{"id":3328,"date":"2020-02-16T22:33:44","date_gmt":"2020-02-16T22:33:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/?p=3328"},"modified":"2020-03-30T13:26:04","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T13:26:04","slug":"yeats-w-b-india-and-rabindranath-tagore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/2020\/02\/16\/yeats-w-b-india-and-rabindranath-tagore\/","title":{"rendered":"Yeats, W. B., India, and Rabindranath Tagore"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Statue of Rabindranath Tagore in Sligo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the middle of town in Sligo sits a statue of Rabindranath Tagore, the bearded Indian Nobel Laureate and accomplished poet. A gift from the Indian Embassy to Ireland unveiled in 2015, the writer\u2019s bust stands austere in the middle of the county seat, which has a population of under 20,000 people. Why a bronze statue of India\u2019s \u201cnational poet\u201d was erected in the western countryside of Ireland can be explained via one of Ireland\u2019s most famous spokespeople: W. B. Yeats.<\/p>\n

Poets William Butler Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore are often paired for their remarkable similarities. Most notably, both won the Nobel Prize: Tagore in 1913 and Yeats a decade later in 1923. Born in 1861 and 1865, respectively, Tagore and Yeats traveled around the imperial metropole London<\/a>\u00a0 at the same time and ran in similar circles, involved in cultural and political movements representing their home countries of Ireland and India, respectively, at the peak of the British Empire. Both poets were interested in the relationship of spirituality, music, and poetry; both poets used landscape and nature in their poetic imagery. They also shared a poor reputation among anti-colonial nationalists<\/a>;\u00a0 both were seen as being sympathetic to the British imperial cause at certain points in their careers. Though Tagore and Yeats were nationalists, their form of nationalism drew from “new” cosmopolitanism emphasizing the global nature of nationalism<\/a>\u00a0 striving for a larger connectivity, as Louise Blakeney Williams notes.<\/p>\n

A growing network of colonialization, industry, and trade routes at the turn of the century fostered metropole-periphery relationships and provided increased opportunity for post\/colonial encounters on the micro and macro level. These encounters, which critics such as Louis Althusser and Homi Bhabha most notably have discussed in their works, served as moments of identity negotiation between colonizer and colonized as well as between different colonized populations. Though the post\/colonial encounter could occur in a shared space or conversation between two individual humans, post\/colonial encounters with the Other could also come through literature, a tactic taken up by Irish and Indian cultural revivals at the time to advocate for mounting independence movements. Yeats as a key figure of the Irish Literary Revival (alternatively, Celtic Twilight) of the late 1800s and Tagore as a cornerstone of the Bengali Renaissance realized their poetry\u2019s position and potential within the larger global connections colonialism had wrought.<\/p>\n

The similarities and differences between these two poets also reflect those of the nations they came to represent, which during this time period perched precariously on the verge of splitting along similar religious and cultural fault lines, leading to comparisons of the countries as both possessing so-called \u201cPartition\u00a0 literatures.\u201d<\/a> Yeats and Tagore in particular were aware of the potency of their artistic representations of their nations during a charged political time. Each drew from imagery of ordinary people and the rural imaginary to form national cultural consciousnesses that would shape British perceptions of Indianness and Irishness. This move to reclaim invaded space and narrative of the people who are citizens of a colonized nation is a hallmark of postcolonial literature as a way of reviving or reinvigorating the pre-colonial culture (see Frantz Fanon\u00a0<\/a>), before British invasion and exploitation created myths of the native<\/a>\u00a0 and before the empire mapped their colonies<\/a>\u00a0 as a form of control.<\/p>\n

The relationship between Ireland and India during the early 20th<\/sup> century has been a source of recent attention as a salient postcolonial encounter, from the inception of these national consciousnesses to the physical independence struggles that later manifest in the two nations. Indian-Irish affinities developed through such individual encounters, as evidenced by figures like Theosophy\u2019s Annie Besant and James and Margaret Cousins, who drew heavy parallels between the Irish and Indian political situations and ran in similar circles with Yeats and Tagore. Connections between the two nations furthered as figures invested in Indian nationalism like Mahatma Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu, and Sri Aurobindo travelled in similar circles in London. These cosmopolitan relationships and postcolonial encounters added to the momentum of the burgeoning and affinitive independence movements of India and Ireland. Specifically, Yeats and Tagore\u2019s relationship has been the source of a rising number of articles, book chapters, and dissertations over the years, notably exploring the dimension to which the pair\u2019s friendship participates in Orientalist<\/a> \u00a0and colonial norms. Yeats himself has been a muddled figure in postcolonialism and the process of decolonization in Ireland (see Yeats and \u00a0Postcolonialism<\/a>), but in a larger global comparative framework he becomes even more muddled.<\/p>\n

