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| Bhattacharjee at the lecture on Wednesday. (Pradip Sanyal) |
Calcutta, July 13: Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee bookmarked his season of apologies today with an eloquent admission of the CPM’s misunderstanding of Rabindranath Tagore and describing Left-leaning authors who had attacked the poet as “(intellectual) dwarfs”.
“There is no doubt that the Left movement made some mistakes. In their attack on Rabindranath, some dwarfed (Left) writers said ‘tini gajendra minar-e thaken (he lives in an ivory tower)’, ‘tini akashchari kabi (he walked in the clouds)’. They couldn’t understand him,” the former chief minister said at the Pramode Dasgupta Memorial Lecture titled Sardhasatabarshe Rabindranath (Rabindranath in his 150th year).
“He was seen from a parochial perspective (khondito drishtikon), which was wrong,” he added.
The Left had dubbed Tagore a “bourgeois poet” and ridiculed him as an “anandabadi kabi (poet who only celebrates joy)”.
“From joy emerges poetry and joy (ananda) was one of his favourite words,” Bhattacharjee said. “The opposite of shukh (happiness) is dukkho (sorrow). But ananda has no opposite word. If we the communists brand him an ‘anandabadi kabi’, we would be making a mistake…. His views on the social fabric, the world, the nation and the orient are still relevant and will continue to be so.”
Bhattacharjee had earlier apologised for his government’s action or inaction in Singur, Nandigram and Netai.
Tagore had been critical of communist culture and practices that curbed the freedom of the individual.
He went to Russia in 1930 and wrote Letters From Russia but Stalin put a stop to the publication of Tagore’s writings in newspapers there.
In Bengal, the Left Front had removed Tagore’s Sahaj Path from the primary school curriculum only to bring it back after a popular outcry.
Poet Sankha Ghosh called the Left’s criticism of Tagore and admission of guilt a “recurring” phenomena.
“More than 60 years ago, a few Marxist writers in Bengal had attacked Tagore’s literary philosophies and skills. When some of them tagged Tagore as a ‘bourgeois sahityik’, it was not the voice of all Marxist poets and authors. There were many who had also opposed such harsh comments. In the early 1960s, the same writers who had made these caustic remarks retracted their statements. During Tagore’s centenary year, many Marxist writers like Gopal Halder, Bishnu Dey, Hiren Mukerji and others came out and wrote honourable pieces on Tagore. In the seventies, during the Naxalite period, Tagore was criticised again by the Marxists. So it has been a recurring thought but to say that all Marxists and their policies were anti-Tagore was wrong propaganda,” he told The Telegraph, adding: “Buddhadeb need not have apologised as profusely as he did.”
Jyoti Basu had also pointed out the Left’s mistake in assessing Tagore and Netaji Subhas Bose, who had been dubbed a Quisling (meaning traitor).
Bhattacharjee had never hesitated to display his admiration for Tagore. During his stint as culture minister, Tagore’s Balmiki Pratibha portrait entered Writers’ in 1993. “He could not come to terms with the dictatorship of the proletariat,” Bhattacharjee said of Tagore this evening.
“Gandhiji could not make Rabindranath use the charkha like he made others do. That is because Tagore thought it was a backward step. He (Tagore) was always in favour of modern equipment.”
Despite being from a family of zamindars, Tagore kept in close touch with farmers. “He believed that the country could not progress without its peasants and our agriculture couldn’t progress without modern equipment,” Bhattacharjee said.
But the paeans to Tagore may have come a tad too late. Mamata Banerjee has in the meantime spared no effort to almost appropriate a politicians’ right to Tagore, mouthing his lines at election rallies, asking supporters to celebrate poll victory with Rabindrasangeet and recommending the songs as a stress-buster at traffic signals.
Although a Tagore admirer, Bhattacharjee has been more famous for his appreciation of Russian Revolution-era poet Vladimir Mayakovski.