Write commentary on the speech of 2 distinguished professor differently. Must be unique. Language standard intermediate and English as a foreign language user standard. Critically depth. Essay style. Short. --- MA Seminar Transcriptions
Introduction from Host:

We are really happy that our distinguished professors here have expressed their kind wish to visit our department and have spared some time for their wonderful lectures for us. Thank you. And now it is time that we listen to Professor Saugata Bhaduri, our distinguished guest from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Professor Saugata Bhaduri is professor at the Center for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He has also served as visiting professor at many universities and colleges in Europe, UK, and the USA, and has been recipient of several international research grants and awards. His research, his areas of research interest include literary and cultural theory, popular culture, translation and comparative literature studies, and the cultural history of colonial Bengal. His latest books are Polycoloniality, European transactions with Bengal from the 13th to the 19th century. And the forthcoming, a critical history of Bengali literature. His earlier books include Transcultural Negotiations of Gender, Studies in Belonging, Literary Theory: An Introductory Reader, Perspectives on Comparative Literature and Culture in the Age of Globalization, Negotiation, Negotiating Globalization, and Translating Power. Ladies and gentlemen, let us welcome Professor Dr. Saugata Bhaduri. The title of his paper today is Rabindranath on World Literature. Thank you.


Lecture from Professor Dr. Fakrul Alam:

A warm welcome to all present at this special event. We have two outstanding personalities, scholars, and academicians visiting Rajshahi University today, and we are extremely delighted to organize this event of distinguished lectures that they have kindly proposed to deliver for our students. Since the Rabindra Jayanti or the iconic poet's birth anniversary, the 156th birth anniversary just passed on the 8th of this month, both of these distinguished speakers have wished to deliver lectures commemorating the great poet and his growth and role in Bengali as well as world literature. Rabindranath Tagore is at the core or the center of the cultural consciousness of every Bengali speaking individual. Therefore, we have wished to share the joy of listening to these wonderful lectures with academicians and teachers of other departments and academic institutions. It is our pleasure to announce the presence of our esteemed colleagues, dear students, former students, and many other dignitaries from other academic institutions present here today. Ladies and gentlemen, we shall begin the distinguished lectures on Rabindranath Tagore with Professor Fakrul Alam, Dhaka University, and end with the lecture of our other distinguished guest, Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. In the end, we will welcome an exchange of feelings or reflections from our learned audience. Professor Fakrul Alam is at present Bangabandhu Chair Professor, Department of History, University of Dhaka, and was previously supernumerary professor of its Department of English and director of its Bangabandhu Research Institute for Peace and Liberty. He received the Sahitya Award in 2012 at the Sahitya Literature Festival, Lucknow, and the Bangla Academy Puroshkar Literature Award for translation in 2013. His publications include Bharathi Mukherjee from Boston, Jibanananda Das: Selected Poems published by UPL University Publisher Press Limited, South Asian Writers in English from the Freud, Imperial Entanglements in Literature in English from Writers in Dhaka, and The Essential Tagore from Harvard University Press. Other works include translations of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Unfinished Memoirs, Dhaka, Present Diaries and New China from Bangla Academy. He has also published Ocean of Sorrow, a translation of the late 19th century Bengali epic narrative Bishad Sindhu. Among his most recent publications are the collection of essays Once More into the Past, Reading Literature in English, and English Studies in Bangladesh: Postcolonial Perspectives. And there is also Gitbitan: Selected Song Lyrics of Rabindranath Tagore. The title of the paper that Professor Fakrul Alam will be presenting today for his lecture actually is "A Living Growth: Rabindranath Tagore and Polymathy." This paper looks at Rabindranath Tagore, the great Indian writer as a polymath, a man crossing literary, artistic, intellectual, linguistic, and civilizational borders of all kinds, and as someone whose imagination was always in flight. It seems it sees him as someone who time and again kept trying his hand at all sorts of things despite the difficulties he faced and the challenges ahead of him. He thus worked also as a reform-oriented educator and as someone committed to educational and agricultural ventures. The paper also notes the polymathic traverse that Tagore occasionally encountered and the indiscretions that sometimes resulted from this spanning of borders. It traces the main features of his polymathic voyage from his youth to the final months of his life and stresses the growth and vitality of his endeavors. Ladies and gentlemen, let us welcome Professor Dr. Fakrul Alam. Thank you very much, and good afternoon to you, sir. Uh, let me just before I read the paper, say something about how I came to write this paper. I was invited two and a half years ago, uh, by the associate editor, general of New Literary History, a very well-known journal, and, uh, they invited me to write a paper for a special issue of their journal called "Polymathy," and they wanted me to write on Rabindranath. Uh, and I called Tagore the paper, but I prefer to call him Rabindranath. Uh, and, you know, because they had read something that I had written on Rabindranath in, uh, the Cambridge Companion to Tagore. So, the paper resulted from that. It's a long paper, and I've told the chair that I really it's not any any kind of, you know, something I'm saying just for the sake of saying it, but if you feel it's a little longer than 40 minutes, you know, and I'm going to complete it, I don't want to, uh, you know, stay in anyone's, uh, patience in any way. The title, uh, is "A Living Growth," which is an extract from a letter that he wrote, uh, "A Living Growth: Rabindranath Tagore and Polymathy." Who or what is a polymath? My 2003 print edition of the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines a polymath as a person who knows a lot about many different subjects. In The Polymath, Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility, Waqas Ahmed describes typical polymaths as, quote, "Essentially self-sufficient, holistically minded, having a connection for making units characterized by boundless curiosity, outstanding intelligence, and wondrous creativity," unquote. In other words, polymaths are individuals who happen to be autodidacts of wide-ranging interests. They dig deep and even flounder in waters that may get too murky at times. But in the end, come to be recognized as humans who are multifaceted, complex, creative, versatile, and inimitable. People who can unlock the brimming potential of our minds. Another source of perspective on polymaths is Peter Burke's The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag. Although Burke confines his otherwise quite comprehensive survey of this special category of intellectual giants to Western and particularly academic polymaths, some of the things he says about them will be quite relevant for this paper on Rabindranath. His focus on serial polymaths, for example, who move from field to field in the course of their intellectual lives, and his attribution to the kind of omnivorous curiosity that makes them learn about many things. Burke identifies two such problems as the tendency of some polymaths to abandon projects or leave them unfinished. But perhaps it is unfair to be critical of this last trait, for as Ahmed implies through a quote attributed to da Vinci, da Vinci in the preface to his book The Polymath, Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility, "Artists never finish, only abandon," In other words, such leaving behind of great work comes with the polymath's territory, and abandoned work still has its distinctive value. The omnivorous curiosity Burke identifies in his book as surely is surely the root cause of such trait. This is a point underlined by Thompson, the quote, "The polymath is broadly curious. Man-made disciplinary boundaries cannot shackle his mind to one particular field," unquote. My paper will consider Tagore as one such polymath, self-taught but widely read, and someone who might be spoken for by what may be his friend and relative's engagement, posed as a motto in morbidity, "I try all things, I achieve what I can." What we remember at this point as well as, uh, uh, lines from, as well lines from Robert Browning's Andrea del Sarto, whose titular character explained, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" As for the supposed limitations of polymaths, let's also recall Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous proclamation in Self-Reliance, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." With consistency, a great soul has simply nothing to do. And one can even imagine Tagore and other polymaths responding to charges that they have been so very too much in their careers and in the process, introducing contradictions every once in a while by quoting Walt Whitman, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes." Tagore, it is good to stress at the outset, is not only a product of the Bengal Renaissance of the second half of the 19th century, but also someone who kept crossing intellectual borders of all kinds. He was someone whose imagination was always in flight, so to speak. He would keep moving on to new imaginative realms and new artistic and social goals that he had set for himself, even though he