Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Friendship

Abstract

Caught between an arrogant European modernist elite and a proprietorial Indian nationalism, Tagore challenged the spatial dimensions of modernity by critiquing both Eurocentrism and a simplistic anti-imperialism. Tagore did build bridges with some Western intellectuals and social activists but much of his life illustrates the difficulties of meaningful cross-cultural relations and the shortcomings of a liberal ‘politics of friendship’. If this is in part due to the inadequacy of translation, then we need more and better translations. Rather than resurrecting a platitudinous ‘cosmopolitan’ World Citizen, Tagore's work should require us to think more critically about parallel modernities and different ways of imagining our futures. As China and India, perhaps above all others, grow in economic, political and cultural strength, these questions are likely to become more pressing.

Keywords:

• Tagore
• Yeats
• Andrews
• Thompson
• politics of friendship
• liberalism
• anti-colonialism
• nationalism
• modernity

Notes

¹ Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), p.230.

² Rabindranath Tagore to C.F. Andrews, Jan. 1913, C.F. Andrews' notebook, C.F. Andrews Papers, Rabindra Bhavana. The original letter has been lost, but a draft was copied by Andrews into his notebook.

³ Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Race Conflict’, (1913) in Sisir Kumar Das (ed.), The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore: Volume II (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996), p.363.

⁴ See for example Martha C. Nussbaum, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Pheang Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Penguin, 2007); and Rahul Rao, Third World Protest: Between the Home and the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

⁵ I explore and (hopefully) justify this claim at some length in my book Empire, Nationalism and the Postcolonial World: Rabindranath Tagore's Writings on History, Politics and Society (London: Routledge, 2011).

⁶ See ibid., esp. Ch.3.

⁷ Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (London: Macmillan, 1917), p.5, emphasis added.

⁸ A lecture—the content of which formed the main output of his American tour in 1916—given in Pasadena on 10 October 1916.

⁹ Literatus, ‘Rabindranath Tagore in America’, in The Modern Review, Vol.21, no.6 (1917), p.661.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Rabindranath Tagore, Kewanee Courier (Illinois) (30 Oct. 1916), published in ibid, p.661.

¹² Rabindranath Tagore, ‘My Interpretation of India's History’, quoted in Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore (London: Macmillan, 1918), p.284.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ A useful overview can be found in Andrew Vincent, Nationalism and Particularity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Ch.8.

¹⁵ Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

¹⁶ From Derrida's deconstructionist perspective all ‘natural’ identity categories—family, clan, nation and class, as well as the associated concepts of community, culture, nation etc.—are ultimately dependent on language and are therefore discursive conventions. In Derrida's usage the politics of friendship is a utopian vision transcending these discursively policed identities. See Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 2005). My own usage of the term is in the context of social and intellectual history rather than normative theory.

¹⁷ Raymond Williams, Culture and Materialism (London: Verso, 1980), pp.148–69.

¹⁸ Andrews to Tagore, 14 Jan. 1914, Andrews Files, Tagore Papers, Rabindra Bhavana.

¹⁹ Ezra Pound to Dorothy Shakespear, 4 Oct. 1912, published in A. Walton Litz and Omar S. Pound, Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters, 1910–1914 (London: Faber, 1985), p.163, quoted in Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: An Anthology (London: Picador, 1997), p.102.

²⁰ Ezra Pound, ‘Rabindranath Tagore’, in Fortnightly Review, Vol.99 (Mar. 1913).

²¹ My research on Swedish papers in the Nobel Committee archive uncovered the fact that a member of the Nobel Committee could read Bengali, and that this enabled them to access a wider range of Tagore's work, well beyond Gitanjali, the translation and promotion of which Yeats had claimed credit for. See Michael Collins, ‘History and the Postcolonial: Rabindranath Tagore's Reception in London, 1912–1913’, in The International Journal of the Humanities, Vol.4, no.9 (Aug. 2007), pp.71–84; and Collins, Empire, Nationalism and the Postcolonial World, Ch.2.

