Canon Without Consensus: Rabindranath Tagore and "The Oxford Book of Bengali Verse"

There is something in the air and water and speech of Bengal that produces poets. Other lands may have built their immortality in slabs of prose, but to the Bengali, life is unthinkable without poetry to create and declaim and sing, read and fight over and imitate, whether competently or quite the reverse. Very briefly, the world shared Bengal's obsession in 1913, before war and weightier matters distracted it, when Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature and for a time silenced his critics at home. For a man whose works had only been available in English translation for one year before the award, this was some feat. ¹

For most of the Bengali literary establishment today, the cultural preeminence of Tagore and his work is unquestionable, even as newer poets are castigated for not being as good, or are accused of betraying his legacy by being too modern, too Westernized, or too "realist." In his lifetime Tagore never really felt part of the mainstream, the center of which was occupied by Sanskritizers such as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Michael Madhusudan Dutta (though each of these was subversive in his own way). The orthodox found his poetry too popular, as it used simple language that even children could understand and carried a message of humanity that many found too facile and "soft." The moderns criticized him for the same failings from the other side, accusing him of shrinking from certain kinds of experiment and daring. Yet even his harshest critics could not deny his greatness. He had a polymorphic and prolific genius, writing lyrics (in the literal sense of songs set to music), "dance dramas," short stories, novels, and plays. His collected works comfortably fill a good-sized shelf; he is a canon in himself. At the same time his style is so distinctive, and the worldview he helped to propagate so all-pervading, that it has given a new adjective to the Bengali language: Rabindrik.

By the 1920s and 1930s Rabindranath, born in 1861, was an institution. His pet project, Viswa Bharati, the "world university" at Shantiniketan, had established itself as a premier center of learning and the arts, with scholars of international repute teaching there. He was in a unique position in Bengal's literary firmament, capable of making or breaking a reputation, at least in the short term, by his praise or blame. Any pronouncement of his with regard to literature was bound to be challenged and fought over, but it could not be ignored. This was to have important implications in the drama that unfolded around "The Oxford Book of Bengali Verse" (OBBV), which never saw the light of day, and its unacknowledged successor, which did. This drama begins in the obscurity of the dusty files of the Indian branch of Oxford University Press, and its end meshes with the beginning of a well-known controversy in Bengali literary history around the book that killed the OBBV.

The war-torn world may have forgotten Rabindranath, but Edward Thompson, enfant terrible, missionary, novelist, and war hero, had not. ² Having been decorated for service as chaplain to the troops in Mesopotamia, a notorious theater of World War I that claimed the lives of many Indian soldiers, he returned in 1920 to Bengal. There he found that Oxford University Press had just set up shop in the person of Noel Carrington. ³ Carrington, brother of the more famous Dora, was a young Englishman who had been at Oxford when war broke out, seen service, and been wounded in the right elbow. Demobbed, he returned to Oxford but joined the press instead of continuing his education, and was sent out to India in 1919 to relieve E. V. Rieu, whose health had broken down in Bombay. ⁴ In 1920 Geoffrey Cumberlege, his superior in Bombay, offered him the choice of going to the Madras depot or setting up a new branch...