'Triumphant Eclecticism'

Rabindranath Tagore was one of the earliest Indian writers in colonial times to try and locate himself in history, and to claim and create pan-Indian lineages with certain Indian poets and texts, with Kalidasa or the Upanishads. By seeking to trace a lineage from antiquity to modernity, from Kalidasa to, specifically, himself, and to use that lineage to rebuff the coloniser, his project was radically revisionist - not only to insert the Orient into Western humanism, but to subsume the more true, the more humane, tradition of humanism under the Orient. An appraisal on his 145th birth anniversary. This essay also appears in a slightly different version in the London Review of Books. 

The limitations of Said’s seminal study have to do with the idea it’s given us about how the post-colonial might engage with the coloniser’s (that is, European, or Western) culture, and with history; and, explicitly, how the European engages with non-European antiquity. And so we’re left with a somewhat monochromatic type where both the post-colonial and the European are concerned: a type whose relationship to European or Oriental culture, as may be the case, is defined almost exclusively by questions of power and appropriation, and whose own culture and past are at once static and strangely blurred. Orientalism, at least at first glance, doesn’t seem to tell us or explain where its author, in all his many-sidedness, comes from - Western metropolitan intellectual; radical political activist; post-colonial critic; champion of canonical European literature; classical pianist. What is it about the long histories of colonisation and modernity that produced these intriguingly separate, even contrary, selves in Said? Orientalism, at least the way we read it now, doesn’t seem to give us an explanation; and for Marxist critics like Aijaz Ahmed, the contradictions are a sign of bad faith.

Yet it’s this book that contains a celebration of the author of La Renaissance Orientale, Raymond Schwab, and gives us, in Schwab, an outline of another idea of, and way of responding to, the Orient, and, by extension, to a culture other than one’s own. Schwab, Said notes, himself looks back to another figure while describing the startling penetration of European culture by the Orient, or their interpenetration by one another: the figure is

Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805), ‘an eccentric theoretician of egalitarianism, a man who managed in his head to reconcile Jansenism with orthodox Catholicism and Brahmanism,’ and who, journeying to Asia, ‘travelled as far east as Surat’ in India, ‘there to find a cache of Avestan texts, there also to complete his translation of the Avesta.’ Here, Said quotes Schwab on what the latter saw to be Anquetil-Duperron’s legacy; it is one of the most affirmative and exuberant passages on cultural contact ever written, though its rhetoric needs to be distinguished somewhat from declamations on hybridity that are common today: ‘In 1759, Anquetil finished his translation of the Avesta at Surat; in 1786 that of the Upanishads in Paris - he had dug a channel between the hemispheres of human genius, correcting and expanding the old humanism of the Mediterranean basin… Before him, one looked for information at the remote past of our planet exclusively among the great Latin, Greek, Jewish, and Arabic writers… A universe in writing was unavailable, but scarcely anyone seemed to suspect the immensity of those unknown lands. The realisation began with his translation of the Avesta, and reached dizzying heights owing to the exploration in Central Asia of the languages that multiplied after Babel. Into our schools… he interjected a vision of innumerable civilisations from ages past, of an infinity of literatures…’

According to Said, the fact that certain Europeans opened themselves, in the late 18th and the 19th centuries, to the cultural store of the Orient resulted, in those individuals, in a ‘new, triumphant eclecticism.’ Among the figures he mentions are, of course, Anquetil-Duperron, and

Sir William Jones, the founder of Indology, whose researches on the Orient, Hinduism, and the Sanskrit language include translations from - and, in effect, a recovery of - the great 4th century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa. Yet Said is hard on the latter - ‘[w]hereas Anquetil opened large vistas, Jones closed them down, codifying, tabulating, comparing’ - as if Jones somehow embodied more of the colonial project and less of the ‘triumphant eclecticism’ than Anquetuil-Duperron did. This is borne out, for Said, by Jones’s personal itinerary, and, for us, by the way Said describes it: ‘In due course he was appointed to "an honourable and profitable place in the Indies", and immediately upon his arrival there to take up a post with the East India Company began his course of personal study that was to gather in, to rope off, to domesticate the Orient and thereby to turn it into a province of European learning.’

