VIŚVA-MANĀH VĀK-PATI

VIŚVA-MANĀH VĀK-PATI

“LORD OF SPEECH, WITH MIND FOR ALL’’

Utá tvah páśyan, ná dadarŚa vācam;

utá tvah srnvan, ná Śrnoti enām;

utÓ tuasmai tanÚam vi sasre—

jāyéva pátya uŚatí su-vaˉ́ sāh.

Although a man is seeing, he does not see Speech;Although a man is hearing, he does not hear Her;But to another man She has shown Her beauty,Like a well-dressed and loving Wife to her Husband.

Rabindranath Tagore was that unique and rare phenomenon in the domain of Man—the Full or Complete and Integrated Man, with a Mind of the widest perception. He took life as a whole, and in a most spontaneous and inevitable manner experienced it as a whole. Further he gave expression to it in its various aspects, and through diverse media. And the final expressions of his experiences of and reactions to Life he has left for Humanity as ‘a possession for ever’. He was not merely a man of literature; he was much more. Sa sarvajnˉah, sarvam āviveŚa : ‘Knowing all, he entered into everything’. He was a poet and song-writer, and a musician and creator of melodies. He was an observer of the life of men and women with its spontaneity and its problems, its joys and sorrows, its happinesses and tragedies, and its motives—patent or underlying; and he described it all in his poems and novels, in his short stories and sketches. His genius in literature was, to use the terms employed by RājaŚekhara, the great Sanskrit poet and critic of the 9th century, both kārayitrī or creative and bhāvayitrī or critical and reflective. Apart from his supreme position as a creative writer who made a significant, abiding and all-embracing addition to the ‘literature of power’ that has been built up by the greatest poets and seers of the world from antiquity downwards, he was a literary critic of the first order. He was fascinated as much by the physical sciences as by the human ones, and could absorb some of the basic scientific facts and give them out in his inimitable style for children and adult laymen. His attitude to language and literature was scientific. Science, as he once defined it, meant either the breaking up of something which existed as a single entity, and finding out its component, parts, or how they formed as sequence in building up this finished entity. On the one hand Science means Analysis. On the other hand, Science consists in building up disjointed fragments of an object or idea or a process into a co-ordinated whole, by finding out their connexions and their order. Science is thus also Synthesis. This scientific vision we see in his creative literature also; but it is most evident in his critical work. In literature, he essayed all the genres which were known to him, and he even created some new ones. We have in his literary output the lyric, the long poem, the drama (social, historical and mystic), the novel, the short story, the prose-poem, the literary, social and political essay, and what not—and all in plenty. In literature, it can emphatically be said of him that ‘there was no form of it that he did not touch, and there was nothing he touched which he did not adorn’. His musical genius and its achievement were both unique. He is the creator of a style of singing and of a type of melodies which now go by his name—the Ravindra Sangita or ‘the Music of Rabindranath’. Certainly, his name in the history of Indian Music is to be mentioned with those of Haridāsa Swāmí, Gopāla Nāyaka, Amír Khusrau, Tanasena and Tyāgarāja. Late in his life, he could not help trying his hand as an artist, as a painter. The traditions and atmosphere of his family and his surroundings led him to this form of self-expression as something which he could not avoid. His pen-and-ink scribblings and sketches, and his paintings and compositions in coloured inks, show a masterly control of line and a sort of a mystic abandon to colour and form, which make his contributions in this domain of very great significance in the history of Modern Art in India. We should also mention that he was moreover a consummate histrionic artist, and an inspiring playwright and producer of plays. He also inspired and directed the revival and full development of the art of the Dance in Modern India.

All the above, and much else, reveal Rabindranath as a unique creative spirit in the domain of Art and Aesthetics. He was also an inspired sage who had glimpses of the Unseen Reality that is behind life. As a mystic and devotional poet (noting also the unavoidable stage, through which he passed, of glorifying man above everything, in his intuition that man in his essence is but God), he takes his place with the greatest seers, sages and devotees of India and the World. And it is in this aspect of his personality and his literary expression that he appears to have his deepest appeal to men and women of to-day. We are groping for light, and are merely sensing the Ultimate Reality which we cannot see or intimately feel. Herein Rabindranath’s voice is not only his, but behind it is the voice of the ancient wisdom of his country, as in the Vedanta Philosophy of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gitā—only he is a more convincing interpreter for Universal Humanity of ‘the Perennial Philosophy’, the Sanātana Dharma of ancient India.

