Tagore, Tagoreans, and Turnover By Vasabjit Banerjee (with permission of course))

Growing up in 1980s and 1990s Calcutta (not Kolkata), I felt that Tagore was omnipresent. Yes, he had been dead for over forty years, but a visitor would think he was either a pop star or a politician in West Bengal. The main reason for Tagore’s omnipresence was that he expressed the core ideology of the ruling party. The CPM leaders were not Marxists, they were Tagoreans: elites confident of their ability to express the wishes of the masses and control them. Moreover, Tagorism was guaranteed international respectability (guaranteed by a Swedish medal), which Subhas Bose with his uncomfortable Nazi connections lacked.

Tagore’s greatest propaganda medium was the Bengali programs on Doordarshan. There were music programs dedicated to Rabindra-sangeet where middle aged women and men howled with harmoniums in a language so formal and stilted that it would make Bach’s church music seem lively. Then, there were the Rabindra-nritya interludes in which slightly overweight Bengali women vigorously moved their arms making intricate gestures. The immobility of the other body parts made these dances seem like Bharatnatyam ‘lite’ or Kathak-kali without facial expressions, unless Tapas Pal’s two modes of grief and extreme happiness were considered the full spectrum of expressions. Finally, there were the endless discussions on Tagore by bearded, bespectacled, and mentally flatulent intellectuals. The topics were: what had Tagore accomplished; why had he accomplished what he had accomplished; and, what is the meaning of accomplishment according to Tagore. In short, Tagore was the alpha and omega of the Bengali programs.

There were ways to escape Tagore: days and times when a young boy knew that he could avoid being ambushed by the Tagoreans. These included Chitrahaar, and the Hindi movies on weekends. After the Second Channel came into existence, there were a few other programs. These short escapes were either courtesy of central Doordarshan or the state minorities who got some programs (Urdu news, Gurkha cultural programs) because they possibly threatened armed rebellion against Tagorean forces. As a sidebar: imagine the Vogon like mentality of naming the Second Channel as the “Second Channel”.

But, wait, Tagore was not only on television, he was read, discussed, and sometimes even critiqued (by some respectable former Naxals). At school, his poems for children was a must read; at the movies, even the demi-god Satyajit Ray made movies on him and his novels. At home, my father had bought the entire Tagore collection, called the Rachanabali. In doing so, he was following the footsteps of his father. The only difference was that my grandfather, an established businessman, left a dog eared copy of Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Make Friends and Influence People’, while the Rachanabali seemed crisp to touch two decades after his death.

All of this made Tagore seem like a superhuman to me. He was a perfect divinity. Compared to Tagore, Ma Kali was uncouth, Ganeshji was fat, Durga was a housewife. But Tagore was the infinite mind, dressed in long robes, with a beard like Zeus, whose spirit resided in the Mount Olympus like near-yet-far Shantiniketan. Tagore’s status remained thus until I heard his voice on a gramophone record: ‘effete’ was the first word that came to my male chauvinist mind. This doubt, however, was buried by the overwhelming evidence of his greatness.

It was at this time that one of my aunts handed me a copy of short stories by Tarashankar Bandopdhyay. I was rudely shocked by his words: simple, clear, and precise. I was touched by his sentiments: unashamed to be nationalist and plebian. His rural Bengal was made of red clay, strong men and women, of toil, happiness and heartbreak. Tarashankar’s heroes were not upper class bhadralok. Tarashankar, in fact, destroyed the babus: Shibnath, a zamindar, willingly gives up his property and status to join the Gandhian mass movement. His characters were intensely nationalist, not merely that they loved the country called India, rather because they loved their village, their land, their deity, their art forms and their honor.

After reading Tarashankar, I realized Tagore’s worldview. Tagore used the mental lens of the bhadralok or directly focused on them. In terms of their mental lens, he reflected their perspective with regards social equity. In Ghare Baire, his hero was Nikhil the patient zamindar who opposes the rabble rousing bhadralok freedom fighter Sandip. In short, Tagore chose the leadership of the benevolent despot. According to Tapati Dasgupta, in the book ‘Social Thoughts of Rabindranath Tagore’, he also upheld the virtues of private property, and the necessity of poverty to expiate the wealthy via charity. Apropos the issue of equity: the character called ‘dada’ in Tarashankar’s Dhatridebata explains that neither the benevolent despotism of the enlightened zamindar nor violent revolution can address the inequities of caste and poverty.

Tagore focused on the bhadralok in Shesher Kabita, where he upheld the virtues of cultural nationalism via his antagonists Amit, the westernized dropout from English universities, or the sadly westernized and spiritually lost Katie. Yet Tagore discussed and decried political nationalism with both Okakura Tenshin the Japanese art critic, and Mahatma Gandhi. This seeming contradiction is explained in his fear that once the masses were brought into the politics by the elites, it would be the first step to the masses destroying the elites.

In this, Tagore was right: the politicized masses did sweep away the old order. In Bengal, the success of the Krishak Praja Party exposed the arrogance of the bhadralok for assuming that they represented rural Bengal against the British. After independence, the CPM attacked the Bangrej (anglicized) Bhadralok for marginalizing the peasants and the petit bourgeois babu. Now, the Trinamul is attacking the babu for having arrogated itself as the overseer of peasant interests.

What will the new world of peasants be? The CPM had forgotten that television had brought images of the outside world to the peasants, that poverty at home and opportunities elsewhere had driven them to other parts of the country. The peasants realized what Tagore’s followers had brought: stagnation in the name of equality; poverty via uncertain control of land; and speeches, lots of speeches. Their support for the Trinamul against violent and economic repression by the CPM reveals that peasants are more rational and confident of their own power than the political overlords had anticipated.

If I predict correctly, the peasants will prefer Hindi songs over stilted poetry and immobile ballets. Peasants will also worship the Gods as if they existed in flesh and blood, not as some sophisticated, abstract, infinite being. Finally, the peasants will want better schools for their children, better roads, less Party Office intrusions and more government administration. Their children will want more urban jobs than enough land to subsist on. It will be a world that Tagoreans tried to block from Doordarshan all those years ago!