Tagore and Cultural Appropriation

I was pleasantly surprised when my wife announced that there has been a “new translation” of Tagore. For those who aren’t familiar with the name, Rabindranath Tagore (the most accurate transliteration of his Bengali name in the Latin script with English phonetics should be Robindronath Thakur, but I stick to the conventional spelling reflecting an Anglicized pronunciation) was a Bengali polymath who lived in colonial India - a highly versatile poet, playwright, lyricist, music composer, novelist, philosopher, political thinker, painter and education reformer, he is the biggest cultural icon for the almost 300 million Bengali people. His music and literature revolutionarlized Bengali culture for generations that followed and contributed deeply in creating the Bengali identity. He is the national poet of the Republic of India and the national anthems of both Bangladesh and India were written by him. Incidentally, in 1913, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for a collection of lyrical poems titled “Gitanjali” (Song-Offerings), which he himself had translated to English, from their original Bengali. He also happens to be the first Asian, and the first non-White person to win the prize in any discipline.

Inspite of his versatility as a writer, his creative genius and the sheer enormity of his works (his complete works span an impressive 18 hardcover volumes), and inspite of his international acclaim, at present he is not as well known outside the Bengali-speaking world, and especially in the West. An obvious factor is the inevitable issue of translation, as no English translation could do justice to the richness of Tagore’s lyrical Bengali. Furthermore, from the very beginning, Tagore was misunderstood in the West. As Amartya Sen, another Bengali intellectual (and also a Nobel Laureate) explains, Tagore's admirers in the West portrayed him solely as a mystical religious figure, ignoring the rich ambiguity in Tagore's work, which balanced love for humanity and God, and emphasized on rationalism. In Europe, Tagore was perceived as a sage with a solution to the discontent plaguing the continent, whereas in his homeland, he was seen as a multifaceted creative artist and rational thinker. This marked a significant disconnect between Tagore's Western and Indian receptions. 

The fascination with the “mystical sage” soon made way to disillusionment, in Amartya Sen’s words:

“... the real Tagore, got very little attention from his Western audience—neither from his sponsors nor from his detractors. Bertrand Russell wrote (in letters to Nimai Chatterji in the 1960s) that he did not like Tagore’s “mystic air,” with an inclination to spout “vague nonsense,” adding that the “sort of language that is admired by many Indians unfortunately does not, in fact, mean anything at all.” When an otherwise sympathetic writer, George Bernard Shaw, transformed Rabindranath Tagore into a fictional character called “Stupendranath Beggor,” there was no longer much hope that Tagore’s reasoned ideas would receive the careful and serious attention that they deserved.”

As a Bengali deeply imbibed in my culture and as an ardent lover of Tagore’s literature, I have always felt that the rest of the world has a lot to receive from this versatile genius, if only the obstacles of language, distance and the orinetalist gaze could be overcome. Therefore, I was excited to learn that a “new” translation has been published. Which of his 40-odd books of poetry were translated to English this time, I asked. Who was the translator, I was curious, a Bengali, or a Western author who had taken the pain to learn Bengali, in order to capture the true beauty of Tagore’s creations?

The answers to both these questions left me shocked. It turned out that an American poet, Coleman Barks, has simply “re-written” the poems from Tagore’s English verses of the Gitanjali, without having any access to the original Bengali, as he does not read or speak Bengali.  Nor did he seem to have received any close collaboration with a Bengali speaker in the process. The cover of the book, titled “What Wants to Come Through Me Now”, however, still presents itself as a “new translation/ version” by the American poet. 

Any Bengali person who has read both the English and Bengali collection of poems featuring in the Gitanjali would agree that the English versions are stripped of much of their original brilliance, partly due to the inherent limitations in translation, partly because of the psalm-like heavy English Tagore chose, and partly because of Tagore’s deliberate adaptation of those poems for a Western audience. As the editors of “The Essential Tagore” a recently published anthology of Tagore’s works published recently by the Harvard University Press point out, 

(Tagore himself) “was not very confident about his own command of English and far from complacent about English translations of his work. He also tried to make his works accessible to readers in the West by toning down the Indianness of his works. ”  

As an aside, the above is a well-done collection that includes some of Tagore’s own English writings as well as translations by an eclectic group of authors, all of whom translated the writings directly from Bengali. The translation of some of his poems by the Oxford-based bilingual poet Ketaki Kushari Dyson is also noteworthy. 

Anyone familiar with Tagore’s Bengali work, would admit that bringing forth the true beauty of Tagore’s Bengali poems to an English speaking audience is simultaneously important and extremely challenging. How someone, with zero knowledge of Bengali could overcome those challenges, or how one could in fact “translate” something without having any access to the original (since they do not know the source language) is puzzling. At best, this is a re-interpretation of Tagore’s poems in simpler English, or, if we must use the word “translation”, a translation from English to English. As such, while it can render the undeniably heavy language used by Tagore to a more colloquial English, it cannot in anyway bring the reader closer to the magnificence of the original Bengali. 

