If one were to sum up in a single word all the new ingredients that were added to India by her contact with a Western power, it would be ‘progress’. This is not to imply any value-judgement on the merits or otherwise of British imperial rule: it is merely that prior to the British presence, progress as an idea or an ideal did not really exist in India. By the 1830s, however, not only were the inhabitants of Bengal faced by a city, Calcutta, that had progressed from a tiny village on the east bank of the Hooghly to a ‘city of palaces’, a great commercial centre, capital of all the territories administered by the East India Company; they also found themselves increasingly swept into controversies about progress – educational progress, religious progress, legal and political progress, literary and linguistic progress. The Tagore family was at the centre of this sea-change. Tagore’s grandfather, Dwarkanath Tagore, had built up an immense family fortune, a network of agricultural, mining, trading and banking interests controlled through his firm, Carr, Tagore & Co. He came to be known as Prince Dwarkanath, renowned for his lavish way of life. Such a career would not have been possible without the British presence, and appropriately his death in 1846 came not in the land of his birth but in London, during a second visit to England (at a time when there was a strong taboo against Hindus making sea-voyages) in which he came into contact with the English nobility and Queen Victoria. But progress for Dwarkanath was not just commercial progress – he was involved in the foundation of many of Calcutta’s major institutions: the Hindu College, which became the centre of English education in Bengal; the Calcutta Medical College; the National Library; the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India; the Hindu Benevolent Institution; and so on.

Dwarkanath was a friend of Rammohan Roy (1772–1833), pioneer among Indian religious and social reformers; and though he was himself quite traditional in his religious practices, he supported Rammohan’s religious reform society, the Brahmo Sabha (later, Brahmo Samaj), against attacks from the orthodox.

The current of religious reform that ran right through nineteenth-century Bengal was what especially attracted Dwarkanath’s eldest son Debendranath, who disapproved of his father’s worldliness and sometimes clashed with him but who was no less concerned with Improvement, interpreted in a more austere and Victorian way. The family business collapsed after Dwarkanath’s death, and Debendranath inherited massive debts which took many years of frugal management to pay off; but landed estates had been left in trust to him and his two brothers and it was into a wealthy family, with a huge house in north Calcutta, that Tagore was born: a family that took it for granted that wealth and influence were to be used for the good of society, and for cultural enrichment.

Dwarkanath had moved, in the direction of material prosperity and public munificence; Debendranath moved, in the direction of inner self-realization and missionary zeal; Rabindranath – fourteenth of the fifteen children that his mother, in best Victorian fashion, bore for her husband – also moved, in a multiplicity of ways that differed from both his father and grandfather but which nevertheless owed something to both. From his father he inherited spiritual aspiration and a desire to do good in the world; from his grandfather he inherited a tremendous zest for life.

Here are some of the ways in which Tagore moved throughout his long life.

He moved in religion, away from the puritanical Brahmo church that his father had created along lines proposed by Rammohan Roy, and away from the Hindu revivalism that was very much in the air by the end of the nineteenth century. Neither Brahmoism nor revivalism left Tagore untouched: his father succeeded in making him Secretary of the Adi Brahmo Samaj for a while, and he composed many songs for it; and his earliest endeavours at Santiniketan – a boarding-school-cum-āśram modelled on the ancient Indian tapovana (forest hermitage) – were distinctly revivalist in character. But he moved away from both, to religious attitudes that owed something to the personalized devotion of medieval Bengali Vaisnavism, much to the poetry and grandeur of the Upanisads, and most to Tagore’s sense of his own creativity, a creativity that seemed a counterpart to the creativity of the universe as a whole. ‘The Religion of Man’ was what he called it; but ‘The Poet’s Religion’, the title he gave to the first lecture in Creative Unity (1922), would be a better name, since the religion is inseparable from his artistic theory and practice.

Tagore moved in social, educational and political ideas. His father, religion apart, was conservative by temperament, with no desire to change institutions that had the stamp of legality, decency or honour on them; but Tagore always rebelled against rigid structures. He rebelled against school, to such an extent that from the age of fourteen, and after frequent changes of school, his family in despair consigned him to a haphazard series of tutors at home. When he came to create his own school at Santiniketan, though it went through many changes and compromises, his abiding aim was to break conventional educational moulds: to develop all aspects of a child’s personality rather than merely prepare him for exams and professions. He rebelled against the entire educational structure set up by the British, sending his son Rathindranath not to Oxford or Cambridge or the Inns of Court but to the University of Illinois to study agriculture, and founding a university of his own that was entirely independent of British funding or control. He never ceased to attack in his poems, stories, novels, plays and essays all forms of prejudice and bigotry – against women, or non-Hindus, or foreigners (including the British). He moved forward in his political ideals, to such an extent that nationalists were frequently annoyed by his refusal to be a chauvinist: even with Gandhi he differed, dreading the irrationality that was exploited by his civil disobedience campaigns, arguing that national independence meant nothing if it were not preceded by social and cultural renewal from within, fearing the emergence of an Indian nation state that would have those very nationalist, militarist and imperialist features that he deplored in the West. Sometimes his relentless search for new solutions, new patterns of human development, led him astray: he was misled by Mussolini at first, and in his report on Stalinist Russia in 1930, though it was not the glowing paean that some people have claimed it to be, he was not, alas, sufficiently aware of the human cost of the educational and social improvements that he admired there. But he never ceased to search, to think and to question: his faith in man demanded it.

The movement was not merely cerebral, or confined to his experiment at Santiniketan. After his third visit to England in 1912, the publication of the English Gitanjali, the Nobel Prize in 1913 and sudden world fame, he moved unremittingly in a physical sense, all round India and all round the world. The list of dates on p. 13 of this book will show the scale of these tours (done by sea and land; only for his last, to Iran and Iraq in 1932, did he use an aeroplane). Their aim was to raise funds for his university, and to say things about the world and its future that he believed were important. They were gruelling, and frequently brought him to the point of nervous collapse – but a restlessness in him drove him on.

This restlessness had always been in Tagore. Before his marriage in 1883 and after it, there had been frequent changes of abode; and at the very end of his life, when ill-health prevented him from travelling, he took to changing his living-place at Santiniketan, even having an experimental cottage built entirely of mud (because he was worried about the frequent fires in the thatched village houses) next to his grand house called Uttarāyan.

In life, so too in his art. Tagore was a perpetual innovator, constantly creating new forms and styles in his poetry; working fundamental changes in Bengali vocal music; introducing novel kinds of drama, opera and ballet; exploring subjects from nursery-rhymes to science in his essays; evolving a unique style in the paintings and drawings that he produced in large quantities from 1928 on; above all, enormously expanding and altering the resources of the Bengali language. In this he was bringing to fruition the efforts of many writers previous to him. The development of Bengal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is also the development of its language.