Rabindranath Tagore Has No Place In ‘New’ Bangladesh
- By : Anirban Ganguly
- Category : Articles
Rabindranath Tagore’s association with East Bengal was a deeply intertwined one and it can hardly be eradicated
The vandalisation of the historic Rabindra Kachharibari in Shahjadpur, Sirajganj, last week proves that Mohammed Yunus’s interim regime and its functioning has entrapped Bangladesh like a curse.
Since August 2024, there has been a concerted attempt to erase and decimate cultural and intellectual symbols that had sustained the struggle for identity and cultural assertion in East Bengal during the dark days of West,
The symbols of Bangladesh’s Liberation War and of its creation were attacked, leaving Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib’s Dhanmondi House gutted and bulldozed and the memorials to the Liberation War vandalised. Similarly, the attack on the Rabindra Kachharibari Museum in Sirajganj is a clear assault on those cultural symbols and icons that have inspired, sustained and defined Bangladesh’s aspiration to remain distinct from the sapping tentacles of Pakistan and its proxies who wish to erase, beyond redemption, Bangladesh’s cultural and linguistic identity and core.
Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, till the other day, was the tallest cultural icon of Bangladesh. In a sense, he still continues to be an icon, for the beleaguered and imprisoned intelligentsia of that country. For generations his poems, songs, essays and thoughts have sustained the East Bengali intelligentsia. He stood as a perennial source of solace in the dark days of the struggle against a marauding West Pakistani dispensation which was determined to erase the Bengali identity and texture in East Pakistan. That unfinished agenda of Pakistan, stymied by the Liberation War and the formation of Bangladesh, has now been set rolling. Pakistan’s proxies such as the Jamaat, Hefazat-e-Islam and other lesser-known radical outfits, propping up the Yunus regime, are in overdrive now to destroy Bangladesh’s cultural symbols and icons.
The Bangladesh that these forces envisage will be dark and monotonous. It will be shorn of colours, devoid of elevating thoughts and emotions, bereft of all music which has flowed out of the soil of Bengal, representing her soul and its deeper aspirations. They want a Bangladesh in which Tagore will be an outcast, fit to be dumped and relegated as haram.
The students who organised and participated in the August protest and insisted that they represented a “new” Bangladesh, have been complicit in this demolition of Bangladesh’s cultural symbols. Realising that their path to survival is through the creation of a political identity and outfit, these youth leaders have joined hands with radicals in order to gain and maintain a political space. An assault on Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s persona and legacy is thus the surest way to gain political space and legitimacy in Bangladesh today.
The attack on the Rabindra Kachharibari has been passed off as a spontaneous reaction to a local dispute and yet the manner in which an organised and armed mob invaded the sacred premises, hardly lends credence to that alibi. It was as if the vandals were lying ready, awaiting an opportunity to attack the Museum.
Prof Yunus’s Bengali Nobel Laureate friends and admirers, led by Prof Amartya Sen and Prof Abhijit Banerjee, or famous Bengali writers like Amitava Ghosh, ought to educate him on the imperative of protecting Tagore’s legacy in Bangladesh. Some of them as self-styled “global citizens”, have been conspicuously silent on the happenings in Bangladesh. Their silence on attacks such as these, their passivity when Hindus were being bullied and assaulted under the Yunus’s regime’s watch, is especially astounding and stunning.
Rabindranath Tagore’s association with East Bengal was a deeply intertwined one and it can hardly be eradicated. Despite seeing it as a task that stood completely opposite to his nature, Tagore deftly managed their landed properties, primarily in East Bengal, that fell to his lot to handle. Some of his most enduring poems, stories and essays were composed and written while he was in East Bengal. But Tagore was no dreamy poet and rent-extracting landowner.
The “zamindar” Rabindranath Tagore was a unique personality. He stood completely apart from the genre of his time. Leading Bengali litterateur, poet and essayist of the Tagore era Pramatha Chaudhuri (1868-1946), observes that as a zamindar Tagore was as unique as he was as a poet. The welfare of the cultivators, village reform and development, improvement of local infrastructure, public health, roads, education constantly preoccupied Tagore on his sojourn in East Bengal in places like Silaidaha, Patisar, Sirajganj, places in which he had estates and houses.
It was in Patisar that he put his entire Nobel Prize money of then Rs. 1 lakh to start a cooperative bank for the benefit of peasants and cultivators. His travels, stay and work as a zamindar and poet in East Bengal, span a period of nearly five decades. The vandals of Sirajganj or their ideological patrons would hardly know of this past or care for it. In their “new Bangladesh” both Tagore and his anthem are to be exiled.
In a captivating Bengali tract “Zamindar Rabindranath,” veteran journalist Amitabha Choudhuri tells us that Tagore did not go to rural Bengal with a zamindari mindset, he went there and took up the responsibility as a worker for his country’s welfare, as a “swadesh-hitaishi.” The ryots were surprised to see a “Babumoshai” who did not fit the usual image of an extractor and entertainer.
Tagore came as their guardian and carer. He worked to make these ryots and those dependent on him self-reliant. He strove to awaken their inner strength – atmashakti and to make them stakeholders in the mission of enriching Bengal’s unique soil. Tagore developed most of his ideas of rural development and empowerment during these years. In Shilaidaha, for instance, Choudhuri writes, he set up, in memory of his father Maharshi Debendranath Tagore, the Maharshi free dispensary which treated the rural poor through homeopathy, Ayurvedic and allopathic medicines. Quinine would be distributed for free and Tagore would himself treat patients at times.
In Patisar, Tagore established a large hospital. The first ever health cooperative in India to be started was the one set up by Tagore in his estate in East Bengal. Writing to Pramatha Chaudhuri in 1917, Tagore observed how the hospital was catering to a large population beyond his estate and benefiting them. “This joy rises above all my wants,” Tagore wrote to Pramatha Chaudhuri.
Gurudev’s letters during this period describing the work in his estate, indicate, writes Amitabha Choudhuri, that Tagore worked with the aim of establishing a “dharma-rajya” among the peasants and never calculated his losses and gains. He was pledged to their welfare alone. In every village in his estate Tagore founded a free school and in Patisar came up a minor school which later became high school. Village roads were improved, drinking water arrangements were made and the villagers were imparted training in weaving. Tagore’s varied initiatives saw a visible improvement in the condition of the people.
In later years Gurudev would recall the deep satisfaction that this work gave him. He kept an open house for the cultivators and peasants. His doors were never closed for them. They in turn adored and admired him. ‘For one who grew up cloistered in the corners of a room, to me the experience of a village was new. But this work has given me great satisfaction; it enthused me, I acquired the joys of carving out a new path…” Gurudev wrote years later. Reams can be written on his work among the people of East Bengal.
Who knows, perhaps the Rabindra Kachharibari vandals are descendants of those same families who must have once benefited from Gurudev’s benign presence and work? Who knows, perhaps Mohammed Yunus’s ancestors were cultivators and ryots in Tagore’s estate. Who knows, perhaps they were the recipient of his elevating vision and of his sublime action. But that memory is being forcibly erased, the possibility of it being resisted. In the “new Bangladesh” that the self-styled August “revolutionaries” wish to create, Rabindranath Tagore has no place. He is being driven out.
