The Essential Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore. Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, editors. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. 819 + xxxiv pages.
Just for the sake of learning about yourself in the context of your own time and its place in literary, socioeconomic, and geopolitical history, The Essential Tagore is an endless adventure. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the first Asian laureate of Nobel Prize for Literature, apparently never exhausted his oeuvre across so many genres during his seven-decade career. He produced long-lasting fiction and poetry as a child, and dictated his last creative works on his deathbed traveling the world over several times in support of much more than his literary endeavors. He was also an educator devoted to redirecting children from a stifling traditional schooling system to a more creative learning environment, as he highlighted in his Nobel acceptance speech, included in this collection. The Bengali author lived when his beloved country contended with poverty exacerbated draconian public policies, India pushed toward independence from a recalcitrant United Kingdom, a centuries-old conflict intensified between his Hindu and Muslim compatriots, and the world survived more than two horrific global wars.
Reading Tagore is like contemplating the totality of human experience. This massive volume opens with two in-depth, reverential, engaging essays by the editors about Tagore's literary vision and biography. Each of the ten following sections divide his writing by letters, autobiography, nonfiction, poetry, songs, stories, novels, drama, humor, and travelogue. This partitioning is not as easy a task as it may seem, as Tagore’s humor might come in the way of a children’s play, his letters burst with polemic pondering as well as poetic imagery, and his fiction and poetry can be equally narrative and lyrical. As abundant as the book is, the editors’ prefatory notes to each section frequently describe how limited the collection actually is. Much of this prodigious literary giant’s work is difficult to translate into English or accompanied by the author’s artwork, beyond the scope of the compilation. The editors refer readers to numerous other Tagore collections, which the present volume will inspire readers to investigate.
While Tagore was a fierce human rights advocate, he did not always walk lockstep with Mohandas K. Gandhi’s vision for an independent India. On the salt and cloth boycotts, he wrote, “We have killed diversities in opinions and actions and have termed it national unity. ... All we see around us are signs of divisiveness, of separation. When this difference is very strong, we are unable to establish our rule or tenets in our own land. So, someone else will govern over us—nothing we can do can prevent that from happening.”
Tagore surely struggled with the contradiction of his best intentions of seeing equality among all Indian citizens and reaping the benefits of farmers’ labor as a landlord. Nevertheless, at the center of his philosophy is an awe of natural world and a deepest respect for humanity. Read and reread his poem “I Saw in the Twilight” as ample testimony, and continue capturing other delights from this genius throughout The Essential Tagore, a classic by any standard.
