Tan Yun-Shan and Rabindranath Tagore: A Monumental Association

 Uma Das Gupta

Tan Yun-Shan is a leading figure in the history of Sino-Indian relations in the true sense of an inter-civilizational dialogue far from any political overtones or undercurrents. We are especially honouring his contributions in the hundredth year of Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to China in 1924 because Tan Yun-Shan became a leading figure in the history of Rabindranath Tagore’s Visva-Bharati International University at Santiniketan.

It was for the future of this University that Tagore wanted China’s cooperation in the modern age. It was Tagore’s dream to renew the cultural interface between China and India which had got lost in the centuries after the five dynasties of China (907 – 959 A.D.). It was Tan Yun-Shan who translated Tagore’s dream into action. Inspired by Tagore, and driven by his own very similar inclinations, Tan Yun-Shan gave his life to that endeavour. Of course, this was an altogether different age from that past history of relations between China and India and, therefore, the channel of communication sought was through the establishment of historical and cultural studies at a university. This university was Visva-Bharati International University located in a remote corner of South Bengal founded by Tagore in 1921.

An opportunity on a grand scale arrived with Tagore’s invitation to China in April 1924. As he said to his hosts in China,

“My friends, I have come to ask you to reopen the channel of communion which I hope is still there; for though overgrown with seeds of oblivion its lines can still be    traced. I shall consider myself fortunate if, through this visit, China comes nearer to India and India to China, for nothing else but for disinterested human love.”

We know from his life sketch that Tan Yun-Shan was not present in China at the time of Tagore’s visit. During 1922-1924 Tan Yun-Shan was studying for an advanced course in Western Culture, Philosophy and Thoughts at Chuan-Shan Academy in the Provincial capital of Changsha. He met Tagore in Singapore in 1927 during Tagore’s travels in South East Asia at the time. Tagore invited him to come to Santiniketan entrusted with creating a centre for the exchange of scholarship between China and India at Visva-Bharati. It was a stroke of good luck that Tagore found in Tan Yun-Shan a personality who combined the spiritual and the practical in carrying out this task, one who was a living source of “disinterested human love” for the cause of reopening a cultural link between China and India. Together, Tagore and Tan Yun-Shan, put their faith in it.
Let me share an excerpt from Tan Yun-Shan’s own account of his life which he titled ‘My Humble Life and Work’.

“I left China and went to Singapore and to Malaya in the beautiful and flowering Spring of 1924 with a heart full of emotions, hopes and prayers, of and for the past, present and future not only of my humble self but also my country and my people, as well as the whole world and all mankind. In the meantime Gurudeva Rabindranath Tagore was just leading the first modern Indian Cultural Mission to China. We actually crossed each other on the South China Sea. Here again, it seemed, there might be some serious cause behind this fortuity.

“Naturally I deeply regretted missing that opportunity of seeing Gurudeva and the Mission and listening to him and the other members of the Mission in my own country. However, I keenly watched all the news about them in China and went through the speeches, addresses and lectures which Gurudeva and the other members delivered there, and which were published in the Chinese newspapers and magazines. At the same time I had also read the few translations of Gurudeva’s works in Chinese as well as some of his works in English. All these impressed me and inspired me very much and profoundly.

“It was indeed very fortunate for me to meet Gurudeva for the first time in Singapore in July 1927, when he was on a tour of some of the South East Asian countries including Singapore, Malaya, Penang, Bali, Java, and Siam. When I saw Gurudeva, I immediately felt in him the real representative and symbol of “Tien Tu” or “Heavenly India”. On hearing of my wish to visit India and Santiniketan, very gladly and graciously he asked me whether I would accept his invitation to teach Chinese at his institution, Visva-Bharati, or, International University. This was not only an unexpected offer but a great blessing for me. I naturally accepted it with great pleasure and deep gratitude. I only asked Gurudeva to give me some time and told him I would come here in the next year, 1928, for several works which I had undertaken could not be completed in a short while. He promptly consented saying, ‘Yes, you can take your time, but we shall eagerly expect you there as soon as possible’.”

