Rabindranath Tagore is well known for his poetry, for his music, his short stories, his novels, perhaps his paintings, but he is not much appreciated as an Indian philosopher and protagonist of liberal Hinduism (if we may call it that). The latter aspect of his life's work is often ignored, downplayed, or even resented. It is for this reason alone that Medha Bhattacharyya's book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on Tagore, including good scholarly translations into English of his major Bengali works. In particular, Bhattacharyya's book contributes to the very slim interpretative literature on Tagore's religio-philosophical (if not theological) thought.
In this volume, Bhattacharyya offers a fresh translation into English from Bengali of an important and often neglected collection of lectures and sermons that Tagore produced between 1909 and 1914. This collection comprises around 150 pieces, some quite small and some quite large, all dealing with passages from religious classics, mostly taken from the Upanishads. In these texts Tagore explained these passages but also expressed his own religious musings to which the Upanishads gave rise. The original texts were published in two volumes under the title Śāntiniketan, ‘Abode of Peace’, the name of the place where Tagore founded his school and university, Visva Bharati. Many lectures in these volumes were actually delivered at Shantiniketan, hence the appropriateness of the title of the book. Bhattacharyya has carefully selected fifty texts out of this large collection, thus giving an adequate and representative sample of these texts. Some of them are more inspirational, others more philosophical or analytical.
Bhattacharyya provides much circumstantial information about Tagore himself, his writings, his thought, and the content of this particular volume in her long introduction (pp. 1–51). Bhattacharyya also proposes some new theories about the similarities between Tagore and Sri Ramakrishna's teachings and Swami Vivekananda (pp. 14–17). To the texts themselves Bhattacharyya attaches a useful apparatus of explanatory endnotes (which I would always prefer to be footnotes, but endnotes are the standard format of Routledge). She identifies all the Sanskrit quotations in the texts themselves, which is useful for the reader interested in the Hindu scriptural background of Tagore's expositions.
To these very positive aspects of Bhattacharyya's remarkable work, it is useful to add some points of consideration. For instance the way the Upanishads figure in Tagore's work, and especially in these essays from Śāntiniketan; it is useful and understandable that Bhattacharyya, like so many others, looks at the scriptural quotations and references, and assumes that Tagore got them from the bulk of the original Upanishads. What is almost universally missed is that most passages which Tagore quotes from the Upanishads are found in the book Brahmo Dharma, the sacred scripture cum textbook of the Brahmo Samaj, a textbook that was composed by Rabindranath's father Debendranath. Or to put it more bluntly: Rabindranath quotes from Brahmo Dharma almost invariably, not from the whole extant Upanishad literature even though he was aware of the content. Many of the verses that reappear with great regularity in Tagore's essays on religious matters, the texts of Śāntiniketan included, are taken from the so-called Brahmopāsanā, the liturgy of the Brahmo prayer services. Tagore was an acting acharya of the Adi Brahmo Samaj, a fact that would explain quite well the nature of the texts in Śāntiniketan, because these texts were for the most part impromptu sermons held during the prayer services. It may be revealing to study these texts in the light of Debendranath Tagore's own commentaries on the Upanishad verses selected in the Brahmo Dharma. The links that Bhattacharyya suggests exist between Rabindranath's thinking and Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda may be also explained by the Brahmo connections they had in common. Sri Ramakrishna had a good relationship with Keshub Chunder Sen, the erstwhile disciple of Debendranath, and Swami Vivekananda had been involved with the Keshubite Brahmo Samaj before he surrendered to his master Sri Ramakrishna. But all this may just show how the atmosphere of late nineteenth-century Calcutta produced networks of contacts between Hindu religious leaders.
Another small point of critique may be that Bhattacharyya does not indicate the exact location in the Bengali original of the translated texts of Śāntiniketan. If one has the Bengali original before one, it is not too difficult to look up and identify the exact source text of every translation, but references could have been added, or a full list of all the Bengali titles of the original with an indication of which ones have been translated. In her Introduction Bhattacharyya quotes passages from Tagore without reference. After some looking and leafing it becomes clear that the quotations are taken from the translated texts in the volume itself. What is also missing is a list of earlier translations of the same texts or other passages from Śāntiniketan.
The present book gives the impression that this is the first time that parts of Śāntiniketan have been translated into English. There exists a much earlier translation into English of a much larger portion of Śāntiniketan: Rabindranath Tagore: ‘Human Values: The Tagorean Panorama’ (translations from Shantiniketan), translated by S. K. Chakraborty and Pradip Bhattacharya (New Delhi: New Age International (P) Limited, 1996). This latter work in no way renders Bhattacharyya's work superfluous. In fact, hers is the first really scholarly presentation of Śāntiniketan. Bhattacharyya's work is indispensable reading for anyone interested in modern Indian religion and thought. It makes a genuine contribution to modern Indian religious studies by highlighting Tagore, whose religious thought merits closer attention than it gets these days. Bhattacharyya's book will certainly show the importance of Tagore for a Hindu-inspired thinking that is modern, humanistic, liberal, and cosmopolitan.
