Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1930-10-05
TACORE TO PAY AMERICA
VISIT AT CRUCIAL TIME
Foe of NatiOnalism Stands Firm While
India and u. S. Lean Strongly
Toward 1t.

grilling that he turned his face toward
Japan instead.
But now the Prophet of the East will
arrive in New York at an opportune
time, when we seem about to enter a
period of Indian rebirth, as in the days
when Bakst and Diagileff and Stanis-
lavsky visited New York, our theater
and our art threatened to become en-
tirely Slavic For during this Fall and
the early Winter months we are to see a
theater company from Calcutta, headed
by Bhaduri the John Barrymore of the
East, so they say, and there are to be
exhibited Hindu paintings which are
the product of a school of painting I'M
der the direction of Abanindranath Ia
gore the nephew of the poet.
If rumor is to be believed, Rabindra-
nath himself will exhibit some of his
own workmanship with the brush. One
of the principles of his educational
theory is that the soul finds expansive
development in the presence of art
From his early childhood this world
famed poet of India has given free rein
to the creative impulses within him
Since he was 6 years old he has written
verse. Since he was younger still he has
sung with the very joy of self-expres-
sion. There are songs that have ema-
mated from him on the lips of desert
travellers. They are composed in a
music scale that sounds strange to
Western ears, but they have become
some of the folk songs of the land
To the finger tips of his long and
slim hands Tagore is the artist; he has
grace OF gesture, grace of movement
silent for the want of shoes, soft tread
ing movements in his sandals Some
where he has likened government to the
wearing of shoes, where ease of develop
ment is restricted to a certain law and
order of mechanical action.
Will Lead Cultural Phase.
Which recalls the Persian proverb
that "he who wears shoes, it Is as
though the whole world were covered
with leather" Tagore might add that
this Is one of the ills of the world: it
is too politically shod.
Under the auspices of the Indian
Society of New York, therefore, presided
over by the enthusiastic direction of
Hari Govil, who was the founder of
India Center in New York which seeks
to promote cultural relations between
India and America and which moves in
the spirit Rabindranath Tagore has
so much to heart, this season will wit
ness Towering of the art of India in
our midst. And its spokesman undoubt-
edly Will be the poet who is still the
poet, even though he might talk on
the nationalism of the West, Of Japan,
of India
The word nation is anathema to him:
1t symbolizes a dehumanizing process, a
bartering of the higher aspirations of
life for the sake Of developing commerce
and Industry; it represents spiritual
slavery for the good of profit and power
He had declared in his book on Ma
tionalism" that mere administration is
unproductive. It is a steam roller, but
"it does not help the soil to become
fertile"
We have reached that moment in his
tory, so he burningly believes, when the
moral man, which to him Is the COM
plete man. is making room for the po-
litical and commercial man. who is a
being Of limited purpose. Tagore is fair
to the nation where he can be; he sees
its practical purposes In 1916, when
the bureaucracy of England in India
was not making life comfortable for
him, he nevertheless recognized that as
far as nations went there were reasons
to believe that the British Empire was
among the best.