This article is illustrated with paintings by Tagore (including the one which will display when you move your cursor over the image above).

When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, almost no one beyond the shores of India had ever heard of him. When he arrived in Sweden to accept the prize, the long, full beard framing his dark face, his floor-length white robes, and his piercing eyes caused people to turn and stare. Within a few years, his reputation worldwide equaled that of his dear friend Mohandas Gandhi.

Throughout his life, his huge extended family called him Rabi (pronounced Robby). Gandhi nicknamed him “The Great Sentinel” because of his penetrating insights into the future of India and her relationship with the rest of the world. When he died in 1941, at the age of 80, accolades and expressions of sympathy and grief poured into India like the monsoon rains. And yet, many Americans of non-Indian heritage have never heard of Rabindranath Tagore.

The passions that fueled Tagore’s whole life intertwined around each other like overgrown vines: love of God and love of humankind. Much to the dismay of many of his Brahmin peers, Tagore insisted that all people, regardless of skin color, ethnicity, spiritual heritage, gender, or class reflect God’s presence, and thus, deserve education, respect, and dignity.

From the multitude of devotional poems Tagore composed, this prayer summarizes his life-ethic:

Here is Thy footstool and there rest Thy feet where live the poorest, and lowliest, and lost.

When I try to bow to Thee, my obeisance cannot reach down to the depth where Thy feet rest among the poorest, lowliest, and lost.

Pride can never approach to where Thou walkest in the clothes of the humble among the poorest, and lowliest, and lost.

My heart can never find its way to where Thou keepest company with the companionless among the poorest, the lowliest, and the lost.¹

Rabi’s love of humankind developed from a growing awareness of the world around him. Though his upbringing afforded Rabi many tangible luxuries, as well as the privilege of ignorance about the suffering masses, Tagore’s father, Dwarkanath, determined that his talented and sensitive son should learn firsthand about life beyond the gates of the family mansion.

At the threshold of the twentieth century, the typical education progression for a bright young Brahmin male prescribed a career as a London-trained lawyer. Rabi briefly flirted with the ivy-covered halls of law school; however, as he had previously done many times, he fled traditional schooling. And so his father decided it was time for the youngest son to earn his keep. Dwarkanath sent Rabi a hundred miles away— a significant distance at the time—to manage the expansive family estates in the rural area of east Bengal.

Routine tasks included checking on the crops, the livestock, and the ramshackle buildings; counting money from sales; distributing salaries to the low-class workers; and mediating disputes among the workers and the impoverished villagers nearby. Initially Tagore thought he had been consigned to hell. His sparse living conditions, his inaccessibility to foods he craved, the meager number of servants, and the chores and interpersonal interactions which seemed beneath his station in life struck him like a furnace blast of Indian summer heat.

Years earlier, the only adults supervising and punishing the young Rabi were frequently the family servants. The active and precocious child spent many hours imprisoned within a chalk circle drawn around his chair, staring longingly out the window. After the adult Rabi spent some time in the rural estates, living an uncomplicated life, he realized his father had granted him the greatest gift of his life. No longer imprisoned by the chalk circle of his high caste status, and finally free to interact with whomever he chose, Tagore grew into the poet, storyteller, and visionary the stars had whispered he would become.

Years later, Rabi’s son wrote this of his father’s interactions with the villagers:

[T]he most interesting function for him was to meet the tenants, hear their complaints and settle disputes. He did not treat them in the traditional manner [of a landholder]. He talked with them freely and they too felt so much at ease with him that they would tell him about their land, their families, and their personal affairs. Father had made known that any tenant who wanted to see him could go straight to him . . . Thus was established a bond of love and respect between the landlord and the tenants, a tradition that lasted in our estates till the end.²

Tagore’s years of living and working in these rural settings transformed the poet into a pragmatist. He learned firsthand about the villagers, both Hindu and Muslim, whose daily lives teetered on the edge of extinction because of hunger, disease, filth-infested waters, and general apathy on the part of most metropolitan Indians. Tagore’s response of solidarity with the impoverished, illiterate denizens of his motherland was truly remarkable.

