Rabindranath and Bangladesh: The umbilical cord

The greatest literary icon whom we, as the Bangalee, take pride in; share joys and sorrows with; seek solace in; draw inspiration from; and recollect in all the seasons of the year, all the stages of life, and all the feelings we have—in our well and woe,pleasure and pain,sense and sensibility, and love and war—is none other than Tagore—Rabindranath Tagore, the most distinguished literary personality of the Bangalee across the globe. As Shakespeare is in English,Victor Hugo in French, Goethe in German, Dante in Italian, Tolstoy in Russian, Ghalib in Urdu, Ferdowsi in Persian, Kalidasa in Sanskrit—so is Rabindranath in Bengali and in Bangladesh.
The poetic soul of Rabindranath was a mixture of urban Calcutta and rural Bengal. By Bengal, I would, quite pertinently, like to mean East Bengal. If Calcutta was the making of his brain, Bengal was the making of his heart. The citified environment of Calcutta gave him the warmth of reason while the rustic charm of Bengal gave him the depth of emotion. His life in Calcutta was an experience of a renaissance and his life in Bengal was an experience of introspection or self-analysis, and this perfect blend of sophistication and naivety contributed to the making of the great literary genius.  Had there been no stay in East Bengal, Tagore would have been a split entity-- a divided personality. A complete and undivided Tagore is that Tagore who is made up of the combination of Calcutta and East Bengal, now Bangladesh. Tagore, however, considered Calcutta and East Bengal as one and the same country—two opposite regions of united Bengal. He could not stand the partition of Bengal (1905), and vehemently opposed it. He was fortunate enough to have died six years before the division of India (1947), and didn't have to suffer the trauma of partition of his beloved motherland by a hasty political caesarian called 'two-nation theory'. He mustn't have accepted the bifurcation of his 'golden Bangla' done in a fit of collective religious craze during the declining days of the British Raj manipulated by the tricky imperial powers and the opportunist political leaders.  
Tagore's sojourn in East Bengal began in 1890 with his coming over here to look after his paternal estate spread over three places—Shelaidah of Kushtia, Sahzadpur of  Pabna and Patisar of Natore. He savoured every moment with obvious relish in the lap of nature— in the exotic green fields and on the floating boats. He discharged his official duties towards the naïve tenants as a benevolent zamindar and devoted himself to writing in profusion. He came in touch with the folk singer Gagan Harkara through whom he gained access to the esoteric world of Fakir Lalon Sain's baul music that he later popularized. This period from 1891 to 1895 has been called 'Sadhana period' which was named after the name of one of his magazines, and Tagore himself admitted that it was 'the most productive period' in his literary life, and he 'enjoyed the greatest freedom [his] life has ever known'. During this period he wrote a large number of poems, stories, essays and letters. More than half of the stories of Galpaguchchha were written at that time which depicted the people of East Bengal living in grinding poverty.  Selected extracts from the letterswritten during his stay in three places of Bangladesh—Shelaidah, Shahzadpur and Patishar were translated into English and published in a book titled Glimpses of Bengal. They testify to his feeling about the beauty of nature in East Bengal along with her people and culture.
In the introduction to the book, Tagore discussed the whys and wherefores of the letters. They “span the most productive period of [his] literary life”. He felt “the writing of letters… to be a delightful necessity” which he considered as “a form of literary extravagance only possible when a surplus of thought and emotion accumulates”. The selected and translated extracts from a large number of letters “found their way back to [him] years after they had been written. They had delighted him “by bringing to mind the memory of days when…[he] enjoyed the greatest freedom [his] life” in rural Bengal. The descriptions contained in those letters are characteristic of East Bengal (now Bangladesh) and have been of great interest to English audience.
Rabindranath lives and shall live in the hearts and minds of the Bangalee and the people of Bangladesh forever. They are inseparable from each other. Rabindranath's ethnicity-Bengali nationalism has been adopted as one of the four basic pillars of our constitution which the nation-state called Bangladesh was built on. To commemorate his deep-rooted association with Bangladesh, we have made his song our national anthem. There had been and are still numerous conspiracies to separate Rabindranath from Bangladesh, but to no avail. Bangladesh and Rabindranath are the Siamese twin tied to each other with an umbilical cultural cord. To try to separate them by an artificial surgery under any ideological or political duress would sure lead to a cultural disaster. To keep Bangladesh socially, culturally and politically healthy, we must fall back on Tagore at all times.   

Dr. Rashid Askari writes fiction and columns, and teaches English literature at Kushtia Islamic University, Bangladesh.
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