Bing Xin In my childhood, when I discovered on the shelves of the school library Tagore's Gitanjali, the Crescent Moon and other poems, which were written so freshly, fluently and full of the atmosphere of the East, I was so elated as if I had found a hidden orchid while strolling along a mountain path. The works of this great Indian poet carried me to a beautiful and strange country which was like a fairyland. There were broad and torrential rivers and dense blossoming forests; there were sweating workers and peasants labouring in the dusty field or roads under the scorching sun. Women in flowing saris were walking by village brooks with pottery lamps in hand and brass jars on top of their heads; musicians were playing harps of flutes in the gardens or at ferries; children were piling sand towers and dancing and laughing with the rolling waves at the seashore or riverside. There were glittering stars in the azure sky as well as rumbling thunders and heavy showers...All this led me to know and love the poet's own country and people that he loved so well. So, when I first visited India in 1953, I felt as though I was visiting an old friend's home without any feeling of strangeness. When my Indian friends cordially asked me, "Is this your first visit here?" I really wished to reply, "No, your great poet Tagore had long ago taken me to India many times." After I had finished reading Tagore's Gitanjali, The Crescent Moon and other poems, I looked for more. Either by purchase or borrowing, I got his other poems, short stories and prose writings. His stories fully express his deep sympathy and strong sense of justice, particularly towards women who were suffering under the yoke of feudalism. With his severe and sharp pen, he criticized the dark oppressive system toward women, such as child marriage, burning alive wit the deceased husband and enforced widowhood after the husband's death. He loved children, too, for whom he wrote such fresh and beautiful verses as The Crescent Moon. Basing on the lonely life of his own childhood, he protested strongly against the antiquated type of education that greatly hindered the physical and mental development of children. He loved the peasants even more, and for a long period lived among them and opened schools for them. His poems effectively expressed the joys and sorrows, hopes and disappointments, beliefs and doubts of the broad masses of his own people. Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, an Indian poetess, when commenting on Tagore's poems, says that in India "all men and all women sang the songs; the boatmen on the river, the peasants in the fields, the students in the schools, women at their household tasks, men doing the labours of men in cities and hamlets, towns and the hill-sides, in fields, everywhere they sang the songs of Rabindranath Tagore. If they were glad, spontaneously his songs rose to their lips; if they were sad, his songs were a sanctuary of broken hearts. Did men need inspiration? he inspired; if men needed to be rebuked in a gentle fashion, he rebuked them; and when his country was in distress, when his country saw dreams of freedom from every form of bondage, he held aloft the torch himself from which all eager hearts caught their own torches.' Mrs. Naidu pointed out the great beauties of Tagore's poems. The reason why these poems strike especially a responsive chord in the hearts of the Chinese people is first and foremost Tagore's fervent love of his country and people, which is well expressed in No. 11 of Gitanjali: Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see they God is not before thee! He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put of thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil! Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found? our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation; he is bound with us all for ever. Come out of they meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense! What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained? Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow. Here, Tagore uses the style of a hymn to point out the importance of living and working together with the workers and peasants. He condemns those who only wish to put on white robes and worship God with flowers in the lonely dark temples but refuse to toil together with the poorest and lowliest masses of the people in the dusty places. Tagore was a patriotic poet. In his poems his fatherland is so dignified, so beautiful and so lovely! In 1905, when he took active part in the anti-British movement in Bengal, he wrote a number of poems. The first line of the first poem is: Blessed am I that I am born to this land that I had the luck to love her. He also appealed to the broad masses of the Indian people to unite with the words of a prayer. In no. 43 of his Poems, also written during the period of the Swaraj movement, he write: Let the earth and the water, the air and the fruits of my country be sweet, my God. Let the homes and marts, the forests and the fields of my country be full, my God. Let the promises and hopes, the deeds and words of my country be true, my God. Let the lives and hearts of the sons and daughters of my country be one, my God. No. 35 of Gitanjali is even more well known: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever widening thought and action-- Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. Who will not be deeply moved when reading this poem? The free Indian in the poet's mind would uphold the truth. With utmost fervour and sincerity, the poet consistently appealed to the sons and daughters of his own country to unite and enter the 'heaven of freedom.' Tagore was a great patriot as well as an anti-imperialist poet, and that is also why the Chinese people love to read his poems. In his youth, Tagore began to take an active part in the various struggles against imperialism--the anti-British movement in Bengal in 1905. With his poems, he sounded the bugle call for battle, and kindled flaming torches in the people's anti-imperialist ranks. In this movement, the Moslems and Hindus stood in a united front and fought together. Tagore appeal in his poem, 'Let the lives and hearts of the sons and daughters of my country be on', met with universal response among the people. Tagore's attitude towards imperialism hardened as time went on. In 1919 when the promulgation of the Sedition Act by the British Indian Government in an attempt to suppress the national independence movement led to the massacre of the Indian people at Amritsar, he renounced the 'knighthood' bestowed on him by the British government to show his indignation and scorn! Because he himself and his