Then we should not miss or minimize the practical sides of his personality. He was in his early life, when the thought of serving his people seriously, an educationist. The Brahmavidyālaya started in the year 1901 at Santiniketan, and its culmination as the Visva-Bharati University in 1921 put Santiniketan in the cultural map of the World as a dynamic centre for the diffusion of original ideas in education and in the culture of the mind and the spirit. Rabindranath did not forget that the economic well-being of the people was the basis of its intellectual and cultural advancement. So with a view to help the people of the area in which he lived, and through that the rest of Bengal and India, he built up, as the sister institution to Santiniketan, the Sriniketan Institute of Rural Uplift through the development of the village arts and crafts, among other things. He was all along closely associated in mind and spirit, and wherever possible, in action also, with all movements for the economic betterment of India.

In the political domain, his position in India and in the world has been in the front line. From the days of the commencement of the Nationalist Movement in India and India’s fight for freedom, the days of the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal in 1905, Rabindranath became a leader of his people. By his writings and his speeches, and above all by his songs, he inspired and gave an ideological content and background to the Nationalist Movement, which otherwise would have become banal and barren. His prayer to God, as the Director of the destinies of nations, for the unity of the Indian people in its diverse elements and in the harmony of its different cultures and religions, and for vouchsafing to India the grace of spiritual lead, first sung at the 1911 session of the Indian National Congress, which was fighting the cause of India’s freedom, has been given the status of the National Anthem of free India. His spirited protests against the iniquities and cruelties of British and other Imperialism and Repression have a permanent place in history.

Another aspect of Rabindranath Tagore’s personality is Rabindranath, the High Priest of Internationalism. No one can be truly International who is not also most intensely national, in the first instance. The truth of this statement is amply borne out in the life of Rabindranath. We see it also in the case of all other great poets and thinkers of the world, like Homer, Virgil, Kālidasa, Shakespeare, Goethe. So Rabindranath too was a staunch Nationalist, and an Indian, and an Indian too whose mother-tongue was Bengali. He was intensely identified with the history and culture and with all the great and good and enduring things which are connected with India. But he had never been, nor could he ever be, a Chauvinist. ‘My country, right or wrong’, or ‘my people, the most ancient and the greatest in history’—such has never been his outlook. He was for the fullest integration of India with the rest of Humanity through service. He was not at all for segregation, placing India on an ivory-tower of its own self-exaltation, in splendid isolation and detachment from other peoples. He has been for bringing to India the greatest things in the world that have been said and done. He wanted not only the physical sciences and technology of the West, not only the intellectualism of the West, but also its spiritual realization, to enrich India in the sphere of mundane affairs, in intellect, and in matters of the spirit. The India of his dreams is also the India of history, where all cultures, languages and faiths are welcome and have an honoured place, to form a symphony of universalism.

Such has been the many-sided personality of Rabindranath Tagore. He can be most aptly described with the old Vedic expression—Visva-manāh, ‘One who has a Mind for All, One with Universal Perception’. He was truly a ViŚvam-bhara, one who bore in his Personality all that is in the World of Man. He has been like a great diamond with many facts, with the light scintillating from each one of these facets. Like the many-armed Gods and Goddesses of Indian Mythology, or like the Sun with his many rays, it may be said that he can touch an individual with that arm or that ray of his with which he performs or illumines some special form of self-expression with which that individual also has identified himself. Rabindranath the dramatist can thus meet lovers of the drama and votaries of the dramatic Muses in their own field. Rabindranath the social worker or the educationist has his admirers and followers among teachers and sociologists who have taken up education and social study and social service as their work in life. The politician can get inspiration from his sane view on politics and nation-building; and the narrow nationalist can be uplifted to a higher sphere of co-operation with the various peoples for the common good of Man, including of course the good of India. The most significant thing is this all-embracing character of Rabindranath’s genius; and the background to it, as it will strike any one is his Love of Man.

All these various facets or aspects of his personality notwithstanding, Rabindranath himself has frequently said that he considered himself first and foremost to be a poet and singer—a lyrist who sang of the joys and sorrows of man, and of his hopes and fears, his failures and aspirations—of the things that man loved as well as things he wished to shun. As a poet, he had to express himself through language. He used his mother tongue Bengali, in the first instance, as the most natural things. He had also access to Sanskrit as the repository of Indian thought and culture, and this was his heritage from the past. Then he acquainted himself with English, which, as the most widely used language of the world, and as the language which brought to India air and light from the outside, he studied with pleasure as well as profit. The vast treasurehouse of literature both of Britain, of Europe and of the whole world came to him through English.

