Bourgeois used to be just a French word. Towards the end of the 17th century, the English began using it. Then, sometime in the Forties, it became a Bengali word. In French, it simply means ‘citizen’. In English, it stood for blue-blooded contempt for those who had to work for a living. In Bengali, the communists used it to dismiss men who, in their eyes, lacked revolutionary brawn, or had been rendered effete by too much culture or feudalism. Imagine Robi Ghosh using the word in, say, one of Ray’s films of the Seventies (when it enjoyed some sort of a revival), and this dismissiveness immediately begins to bristle with a delightfully comic energy. In the difference between bourgeois in French and burjoah in Bengali lies a potted history of class warfare. So, it is amusing to recall that Rabindranath Tagore was dismissed by a fairly well-known Bengali communist in the late Forties as a bourgeois poet whose Gitanjali was no better than garbage. More so, because the communists have now deemed the poet’s statue worthy of being garlanded on his birthday — a good hundred years after the world paid its homage with the Nobel.

Perhaps this Bengali communist from the Forties read his masters in German. It was in the early Twenties that Georg Lukács, the famous Marxist commentator on realism and the modern novel, had described Tagore’s The Home and the World as a “petty bourgeois yarn of the shoddiest kind” in a Berlin periodical. For Lukács, Tagore was “a wholly insignificant figure” peddling “scanty leftovers from Indian philosophy” to the West, and his popularity in Europe was a “cultural scandal”. (Unfortunately, Lukács wrote, in the same review, that the figure of the lecherous freedom-fighter in Tagore’s novel was modelled on the Mahatma.) Although this dismissal of Tagore was never officially reversed by the party in Bengal (and even got a new life in the turbulent Seventies), the party, split by that time, published a commemorative volume in Tagore’s centenary year with contributions from some of its leading intellectuals. And Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee did admit — after he was out of power — that some of his comrades were mistaken in their bigoted disapproval of Tagore. The Chinese, on the other hand, never had a problem with the poet. He was always a popular figure in China, where his poems and fiction figured in school texts and university courses; and his first translator into Chinese was the first general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, who chose to translate four poems from none other than Gitanjali.

It is difficult to engage seriously with a debate on whether or not to garland the statue of a poet. It is equally difficult to respond with a straight face to a passion for the poet, which demands that his songs be played on a loop at traffic lights. Perhaps it is enough that every time some important Indian wants to go it alone, with a mind without fear and head held high, the old man’s words come in handy — and still manage to sound quite startling.