Of course, any poet, can interpret another poet’s works in whatever way they feel inspired, and I do not doubt that Coleman Barks, who, in his own words, attempted to “rephrase his insights in language that does not cloud their brilliance”, has produced verses that are indeed more lucid and simpler than Tagore’s biblical English. As a literary exercise by a poet, that is an interesting endeavour. However, when the same exercise is presented as a new translation, and pretends to re-introduce Tagore to the West, this becomes deeply problematic. 

As I read the description of the book, I also realized that Mr Barks has followed the footsteps of Yeats and Pound in “re-introducing” Tagore as “one of the great universal mystics”. It is disappointing that such a reductionist view of the versatile maestro would continue to be presented and entertained in the Anglo-American circle despite decades of both scholarly and literary work in English that should have presented ample opportunity to demystify Tagore, and appreciate his multifaceted contributions. Sadly, Mr Barks chose instead to continue the same orientalist perspective that has obfuscated Western perceptions of the East through centuries. 

But to me the biggest issue with this purported “translation” is the complete exclusion of Bengali voices from the presentation of the book. Not only do millions of educated Bengalis learn Tagore’s songs and poems at a very early age, many of us literally live by them. Many Bengalis would admit how Tagore’s songs connect profoundly with our emotions in both joy and the depths of sorrow. To an outsider, it’s difficult to explain what Tagore means to Bengalis — few other people have such deep adoration for a poet. Nor are Bengalis an alien, inaccessible lot, there are more than a million Bengalis in the English-speaking world, many of whom are extremely well-versed in both Bengali and English. And yet here they are uninvited in conversations around their most precious treasures. 

The above could have been palatable even if the people presenting Barks’ version were at least somewhat familiar with Tagore. Alas, that too is not the case – the publisher’s own website, for instance, quotes one Elizabeth Burns, President Emeritus, Mount Holyoke College, as saying 

“This is what Coleman Barks has just done in his reinterpretation for English-speaking audiences of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali. In the elegant poems we have been taught to love in his versions of Rumi, Barks now makes available to all of us Gitanjali of Tagore, a crowning achievement of Hindi Bengali literature. With it he has opened for us the treasures of Hindi spirituality and given new and personal meaning to diversity for the 21st century.”

Note the use of the word “Hindi” here. This is akin to describing Federico García Lorca as a French poet, or Victor Hugo’s works as a crowning achievement of Anglo-French literature. Tagore was not a Hindi poet and wrote nothing in Hindi, and his Gitanjali has nothing to do with “Hindi spirituality”, whatever that may mean.   

The fact that the Anglo-American publisher could audaciously ignore the Bengaliness of Tagore, and appropriate the greatest icon of a people, and strip him of his versatility, is ultimately linked to the privileged position that the West, and especially the English speaking circles in the West, enjoy in a world that still remains culturally colonized. Coleman Barks himself is not new to this, his “translations” of Rumi, too, were rendered boldly without any knowledge of either Persian or Islamic theology, and has been called out for de-Islamizing Rumi and Sufism to the international audience. And yet, thanks to that same privilege, these still happen to be most well-known  internationally, out of several, more authentic versions. For products of South Asian culture, Tagore’s reconstruction through Barks, joins a long list of colonial appropriations, some of the foremost of which are Tantra and Yoga. 

Who gets to represent something at a global stage? Those who come with a deep personal connection to the culture that it comes from, and have access to it in its most unadulterated form, or those only superficially familiar with it, but who, by means of their privilege, have far greater clout and reach? Those of us who dream of decolonizing the literary world need to have an unambiguous answer to this question. 

How Absurd Are Nation States?

When we look at a world map today, all the land is seen to be neatly divided into around 200 or so fixed blocks, known as “countries”. In the context of international relations and conflicts, we often hear about the irrevocability of borders, in popular culture we learn about stereotypes and festivals and languages and cuisines of these countries. In a way we are presented with a world that is always divided into countries through clear lines, and these borders are deeply connected to the history and identity of the people that live inside them, and fixed in an eternal, intrinsically natural, almost sacred way. Countries are seen as units of culture, tradition, behavioural traits and values. 

If we look back even 40 years into the past, which is a very short period in human history, this irrevocable aspect of borders become questionable - suddenly there is a huge country called the USSR in the midst of Asia, there are two Germanies, Czechia and Slovakia have merged into one, and all those tiny Balkan countries have disappeared into Yugoslavia. If we keep going further back, we see more and more changes - before the 1940’s there were hardly any independent country in Africa or Asia, instead there were colonial empires. The many lines in Africa where exactly how a handful of European powers deemed it right to divide the continent among themselves.  Those lines would become the basis of countries in Africa in the second half of the 20th century, along with some of the administrative divisions within them. Of course these lines not any more natural than any arbitrary line on a map, they have nothing to do with people, and everything to do with foreign powers that ruled over them. The same goes for the borders in West Asia, which were drawn up when the Ottoman Empire fell. 

