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Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)--poet, philosopher, painter, novelist, playwright, composer, traveller, political commentator and Asia’s first Nobel Laureate--was one of his era’s cultural icons. Proclaimed as the greatest poet India has ever produced, Tagore left an astonishing legacy undimmed nearly 70 years after his death. But he was also an enigmatic, complex and contradictory figure, torn between India’s spiritual values and the spirit of the West. In this definitive biography, Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson explore the man behind the myth, presenting the power of his person, the power of his name and the power of his work. The result is an enlightening and exquisitely rendered portrayal--not of the legend but, to quote Tagore, of *the figure that once moved.*
520 pages, Paperback
First published February 16, 1995
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August 8, 2022
Book: Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-minded Man
Author: Krishna Dutta, Andrew Robinson
Publisher: I.B. Tauris; Reprint edition (30 November 2008)
Language: English
Paperback: 512 pages
Item Weight: 794 g
Dimensions: 15.52 x 3.71 x 23.52 cm
Price: 1957/-
“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.” ― Aristotle
In an article in Bengali on Rabīndrasangīt, published in 1967, Satyajit Ray distinguished between Tagore the poet, Tagore the composer of songs, and Tagore the painter, consistent with his technical expertise.
**As a poet — and undeniably as a writer of fiction and drama — Tagore was an unqualified maestro. He could do anything with language, could write in any number of verse-forms and metres, and invented many novel forms of his own.
**As a singer and composer, Tagore was tremendously accomplished too. His knowledge of India’s musical traditions, both classical and folk, was insightful, and recordings that have survived show him to be a singer of great suppleness and refinement.
He was however to some extent intolerant with rigid musical orthodoxy, adopting a pioneering and creative approach in his use of rāga and tāla.
**As a painter, Tagore was for the most part self-taught. He lacked academic training in draughtsmanship (though some early sketches that have been discovered show him to be more skilled in that area than was beforehand thought), and by his inimitable, expressionist style he made a virtue of his technical limitations.
While one might agree with Ray’s threefold scrutiny, it should be possible to find some unifying factor, some special characteristic or instinct that went beyond technique.
Many scholars of Tagore have sought a unity in his universalist philosophy, in his humanism and international ideals. Others have pointed to his general pursuit of harmony, his quest for ‘purnatā’ or ‘fullness’, a totality of vision that would bring together art and morality, science and religion.
One might not feel quite comfortable with this approach, partly because his literary works, like any great works of literature, are full of intricacy and denial.
For every positive current, there is a darker undercurrent; delight is always mixed with grief, life with death.
There is also a problem with his paintings. Many people have been puzzled by an obvious gulf between the paintings and his literary works.
The blend is even more palpable in his relation to and appropriation of literary tradition. Few modern Indian authors were as deeply immersed in — and committed to — Indian literature and culture, extending back to the earliest Sanskrit poems.
But, at the same time, few could claim anything like Tagore’s command of the European canon. His writings are sprinkled with allusions to the Bhagavad Gita and the Bible, Kalidasa and Shakespeare, Jayadeva and Shelley.
The instant a reader thinks he has located a work by Tagore in one tradition, he is sure to come upon some vital structural element that places it squarely in the other camp — not the Sanskrit mahakavya, but Spanish modernism; not English romanticism, but the Urdu ghazal.
There is a story often recounted about Tagore. When asked what his greatest imperfection might be, he said, ‘‘Inconsistency.’’ The punch line is that he was then asked what his greatest virtue might be, and he replied, ‘‘Inconsistency.’’
The moral is openly relevant here. We often tend to think of issues and causes — national, educational, scientific, or whatever —
as having answers that are simply right or wrong. But our reactions to these issues and causes are more multifaceted, as the issues and causes are themselves more multipart.
Like many of us, Tagore felt ambivalent about the positions he advocated, the causes he supported. Moreover, he felt ambivalent for good reason.
