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of alienation of Western-style modernism. He was too whole, not cracked or fragmented enough, not in love with sickness or despair. For the thrills he could not provide, they went to Baudelaire or Rimbaud, Proust or Kafka, phases of Eliot or Brecht. But now a new generation of Westerners themselves have emerged, who turn with relief from the negative features of Western modernism to holistic perspectives, to qualities such as compassion and affirmation, nurturing and the making of connections, qualities for long despised as feminine, but now reinvested with value by the women’s movement. To such an audience, Tagore’s poetry should prove attractive. It is characterised by an impressive wholeness of attitude: a loving warmth, a compassionate humanity, a delicate sensuousness , an intense sense of kinship with nature, a burning awareness of the universe of which we are a part.

    Tagore in London in 1913 (shortly before the announcement of the Nobel Prize).
    In the paragraphs above I have deliberately not included the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded to Tagore in 1913, among his principal achievements . That award is a cultural institution of the Western world which has hardly any meaning in the context of Indian literature. An accidental concatenation of circumstances led to Tagore being given the award, more, one suspects, as a symbolic recognition of the reawakening of an old civilisation under the aegis of the British Empire than as anything else, for no other writer from the Indian subcontinent has been awarded this prize since that time. If some take this to mean that no other major author has appeared in that part of the world since 1913, they will be deceiving themselves. All it means is that because of the politics of culture the major writers in the modern languages of the subcontinent do not get translated for the Western markets and are “invisible” in the West. And in 1913 there were even protests in certain papers in the USA and Canada against the fact that an Asian, a non-white, a Hindu, a man whose name was difficult for Westerners to pronounce, should have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature! 6
    Yet the Nobel Prize was definitely a landmark in Tagore’s life. It made him internationally famous. He reached a world-wide audience, received invitations from many countries, travelled and lectured widely, acquired foreign friends, and thanks to his fame, met many other distinguished personalities of his time. There was a substantial widening of his artistic and political experiences. He saw the passion-play at Oberammergau, heard La Traviata at La Scala in Milan, saw the art of China and Japan as well as of modern Europe, watched the dance-dramas of Indonesia, witnessed the devastated state of Europe after the First World War (which saddened him) and the Communist efforts to uplift the masses in Russia (which stirred him profoundly). His foreign travels enriched and sharpened the elements of cosmopolitan humanism in his thinking and made him strongly anti-war. Seeing that he had gained a large audience, Tagore also tried, in the lectures he was invited to give, to use his influence for a good cause. There is a game that the West plays with men from the East: first, craving gurus, then criticising them for preaching like gurus. Tagore could not escape this fate, half seeing what was happening, yet reluctant to miss the opportunities for bridge-building that the encounters with foreigners afforded. It is true that he sometimes spoke like an angry prophet, but he was absolutely sincere. Angry prophets make us uncomfortable because they speak the truth anddisturb our complacency. Tagore’s analyses of contemporary problems were radical and penetrating. His indictment of violence and commercial greed, his insistence that intelligent cooperation between nations was saner than the path of unbridled competition, are just as relevant today as they were in his lifetime, if not even more. The Nobel Prize is