This reservation about Jones or what he represents - Jones as a symbol of 19th-century European scholarship’s ‘domestication’ of the Orient - has been echoed by others. The historian, Dipesh Chakrabarty, says something similar while enquiring into why he finds it possible to engage in a form of serious intellectual commerce with European philosophers, but not with the many Indian ones going back to antiquity: ‘Sad though it is, one result of European colonial rule in South Asia is that the intellectual traditions once unbroken and alive in Sanskrit or Persian or Arabic are now only matters of historical research for most - perhaps all - modern social scientists in the region.’ But were intellectual traditions in South Asia ‘once unbroken and alive’ - ‘once’ referring to the hazy and golden period before colonisation? This speculation is all the more surprising because it comes only a few sentences after Chakrabarty admits, pertinently, that the idea of an ‘unbroken’ European intellectual tradition going back to the Greeks is a relatively recent construct. The idea of an unbroken Indian tradition is itself probably an Orientalist invention, and Jones one of its early architects.

Nor would it have occurred to Chandidas to locate himself in history, and to claim and create pan-Indian lineages with certain Indian poets and texts, with Kalidasa or the Upanishads, as Tagore does. And, for Chandidas, naturally, there is no Europe; for Europe was born, for the Indian, at about the time the Orient was - twins, though not identical ones, that had, in the Indian’s mind, a momentous and painfully coeval birth. The researches of the likes of Anquetil-Duperron and even Jones brought to certain Europeans a ‘new, triumphant eclecticism’, says Said; but that eclecticism had a relatively brief legacy in the West: by the early twentieth century, it had narrowed itself to an almost exclusively European definition, so that words like ‘cosmopolitan’ were more or less interchangeable with ‘European’. Said doesn’t mention - maybe it doesn’t occur to him - that the true and most significant inheritors of Anquetil-Duperron’s ‘triumphant eclecticism’ weren’t Europeans, but Orientals; that it was they who took fullest intellectual and artistic advantage not only of the advent of Europe in their consciousness, as they did, but of the fact of the ‘Orient’, the ‘correction’ and ‘expansion’ of ‘the old humanism of the Mediterranean basin.’ It’s in this context that we must situate the importance of Tagore, born roughly eighty years after Anquetil-Duperron’s translation of the Upanishads, in 1861; and, indeed, that of Said, as one of the latest in that line of Orientals appropriating and complicating Anquetil-Duperron’s inheritance.

‘A nineteenth-century Orientalist was therefore either a scholar… or a gifted enthusiast… or both,’ says Said, after pointing out that ‘there was a virtual epidemic of Orientalia affecting every major poet, essayist, and philosopher of the period… this is a later transposition eastwards of a similar enthusiasm in Europe for Greek and Latin antiquity during the High Renaissance.’ But the resemblance with the Renaissance ends there. The Orient, in Europe, continued to remain the province of arcane scholars and gifted enthusiasts; in the realm of culture, it retained, and still does, the ethos of ‘Orientalia’. Unlike Greek and Latin antiquity, which becomes an indispensable resource and even a romantic myth for modernism, the Orient, with a handful of exceptions, such as the final lines of The Waste Land, is never inserted into modernist self-consciousness. Its domain becomes, in Europe, largely the domain of popular culture, of kitsch and the exotic. Even in 19th-century Indian art, the Orient occupies the soft, hazy space of ‘Orientalia’ in popular artists like Ravi Varma; indeed, the Oriental paintings - the faux Mughal miniatures - of

Tagore’s nephew Abanindranath, often seen to be the father of modern Indian painting, have their life-blood, partly, in the kitschy, the popular. This is not to make a value-judgement about one sort of artist, or art, and another, but to try to map the moment and to be as true as possible to its impetus. It would have been easy enough for Tagore to turn, as a poet and writer, to the Orient as a magical and occult resource, as Yeats did, in some of his writings, with Ireland. Instead, radically, he inscribed it, in his vast oeuvre, into the trajectory of humanism and the ‘high’ modern; Easternness, in his work, is no longer incompatible with individualism, with the self-consciousness about the powers and limits of language, or the awareness of the transformative role of the secular artist. In fashioning these paradigms, modes of consciousness, and roles for himself, Tagore seems to be addressing, instructing, and even rebutting not a Brahmin, but a bourgeois, orthodoxy in Calcutta; and, unprecedentedly, conflating his identity as an Oriental and his vocation as a secular artist in doing so.