\u00a0To better understand Yeats\u2019s relationship with colonialism beyond the Irish context, specifically with India and Tagore, this article aims to give a critical overview and outline Yeats\u2019s relationship with India prior to meeting Tagore, then the relationship to Tagore himself.<\/p>\n

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Yeats and India<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

Early Exposures: Textual Encounters<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeats\u2019s fascination with Tagore was not his first foray into Indian culture; India, in fact, served as an inspiration point throughout most of his life both aesthetically and spiritually. From as early as his first poetic endeavors in the late 1800s, references to India and Hindu spiritual practices permeated his writing. Three poems featured in the 1889 publication Crossways,<\/em> published when Yeats was 24, specifically take India as their setting– \u201cThe Indian to His Love,\u201d \u201cAnushaya and Vijaya,\u201d and \u201cThe Indian Upon God.\u201d These poems suggest Yeats\u2019s prior engagement with the literature and ideas of India from a myriad of sources. Ashim Dutta in \u201cIndia in Yeats\u2019s Early Imagination: Mohini Chatterjee and K\u0101lid\u0101sa\u201d notes the influence of Indian poet Kalidasa\u2019s play Sakuntala <\/em>on Yeats\u2019s imagery of Indian flora, fauna, and landscape in \u201cThe Indian To His Love\u201d; both Dutta and Elleke Boehmer in their close readings of these poems also observe Vedantic concepts of self and anti-self unfolding through the exchanges in \u201cAnushaya and Vijaya,\u201d which they propose stems from Yeats\u2019s reading of the Hindu holy text, the Bhagavad Gita (Dutta 20; Boehmer 113). Boehmer posits that these three \u201cIndian\u201d poems may have served as a way for Yeats to experiment with a bucolic, pastoral landscape that he would later make Irish in \u201cThe Lake Isle of Innisfree\u201d in 1890 (117). Sushil Kumar Jain traces echoes of Brahmanite texts and teachings, specifically the Upanishads, through this early phase\u2019s poems that are not nominally \u201cIndian\u201d, including “Quatrains and Aphorisms,” “The Way of Wisdom,” “The Pathway,” “The Priest and the Fairy,” “The Song of the Happy Shepherd,” “Fergus and the Druid,” and his little-published The Seeker <\/em>among his close readings. The text of the Upanishads were introduced to Yeats by his schoolmate and fellow poet AE (George Russell), who obtained his copy through the spiritualist network that was arguably Yeats\u2019s greatest source of accessing Hindu spiritual texts: Theosophy.<\/p>\n

Like the pre-Tagore poems, later poems without a directly named Indian tie, such as \u201cSailing to Byzantium\u201d (1928), \u201cVacillation\u201d (1933), \u201cA Prayer for My Daughter\u201d (1921), and \u201cA Dialogue of Self and Soul\u201d (1933) also utilize Hindu spiritual concepts as their themes, as noted by A. Davenport and Ruth Vanita. Davenport compares lines from \u201cVacillation\u201d to direct analogies of self-creation and rebirth from the Upanishads (56) while Vanita emphasizes Yeats\u2019s use of dialogic between ego and world, which she proposes are also taken from the Upanishads (239). Shamsul Islam traces Hindu, Buddhist, and Sufi influences in Yeats\u2019s later \u201cRibh\u201d poems and in his unpublished novel, The Speckled Bird.<\/em> Most notably is Yeats\u2019s use of Hindu ideas for his late poetic and spiritual manifesto A Vision <\/em>(1925), <\/em>as Shalini Sikka and Charles Armstrong detail in their works. Indian philosophy and spirituality was indeed something that Yeats pursued throughout his entire life, not just a passing phase. However, most note that Yeats\u2019s obsession with India came in three waves spurred by three crucial Indian figures: pre-Tagore, Mohini Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, and, post-Tagore, Purohit Swami.<\/p>\n

