Rabindranath Tagore with Kalidas Nag, aboard a ship on their way to China

Tagore and China Edited by Tan Chung, Amiya Dev, Wang Bangwei, Wei Liming, Sage, Rs 895

It is remarkable that Rabindranath Tagore went to China for the first time in 1924, more than a decade after he had won the Nobel Prize and been to most of the Western world. Yet, as early as 1915, Tagore’s Gitanjali had been translated into Chinese by Chen Duxiu, one of the founders of the Communist Party of China. Guo Moruo, the celebrated Chinese writer, claimed to have been influenced by Tagore as a student in Japan between 1914 and 1920. So it seems a bit odd that Tagore took such a long time to make a visit. Although this book does not offer an explanation for this delay, it is evident that Tagore’s visit to China was prefaced by a number of political upheavals that also left a decisive impact on his reception in the country.

Tagore got a mixed response from his Chinese audience. His hosts, mostly men and women of letters, tended to extol him in hyperbolic terms. In a speech delivered at Beijing’s Normal University on the occasion of the poet’s 63rd birthday, Liang Qichao conferred a Chinese name — “Zhu Zhendan” — on Tagore, then went on to address him as “our respected and beloved poet-saint from Heavenly India”. Yet, in spite of such heady praise, Tagore left China somewhat crestfallen. In his valedictory lecture in Shanghai, he confessed, “My stay here has been made pleasant, beautiful, and I am happy. But in the depth of my heart there is a pain… I have not been serious enough. I have had no opportunity to be intensely, desperately earnest about your most serious problems. I have been pleasant, nice, superficial. I have followed the spirit of the time which is also easy and superficial, when I ought to have come as one making penance, to take up the heart of life, to prove that I was sincere, not merely literary and poetical.”

Tagore’s sense of inadequacy was exacerbated by the strong criticism he faced from a section of the Chinese intelligentsia, who deplored his advocacy of traditional values, and mistook his warning against blind imitation of the West for anti-West propaganda. China, in 1924, was smarting from the humiliation of losing Shandong to Japan after the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919 at the end of World War I. Nationalist sentiments ran high in the 1920s, especially after the May 4 rebellion by Chinese students in 1919. The Opium Wars had made China vulnerable, and Japan’s continued aggression was proving detrimental to China’s stability. Having overthrown the last emperor, Puyi, in 1911, China was stridently moving towards a new socio-political ethos, battle lines were being drawn between the Left and the Right. Although Tagore was pained by China’s plight, he believed that the long-term solution lay not in the rejection of tradition but in inculcating a distinctive national identity without lapsing into mindless chauvinism.

Tagore — who tended to be stereotyped and Orientalized by the West as the wise man from the East — seemed to have misjudged the popular mood in China. When the Chinese youth expected him to speak of progress and science, he ended up preaching the virtues of spirituality and a pan-Asian culture. In the best essay in this book, Amartya Sen offers a sharp analysis of the criticism that Tagore faced in China. Sen writes, extending the thesis he put forward in The Argumentative Indian, that “the influence that Tagore’s early reception in Europe had on [his] own thinking” is particularly relevant in understanding the kind of uproar he caused in China. That influence, as Sen clarifies, “was not so much on Tagore’s comprehensive line of thinking, but specifically on what he tended to choose for presentation abroad”. Crucial to our assessment of Tagore’s Chinese tour is not just what he professed, but rather “the tensions he faced in deciding on what to present to the world”.

Sadly, most of the other contributors seem to prefer hagiography and dull summaries than original and incisive analyses. Uma Das Gupta is an exception with her scrupulous history of Cheena Bhavana at Visva-Bharati. But otherwise, moony-eyed adulation appears to have been the editorial policy of this commemorative volume, published on Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary. The two forewords by Nirupama Rao, one for the Chinese edition and the other for the Indian edition, suggest a strong official imprimatur. Most of the writers do not lose a chance to make self-congratulatory remarks. Apart from rambling personal anecdotes of those who had endured the hardships of Tagore’s Santiniketan, there are exuberant paeans to Sino-Indian amity — and just a passing mention of the 1962 border conflict. There is, for example, a totally unnecessary reference to Pratibha Patil’s visit to China last year, where she spoke highly of Tan Yun-Shan’s contribution to Indo-China relations: Tan’s prestige does not get any more enhanced by the Indian president’s approbation. The irony deepens with the fulsome mentions of China’s economic growth. Had Tagore lived to see what this growth rate had been based on — the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, the Tiananmen Square massacre, famines, and suppression of fundamental freedoms — he would perhaps have been more aghast than impressed. Once again, Amartya Sen’s recent comparative analysis of the economies of India and China has shown that there are more elements to development than just enviable GDP rates.

There is also much in this tediously repetitive book that is eminently dispensable. Insipid prose and mangled sentences do greater harm to articles that are already long-winded and often missing the mark. Sample this sentence from one of the editors: “Are we going to say, with World War turned memory, Hiroshima a reminder that there be no War (in spite of Korea and Vietnam, to begin with), and colonialism consigned to archive, that we have made it in Asia, or are on our way to making it, that Tagore’s poetic words [in the song, Oi Mahamanab Ashe] were indeed prophetic, that how miserable we might have had felt in 1941 to be Asians when the War came to our door we are proud today to be Asians, that what had in Western circles been pejorative until not long ago is turning honorific?” A Chinese contributor calls Gitanjali “a highly intelligently worded manifesto of patriotism”, while phrases like “The Sino-Indian relations have both a hoary and near past of its history” or “a very perceptible essay”, to describe Tagore’s essay, “Samajbhed”, show up the lamentable editorial standards. An essay on Tagore’s novel, Char Adhyay, is written in what seems to be a stream of consciousness mode. There are also superfluous pieces on the “power of Tagore’s words” and on his music — offering not much more than fleshed out Wikipedia entries. One is mystified by their inclusion in a volume on Tagore and China.