would at times get stuck for a while because of them or suffer for them one way or another. But in what sense is Tagore a polymath? He is primarily and not incorrectly identified as a poet and song lyricist, but he was also a writer of short and long fiction, plays, verse, and dance dramas. He was an essayist, a translator, an editor, and a singer, actor, and composer. In addition, he was an educator, a writer of textbooks for school-going students, someone with a keen interest in science, a pioneer of ecocriticism, and an initiator of rural reconstruction projects in his part of the world. As he left the confines of Jorasanko, North Kolkata house, and ventured abroad as well as to remote areas of undivided colonized Bengal, he became critical of nationalism and an advocate of internationalism. Although his politics were initially marked by swadeshi or patriotic feelings for self-rule, indeed, he became a globe-trotting lecturer, a seemingly indefatigable voyager, and inevitably, a writer of travel narratives and journals. It's striking to learn of Tagore in the 38th minute of Satyajit Ray's classic 1961 documentary on the centenary year of the poet's birth that, quote, "At the age of 70, Rabindranath had found a new outlet for his creative urge through his paintings. At every turn of his life, in effect, and until his later years, Tagore would also surprise those who tried to categorize him, regardless of the challenges ahead. In an early sequence of Ray's film, we are presented with the wide-eyed boy peering through windows, wandering across the long corridors of the very big Jorasanko house, Jorasanko house he grew up in, listening to music, observing prayer rituals, listening to debates, mingling with his family members or servants, or looking at the world outside. He was admitted to four schools, but he felt confined by all of them, and he quit them one after another. Subsequently, for a while, Tagore was taught by tutors, but he was largely self-taught. His father wanted him to be educated in the West, so at the age of 17, he was sent to England, but he returned to India in 1880, unable to advance in his studies because of his persistent, his interest in formal schooling. The exposure to the West, however, would in fact, his music and verse. For Western influences can be heard in many of his songs, but a few of his plays can be operatic at times. At all stages of his life, Tagore was well aware of his desire to wander from field to field and remain unencumbered across disciplines and genres. Thus, in a long English letter he wrote in 1893, one of his sequence of letters he later published in the book translated into English as Chitra: Manju's Love for the Essential Tagore. By the way, Gopa introduced me wrongly as the author of Essential Tagore. I'm one of the two editors, the other one is, uh, Ranjit Chakravarti. So, not your fault, I'm sure. Where translated into English as Chitra: Manju's Love for the Essential Tagore with the title "Torn Asunder," one finds Tagore reflecting wryly on how he would rather not disappoint any of his muses. Sometimes he feels like writing stories, but he knows that poetry is what he likes, writing plays. However, he declares, "The claims of my hundred wants spread everywhere in the world outside and inside my mind." I'm sorry, there's a problem here. I'm happy to go back. And that's the essential thing. Sometimes he feels like writing stories, but he knows that poetry is what he likes, writing plays. So, he declares, "The claims of my hundred wants spread everywhere in the world outside and inside my mind." And so at times, in this period of his life, he confines himself to composing songs as well. But he must try to compose tracts for social amelioration too, texts with titles such as "Child Marriage" or "Differences in Education." The social reformer in him was already taking his thoughts already. But it is the same letter he confesses that his attention is certainly divided between acting and has been contemplating painting as an option. This letter was written when Tagore was in his early 30s and quite unknown as a writer internationally. However, in a few years, he would be awarded the Nobel Prize and would be feted as a poet whose meditative verse appeared to be the kind of balm Western readers needed at a time when the First World War was beginning to ravage the European continent. Tagore could have rested content to write and self-translate more of his reflective and spiritually nuanced poems in his favored contemplative mode. In fact, he did so for a while, but there was another side of him that was always reluctant to get into a groove in any way. That is no doubt why when on a visit to Kashmir, he viewed a flock of geese in flight and found the perfect image for his polymathic mind. This he articulates in his following in the following lines, and let me just say all the translations here are mine unless I say so. Not here, but somewhere else, somewhere further away. As a note elsewhere in Chitra suggests, he is prompted by the flight of the birds into contemplating the soul's instinctive yearning for motion as opposed to stasis. On the heart's instinct for wandering and wondering and for the mind's tendency to take flight to the beyond as opposed to opting for digression or even remaining earthbound. He would then embark even more determinedly than before on both creative writing and socially constructive, reconstruction work that would take him beyond modernity and nationalism. In another letter, one Tagore wrote to his somewhat polymathic but more systematic Scots correspondent, Patrick Geddes in 1922, he describes his preferred mode of work as a living growth, and that's why my title is one, as a living growth. Whether it was rural reconstruction, teaching, and managing educational institutions or writing stories, he hoped for help from men like Geddes, men who not only have a most comprehensive vision and imagination, but a wide range of knowledge at their command. Patrick Geddes must have been a most systematic individual, but Tagore kept explaining to the Scotsman his own special way of mind, quote, "All my activities and the characters I play in them, their world is like that in poems, only different mediums of expression." This theme persists into a long poem that he wrote 12 years later on his 74th birthday, which was published in Bengali with the title, which is Shesh Saptak, the day and the month of his birth, which we have just observed in a verse collection called Shesh Saptak or The Last Seven. In this poem, Tagore looks back on his long life, on his religious wanderings, about the artist who's weaving a garland out of innumerable moments. In this poem, which is Shesh Saptak, reflecting on his transition from boyhood to manhood as an old man who successfully weathered warring phases as he meets the people who come to greet him on his birthday, he still looks forward to the fruits of his polymathic striving in the area of the literary. As he puts it in his conclusion, "Let me mingle different tunes produced from diverse instruments to then reach the source of all music and mingle with the primal melody," which is to say he would continue to indulge in polymathy till his dying day. Inevitably, Tagore's polymathic life and works have attracted the attention of biographers and scholars working in Bengali or English. Indeed, Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson's 1997 biography in English subtitled The Myriad-Minded Man, quite aptly, the introductions draw attention to some of the many self-portraits that Tagore painted in old age. That Tagore painted in old age that gave an inkling of his inner complexity. In particular, 12 transmogrified faces, several of them distinctly uncanny, find kind of a monster, a tortured bird, and a woman. As biographers, they rage over his polymathic life and record his many-sided achievements in the creation and translation of literary and visual works, briefly surveying his educational and agricultural projects as well. But understandably, because they are interested in tracing the contours of his conscious life, his biographers do not explore Tagore's polymathic creations analytically or dwell on the phenomenal energy they indicate. In comparison, Sukanta Bhattacharya in Rabindranath Tagore and Interpretation is more focused on reflecting insightfully at some length and through a close reading of his works on the many roles Tagore played in his lifetime besides that of, of a poet, roles such as, quote, "A preacher, a teacher, and a patriot," unquote. In particular, in the chapter "The Inner Life," Bhattacharya notes the problems that Tagore faced when the founding, when the founding of his university, Visva-Bharati, led to conflict between his poetic self and other selves. Tagore records in his diaries and letters feelings of helplessness, even depression, because his educational ventures had at times led him into debts and made him resort to desperate fundraisings. Bhattacharya concludes that Tagore's was, quote, "A problem of an overactive conscience and a life overextended into too many spheres of activity," unquote. In the next few pages of this essay, I will try to highlight some of the many roles Tagore took on in the course of his lifetime as well as a few of the problems he faced in the process, highlighting representative aspects and phases of his life and works associated with this polymathic mindset. It during service can his early polymathic leanings since he seemed to flit from one artistic genre to another in a relatively different way to the end of 1880. As the youngest son of the landowning and affluent but spiritually inclined Debendranath Tagore, he seemed to move among poetry, music, and drama in an eclectic manner, as if infected by fin de siècle end of the century fondness for playing with genres and media categories. But it was at the end of the decade that his many-sided and increasingly wide-ranging genius began to register significantly in his creative work in manifold, on that place. The decisive moment here seems to be in