Everyman’s Tagore

EVERYMAN'S TAGORE : Edited by Mahendra Meghani, Lokmilap Trust, 2008, p.96, Rs. 30

Rabindranath Tagore was described as the Poet of Humanity by Jawaharlal Nehru. Tagore’s 147th birth anniversary fell on May 7th, 2008. A few days before that, Lokmilap Trust published Everyman’s Tagore. Compiled by Mahendra Meghani, who last year had given Everyman’s ABC of Gandhi, this book contains 400 extracts from the poetry and prose of the Poet, who was the first Asian to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.

Here are a few specimens from Everyman’s Tagore:

All the great civilizations that have become extinct must have come to their end through slavery imposed upon fellow-beings, through parasitism on a gigantic scale bred by wealth.

*

The butterfly flitting from flower to flower ever remains mine,
I lose the one that is netted by me.

*

Day by day thou art making me worthy of the simple great gifts that thou gavest to me unasked – this sky and the light, this body and the life and the mind.

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Wrong cannot afford defeat, but right can.

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Every child comes with the message that
God is not yet discouraged of man.

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Grant me that I may not be a coward,
feeling your mercy in my success alone;
but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.

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I am able to love my God because
He gives me freedom to deny Him.

*

I love India, not because I have had the chance to be born in her soil, but because she has saved through tumultuous ages the living words that have issued from the illuminated consciousness of her great sons. I love India, but my India is an idea and not a geographical expression. Therefore I am not a patriot. I shall seek my compatriots all over the world.

*

The leaf becomes flower when it loves.
The flower becomes fruit when it worships.
Let life be beautiful like summer flowers,
and death like autumn leaves.

*

Let me not beg for the stifling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it. Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling your mercy in my success alone; but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.

*

Make me thy poet, O Night, veiled Night!
There are some who have sat speechless for ages in thy shadow;
let me utter their songs.

*

The moon has her light all over the sky,
her dark spots to herself.

*

My King, thou has asked me to play my flute at the roadside, that they who bear the burden of voiceless life may stop in their errands for a moment and say, the flowers are in bloom, and the birds sing.

*

Not hammer-strokes, but dance of the water
sings the pebbles into perfection.

*

The sweet, soft freshness that blooms on baby’s limbs – does anybody know where it was hidden so long? Yes, when the mother was a young girl, it lay pervading her heart in tender and silent mystery of love – the sweet, soft freshness that has bloomed on baby’s limbs.

*

They try to hold me secure who love me in this world.
But thy love is greater than theirs, and thou keepest me free.

*

The life is the crossing of a sea,
where we meet in the same narrow ship.
In death we reach the shore, and go to our different worlds.

*

When a religion develops the ambition of imposing its doctrine on all mankind, it degrades itself into a tyranny and becomes a form of imperialism. That is why we find a ruthless method of fascism in religious matters prevailing in most parts of the world.

*

“Who is there to take up my duties?” asked the setting sun.
“I shall do what I can, my Master,” said the earthen lamp.

*

The 96-page hard cover book costs $5 outside India, inclusive of airmail postage, and 25 copies will be available at $4 each.

Being simultaneously published in Gujarati is રવીન્દ્રનાથ સાથે વાચનયાત્રા (Ravindranath Sathe Vachanyatra). Also edited by Mahendra Meghani, it contains about 90 selected translations of Tagore’s writings by about a dozen writers, including Nagindas Parekh, Jhaverchand Meghani, and Umashankar Joshi. The 160-page book in hard cover costs $5 outside India, inclusive of airmail postage, and 25 copies will be available at $4 each. Books sent by airmail from India usually take a fortnight to reach USA.

Those interested in buying either book may send their checks to: Lokmilap Trust, P.O.Box 23, Bhavnagar, 364001, India. Their telephone number is: (0278) 256 6402, and E-mail address: lokmilaptrust2000@yahoo.com.

The Challenge of Our Times

By: Rabindranath Tagore

[Extracts from a letter to Professor Gilbert Murray: September 16, 1934]

We have seen Europe unscrupulous in its politics and commerce, spreading slavery over the face of the earth. And yet, in this very Europe, protest is always alive against its own iniquities. Martyrs are never absent whose lives of sacrifice are the penance for the wrongs done by their own kindred.

There was a time when we were fascinated by Europe. She had inspired us with a new hope – of liberty. We had come to know only her ideal side through her literature and art. But modern Europe has portioned out this wide earth. In our traffic with her we have learnt, as the biggest fact of all, that she is efficient, terribly efficient. But this is only one side of Western civilization. The Western humanity, when not affected by its unnatural relationship with the East, preserves its singular strength of moral conduct in its social life which has its great inspiration for all of us.

In India, what is needed more than anything else is the broad mind which, because it is conscious of its own vigorous individuality, is not afraid of accepting truth from all sources. Fortunately we know what such a mind has meant in an individual who belongs to modern India. I speak of Rammohun Roy. Thoroughly steeped in the best culture of his country, he was capable of finding himself at home in the larger world. The ideal I have formed of the culture which should be universal in India, has become clear to me from the life of Rammohun Roy.

Religion today in its institutionalized forms both in the West and the East has failed in its function to control and guide the forces of humanity; the growth of nationalism and wide commerce of ideas through speeded up communication have often augmented external differences instead of bringing humanity together. Yet I do not feel despondent about the future. There is today all over the world, in spite of selfishness and unreason, a greater awareness of truth. It is this stirring of the human conscience to which we must look for a reassertion of man. In this fact lies the great hope – this emergence in every nation, in spite of repression and the suicidal fever of war-mindedness, of individual consciousness. To these individuals of every land and race, these youthful spirits burning like clean flame on the altar of humanity, I offer my obeisance from the sunset-crested end of my road.

I feel proud that I have been born in this age. Let us announce to the world that the light of the morning has come, not for entrenching ourselves behind barriers, but for meeting in mutual understanding and trust