New and improved Tagore

Rabindranath was not just pen and ink, but as Sayandeb Chowdhury finds out from a set of new exhibitions, a regular endorser of indigenous enterprise and a great believer in the potential of the moving images

One problem with the traditional appraisal of Rabindranath Tagore, in which the Bengali community, the chief benefactor of the great man’s infinite genius, has usually regaled, is that such a disposition obliterates larger spheres of reception and cognition. Tagore, who divided his life almost equally between the 19th and 20th century, was perpetually – as a man and artist, in love with the pulls and pushes of modernity, a fact he relished as much as he often derided. This is not to say that he abhorred modernity. Not at all. He, in fact, embraced it with all warmth but did so with a philosopher’s dilemma and an intellectual’s alacrity. Modernity, on its part often enjoyed his graceful hospitality.

The meeting points of the two are hence signposts for our own collective engagement with various aspects of modernity. Tagore, for example, singularly embraced photography, endorsed the phonograph and was endearingly intrigued by motion pictures. And even rudimentary historical knowledge would report that all three became in due course, major areas of engagement for the Bengali intellectual elite. What and how Tagore did is a story that is currently on display at the ICSSR Rabindranath Tagore Centre in Calcutta. As part of the sesquicentennial celebrations of his birth, the Centre has put up on view five exhibitions on Tagore, among which two, ‘Tagore in Advertisements’ and the ‘Philatelic Exhibition of Tagore’ deserve mention for their expansive collection, though, given the detailing, it is impossible to make a place for both in the scope of a single article. In the third exhibition, ‘Tagore & Kantha’, Kantha expert Shamlu Dudeja has put together a sweet little exhibition of Kantha samples, which carry embroidered motifs on the works of Tagore. ‘Tagore and Cinema’ is a relatively well-travelled area of debate and discussion but this one comes with interesting details, while the last one on ‘Tagore’s Pilgrimages to the East’ is full of the minutes of his visits to countries of East Asia, a fact which is perhaps less acknowledged that his eventful visits to the West.

It is unusual to associate the heavy bearded, long-robed, monastic looking Tagore with canvassing of soaps, hair oil, harmoniums, record players, insurance, printing and stationery etc, not to speak of books, journals, publications etc, but he did all of it. As per the booklet that accompanies the exhibition, conceptualised by Arun Kumar Roy (who is the curator of this exhibition as well as the one on Tagore and Cinema), Tagore featured in close to hundred advertisements between 1889 and his death in 1941. And he did so often with a line or two composed specially for the product he was canvassing. On one side this ensues the making of a rare gallery of indigenous every day/household/entertainment stuff that the average late 19th early 20th century Calcutta would make use of. On the other hand, Tagore’s attendance in and attention to these advertisements offer a kind of metanarrative of the growth of advertising in India itself, the language, the coinage, the imagery, the desperation of competition and of course the ancestry of celebrity endorsement. Surely MSD or SRK is but part of a legacy.

The kindred spirit that Tagore was, a large part of his involvement with advertisements was to do with the promotion of Indian goods, as against those imported by the British. “I am grateful to Basak Factory for giving me a chance to sample Radium Snow during a performance of a play at Calcutta recently. All my actors and actresses have sampled the Snow and have been very impressed by the product” – Rabindranath Tagore. The above is a regular specimen of what Tagore is said to have considered a duty. Though never the blind patriot, Tagore perhaps reserved his ambivalence towards bare-fisted nationalism for his writings and had instead been generous towards enterprises which were struggling to be part of an economy that would buttress the local industry rather than allow the revenue to be shipped outside, as the British companies would inevitably do. So he appeared in one advert after another to convince the Calcutta elite, used largely to European goods and services, to make allowances for indigenous companies.

Like Radium, he had praised SriGhrita — the ghee company, Jalajoga — the sweetmeat makers, Inkmakers Kajal Kali, the Ikmik cooker, Napiere paint works, paper merchants Bholonath Dutta, The Indian Photo Engraving Company, Godrej soap, Dwarkin’s Harmonium, H Bose’s famous Kuntaleen hair oil and Dil Khosh perfume etc. But he is also seen to have written a line to endorse Bournvita, by no means an Indian company. But why should that be a criterion always?

Tagore also wrote letters and recommendation appraising books, journals and individuals, a good sample of the last being one Amarkrishna Ghosh, who was to take part in the Reserve Bank of India elections with Tagore’s letter of kind approval of his person. Most ads featuring the Poet were published in Probasi, Basumati, Calcutta Municipal Gazzette, Bhandar, Shonibarer Chithi, Sadhana, Tattvabodhini Patrika, Desh, Kheyali, Sahana, Deepali, Banglar Katha, Modern Review etc, as well as in newspapers like Anandabazaar Patrika, which had the largest number of Tagore adverts; Amrita Bazaar Patrika, The Statesman and Advance.

‘Tagore and Cinema’ lays out the posters of films based on his works. It also details, in text, Tagore’s personal engagement with moving images, a technological breakthrough which, given his clairvoyance and insight into the modern mind, he would consider as inevitable, as say, the coming of the aeroplanes. What perhaps is subliminal to the exhibition is Tagore’s meditation on the visual as a medium and whether it was to displace the centrality of the written text in the years to come. Tagore took time to formulate his thoughts of the moving images but from the earliest days endorsed it as an invention with great potential. It is perhaps more than a coincidence that his Nobel Prize came in the same year, in 1913, when India’s first feature, Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra debuted. The same year Tagore wrote a letter of recommendation for one Dhirendranath Ganguly to help him study cinema abroad. Then, since 1917, when Nitin Bose first caught the Poet on camera at Santinikean to Tagore’s directing Natir Puja in 1932 for New Theatres, Tagore’s many engagements with cinema’s budding talent and technology is impressive, to say the least. It included his controversial interview on actress Mary Pickford in London, an adaptation of Manbhanjan for cinema by Naresh Chandra Mitra in 1923, the film Sriniketan based on Tagore’s views on rural development, his writing the script of a film called Giribala for Modhu Bose in 1929 and his acting in Tapati, an aborted film directed by Dhirendranath Ganguly (by then famous as DG), the same man he had helped study abroad. The film was shot for only 8 reels when Tagore had to leave for Europe, but the 8-reel film is lost to the world. He has been associated with almost the entire generation of Calcutta’s early film fraternity, which included, apart from those mentioned, Satu Sen, BN Sirkar, Himanshu Ray, Debika Dani, Kanan Debi and a whole lot of others. He had also baptised the cinema hall Rupabani. His long association found fruition in directing Natir Puja, much the original of which was damaged in a fire at the New Theatres a decade later.

In the meantime, Tagore visited the filmmaking fraternity in the US and Germany and in USSR, he found himself, among other greats, on the sets of Sergei Eisenstein’s iconic Battleship Pottemkin. While on the sets of the Eisenstein’s classic, Tagore is said to have repeatedly opened and closed his fist in excitement while observing the shooting of the famous Odessa steps scene! Such details lead to another half of the exhibition, which enlists the various interpretations and adaptations of Tagore’s on celluloid, much of which is widely known.

The best reward from such exhibitions was to emerge with the knowledge that at least some individuals in Calcutta and elsewhere are taking a keen interest in archiving what is obviously great specimens of everyday history. That’s at least a good place to begin resisting our endemic forgetfulness.