April 1889 when Tagore visited parts of what was then East Bengal, our country, to take over the management of a few of his father's sprawling estates. The change in landscape and assortment of activities he now had to perform as well as the diverse nature of the people he kept coming across then became decisive in the transformation of his art and his outlook on life, inflecting his polymathic, mature reflections on human existence and for a while, also leading to his involvement in contemporary politics. The letters, proses, fictions, poems, and song lyrics start to introspect critically on human relationships with external nature, which he always saw as a manifestation of the Supreme Being. His fiction, likewise, in his 90s, they increasingly began to record every moment in the lives of ordinary people, uh, in riverine, in riverine East Bengal and the simple and difficult lives of villagers coping with river erosion, excessive rain, poverty, and exploitation at the hands of British colonial agents, and that, and the exploitation the British colonial agents had brought. This took Tagore closer to real life than ever before, and it gave him a sense of responsibility as well. At the same time, with a new name for the world to travel down from the estates he was asked to manage, the writer in him remained aware of the beauty of Bengal's riverscapes and the simple lifestyles of rural people. Tagore's increasing familiarity both with Bengal's riverine beauty and human hardship on and around the estates for which he had been given responsibility generated from the 1890s forward ever-widening circles of involvement. As he told himself in an 1894 poem, "Ebar Phirao More," translated in English as "Come Back to Work," "Shake off your sleep and rise. There's life around. We must bring speech to these dumb, denuded lips. We must light up those weary, empty hearts." His polymathy would now be geared towards educational, social, economic, and agricultural reforms, and it would not be made, it would not merely be articulated through his literary workings. The new orientation would become particularly evident in the educational schemes he took up from the 1890s onward. Tagore hated the schools that he had been exposed to in Kolkata and had, had not been able to adapt to the teaching system of University College, London. He wrote essays critical of colonial educational policies as early as the 1890s. In the first decade of the new century, he would work with others to come up with a national education policy formulated for Indians by Indians. His own everything he had experienced, he seems to see in existing educational systems made him feel that he must alter them, if necessary, in his own limited sphere of existence. Tagore first tried his hand at teaching in a way that suited him in 1898 in Shelaidaha when he took up the education of his own children. No doubt, as distrustful of the rural schools in East Bengal as he was of the ones in Kolkata. But the decisive step for Tagore, the polymathic educator, was in 1901 when he inaugurated the school in Shantiniketan, where his father, uh, uh, that his father acquired and for which Tagore would eventually be given responsibility. The school began to flourish, attracting the attention not only of the few educated and like-minded Bengalis who sent their children there, but also of international educators for its liberal and novel teaching methods, such as open-air classrooms. However, Tagore had to run the school at some cost to himself and his wife. He had to sell some of the land he owned and use the money his wife gave him after selling her jewelry in order to weather the financial crisis. Not only did he pay for the school teaching and work as an administrator, but he also wrote its primers and textbooks, having found what was available to be quite inadequate. He went on to lecture on education at home and abroad, criticizing existing systems and envisioning alternative ones. Eventually, the education provided by the school was supplemented by Visva-Bharati, a full-fledged, particularly university, international university, also in Shantiniketan, which much more towards, as we all know, is where the world meets the East. The distress of the estate villagers Tagore saw in Eastern West Bengal also made him feel responsible for their uplift in other ways. The city-bred upper-class poet attempted to find means of alleviating the suffering of the villagers caught in the web of rural, or absentee landlords and their own self-generated and inherited. In a poet's experiment in rebuilding, experiment in rebuilding, experiment in rebuilding Swadeshi and nation, Shantiniketan's rural reconstruction work, 1922-1960, Dikshit Sinha notes that Tagore set up credit agencies, cooperative schemes, and even an agricultural bank in his East Bengal estates. And as Sukanta Bhattacharya notes, he worked out schemes to further agricultural education, health, and social awareness that even reflected his growing eco-consciousness. He had a tractor imported for his Potisar land as well at one point. In time, the school and university would be complemented by the Visva-Bharati Institute of Rural Reconstruction. This was set up in Shantiniketan in February 1922, only a year after Visva-Bharati began functioning formally as a university. Tagore's educational and agricultural reform ventures thus provide significant instances of his polymathic traverse. Despite his creative and physical challenges, the financial burden of managing the ever-growing school that was now linked to an ever-expanding university and an institute for rural education strained his resources. And further, as I note in the concluding chapter of his book on the ages of time, Tagore's only surviving son, Rathindranath Tagore, and someone who was with him throughout his period of educational expansion, notes in brief the many ways Tagore resorted to fund his expensive and ever-evolving ideas about education that were taking shape in institutional forms through donations from home and abroad, selling of property and valuables, lecture tours, sales of books, and even begging missions, as somebody called it, efforts that could be humiliating and painful for the family. Tagore himself addresses ruefully and gloomily his autistic nature in a letter to Andrews, C.F. Andrews, an English clergyman, educationist, and social and political activist who was close to him as well as to Mahatma Gandhi, agonizing, agonized, and explaining, hoping with the burgeoning financial demands of setting up Visva-Bharati, Tagore asked himself in the letter, "What is all this that you are planning?" He's talking to himself in the letter. "Must you guide the multitude and work with them for building institutions?" As the burden of his commitment extended to raising money and finding like-minded educators for the Shantiniketan and Visva-Bharati villages, in 1924, we find him confessing to his correspondent and fellow polymath, Romain Rolland, "I myself had a kind of civil war constantly going on in my own nature between my personality, the creative artist, who necessarily must be solitary, and that as an idealist, who must realize himself through the world's complex character, leading a large field of collaboration with a large body of men." Bhattacharya's insights into the relationships between Shantiniketan and Shantiniketan, Bhattacharya's insights into the relationships between Shantiniketan and Shantiniketan at times fraught, compounding the problems of Tagore's polymathic involvement in the later part of his life. To quote Sukanta Bhattacharya, "The complementarities of the two, complementarity of the two, so basic to their founder's thought, was not easily grasped by others in that enterprise. And the problems of financing the two institutions due to restrict Tagore's financial situation to such an extent that at one point, Visva-Bharati was in real danger of its solvency collapsing." This dire situation motivated the increasingly frail Tagore in 1934 to lead a troupe to stage his dance drama, Chitrangada, today's France, despite his poor health. Gandhi, however, intervened at this point by donating 60,000 rupees to Tagore so that the poet would not have to go on the tour and endanger his health. But even the playwright polymath and one who enjoyed acting and dancing as well as writing plays and directing them, Tagore regrets feelings about having to forgo the stage performance. As Krishna Kripalani observes wryly in his biography on Rabindranath Tagore, "There is no doubt that he thoroughly enjoyed putting his creations on the stage, himself seated in a corner like a silent and motionless conductor, or as a critic once put it, like an authentic signature on his own work." Nevertheless, as the end of his life came closer, Tagore looked to Gandhi once again for help. To remain this system, the university had received in the mid-30s, he wrote, he wrote how at one of his critical moments, Gandhi had saved him from utter, from utter breakdown and helped him to his legs. By that time, he was hoping for more. He wrote to Gandhi, "Accept this institution under your protection, giving it an assurance of permanence if you consider it to be a national asset." Movingly, Tagore concludes his letter thus, "Visva-Bharati is like a nest which is carrying the cargo of my life's frustration, and I know it may claim special care from my countrymen for its preservation." Another way in which Tagore's polymathic interests could get him into trouble emerges in his involvement with nationalism at the turn of the century. Even in the early 1890s, he had been writing critically of the British colonial presence in his letters and essays. But when the British government took steps to partition Bengal in 1905, Tagore joined other nationalists, not merely writing protest songs, but also through public lectures. However, Tagore's moods soon became disillusioned by the instances of anarchy and the interracial, slash, religious divisiveness that accompanied the movement. His distaste for nationalism intensified because of the people's