1
Tan Chung & Wei Liming
A century of vibrations between
Tagore and China (1913-2012)
The first Asian Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, arrived when the Chinese intellectuals were in the second year of their bewilderment of the sudden crumbling of the ancient regime and the uncertain destination of the new-born Republic. They were also immersed in the whirlpool of modern thinking bubbling over with individual liberation, free thinking, scientific temper, democracy and equality, and women’s empowerment. When they began hunting food for thought in the jungle of foreign literature, Tagore who synthesized quintessential Indian civilization and Western modernism and who symbolized the Renaissance of India had much to offer. On top of it, Tagore’s bagging the Nobel laurel and simultaneously being absorbed as a part of the English civilization became an eye-opener to the peoples of the East whose self-confidence had been martyred to modernization. As China lined up with other Asian colonies in search of national salvation, Chinese intellectuals discovered the adorable Rabindranath Tagore icon from the niches of Western temples. China’s reception of Tagore and her modern awakening fed each other -- greeting the Indian Nobel laureate and the New Culture Movement (that began from 1919) with equal enthusiasm.
In our study, we focus on the similar as well as different responses of the two ancient civilizationsto the fatal challenge of the Western civilizations that is not yet over. We specially focus on Tagore’s lecture tour in China in 1924 and intend to transcend the alleged ‘controversy’ about this trip that makes the rounds in both knowledgeable and uninformed circles all over the world, so as not to allowcontinual hijacking of the glorious vibrations between Tagore and China which is the historical truth.
I
It was as if China applauded Tagore’s Nobel laurel a couple of weeks before it was announced. This was in October 1913 by Qian Zhixiu钱智修, editor of Dongfang zazhi东方杂志(Eastern Miscellany), one of China’s earliest modern journals that played a vital role in disseminating international knowledge and modern thinking in China. Qian informed his readers: ‘Tagore is an Indian poet famous for prophecy’, in Volume X, Number 4 of the journal in his article ‘Tai’e’erzhi reshengguan台莪尔之人生观’ (The worldview of Tagore) along with Tagore’s photograph.
In January 1915, Liang Qichao梁启超founded Da Zhonghua大中华(The Great Chung Hwa Magazine), a pioneer organ blending traditional values with modern ideas. Volume II, Number 2 of the journal (February 20, 1916) carried Zhongtao’s仲涛(he was Ouyang Zhongtao’s欧阳仲涛) article entitled ‘Jieshao Tai’a’er介绍太阿儿’ (Introducing Tagore) along with a portrait of Tagore and a photocopy of his handwriting. In the article, Tagore was introduced as a ‘prophet, philosopher, preacher, educationist, Indian patriot and great man for revitalizing Indian civilization’ and ‘representative of Indian civilization’. The journal also published, a few months later, in Volume II, Number 8, a Chinese translation of Tagore’s ‘Autobiography’.
Ouyang Zhongtao was a teacher of Tsinghua清华University, and his ‘Introducing’ article was marked ‘to be continued’ which never was. The completion was left to his colleagues and students who brought out a 3-part biographical account on Tagore entitled ‘Yindu shiren Taguo’er zhuan印度诗人塔果尔传TAGORE’ (The Indian poet Tagore) in the university journal ‘Qinghua zhoukan清华周刊’ (The Tsing Hua Weekly) dated April 26, and May 24 and 31, 1917 consecutively. The Journal also published an article commenting on Tagore’s writings in the summer of 1918, and a translation of Tagore’s short story entitled ‘Xiao zhuren小主人’ (‘Little Master’, translating Tagore’s short story ‘Little Master’s Return’) in June 1919.