In 1879, ‘Oriental’ poetry received a final fillip with the publication of

Light of Asia, Edwin Arnold’s life of the Buddha in narrative verse. As early as 1817, Thomas Moore had received the unheard-of sum of 3000 guineas as an advance for his poem Lalla Rookh; now, once more, Light of Asia became an immense success on both sides of the Atlantic, and was reprinted eighty times. When Matthew Arnold visited America, he found he was confused by many with Edwin. Of course, the notion of ‘high seriousness’ that Matthew Arnold had himself formulated would prevail upon the culture of the time, guaranteeing that his reputation would outlast the frenetic but essentially light efflorescence of the ‘Oriental’ poem; here, too, in the contrast between the two Arnolds, we’re reminded that ‘seriousness’ in literature remained a European or Anglo-Saxon province, and the ‘Oriental’ was marked by lightness, colour, and momentary success. The matter of success in the marketplace (one of the first things we associate with a certain kind of Indian writing today) and its relationship to the Orient has a lineage, then, stretching back to the early nineteenth century.

example of the Tagore family shows us that, in Calcutta itself, the creation of a space for culture had everything to do with a humanistic embracing of ‘high seriousness’, and a turning away from commerce and material reward: the same turn that marks the emergence of modernism in the bourgeois cultures of Europe. Tagore’s grandfather, ‘Prince’ Dwarkanath, was a man who made his fortune out of the opportunity the colonial moment presented him with, as a middleman for the Company in Calcutta. He travelled to London and threw lavish parties; he died with his financial affairs in disarray. The disarray - not to speak of the vast estates - was inherited by his son Debendranath, who paid off his father’s debts and made his family financially secure again. But the turn away from commerce and entrepreneurship (if not from inherited land) that would come to characterise middle-class or bhadralok Bengali culture already marks Debendranath, who, besides being a man of property, became a philosopher-mystic - ‘maharshi’ or ‘maha rishi’, the ‘great sage’. What facilitated Debendranath’s increasing philosophical leanings was his discovery of the Upanishads - a text that his father’s friend, the scholar, reformer, and thinker Rammohun Roy had translated into English in the early 19th century, and which Anquetil-Duperron, too, had brought to the world’s attention in the 18th century in his French translation. The Upanishads, then, became, for both Roy and Debendranath Tagore, a prism through which they recovered not only their own spiritual inheritance, but the lineage of a humanism to be found outside the Mediterranean basin.

The break with commerce that Debendranath

represented was deepened emphatically and with finality in the next generation, especially by two of his fourteen children: Jyotirindranath, his fifth son, and Rabindranath, the youngest. (Tagore’s biographers, Andrew Robinson and Krishna Dutta, have noted shrewdly that, although the poet speaks constantly of his father in his memoirs and elsewhere, he elides the subject of his grandfather Dwarkanath.) Jyotirindranath, with his experimentations in theatre, literature, and especially musical composition (in the 1870s and 1880s he was composing Bengali songs on the piano), was a great influence on Rabindranath, as was Jyotirindranath’s young wife, with whom he had an ambiguous relationship: part filial, part romantic, the sort of semi-articulate bond that animates many of his fictions and especially his songs, a bond that almost thrives on the permanent impossibility of consummation -

‘I could speak to her on a day like this,
on a day when it rains as heavily.
You can open your heart on a day like this -
when you hear the clouds as the rain pours down
in gloom unbroken by light.
… Those words won’t be heard by anyone else;
there’s not a soul around.
Just us, face to face, in each other’s sorrow
sorrowing, as water streams without interruption;
it’s as if there’s no one else in the world.’