leading to the First World War. By the second decade of the century, he had become an outspoken critic of nationalism, indeed, internationalist, in India and also internationally. When after winning the Nobel Prize, he was asked to lecture in Japan and the West in 1916, he chose the perils of nationalism as his unifying topic. The first three lectures he delivered in Japan and the fourth one in the US. All evoked overwhelming, overwhelmingly hostile response from the press and alienated most of the people who had paid to listen to the Nobel laureate, whom they had imagined to be only passive and soothing sage. As Tagore's biographer, Kripalani, observes, "The lectures show how his polymathic interests could get him into trouble in any way. For there is an incongruity in the role of a prophet running down nationalism and asking them to be paid for it." His lectures were a hit at times. In the final section of this paper, I like to concentrate entirely on his many-sided literary ventures. Once he began in the 1890s, the poet's myriad interests had begun to manifest themselves in manifold impressive ways. It contributed to increasingly notable publications of poetry, fictions, songs, and essays of the now mature Tagore life. Sukanta Chaudhuri observes that the poet's 2,200 poems cover an extraordinary formal range. The poems are not overwhelmingly meditative or given to using spirituality as some of his critics concede. Rather, they can be erotic, romantic, humorous, nonsensical, and they're not infrequently given to social satire and critique of injustice. It is crucial to note that Tagore's polymathy is visible in his use of poetic forms and subjects of the combined events. A poem about nature may have a metaphysical undertone, and a poem that is seemingly comic may have dictations that are serious, stylistically as well as thematically. The 40 volumes of verse that he published in his lifetime kept differing from one another at times dramatically. In fact, he would move over the decade from one form of poetry to another, from the sonnet to the ode, for instance, or from long poems to tightly packed ones, and from tightly woven meters to free verse. And the themes of his letters, prose poems, or move away from very personal themes to mythical or historical or public ones with seeming effortlessness. Child's world, the woman's lot, the plight of the working-class clerk, and the way authority may be ignored by people who felt themselves to be superior by reasons of birth or ritual and cultural traditions, all preoccupied the poet. Village life, but also the misery of urban subaltern existence were among these things. And by the 1890s, could only have been written by someone with a vast appetite for life. Tagore would brood over birth and dying and yearn, inevitably, the world beyond. As Chaudhuri, as Chaudhuri concludes, "The poet kept moving back and forth in his verse as far as style and theme are concerned. He experiments, he presents, he presents himself, working continually in new synthesis or refusing to work in any." Most Bengalis on both sides of the border now encounter Tagore's poems only in schools and colleges and anthologies, but quite a few of them listen to his songs regularly. Here, too, in the more than 2,000 songs he composed in his lifetime, which filled almost 1,000 pages of his collected edition, one notices not merely the variety, but also his wide-ranging musical combinations and experiments. As his biographer, Kripalani, observes, "Tagore's songs, which spread elements mingled imperceptibly to form a new individual world." Hindu, Hindustani, classical music, British comic operatic elements, Brahma Samaj hymns, Baul, mystical, and Bengali folk melodies, Western tunes, Baul mystical and Bengali folk melodies, Western tunes, rhythms from the Vaishnava traditions, folk songs from Punjab, English, Scottish, and South Indian tunes, all contributed to the assortment of songs that Tagore delivered in his lifetime and what is surely his most lasting legacy to Bengalis. Polyphony seems to have become natural to this polymath. To quote Chaudhuri once more, "He effortlessly mixed one raga with another or ragas with folk tunes, Kirtan, and even Western tunes. And the songs he would compose would be sung in Brahma Samaj prayer houses or made part of the musical plays and dance dramas." He made glances at ordering the Bengali, ordering of the Bengali, ordering of the Bengali Gitbitan that he published in the revised and definitive edition of 1941, which revealed the wide range of the song lyrics. Meticulously, he had the poems in broad categories ranging from prayer to patriotic, to love, to nature, to beauty, or miscellaneous, to ceremonial and supplementary verses. Nevertheless, each category includes many subcategories of its own. In prose fiction as well, Tagore moved effortlessly through forms and categories, authoring novellas, long novels, short stories. Should I move to the next one? Tagore, excuse me. Tagore began writing fiction, began fiction writing in his teens and continued it to his final years with a total output of around a dozen novels and another dozen of short story collections. It was in his Shelaidaha years that he was particularly prolific. He wrote at the time about the lives of the people of rural East Bengal, but he also described feelingly the confinement of women living under the patriarchy or the fetters imposed on them by religious and social traditions. At the same time, he would write short horror stories, and as he approached middle age after the, began brooding on his, uh, love ones, and as he became aware of domestic disputes, disputes, and more and more sensitive to the harsh realities of human cruelty, he turned to longer fictional works, ranging from novels such as "Nastanirh" or "The Broken Nest," the longest novel for a writer of the human world. In contrast, Tagore's final novels, "Gora" seems to embrace the whole historical epochs, sorry, to embrace whole historical epochs and the coming together of people in the space that had become India. The wide-ranging novels amount to well over 1,300 pages, and the short fiction as well, over, to well over 900 pages in the Visva-Bharati collected volumes. He would brood over them. But as Supriya Chaudhuri points out, polymath that he was, he was also beset by all sorts of burdens and too many commitments. He seemed often to rush his endings. Such is the case with the otherwise moving novel, "Gora," to get the relationships on which the poet himself commented, "When I am overwhelmed by tiredness and my mind is distracted by a thousand milling tasks, my pen cannot preserve its self-respect, it cannot create." Bhattacharya comments on the way the novel's ending leaves the reader feeling a sense of incompleteness, and accounts it as the price Tagore paid for abandoning his initial plan for the trilogy. But Chaudhuri suggests that such abandonment of what was intended to be a trilogy was not untypical of Tagore and came with his polymathic personality. As Chaudhuri puts it, "The poet, the singer, and the teacher constantly mingled with his moods, and he could not concentrate for long on one plot or one set of characters." Tagore's non-fiction proves that in English as well as Bengali writings, Tagore's non-fiction proves that in English as well as Bengali writings, Tagore's non-fiction proves that in English as well as Bengali writings, Tagore indeed exhibited his incredible variety and essentially polymathic output. He wrote proses about poetry, poets, fiction, the writer's past and present, religion, women's lot, the lessons of history, cultural politics, education, rural reconstruction, eternal nature, and environments that he felt had become vulnerable by his, in his time. He also wrote about the importance of upholding human values in times of crisis. Even a cursory look at the titles of English prose collected in the second volume of the four-volume English Writings of Tagore will reveal him pondering topics such as the place of the individual in the universe, the self, the existence of evil in the world, the right of religion, and the problem of nationalism. We find him articulating his educational vision and writing about his experiences as a teacher. We discover his preoccupation with aesthetics and what could be considered as the sublime in his essays, letters, and speeches. The third volume reveals many similar topics, but also shows him discoursing on issues related, relating to civilizational connections that date back to ancient times, such as East and West, East-West relationships. In addition, there are also reflections on men and women whom he admired, could be for their, India, could be for the Britons, could be Britons for the India that must come, visionaries such as Romain Rolland and Mahatma Gandhi. Many of his proses collected in the third and fourth volumes of the English Writings amount to extended meditation and reflections on nature. But quite a few consist of lectures and addresses given over decades and delivered as a result of invitations to speak that came to speak from, uh, all corners of the world after he got the Nobel Prize. Uh, for English departments, let me just say that, uh, he has about 300, 3,000 pages in English, and for the size, not just the short size. So, there's enough for all of you to get also. The extent of Tagore's polymathy can also be gauged from the conversations recorded in these volumes, which, for they come across his exchanges with the scientist, Einstein, the philosopher, Bertrand Russell, the military dictator, Benito Mussolini, as well as the writer, Romain Rolland. We, we hear him contemplating, and this is so, so relevant, we hear, also, hear him contemplating the Palestinian problem and visualizing a future in, quote, "Which the Arabs will rebuild their own lives and Jews will rebuild their religion and culture, but both will be united as one political entity," unquote. Although he knows that this can be possible only if, quote, "If the Jews will include the Arabs in their political and economic programs," unquote. We