Chinese readers first read Tagore’s poetry through the translation of the founder of the forthcoming Communist Party of China (founded in 1921), Chen Duxiu陈独秀, a Peking University professor of Chinese literature and also the founder-editor of the leftist journal, Qingnian zazhi青年杂志(The Youths’ Journal). Chen translated four poems of Gitanjali and published them in Volume I, Number 2 (October 1915) of the journal, entitled ‘Zan’ge赞歌’(Hymns) and wrote: ‘Tagore is a modern poet of India. He advocated carrying forward the Eastern spiritual culture. He was awarded Nobel Peace [sic.] Prize and is famous all over Europe. Indian youths revered him as a prophet. His poetry is rich in religious and philosophical ideals.’ (All quotes from Chinese writings are in our English translation.) This is a high approbation by the first communist of China marred slightly by the mistake of ‘Nobel Peace Prize’.
Chen Duxiu’s journal Xinqingnian新青年/The New Youths (the reincarnation of Qingnian zazhi青年杂志) published two more pieces of Tagore’s poems in Volume V, Number 3 (September 1915) entitled ‘tongqing同情’ (‘Sympathy’) and ‘haibin海滨’ (‘On the sea shore’) from The Crescent Moon. The translator, Liu Bannong刘半农, was a young editor of the journal who later became a professor of PekingUniversity and famous writer. Then, Huang Zhongsu黄仲苏translated 17 Tagore poems and got them published in 1920 in the journal Shaonian Zhongguo少年中国 (Young China), the monthly organ of a famous and short-lived ‘Young China Association少年中国学会’ founded by the foster mother of the Chinese Communist Movement, Li Dazhao李大钊, the Peking University librarian who was the mentor of Mao Zedong.
We see here two important and so far unnoticed items among the earliest publications of Tagore translations in China. We must first credit the Chinese Communist Movement for its high sensitivity in seeing merit in Tagore’s poetry and their relevance to China’s awakening. Second, these translations were not for idle amusement but a serious realization of the power of the word, of progressive thinking and of the patriotic appeal in Tagore’s works. We select Chen Duxiu’s translation of ‘Mind Without Fear’ from Gitanjali to illustrate:
Tagore’s original / Chen’s Chinese translation andour literal re-rendering
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; / 远离恐怖心，矫首出尘表
Keep faraway from fear
Head up above the sentient world
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; / 慧力无尽藏，体性遍明窈
Wisdom endless, freely available
Body and nature universally enlightened and profound
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; / 语发真理源，奋臂赴完好,
清流径寒碛，而不迷中道。
行解趣永旷。
Words from fountainhead of truth
Arms strive hard towards perfection
Clean flow through cold desert
Not ashtray from the middle path
An eternal unbounded quest
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. / 心径资灵诏。挈临自在天。
使我长皎皎。
Mind’s path to the call of inspiration
Fulfilment is disposed by Heaven
I become bright and pure eternally
In 1915 Chinese literature was still in the rigid grip of classical poetry too stiff to translate foreign poetry, especially Tagore’s informal blank verse. Chen showed his mastery in adaptation by using the popular 5-syllabic rhymed lines mixing colloquial expressions with classical idioms. In Chinese, it reads quite well. Our re-rendering shows Chen did somewhat grasp Tagore’s essence. ‘Mind Without Fear’ was the golden treasury of Indian literature that had inspired innumerable Indian intellectuals to love Indian civilization and to dedicate themselves to the struggle for freedom and independence of the motherland – just as the ‘Yiyongjun jinxingqu义勇军进行曲’ (Song of the Volunteers), now the national anthem of China, had done in China. Chen evidently selected it to inspire his countrymen.
Three short stories of Tagore were translated and published in 1917 in Funu zazhi妇女杂志/Women’s journal (the first ever mouth organ for Chinese women starting from 1915 by the Commercial Press商务印书馆, Shanghai) in Volume III, Numbers 6, 7, 8, and 9 entitled ‘Chulian雏恋”(‘Child love’, translating Tagore’s ‘holiday’), ‘Maiguo yanzhe卖果言者’ (‘Talk by the fruit-seller’, translating Tagore’s ‘The Fruit-seller from Kabul’), ‘Kabuerren喀布尔人’ (‘Man from Kabul’, translating Tagore’s ‘Kabuliwala’), ‘Mangfu盲妇’ (‘Blind woman’, translating Tagore’s Vision). These translations extended Tagore’s empathy for women’s suffering to China and contributed to the early awakening of Chinese women who are regarded as the most liberated and vibrant among Asian women today.