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Early Exposures: Personal Encounters<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pre-Tagore, Yeats had encountered these previously mentioned Indian texts and philosophy through the fashionable esoteric movement of Theosophy, which he was exposed to prior to his joining the Blavatsky Lodge of the Theosophical Society in 1887. Madame Blavatsky, a Russian mystic, was one of the founders of Theosophy, promoting it as a belief system. Blavatsky often feted \u201cEastern\u201d speakers to come speak to members of the Lodge. It was through these talks that Yeats became more familiar with Hindu teachings.<\/p>\n

The first Indian that Yeats ever met, Mohini Mohan Chatterjee (Chatterji) was especially foundational in teaching select Brahmanite tenets, specifically an interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita that centrally emphasized karma and reincarnation of the soul if not dissolved of desire, a line of thought that heavily influenced Theosophical beliefs. Ashim Dutta traces just how deeply Chatterjee\u2019s ascetic teaching affected a young Yeats by analyzing Yeats’s journalistic writing, particularly “The Way of Wisdom\u201d and “Kanva on Himself” (21-22). Judge Rajbir Singh details Yeats’s first meeting with Chatterjee and the time spent with him over the course of a week in 1886, about which, years later, in 1935, Yeats would recount by describing Chatterjee as “beautiful” and speaking “all wisdom” that “confirmed [his] vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless” (Singh 19). Yeats in 1935 wrote to Chatterji to thank him for the vivid memory of that encounter throughout the years. He claimed it gave him his “first philosophical exposition of life” and impacted his work tremendously (20). The exoticizing language that Yeats uses in discussion of Chatterjee, comparing him to a \u201csage\u201d and a \u201cmonk\u201d and crediting him as a guide in his own spiritual journey, has been criticized by Singh, Shamsul Islam, and Michael Collins as indicating an unbalanced and tokenizing colonial relationship, one that may have informed his later interactions with Rabindranath Tagore.<\/p>\n

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Appreciation or Appropriation? Yeats\u2019s Use of Indian Themes<\/strong><\/p>\n

For all of his exposure to Indian philosophy, Yeats\u2019s true understanding of Indian tradition and ethical treatment of the material he encountered remains debatable. Yeats may have found the Indian and Irish situations as analogous, but the sympathy he had for Indian philosophical and mythological tradition did not excuse him from exploitative and Orientalist behaviors. Yeats in piecemealing from Celtic bardic narrative conventions, musicality, mythology, spiritual belief, and folklore believed he was forging a united Irish literary and cultural tradition. However, Yeats\u2019s quest to create a national literature from a mystic, pre-colonial Ireland in search for what Salman Rushdie<\/a>\u00a0 refers to as an \u201cimaginary homeland,\u201d more often lent itself to borrowing and syncretizing other traditions in a way that can only be described as appropriative. The selective and dilettante-ish use of Indian imagery and philosophy in his own poetry is an ethical concern for many critics. Michael Collins in \u201cHistory and Postcolonial Thought: Rabindranath Tagore\u201fs Reception in London, 1912 – 1913\u201d argues that as much as Yeats’s knowledge of India has been praised, Yeats’s knowledge of India and “the East” were vague or primarily through Theosophy, which Yeats himself confesses could not be read as objective nor entirely true in understanding “the Orient.”\u00a0 Boehmer observes how openly calls Yeats\u2019s use of Indian philosophy \u201cdeliberately attention seeking, an expression of the poet\u2019s quest for an authoritative esoteric voice\u201d (109) in an \u201cuneven exchange of influence\u201d (113).<\/p>\n

Yeats was not alone in this pursuit. Joseph Lennon situates Yeats in the modernist Symbolist tradition during the fin de si\u00e9cle<\/em>, furthering that John Millington Synge, James Stephens, the previously mentioned AE, and Lady Augusta Gregory “often looked to their version of the Orient as a remedy for Ireland\u2019s colonial and sectarian problems, using aspects of it to represent an imagined, precolonial, heroic Irish past, and to foster a sense of a literary and mythological tradition in Ireland” (214). This Orientalism circulated throughout not only the Irish consciousness in the Celtic Twilight\/ Irish Literary Revival but also throughout the London Rhymers Club and other cultural circles Yeats ran in, which predicated Rabindranath Tagore\u2019s European involvement and no doubt paved his favored arrival.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWise Imperialism\u201d: The Friendship of Yeats and Tagore<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