find him ruminating on topics such as that science can be humanized. We find him as well supporting the birth control movement in a letter to the educator and birth control activist, Margaret Sanger in 1926. He embraced birth controls, not only because it will save women from enforced and undesirable maternity, but because it will help the cause of peace by lessening the number of surplus population in the country, competing for food and space. The topical breadth of his polymathic, polymathic writing in English is where I was wondering about how can one lifetime, he could have combined such diverse interests and still moved on to new realms of thought and reason. The letters Tagore exchanged with so many people until the end of his life, setting aside his innumerable letters in Bengali, which span 20 or so volumes, we can marvel at the 550 pages of the Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore in which Dr. Robinson, you know, mainly translated all his letters from English to Bengali, but also reproduced a lot of his voluminous correspondence, correspondence in English. As Robinson observes in his forward, we get in the wide-ranging selection some of his thoughts on nationalism, war and peace, cross-cultural education, the role of toleration, the need for openness. The range of correspondence too reveals the polymath's association with men and women of diverse faiths, occupations, and commitments. These include writers, composers, artists, politicians, educators, and scientists, as well as admirers and devotees. In his translation work, because he did a lot of translation, we can, again, gauge the extent of Tagore's polymathy and of the problems his diverse interests and commitments brought him. The most successful among his numerous collections, collections, translating his own poems is without a doubt the first one, "Gitanjali," which was chiefly responsible for the Nobel Prize awarding in 1913. To be sure, the translations in this volume conveyed the religious sensibility of the poet given to intense devotional feelings through more than competent English renderings. The literally-like prose format and the tone he had adopted there were just right for consumption. But the fame the book had earned him led him in the next few years to hurried attempts to work, to work the appetite of the Western reading public that seemed impatient for his Tolstoyan work. And at just this time, the polymath needed a continuous flow of money for his educational and rural reconstruction schemes. This need led to rushed translations and uneven selection of works, enough published producers in the West, often by depending on other translators, phrases in the one volume translated in English. The frequent lectures he undertook at the same time also took their toll on the writer and damaged his reputation. The increasingly poor quality of his rushed translations as well as the progressive indifference of readers, were once ready to devour anything he produced in the country, indicate the travails and indiscretions that polymathy could get if it's not effectively managed. Moreover, lecture audiences were more increasingly put off by what he said, especially when he attacked nationalism in the West and in Japan, where the audiences were unprepared for such aggressive views. He may have been speaking the truth in denouncing nationalism's shortcomings, but in his eagerness to collect funds for his imminent projects, clearly misjudged locations and audience for his lectures. One episode from this period is particularly illustrative of this poor judgment. In 1926, he visited Italy and accepted the hospitality of the fascist government. He was misled into visiting Benito Mussolini at the time and praising him, and even accepted gifts, he accepted for the Visva-Bharati library from a Tagore committee. Little did the Italian English committee sitting in Shantiniketan then know that they were being funded by the dictator's agents seeking worldwide endorsements. By a dictator's agents seeking worldwide endorsements. In the world of, in the works of biographer, Dr. Andrew Robinson, that Rabindranath was in a peculiar state of mind, was in a peculiar state of mind by the time he left Italy, cheered by his reception, intrigued by Mussolini, but disturbed by the growing picture of repression and violence underpinning the fascist state. Soon after he left Italy, he met Romain Rolland, the French pacifist who'd be awarded the Nobel Prize for his activities. It was only when Rolland briefed Tagore thoroughly about what Mussolini actually did that the Indian writer became fully aware of the extent of his indiscretion. Tagore's story reminds us of polymaths, even the ones with the most positive intentions, can overreach themselves in pursuit of their diverse goals. Yet, the affirmative results of such polymathic versatility abound. As a translator, Tagore would take his text across not only the language barriers, but generic ones. The text I have in mind is his only full-length poem published in English, originally presented as "The Child." Tagore wrote it one, one night in Germany in 1930 after watching a passion play that depicted Christ's crucifixion as an act of redemptive suffering on behalf of the community. Before the end of the year, it was performed in New York's, New York's Carnegie Hall, but Tagore decided to recite it to the accompaniment of eight English verses that he had. Then in 1931, the poem found a Bengali avatar in a prose poem collected as Shesh Lekha, the volume, Punashcha, or Once More. A rare combination of reverse translation as the poet crossed languages and poetic modes of one. It was then performed on stage with dances complementing the dramatic performances as in the Western ballet. Tagore's polymathy took him across continents, cultures, and languages, languages, and transformed modes, modes, poetry in English and Bengali, his nature and everything. Not only, not did the metamorphoses stop here. Tagore would create yet another Bengali composition based on the theme of the coming of the savior in 1941, one that we all know as "Shey Amader Mohanabash," or my literal translation, "The Great Deliverance." And before that, in 1933, he had translated his earlier "Janmadine" or "Birthday," which he had adapted for senior across cultures, the theme of the savior, come to redeem crisis-stricken mankind. As the Bengali scholar, Hitesranjan Sanyal observes, "In the course of Rabindranath's sea voyages, the waves from the East, the West, the North, and the South, all fused completely into one oceanic flow." And coming to my conclusion, which brings me to my penultimate topic, Tagore, the polymath's experiments with the visual arts. Satyajit Ray, an alumnus of Visva-Bharati, and according to some, the last polymath of Bengal, indicates in his film of the poet that though he had emerged as a painter only towards the end of his 60s, Tagore had been doodling for a long time. He had been sketching since the turn of the 20th century, and he had close links to major Bengali artists, such as his nephew, nephews, Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore, through whom he met Sir William Rothenstein, an English artist who played a key role in the publication of the English "Gitanjali." Visits to the West must have stimulated his aesthetic sensibility to exposure to modern art movements, such as expressionism and surrealism. He set up an art school in Shantiniketan, Kala Bhavan, where he invited already famous painter, Nandalal Bose, and other art students to head Kala Bhavan. Ever dancing, ever painting, ever expanding, constituted circles, Tagore thus transitioned from verse writing to doodling and sketching to painting with remarkable ease. From 1928, when he first exhibited as a painter, to his death in 1941, he created well over 2,300 paintings, which proved path-breaking for Indian art in many ways. Tagore remained a polymath till the end. "Nirban," a memoir by his daughter-in-law, Pratima Tagore, offers final evidence of the way his multi-talented and unendingly versatile and incredibly gifted man continued to range over different forms and modes of art and education even as he came closer to die. In the final months of his life and despite increasing ill health and pain, Tagore records in writing poetry and short fiction, and initiating works for the songs, dances, and acting that would go on for the festivals he introduced in his beloved institutions. This was the time when he penned his famous lecture that would be his last testament to humanity, "Shabhyatar Sankat," or "The Crisis in Civilization." How did, my last part, how did Tagore achieve so much in so many fields and genres in 81 years? Some answers can be found in the concluding chapter of his son, Rathindranath's memoir, "Pitri Smriti." In "Father as I Knew Him," the son marvels at the many-sidedness of his father's genius. "He combined in himself the minds of a poet, a scientist, a philosopher, and a seer," his son says. His son tells us that Tagore was extremely capricious in his moods, mingling with children and families at one point and disappearing in another, essentially lonely, but with a sense of humor that saw through the travails of life full of sorrow and punishing struggle. Although he had been born the son of a rich man and the grandson, grandson of a fabulously rich one, Rathindranath points out how his father would write all day, poems, songs, essays, plays, fiction, no matter how many callers he had, and how he would dream most of the night, for he would sleep for only a few hours. Tellingly, Rathindranath observes that his father's, quote, "Receptive and imaginative mind would never accept anything as final," unquote. But most decisively polymathic of the many features noted in the final one, is the son's loving summary in the final paragraph of his memoir, quote, "What struck me most was the amazing vitality of his mind. Never for a day did he cease to grow. His poems are his best life story," and may conclude by saying that his greatest poem is the life he has lived. Thank you.


