At the age of fifty, he was suddenly physically and emotionally exhausted. Not only had his literary labours been unremitting; there had been his energetic involvement in the public affairs of Bengal; there had been his school at Santiniketan, inaugurated in 1901; and there had been a shattering series of bereavements – wife, second daughter, father and youngest son. All this threw Tagore in upon himself, producing the austere devotional songs of the Bengali gītāñjali (1910); and it is crucial to remember that Tagore’s literary entrée to the West came at this particular phase in his art, setting the tone for all that was later expected of him abroad. To revive body and mind, he planned a trip to England (he had been twice before, in 1878 and 1890, but had made no mark then). He needed medical treatment, and he also claimed that he needed to relate his educational experiment to the world outside.

In March 1912 he was due to sail, but suddenly fell too ill to leave. He went to Shelidah, the family estate in north Bengal, to recover; and while he was there – too weak to write anything new – he diverted himself by translating the songs in gitāñjali. When he was well enough to sail in May, he went on with the translations on the ship. On arrival in London he went straight to the home of William Rothenstein, who had met Tagore on a painting tour of India in 1910. Rothenstein had already seen a few translations of Tagore’s poems done by Ajit Chakravarty, a teacher at Santiniketan, and had been impressed. He asked to see more – Tagore showed him the exercise book he had filled with translations, Rothenstein showed them to Yeats, and on 7 July 1912, Yeats read out the poems at a gathering in Rothenstein’s Hampstead home that included Ernest Rhys (who wrote a book about Tagore, published in 1915), Alice Meynell, Arthur Fox Strangways (who played an important part in securing Tagore’s profitable contracts with Macmillan) and Charles Freer Andrews (who became one of his most loyal associates at Santiniketan). The whole extraordinary business quickly gathered a momentum of its own, with the India Society edition of Gitanjali before the end of the year, rapturously reviewed, quickly followed by the Macmillan edition, and a sudden literary craze powerful enough for Thomas Sturge Moore to make his successful proposal of Tagore’s name to the Nobel Prize Committee in 1913.

Tagore’s popularity in England did not actually last very long: his lectures on Nationalism (1916) caused offence to a nation at war, and the return of his knighthood after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in 1919 effectively killed his English reputation. In America – Britain’s ally – these acts had also caused offence, and he was coolly received there during his second visit in 1920. His most astonishing successes were in Europe, his tours of 1921, 1926 and 1930. For this, especially the sometimes hysterical acclaim he received in Germany, there may be good historical reason, though no one has yet been able to assess it objectively: and the fame and the charisma had already been established. But the short-lived English fashion remains something of a mystery; as remote and peculiar as the craze for the spurious poems of Ossian in the 1760s.

Were Tagore’s translations spurious? They were started in all modesty, and the first book, Gitanjali, was the best. Thereafter their increasing inaccuracy and truncatedness owed something to the sheer pressure of work on Tagore, something to the fact that their success gave him inflated confidence in their quality (late in life he looked at them much more wryly: in a letter to Rothenstein in 1932 he regretted that they had been published at all). Short stories were generally farmed out to other people, and were scarcely glanced at by an over-busy Tagore. The plays are a nadir of unfaithfulness (Sacrifice, twenty-nine obscure and formless pages in English, is a brilliant, ambitious, cogent five-act drama in Bengali). But leaving the inferior work aside, even Gitanjali has not stood the test of time, could not have remained sufficient basis for the survival of a reputation after the formidable, tall, robed and bearded bearer of that reputation had gone from the world scene. The reason for this is not inaccuracy – Gitanjali is on the whole reasonably accurate; nor that Gitanjali represented only a fraction of Tagore’s sixty-odd books of verse (a really fine translation of a single book might revive Tagore’s reputation today); nor that it represented the religious rather than the humanistic strain in Tagore (it is false to distinguish the two); nor even that the language of the translations has dated. The simple, most elementary reason – perceived clearly only by Ezra Pound in reviews of Tagore in 1913 in the Fortnightly Review and the New Freewoman – was that most of the lyrics that Tagore chose to translate are actually songs, intimate combinations of words and melody. I shall say more about the songs in the next section of this Introduction. Let me simply say here that I do not believe you can translate songs, and I have not tried to translate songs in this book. Tagore himself said in Creative Unity (1922) that a song without its melody is like a butterfly whose wings have been plucked, and in My Reminiscences we read of his reluctance to publish books of the words of his songs, for that very reason.

Though he died only sixty years ago, Tagore as he presented himself to the world outside Bengal is far from us today: far because of the dependence of his sudden Western success on a very special set of factors, hard to define; far because his own translations do not really take us close to the scope or fabric of his creative work. The ideals that he preached are far, too – though no more so today than in his own day. In sober moments, such as the end of his second lecture on Nationalism, he knew that his voice was too feeble, too vulnerable to the charge that he was naïve or unpractical, for it to have any effect on the progress of modern civilization towards (though he died before Hiroshima) what he feared would be self-destruction.

The idealism kept him far from his countrymen too, deeply involved though he was in the life and culture of Bengal. There was a loftiness, a refusal to compromise, that eventually distanced him from the Indian nationalist struggle, though Gandhi and Nehru acknowledged their debt to him to the last, Gandhi calling him ‘The Great Sentinel’, the conscience of the sub-continent, Nehru (in a letter to Tagore’s biographer Krishna Kripalani) describing him, with Gandhi, as one of the two outstanding personalities in the world in the last quarter of a century. The loftiness – which included immense stoicism in the face of more personal bereavements than any man has a right to suffer – was another inheritance from his father Debendranath, who was known as Maharshi or ‘great seer’; but Tagore despite his deep religious feeling would not have liked such a title, for running through all his writing, and above all his songs, is not the full self-realization or enlightenment of a mystic or seer, but a passionate human yearning: a sense of the Ideal always being out of reach. His perceptions could bring him joy – in Nature and in children especially – but never the self-satisfaction of the religious fanatic, of one who has ‘found the truth’. More often his idealism brought him sorrow, realization that most of his efforts had been futile, that in his beloved school and university at Santiniketan he had, knowingly, tried to fly against the truth (expressed at the end of his third lecture on Personality) that institutions, like kingdoms and nations, fade in the air like dreams.

He is near

In this Introduction I am deliberately distancing myself from my material: chapter and verse for Tagore’s ideas will be found in the Notes at the end of the book.