Krishna Dutta

Tagore lived a busy and wide ranging eighty years, which this biography surveys broadly. A truly comprehensive biography would have to be massive - maybe five volumes. But this biography does a good job of mapping out the terrain.

Probably the central axis of the book is the relationship between Gandhi and Tagore. They were not particularly close personally. They probably met less than a dozen times. But they wrote each other letters, some of which were then published. They were both major cultural figures and their conversations, their debates, were important to India and the world, were vital strands in the development of India as it struggled toward independence.

I was just listening to a lecture series "The Meaning of Life" by Jay Garfield, a professor of philosophy at Smith College. He devotes two lectures to Gandhi and portrays him as a deep thinker. This contrasts with the portrait drawn here by Dutta and Robinson, whose Gandhi comes across rather small minded and stubborn. But really this portrait is no more than a sketch. Gandhi and Tagore did not clash head-on. They were pursuing quite different projects, and each couldn't really understand why the other was so committed to heading off in that other direction. Tagore wanted to integrate East and West, India and Europe. Gandhi wanted to reassert the value of Indian civilization more purely.

Dutta and Robinson handle in a balanced way a difficult aspect of Tagore, that he was somewhat of an elitist rather than a democrat. He admired strong leadership... including such folks as Mussolini and Stalin. Others managed to open his eyes to the defects of Mussolini. It seems Tagore admired the Soviet system to his end. Of course, it seems the most widespread dejection with Stalin waited to the 1950s... I am thinking of Doris Lessing's _Golden Notebook_ ... do I have that right? Where the revelations of the Gulag and the political assasinations, the Lysenko affair, finally disillusioned even the Marxists in Europe.

This biography focusses mostly on politics and society, e.g. on Tagore's reception across his many tours around the world, how in one decade in the USA he would receive wild accolades, and then in another decade or so would be run out of the country under a cloud of suspicion.

Another theme of the book is the difficulty in translation. One problem is simply that Bengali village life is so remote from the life of a modern European. Another problem is even Bengali literary culture is remote and the links are tenuous. If only a small fraction of works are translated, and that selection is not representative, and if much of that is poorly translated... one thing that seems to have happened to Tagore is that his reputation got anchored to the works first translated, especially Gitanjali. Tagore's vast literary output was well known in Bengal, but he was stuck with that narrower slice translated to the West. That narrow slice suited European taste in the first decades of the twentieth century, before the Great War. But later those works looked naive.

Tagore was a world figure. This biography does a good job of showing him on the world stage, of showing the interplay between his life and the grand story of the world in that time. There is a lot of material to cover in 372 pages and the book keeps a steady pace, not pausing very long to study in detail or in depth. But prepared by way of this broadly ranging perspective, the reader will be ready to dive in to most any of the myriad dimensions of the life of this prolific man.… (lisätietoja)