Lecture from Professor Dr. Saugata Bhaduri:

talk on world literature that is finally what I'm going to do as we do know uh world literature itself the term world literature that was coined or at least the first time anyone talks about world literature was Goethe So Goethe kind of coined or at least popularized the term world literature or world literature to welcome the impossibility of restricting oneself to the insularity of a national literature So that is the point with which we begin the whole idea of national literature that literature has to be restricted to only one nation or one community and often that going beyond that because of the ever increasing availability of texts from other cultures and Goethe famously told his disciple Johann Peter Eckermann in January 1827 so that's almost 200 years back and I'm quoting actually the bulk of my presentation actually quotes that's why I thought that we should share the screen So Goethe told Eckermann I am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession of mankind revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of ways I therefore like to learn about it in foreign nations and advise everyone to do the same National literature is now a rather unmeaning term The epoch of world literature is at hand and everyone must strive to hasten its approach So this dichotomy this kind of opposition between what is national and therefore restricted versus what is open that would inform Goethe's original coinage of the term world literature Uh furthermore as we would see though this is reported in the first time Goethe used the term in January 1827 but this was published a bit later this letter to Eckermann or this advice to Eckermann was published only in 1835 So therefore this wasn't the first published instance of Goethe having used the word world literature but the first instance was also in January 1827 when Goethe wrote an essay where he compared two different authors altogether and that was the first time he really coined the term world literature But what is interesting and therefore we get led to the first paradox concerning world literature is that this first published instance of the the word world literature being used by Goethe however betrays a certain nationalist pride because if you remember back he was saying that world literature needed to be invented precisely because we should not be nationalists we should not have national constraints we should not constrain ourselves to national literature alone But the first published use of the term by Goethe of world literature however betrays a certain nationalistic pride and he says and I quote again and I'm quoting Goethe There is being formed a universal world literature So far so good right In which an honorable role is reserved for us Germans Somehow strangely so while he you know raises the idea of world literature but he somehow cannot depart from the very privileged position within that that Germans must occupy All the nations review our work They praise censure accept and reject imitate and misrepresent us open or close their hearts to us all this we must accept with equanimity etc etc So already we find the very original dire with which we started that on the one hand there is nationally constrained literature and on the other hand there is the possibility of an open world literature that gets problematized by the very the very person who coined the term because he himself seems to have somehow within him a latent nationalist pride while theorizing world literature while talking about world literature And this becomes even further complicated because elsewhere also in an essay on a German translation of playwrights like Schiller Goethe writes The wide world extensive as it is is only an expanded fatherland So somehow this connection between nation somehow already compromises the clear dichotomy with which we have begun our discussion And furthermore so therefore let me just end the discussion there to with this So Goethe's notion of world literature continuously strives between nationalism and cosmopolitanism So this dire and this will become very important once we move to Rabindranath in just a few more minutes So on the one hand world literature is supposed to go beyond narrow nationalisms into probably cosmopolitanisms but that is not as it's easier said than done and we would see this continuous juxtaposition between the two And this has been discussed in great detail by John Feiser in his very well-known article on Goethe and the Romantic school where he precisely discusses this particular dichotomy or this particular ambivalence in it Similarly just a few years after Goethe so that was 1827 as you remember a very early use of the term world literature happens in Communist Manifesto and that's just 24 years after Goethe's famous letter to Eckermann So Marx and Engels in Communist Manifesto talk about and I quote a particular passage from the Communist Manifesto So Marx and Engels say The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country As in material so also in intellectual production The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature Unquote So Marx and Engels also frame the idea of world literature precisely from the standpoint of how national literatures restricted rather let's say rather myopic local literatures have to give way to more open cosmopolitan cosmopolitanism again becomes a keyword because Marx and Engels refuse to use the word cosmopolitan but wants to open oneself to the possibilities of a more cosmopolitan world But Marx and Engels associate this emergence of world literature also with the spread of capital as we have already seen in this very quote So this quote by it shows how world literature potentially takes people beyond narrow-mindedness It also shows the problematic relationship between bourgeois world capitalism and world literature showing that worlding and cosmopolitanism may not be altogether unproblematic So unless we end up believing that being nationalistic is a bad thing and being cosmopolitan is a good thing we must recall from both Goethe and from Marx that probably it's not that easy This dire is somewhat uneasy because even when you are cosmopolitan you probably still have some remnants of nationalism in you as we did in Goethe And furthermore cosmopolitanism itself can also be connected to the global spread of capitalism and therefore it need not be something that needs to be uncritically defended It is in this context that we move on to Rabindranath on world literature and we will precisely see that these two things which see sit somewhat uneasily nationalism and cosmopolitanism how they get juxtaposed Now interestingly not much later just about half a century after the after the after the the instance from Marx that I just quoted from Rabindranath was asked to deliver a lecture on comparative literature So we have now suddenly got introduced to another term altogether comparative literature because we began by talking about world literature and suddenly we discovered that maybe world literature itself also has to be rooted through comparative literature because Rabindranath was originally asked by the Jatiya Shiksha Parishad National Council of Education which Professor Sukumar Lahiri has also referred to in his lecture in February 1907 so just about 60 years less than 60 years after Marx's Communist Manifesto Rabindranath was invited by the Jatiya Shiksha Parishad to deliver a lecture on comparative literature and the very lecture that he delivered uh the lecture delivered in February however got titled Vishwa Sahitya The term that he comes up with almost recalling Marx's and Goethe's earlier use of the term because he was asked to deliver a lecture on comparative literature but he ended up delivering a lecture that got called Vishwa Sahitya and in 1907 itself it was published and the there was an English translation of this particular uh this particular lecture turned article too and David Damrosch's World Literature in Theory chapter 4 is precisely this particular article by Rabindranath But in my presentation today I would use my own translations because probably that would work the best So I would quote elaborately from this particular article but not using Chakravarti's translation in the David Damrosch volume but my own translation And everyone since practically all of you would know Bangla I would invite you to just visit the very readily available repository of Tagore's works Tagore web archive and therein in the search engine you'll be led to the article and I would invite all of you to read it in original in Bangla So for today's talk I'll be using English translations of mine But what he does in this particular lecture therefore the article so remember he was asked to deliver a lecture on comparative literature But Tagore says and this is exactly quoting him he says What you have named as comparative literature in English I will call world literature in Bangla I will call Vishwa Sahitya in Bangla So comparative literature becomes world literature in a way So apart from the nationalism cosmopolitanism dire which I entered into a minute probably one has to take a second detour now into comparative literature to understand what is at stake in comparative literature so much so that Tagore Rabindranath would have actually renamed it at least for the purposes of this lecture as world literature So very brief detour into the history of comparative literature part of which I just breezed through because it may not be really central here So the idea of comparative literature was evolved quite early So as early as 1598 we already have a particular person called Francis Meres writing an essay called A Comparative Discourse of our English Poets etc etc So as early as 1598 we already have the signs of comparative literature as a as a discipline and by the mid-18th century by 1774 we already have comparative surveys of literatures emerging and soon enough from comparative criticism So comparative literature the phrase comparative literature is still missing but by the end of the 18th century we already have comparative criticism as a term directly emerging in George Ellis's works in his Early English Poets that was the work In French not comparative literature but compared literature because literature compare would be compared literature rather than literature comparative but nevertheless So by 1816 we have compared literature literature compared almost emerging as a term and it goes on and on But what is interesting is that when we would come to how comparative literature precisely factors in the very dire that I was talking about we should come to the use of comparative literature the phrase comparative literature in English because so far we were talking about either the phrase comparative literature not being there or it being literature compared in French But the first use of comparative literature the very phrase comparative literature in English was by Matthew Arnold and someone that you all know and in the 1848 letter which he wrote to his sister the first time in English the phrase comparative literature gets used and you can all read that letter to his sister it was in 1848 where Arnold probably the same thing that somehow we cannot at all just restrict ourselves to English literature and the English are somehow falling behind the continent that is paraphrasing the quote from Arnold We have to have an outlook towards comparative literature And once the term therefore gets introduced in English we find Arnold further in a slightly later work in 1857 he again talks about the same thing that no single literature no single event no single national culture can contain literary sensibilities and this Matthew Arnold once again on the modern element in literature one of his articles very boldly says that we have to take recourse to comparative literature So Matthew Arnold therefore is the father so to say of the phrase comparative literature and therefore this whole moving on from national literatures unto world literatures as a genre And by the time we have the first book with the name comparative literature that was by someone called Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett and he for the first time the first book to bear the title comparative literature was in 1886 and he also held the chair in comparative literature We find Posnett once again bringing that word cosmopolitanism to the fore because Posnett says in his book and I'm reading the quote The gradual expansion of social life from clan to city from city to nation from both of these to cosmopolitan humanity as the proper order of our studies in comparing So comparative literature also somehow brings in precisely what a century back almost a century back that is 70 years back Goethe had talked about which is to move on from clans