But his mother tongue was for him the most effective and powerful means of expression. His greatest thoughts, his noblest sentiments and his most beautiful ideas, as well as his most musical lines, in the domains of poetry and criticism, and of fiction with its introspection and reconstruction, and integration and realization, are enshrined in his mother tongue. He was one of the greatest artists in language, and he drew out from Bengali, which before his advent was just a provincial language of India, all its latent powers of expression. He found his mother tongue to be as brass, but he left it as gold. From a language the atmosphere of which was largely medieval he was able to forge a modern means of expression, nervous and forceful, which can keep abreast of any advanced language of the world. For this we have to thank his genius and his artistic skill on the one hand, as well as the impact of Western thought and culture on the mind of the Bengali-speaking people on the other (through their contact with European thought which English literature brought to them). In this matter, Rabindranath merits to the fullest the sanskrit epithet of Vāk-pati or ‘Lord of Speech’, which was applied to Brihaspati, the divine sage and Mentor of the gods.

Indeed, he was truly a ‘Lord of Speech’. Not only was he a very successful employer of the speech, which revealed to him for the first time all its hidden powers, its vigour and its beauty, but he was also one of the first successful investigators who sought to throw light on the character and the history of the Bengali language. I may quote here what I had written in 1926 in the Introduction to my big work on The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language :

The first Bengali with a scientific insight to attack the problems of the language was the poet Rabindranath Tagore; and it is flattering for the votaries of philology, to find in one who is the greatest writer in the language, and a great poet and seer for all time, a keen philologist as well, distinguished alike by an assiduous enquiry into the facts of the language as by a scholarly appreciation of the methods and findings of the modern Western philologists. The work of Rabindranath is in the shape of a few essays (now collected in one volume) on Bengali phonetics, Bengali onomatopoetics, and on the Bengali noun, and on other topics, the earlier of which appeared in the early nineties, and some fresh papers appeared only several years ago. These papers may be said to have shown to the Bengali enquiring into the problems of his language the proper lines of approaching them.

Ram Mohun Roy, the first great thought-leader of India in modern times, had also turned his attention to the Bengali language, and in his Grammar (published 1826 and 1836) he made some very valuable observations. There were other writers in Bengali who possessed something like a right vision, but they were few and far between. Mention may be made only of Chintamani Ganguli (1885), Nakuleswara Vidyabhushana (1898) and Hrishikesa Sastri (1900). Two of the greatest intellectual sons of Bengal, who were contemporaries of Rabindranath, the scientist and philosopher Ramendra Sundar Trivedi and the historian and Archaeologist (and scholar of Sanskrit as well as litterateur in Bengali) Hara Prasad Sastri, also tried in their essays and observations to introduce a rational approach to the study of Bengali as a language. Rabindranath was easily in line with Ramendra Sundar and Hara Prasad; and his great authority, as the universally accepted master of Bengali in its literary employ, helped generally (though not among the pundits with an orthodox mentality) to prepare the mind of the average intelligent Bengali-speaker who was interested in his language and in a correct appraisement of its nature and behaviour.

Rabindranath tells us that, as it was his mother tongue, which he picked up without conscious effort from his environment, he took it for granted that Bengali was an easy language for all and sundry. But on one occasion, he essayed to teach Bengali to a non-Bengali person, and then in this ‘easy’ language, unexplained difficulties began to raise their heads. This set him thinking, and he collected materials and examples, and deduced for the first time some of the fundamental laws of Bengali phonology which were operating in the standard spoken form of the language. The onomatopoetics in Bengali are a characteristic speech-element or speech-habit which Bengali shares with all other sister-languages in the Indo-Aryan family and also with the Dravidian and Austric speeches. Rabindranath was the first to consider the nature and action of this class of words. In this investigation, Rabindranath’s basic article was ably supplemented from another aspect by Ramendra Sundar Trivedi. It is not necessary to go into details of the pioneer work that lies to the credit of Rabindranath. The amount of actual contribution made by him may not be very extensive; it consists of a number of detached essays, which had some sort of link among them, and these were later collected in the form of a book to which he gave the name Śabda-tattwa or ‘Science of Words’ (first published in 1909). But what is valuable in these essays in the sound beginnings and the correct orientation which lie to the credit of Rabindranath. He also wrote an appreciative criticism of the Bengali grammar by John Beames, who, as the author of the first Comparative Grammar of the Modern Indo-Aryan Languages, may be designated ‘the Father of Modern Indo-Aryan Linguistics’. As an instance of Rabindranath’s serious study of the science of Linguistics and of the Comparative Grammar of the Modern Indo-Aryan Languages, may be designated ‘The Father of Modern Indo-Aryan Linguistics’. As an instance of Rabindranath’s serious study of the science of Linguistics and of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European languages, it may be mentioned that he had read the monumental work on the subject by that great German scholar Karl Brugmann in its English translation in 4 volumes, and I have seen on and of these volumes in the library at Santiniketan with pencil marks and notes by the poet himself.

