Talks in China
Rabindranath Tagore
Autobiographical
Lately I read an observation in one of your papers that, being a philosopher, I was half an hour late in attending a particular meeting. I could satisfactorily explain my conduct if the complaint were restricted to this one casual event, but I believe the writer took it to be a symbol of some truth about me which was not accidental. I suppose that what gave him more serious concern was that according to him I was altogether out of date in this modern age, that I ought to have been born 2,000 years ago when poets dreamed over their brimming wine-cups in the moonlight, and philosophers ignored everything immediate, time and space.
This has caused me some surprise, which I am sure will grow into amusement when I have more leisure than I have now. Almost from my boyhood I have been accustomed to hear from my own countrymen angry remonstrances that I was too crassly modern, that I had missed all the great lessons from the past, and with it my right of entry into a venerable civilisation like that of India. For your people I am obsolete, and therefore useless, and for mine, newfangled and therefore obnoxious. I do not know which is true.
Dr. Hu Shih, yesterday, in the capacity of astrologer, calculated from the sum and stars some augury on my visit to this country. I suppose he will be able to tell from the antics of the stars, under what auspices, and what contradictory influences I was born. He will let me know why this unfortunate being has been so continually suspected to be contraband,--smuggled on to the wrong shore of time,---not only by his own countrymen to whom he is too familiar, but by others to whom he could hardly have yet given any occasion for grave anxiety. Because of this misunderstanding, I have been asked by my friends to introduce myself to you with some biographical details so that my ideas may not appear to you too visionary, and frighten you as does an apparition that has lost its context of life.
I was born in 1861 : that is not an important date of history but it belongs to a great period of our history in Bengal. You do not know perhaps that we have our places of pilgrimage in those spots where the rivers meet in confluence, the rivers which to us are the symbols of the spirit of life in nature, and which in their meeting present emblems of the meeting of spirits, the meeting of ideals. Just about the time I was born the currents of three movements had met in the life of our country.
One of these movements was religious, introduced by a very great-hearted man of gigantic intelligence, Raja Rammohan Roy. It was revolutionary, for he tried to re-open the channel of spiritual life which had been obstructed for many years by the sands and debris of creeds that were formal and materialistic, fixed in external practices lacking spiritual significance.
There was a great fight between him and the orthodox who suspected every living idea that was dynamic. People who cling to an ancient past have their pride in the antiquity of their accumulations, in the sublimity of time-honoured walls around them. They grow nervous and angry when some great spirit, some lover of truth, breaks open their enclosure and floods it with the sunshine of thought and the breath of life. Ideas cause movement and all movements forward they consider to be a menace against their warehouse security.
This was happening about the time I was born. I am proud to say that my father was one of the great leaders of that movement, a movement for whose sake he suffered ostracism and braved social indignities. I was born in this atmosphere of the advent of new ideals, which at the same time were old, older than all the things of which that age was proud.
There was a second movement equally important. A certain great man, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee who, though much older than myself, was my contemporary and lived long enough for me to see him, was the first pioneer in the literary revolution which happened in Bengal about that time.
Our self-expression must find its freedom not only in spiritual ideas but in literary manifestations. But our literature had allowed its creative life to vanish. It lacked movement and was fettered by a rhetoric rigid as death. This man was brave enough to go against the orthodoxy which believed in the security of tombstones and in that perfection which can only belong to the lifeless. He lifted the dead weight of ponderous forms from our language and with a touch of his magic wand aroused our literature from her age-long sleep. What a vision of beauty she revealed to us when she awoke in the fullness of her strength and grace.
There was yet another movement started about this time in my country which was called National. It was not fully political, but it began to give voice to the mind of our people trying to assert their own personality. It was a voice of indignation at the humiliation constantly heaped upon us by people who were not oriental, and who had, especially at that time, the habit of sharply dividing the human world into the good and the bad according to what was similar to their life and what was different.
This contemptuous spirit of separateness was perpetually jutting us and causing great damage to our own world of culture. It generated in the young men of our country distrust of all things that had come to them as an inheritance from their past. The old Indian pictures and other works of art were laughed at by our students in imitation of the laughter of their European schoolmasters.
Though latterly our teachers themselves changed our mind their disciples have not yet fully regained confidence in the merit of our art traditions even where such merit is permanent. They have had a long period of encouragement in developing an appetite for third-rate copies of French pictures, for gaudy oleographs abjectly cheap, for the pictures that are products of mechanical accuracy of a stereotyped standard, and they still consider it to be a symptom of superior culture to be able disdainfully to refuse oriental works of creation.