(my translation)

These, the first two verses of a song, echo, with their promise of secrecy and revelation, what Tagore wrote to Kadambari in the concluding piece in a collection of jottings and musings published not long before her death: ‘I offer something more with these thoughts, which only you will notice.

Do you remember that moment by the banks of the Ganga? That silent dark? Those wanderings in imagined worlds? Those deep discussions in low, serious voices? The two of us sitting silently, saying nothing? That breeze at sunrise, that evening shadow! And, once, those rain-bearing clouds, Sravan’s downpour, the songs of Vidyapati?…I have concealed a handful of contentment and grief in these thoughts; open these pages once in a while and look upon them with affection, no one but you will be able to see what’s in them! The message inscribed into these words is - there’s one writing that you and I shall read. And there’s another writing for everyone else.’

Part of the immediate legacy bestowed on Tagore by his father Debendranath was that of the Brahmo Samaj, the reformist sect within Hinduism founded by

Rammohun Roy. The sect developed a curious but compelling mixture of Protestant high-mindedness and Hindu metaphysics; its prayers and meetings were conducted in a ‘church’; its central text was the Upanishads. In rejecting the idolatrous practises and the deities of ordinary Hinduism and replacing them with the niraakar (formless) One of the Upanishads, Brahmoism supplied Tagore not so much with a religion - he was never entirely convinced by, or interested in, its claims to being one - as an aesthetic. It was an aesthetic that corresponds closely with the Flaubertian dictum that would define a substantial part of the modernist enterprise: ‘The author, like God in the universe, is everywhere present but nowhere visible in his works.’ This is a notion of God, and his relationship to creation, that goes to the heart of Brahmoism’s vision of the world. Indeed, you have to wonder if Flaubert had been reading Anquetil-Duperron, and had aestheticised an Upanishadic idea. Certainly, Tagore did perform that aestheticisation in his own work, introducing to Bengali literature a new sort of self-reflexivity as he did so; seldom referring to God in his writings, but speaking of the ‘kabi’ or ‘poet’ while referring to both author and divinity, and punning on the word ‘rachana’, or ‘composition’, to mean both text and creation.

When Tagore published his first book of songs at the age of 16, he was praised by the foremost writer of the time, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. But his relationship with Bengali literary culture was no means easy. Although he was probably Bengal’s foremost poet by the end of the nineteenth century, he had several vociferous detractors (among them contemporaries like the poet DL Roy), whose comments on his work ranged from the snidely witty to the piously outraged.

Even after the Nobel, which he got in 1913, the passages in which Tagore had begun to write a new colloquial Bengali prose were included by Calcutta University in the MA paper in Bengali as specimens to be rendered by examinees into ‘chaste Bengali’. The Nobel itself was the climax of a series of meetings and accidents. On board a ship to England in 1912, Tagore had completed his translations of the metrically strict but delicately agile Bengali songs of his Gitanjali into loose English prose-poems with a hint of Biblical sonority: ‘The pages of a small exercise-book came gradually to be filled, and with it in my pocket I boarded the ship.’ Once in London, Tagore lost the attaché case in which he was carrying the manuscripts on the Underground, but rediscovered it in the Left Luggage Office: a tribute to British civic sense, and possibly a reminder that the case contained nothing that would be of use to anyone. He gave the translations to the painter William Rothenstein, a friend of his nephew Abanindranath’s, who had met Tagore in the winter of 1910-11 in the house in Jorasanko, Calcutta. Rothenstein had then been intrigued by both Tagore’s presence and his silence during conversations; not knowing of his reputation as a writer, his curiosity grew when he happened to read a story by Tagore in Calcutta’s Modern Review. Rothenstein was astonished and immensely moved by the translations in the Gitanjali (the English Gitanjali doesn’t quite correspond to its Bengali counterpart, but also contains a selection from two other books of songs); he showed them to Yeats. The Irish poet seems to have responded to them

as business executives are reported to respond to Paul Coelho: ‘I have carried the manuscripts of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me.’

