|
|
People
Tagore: A Multitalented
Artist
by Rajesh Williams
In today’s world of
specialization, it is vital to remember those geniuses who have been
masters in many fields—the great talents not limited to one form of
artistic expression. Michelangelo was a painter, sculptor, architect,
poet, and engineer. Goethe, one of the greatest men of letters, was also
an accomplished horseman, swimmer and skater. He loved to dance and act
and was an amateur cellist. There was no discipline or activity alien to
him, from archaeology to zoology. His works span the fields of poetry,
drama, literature, theology, philosophy, humanism and science. Leonardo
da Vinci was a polymath, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor,
anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer.
Salvador Dalí, whose expansive artistic repertoire includes film,
sculpture and photography, was not only a great painter, but also a
skilled draftsman and an interesting writer. Pablo Picasso was a
painter, draughtsman and sculptor.
India has also produced quite a few multitalented geniuses. Talents like
Satyajit Ray and Rabindranath Tagore can never be forgotten. Ray was an
excellent filmmaker, a fiction writer, publisher, illustrator, graphic
designer and film critic. Tagore, a man with a multidimensional
personality, was an outstanding poet, painter, prose-writer, composer
and politician. These creative men had so much to give to the world.
 Imagine a man bed-ridden due to sickness and yet writing fine pieces of
prose and poetry. That is exactly what Tagore did in the last few months
of his life. His pen remained active till the very end. Four new volumes
were published in his last days, which included three of poems entitled
Navajatak (The New-born), Sanai (The Flute) and
Rogasajyay (From Sick-bed) and one of prose entitled Chhelebela
(Boyhood Days).
Lying in his bed and watching the calm life of Shantineketan, the poet
brooded on the past and wondered whether he had done his best to
understand and interpret what he had seen and experienced of this world;
but how little it seemed to him he had seen and comprehended:
How little I
know of this mighty world!
Myriad deeds of men, cities, countries…
Have remained beyond my awareness.
Great is life in this wide Earth
And small the corner where my mind dwells.
Unable to write, he
dictated his verses to his students. Later he was taken to Calcutta and
was operated upon. Just before his operation, he dictated his last
verses:
Your creation’s
path you have covered
With a varied net of wiles,
Thou Guileful…
He who has easily borne your wile
Gets from your hands
The right to everlasting peace.
He, however, did
not get the chance to read what he had dictated as his condition
worsened after the operation and he gradually lost consciousness, never
to regain it. On August 7, 1941, he breathed his last. The song that he
had desired to be sung on his death was one of his own compositions:
In front lies
the ocean of peace,
Launch the boat, Helmsman,
You will be the comrade ever…
May the mortal bonds perish,
May the vast universe take him in its arms,
And may he know in his fearless heart
The Great Unknown.
Ever since then, at
each anniversary of his death, this song is sung and the versatile
genius is remembered. On his death, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote” “Perhaps it
is as well that he died when he was still pouring out song and poem…what
amazing creative vitality he had: I would have hated to see him fade
away gradually. He died, as he should have, in the fullness of his
glory.”
Tagore was a prolific genius. He wrote about fifty plays, a hundred
books of verse, many of which he set to music, and forty volumes of
novels, short stories and essays. Later, he painted portraits with warm,
sweeping brushstrokes.
What was the secret of Tagore’s creativity? Where did this “creative
vitality” spring from? D.T. Suzuki’s interpretation of Zen may help us
in finding answers to these questions. From this interpretation we learn
that Nature is spontaneous and creative, and that man being a part of
Nature, acts best when he acts with freedom.
Tagore valued spontaneity and treasured “freedom from constraining
patterns.” As we know, Tagore stopped going to school altogether at the
age of thirteen. No amount of family pressure could make him face the
eternal grind of the school mill, which he described as a “combination
of hospital and jail.”
The following lines from one of his talks during his China visit of 1924
reveal his attitude towards formal education: “When I was very young I
gave up learning and ran away from my lessons. That saved me, and I owe
all that I possess today to that courageous step. I fled the classes
which instructed, but which did not inspire me and I gained a
sensitivity towards life and nature. It is a great world to which we
have been born, and if I had cultivated a callous mind and smothered
this sensitivity under a pile of books, I would have lost this world. We
can ignore what is scattered in the blue sky, in the seasonal flowers,
in the delicate relationships of love and sympathy and mutual
friendship, only if we have deadened the thrill of touching the reality
which is everywhere…
He hated school education: “What tortured me in my school days was the
fact that the school had not the completeness of the world. It was a
special arrangement for giving lessons. It could only be suitable for
grown-up people who were conscious of the special need of such places
and therefore ready to accept their teaching at the cost of dissociation
from life.
“But children are in love with life, and it is their first love. All its
color and movement attract their eager attention. And are we quite sure
of our wisdom in stifling this love? Children are not born ascetics, fit
to enter at once into the monastic discipline of acquiring knowledge. At
first they must gather knowledge through their love of life, and then
they will renounce their lives to gain knowledge, and then again they
will come back to their fuller lives with ripened wisdom.”
And so Tagore’s guardians gave up all hopes about his career and even
ceased to scold him. His eldest sister lamented, “We had all hoped Rabi
would grow up to be a man, but he has disappointed us the worst.”
Certainly, by all academic standards Tagore had proved himself a
drop-out.
School education disgusted him so much that all his life he continued to
joke about his lack of academic qualifications, which his countrymen
treasured, for such qualification was almost the only passport for
government service under the British rule.
In a letter written to his granddaughter, Nandita, who had shortly
before left for Europe, he sent her his blessings and good wishes and
included among them a hope that she would fail in the University
Entrance examination, which she had taken shortly before, for how would
he show his face to the world if his grandchild succeeded where he had
failed.
But Tagore did not play footsie with life. Writes Krishna Kriplani: “But
though he played truant from school, he did not idle away his time. He
was a born devotee of Saraswati, the goddess of learning and the
arts, but he refused to be led to her altar by any priest. He must woo
her in his own fashion. Like a wild horse he would not be yoked; he must
graze at will in what pasture he liked.”
Rinzai (Lin-Chu), a prominent master during the T’ang dynasty (618-905)
in China and high priest of the Zen movement, stresses in his sayings
that only faith in your Self leads to true understanding. When faith is
lacking, you find yourself hurried by others and unable to be your
master. To be one’s own master, whether walking or standing or standing
still, is all that matters. God created the world out of his free
will... He was his own master, and each of us has something of this in
him, ‘the same in essence as the divine will.’”
Tagore is one of the few men who really “mastered true understanding.”
He was something more than a poet, a writer and a painter. He was an
artist in life. His verses were a reflection of his inner self. His
personal life was as clean and noble as his works.
Writing for him was an act of faith, nor a trick of grammar. What he
was, determined his style. He wrote not for pleasure or profit but out
of joy, conscious that his genius was a gift from the divine, to be used
in the service of man.
August 9,
2009
Rajesh Williams is a
professional editor and a writer with a background in instructional
design, technical writing, technical editing, teaching, white paper
writing, and development of marketing brochures, flyers, and data
sheets.
Top
|
People
|
|