²² Louise Blakeney Williams, ‘Overcoming the Contagion of Mimicry: The Cosmopolitan Nationalism and Modernist History of Rabindranath Tagore and W.B. Yeats’, in The American Historical Review, Vol.112, no.1 (2007), p.69.

²³ Ganesh N. Devy, ‘The Indian Yeats’, in Toshi Furomoto et al (eds), International Aspects of Irish Literature (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1996), p.99.

²⁴ A 1913 ‘referendum’ on the ‘three greatest living English poets in order of excellence’, conducted by the Journal of Education, placed Yeats tenth, with Rudyard Kipling in first place. See press cutting in E.J. Thompson Papers, MS Eng. c. 5279, Folio 56, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

²⁵ For example see Hirendranath Datta, ‘Tagore and Yeats’, in Visva-Bharati Quarterly, Vol.17, no.1 (May–July 1951), pp.29–34.

²⁶ W.B. Yeats, ‘Introduction to Gitanjali’ (1912), in Sisir Kumar Das (ed.), The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore: Volume I (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1994), p.38.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Mary Lago, ‘The Parting of the Ways: A Comparative Study of Yeats and Tagore’, in Indian Literature, Vol.6, no.2 (1963), p.5.

²⁹ Allan Wade (ed.), The Letters of W.B. Yeats (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), pp.834–5.

³⁰ Ezra Pound to Harriet Monroe, 22 April 1913, in D.D. Paige, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941 (London: Faber, 1982), p.19. Strangely, this is frequently misquoted as ‘mere theosophy’: the subtle change in emphasis is important. Pound claims that the translation work was only at Tagore's instigation: ‘God knows I didn't ask for the job of correcting Tagore’. See Paige, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, p.19.

³¹ Ibid.

³² D.H. Lawrence to Lady Otteline Morrell, 24 May 1916, in James T. Boulton and George J. Zytaruk, The Letters of D.H. Lawrence: Volume II, 1913–1916 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.608, emphasis in original. Also quoted in Dutta and Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man, p.199.

³³ R.K. Dasgupta, Rabindranath Tagore and William Butler Yeats (Delhi: University of Delhi, 1965), p.22

³⁴ Benita Parry, Delusions and Discoveries: India in the British Imagination, 1880–1930 (London: Verso, 1998), p.153.

³⁵ Andrews was invited by H.W. Nevinson, a friend of Rothenstein, whom Andrews met at the Congress of Universities of the British Empire. See Hugh Tinker, The Ordeal of Love: C.F. Andrews and India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p.56.

³⁶ C.F. Andrews, ‘An Evening with Rabindra’, in The Modern Review, Vol.11, no.2 (1912), p.228.

³⁷ W.B. Yeats to Edmund Gosse, 25 Nov. 1912, W.B. Yeats correspondence files, Tagore Papers, Rabindra Bhavana. Cf. Wade (ed.) The Letters of W.B. Yeats, pp.572–3.

³⁸ W.B. Yeats to Tagore, 9 Jan. 1913, published in Visva-Bharati Quarterly, Vol.30, no.3 (2003), p.163.

³⁹ Tagore to Edward Thompson, 18 Feb. 1914, Ms. Eng. c.5318, folio 30, Thompson Papers, Bodleian. Cf. E.P. Thompson, Alien Homage: Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), p.17.

⁴⁰ Cf. Dutta and Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: An Anthology, p.155.

⁴¹ C.F. Andrews to Tagore, 6 Oct. 1912, Correspondence Files (English), Tagore Papers, Rabindra Bhavana.

⁴² Andrews to Tagore, 14 Jan. 1914, Andrews Files, Tagore Papers, Rabindra Bhavana.

⁴³ Andrews to Tagore, undated (and possibly unsent), Correspondence Files (typed copies), Andrews Papers, Rabindra Bhavana.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ William Pearson to Tagore, 5 Oct. 1915, Correspondence Files (English), Tagore Papers, Rabindra Bhavana.