On the morning of 25 July, Tagore left Shantiniketan for the last time.
The whole ashram had gathered at his house from early on and silently waited for him to be taken down from his room upstairs on an expressly constructed stretcher to the ashram's bus. During the previous day, the pot-holes in the short stretch of road from Shantiniketan to Bolpur station had been filled up to give him a tolerable ride.
Rabindranath was too worn out even to address a few words to his workers and students and they did not take the dust of his feet, lest they bother him.
His secretary described the moment of farewell: ‘In deep silence and with mute salutations they bade him goodbye but as the bus began to move they could not contain themselves any longer. Spontaneously from a thousand throats broke out the ashram song “Amader Shantiniketan”.
It reached Gurudev’s ears and there were tears in his eyes.’
Two weeks later, around noon on 7 August 1941, in north Calcutta, in an upstairs room of the house where he was born, Rabindranath Tagore expired.
But not before he had dictated three more poems, published posthumously as Shesh Lekha (Last Writings). They were untitled, brief and utterly direct.
On 27 July he said:
The sun of the first day
Put the question
To the new manifestation of life - Who are you?
There was no answer.
Years passed by.
The last sun of the last day
Uttered the question on the shore of the western sea,
In the hush of evening - Who are you!
No answer came.
And on 30 July, just before the operation, he produced his very last poem, which he was unable to correct.
Translation, as ever, fails to do justice to Tagore’s Bengali; this is Nirad Chaudhuri's precis:
Sorceress!
You have strewn the
path of creation with
your varied wiles. . .
With a cunning hand
laid the snares of false trust for
a simple soul. . .
Sixty years before, the poet had written to his young niece Indira: ‘In my life I may have done many things that were undeserving, with or without knowing, but in my poetry I have never uttered anything false; it is the sanctuary for the deepest truths I know.’
He had kept his promise to himself. He also told her: ‘How I cherish light and space! Goethe on his death-bed wanted “more light”. If I am capable of expressing my desire then, it will be for “more light and more space”.’
His last wish was not fulfilled in death - as his deepest wishes had seldom been fulfilled in life.
Instead of passing on among the trees of Shantiniketan that he loved, beneath the unwrapped sky and breezes of Bengal, he died in a house he detested in the most overcrowded part of a city he disliked.
It was a clemency he could not see his own funeral.
While he might have been moved by the ocean of Bengali faces - analogous in size to the funeral of Gandhi in 1948 - he would have been appalled by the disorder and unruliness, as he had scorned the crowd that had descended on Shantiniketan from Calcutta after the Nobel Prize announcement in 1913.
As the funeral cortege moved haltingly along, hairs were plucked from the famous head; and at the cremation ghat itself, beside the Ganges, before the body was entirely burnt, the crowd invaded and began searching for bones and other relics of the Poet’s mortal being.
The fire had to be lit by a great-nephew of Rabindranath, not by his son, as is habitual - Rathindranath could not get near the ghat. There was much uproar and cursing, for little was left among the ashes.
‘It was a disconcerting, indeed a mind-boggling spectacle’, wrote Alex Aronson, the Jewish-refugee teacher from Shantiniketan who witnessed the ghoulish scene……
This absolutely fabulous, 500 plus page tome by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson is one of the best biographies of the genius you could ever read.
Author: Krishna Dutta, Andrew Robinson
Publisher: I.B. Tauris; Reprint edition (30 November 2008)
Language: English
Paperback: 512 pages
Item Weight: 794 g
Dimensions: 15.52 x 3.71 x 23.52 cm
Price: 1957/-
“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.” ― Aristotle
In an article in Bengali on Rabīndrasangīt, published in 1967, Satyajit Ray distinguished between Tagore the poet, Tagore the composer of songs, and Tagore the painter, consistent with his technical expertise.
**As a poet — and undeniably as a writer of fiction and drama — Tagore was an unqualified maestro. He could do anything with language, could write in any number of verse-forms and metres, and invented many novel forms of his own.