Why Tagore translated the songs into a language he’d once found so tedious, and which he used with a degree of insecurity (‘That I cannot write English is such a patent fact that I never had even the vanity to feel ashamed of it,’ he confessed to his niece Indira), is mysterious. Also mysterious is how they excited and even instructed, albeit for a relatively short while, the most exacting figures of literary London, Ezra Pound included. The English Gitanjali is a shadowy approximation of the marvellous original; if it continues to be of interest, it’s for cultural and even psychological, not literary, reasons - and the same is true, as it happens, of the ‘Orient’. The writers who’d once promoted Tagore went off him not long after he got the Nobel in 1913; in 1917, Pound wrote in a letter: ‘Tagore got the Nobel Prize because, after the cleverest boom of our times, after the fiat of the omnipotent literati of distinction, he lapsed into religion and was boomed by the pious non-conformists.’ The word ‘boom’ is striking; the economist Amartya Sen, in his recent book The Argumentative Indian, seems to pick up that word and both recall and refute Pound when, speaking of Tagore’s reputation, he places it within the logic of capital and the free market by saying it was a victim of the ‘boom and bust’ cycle that most Oriental enthusiasms constitute in the West. Tagore’s star waned irrevocably in the Occident; or at least the Oriental Tagore’s did - the humanist Tagore’s star had never appeared in that firmament.

In listening to these criticisms, Tagore was exceptionally patient; and yet, while officially stating his reservations about the modernists and about Eliot (with the exception of ‘Journey of the Magi’, which he was greatly moved by), and his disagreements with Bose, he was also studying and taking cues from them. Tagore was an astonishingly shrewd and gifted learner; and the topoi and characteristics of much of his work of his middle and late periods - the experiments in fragmentary and free verse; the appearance of the lower-middle-class city in a poems like ‘Banshi’ or ‘Flute’ (translated in this series by the novelist Sunetra Gupta, who also gives us some very striking renditions of some of the prose poems); the unfinished and provisional quality of much of the late poems and especially the paintings - are partly the irresolvable marks of what Edward Said called ‘late style’, and partly a working out of Tagore’s problematic relationship with stimuli he felt compelled to reject, and yet couldn’t ignore. Very few modern poets, except Yeats, have aged as intriguingly as Tagore; very few, in age, continued to be such gifted, if often recalcitrant students, while appearing to the world as a master.

Chakrabarty, in an essay on Tagore, distinguishes the poet’s ‘critical eye’, which he finds in his stories, and which, for Chakrabarty, negotiates history and society, from the sensibility, or gaze, found in the poetry, which he describes as the ‘adoring eye’: romantic, transcendent, bucolic. A ‘division of labour’ is at work here, and this is how Chakrabarty puts it: ‘At the same time…as he employed his prosaic writings to document social problems, Tagore put his poetic compositions (not always in verse), and songs to a completely different use. These created and deployed images of the same category - the Bengali village - but this time as a land of arcadian and pastoral beauty overflowing with the sentiments that defined what Tagore would increasingly - from the 1880s on - call "the Bengali heart."’

That notional arcadia has a deceptive tranquillity; for Tagore, nature is as much a political metaphor, an instrument for national contestation, as it is for John Clare and Ted Hughes. Critics like Tom Paulin and Mina Gorji have drawn our attention to the ways in which nature becomes a metaphor for an embattled ‘Englishness’ in Clare and Hughes; the unfinished ‘naturalness’ of nature is conflated with the ‘rude’ qualities of Northern speech or English dialect, and set, implicitly, against the refined and false graces of Southern England, and of the court and the city. So, as Paulin points out, the thistles in Hughes’s poem of the same name become ‘a grasped fistful/ Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up/ From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.’ The thistles, in the poem, enact the contestation over what Englishness, and English speech, constitute: ‘They are like… the gutturals of dialect’; mown down, their ‘sons appear, / Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.’

