gitanjali, changing the
repeated O bhāi (‘O brothers’) to ‘my darling’, which give the poem a rather different
tone and reference. I have never seen Acalāyatan performed, so I can only imagine
how the climactic scene of the Guru’s arrival would work on stage, but I feel that its
effect would be like dark (the clouds, thunder and destruction) emerging from white
(the sky) in order to reveal the white, as in the verse in Chitralipi I quoted earlier. The
dark would not be dispelled by the white or light, but would remain bound up with our
perception of it, just as the horror of Jaysinha’s suicide stays in our minds at the end of
Bisarjan. The Guru’s gesture towards construction (mentioned by Tagore in his
comments) would not, I think, displace the lingering impression of destruction. His
arrival would also have a touch of the absurd or (if you’ll pardon the pun) the camp,
for Tagore gives the surprising direction, YoddhrBbeśe DādātBhakurer prabeś, “Enter
Dadathakur in martial dress.” As he has led the military assault that has smashed the
walls of the ashram, the martial dress seems logical enough, but imagine its effect!
Whether one conceives it as traditional costume – the martial dress of the Kauravas
and Pandavas in Bollywood films perhaps – or as modern battle fatigues, it seems at a
stroke to subvert and complicate the idealistic message that, in his response to
criticism, Tagore himself claimed he wanted to convey. If we cling to the notion that
the play, despite its touches of fun and humour, is essentially ‘a seriously satirical
allegory’, then not only the Guru’s martial arrival but also his exchanges with the boys
in the ashram would probably seem inept and laughable. But if – as I am sure any
modern director would – we were to revel in its absurdities, then the play becomes
interesting, ambiguous, multi-layered, and irreducible to any straightforward
message. 16 The absurdities of the end of Bisarjan, would, I think, be absorbed by

16
Another question about it that I might consider in a future paper is whether it covertly expresses
Tagore’s own worries about his Gurudev status and the new kind of educational community he was trying
to create at Santiniketan. Prasantakumar Pal (1993: 225) writes about the fears Tagore had that the rules
at his school were too strict: his correspondence in the year before he wrote the play reveals fears that he
later expressed through the character of the Ācarya. I myself would relate the ambiguity of the ‘Guru’
when he arrives to the Vairagi Dhananjay in later play, Muktadhārā (1922). I have written elsewhere

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 Asian and African Studies XIV, 1 (2010), pp. 17–36

intensity, poetry, tragedy, just as the absurdities at the end of Shakespeare’s tragedies
are absorbed and legitimized. King Gobindamanikya can get away with saying, Geche
pāp (Sin has gone) because everything is in a state of emotional meltdown. But when
the Guru at the end of Acalāyatan says something similar about sin, the only way in
which it could possibly work would be to find absurdity in the whole play, and to see
that absurdity as a rich and fascinating part of its meaning:

All: Guru!

Dadathakur: Come, my dears, come.

First boy: When shall we get out?

Dadathakur: Not long to go – you will soon have to come out.

Second boy: What shall we do now?

Dadathakur: Something has been prepared here for you to enjoy.

First boy: O bhāi, these are jām-berries – what fun!

Second boy: O bhāi, sugar-cane – what fun!

Third boy: Guru, is there no sin in this?

Dadathakur: None at all – it has virtue.

First boy: Shall we all sit here and eat?

Dadathakur: Yes, right here.

Indeed, the more one thinks about it the more one realizes that the mining of Tagore’s
plays for their messages, whether by critics or by the author itself, is always going to
be at odds with the way actors and directors are likely to deal with them, for so much
is left undefined. Stage directions are minimal, descriptions of characters are non-
existent. His dramaturgy is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the plays of
George Bernard Shaw, who certainly did aim to define his characters and convey
messages and ideas, and made it absolutely clear in his elaborate stage directions and
prefaces exactly what those characters and messages were.
I admire Shaw, but think of him as the ultimate in prose drama, whereas Tagore,
in his plays, as in everything else, is always a poet. And this brings me to my
concluding a point – a basic one and an obvious one that I have often made before and

about how ‘Dhananjay is aware of the dangers of his own gurugiri.’ See Never not an educator: Tagore
as a poet-teacher (Radice in print).

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William RADICE: Sum ergo cogito…

will go on making in the future. If he was – as he himself repeatedly said – a poet first
and foremost, then his philosophizing and preaching, however noble and inspiring it
may be in itself, will always be secondary to the poetry. It is not the engine of the
poetry, but a by-product of it. To return to the questions I raised at the beginning, my
conclusion is that reading his creative works through the filter of his thought has
misled us because it has distracted us from the poetry. In his discursive writings,
Tagore often seems to imply that poetry is a simple thing, an expression of the spirit,
an ultimate harmonization of the good, the true and the beautiful. That may be true of
the spirit of poetry, the transcendent quality that lifts the heart and distinguishes poetry
from prose. But it is not true (to use two of Tagore’s favourite terms) of the finite
forms in which the infinite can be expressed. Poems, plays, songs as finite entities are
exceedingly complex.
My reading of Bisarjan and Acalāyatan certainly encourages me to believe that
pretending Tagore’s discursive writings and explanations do not exist might indeed
help us to understand those plays – and many of his works – better. It would bring us
much closer to his poetry. It would help us to see that he was a thinker not in order to
plan, inform or drive forward his creative works, but as a consequence of those same
works. He thought, because his restless, endlessly probing poetic and creative mind –
dedicated always to the truth – obliged him to think, to think about everything, from
God to Nature to science to society to politics to education. He knew that the actual
truth was always more complicated than anything he could say about it in a lecture,
essay or sermon, but was not too complicated for the media of poetry, drama, fiction,
song or painting. The complex, strenuous ‘truth of art’ and Tagore’s fundamental
commitment to it was summed up in a famous poem in ŚesB lekhā, his last book of
poems:

satya ye katBhin,

katBhinere bhālobāsilām –

se kakhano kare nā bañcanā.17 (Tagore 1947: 48)

It may be a daunting prospect, trying to understand and describe the hard truths of
Tagore’s creative works, and it is always easier to reach for one of the essays or
addresses that possibly gave him relief from the demands of his art. But I am certain
we will remain forever ignorant of those works if we do not make the attempt.

17
Truth is hard,
I have loved the hard –
It never deceives.

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 Asian and African Studies XIV, 1 (2010), pp. 17–36

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