The rest is history in respect to this particular aspect of China’s and India’s renewed association. From the account above we already know something of Tan Yun-Shan’s background.  As for Tagore, his travels in the world after his award of the Nobel Prize in 1913 for his Gitanjali Song Offerings convinced him of the need for worldwide cooperation and he naturally hoped that Santiniketan would become the fittest place for a meeting of the scholars of the East and the West. This was the vision of the universal in Rabindranath, universal in his interpretation of India’s history and culture as well as in his goal of building a bridge between nations.   

A landmark in the Tagore family’s history was Tagore’s father Maharshi Debendranath Tagore’s travel to China in his advanced age. His diary of that sea voyage is unfortunately lost but fragments were published during 1875-76 in the famous Bengali journal of those times, Tattwabodhini Patrika, which used to publish articles on Taoism, Confucianism, and other systems of Chinese philosophy as well as some vivid descriptions of the temples of Canton which was the terminus of Maharshi’s journey. Being 15-16 years of age by then, and being home-schooled, Tagore could easily have been reading these articles in the Tattwabodhini Patrika, and could naturally have inherited from his father a curiosity and a fascination for Chinese culture.                       
Tagore was clearly a China-watcher, to use a modern day terminology. The earliest reference specifically to Tagore’s interest in Asian affairs can be found in the Bengali article he wrote on “Death Traffic in China” in which he protested vigorously against the inhuman Opium trade of the European merchants. The article was published in 1881 before the foundation of the Indian National Congress. In his later years Tagore was the first to spread word of the famous vindication of Eastern idealism in Charles Lowes Dickinson’s celebrated work titled Letters of John Chinaman. Tagore wrote an appraisal on it in Bengali with the title China man er chitthi.

The Republic of China was established in 1911 and in 1913 Tagore won his Nobel Prize in Literature for the English version of the Gitanjali titled Gitanjali (Song- Offerings). This was the first time that not just an Indian but an Asian citizen had become a Nobel Laureate. Not surprisingly, on his third foreign tour of 1912-13 to Europe and USA, he came in contact with many oriental students from whom he came to know that some of the early translations of the Gitanjali (Song-Offerings) were in Chinese and Japanese.

In 1916 Tagore went to Japan and to America. He suffered humiliation from the Japanese for his trenchant criticism of the nationalistic chauvinism which was the cause of the first world war.  He was ridiculed in the American Press for the same reason. In his next tour to Europe and America in 1920-21 Tagore found himself seriously planning to establish an Asian Research Institute in Santiniketan. While in Paris in 1921 he invited the Sinologist Sylvain Levi of the Sorbonne to Santiniketan as the first visiting professor of Visva-Bharati. Headed by Professor Levi, Visva-Bharati’s department of Sino-Indian Studies was the first institute of Asian Culture to develop under the joint collaboration of the scholars from the East and the West.    

Once Tan Yun-Shan came to Santiniketan in 1928, and stayed for two years at a stretch, he and Tagore got down to prolonged discussions over ways and means to establish a permanent Hall for Chinese Studies. In 1930 Tan Yun-Shan went to Singapore and Burma and Tibet to raise funds for the project. He then went to China. In 1933 the China Chapter of the Sino-Indian Cultural Society was established in Nanjing with Tan Yun-Shan as its first secretary. Tagore was delighted with this progress. In 1934 Tan Yun-Shan returned to Santiniketan and established the India Chapter of the Sino-Indian Cultural Society with Tagore as president. Soon afterwards Tan Yun-Shan returned to China to raise funds for the remaining task of the construction of the China Hall, Cheena-Bhavana, and to obtain books for its research activities. Tan Yun-Shan succeeded in obtaining Rs. 50000 in money and 100, 000 books for Visva-Bharati’s Hall of Chinese Studies with a Library. Cheena-Bhavana was thus inaugurated on 14 April 1937.                        
However young when he came to Visva-Bharati, Professor Tan was an individual of that same spiritual and scholarly tradition who believed that the culture of peace and friendship is the spiritual side of civilization as is the common notion. For example Tan Yun-Shan wrote, and let me end our tribute in his words,

“Culture helps man to realize at the first stage the real meaning and value of life, and ultimately to reach its real goal, in which alone there is eternal peace, love, joy, freedom and blessing. In this respect, there is not only much similarity but much identity between the culture of India and that of China.”    

Uma Das Gupta is a historian and renowned Tagore biographer.