Los bienes públicos desde las perspectivas económica

Profoundly aware of the central function of the artist, Tagore ques-tioned: What are poets for? Artists capture on their instruments the “secret stir of life in the air” and give it “voice in the music of prophecy.” A poet’s mission, Tagore believed, is to “inspire faith in the dream which is unfulfilled” (Tagore, Talks in China 57). Tagore as the poet-intellectual made re-evaluative inroads into several deep-seated concepts in the Euro-pean tradition, bringing Europe into contact with a difference of knowl-edge which was a challenge at once to its parochialism and the provincial-ity prevalent in his own country. Compared admirably with the likes of

Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, he generated massive interest in the Eu-ropean public by his sheer intellectual presence. He made people in the West think out of their own provinces into the unmapped territories from the East (Aronson 1978: 10). He “humanized” the East. He demystified the East for the West. His ambitious mission to unite the people of Japan, China, and India was not meant as a military mobilization against imperial Europe but was a move—arduous, vexed, and expansive—to introduce oriental cultures and knowledge systems into a global circulation with a view to bring discernment and understanding in the imperial eyes. Aron-son rightly observes that “there existed at that time a very real desire for a revaluation of standards all over Europe; and this desire was brought about not by books, but by events of a political as well as of a moral nature. Ra-bindranath in his own inimitable language, expressed the need of the hour better than any other writer at that time. Whether the mass intuitively grasped the meaning of his message, it would be difficult to say. But the response of intellectuals was undoubtedly due to the awareness that Ra-bindranath succeeded “in saying the things that are in our minds, but which we cannot quite bring out.” The fact that Rabindranath did say them evoked among them responsive attitudes which had long lain forgotten or repressed. And all of a sudden they found that “Dr. Tagore is not alone in his dismay, nor is he alone in desiring a restatement of personal values in a wilderness of impersonal forces” (Aronson, 29). Both the European mid-dle class and many intellectuals sought the refuge of “ideals” in trying to envision, rather vaguely though, a new Renaissance, a sort of spiritual reawakening. They held common cause with a spiritual crisis and the need for a moral integration and fulfillment in the years following the First World War. Tagore’s prophetic emergence with a spiritual accent went down well with them. For a while, the prophet-intellectual found his voice and cornered the acclaim. But the stint of his glorified intellectual position was short-lived, for Tagore-worship came under acerbic attacks. However, his ideas left a strong stir among the intelligentsia and civil society; it in-troduced disquiet; his position became vexed and censorious through con-certed opposition which, however, did not fail to remind us of the strength and freshness of his messages. That his ideas caught the worm of a dwin-dling popularity and misgivings goes to show the nature of the world which was not prepared to read deeply into the merit of his views. Stephen Hay rightly notes that

stripped of the colourful rhetoric about Eastern civilization in which he un-fortunately clothed it, the message Tagore tried to bring his audiences in China, Japan, the United States, Europe, and even the Soviet Union was essentially a warning against the dehumanizing potentialities of unlimited

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technological modernization. . . . No man in his own lifetime had tried harder than Tagore to establish this ‘world-wide commerce of heart and mind,’ and historians reviewing his life will judge him more fairly by what he tried to do than by what he failed to achieve (331).

As it is true of all visionary thinkers, Tagore had his faults: a failure to problematize a nuanced reading of a rather simplistic dichotomy of spiri-tual and material culture, insubstantial understanding of contemporary sociopolitical complexities, unwavering efforts to find a way out of all crises through universal humanism which needed a more cultivated rheto-ric and insightful exposition to become effective and credulous. But he did not force his criticism upon people; “he wants to help people to see the danger and to overcome it. He gives them hope and consolation, he dem-onstrates to them in his own being and work the integrity and profundity of genuine humanity, and thus he shows them that after all mankind is not living in hell, estranged from all that is divine, without love and soul” (Ro-thermund 47). In the face of all odds, Tagore believed that the world is a movement and the truth of the world is “in its law of relatedness,” the law of “keeping step together”(Soares 61). He was deeply convinced that an artist cannot be left out of any decisive movement for change because his exclusion will invariably wreck a disaster. As an artist-intellectual, he looked into a “rhythm” which did not allow ideas to run off in disorder, which made the “commercial and political man” give way to the “moral man,” ensuring a vitalizing force which translated finally into the “unity of man.” The visionary Tagore awaited a day when “unvanquished Man will retrace his path of conquest, despite all barriers, to win back his lost hu-man heritage” (Tagore, Crisis.. 18). The struggle, the waiting, the crisis of restitution of “human heritage” continues. And sixty-seven years into his death, Tagore still disturbs; he still inspires; he still coaxes out a dream which is all it should always be for an archetypical intellectual—the tout ensemble with an arresting combination of an artist, an educationist and, most importantly, a relentless transnational.

Works Cited

Aronson, Alex. Rabindranath through Western Eyes. Calcutta: Riddhi-India, 1978.

Cox, Peter. “A Journey into the World of Rabindrananth Tagore,” in Bhu-deb Chaudhuri & K. G. Subramanyan, eds. Rabindranath Tagore and the Challenges of Today Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1988.

Dutta, Krishna & Andrew Robinson, eds. Rabindranath Tagore, The Myr-iad-Minded Man. London: Bloomsbury, 1995. Republished: Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Fried Schnitman, Dora and Jorge Schnitman (eds.) New Paradigms, Cul-ture and Subjectivity. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002.

Hay, Stephen N. Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China and India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.

Mukherjee, Himangshu Bhushan. Education for Fulness. London: Asia Publishing House, 1962.

Nussbaum, Martha. “Education for Democratic Citizenship” Doctor Hon-oris Causa Lecture. Institute of Social Studies, Hague, The Nether-lands, 9 March, 2006. <www.iss.nl/content/download/6932/63727 /file/nussbaum.text> accessed February 2010.

Purakayastha, Bandana. “Contesting the Boundaries between Home and the World: Tagore and the Construction of Citizenship” in Patrick Ho-gan and Lalita Pandit. eds. Universality and Tradition, Madison: Far-leigh Dickinson University Press, 2003: 49-64.

Radhakrishnan, S. The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore Baroda: Good Companions Publishers, 1961.

Rothermund, Dietmar. ed. & trans. Rabindranath Tagore in Germany.

New Delhi: Max Mueller Bhavan, 1962.

Shils, Edward. The Intellectual between Tradition and Modernity: The Indian Situation. Hague: Mouton, 1961.

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London: Macmillan, 1955.

Tagore, Rabindranath. The Centre of Indian Culture. Visva-Bharati:

Calcutta, 1921.

—. Talks in China. Calcutta: Visva-Bharati Bookshop, 1925.

—. Crisis in Civilization. Visva-Bharati: Calcutta, 1950.

—. Towards Universal Man. London: Asia Publishing House, 1961.

—. Personality. Bombay, London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd, 1970.

—. Letters to a Friend. Tagore’s letters to C. F. Andrews, 1928. New Del-hi: Rupa, 2002.