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The Yeats-Tagore Encounter<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tagore and Yeats met for the first time on June 27, 1912, at the home of photographer William Rothenstein. Rothenstein had previously sent Yeats the manuscripts of Tagore\u2019s partial translation of Gitanjali.<\/em> On July 7, Yeats gave a reading of these poems to a group of thrilled London literary elite, including Ernest Rhys and Ezra Pound, and on July 12, Yeats hosted a dinner for Tagore. After this reading, Yeats and Tagore worked on translating the remainder of Tagore\u2019s Gitanjali <\/em>while in London, then Yeats continued editing them in Normandy, giving several readings of the poems while Tagore was back in India. In November 1912, the India Society published the full translation with an introduction by Yeats, which likens Tagore to famous British writers like Chaucer, depicts Tagore as a wise and solemn mystic, and positions India as an eternal land \u201cimmeasurably strange to us…and yet we are not moved because of its strangeness, but because we have met our own image, as though we had [heard]…our voice as in a dream\u201d (Yeats xvi). In the spring of 1913, Yeats directed the Irish Players to perform Tagore\u2019s play The Post Office<\/em>, then unpublished, at Dublin\u2019s Abbey Theatre, and then again in London in July 1913. On November 14, 1913, Tagore was informed that he had won the Prize via telegram at home in Bengal, then on December 10, 1913, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first non-European to do so. Yeats\u2019s involvement and role in the Nobel process has recently come under debate, per Michael Collins\u2019 work that claims Thomas Sturge Moore had more sway with the Nobel committee than Yeats did, but undoubtedly his translations and 1912 feteing elevated European consciousness of Tagore\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

After this, nothing much is written about what became of their friendship– Tagore went back to Bengal from the UK and founded his school, Shantiniketan, with his Nobel Prize money, and Yeats would later be propelled into a highly politicized poetic environment away from his Eastern pursuits. Eventually, Yeats seemingly lost interest in Tagore\u2019s poetic career and did not sing praises of his poems as he had effused in the Gitanjali <\/em>introduction, stating in a 1935 letter to Thomas Sturge Moore that Tagore wrote too much of God; Mary Lago examines how the two\u2019s poetic aims diverged later in life in her 1965 essay. In a letter to Rothenstein in May 1935, Yeats wrote, \u201cDamn Tagore. We got out three good books, Sturge Moore and I, because he thought it more important to see and know English than to be be a great poet, he brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation. Tagore does not know English, no Indian can know English\u201d (Wade 834-835).<\/p>\n

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Yeats\u2019s Interest in Tagore<\/strong><\/p>\n

Meeting Tagore was for Yeats what Sne\u017eana Dabi\u010b refers to \u201cthe renewal of the Indian spell\u201d (59). She outlines that Yeats\u2019s primary spiritual concern at that time was a Unity of Culture and Being that was akin to the unity of atman<\/em> and Brahman<\/em> within the Hindu tradition, which was one of the primary themes present in Tagore\u2019s poetry, specifically in Gitanjali. <\/em>Spirituality aside, Lennon has posited that Yeats projected his affection for India and for the idea of a romantic, unified nation onto Tagore. Jain notes the romantic similarities of the two\u2019s interests in ancient mythology and in using bucolic imagery as reasons why Yeats would have been attracted to Tagore’s work: “Tagore’s influence was primarily moral in nature. He symbolized to the Irish poet the power, the strength, and the wisdom that could be achieved through and assimilation of the Indian holy books; he strengthened belief in the validity of Asian philosophy and confirmed the course that Yeats’s life had followed since the meeting with Mohini Chatterji” (94).<\/p>\n

Poloumi Saha through the account of Gitanjali’s translations gives a generous reading of Yeats, positing him as a figure complicit in advancing Tagore’s “Oriental inscrutability” but employing that inscrutability as helping Tagore, not hindering him (17). Elleke Boehmer too in her reading of Tagore and Yeats\u2019s relationship obviously acknowledges the one-sided enthusiasm of Yeats, but also argues that Tagore was aware of the Orientalism at play both against him and to his own advantage in advancing an agenda. Boehmer seems more sympathetic to Yeats\u2019s relationship with Tagore\u2019s stemming from \u201cwise imperialism\u201d\u2014calling it \u201cpatronizing yet promotional\u201d (224)\u2014and claims that Yeats did not see Tagore as a mere tokenism but as truthfully part of his pursuit for world unity.<\/p>\n

