So why do we (or I?) care about Rabindranath Tagore?

For those among you, who were singularly unlucky enough not to be born into a Bengali bhodroloke household, Tagore is considered pretty high up in the list of things you are missing out on, right up there with hilsa and roshogolla.  Right up there also with a sense of privileged belonging to the same cultural  traditions that produced some of the brightest intellectual luminaries of modern India, and the consequent bragging rights, and also to the most spectacular modern collapse of culture and commerce in the subcontinent and the consequent entitlement to an aura of mystic tragedy compounded by a peculiar fetish for self-flagellation.

When I was a kid, they once took me to see the Basanta Utsab ( "Spring festival")  celebrations in Shantiniketan, the home of the Utopian University that the poet had founded.  God was I bored!  There were all these girls in yellow saris dancing all day to some very cloying songs about how spring was in the air, and how cool southerly breezes delighted the hearts of young maidens, and how different kinds of flowers were blooming in the Bengali countryside (as a downright city boy I usually find plants and fruits and  flowers to be singularly boring). And God there were men too! dancing with all these girly hand gestures about spring being in the air. I screamed and cried and begged to be let off this torture - as all the mothers and aunts frowned at me -  as all their daughters, looking smug and self-important in their yellow saris, eyed me with an air of haughty condescension, as only young girls can do to young boys they (perhaps rightly) consider crude, uncouth and immature.  

From that day on, I declared war on Tagore.  I took to referring to him as "nyaka buro"  ("that sappy oldie", for lack of a better translation). I held this man entirely responsible for emasculating the bhodroloke

man of all his machismo. But there was no escaping! His song and dance routines were everywhere!  Every year, there would be at least three different Bengali festivals, when after the usual socializing and gastronomic indulgences, the neighborhood families would collect to have "cultural programs".  This consisted in rigging up a wooden platform, where people could showcase their musical or histrionic talents.

It is the obligation of every self-respecting bhodroloke (please note that I use this as a 'unisex' word) to contribute to, or have her kids contribute to these "cultural" performances. My macho younger self being already convinced of singing and dancing being an exclusively feminine preserve, would fight to have my dignity preserved and not be pushed into it.  This usually meant I would be pushed into that peculiarly Bengali form of cultural expression - poetry recital.  This meant a person getting up on the stage and saying out aloud some lines of poetry in a loud theatrical voice.  How this could constitute entertainment for the people in the audience, has always eluded me.  And here of course, there was no escaping Tagore!  Still I fought hard - reciting poems by other famous Bengali poets when I could or even taking recourse to English (somehow that was acceptable).   There was only this one time when my mother had successfully pushed me into enrolling in the dance team.  This is the only time in my life I have sang-or-danced on stage (which is highly unusual for most bhodroloke kids) and it was such a mortifying experience.  I have always been terribly amusical, to the point that I hate people discussing music around me, and the friendly neighborhood "aunty" who trained us for the dance must have had a hard time with me. The singing team also rehearsed with us. One day, horror of horrors, I was humming a Tagore song quietly to myself (well, in my defence I was subjected to this song every day at rehearsals, so I couldn't help learning the words) thinking I was out of anyone's hearing, when two of the singing girls happened to pass by.  They just laughed at me - in that peculiarly, conspiratorially taunting  feminine way, that only girls, specially "cultured" bhodroloke girls can. This was the first time in my life I was made aware of the hurt that women could cause men.  And it was all Tagore's fault. 

Much, much, later, when I would play Tagore songs all the time on my computer in my Kanpur dorm room (it is possibly a classic illustration of Stockholm syndrome), my Rajasthani "wing-mate" would often stroll in and enquire, "dada, yeh sab kaise gaane sunte rehte ho dinbhar? yeh kya koi bungali bhajan hai?"Non-Indian readers (though I don't think I have any whose interest this piece could have held till now) would need some context here. Tagore's songs are basically poems in Bengali that were set to music, and sound and feel distinctly different from most of the popular music in the rest of India. The cadence is much slower, the lyrics more thoughtful than the more peppy film music from Bollywood.  Understandably unfamiliar with this musical tradition,  the north Indian friend had mistakenly assumed that this was some Hindu religious hymn in Bengali.  It had to be - for what else could be so slow, tragic sounding and possibly so calculatingly unentertaining (for him)?  Tagore perhaps would not have disliked this description, for most of his poem-songs were celebrations of love and worship, how earthy love was like love of the divine .  His poetry often delights in this intrigue, when you would be left uncertain whether it is just erotic desire for a lover, or something more spiritual, that he is talking about.

My serious literary engagement with Tagore began in high school, when I read "Gora".  Then I read all his other novels. And then all his short stories. Some of these are gems.  Right up there with the Russian masters. The novels can some times be too pedantic,  where characters begin to represent ideas - but the writing is usually great to read - there is a certain subtle wit, that could even recall Austen. But it still seems to me that his prose is vastly underrated compared to his poetry, which is a tad unfortunate. For although brilliantly structured in Bangla, a lot of his poetry still strikes me as being inventories of names of flowers and descriptions of meteorological phenomena.  Perhaps I am not a poetry person.  As for the music,  his songs are probably the only genre of music that I consistently listen to.  It's the Stockholm syndrome of an amusical person.   Bombarded with an overdose of his songs from an early age, my emotional reflexes have come to be considerably built around them, like Pavlov's dogs, and while my more musically accomplished peers have gone on to try out and move on to newer genres of music later in their lives, I have never had the time or inclination for that.  So perhaps it can be safely said that I have made peace with the sappy old man now.