It was a great event of my life when I first dwelt among my own people [the tenants] here, for thus I came into contact with the reality of life. For in them you feel the barest touch of humanity. Your attention is not diverted . . . one has to be a helper to be a real man; for then you share your life with your fellow-beings and not merely your ideas.³

The other fact that cried out for Tagore’s attentions was the fragile relationship between the Hindus and Muslims, all of them with an ancient heritage in India.

The greatest harm of all would be for Hindus to become inimical to the Mussulman [Muslim] community . . . our relationship with the Mussulmans has been difficult on both sides, for lack of proper contact . . . the Mussulmans are our close relations . . . I love [my Muslim tenants] from my heart, because they deserve it . . . by fighting each other we only increase the inflammation. To remain calm and try for a fundamental cure is the only solution. We must take that path without delay . . . When relatives fight each other, both victories and defeats are equally fatal.⁴

The compassionate landlord with the soul of a poet began to formulate a dream that would propel him and haunt him for the rest of his life: a school where children from all backgrounds and castes would live and learn together; a rural setting where the fields and streams and forests taught their lessons as surely as the faculty; a school where singing, poetry, storytelling, and drama shared the podium with mathematics, science, and history; and a place that would welcome guest lecturers representing varied cultural and spiritual backgrounds.

In previous generations, the Tagore name implied wealth, but by the time Rabi attained adulthood, little was left of the family fortune. To start the school, Tagore had to sell almost everything he owned. In 1901, a couple of buildings on some rural land his father bequeathed him became a school for boys. Initially, the school had five teachers, three of whom were Christian, and five boys, one of whom was Tagore’s own son.

Despite unceasing financial challenges, Tagore refused to charge tuition for several years, consonant with his ideal that all children deserved an education. The school became known as Santiniketan, which translates “Abode of Peace.” Tagore loved the children and his faculty members, but keeping the school solvent and trying to assuage his many detractors who disapproved of his unorthodox methods took a tremendous toll on the poet. The British government even issued secret circulars warning parents against sending their children to Santiniketan.

Tagore explained why he would not abandon this dream. “The growth of this school was the growth of my life and not that of a mere carrying out of any doctrine.”⁵

His Nobel prize, his knighthood (which he later repudiated),⁶ and his worldwide fame grew increasingly burdensome to the man who constantly sought peace in his relationships with God and with all humankind. Santiniketan offered Tagore a place of solace, where kindness and friendliness embraced everyone.

“From Santiniketan, the boys go out to the villages, to run night-schools for the laboring classes and the lower castes. In this way, caste exclusiveness is broken down in early years.”⁷

To 21st-century Americans, the concept of caste may seem foreign, but in reality we also promote similar class divisions. Bigotry in multiple disguises continues to parade across our nation. Racism, homophobia, and immigrant discrimination top a long list of ways in which we cast people aside and label their castes.

In the early years of Santiniketan, many of Tagore’s students came from aristocratic backgrounds. When they ventured into the neighboring rural villages to teach reading and writing, to share song and drama, and to learn skills of rural life, those interactions exemplified what Tagore ultimately sought to teach the whole world: God loves all people equally, and God prays for us to do the same.

By the 1920s, the school had expanded to include a college with centers for Indian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Japanese cultures. Especially after his worldwide travels, enabled by Tagore’s Nobel Prize in 1913, he became more convinced than ever that the hope of the world rested in communication and dialogue between Eastern and Western cultures. He saw firsthand the destruction of World War I, and he pleaded with leaders of his own country and other countries around the world, including the United States, for a spirit of cooperation and trust, rather than isolationism and fear. Tagore named his expanded school Visva-Bharati, from a Sanskrit text, meaning “where the world makes its home in a single nest.”