**As a singer and composer, Tagore was tremendously accomplished too. His knowledge of India’s musical traditions, both classical and folk, was insightful, and recordings that have survived show him to be a singer of great suppleness and refinement.
He was however to some extent intolerant with rigid musical orthodoxy, adopting a pioneering and creative approach in his use of rāga and tāla.
**As a painter, Tagore was for the most part self-taught. He lacked academic training in draughtsmanship (though some early sketches that have been discovered show him to be more skilled in that area than was beforehand thought), and by his inimitable, expressionist style he made a virtue of his technical limitations.
While one might agree with Ray’s threefold scrutiny, it should be possible to find some unifying factor, some special characteristic or instinct that went beyond technique.
Many scholars of Tagore have sought a unity in his universalist philosophy, in his humanism and international ideals. Others have pointed to his general pursuit of harmony, his quest for ‘purnatā’ or ‘fullness’, a totality of vision that would bring together art and morality, science and religion.
One might not feel quite comfortable with this approach, partly because his literary works, like any great works of literature, are full of intricacy and denial.
For every positive current, there is a darker undercurrent; delight is always mixed with grief, life with death.
There is also a problem with his paintings. Many people have been puzzled by an obvious gulf between the paintings and his literary works.
The blend is even more palpable in his relation to and appropriation of literary tradition. Few modern Indian authors were as deeply immersed in — and committed to — Indian literature and culture, extending back to the earliest Sanskrit poems.
But, at the same time, few could claim anything like Tagore’s command of the European canon. His writings are sprinkled with allusions to the Bhagavad Gita and the Bible, Kalidasa and Shakespeare, Jayadeva and Shelley.
The instant a reader thinks he has located a work by Tagore in one tradition, he is sure to come upon some vital structural element that places it squarely in the other camp — not the Sanskrit mahakavya, but Spanish modernism; not English romanticism, but the Urdu ghazal.
There is a story often recounted about Tagore. When asked what his greatest imperfection might be, he said, ‘‘Inconsistency.’’ The punch line is that he was then asked what his greatest virtue might be, and he replied, ‘‘Inconsistency.’’
The moral is openly relevant here. We often tend to think of issues and causes — national, educational, scientific, or whatever —
as having answers that are simply right or wrong. But our reactions to these issues and causes are more multifaceted, as the issues and causes are themselves more multipart.
Like many of us, Tagore felt ambivalent about the positions he advocated, the causes he supported. Moreover, he felt ambivalent for good reason.
On the morning of 25 July, Tagore left Shantiniketan for the last time.
The whole ashram had gathered at his house from early on and silently waited for him to be taken down from his room upstairs on an expressly constructed stretcher to the ashram's bus. During the previous day, the pot-holes in the short stretch of road from Shantiniketan to Bolpur station had been filled up to give him a tolerable ride.
Rabindranath was too worn out even to address a few words to his workers and students and they did not take the dust of his feet, lest they bother him.
His secretary described the moment of farewell: ‘In deep silence and with mute salutations they bade him goodbye but as the bus began to move they could not contain themselves any longer. Spontaneously from a thousand throats broke out the ashram song “Amader Shantiniketan”.
It reached Gurudev’s ears and there were tears in his eyes.’
Two weeks later, around noon on 7 August 1941, in north Calcutta, in an upstairs room of the house where he was born, Rabindranath Tagore expired.
But not before he had dictated three more poems, published posthumously as Shesh Lekha (Last Writings). They were untitled, brief and utterly direct.
On 27 July he said:
The sun of the first day
Put the question
To the new manifestation of life - Who are you?
There was no answer.
Years passed by.
The last sun of the last day
Uttered the question on the shore of the western sea,
In the hush of evening - Who are you!
No answer came.
And on 30 July, just before the operation, he produced his very last poem, which he was unable to correct.
Translation, as ever, fails to do justice to Tagore’s Bengali; this is Nirad Chaudhuri's precis:
Sorceress!
