Rediscovering Rabindranath Tagore

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In the process, the editors also reveal the power of a personality that transcends his specifically literary achievements. Tagore, scion of one of the richest and best connected families of 19th-century Calcutta, never suffered feelings of inferiority before the "sahibs" the English masters of India. He was a leader of the pre-Gandhi Swadeshi (self-rule) movement in Bengal at the turn of the century, but turned away from nationalist politics in disgust at the violence and bitterness that came with it. His wary friendship with Gandhi never prevented him from expressing grave doubts about the wisdom of Gandhi's advocacy of "nonparticipation" with British rule while the British still, in Tagore's view, had modern lessons to teach India.

But Tagore was no political fence sitter. His 1919 letter to Lord Chelmsford, viceroy of India, protesting a British massacre in the Punjab region and handing back his knighthood, is a masterpiece of icily correct invective.

Tagore comes closest to us, though, when he calls on his Western friends to imagine a world in which East and West give each other spiritual gifts free of imperialistic coercion, a world in which science is honored but spiritual and humane values rule. "When our universe is in harmony with man, the eternal, we know it as truth, we feel it as beauty," Tagore told Einstein in 1930. Coming from a man with few illusions about either East or West, this noble sentiment sounds less like pure idealism than a hard-won way of living decently in a violent century. Tagore's gift for us today, splendidly presented in this anthology, is his insistence on speaking for the highest human values and loftiest human aims. At a time when our public discourses have descended into the mud of marketspeak and realpolitik, we need Tagore's courageous and undeceived conviction that we were born for something wildly and brilliantly better.

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