to nations therefore to cosmopolitanism So we are back to the same dire nation and cosmopolitanism and which would therefore let me go before I move into the particular article Vishwa Sahitya a slight detour to cosmopolitanism and nationalism So are they indeed diametric or they indeed diametrically opposed to each other Can you indeed if you want to abjure nationalism do you automatically become a cosmopolitan because that would set the agenda for world literature a bit clearly Now when we talk about cosmopolitanism nowadays more often than not we begin by talking about Kant and Kant's famous essay 1795 Perpetual Peace where he first defines cosmopolitanism I wouldn't drag you through the longish quote that I have on my slide and we are not going to read the longish quote so you must be wondering where is the longish quote So the longish quote comes a little later but I didn't want to drag you But as Kant says in this particular article because he argues and we all know the argument that somehow we have to become cosmopolitan for the simple reason that nation states cannot afford to fight with each other etc etc But what we notice is that in Kant therefore cosmopolitanism is derived from the nation It is the nation which has the agency to be hospitable to other nations So cosmopolitanism rather than being an antidote to nationalism or rather than being derived otherwise otherwise than national cosmopolitanism in Kant's definition is derived from the nation So it's nationalism that leads to cosmopolitanism rather than cosmopolitanism being the reverse or the obverse of of nationalism Now this is exactly what gets critiqued later Kant's notion of a derived cosmopolitanism where cosmopolitanism essentially emerges from the nation was critiqued by many including very importantly Derrida who in a 1997 interview precisely calls Kant out again for for lack of a better term I won't read the quote but you can all look up the interview and Derrida almost calls out Kant by suggesting that Kant talks about cosmopolitanism but that cosmopolitanism is somehow derived from nation itself So nation becomes the key to being cosmopolitan And accordingly someone called Seyla Benhabib who you may have heard of she writes a book called Another Cosmopolitanism And there she goes on to say rather than this strange notion of a purer than thou holier than thou kind of cosmopolitanism which emerges from without the nation one has to probably think of the connection between nationalism and cosmopolitanism as being fraught as being problematic and not automatically being antithetical to each other And this really becomes our entry point into Tagore though I would still for a minute or so dwell on another article by Tagore which again Professor Sukumar Lahiri has already referred to which is the Nationalism lectures and all of us are aware that they were originally in English So in the Nationalism lectures we know that Tagore precisely talks about how cosmopolitanism and nationalisms are both problems both are problematic And Rabindranath in his major articles which are compiled in this volume called Nationalism there he says and I'll just share a few quotes from from his Nationalism lectures He says and I'm quoting Rabindranath Neither the colorless vagueness of cosmopolitanism nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation worship is the goal of human history So human history has to chart a path which is equally probably distant from both cosmopolitanism as well as nationalism Neither cosmopolitanism does not get delivered automatically as the other to nationalism One has to steer clear from both nationalism and cosmopolitanism And therefore rather than the automatic axiomatic statement of becoming cosmopolitan rather than being nationalist which was thought of as the starting point of world literature we'll see soon see Rabindranath chart out quite a different path quite a varied path which would be equidistant from both the vagueness of cosmopolitanism and the idolatry of nationalism Of course Rabindranath Rabindranath has the choicest critical things to say about the nation and since we are at it one might as well as read some of the more pithy quotes from his Nationalism lectures The nation and all of these are quotes from Rabindranath The nation with all its paraphernalia of power and prosperity its flags and pious hymns its blasphemous prayers in the churches and its literally mock thunders of patriotic bragging cannot hide the fact that the nation is the greatest evil for the nation We do know that nationalism is probably the most problematic thing to have happened to us and Rabindranath has already laid it before us But what I mean to say is as we will soon move into world literature that somehow a vague cosmopolitanism does not become the automatic answer to virulent nationalism Rabindranath goes on to say further Nationalism is a great menace It is the particular thing which for years has been at the bottom of India's troubles etc etc because maybe one more quote from nationalism And the ideal of the nation is one of the most powerful anaesthetics that man has invented Under the influence of its fumes the whole people can carry out a systematic program of the most virulent self-seeking without being in the least aware of its moral perversion So nationalism is perverse morally perverse In fact even dangerously so since for this point that So that being said this kind of preface being put before you let me now jump straight into the 1907 article by Rabindranath World Literature and let me uncouple let me just lay before you a few registers one after the other as to what Rabindranath exactly has in mind when he talks about world literature The first register that I lay before you is work and literature And Rabindranath would go on to say that while there is a certain productive activity wherein frenetically we try to deliver something instrumentally give something literature seems to stand right outside of work of pragmatic work And all the things that you see on the screen are quotes translated by me from the original Bangla and which I'll read out one after the other So Rabindranath says There are two major streams in which human beings express themselves in this world One stream comprises the work that humans do The other stream is that of literature These two streams flow right next to each other Human beings have dedicated themselves to both of these compositions through labor and compositions through imagination If we try to know the history and literature of humankind these two flows must be respected So there is of course labor work but that is one flow If we at all have to find out what literature is and therefore what world literature should ideally have it is kind of the other of work the other of work that lies outside of it Rabindranath further goes on to say in distinguishing these two spheres therefore work and literature He goes on to say In the sphere of work human beings expend all their energy and experience to build homes societies states and religious rituals through these buildings that all that human beings know all that they have achieved and all that they still desire get expression and gradually it has come to such a force that no sovereign individual can express himself or herself clearly and wholly anymore but through the prisms of home society state and religion built by many people over many years So that is what he calls burden This burden of work and all that we tend to express has to be through those fruits of labor but that wouldn't be the case And that is what Rabindranath seems to say seems to suggest really says that which is great in human beings that which is eternal that which cannot be exhausted in everyday work is what gets captured in literature So literature precisely exceeds work this this sphere of labor with the truthfulness things to work there's no denying that but that which lies beyond the sphere of work is precisely literature And automatically builds up the great form of the human race And this is Tagore's primary suggestion So the first point that I culled out for you is this distinction that literature must have from work So there are spheres through which we productively laboringly create certain things and then there is something that exceeds that And therefore to move on to my second register Rabindranath defines literature which lies outside of the sphere of work in his essay Vishwa Sahitya as wasteful expenditure So there are certain expenditures that we do where we calculatedly put in invest a certain amount of labor invest a certain amount of resources to to gainfully achieve something But literature on the other hand lies precisely outside of work and therefore is indeed wasteful expenditure And wasteful expenditure is being used here as a positive term We must waste we must wastefully expend And Rabindranath says and again I will just share a few quotes from the article and he in his own poetic way invokes invokes metaphors So here he invokes the metaphor of mother A mother cannot help taking care of her little child But she expresses her love not only through routine work for the child but also through spontaneous gestures which have no purpose So even when the mother feeds the child that's that's useful that's kind of routine to work But the mother also showers upon the child so many other gestures that maybe considered excess meaningless Why must the mother pet a child or call the child some some name some names in love etc Spontaneous gestures with no purpose They express themselves through so many games she plays with the child so many cuddles of affection that she showers on him so many meaningless babbles that she utters to him She dresses up the child in many colors decks it with many ornaments and without any need or purpose cannot but expand her love and beauty for the child through meaningless but beautiful excessive expenditure And this excessive expenditure rather than useful expenditure that Rabindranath reads as the mandate of literature and also world literature by extension The next metaphor that Rabindranath uses is of the of the greedy I have also translated this quote primarily non not knowing whether this domestic mistress of our hearts feels affronted if she cannot match the gifts she receives from her relatives also So it's a very peculiar kind of paradigm already in wasteful expenditure we almost invoked sort of a child and generous wasteful expenditure Here we are in the paradigm of gift And Rabindranath was writing almost four decades before Bataille and just like he may have prefigured so many things even the whole theory of wasteful expenditure and gifts being outgifted you must be aware of George Bataille's general kind of take in this But indeed so a shrewd greedy the greedy of our hearts feels affronted if she cannot match the gifts she receives from her relatives also She picks up all kinds of materials language tunes touch and stones to create a gift hamper to express a reciprocal relationship with the other If this ends up serving any purpose of hers good but many a times she gets eager to express herself even at the cost of destroying her own experiences The idea is to give even beyond what you have before and that really is the test of you being able to gift well She wants to express herself even at the cost of getting bankrupt This is the chief faculty of human beings And Rabindranath says this is what is literature where we completely we we go beyond our means we wastefully expend rather than conservatively to work to labor try to productively achieve something The faculty of that this is the chief faculty of human expression the faculty of wasteful expenditure And to this the accountants of prudence and experience can only express regret So those who rather stick to prudence and experiences they would probably think we people who do humanities and literature or someone whom Rabindranath is generally talking about here are silly people But this is what we are supposed to do to engage in wasteful expenditure And Rabindranath further goes on to say The prudent and the expedient worship in one manner It is ecstatic in another So we are talking about two kinds of worship Ours is not a worship of prudence of experience but it's another kind of ecstatic celebration ecstatic worship The prudent and expedient worship God with the objective of getting well-being in return There is a return that we expect and that's why you pray Their worship is like lending money on interest The ecstatic worship is nothing but wasteful expenditure When the heart wants to express itself it does not give any attention to losses This uncalculating wasteful expenditure is what needs to be esteemed So this is the second register wasteful expenditure Literature is about being able to wastefully expend completely give yourself away without