However, the Orientalist dimension of this interest cannot be overlooked. Specifically when considering Yeats\u2019s comment on how \u201cno Indian can know English,\u201d it becomes apparent that though Ireland may be considered a postcolonial nation, Yeats himself benefits from the European-ness and whiteness of his own identity\u2019s positionality and perpetuates the model of a patronizing, paternalistic imperial relationship as superior to Tagore. Ana Jelnikar specifically delves into how Yeats propelled Tagore\u2019s meteoric rise to fame whether Tagore wanted it or not by positioning Tagore as a one-dimensional tokenism, a serene and pious mystic. When “the real Tagore, the Bengali Rabindranath of a thousand interests and commitments, refused to wear the \u2018Oriental\u2019 straitjacket the British had fashioned for him,” Yeats (though not British, still obviously highly influential in British circles) and the writers he associated with in London lost interest and patience (Jelnikar 1009). Mary Lago also takes issue with the flatness of Yeats\u2019s idea of Tagore, arguing that Yeats\u2019s own obsession with Eastern thought and spirituality reduced Tagore’s poetry to simply mysticism and failed to recognize the merits of his other works in a way that were \u201cromantically inaccurate\u201d as “in actuality Rabindranath did not fit Yeats’s stereotype of the spiritual Indian” (40). Both Lago and Michael Collins point out the vagueness and little knowledge Yeats had about the sources of Tagore\u2019s philosophy or about his social and cultural life outside of the poems of Gitanjali. <\/em><\/p>\n

These differing views illustrate a post\/colonial turn that Yeats scholarship, and Irish studies as a whole, will need to address; though some Yeats scholars engage critically with the post\/colonial dimensions of Yeats as part of a colonized culture yet complicit in colonial attitudes, others are willing to be more forgiving of Yeats\u2019s appropriation under the claim of search for religious truth or transcendental unity.<\/p>\n

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Reciprocated? Tagore\u2019s Interest in Yeats<\/strong><\/p>\n

One way to combat a normatively colonial reading of the Yeats-Tagore relationship is to flip the focus from how Yeats related to Tagore to look instead at how Tagore viewed Yeats. Though little is written from Tagore\u2019s side of both secondary scholarship and primary sources, the question remains of how much Tagore returned the affection for Yeats that Yeats exhibited for him. Joseph Lennon points out that though Yeats’s interest in Tagore as a national poet seems to be a reciprocal one, their relationship still points out “complex macrorelations” (214) between India as a colony in the \u201cOrient\u201d and Ireland as a white, Occidental colony. Tagore’s poetry heavily incorporates Vaishnavism’s use of love and self-dissolution into the whole, what Shamsul Islam in his essay attributes instead to Sufism). Lennon interprets this as similar to the arguments Yeats made about the universality of Eastern religions, but as a non-European Tagore did not have “the power of the Empire behind his words” (215) and thus in these literary workings his work was read not as national but as aesthetic. Instead, Yeats and his circles could categorize India as spiritual and mystic, a unified land and culture for their own usage– advocating for Tagore was what Yeats called “a piece of wise imperialism” that mapped onto his understanding of unifying cultures in the way he \u201cunified\u201d Irish tradition, even though it was done without Yeats actually understanding the factioned history of the Bengal Tagore was representing. However, Lennon still believes Tagore to have been equally inspired by Yeats as Yeats was by Tagore based on their similar views of the bard\u2019s relation to the natural world.<\/p>\n

Sirshendu Majumdar explores Tagore\u2019s refusal to visit Ireland in 1913 by positing that Tagore\u2019s decline to visit Ireland was not because of Yeats, but in part<\/p>\n

\u201cbecause [Tagore] had distanced himself from the political scene of his own country, and did not want to get embroiled in any further controversies. Or he might have been advised by his more cautious English friends that the English government would not be pleased with his visit to England\u2019s most disturbed country\u201d (193).<\/p>\n

Other critics are not as convinced. Michael Collins finds the idea that Tagore \u201crecognised in Yeats a common poetic genius\u201d problematic, as Yeats at the time of the Nobel Prize in 1913 was not as established of a renowned poet as his later reputation would grow to be (124). Mary Lago implies that Tagore might have found issue with Yeats’s Orientalist methods of marketing his poetry and himself throughout 1912-1913 and that the friendship may have been one-sided. Most notably on the matter, a footnote of Harold M. Hurwitz\u2019s seminal 1964 piece on their friendship observes that while Yeats mentions Tagore several times in his Autobiographies <\/em>as being influential,<\/em> a mention of meeting Yeats does not make the cut in Tagore\u2019s own autobiography.<\/p>\n

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Bibliography & Further Reading<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

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