Even in countries that were not created through colonization by foreign forces, the present borders were drawn up following wars and treaties. Most borders in Europe have everything to do with kings and armies and almost nothing to do with the people who got defined by them. It was entirely possible that Provence in Southern France or Andalucia in Spain  remained its own country and Portugal were part of Spain, or that Italy remained fragmented in dozens of different countries. But despite their fragile and artificial nature, somehow, once countries become a reality they become a strong marker of identity. These identities stick to people defined by those borders, the same people who had little or no say in choosing those borders in the first place. Emphasizing on borders to redefine identity often leads to sad yet hilarious results, like how Indians and Pakistanis insist on Hindi and Urdu being different languages, or how Croats, Serbs and Bosniacs speak effectively the same language but call it by separate names, or how the many languages o China simply become, Chinese.   

Even if someone tried to redefine countries to represent people living in a geographical region as faithfully as possible, it’s an impossible task. Throughout history, people of different languages, cultures and religions have almost always cohabited the same large geographical spaces, living side by side. As a result, no matter where we try to draw borders, we would almost always be left with minorities, be that linguistic, religious or ethnic. The idea that a large part of land is exclusive to a certain group of people is a relatively new and a very dangerous one, and attempts to implement that have resulted in extreme bloodshed and horrendous levels of tragedy, as in the case of the partition of India, the Balkan civil wars, the Armenian genocide or the Holocaust. Even after these very violent episodes, these regions are still quite diverse and heterogeneous, their cultures and traditions are still not entirely shaped by those lines. Today that same toxic idea is continuing to cause pain across the world.

Assigning one’s cultural, ethnic or national identity through borders lead to absurdities. A Bengali person born before 1947, has been an Indian, a Pakistani and a Bangladeshi. These changes have certainly affected the laws they had to follow or their travel documents, but does it really change every aspect of their culture? Cultural, ethnic and religious identities continue to exist in spite of borders – people within one country could maintain myriads of distinct identities (like in countries like India or Pakistan or Papua New Guinea), whereas people separated by borders can share virtually the same culture (like US and Canada, or Uruguay or Argentina). Not to forget the many groups of people who have neither their nation state, nor are even confined in one country, like the Kurds or Balochis or Punjabis, or those who do not even have a province or region where they constitute numerical majorities, like the Roma people in Europe or the many indigenous people in the Americas and Australia. Such identities are shaped by language, religion, culture and shared histories, which may or may not always coincide. The identities of each of these communities, represented neither by a border nor a flag and sometimes not even by a map, are still no less real than those coming from more homogeneous and well defined countries like Korea or Iceland.  

What makes it hard for many to notice this is that the dominant countries of today's world, especially in the West, do have somewhat homogeneous cultures within their borders, with at least a very significant majority of their people belonging to the same linguistic, ethnic, religious and cultural identities. In some countries like France or England this homogenity was not there to begin with but was achieved through decades of government policy. Countries like USA, Canada, Australia or Argentina were shaped by settler colonialism lead by specific imperial groups, and are also culturally rather homogeneous. As a result, people from these countries look elsewhere expecting to see the same culture within borders, and struggle to comprehend either the depth of diversity in South Asia or Sub Saharan Africa within a country, or the complex relationships that culture and identity have with borders in those regions.      

If we look further back in time, beyond the period of extreme European colonization, we see a very different world with regards to borders. Borders used to be a lot less rigid, and were not seen as much a part of one’s identity as they are today. States and kingdoms, even empires had a weaker grip than present day countries. As a result. Borders kept changing regularly, frontier regions kept switching hands, and people moved through them with far more relative ease than today. In many cases, the borders were not clearly defined in the first place and even when they were, there were vast amount of unclaimed or loosely claimed lands where people lived relatively free from any big national or imperial government. In Central Asia and the Eurasian steppes, even a few centuries ago, many people lived in self administered city-states or small communities, occasionally paying tribute to a nearby empire, but maintaining their identity and culture still. Vast regions in Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas, simply didn’t have well defined frameworks of political divisions comparable to today’s borders. In many of those regions, communities were often nomadic or semi-nomadic, for whom borders didn’t really have the same connotation. 

May be its time we rethink the idea of nation states. May be we start to take borders for what they really are, mutually recognized power sharing mechanisms between groups of poltical elites, not something that defines who we are, and definitely not the fundamental unit of culture, language, traditions or shared history. We should be very careful to use these borders to define others or ourselves.