The Other Tagore

Amit Chaudhuri speaks to Chandrima S. Bhattacharya on discovering the poet's secret selves

It is good that Tagore cannot be wished away. Or can the poet only be referred to in the plural? Many things require revision with Tagore.

Oxford Bookstore on Friday evening saw the launch of Amit Chaudhuri's book On Tagore ' Reading the poet today, where the writer was in conversation with Swapan Chakravorty, the director-general of National Library and the secretary and curator of Victoria Memorial, who described Tagore as "tricky", an unusual adjective for Tagore.

The evening would lead to much unusual grammar.

Chakravorty began the conversation by referring to the "ungendered pronouns" in Tagore, something Chaudhuri had referred to in his book, in the song Ekhono taare chokhe dekhini/ shudhu baanshi shunechhi (I haven't seen him with my eyes as yet,/ I have only heard a flute playing, Chaudhuri's translation). The book, published by Penguin/Viking, is a collection of essays that appeared in publications in the country and abroad.

Two things, apparently small, Chaudhuri said, were significant, about the pronoun.

First, his English translation has the word "him" in the first line, though the Bengali pronoun "taare" does not specify the gender, but derives it through context. Second, the second line, literally, does not mention if the flute belongs to a male figure, though a Bengali reader may assume so, so it was translated as just "a flute". Both the points, he said, were important in understanding "the Brahmo-influenced, secular spirituality of Tagore's poetry, the leap he is making, very subtly, from the old world to the new".

In a traditional devotional song, the flute-player would be Krishna. "In Tagore's song, the player is not named, and the indeterminate Bengali pronoun is apposite to the nameless, secular meanings of modern India that have replaced the hallowed, familiar names and significances," Chaudhuri writes in his essay The Flute of Modernity.

In Tagore, Chaudhuri, novelist, critic and teacher, sees all the other modernist tendencies ' breaks, ruptures, ambiguities, silences and a complicated relationship with nature, history and consciousness, to name only a few. "Tagore is relevant to me for reasons other than his putative greatness," he says.

The most fundamental thing about modernism is not the ugliness of the city, tenement housing and the heap of broken images that belong to T.S. Eliot. That is why perhaps Buddhadeb Bose had complained about Tagore's poetry, says Chaudhuri in an interview with The Telegraph earlier in the week, as not being modern enough.

But a certain kind of imagery is not the most fundamental feature of modernism. If Buddhadeb was disappointed with Tagore for not being Eliot, it can be pointed out that Tagore hardly wanted to be Eliot ' though he did write Banshi. Eliot's The Waste Land is Dante's metaphor for Inferno, post World War II, post-industrial, but for Tagore the world is not Inferno.

His poetry is about the moment of arrival, joyous arrivals. Much of Tagore's work is "mesmerised" by coincidence and possibility, says Chaudhuri. "The role of the na�ve or nature poet, or even a certain kind of romantic, is to wonder at the real, at the universe, but the speaker in the song (Aakash bhora) is not just transfixed by the beauty of the universe but by the happenstance that's brought him to it: 'in the midst of this, I find myself'."

History, like time, cannot be appropriated either. Tagore's poem on Kalidasa's Meghadutam is based on the deferral of reaching Alaka. When the reader finishes reading Meghadutam, that world is lost. Beauty lies in the fragment, in the moment.

Modernism is about the breaks in time, a moment in which a radical change occurs, for the valuable cannot be captured in entirety; what is valuable is available fleetingly ' Majhe majhe tobo dekha pai (I can see only from time to time). Truth is never an overarching presence, it is an imperfectly perceived, partially known, unnamed thing ' more like Joyce's epiphany and also like Wordsworth's spots of time, a bit Modern, a bit Romantic, though certainly not romantic in the way Rabindrasangeet is sung these days.

Chaudhuri, a singer of Indian classical music, had begun on a wrong note with Tagore. He lists the several Tagores he grew up with and found annoying. On top is Tagore the "romantic, almost bordering on the sentimental" or the maudlin, not to mention the instrumental, found in abundance in a certain way his songs are being sung these days. Then there is Tagore the national icon, sculpted epically on the Mount Rushmore of the Indian imagination, alongside Gandhi and Nehru.

The declamatory Tagore, of lines such as "Where the mind is without fear" ' fared no better when Chaudhuri in his late teens was discovering complexities: Indian classical music, "the devotional songs of Meerabai, Tulsidas and Kabir, not to speak of the work of the modernists". The situation did not improve with an uncle in London who imagined Tagore as "a historical pinnacle, after which everything was a kind of decline, and every writer a latecomer".

Historical pinnacles can be boring, irritating and tyrannical and are hardly poets. But more was to come.

Partly because his mother is the renowned Rabindrasangeet singer Bijoya Chaudhuri, who, like Subinoy Roy, sings in the "classicist" style, with a certain detachment, as "sentiment is not native to Indian classical", and partly because he is a Bengali (though he did not always live in Calcutta), Tagore was an "inescapable constituent" of his life. Gradually Chaudhuri discovered his startling, secret poet. He was moved by Tagore's craft and his skill, and his desire for life: "Jagate anandajagne amar nimantran".

The poet is alive every moment in his words. But we have banished him to the mountaintop of fame, and death. He needs to be brought back to life.