In addition to the academic and cultural presence of Visva-Bharati, Tagore facilitated another radical innovation. He had understood for years that the impoverished villagers surrounding Santiniketan needed more than the “three R’s.” They needed to know how to build their own water wells, how to recycle human and animal waste, and how to take better care of their lands so the crops would continue to grow. They also needed some basic healthcare. He also wanted to restore, at least to a couple of villages, traditions of music and epic readings from the ancient Indian history.

I endeavored all the time I was in the country to get to know it down to the smallest detail. . . I was filled with eagerness to understand the villagers’ daily routine and the varied pageant of their lives. I, the town-bred, had been received into the lap of rural loveliness and I began joyfully to satisfy my curiosity. Gradually the sorrow and poverty of the villagers became clear to me, and I began to grow restless to do something about it.⁸

Thus began Tagore’s institute of rural reconstruction called Sriniketan. Economists, agriculturalists, social workers, healthcare workers, and other industry and education specialists brainstormed the problems plaguing the villagers. For the duration of Tagore’s life, and into the 21st century, thousands of India’s little villages still suffer incomprehensible poverty.

Tagore never abandoned his lifelong passions of loving God and loving humankind. He never quit praying to see God in “the poorest, the lowliest, and the lost.”⁹ In 1938, when he was 77 years old and in very poor health, Tagore told a group of writers:

… [T]ake yourself to any village and give education to them with whom nobody has ever spoken; bring them happiness, hope, serve them, and let them know that there is a dignity in them as human beings, that they do not deserve the contempt of the universe.¹⁰

In January 2009, I spent three weeks on a spiritual pilgrimage in Tamil Nadu, reputedly the poorest part of India. I saw homeless lepers who had lost their appendages and their dignity. I saw widows whose families had disowned them. I saw a gypsy camp, where every girl over the age of 12 seemed to be a mother. I saw entire families bathing themselves and their cows in the same river waters from which they collected their drinking water.

One Friday night, I saw thousands of Indians dressed to the nines, worshiping at an ancient Hindu temple. Despite the crushing poverty of that part of India, our little group of American pilgrims was embraced by a spirit of hospitality and generosity everywhere we went.

I know that I can easily become immune to the sufferings and hardships of so many of the world’s outcasts. And I certainly did not have to travel all the way to India to find persons whom society has marginalized.

I am inspired by Tagore’s lifelong passion of trying to reflect God’s love in his treatment of others. Many of us seek helpful ways to empower and encourage those who feel as though the contempt of the universe has been dumped upon them. I have counseled many discouraged and distraught individuals, and I know that frequently it only takes one person to plant enough hope to restore life to another.

What are you doing, Dear Readers, to help make a difference? How can you, like Tagore, transform your passions, whatever they may be, into a healing balm for another?

Let Your love play upon my voice and rest on my silence.
Let it pass through my heart into all my movements.
Let Your love, like stars, shine in the darkness of my sleep and dawn in my awakening.
Let it burn in the flame of my desires and flow in all currents of my own love.
Let me carry Your love in my life as a harp does its music,
And give it back to You at last with my life.¹¹

Notes

    ¹     Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali: A Collection of Prose Translations Made By the Author From the Original Bengali (NY: Scribner Poetry, 1997), p. 26.

    ²     Rathindranath Tagore, On the Edges of Time (Calcutta: Visva Bharati, 1958), p. 28.

    ³     Rabindranath Tagore, Letters to a Friend: Rabindranath Tagore’s Letters to C.F. Andrews (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2002), pp. 42–43.

    ⁴     Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, eds., Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore (Daryaganj, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 405.

    ⁵     Uma Das Gupta, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 25.

    ⁶     Tagore denounced his knighthood after British troops killed hundreds of Indians in Amritsar during a peaceful demonstration against British rule.

    ⁷     Edward Thompson, Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 190.

    ⁸     Ibid., p. 33.

    ⁹     Tagore, Gitanjali, p. 26.

    ¹⁰    Gupta, 38.

    ¹¹    Herbert F. Vetter, ed., The Heart of God: Prayers of Rabindranath Tagore (Boston: Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc., 1997), p. 44.