Incidentally I should say that Rabindranath all through his life kept up his interest in science. He was first initiated into science as a little boy, when his revered father used to make him acquainted with the planets and stars in the sky. In 1927, when he started on his travels in Malaya, Nederlands-India or Dutch India (Indonesia of to-day) and Siam, a tour in which I was privileged to accompany him, he went to the big book shops in Calcutta and purchased a mass of reading material for this tour. Among the books he bought were some 18 to 20 volumes in that scientific series of small books in English, the To-day and To-morrow series, in which there were discussions, particularly from the human side, of most of the physical and mental sciences in their most recent developments. A good example in contagious, and as one accompanying him, I found time and interest enough to read at least half-a dozen of these.

Rabindranath kept up his study of Bengali linguistics and related problems, and continued to write occasional papers on these subjects which were full of striking ideas. He gave his own interpretation of the vexed and complicated topic of Bengali versification. In this conversations, particularly when I was in the company, points in Bengali grammar and usage would crop up, and we would always be looking for new light from his observations and statements, which he made in his usual brilliant manner, always enlivened with his sparkling wit and humour. He had done me the great honour of reading my book on The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language, and for me it was one of the crowning glories of my life that he appreciated and approved my approach and my method as well as my conclusions, and this appreciation he expressed in some of his writings, and, as I feel very proud and happy and grateful when I think of it, this approval of my work made him feel a kind of affection for me of which I fancy I could see plenty of indications.

This affection of his was for me one of the greatest things in my life. But I have a belief that this affection had its origin not so much in his appreciation, as a mere dry-as-dust scholar, of my linguistic investigations undertaken with the objective approach of a scientist. Rather it was rooted in his sensing that my interest in language was closely interwoven with my interest in Man and in the surroundings of Man. I was myself but vaguely conscious of it, but Rabindranath discovered it for me, and then I became conscious of it as I could see it with my own eyes. I bring all this the just to lay stress on the fact that it was his love of Man (which has enhanced by his being over-powered with the sense of Man’s mystery vis-á-vis the Ultimate Reality) which was the motive force behind his own interest in language, in both its origin and its functioning.

In 1938, he published his later studies and papers on the Bengali language in collected form in a book called Bānglā Bhāshā Parichay or ‘Introduction to the Bengali Language’, which he inscribed with my name (it was one of the greatest honours in my life), and in this book he gave me the sobriquet of Bhāshāchārya or ‘Doctor of Language’, an informally awarded title or degree which I value so much and which I use with my name with pride. He has in this book, with the true humility of the scholar who actually knows the science and of the poet who has an intuitive sense of the language described himself as ‘a traveller who is doing his journey on foot’. As he has said in this book, he has been wandering in the highways and by-ways of language and recording his observations, only with a view to create a similar Wanderlust in the domain of language-study among his readers. He begins this book of his with this statement :

I have commenced this book with a view to explain the strange mystery which overpowers my mind with its wonder, the mystery which concerns the world of language that is born in the mind of man.

He has thus both the sense of wonder for the mystery of speech on the one hand, and the conscious desire and attempt to explain that mystery. He is thus equally the mystic and the profound thinker and scientist, even in the domain of language, as in many other matters.

As it has been beautifully put in the passage from the Rigveda given at the head of this article, Rabindranath saw and heard speech with a true vision and insight, and speech came and revealed to him all her loveliness, even as a wife would do to her Lord and husband whom she loved. He was thus a Lord and Lover of Speech, from all aspects. And this love of speech is part of his wider mental make-up; his mind having been ever open to everything in this world which was of interest for man. He was thus a ViŚva-manāh and a Vāk-pati at the same time.