Jawaharlal Nehru and Rabindranath
Tagore
Between 1878 and 1932, Tagore set foot in
more than thirty countries on five continents.[72] In 1912, he took a sheaf of his
translated works to England, where they gained attention from missionary and
Gandhi protégé Charles F. Andrews, Irish poet William Butler Yeats,Ezra Pound, Robert Bridges, Ernest Rhys, Thomas Sturge Moore, and others.[73] Yeats wrote the preface to the
English translation ofGitanjali; Andrews joined Tagore at Santiniketan.
In November 1912 Tagore began touring the United States[74] and the United
Kingdom, staying in Butterton, Staffordshire with Andrews's clergymen friends.[75] From May 1916 until April 1917, he
lectured in Japan and the United States.[76] He denounced nationalism.[77] His essay "Nationalism in
India" was scorned and praised; it was admired by Romain Rolland and
other pacifists.[78]
Our
passions and desires are unruly, but our character subdues these elements into
a harmonious whole. Does something similar to this happen in the physical
world? Are the elements rebellious, dynamic with individual impulse? And is
there a principle in the physical world which dominates them and puts them into
an orderly organization?
“
”
Shortly after returning home the
63-year-old Tagore accepted an invitation from the Peruvian government. He
travelled to Mexico. Each government pledged US$100,000 to his school to
commemorate the visits.[80] A week after his 6 November 1924
arrival in Buenos Aires,[81] an ill Tagore
shifted to the Villa Miralrío at the behest of Victoria Ocampo. He left for home in January 1925. In May
1926 Tagore reached Naples; the next day he met Mussolini in Rome.[82] Their warm rapport ended when Tagore
pronounced upon Il Duce's fascist finesse.[83] He had earlier enthused:
"[w]ithout any doubt he is a great personality. There is such a massive
vigour in that head that it reminds one of Michael Angelo's chisel." A
"fire-bath" of fascism was to have educed "the immortal soul of Italy
... clothed in quenchless light".[84]
On 14 July 1927 Tagore and two companions
began a four-month tour of Southeast Asia. They visited Bali, Java, Kuala
Lumpur, Malacca, Penang, Siam, and Singapore. The resultant travelogues
compose Jatri (1929).[85] In early 1930 he left Bengal for a nearly
year-long tour of Europe and the United States. Upon returning to Britain—and
as his paintings exhibited in Paris and London—he lodged at a Birmingham Quaker
settlement. He wrote his Oxford Hibbert Lectures[f] and spoke at the annual London Quaker
meet.[86] There, addressing relations between
the British and the Indians — a topic he would tackle repeatedly over the next
two years — Tagore spoke of a "dark chasm of aloofness".[87] He visited Aga Khan III, stayed at Dartington Hall,
toured Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany from June to mid-September 1930, then
went on into the Soviet Union.[88] In April 1932 Tagore, intrigued by
the Persian mystic Hafez, was hosted by Reza Shah Pahlavi.[89][90] In his other travels, Tagore
interacted with Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Romain Rolland.[91][92] Visits to Persia and Iraq (in 1932)
and Sri Lanka (in 1933) composed Tagore's final foreign tour, and his dislike
of communalism and nationalism only deepened.[60] Vice-President of India M. Hamid Ansari has said that Rabindranath Tagore
heralded the cultural rapprochement between communities, societies and nations
much before it became the liberal norm of conduct. Tagore was a man ahead of
his time. He wrote in 1932, while on a visit to Iran, that "each country
of Asia will solve its own historical problems according to its strength,
nature and needs, but the lamp they will each carry on their path to progress
will converge to illuminate the common ray of knowledge."[93]
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