Rabindranath Tagore: Poet, Nationalist, and Cultural Leader

Introduction: Poetry as Nationalist Leadership

When we consider the career of Rabindranath Tagore as a nationalist leader, it is slightly difficult 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. 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 he became 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 adopt a strictly political definition of art — something like the definition advocated by the political theorist Antonio Gramsci with his concept of "cultural production." In other words, even something as abstruse as poetry can be implicitly ideological under the right circumstances. How can poetry 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."¹ 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 channeled primarily 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. 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.

Tagore as a Rooted Cosmopolitan

Tagore was born in 1861, and Guha notes that he had already come from a long line of "scholars, social reformers, and entrepreneurs."² In some sense, Tagore's career as a poet would encompass elements of all three. The pre-eminence of members of the Tagore family in Sanskrit scholarship lent credibility to Tagore's attempts to write poetry in modern Bengali that did not slavishly imitate Sanskrit models, but instead tried to capture the authentic voice of Bengali speech within his own lifetime. In some sense, Tagore was modeling his public career on a poet whose work was peaking at the time of his birth: the American Walt Whitman. Tagore's public presence looks rather like an Indian Brahmin dressed as Walt Whitman — the long flowing beard of the sage, and Whitman's well-known respect for Indian poetry and philosophy (captured in his 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."³ What Guha means by this phrase 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 explains why one of his poems also serves as the national anthem of Bangladesh. Before Bangladeshi independence, Tagore had known and written intimately about that specific region of the Indian subcontinent, and so 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 provides the "rooted" part of Guha's formulation.

But arguably it is the "cosmopolitan" aspect that is more important. Although certainly beloved by readers in India, Tagore's poetry was predominantly concerned with establishing a vision of India made by an Indian — a vision directed outward at the world.

Countering the British Imperial Narrative

To use the Nobel Prize for Literature as a lens through which to examine the intersection of poetry and politics, the example of Rudyard Kipling, who won the Nobel six years before Tagore, reminds us that the most influential views of India had long been produced by members of the British Raj. Kipling was born in Mumbai four years after Tagore was born in Calcutta, yet by no stretch would we 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.

Conclusion

As a result, if Tagore had done nothing else as a nationalist leader, he would still count as an extremely important figure in the history of Indian nationalism, purely by his influence on both Gandhi and Nehru. But he influenced them through poetry, perhaps proving the old maxim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Tagore's career demonstrates that cultural production — the writing of verse, the crafting of philosophical essays, the representation of a people's identity to the wider world — can be as powerful a form of political leadership as any march, speech, or act of parliament.

Bibliography

Guha, Ramachandra. Makers of Modern India. Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.

Metcalf, Barbara, and Metcalf, Thomas. A Concise History of India. London: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

1. Metcalf, Barbara, and Metcalf, Thomas. A Concise History of India. London: Cambridge University Press, 2012. p. 298.
2. Guha, Ramachandra. Makers of Modern India. Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. p. 170.
3. Ibid.
4. Guha, p. 180.
5. Guha, p. 172.