Poetry and Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore

When we consider the career of Rabindranath Tagore as a "nationalist leader," it is slightly hard to find comparable figures elsewhere in world-history. Outside of India, Tagore is most famous as a poet: he won the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature for his Bengali poetry collection Gitanjali. Perhaps the closest contemporary analogue to Tagore would be the Irish poet and "nationalist leader" W.B. Yeats, who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature ten years after Tagore. Ironically enough, it was Yeats who introduced Tagore to Europe, quite literally -- the English translation of Gitanjali had an introduction by Yeats recommending Tagore in the highest possible terms to European readers. And Yeats was a "nationalist leader" in the same way as Tagore: Yeats, after all, believed that his own poetry and drama in favor of Irish independence had inspired the 1916 Irish "Easter Rebellion" against the British Empire, and was a member of the newly-formed Irish Senate in the semi-independent Irish Free State. In some sense, to understand Tagore as a "nationalist leader" at all requires us to take a strictly political definition of art, something like the definition advocated by the political theorist Antonio Gramsci with his definition of "cultural production." In other words, even something as abstruse as poetry can be implicitly ideological under the right circumstances. How can poetry in any way lead a nationalist movement? Quite effectively, as Tagore's example demonstrates. After all, one of Tagore's poems was "adopted after independence as India's national anthem."[footnoteRef:0] That is perhaps the most obvious way in which nationalist politics and popular poetry can coincide, but in Tagore's case, his work as a "nationalist leader" was through his poetry. Tagore's task was the representation of India -- and of the idea of an independent India -- in the minds of the rest of the world, including the British Empire but also including the rest of the world. Thus, Tagore's real gift as a "nationalist leader" was not through practical politics or social organization -- it was through influence, and through the kind of persuasive power that poetry can share with propaganda under certain circumstances. [0: Metcalf, Barbara, and Metcalf, Thomas. A Concise History of India. London: Cambridge University Press, 2012. p298.]

Tagore was born in 1861, and Guha notes that Tagore had already come from a long line of "scholars, social reformers, and entrepreneurs." [footnoteRef:1] In some sense, Tagore's career as a poet would encompass elements of all three of these. The pre-eminence of members of the Tagore family in Sanskrit scholarship would lend credibility to Tagore's attempts to write poetry in modern Bengali that did not slavishly imitate Sanskrit models, but attempted to capture the authentic voice of Bengali speech within his own lifetime. In some sense, Tagore was modeling his own career on a poet whose career was peaking at the time of his birth, the American Walt Whitman. Tagore's public presence looks rather like an Indian Brahman dressed as Walt Whitman -- the long flowing beard of the sage, and the well-known respect of Whitman for Indian poetry and philosophy (captured in Whitman's famous poem "Passage to India") gave a model for Tagore's public career, much of which was actually spent in the West. Guha considers this to be the most important aspect of Tagore's public career, describing him as a "rooted cosmopolitan."[footnoteRef:2] What Guha means by "rooted cosmopolitan" is that Tagore had a very strong sense of the local culture of India -- it is worth noting that Tagore's deep knowledge of local regions of India provides the reason why one of Tagore's poems serves as the national anthem of Bangladesh too. Before Bangladeshi independence, Tagore had known and written about that specific region of the Indian subcontinent, and thus one of his Bengali hymns to that countryside became the Bangladeshi national anthem, just as a second poem provides India's national anthem. This keen sense of localism on Tagore's part as a writer provides the "rooted" part of Guha's formulation. But arguably it is the "cosmopolitan" aspect which is more important. Although certainly beloved by readers in India, Tagore's poetry was predominantly concerned with establishing a vision of India that was made by an Indian. Again, to use the Nobel Prize for Literature as a way of thinking about the intersection of poetry and politics, the example of Rudyard Kipling, who won the Nobel six years before Rabindranath Tagore, reminds us that the most influential views of India were produced by members of the British Raj. Kipling was born in Mumbai four years after Tagore was born in Calcutta, but by no stretch would we ever call Kipling an Indian writer -- he was, after all, the poet who coined the phrase "white man's burden." Rabindranath Tagore quite consciously set out to reverse the British Empire's official portrait of India, much as Yeats would reverse the Empire's portrait of Ireland. In all of these cases, the poetry is actually quite consciously political -- the writer is attempting to speak poetically on behalf of an entire nation. [1: Guha, Ramachandra, Makers of Modern India, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. p170.] [2: Ibid.]

Tagore's stance as a cultural representative for India in the West meant that he would have to defend India to the West in some ways, and he was by no means a kneejerk national chauvinist. Here, the presence of Tagore's family members in political reform causes throughout the nineteenth century meant that Tagore was quite happy to break ranks with certain militant defenders of Indian customs that were found abhorrent by Europeans, such as the existence of the dalit or untouchable caste. Tagore's broadly democratic cast of mind -- which resembles the one in Walt Whitman's poetry, just as Gitanjali on the page looks like no other book of poetry available in 1913 besides Whitman's Leaves of Grass, because both employ long free-verse lines -- meant that he agreed with Europeans about the horror and folly of upholding this caste system and this inhuman treatment of the dalits. Therefore Tagore engaged in a political cause through his poetry, by defending the dalits in his prose writing and making a dalit the hero of a long epic poem. When we consider Tagore's involvement in such nationalist political questions, we must look at what he himself said on the subject in his 1917 book Nationalism, written shortly after he won the Nobel Prize. Here Tagore wrote that India