Pujit Aggarwal Redivivus - Gitanjali

 

  It is a handy book of poems, so exiguous you can fold the paperback edition and insert it in your pocket. You can slow-read it in a couple of hours while reverting and re-reading parts of it. Poetry, by its very nature, resists perfunctory or fast reading.

  It comprises about 100 verses or songs that celebrate the ineffable glory of divinity that permeates the entire cosmos. Cast in prose, each verse illustrates how God manifests his power and majesty through phenomena and objects far too obvious and unadorned to draw our attention to themselves. It is a collection, a liturgy, which you can open anywhere and pray without the mandatory accessory of a church or temple. Invoke Nature in its infinite variety and hear it in your inner ear,—the Lord chanting mantras with your lips.

  Rabi—short for Rabindranath Tagore—was a little over 50 when his name swept across the world for becoming the first non-European Nobel Laureate for his modest book of poems, Gitanjali. Translated literally it denotes ‘an offering of songs’. In other words, it is an oblation of hymns and prayers at the altar of God.

  Tagore bagged the Nobel Prize in 1913 just a year after the publication of his book. The typescript had been circulating among eminent literati like W B Yeats and Ezra Pound for quite some time. They, among other men of letters, were highly impressed by the humanism and spirituality that emanated from the core of the poem.

  It was a stroke of luck that the British Postal Services traced the original manuscript of Gitanjali in the London underground where Rabi had misplaced it while commuting a few years before. Without the miraculous recovery, there would have been no publication, no approbation, and no Nobel.

  Gitanjali was translated from the Bengali by Rabi himself. He used the archaic form of the second person pronoun…thou, thine, thee… while apostrophizing the addressee which varies from God, mother, nature, to other personas like shepherd, the farmer, and reflexively the poet himself.

  ‘Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of the temple with doors all shut? Open thy eyes and see thy God is not before thee!’    Line 1, Verse 11

  The popularity of the award-winning Gitanjali declined with the passage of time. It was lambasted for its overt religiosity and indifferent, repetitious tropes. The flak was far too tangential to make a dent into the copious and varied oeuvre of Rabi. The immensely rich corpus of poems, plays, short stories, novels, essays, lectures, and music, carved a niche for him as a littérateur of universal appeal.

  He championed and nurtured institutions like Santiniketan and Visva Bharti. Their world-famous alumni include Indira Gandhi, Satyajit Ray, and Amartya Sen.

  Tagore was not religious in the orthodox sense of the word. A votary of Brahmo Samaj, he was more of a free spirit, a mystic who did not subscribe to a single denomination. God, for him, abides in every human being, in every green sprout growing from a crack in the stone.

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