You have strewn the
path of creation with
your varied wiles. . .
With a cunning hand
laid the snares of false trust for
a simple soul. . .
Sixty years before, the poet had written to his young niece Indira: ‘In my life I may have done many things that were undeserving, with or without knowing, but in my poetry I have never uttered anything false; it is the sanctuary for the deepest truths I know.’
He had kept his promise to himself. He also told her: ‘How I cherish light and space! Goethe on his death-bed wanted “more light”. If I am capable of expressing my desire then, it will be for “more light and more space”.’
His last wish was not fulfilled in death - as his deepest wishes had seldom been fulfilled in life.
Instead of passing on among the trees of Shantiniketan that he loved, beneath the unwrapped sky and breezes of Bengal, he died in a house he detested in the most overcrowded part of a city he disliked.
It was a clemency he could not see his own funeral.
While he might have been moved by the ocean of Bengali faces - analogous in size to the funeral of Gandhi in 1948 - he would have been appalled by the disorder and unruliness, as he had scorned the crowd that had descended on Shantiniketan from Calcutta after the Nobel Prize announcement in 1913.
As the funeral cortege moved haltingly along, hairs were plucked from the famous head; and at the cremation ghat itself, beside the Ganges, before the body was entirely burnt, the crowd invaded and began searching for bones and other relics of the Poet’s mortal being.
The fire had to be lit by a great-nephew of Rabindranath, not by his son, as is habitual - Rathindranath could not get near the ghat. There was much uproar and cursing, for little was left among the ashes.
‘It was a disconcerting, indeed a mind-boggling spectacle’, wrote Alex Aronson, the Jewish-refugee teacher from Shantiniketan who witnessed the ghoulish scene……
This absolutely fabulous, 500 plus page tome by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson is one of the best biographies of the genius you could ever read.
October 7, 2023
4.5/5
P.S. Have I mentioned that Tagore's 'Shah Jahan', a poetic meditation on that emperor commissioner of the Taj Mahal, is so much like my meditation on Emperor Hadrian in my review of Yorcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian that I nearly crawled out of my skin? Talk about incentive for believing in past lives.
[Tagore] replied [...] that he would much rather allow Shantiniketan to be 'strangled' by official mistrust than 'fettered' by official help.I bought this book at a humble library sale that I was occupying my time with while my sister, whom I was visiting at the time, was at work. It was one of those purchases that I made due to not seeing anything else of note and/or of presence on my TBR, although in terms of the acquisitions I've made with an eye on filling a gap in my knowledge, this is certainly one of the standouts. For while I was familiar with such types as Karel Čapek, Okakura Kakuzō, Mahatma Gandhi, Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, Yasunari Kawabata, Victoria Ocampo, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Ghandi, and so many other movers and shakers of the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries of the international scene, it is another thing entirely to watch a figure like Rabindranath Tagore touch each and every one of them in ways that may not have always succeeded in understanding or fruitfulness, but were never insignificant in the shared intent or the cross-cultural effort. It didn't hurt that Tagore himself was inordinately perceptive when it came to the nation-building choices that would eventually coalesce into full fledged fascism, and while he was more than susceptible to prioritizing aesthetics over communication, I can't help but think about how different (and how much worse) the world would have been without him. Indeed, the worse thing about this biography is its unwillingness to present Tagore without significant subjectivity in certain key respects. Thus you get authorial admonishments of Tagore not being more sympathetic to a white Anglo biographer, a sweeping pronouncement that the "West" has become less creative in everything save film since the 1940s, and a flyaway reference to Prince Nyabongo of the Toro Kingdom in modern day West Uganda as some 'African prince' who met with Tagore. It's worth keeping the 1995 publication in mind for a few of these things, but when I look at the Tagore biographies available to the modern reader that have been published since then and find only a 2019 work numbering less than 300 pages and having less than five ratings, what else is there that an Anglo autodidact like myself can resort to? As such, I'm glad that I picked this up, as both the ideals and the flaws of its subject and its composers reflect my own to such a degree that I have smile bemusedly and take what wealth of learning I garnered in the long run. I'm far from done with Tagore when it comes to an overall appreciation, but this tome was as good a start as one who doesn't know a lick of Bangla can expect to get in the 21st century.