The modern young men of India nodded their heads and said that true originality lay not in the discovery of the rhythm of the essential in the heart of reality but in the full lips, tinted cheeks and bare breasts of imported pictures. The same spirit of rejection, born of utter ignorance, was cultivated in other departments of our culture. It was the result of the hypnotism exercised upon the minds of the younger generation by people who were loud of voice and strong of arm.
The spirit of revolt had just awakened when I was born and some people were already trying to stem the tide. This movement had its leaders in my own family, in my brothers and cousins, and they stood up to save the people’s mind from being insulted and ignored by the people themselves.
We have to find some basis that is universal, that is eternal, and we have to discover those things which have an everlasting value. The national movement was started to proclaim that we must not be indiscriminate in our rejection of the past. This was not a reactionary movement but a revolutionary one, because it set out with a great courage to deny and to oppose all pride in mere borrowings.
These three movements were on foot and in all three the members of my own family took active part. We were ostracised because of our heterodox opinions about religion and therefore we enjoyed the freedom of the outcaste. We had to build our own world with our own thoughts and energy of mind. We had to build it from the foundation, and therefore had to seek the foundation that was firm.
We cannot create foundations, but we can build a superstructure. These two must go together, the giving of expression to new life and the seeking of foundations which must be in the heart of the people themselves. Those who believe that life consists in change because change implies movement, should remember that there must be an underlying thread of unity or the change, being unmeaning, will cause conflict and clash. This thread of unity must not be of the outside, but in our own soul.
As I say, I was born and brought up in an atmosphere of the confluence of three movements, all of which were revolutionary. I was born in a family which had to live its own life, which led me from my young days to seek guidance for my own self-expression in my own inner standard of judgement. The medium of expression doubtless was my mother tongue. But the language which belonged to the people had to be modulated according to the urging which I as an individual had.
No poet should borrow his medium ready made from some shop of respectability. He should not only have his own seeds but prepare his own soil. Each poet has his own distinct medium of language,---not because the whole language is of his own make, but because his individual use of it, having life’s magic touch, transforms it into a special vehicle of his own creation.
The races of man have poetry in their heart and it is necessary for them to give, as far as is possible, a perfect expression to their sentiments. For this they must have a medium, moving and pliant, which can freshly become their own, age after age. All great languages have undergone and are still undergoing changes. Those languages which resist the spirit of change are doomed and will never produce great harvests of thought and literature. When forms become fixed, the spirit either weakly accepts its imprisonment within them, or rebels. All revolutions consist of the fight of the within against invasion by the without.
There was a great chapter in the history of life on this earth when some irresistible inner force in man found its way out into the scheme of things, and sent forth its triumphant mutinous voice, with the cry that it was not going to be overwhelmed from outside by the huge brute beast of a body. How helpless it appeared at the moment, but has it not nearly won? In our social life also, revolution breaks out when some power concentrates itself in outside arrangements and threatens to enslave for its own purpose the power which we have within us.
When an organisation which is a machine, becomes a central force, political, commercial, educational or religious, it obstructs the free flow of inner life of the people and waylays and exploits it for the augmentation of its own power. Today such concentration of power is fast multiplying on the outside and the cry of the oppressed spirit of man is in the air which struggles to free itself from the grip of screws and bolts, of unmeaning obsessions.
Revolution must come and men must risk revilement and misunderstanding, especially from those who want to be comfortable, who put their faith in materialism and convention, and who belong truly to the dead past and not to modern times, the past that had its age in distant antiquity when physical flesh and size predominated, and not the mind of man.
Purely physical dominance is mechanical and modern machines are merely exaggerating our bodies, lengthening and multiplying our limbs. The modern child delights in this enormous bodily bulk, representing an inordinate material power, saying “Let me have the big toy and on sentiment which can disturb it.” He does not realise that we are returning to that antediluvian age which revelled in its production of gigantic physical frames, leaving no room for the freedom of the inner spirit.
All great human movements in the world are related to some great ideal. Some of you say that such a doctrine of spirit has been in its death-throes for over a century and is now moribund; that we have nothing to rely upon but external forces and material foundations. But I say, on my part, that your doctrine was obsolete long ago. It was exploded in the springtime of life, when mere size was swept off the face of the world, and was replaced by man, brought naked into the heart of creation, man with his helpless body, but with his indomitable mind and spirit.
The impertinence of material things is extremely old. The revelation of spirit in man is truly modern: I am on its side, for I am modern. I have explained how I was born into a family which rebelled, which had faith in its loyalty to an inner ideal. If you want to reject me, you are free to do so. But I have my right as a revolutionary to carry the flag of freedom of spirit into the shrine of your idols,---material power and accumulation.