Rabindranath Tagore's epic life had spanned the last four decades of 19th century and the first four of the 20th. He was probably the most versatile aesthetic genius India had every produced. In 1913 he won the first Nobel Prize for India, and for Asia in literature, with English translations of his own poems in Gitanjali.
But literature, art, music, dance and the like alone were not his sole pasture. Deeply involved in the Swadeshi and freedom movements, he was a respected counsellor - mentor for Gandhiji, Subhas Bose and Nehru. The British government had conferred Knighthood on him which he renonuced later in protest against the Jalianwalla Bag atrocities. It is a Tagore-composition which is India's national anthem. He was a pioneer in experimenting with grass roots cooperatives for rural reconstruction in India. He had travelled across the globe quite comprehensively which vivified his intrinsic universality. His universal University (Vishav bharati) at Shantiniketan was to be a meeting ground of East and West for development of complete man.
Where science is reductionistic, seeking to understand in terms of the smallest elements and how they are assembled, poetry and art deal with the indivisible whole. Science and art are dialectical to each other, but predominance of one over the other causes crisis.
Richard M. Weaver stated - "Poetry is a form of knowledge which offers the fairest hope of resting our lost unity of mind."
Dennis Stuart stated - "There is something in man that goes beyond exact science. All poetry, all great art, all higher culture - all civilization, in fact - has been based on some kind of metaphysics. because that element of aspiration towards something which is not in this world is one of the fundamental powers of human soul."
Mortimer Adler remarks "All poetry deals with the abiding problems of human action and the perennial themes of human thought".
Joseph Wood Krutch puts it, "Perhaps the broadest possible definition of poetry would be that it is a report or analysis of some human experience ordering it in terms of concepts involving a value judgment. The arts represent an attempt to organize human experience in terms foreign to the would-be objective sciences, but peculiarly appropriate to the human experiences which elude those sciences"
T.S.Eliot notes, "IT is the function of all art to give us some perception of an order in life by imposing an order upon it."
J.W.N. Sullivan is even more specific, "All art exists to communicate states of consciousness which are higher synthetic wholes than those of ordinary experience - to make us aware of a state of consciousness surpassing our own, where our problems do not exist, and to which even our highest aspirations, those that we can formulate, provide no key"
Tagore addresses the same matter in his 1920 lecture "What is Art?" delivered in America. He concludes that art "has come out of some impulse of expression, which is the impulse of our being itself". He claims, "where our heart is fully awakened in love, or in other great emotions, our personality is in its fold-tide. Then it feels the longing to express itself for the very sake of expression. Then comes Art, and we forget the claims of necessity, the thrift of usefulness - the spires of our temples try to kiss the stars and notes of our music to fathom the depth of ineffable"
Art expresses that which in the mortal individual is immortal. Tagore reflects: "What is it in man that asserts its immortality in spite of obvious fact of death? It is not his physical body or his mental organization. It is that deeper unity, that ultimate mystery in him, which, from the center of his world radiates towards its circumference which his in his body yet transcends his body which is in his mind yet grows beyond his mind which through the things belonging to him, expresses something that is not in them; which, while occupying his present, overflows its banks of the past and future. This is the personality of man, conscious of its exhaustible abundance it has the paradox in it that it is more than itself; it is more than as it is seen, as it is known, as it is used. And this consciousness of the infinite, in the personal man, ever strives to make the whole world its own. In Art the person in us is sending its answers to the Supreme Person, who reveals Himself to us in a world of endless beauty across the lightless world of facts."
The modern society needs to be back in touch with the kind of truth which is so central to classical Indian thought, and not only neglected but spurned in the arrogant positivism which still prevails in Western science. Rabindranath Tagore provides one of the most accessible doors to Indian thought and experience for the Western mind. Tagore's poetry is not a decoration to be added to comfortable affluent existence; it tells of the essence of life, and is an antidote to material affluence.
- Willis W. Harman, President Institute of Neotic Science, California.