Tagore’s deployment of nature in his politics and aesthetics is as ideological as Hughes’s, and has equally to do with nationality; but it moves in the opposite direction, critiquing imperialism while overturning the verities that we’ve now come to associate with post-colonial writing and identity. If Tagore were to fit in with our stock idea of the post-colonial writer, he would have enlisted the wildness of nature, of the indigenous landscape, as a trope of resistance against European civilisation and the Enlightenment. Instead, for Tagore, nature is the site of civilisation, refinement, and of certain ideals of the secular enlightenment, such as the ideal of living in harmony with the world: and it’s a specifically Indian location for these things. Tagore, audaciously, not so much critiques the Western enlightenment and humanism, and the idea of ‘civilisation’ itself, but snatches them away from their expected location and gives to them another source and lineage in India and its antiquity; cheekily, he implies this lineage might be the more authentic one. Here, both nature and Kalidasa - for him, the ur-poet of the physical world - are crucial to his purposes. Tagore’s engagement with Kalidasa is all the more astonishing when we think of Chakrabarty’s honest, if remorseful, admission that modern Indian intellectuals are unable to enter into a fruitful dialogue with their forbears; for the dialogue Tagore has with Kalidasa is not just instinctive and emotional, but pressing and contemporary. We begin to understand, as we read him theorising about nature and the Sanskrit poet, the radically revisionist nature of his project - not only to insert the Orient into Western humanism, but to subsume the more true, the more humane, tradition of humanism under the Orient.

Towards the end of an essay, ‘The Religion of the Forest’ (not included in the OUP translations), Tagore reflects on two broad, and conflicting, civilisational impulses: ‘When, in my recent voyage to Europe, our ship left Aden and sailed along the sea which lay between the two continents, we passed by the red and barren rocks of Arabia on our right side and the gleaming sands of Egypt on our left. They seemed to me like two giant brothers exchanging with each other burning glances of hatred, kept apart by the tearful entreaty of the sea from whose womb they had their birth.’

For Tagore, ‘the two shores spoke to me of two different historical dramas enacted.’ In Egypt, he sees a civilisation that grew around a ‘noble river, which spread the festivities of life on its banks across the heart of the land. There man never raised the barrier of alienation between himself and the rest of the world.’ On the other hand, on ‘the opposite shore of the Red Sea the civilisation which grew up in the inhospitable soil of Arabia had a contrary character to that of Egypt. There man felt himself isolated in hostile and bare surroundings.’ And so, his mind ‘naturally dwelt upon the principle of separateness. It roused in him the spirit of fight, and this spirit was a force that drove him far and wide.’ For Tagore, these ‘two civilisations represented two fundamental divisions of human nature. The one contained in it the spirit of conquest and the other the spirit of harmony.’ Tagore concludes that ‘both of these have their truth and purpose in human nature.’

As Tagore reads these poets, he seems to argue that Western humanism - and its idea of ‘civilisation’ - is complicated, and compromised, by its compulsion to dominate and colonise nature. It’s a conclusion remarkably similar to D.H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places; Lawrence’s metaphors for coloniser and colonised are the Romans and the Etruscans respectively, where the former’s civilisation is marked by territorial conquest and the domination of nature, the latter’s by its investment in agricultural and spiritual regeneration. Extraordinarily, in his essay, Tagore notes a particular break in the English imagination after the Renaissance with the advent of Romanticism; the break is characterised by a new relationship to nature, a new definition of the human, and its source, Tagore claims, is the Orient: ‘We observe a completely different attitude of mind in the later English poets like Wordsworth and Shelley, which can be attributed in the main to the great mental change in Europe, at that particular period through the influence of the newly discovered philosophy of India which stirred the soul of Germany and aroused the attention of other Western countries.’