⁴⁶ Quoted in Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp.194–5, note 22.

⁴⁷ Tinker, The Ordeal of Love.

⁴⁸ Thompson, Alien Homage, p.104.

⁴⁹ Quoted in Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, p.18.

⁵⁰ Andrews to Tagore, 2 Mar. 1914, Andrews Files, Tagore Papers, Rabindra Bhavana.

⁵¹ Ibid.

⁵² Mary Lago, ‘Edward John Thompson’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36487?docPos=3, accessed 18 July 2011].

⁵³ Edward Thompson to Elizabeth Thompson, 30 Oct. 1913, Ms. Eng. d.2670, folio 33, Thompson Papers, Bodleian. Cf. Thompson, Alien Homage, p.1.

⁵⁴ Uma Das Gupta, ‘Appendix: Tagore Learns of the Nobel Prize’, in Thompson, Alien Homage, p.114.

⁵⁵ Ibid., pp.114–5.

⁵⁶ Ibid., p.109.

⁵⁷ Thompson, Alien Homage, pp.19–20.

⁵⁸ Edward Thompson to P.C. Mahalanobis, undated (probably Jan. 1921), quoted in Thompson, Alien Homage, p.33.

⁵⁹ Edward Thompson to Theodesia Thompson, 20 Sept. 1920, Ms. Eng. c.5357, folio 146, Thompson Papers, Bodleian. Cf. Thompson, Alien Homage, p.34.

⁶⁰ Edward Thompson to Theodesia Thompson, 9 Nov. 1920, Thompson Papers, Bodleian Library, also quoted in Thompson, Alien Homage, p.39.

⁶¹ Tagore to Edward Thompson, 16 April 1922, quoted in Thompson, Alien Homage, p.48.

⁶² Tagore to William Rothenstein, quoted in Thompson, Alien Homage, pp.40–41, emphasis in original.

⁶³ Thompson, Alien Homage, p.41

⁶⁴ E.J. Thompson, Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist, p.278, quoted in Thompson, Alien Homage, p.104.

⁶⁵ E.J. Thompson to E.W. Thompson, 26 June 1924, quoted in Parry, Delusions and Discoveries, p.163.

⁶⁶ Ibid.

⁶⁷ Thompson, The Other Side of the Medal, p.29, quoted in Parry, Delusions and Discoveries, pp.163–4, emphasis added.

⁶⁸ Ibid., p.164.

⁶⁹ Ibid.

⁷⁰ Thompson, Alien Homage, p.104.

⁷¹ Williams, Culture and Materialism, p.165.

⁷² Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘Gandhi and Tagore: Where the Twain Meet’, in Tapan Raychaudhuri, Perceptions, Emotions, Sensibilities: Essays on India's Colonial and Post-Colonial Experiences (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp.141–51.

⁷³ Parry, Delusions and Discoveries, p.154.

⁷⁴ Ibid., p.155.

⁷⁵ Edward Thompson to Elizabeth Thompson, 30 Oct. 1913, Ms. Eng. d.2670, folio 33, Thompson Papers, Bodleian. Cf. Thompson, Alien Homage, p.1.

⁷⁶ Thompson, Alien Homage, p.3.

⁷⁷ Ibid., p.9.

⁷⁸ Tagore to William Rothenstein, 20 April 1927, quoted in Mary Lago, Imperfect Encounter: Letters of William Rothenstein and Rabindranath Tagore, 1911–1941 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), p.321. Cf. Thompson, Alien Homage, p.9. In fact, Tagore's letter is far more cutting that Thompson's son, understandably, wishes to make clear.

⁷⁹ Thompson, Alien Homage, p.9.

⁸⁰ Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-De-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p.6.

⁸¹ Hayden J.A. Bellenoit, Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, 1860–1920 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007).