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Paying a Debt of Gratitude in Massive Celebrations

by Waheedul Haque
THE celebrations of the Bengali New Year's Day this year far outshone all such celebrations held before. Even after the misc-onstrueted enthusiasm about the dawning of a new century that morning had been cut sizeably, that memorable turn out gave a full day of forgetting all worries and enjoying life positively if only for one day. All intelligent Bengalees knew the one and only reason behind the unprecedented festival. Tagore, way back In 1302 of the Bengali era, wrote a poem titled 1400 Sal or The Year 1400. As that year approached, the awareness of the poem grew and somehow the idea took over that in that poem perhaps the poet was musing over the fate of his works in the new century. The unforgettable celebration on the last Pahela Baishakh and in the week following were thus an indirect but very forceful compliment to the memories of the poet and his works.
It. Was js^kind of jraying e (debt of gratitude — in a very grand and alt-involving way. And how this nation and this state — and more so the society of world Bengalees — is indebted to Tagore! It will be very difficult to catalogue the numerous items of that debt and impossible to gauge the depth of all of those. But for Tagore it would have been Impossible for the Bengali Muslims to engage the fascistfundamentalist ideas directly spawning rabid communalism that intoxicated in sadistic perversions a whole community of people for more than half a century's time — and come out rallying round their true identity as Bengalees. The anti-Bengalee and as such anticulture persuasions still remain very strong, in the social sinews of this community proving the monumenlality of Tagorc's achievement against
an almost Impossible adversary. The adversary is string because in its demonic power there Is all that illiteracy and backwardness, prejudice and mutual hatred, greed and a total Incomprehension of consequences to one's own self and to others, social and moral, can produce over centuries. Tagore standing for light and understanding, tolerance and accommodation, compassion and an abidance by the social weal as well as the cause of the individual's liberty of life and thought, has seen us through the half century of cataclysmic. happenings starting with the '43 Bengal famine and ending in the subcontinental wave of inhuman communal carnages of the current year. The fascist phallanxes ' overtake the forces repre-
sented by Tagore but for spells — and the time of culture and
. of mending the damages and constructing the future comes beck.
Tagore's bequests come down to us in three main streams: art, wisdom and life. He is incomparable in his art— linguistic, painterly and musical— and, we must not forget,
in his art of drama. It must • give us a dizzying feeling to meaningfully comprehend that we have his poems and his fictions. his short stories and his belles lettres, and than we have his vast and weird and beguiling trove of paintings; and then again his songs, all 22 hundred of them literally holding the society of all of the world's Bengalees together. Art is fast going out of our social as well as individual lives and it is most of all he who causes art to find a place, a true relevance In our pathetic situations making us wonder if life after all has something making it worth living. His art gives meaning to our lives — inspiring us to get to creating our own art.
His wisdom easily compares to what has been called the wisdom of the East— the prod uct of millennia of Introspection by the sages and savants— and perhaps surpasses it at points. He is Panini and Patanjali, Rajshekhar and Abhinaba Gupta. Sayan and Mallinath all rolled into one making available to us the subcontinent's first historiographer and modem linguist and anthropologist. His pface as a pathbreaker in so many sciences is secured for all times. But his contributions to the study of society and polity, economy and cooperative cn terprise and his nuijor work tn delineating the Religion of Man or giving humanism a tremendous theoretical fillip-are what remain to be recognised for its true worth. This applies as well to his supremely important work on education.
What he had said of Shahjahan c an be said of him — he wus greater than his contributions. But there is a risk of Its sounding rather trite — a little too unthinking. One who has even a general grasp of all his works, would find it hard to believe that any one man, even If he happens to be Tagore himself, can surpass that body in any way. Well, as a matter of plain prosaic fact, he did. His life was one gigantic canvas of art. a magnificent physical continuum studded al-through with deep drilling Inquiry resulting in the most rewarding integration and synthesis of Ideas. And yet there was much more to it. It is a story of a self realising itself through gritty honesty and un sparing application and true genius. His had been a hard life
contrary to popular notion. A full-time writer and yet not quite wholly professional, a successful benevolent zamin-dar who would hardly get h1s' minimal expenses of sheer existence paid out from the paternal treasury— for the simple reason that there was none, and a long-living one who continued to lose to death nearly all his loved close ones — he
1 took every suffering in his stride to keep himself at the ready for the service of his people and to keep his ere atlve life ever out of the bog. He is one great teacher of man who lived all his teachings and did far more. He never outgrew the shy boy bullied by the servants and looking out to the old banyan tree drowned in a strange loneliness that he so loved. Life, how well to bear it and how to make the best of it — that's one teaching that is in his life and not tn his books. Perhaps one can find very touching references to this in his songs. His politics and his lifelong organisational exertions addressed to liberating the broad masses from the consequences of a colonial society rotting in its roots — demanded of him a lot more than there are in his books And he was never found wanting or unresponsive. This is equally true for Tagore as a man — a friend and a father, a son and as a husband
To paraphrase a celebrated utterance, we can say Tagore was enough reason why the Bengalee people should be free and have a state of their own. Wc vindicated that and carved out our own state. We have been waging our own war to keep our true identity to eliminate Injustice and any cultural straitjacket and Bangladesh came as a product of that. That struggle appears to be far from a conclusive success which could allow us to engage other pressing challenges. It goes on and. as of always, we fight with the name Rabindranath writ large on our standards.
Isn't it time that we started reading him more and getting truly into his art and philoso phy and life? We have only solar used him without knowing him much. He is a beacon light to us but we must hare the right eyes to take direction. Except for his music, he is increasingly being pushed into becoming the academic's grist — devoid of life and sod ety. We must embark on work that would make Tagore a living force in our social and economic endeavours and, more importantly, tn our edu cation. Why should a nation having Rabindranath as a son continue to waste into a stinking extinction?
Tagore at the break of the 14th Century of the Bengali era was a fittle unsure about his standing amongst us at the dawn of the next century. We have in the mean time earned much using his name. And we ran assure him we are now conscious more than ever of the unaddressed task of having him as a living presence tn all the aspects of our collective and Individual being.