This kind of syncretism goes directly back to Rammohan Roy, and it is what Tagore has left behind in the West as his abiding memory – faint though it is now, and not always advantageous to him, for the world does not suffer idealists gladly. But there was another direction to the Unitarian tendency, and here Tagore was very different from Rammohan.

Rammohan’s One God was an abstraction, the pure, impersonal Brahman of the Vedānta. He was a prosaic man, analytical rather than imaginative. Tagore’s religion, however, was a poet’s religion: the unity of God and his creation was the unity of a creative personality, who revealed himself to Tagore as a personal jīban-debatā, a ‘life-god’; and just as God governs and penetrates and harmonizes all aspects of an endlessly varied universe, so this jīban-debatā governed and penetrated and harmonized Tagore’s own varied creative activities. Personality, at the human level, can only be realized through locale, through the immediate culture and language and land to which one belongs. Rammohan was a Bengali by birth, but there was nothing specifically Bengali about him (though he pioneered Bengali discursive prose). Tagore, however, is inseparable from his Bengali background. This was the basic trouble with what the West saw of him: they got the universal message, which because it came to them detached from Tagore’s background appeared to many insipid or gutless; they saw the all-Indian, all-world figure, not the Bengali; they read the poetry in English – a language that was being steadily eroded and etiolated by its very universal currency – not in the poet’s mother tongue.

Tagore was rooted to Bengal. He travelled all over the world, but no landscape could ever move him more than the flat, dry plain around his beloved Santiniketan. The rivers of East Bengal inspired much of the poetry of his thirties; but it was the drier West Bengal landscape, with its spaciousness of sky and simplicity of earth, that he came to regard as his home. Even the Himalayas – so important to his father, who took Tagore there when he was eleven years old – never meant as much to him. He belonged with the land, the flowers and the trees; the birds; the people – whom he cared for genuinely, not just romantically, combining his educational experiment at Santiniketan with an agricultural experiment at the neighbouring village of Santiniketan; the music, which he enriched immeasurably with his two thousand songs; and above all the language of Bengal. He may have moved to English at a particular phase in his life; but he never moved from Bengali. He insisted that Bengali should be the medium of instruction in Bengal’s schools, and wrote several essays and lectures on this theme. When he was invited in February 1937 to deliver the Convocation Address at Calcutta University, he made history by delivering it in Bengali. Back in 1895 he had made a similar stand at the Bengal Provincial Conference, demanding (unsuccessfully) that all business should be conducted in Bengali. His concern for the language went. far beyond the literary use he made of it. Near the end of his life, he wrote a technical treatise on the Bengali language, bāngla-bhāsa paricay (1938); when the Bangiya Sāhitya Pariimagead (Bengali Literary Academy) was founded in 1894, he provided a list of scientific and technical terms.

The Bengali language, the fundamental unifying factor in all Tagore’s writing, binding him to one place and one time for all his restless travelling, cannot of course be present in a book of this kind. The difficulty that Western readers will have is that whereas if they read a translation from French, Italian, German or even Russian they are able to relate the text to a preconception of the original language – vague maybe, but real nonetheless – for a modern Indian language there can be no such aid. Sanskrit, after two centuries of Western scholarship, has conveyed its character to at least some foreigners; but the modern Indian languages have been unlearned, unstudied, unappreciated by outsiders. In the early days of the British presence in Bengal, there were enthusiasts. The Baptist missionary William Carey (1761–1843) is revered to this day in Bengal for his pioneering work: he and his colleagues at Serampore and Fort William were among the first writers of Bengali prose. But when Oriental learning ceased to be Government policy in India, and a bureaucracy and educational system based on English established itself after the assumption of the rule of India by the Crown in 1858, the language was barely learnt beyond the practical level, seldom to the level needed for the enjoyment of literature.

One could list some of the characteristics of Bengali: its rich sound patterns, exploited to the full by Tagore; its elegantly economical and regular inflexional system; its abundance of vivid, onomatopoeic words (non-Sanskritic and probably very ancient); its eclecticism of vocabulary – Persian words often giving a colloquial alternative to a Sanskrit word, just as in English there is a choice between a Latin and an Anglo-Saxon word); the freedom with which it can draw on the immense resources of Sanskrit for its higher vocabulary; its subtle and inventive compound verbal expressions. One could also talk of some of its drawbacks: the cumbersome nature of some of its prose, over-Sanskritic in vocabulary, over-influenced by English in syntax; or the facile manner in which it can rhyme so easily in poetry. But what would all this serve? From the point of view of foreigners, in the final analysis Tagore’s writings cannot move from the language to which they belong; and the language is not one that many foreigners will probably ever learn.

He is far

Granted that translation, especially of poetry, is ultimately impossible, have foreigners had even the limited access to Tagore’s writing that translation can afford? Translations by native speakers have been done steadily over the years, sometimes well – I would single out Sheila Chatterji’s translation of Tagore’s late book of vers libre, syāmaī (1936, translation published by Visva-Bharati in 1955) as perhaps the best book of verse translation; and some of them have been published outside India (in particular Aurobindo Bose’s three books: A Flight of Swans, John Murray, 1955; The Herald of Spring, 1957; Wings of Death, 1960). Edward Thompson, whom I have already mentioned in my Preface, included quite large chunks of translation in his biography of Tagore, and also published a small pamphlet in his own Augustan Books of Poetry series in 1925. An anthology, mainly of short stories, came out in America in 1965 (The Housewarming and Other Selected Writings, translated by Mary Lago, Tarun Gupta and Amiya Chakravarti, Signet Classics). But none of these have been sufficient to displace the impression left behind by Tagore’s own translations, which are still available, in a volume that gives no information whatever about the original works, as the Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore, Macmillan, first edition 1936. This book is not as well known as it was, but it survives sufficiently for many people to have at least glanced through it; and they sometimes express surprise when they learn that Tagore wrote primarily in Bengali.

Tagore started to translate through a sequence of accidents.