Gitanjali
(Song Offerings)

Dinesh Chandren

Publisher: Grange Books, 123 pages, (translated by the author with an introduction by William Butler Yeats)

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of deadly habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action –
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

That passage from Gitanjali seems to sum what it means to live in a world where peace reigns and human life, not political, economic and military supremacy, is given the highest regard. These lines seem to contain what people all over the world yearn for, and what generations of peace activists, including SGI President Ikeda have been fighting for.

In For The Sake Of Peace, SGI President Ikeda wrote about Tagore:

The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore possesses both a delicate sensibility that permitted him to directly grasp the eternal as well as penetrating inside into the nature of human existence... Tagore forcefully indicts the human brutality and inhumanity that can erupt at any time given the right conditions.

As if to reinforce that statement, Gitanjali contains the following lines:

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous leaves and flowers.
It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and death, in ebb and in flow.
I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in blood this moment.

Tagore clearly perceives that human life is at one with the earth and the universe. Thus to harm the earth is to harm ourselves. However, humanity’s general blindness to that universal truth has lead to numerous conflicts and rapacious destruction of the environment. And it has already become clear now that world peace cannot be divorced from the well-being of our natural environment. This is further reinforced by the conferral of the Nobel Peace Prize to environmentalists in recent years such as Wangari Maathai (2004) and Al Gore (2007, jointly with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

Singer-poet Tagore is widely considered to be the Indian sub-continent's greatest literary giant, and even Gandhi has deep admiration for him. In fact, it was Tagore who first called Gandhi "Mahatma", or Great Soul, and that has stuck ever since. Tagore was awarded the Nobel Literature prize in 1913, the first non-European to do so.

William Butler Yeats, another great poet himself, wrote in the Introduction, "...these prose translation by Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years." This particular edition, which is translated by Tagore himself is published by Grange Books of the United Kingdom, and surprisingly, printed in Malaysia (though the printer is not credited in the book).

Tagore's period also coincided with India's struggle for independence from British rule. His poetry is grounded in the daily life of the toiling masses and he too seeks tomake the people see that spiritual emancipation lies not in mindless contemplation divorced from the masses, but from honest labour among the people:

Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom does thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!
He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them in the sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!

The month of May is the month when Cosmic will publish SGI President Ikeda's SGI Day peace proposal. President Ikeda has for many years stressed the need for everyone to look beyond their national boundaries and develop a global consciousness that is not constrained by petty nationalistic demands. Global citizens in the truest sense recognise that humanity is one big family and differences like race, language, religion and nationality are nothing more than artificial boundaries that can be built, or torn down by the state of our minds. In Malaysia, in the last two months or so, perhaps we have just begun to see beyond those differences and hunger for a nation where we are equal human beings and nothing else. Hopefully, we can one day proudly claim, as Tagore, "Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."

Rabindranath Tagore is one of those rare people who have become the embodiment of a global citizen. When you read Gitanjali, you will be moved and maybe even rocked to the core of your being, by the flowing beauty of his words. Though I have heard of Tagore for many years, this is the first time I have actually seriously read his work. Finishing this book made me ask myself, "What took me so long?"

Seriously speaking, in Malaysia, there is a lack of a systematic programme to introduce good books and classics by literary giants such as Tagore. When was the last time you heard his name being mentioned in our media? (Ok, maybe we’ve been busy with the elections and post-elections analyses and "soul-searching" in the preceding months). We know too little about icons such as Tagore and how their works and outlook can help towards fostering capable people who work for peace.

In Gitanjali, Tagore also appeals to mankind’s yearning for love:

Clouds heap upon clouds and it darkens. Ah, love, why dost thou let me wait outside at the door all alone?
In the busy moments of the noontide work I am with the crowd, but on this dark lonely day, it is only for thee that I hope.
If thou showest me not thy face, if thou leavest me wholly aside, I know not how I am to pass these long, rainy hours.
I keep gazing on the far-away gloom of the sky, and my heart wanders wailing with the restless wind.

Such is the genius of Tagore's pen, that by turns he induces inspiration, ecstasy, contemplation and even melancholy with the most elegant of phrases. Such is the spiritual depth of Rabindranath Tagore. There are those who say "to read one line of his is to forget all the troubles of the world."

Gitanjali is just one of many of Tagore's wide body of works, but perhaps his most well-known. It is a good starting point to learn about this poet-singer who is perhaps the most towering figure in Asian literature in the 20th century. Good luck finding this book, and I am sure you will enjoy reading it.

[ Courtesy May 2008 Cosmic]