expecting anything in return It does not belong to the order of productive expenditure of work And this leads me therefore to the third register literature therefore as Rabindranath says in world literature in his article on world literature is excess It transgresses it exceeds it goes beyond and something is already evident from now So Rabindranath says in the same article because all the quotes are from the same article Rabindranath says that We find the power of self-preservation within work We find the power of self-expression in aesthetic excess or what he calls what is in the original as I have translated as aesthetic excess but nevertheless it can work Self-preservation is what we need self-expression is what is an excess of our needs So it's going beyond our needs the exceeding of our needs but that is precisely the mandate of literature And he goes on to say further Self-interest does not want to indulge in wasteful expenditure and yet ecstatic joy reveals itself only in wasteful expenditure and only thus only from that excess in wasteful expenditure or comes only from such kind of excess And Rabindranath further says This is why there is no diligence to self-expression in literature It is far from self-interest There is no duty there There is only happiness There are no gods and millions there There is only the sovereign himself So literature brings us face to face with the sovereign himself We are no more in the domain of need and utility because there is no debt to just derive what we require Need is not your language excess is exceeding is And Rabindranath further says What do we get in front of us to be seen in literature That which human beings have in abundance that which is their will that which exceeds all their needs and experiences that which has not been exhausted within their worldly lives And it is this inexhaustibility this transgressive excess that literature necessarily dwells in And which leads me therefore to the fourth register that Rabindranath also comes up with in this particular article which is literature therefore has to be trans-contextual Limiting literature to any particular context ties it up with the domain of work self-preservation interest utility whereas really literature has to be trans-contextual And Rabindranath says and I quote One cannot do justice to literature if one were to delimit it to a specific place time and people If we understand that the world being again I have translated world being what he uses Vishwa Manav So if we understand that the Vishwa Manav itself is expressing itself through literature then only will we be able to see what is to be seen in literature If you restrict it to any particular context you'll miss out what literature is all about You have to be able to move beyond that clearly get back to the quote Wherever in literary writing the author has not been but a mere citizen the writing has got spoiled Wherever the author has perceived the feelings of the whole of humanity in his or her feelings has expressed the pains of all humans in his or her writings there the writing has found a place in literature Literature has to be seen like this The world being Vishwa Manav is constructing this temple as the master mason Authors arrive from different places and times to work for him as laborers The exact plan of the entire edifice is not in front of anyone But wherever there is an error that crops up every laborer and exercising his natural instinct tries to match his own work through the whole to that invisible master plan It is in this that his powers get expressed and this happens when one does not receive the petty salary of an ordinary laborer but the respect that is due to great masters So ultimately it has to literature has to move beyond immediate confines Every author emerges from a context but somehow all of them are contributing towards this grand continuing project And that continuing project is beyond work as it is is of world literature To move on to my fifth register therefore accordingly literature also has to be trans-historic because if literature takes a really bound to a historical period that does not fulfill the mandate of being Vishwa And Rabindranath in a very sardonic in his own way as you knew about Rabindranath he says To look exclusively at Akbar's empire or the history of Buddha or the character of Queen Elizabeth only satiates one's curiosity for information to know the news as it were So if you read literature with the objective of getting historical data read about it you might as well as read history books you might as well as read news etc So one who knows that Akbar and Elizabeth are but symptoms the one who knows that the human being is just trying to bring into fruition his deepest objectives through history through many attempts many errors many rectifications So one who knows that the human being is trying to liberate himself by getting connected to larger wholes that everyone is in that direction So one who knows that sovereignty which in its confines to justify itself is continuously battling beyond monarchy and democracy The human being is continuously making and unmaking itself to express itself within the world being to realize its particularities within collectivities That person does not see particular personages in human history but attempts to find the ever-attempting desires of the Everyman Nityamanush I've translated as Everyman So that person is not really constrained by any particular person Such a person does not go on a pilgrimage and return after seeing the pilgrims alone If they go on a pilgrimage and you see the pilgrims and you're happy right He returns after having a glimpse of the divine to see whom the pilgrims are assembled for diversely to be restricted within history is to actually just be a pilgrim just to see the pilgrims Why have the pilgrims arrived to begin with is that which we should see and therefore literature has to be trans-historic which takes me to the second last the penultimate register that I have gleaned and I have culled out from Rabindranath's essay which is therefore as Rabindranath believes literature leads us to a second world Our primary world is obviously the world of work the world of labor the world of utility but the second world is what exceeds it transgresses it in an unutilized manner And that is what literature is And Rabindranath says and again I quote from his article While walking down the street of a town you see that everyone is busy The grocer is running his shop the blacksmith is beating his iron the porter is carrying his load the laborer is building his wall But there is another which you may not literally see but see in your thoughts On both sides of the street through every household through the shops and markets the lanes and the villages the flow of ecstatic joy is spreading itself in so many branches in so many ways over so much squalor and narrowness One has to be able to see the whole of literature around the whole of humankind in this manner One has to be able to see how the human being is able to expand its real being all around itself to great distances through its imagination This is how the human being continuously exceeds and radiates all around itself which makes him continuously exceed itself expand itself This expansion that the human being in spite of the restrictions of its condition attempts through imaginative creation which builds a second world around this world that is literature So literature is that second world There is of course the first world the world that we live in the world of materiality and the world literature of literature is precisely the second world which is an excess of this world being And which leads me therefore to the final seventh register that one also gleans out from this particular article which is of course beyond narrow-mindedness This is something that right from Goethe we have been talking about but which is also an ethical rather than a dilettante kind of cosmopolitanism a big cosmopolitanism And ethical going beyond the provincial narrow-mindedness which is to be able to reach out to the other And this other regarding ethical move that literature alone does taking you trans-historically trans-contextually into the domain of the other is precisely what Rabindranath talks about and he says The bond that we have with truth in this world is of three types The bond of prudence the bond of experience and the bond of ecstatic joy What is this bond of ecstatic joy It is to know the other as your own and to know your own self for the other So joy itself literature that the objective of literature itself is for you to be able to reach out to the other and also discover the other in you And this of course leads you therefore to be the the go beyond narrow-mindedness And Rabindranath says The world is not my and I have translated this for it's kin the word that Rabindranath uses is kin So the world is not my kin and your kin and his kin And we tend to look at the world in such manners in such a such a mode that the world we look at the world as my part your part and his part To know the world like that is profoundly provincial Similarly literature is not my writings your writings and his writings We usually look at literature in this provincial manner We have to set our goal at liberating ourselves from this provincial narrow-mindedness and see the world being in world literature and accepting the wholeness in every author's work and seeing in that and seeing in that wholeness the attempt of all human beings at expression The time has come to take that pledge And this is the pledge that Rabindranath therefore wants us to take and ending the essay with the quote that I've already presented before you at the beginning of my talk somehow the the beginning of my talk What you have named as comparative literature in English I will call it as world literature in Bangla So world literature is precisely this possibility following these seven registers of going beyond narrow provincial modes of looking at literature as productive as utile as restricted to particular contexts but not going over to the other extreme of a vague cosmopolitanism So this somehow as I've already put before you and then we'll put things in perspective and conclude Rabindranath's views of world literature is thus an ethical project of establishing literature as the very foundation of a new world wide beyond insularities beyond sectarianisms And as you recall one after the other these and how does he establish that The difference between useful work and joyful literature Second literature as wasteful expenditure just to recall the seven things that I put before you Third as you all recall literature is excess through which humans exceed their limitations Fourth literature as does as trans-contextual Fifth literature also does as trans-historical Sixth as you recall literature does as the vehicle of being the second world And finally therefore literature as something that the world the second world is something that is beyond provincialism confined to territories And this is exactly what Rabindranath therefore lays before us as the mandate of world literature And that is exactly what we are talking about World literature is thus an unutilized excessive gesture of joy that promises to take one beyond narrow provincialisms unto a true calm beyond both nationalisms and first world cosmopolitanisms And therefore in conclusion to conclude and finally put things in perspective because it's very pertinent for our own times because we we are living through very difficult times In these troubled times when all around us sectarian identities assertions of different forms are raising their ugly heads and challenging the very foundations of humanity and on the other hand the promise of vague first world cosmopolitanism merely skirts real issues in a make-believe bubble of affluence of the few world literature thus becomes an ethical means of leading one beyond the cesspool of both the insular identitarian and the dilettante metropolitan cosmopolitan here and now to the promise of a truly cosmopolitical to use the Derridean term a truly cosmopolitical democracy to come And therefore let me leave you with these words The relevance of Rabindranath's vision of world literature lies in its forming a blueprint for this non-instrumental non-identitarian non-nationalistic and non-cosmopolitan and yet cosmopolitics for a world literature and culture which can attempt to show us the way out of the sectarianism and identitarianism as well as the indifference and cynicism So if nationalism is sectarian vague cosmopolitanism is cynical indifferent and neither can really lead us very far So beyond both the both the both the things that plague our society today Rabindranath probably gives us this blueprint of world literature Thank you very much.