HOW AMERICA HONORED TAGORE By SUJIT MUKHERJEE
Tagore’s birth anniversary falls on May 7. An Indian scholar recalls the enthusiastic celebration of the poet’s centenary in the United States in 1961 and his research for Tagore memorabilia.
T
he recent Gandhi centennial celebrations in the United States bring to mind similar events honoring Tagore. Everybody in America in 1961 knew about Rabindranath Tagore. And this includes the Indians resident in America in various capacities for varying periods of time. All over the United States, Indian scientists, doctors, engineers, nurses, dancers, yoga experts, hybrid rice specialists—all caught the fever of knowing all about the poet and telling everybody about him. The Tagore Centenary must have been the greatest centripetal force for Indians abroad since the Non-Cooperation Movement and the Round Table Conference days. Traditionally anti-imperial America has always lent a sympathetic ear to Indian causes more controversial than this, and in 1961 I am sure there were at least as many Tagore Societies in the United States as there were in Tagore’s homeland. As the one-hundredth May of Tagore’s birth approached, the pace grew hotter—like the last hundred days before the election of an American President—and each Tagore Society vied with the other in planning a still bigger and better celebration. America, of course, responded in equal measure. In fact, the American celebrations would probably have been just as enthusiastic even without the aiding and abetting of available Indians. There was no large university campus in the land, no world-minded literary organization, no center of art and culture,
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no city which Tagore had visited even once, which did not underline the occasion in some form or another. More than the lectures and editorials and special broadcasts, the most interesting feature of the celebrations was the array of Tagore memorabilia which came out of oblivion, however briefly. Philadelphia unearthed a Sturge Moore letter to Tagore. In Chicago, one could see the galley-proofs of Tagore’s first American publication—the six poems carried by the December 1912 issue of Poetry. The Cleveland Public Library showed a copy of Education and Leisure, a volume which is so rarely seen that it sometimes does not even appear in Tagore bibliographies. There must have been countless other instances elsewhere in the country to demonstrate beyond question how well Tagore was remembered. New York City, as always, went one better than all others by renaming Times Square for a day to call it Tagore Square. If that was only a formal gesture, there was no formality about the theater-goers who kept turning up at an off-Broadway house where “The King of the Dark Chamber” was diffidently planned for a four-week run and eventually ran for nearly four months. I was in Philadelphia from August 1960 and remember how reassuring it was to find there a ready-made circle of fellow Indians brought together by a Tagore Society. Though it was by no means an appendage of the University of Pennsylvania, a majority of the members were Indians studying or working at Penn, while the Society had become a natural extrapolation