Tagore, in spite of his use of the word ‘philosophy’, is not so much thinking of Max Mueller, Schiller, Schelling, and German Indology here, but of nature and poetry, of Kalidasa, and of Goethe’s enthusiasm for the

Shakuntala. This is more than Tagore’s version of what Schwab called the ‘correction and expansion of the old humanism of the Mediterranean basin’; it’s a wresting of the humanist and civilisational initiative from the West. Tagore, then, is not as interested in critiquing the Western Enlightenment in the now-familiar post-colonial manner, as he is in relocating its original impetus in the Orient and in India. This relocation, of course, was an obsession with a branch of Orientalist scholarship, and with figures like William Jones; but, while the Orientalists were content to discern certain features of the Enlightenment in Indian antiquity, Tagore wants to trace a lineage from antiquity to modernity, from Kalidasa to, specifically, himself, and to use that lineage to rebuff the coloniser. For these purposes, Kalidasa and Shakespeare and their imaginative relationships with nature continue to be contrasted strategically by Tagore; his own advocacy of Kalidasa is also shrewd and strategic, besides being passionate.

Kalidasa is crucial to Tagore’s revisionist notion that a fundamental strain of enlightenment humanism - the idea that the individual fashions and reorders his relationship to the physical universe through language - is more authentically Indian, or Oriental, than European. As a colonial subject, Tagore would have known that, ever since James Mill wrote his contemptuous diatribe on the Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata , the common English view of Indian writing was that it was overblown, grotesquely overwritten, and excessively romantic. In Mill’s words: ‘These fictions are not only extravagant, and unnatural, less correspondent with the physical and moral laws of the universe, but are less ingenious, more monstrous and have less of any thing that can engage the affection, or excite admiration… Of the style in which they are composed it is far from too much to say, that all the vices which characterise the style of rude nations… they exhibit in perfection. Inflation; metaphors perpetual, and these the most violent and strained… repetition; verbosity; confusion, incoherence; distinguished the Mahabharat and the Ramayan.’

Through Kalidasa, Tagore wishes to show his readers that classicism - refinement and obliqueness in language; impersonality in perception - is not only native to India, but has older roots there than in Europe. In another, brilliant essay on Kalidasa, in which he compares Shakuntala to the Tempest, Tagore turns Mill’s rhetoric upon Shakespeare, claiming, in effect, Hellenic classicism as an essentially Oriental literary characteristic, and Orientalising, in Said’s sense of the word, Shakespeare and the European poets: ‘Universal nature is outwardly serene, but a tremendous force works continually within it. In Shakuntala we can see an image of this state. No other drama exhibits such remarkable restraint. European poets seem to grow wild at the least chance of displaying the force of nature and impulse. They love to bring out, through hyperbolic utterance, how far our impulses can lead us. Examples aplenty can be found in plays like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Among all Shakespeare’s dramatic works, there is no play as serenely profound, as restrainedly complete and perfect as Shakuntala. Such love dialogue as passes between Dushyanta and Shakuntala is very brief, and chiefly conveyed through hints and signs.... Precisely where another poet would have looked for a chance to let the pen race, [Kalidasa] quells it.’

Reading the essays on Kalidasa in the Oxford Tagore Translations, one feels that Tagore is trying, in recuperating the Sanskrit court poet, to do in the realm of literature what Rammohun Roy and his own father Debendranath had done not very much earlier in the realm of religion and philosophy. Faced with the charge that the Hindu religion was incorrigibly polytheistic, these figures, instead of rejecting the European humanism from which that charge emanated, turned to ancient texts like the Upanishads to claim that, in a sense, the Enlightenment had an older lineage in India than it did in Europe. The story of that Indian rewriting of humanism wouldn’t be complete without an acknowledgement of how Tagore enlarged it in the field of literature; for him, and for the narrative of Indian literature in the context of humanism, Kalidasa and his arcadia is as significant and loaded with meaning as the discovery of the Upanishads was to the Brahmo Samaj, the reformist sect that Roy and Debendranath founded. ‘Universal nature is outwardly serene, but a tremendous force works continually within it’: it’s as if, in speaking of nature, Tagore actually means literature, and the politics of literature, as it appears to a man living in a momentous and turbulent time.