In 1800 – virtually no prose; poetry confined to religious subjects and restricted to two monotonous metres. But by 1900 – after the essays of Rammohan Roy and Isvarchandra Vidyasagar (1820–91), the epic poetry of Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824–73), the drama of Dinabandhu Mitra (1829–74), the novels of Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1838–94) and the lyrics of Biharilal Chakravarti (1834–94) – we have Rabindranath Tagore, a writer whose complete works were to run to thirty-two large volumes, covering almost every literary genre. He built on all their achievements, and went further: digging more deeply into Sanskrit (when he wanted a rich and complex diction) than even Madhusudan did; bringing prose closer to natural speech than Bankim had done; inventing a range of lyric metres and verse-forms that no writer before him in any modern Indian language had dreamed of. He was not alone; many other talents emerged during his lifetime. But no one could ignore him, and his achievement remains an almost oppressive legacy, too close still to its inheritors for it to be seen or assessed clearly.

I have tried, in this book, to be true to the spirit of movement in Tagore: not only through a selection that is chronological and which spans almost his whole career, but by trying in the English verse-forms I have used to convey that spirit. The constantly changing verse-forms require equal inventiveness in the translator, and I have tried many things: lines based on syllable or accent as well as metre; verses based on half-rhyme as well as rhyme. Sometimes I have been traditional, just as Tagore was traditional at times; sometimes I have produced forms that I believe are new to English poetry. In my notes I have tried to relate the restlessness and movement in Tagore’s poetry – seen in its purest form in the poems from balāka (1916) on, in which he used varying line-lengths, spreading out across the page – to his deepest ideas and intuitions: his sense of the khelā or play of the universe, of a process at work in Nature and man that involves ceaseless change through time, but which also remains tuned to an underlying and unchanging harmony.

He moves not

Tagore was a radical in the true sense, always trying to get to the root of things: but there were strains of traditionalism in him that separated him from other groups of Bengalis to whom the term ‘radical’ might more readily be applied. With terrorism he would have nothing to do: his one dip into subversive politics was a short-lived secret society called the Sanjivani Sabha, founded by his elder brother Jyotirindranath in 1876, recalled with amusement in My Reminiscences. But there was another very important current in nineteenth-century Bengal that was alien to Tagore – one that had its source in the radical group of students that clustered round a charismatic young Eurasian teacher called Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809–31) at Hindu College in the late 1820s. Derozio’s ideas can be traced, via his own schoolmasters in Calcutta, to the Scottish Enlightenment, to Hume and Reid and Dugald Stewart. He was perhaps not as revolutionary as some nationalist historians have wished to make out: he was certainly unfairly sacked from Hindu College in 1831. His students moved in various directions – one to the Christian ministry (Krishnamohan Banerji), one to journalism and satirical fiction (Pyarichand Mitra), one to Brahmoism (Ramtanu Lahiri) – but he left behind a legacy of free-thinking, agnosticism and pragmatism that can even be traced through to the socialist politicians who dominate West Bengal today. By the time Tagore was born, ‘Young Bengal’, as Derozio’s group was called, had mellowed, and Hindu College had been absorbed into the Government educational system; but there is a very real temperamental gulf between Tagore and the kind of attitudes that inspired the group’s more notorious escapades: their deliberate bating of the orthodox by the eating of beef; their contempt for missionaries; their bibulousness. Tagore was quite a dandy in his early twenties, an aesthete whose dress and demeanour attracted some ridicule; and the diary he wrote of his first visit to England in 1878 – the Brighton balls and musical evenings, the flirtatious séances with the daughters of his London guardians Dr and Mrs Scott – is ample evidence that the grey-bearded, long-robed poet was young once. But drinking parties, or revolt (like his great predecessor the epic poet Michael Madhusudan Datta) against arranged marriage? Never. Seriousness and traditionalism had some hold on him from boyhood.

This traditionalism could sometimes extend to quite surprisingly orthodox practices. Having been married off to a ten-year-old almost illiterate member of the peculiar Tagore family caste (they were Pirali Brahmins, a group that had supposedly lost caste generations ago through smelling – not even eating – some Muslim food), Tagore followed suit by marrying off his daughters Bela and Rani in 1901 when they were only fourteen and twelve respectively. Debendranath also adhered to practices such as the upanayan or sacred-thread investiture for Brahmins: Tagore went through it when he was eleven, and his own sons went through it too. But generally of course Brahmoism was anti-orthodox, and the essential cultural tradition to which Tagore belonged went back to Rammohan Roy. Tagore left the Brahmo church in his twenties; and it would be entirely wrong to describe him as a ‘Brahmo writer’. But to Rammohan Roy and his legacy he remained loyal throughout his life. He wrote on him several times: the very last address that he wrote, read out in the Mandir (temple) at Santiniketan in early 1941 when Tagore was too weak to read it himself, was on this great ‘Father of Modern India’; and in an important essay of 1925 on ‘The Cult of the Charka’, a criticism of Gandhi’s spinning-cult, he replied painfully to Gandhi’s charge that Rammohan Roy was ‘a pygmy’ compared to some of the other great men of India.

The tenets of Rammohan Roy from which Tagore never moved throughout his life were: contempt for idolatry and externalized, ritualistic religion; a belief that the truth of Hinduism lay in the Vedānta philosophy of the Upanisads, with its recognition of only one true God; and a desire to bring the various religions of the world together, to extract their shared and quintessential meaning. Tagore’s rationalism – profound and unswerving for all his poetic fervour – was Rammohan’s: it inspired in him the same hatred of intolerance and injustice and tyranny, and it also gave him a life-long interest in science. Some historians have identified Rammohan Roy with the ‘orientalist’ educational policy of the East India company up to 1835, its promotion of Oriental learning in Fort William College – for this policy had its roots in the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment and in particular the work of the pioneering Oriental scholar Sir William Jones. But in fact Rammohan believed that India needed Western science and learning – he wrote a famous letter to the Governor General Lord Amherst in 1823, condemning a Government proposal to establish a Sanskrit College in Calcutta. In his universalism, his belief that India must learn from the West as well as from her own heritage, we see his real debt to the Enlightenment, and the real nature of his influence on Tagore, who saw likewise.

Rammohan formed connections with Unitarianism in India, America and England (where, like Tagore’s grandfather Dwarkanath, he died, in Bristol in 1833); and when Tagore was in America for the first time in 1912–13, staying with his son Rathindranath at Urbana, Illinois, it was a Unitarian minister who asked Tagore to give, at various Unitarian chapels, the lectures that he later delivered at Harvard and published as Sādhanā (The Realization of Life), 1913. If ‘Unitarian’ were not a term that has become restricted to a particular sect, it would be a useful word for the tendency in Tagore that was opposite to the ‘progress’ described in the first section of this Introduction: for just as Tagore’s life was a continual progress, a continual moving forward, it was also a search for unity, for a stability of belief and moral principle to give meaning and order to everything he did.

This ‘Unitarian’ tendency had two complementary directions. On the one hand there was the syncretism in Tagore, a faith in the unity of man and the world that was patterned on his deep religious sense of a harmony underlying all things. This was what inspired the messianic role he took upon himself after he was made world-famous by the Nobel Prize: the defiant lectures against Nationalism in the Japan of 1916; the less-than-happy attempt to preach pan-Asianism in the turbulent China of 1924; the friendships with Romain Rolland (originating in a request from Rolland for Tagore to be a signatory to his ‘Declaration of Independence of the Spirit’ in 1919) and with Einstein; the noble attempt to create a ‘universal Indian’ university – Visva-Bharati – that would bring together not only the different cultures and languages of India, but scholars and learning from all over the world.