Being a celebrity comes with a bad package and being a super celebrity comes with an even worser one. Take a moment off your reality and imagine being Rabindranath for a while. Imagine Sneaky peeps into your life continuing even after some seven decades since your death. No matter how cacophonous they are, all trying to sing songs you once wrote and some still ambitious ones engaging themselves in forging your painting and exhibiting them. People won’t bother to read you ever but to an utter dismay your poems would pop up whenever there is some loose talk or the other going on.
Getting your poems imprinted on kurtas might become a fashion craze and your works; those which were once born out of your veneration for life are left helplessly clinging on to some sweat stinking bodies. It might as well become a common prerogative amongst the pseudo intelligentsia to flaunt their expertise on you. While Marxists would claim that you were a reactionary born into a rich household and that your works are over hyped, some ‘liberals’ would come up to point out how your words endorse their profound pontifications.While nothing gets done to retrieve the Nobel you once won, you become a part of the central budget session with the Union Finance Minister declaring an international award on your honour (Good God knows who will bag it). And last but not the least; if you have been unfortunate enough to have your 150th birth anniversary coinciding with the assembly elections, you get grossly misquoted almost by every other leader, be it the ruling left or the opposition. Being the greatest poet of the times does not come easy you see.
I don’t intend to present any overview of the Tagorian oeuvre here. Neither do I claim to have the requisite erudition for such a task nor will the space of this rather small write up allow that. At the most I can share my reading. To me the great poet comes across primarily as one who would rejoice the joy of living.
Despite his personal losses, he could still perceive life as celebration, a pulsating manifestation of the Divine omnipresence. In his foreword to the work on the Upanishads by Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Rabindranath points out “Our soul has its Anandam, its consciousness of the infinite, which is blissful. This seeks its expression in the limits which, when they assume the harmony of forms and the balance of movements, constantly indicate the limitless. Such expression is freedom, freedom from the barrier of obscurity. Such a medium of limits we have in ourselves which is our medium of expression. It is for us to develop this into Ananda-rUpam amRtham, an embodiment of deathless joy, and only then can the infinite in us can no longer remain obscured.”The poet shall forever persevere to proximate this ecstasy through his poetry. Rabindranath comes across as a poet who aspires and thereby inspires us to break the boundaries imposed on us by the hegemonic institutions. It is only by doing so that we shall come in term with what we are – that ‘self’, which remains unperturbed by the dogmas and the narrowness that are often imposed upon us. This notion of selfhood recurs in his works on social issues too. Thus stories like Gora, Laboratory, Chaturanga and Noshtoneer remain not just social commentaries but become accounts of individuals.
Just as any great work of art, Rabindranath’s works too are multivalent and thus open multiple interpretations. Any keen reader must read his works first instead of letting others form their opinions. And it is this reading of Tagore’s works, which has so conspicuously taken a backseat amidst all these hullabaloo over the 150th birth anniversary.
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| Tagore with Albert Einstein |
There are commemorative stamps, special menus arranged at posh Kolkata restaurants, microphones blaring rabindrasangeet at the oddest hours of the day. A rather curious piece of news is that I just came across is that Cornell University has put up the poet’s snipped beard as an exhibit. We have all been so busy with the festivities surrounding Tagore that we have become almost oblivious of the fact that this year also marks the 150th birth anniversary of Prafulla Chandra Roy, a chemist per excellence and the founder of the Bengal Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals!
-- Priyanka Mukherjee
