Abstract
Some of Tagore’s travel writings carried the imprints of the poet’s visions of historical progression and nationalism. Tagore’s Europe Provasir Patra (Letters of a migrant from Europe) or Europe Yatrir Diary (The diary of a traveller to Europe) contained a comparison between what he saw as a dynamic Western culture and a relatively static east. Accompanied by Suniti Chatterjee who described Southeast Asia as ‘island India’, Tagore’s search for the footprints of ‘our’ ancestors had given the travel piece a distinct historical cast. Tagore’s pilgrimage to Southeast Asia requires to be placed in the larger backdrop of the research activity of the Greater India Society in Calcutta.
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Notes
- 1.
For the travel writings of Rabindranath Tagore see Tagore (1962, vol. X). Vivekananda’s letters in which he frequently compares the East with the West, lending into this epistolary literature the quality of comparative sociology were compiled long ago in 1940 by Advaita Ashrama under the title Letters of Swami Vivekananda (21st reprint November 2011).
- 2.
Tagore’s visit to Oxford was graphically narrated by Shahid Hassan Suhrawardy, who later became a distinguished exponent of Indian Art History and at that time a student at Oxford. Suhrawardy’s recollection of this visit shows how Tagore enjoyed immensely the company of Oxford scholars and poets like Robert Bridges, who lived on a hill—six miles from Oxford, and whom the poet visited traversing the Oxford meadows. This was published in Calcutta Municipal Gazette in 1941. I am grateful to Dr. Rudrangshu Mukherjee for a copy of this essay.
- 3.
Europe Prabasir Patra, letters Nos. 6–10.
- 4.
Preface to ‘Europe Yatrir Diary’.
- 5.
Tagore’s views which have been summarized in the foregoing section featured in the introductory piece of Pather Sanchay.
- 6.
‘Japan Yatri’.
- 7.
‘Paschim Yatrir Dairy’.
- 8.
For Tagore’s critical assessment of nationalism, especially its Western version, see Das (1996, pp. 419–435). The essay ‘Nationalism in the West’, which was a lecture that he delivered in several placed in the USA requires to be read alongside ‘Nationalism in Japan’ and ‘Nationalism in India’ in the same volume (pp. 436–465), both of which strike a somewhat different note.
- 9.
Several essays written during the 1920s, i.e. ‘Swaraj Sadhan’ (Attainment of Swaraj, 1925); and ‘Hindu Musalman’, 1931, regretted the eruption of communal conflicts.
- 10.
The essays in Kalantar (Tagore 1962, vol. XIII), written mostly in the 1930s, are particularly important for gauging Tagore’s deep feeling of remorse and scepticisms about what he saw as a crisis of civilization against the backdrop of the war.
- 11.
‘Russiar Chithi’. It is noteworthy that despite Tagore’s carefully veiled criticism of Soviet authoritarianism which he described as Jabardasti he expressed his great admiration for the achievements of the Soviet state in promoting industry, health care and education.
- 12.
Sugato Bose (2009) uses these travel writings to foreground Tagore’s deep seated belief in civilizational connections in the Asian world without the kind of aggression with which modern European imperialism brought about ruptures in the interdependent networks of commerce and culture.
- 13.
‘Java Yatrir Patra’ (Tagore 1962, vol. X) and Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, Rabindra-sangame dwipamay bharat o shyam-desh.
- 14.
The lecture was published with the title of Brihattara Bharat (Tagore 1962, vol. XIII).
- 15.
Glimpses of the interest of the Calcutta intellectuals in early Southeast Asia which they looked upon as the Greater India are available in Chong-Guan (2013).
- 16.
A detailed treatment of the early French contribution to southeast Asian archaeology resulting in the idea of Greater India is available in Bayly (2004, pp. 703–744); see also for an assessment of this archaeological heritage from the Southeast Asian perspective which did not conform to the Indic vision of a ‘civilizing mission’, Chong-Guan’s introductory essay, ‘Visions of Early Southeast Asia as Greater India’ in Chong-Guan (2013).
- 17.
Nirmal Chandra Chaudhuri has edited a compilation of a number of essays in 1986 of essays by Akshaya Kumar Maitreya, which were included in a book entitled Sagarika and published in 1912. These essays were written in the late 1890s and during the turn of the twentieth century. The essays, apart from drawing attention to the maritime tradition in India, offering a corrective to the Western view that in Hindu India, sea voyage was condemned and subjected to social punishment, talked about the export of the regional sculptural artistic styles which flourished during the Pala period to Southeast Asia. The manner in which a scholar like R.C. Majumdar wrote about Hindu colonies in Southeast Asia and Nilakantha Shastri connected the story with the maritime empire of the Cholas pointed towards a civilizing mission of the colonizing Indians in Southeast Asia. Indeed, the Hindu colonization theory along with the notion of a civilizing mission was later disputed on the legitimate ground that instead of blindly emulating Indian culture, the local population adopted features of what came from India through the maritime connection.
- 18.
‘Java Yatrir Patra’.
References
Bayly, Susan. 2004. Imagining ‘Greater India’: French and Indian Visions of Colonialism in the Indic Mode. Modern Asian Studies 38(3): 703–744.
Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi. 2011. Rabindranath Tagore: An Interpretation. New Delhi: Penguin.
Bose, Sugato. 2009. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Harvard: University of Harvard University Press.
Chong-Guan, Kwa (ed.). 2013. Early Southeast Asia Viewed from India: An Anthology of Articles from the Journal of the Greater India Society. New Delhi: Manohar.
Das, Sisir Kumar (ed.). 1996. The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, vol. 2. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.
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Sen Gupta, Indra. 1994–1995. Alternative Ideas of the West in Bengal in the Early Twentieth Century: Impressions from Contemporary Periodical Literature. Unpublished M. Phil. Thesis in History in the University of Calcutta.
Tagore, Rabindranath. 1962. Rabindra Rachanavali, vols. X, XIII. Kolkata: Government of West Bengal, Centenary Publication.
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Chakrabarty, B. (2017). The Self, the Nation and the World Beyond It: Reading Tagore’s Travel Writings. In: Tuteja, K., Chakraborty, K. (eds) Tagore and Nationalism. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3696-2_11
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