Rabindranath Tagore - Selected Short Stories

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Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) is regarded as the father of Indian modern literature. He was a polymath and all-round creative talent who became something of a celebrity in the West during the second half of his lifetime. In 1878 Tagore moved to England with the intention of obtaining a degree. However, he was ill-suited to formal education and returned to India in 1880, having failed in his academic ambitions. Despite this, his exposure to English literature, including Shakespeare, had made a lasting impression on Tagore, and he resolved to fuse the European concept of the novel with elements of Indian culture and society.

Tagore came from a very wealthy Indian family, which explains his position to travel and to indulge his creative interests in a country where poverty and hardship were the lot of the common man. Despite his privileged background, he had strong empathy for his fellow human beings, which is largely why he was able to write stories and poems with humility and connection. This empathy came from managing his vast ancestral estates, where he would travel to collect rents and interact with the tenants. This exposed him to traditional storytelling and songs, as well as philosophical and religious ideas. This fertile environment, combined with his intellectual curiosity and imagination, resulted in prolific creativity.

Tagore’s stories are typically like a hybrid between fairytales and fables, as they incorporate elements of the traditional Indian belief system with philosophical insight. Many are short in length, simply because they have no need to be any longer. In fact, they are already filled with superfluous detail, so it would be quite possible to condense them further.

From a literary point of view, it is difficult to assess their merits, as the works we read in the West are merely translations. The stories themselves and their allegory survive intact, but the use of language is largely lost, primarily because the translator naturally gives a subjective interpretation of Tagore’s words and subsequent choice of English words. Also, the English language has a far richer vocabulary than Bengali, so an inevitable ambiguity results in terms of the literary forming of prose. Further complicating the issue is that Tagore also translated some of his own material into English.

Of course, Tagore’s tales also possess a distinctly Indian flavour in terms of their content and the behaviour of the characters. This exoticness certainly played its part in cementing Tagore’s appeal to the Western readership. In India, his fame was largely confined to the region in which he lived, and even then, only among the elite who were able to read.

It is difficult to discuss Tagore without comparing him with Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). Kipling was also Indian, born of Caucasian stock, whose life ran parallel with that of Tagore. He too wrote many short stories and poems focused on the Indian subcontinent, which inevitably have a very similar feel. It would be fair to say that both writers shared a similar gift for the narrative and both were awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature; Kipling in 1907 and Tagore in 1913.

While Kipling was among the Anglo-Indian population who administered the British Empire in India, Tagore was a native Indian who resented the colonial presence. He wasn’t overtly political in his activities, but he wasn’t afraid to let his feelings be known, either. He died during World War II and so missed seeing India gain its independence by only a few years.

Kipling is sometimes seen as intrinsically racist and had a particular dislike for Bengalis, of which Tagore was one. As a consequence, there was no love lost between the two literary giants. Tagore had interactions with other white writers, but he ignored Kipling as if he were a pariah. Kipling could not, or would not, acknowledge Tagore’s work as having any literary worth, because his prejudice was so strong. He suggested that Tagore was a pretentious pseudo-intellectual, incapable of writing anything of value. Kipling’s view was typically imperialist due to his upbringing. He had been conditioned to believe that ‘good’ Indians were those who knew their place as servants to the ruling elite, so his racism towards Tagore was amplified by his indignation that a native Indian had risen to the same literary heights as himself. Like all racists, Kipling evidently needed to feel superior to mask his own insecurities, so Tagore’s success presented a psychological impasse to him as it didn’t fit with his model of the way things should be ordered to make him feel self-confident.