compatriots were long under the iron heel of the imperialists, he had the deepest sympathy for the exploited and oppressed Asian people and bitter hatred against the Western imperialist cliques. As we read the lines Tagore wrote to denounce European colonialist pillage and plunder of the continent of Africa (Poems, No. 102): With man-traps stole upon you those hungers whose fierceness was keener than the fangs of your wolves, whose pride was blinder than your lightless forests, The savage greed of the civilized stripped naked its unashamed inhumanity. And all the time across the sea, church bells were ringing in their towns and villages, the children were lulled in mothers' arms, and poets sang hymn to Beauty It seems as though the poet, with sparkling eyes and silvery hair and beard, was piercing with his sharp pen through the hypocrisy and ruthlessness of the colonialists. When the Japanese militarists invaded China's mainland, the poet again wrote indignantly (Poems, No 108): ...sever ties of love, plant flags on the ashes of desolated homes, devastate the centres of culture and shrines of beauty, mark red with blood their trail across green meadows and populous markets, and so they march to the temple of Buddha, the compassionate, to claim his blessings, while loud beats the drum rat-a-tat and earth trembles. They will punctuate each thousand of the maimed and killed with the trumpeting of their triumph arouse demon's mirth at the sight of the limbs torn bleeding from women and children; and they pray that they may befog minds with untruths and poison God's sweet air of breath, and therefore they march to the temple of Buddha, the compassionate, to claim his blessing, while loud beats the drum rat-a-tat and earth trembles The poem denounces the shamelessness and falsehood of the Japanese militarist troops, who went to Buddhist temples and prayed for blessings before embarking on their aggressive expedition. In his letter in reply to Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet, who defended the Japanese invasion of China, Tagore reproached him with severe indignation: 'in launching the ravening war on Chinese humanity, with all the deadly methods learnt from the West, Japan is infringing every moral principle on which civilisation is based...You are building your conception of an Asia which would be raised on a tower of skulls...China is unconquerable, her civilization is displaying marvellous resources; the desperate loyalty of her peoples, united as never before, is creating a new age for that land.' A Chinese citizen, whoever he may be, cannot but be inspired and filled with gratitude on reading these words, which are full of a sense of justice and deep understanding and sympathy for the Chinese culture and people. Now, the Chinese people have created their new age. If the poet could see it with his own eyes, how happy he would be ! In his last testament the poet used the severest and sharpest language to condemn the bullying and swash-buckling Western imperialists for the havoc they brought to the world during the Second World War. He said: ...the demon of barbarity has given up all pretence and has emerged with unconcealed fangs, ready to tear up humanity in an orgy of devastation...The wheels of fate will some day compel the English to give up their Indian Empire...what a waste of mud and filth they will leave behind!...I had at one time believed that the springs of civilisation would issue out of the heart of Europe. But to-day when I am about to quit the world that faith has gone bankrupt altogether. However, the poet was always optimistic about the future of the East and of mankind. He continued: I would rather look forward to the opening of a new chapter in his history after the cataclysm is over and the atmosphere rendered clean with the spirit of service and sacrifice. Perhaps that dawn will come from this horizon, from the East where the sun rises. Tagore placed this bright hope on the great friendship between the Chinese people and the people of India. In his address on the occasion of the opening ceremony of the Chinese Hall at Santiniketan in 1937, he spoke with great joy and excitement, 'This is, indeed, a great day for me, a day long looked for, when I should be able to redeem, on behalf of our people, an ancient pledge implicit in our past, the pledge to maintain the intercourse of culture and friendship between our people and the people of China, an intercourse whose foundation were laid eighteen hundred years back by our ancestors with infinite patience and sacrifice.' Then poetically he again said, 'As the early bird, even while the dawn is yet dark, sings out and proclaims the rising of the sun, so my heart sings to proclaim the coming of a great future which is already close upon me.' Before this, in 1924, when the poet visited China, he uttered similar words: 'I have come to ask you to reopen the channel of communication...for through overgrown with weeds of oblivion, its lines can still be traced.' 'The supreme significance is that man is a pathmaker. It is not a path leading to profit or power but one through which people's hearts can reach their brothers in other countries.' Again he said 'The friendship and unity between China and India are the foundation-stone of struggling Asia.' 'Let the dawn of this new age light up the East! These words, like glittering stars, will shine for ever in the hearts of the Chinese people! Tagore's visit to China in 1924 left the most precious memories on the poet himself as well as among the Chinese people. Tagore, who deeply loved Chinese culture and people, visited seven cities, including Pekin, Nanking and Hangchow. His several lectures at universities and cultural organizations were enthusiastically acclaimed by the Chinese people. In one of his poems (Poems, No. 123) he wrote down, in the most intimate words, the experience of spending his birthday in China: Once I went to the land of China, Those whom I had not met Put the mark of friendship on my forehead Calling me their own. A Chinese name I took, dressed in Chinese clothes, This I knew in my mind Wherever I find my friend there I am born anew Life's wonder he brings. The hundredth anniversary of Tagore's birth is coming soon. In the twenty years since his death, the 'dawn of the new age' has lighted up the East'. In commemorating the great poet whom we all love profoundly, let the 1000 million people of both our countries remember forever his valuable advice and continue to lay the most solid foundation-stones of friendship and unity for 'struggling Asia'. Bing Xin was a Chinese poet and writer. This text was written for Tagore’s centenary.
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