"Japan is the youngest disciple of Europe — she has no soul — she is all science — and she has no sentiment for other people than her own. If things ever go wrong with England everything is beautifully made ready for Japan."
-Tagore writing to his daughter Mira, Chicago, October 1916
[T]he Nobel committee of 1913 had not the foggiest notion that in far-off Bengal Tagore was a polemical critic of religious, social and political orthodoxy, and by no means friendly to Government. If they had read his Bengali essays, they would not have given him the Nobel Prize. (Today, by contrast, his prose writings would more likely have secured him the prize than his translated poetry.)
P.S. Have I mentioned that Tagore's 'Shah Jahan', a poetic meditation on that emperor commissioner of the Taj Mahal, is so much like my meditation on Emperor Hadrian in my review of Yorcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian that I nearly crawled out of my skin? Talk about incentive for believing in past lives.
December 5, 2014
Quote: "What I had possessed I was made to let go - and it distressed me - but when in the same moment I viewed it as a freedom gained, a great peace fell upon me."
Tagore was a Bengali poet, playwrite, musician and painter who received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 (he wrote the Indian anthem). This account by Dutta and Robinson portrays a man enamoured with India. Whereas Gandhi, Tagore's counterpart of the same era, sought total independence from British rule, Tagore desired something far more Utopian: the synthesis of the best of east and west. The biography sets India in the early twentieth century where caste traditions burdened the general populace and child marriages were still extremely common (Tagore's first wife was only 9 years old). Continually travelling the world seeking funding for his school, Visva-Bharati, Tagore met some outstanding thinkers of his day: HG Wells, Einstein, Mussolini, Bernard Shaw, Yeats, etc. Tagore died at the ripe old age of 80, misunderstood and disillusioned by the world around him. His death is still mourned across India today.
I couldn't help but notice similarities between South Africa and India in those early days: a country fighting for its independence and a place as a culture and grouping of people who have a unique contribution to make. India seems even more alluring now after reading this biography.
Tagore was a Bengali poet, playwrite, musician and painter who received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 (he wrote the Indian anthem). This account by Dutta and Robinson portrays a man enamoured with India. Whereas Gandhi, Tagore's counterpart of the same era, sought total independence from British rule, Tagore desired something far more Utopian: the synthesis of the best of east and west. The biography sets India in the early twentieth century where caste traditions burdened the general populace and child marriages were still extremely common (Tagore's first wife was only 9 years old). Continually travelling the world seeking funding for his school, Visva-Bharati, Tagore met some outstanding thinkers of his day: HG Wells, Einstein, Mussolini, Bernard Shaw, Yeats, etc. Tagore died at the ripe old age of 80, misunderstood and disillusioned by the world around him. His death is still mourned across India today.
I couldn't help but notice similarities between South Africa and India in those early days: a country fighting for its independence and a place as a culture and grouping of people who have a unique contribution to make. India seems even more alluring now after reading this biography.
February 8, 2019
Tagore's life and work is so fascinating one wonders whether it's indeed possible to write a biography that isn't gripping. This book should be prescribed to a culture obsessed with a superficial form of "cultural diversity."
July 25, 2020
The soul of indian literature and his vivid portrait
May 24, 2025
This anthology is a great introduction to both the breadth and depth of Tagore and the way he sees the world. With the many different forms of writing and paintings shown here, it just goes to show what a unique mind he possesses and an encounter with Tagore’s work shouldn’t be taken for granted
December 3, 2013
Another in the line of many heroes from pre and during-partition India
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews