THERE Is perhaps no better way to kill a writer than to present >e him as a text Mi the college and university syllabi. Some thing more by way of enmity as if. has been done to Rabin dranath killing him doubly as the intellectual and literary kalpataru of the Bengalee people. He has been for fifty years a standard subject for PhD dissertation And finished is the poet who loved to be called as such and himself called his good self by the same epithet, although his creations outside of poetry are not any less ponderous or of lesser value. And as a writer of fiction inclusive of his Inimitable short stories, he seems to have been very largely ignored by novelists and short story writers coming after him in his own language. Wasn t Rabindranath the greatest of the modern Indian philosophers? Greater than Sri Aurobindo or Vivekananda or Sar vepalli Radhakrishnan? Decidedly yes. But he Is nowhere read or discussed as a philosopher. and the text-books on even Indian philosophy do not mention him even for once.
He was indubitably our best thinker on education and the arts. Bengali linguistics and Indology Our InsUtutes of edu cation do not offer anything on him and our institutes of lan guage and history establish ments in the universities or in
the Asiatic Society ignore him equally
His was the best insight into the Indian, or precisely. Bengali society We liave cared to lake a cue Irom him in our political and cultural expedi tion to build a destiny for this nation roaming as it has been in wilderness for ,centuries Who among the new builders of Bangladesh or of India has read Rabindranath to see light?
Tagore the music composer and Tagore the painter are artists who are far more hflng today than Tagore the writer or even Tagore the social trend-setter How is that and why? There is. in fact, a global move away from things intellectual. things impinging upon the reflective sensibilities in man And humanity as a whole specially in the West has been showing pronounced prefer ences for formal, rather than conceptual, constructions’, either aural or visual having impact on physical sensation. This has been going for pretty long in the West and the Paris-centred wonder-sprouting of a revolution in the visual and plastic arts al the opening of the present century contributed in no mean manner to
the erosion of the conceptual comprehension of the human m id the physical aspects of the universe The whole human lamlly. spurred by Euro-Amer lean examples, went for mans doings rather than musings. Or for art rather than literature and philosophy Man fashions a song or paints a picture and he is the man In He writes senous novels, he Is the man
The industrially advanced North Is also advanced In literacy and general education With all that Is happening there — the entertainment boom boosted by the universal TV full lire — society there would have long dried up of the language-based intellectual activity Thanks to that very very broad base of education there, say even in small linguistic societies such as Swe dish or Norwegian the writers while booming ever so spe < lalised as a specialist clien tele s hero. retains a wide enough audience as to fnflu-ence the cultural development of their human milieu.
In the South. Bangladesh to wit. less than one per cent of the population read a newspa per The number of those reading a book must be far less
than that And the strength of Dial miserable minority is progressively being dissipated by an increasing number of those who can buy as well as read a book becoming a TV-addict or a band music buff The base of educated people is razor-thin here, and the razor Is shorter than standard. Coming back to the Tagore topic, we are con fronted by a horrifying situation. Those who could, for their cultural background's sake, read a Tagore poem or any other's once in a week or a Tagore prose piece every other month, are picking up an audio < assette of Tagore songs once in a while and be done with their pretension to culture.
With these few moving away from literature or the print material. Rabindranath is being pushed to a very diminished existence in Bangladesh There could still be some hope left, if the buyer of the cassette would only care to listen to it in the manner he would have done while reading a poem or fiction by Tagore or any other lesser mortal.
People talk of Tagore music literally flooding the national psyche of Bangladesh That Is an exaggeration In bad taste
Bui there indeed has been a great increase in the consumption of Rabindra sangeel What does it really signify? A grow Ing taste for good music? A general move towards culture?
Things aro no so simple even If we welcome the news. There has also been a big increase in the member of pupils taking lessons in Rabindra-sangeel For one not knowing the mu-sico-cultural situation, this could be a piece of wonderful news. Not so far music teach ers of any standing. For they very well know this Is hardly any sign of a newfangled love of good music, welling up from maybe a love of Rabindranath. This is a trendy thing to be sure. But more than that.to the average Bangladeshi middleclass mind. Rabindranath offers a last hope for all having no potential for music. How? Ever Rahim. Karim and Anwara believe that Rabindra -sangeet Is hardly any music at all. It Is more recitation than music So those that are tone-deaf or do not have simply the voice that can couch a song - ail twin eagerly to Rabindra sangeet.
This Is confirming Tagore s musical creation as less than truly musical in a most unusual and unlikely manner. This we are getting in lieu of a poten tial reader of Tagore’s poems or other writings Naaker bod oley norun pelam tak doom adum doom