The year 1921 was a year of upsurge for Tagore translations in the Chinese press. About 50 pieces of translations were published by Xiaoshuo yuebao小说月报(Fiction monthly), Xuedeng学灯(Learning lamp), Dongfang zazhi东方杂志(Oriental Miscellany), Xinren新人(New people), Funu zazhi妇女杂志(Women’s journal), and Pingmin zazhi平民杂志(Common people’s journal), all representing the New Culture Movement. The Commercial Press brought out separate volumes of Zheng Zhenduo’s郑振铎translation of The Stray Bird (in Chinese translation, ‘feiniaoni飞鸟集/The flying bird collection’) and other works of Tagore. Scholar-writer Wen Yiduo闻一多dramatically observed in 1923 that ‘Almost every word of Tagore has moved into the Chinese language. There is very little translation of the first-rate masterpieces of Western literature.’[1] Though a gross exaggeration, it reflects the Chinese ‘Tagore fever泰戈尔热’ mood culminating in the Jiangxueshe’s讲学社invitation to Tagore in 1923. Tagore’s lecture tour took place in 1924 from April 12 to May 30.
II
A ‘grand visit’ was Tagore’s 1924 China tour, so wrote Professor Amartya Sen of Harvard University for our book, Tagore and China, jointly published by SAGE India and CCTP (Central Compilation and Translation Press of Beijing) in New Delhi in 2011.[2] The ‘grand visit’ has been as fondly remembered by Tagore and China as maliciously vandalized by the conspiracy theory. In the historical perspective, China was the only foreign country that Tagore’s father, Debendranath, visited. The visit in 1877-1878 was a rich fare for entertaining and enduring gossips in Bengali style in the Tagore family when Rabindranath was a teenager. This must have had a bearing on Tagore’s excitement on the eve of his own China visit (he even imagined half-jokingly his being held hostage in China by robbers, and his countrymen’s failure of paying the ransom, compelling him to wear a pigtail and marry a Chinese girl[3]). Tagore’s own China experience was much more exciting. When asked whether he had left behind anything on his departure from China, Tagore replied: ‘I left behind my heart’.[4] On top of it, Tagore cherished this ‘grand visit’ in his last poem on his last birthday in 1941:
‘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.’[5]
Tagore’s ‘A Chinese name I took’ had a moving scene unpacked by Liang Qichao on May 7, 1924: ‘One day when we met, Tagore said to me: “I don’t know why, as soon as I arrived in China, I felt as though I was returning to my native place. Maybe I was an Indian monk in a previous life, who stayed on a particular mountain, in a particular cave enjoying freedom.” He then asked me to give him a Chinese name…’[6] Then, Liang Qichao gave Tagore the Chinese name of ‘Zhu Zhendan/Chu Chen-Tan竺震旦’ (‘zhu竺’ for India, ‘zhen震’ for ‘indra’ and ‘dan旦’ for ‘rabi’, and ‘zhendan震旦’for ‘cinasthana’). This is not just a name, but a befitting tribute to Tagore and to the millennial affinity and friendship between India and China that Tagore symbolized.
Amartya Sen rightly points out that the Tagorean mission was unfortunately dogged by ‘controversy’. With his towering vision Tagore just could not refrain from the following observation while lecturing in China:
‘I have no doubt in my own mind that in the East our principal characteristic is not to set too high a price upon success through gaining advantage, but upon self-realisation through fulfilling our dharma our ideals. Let the awakening of the East impel us consciously to discover the essential and the universal meaning of our own civilization, to remove the debris from our path, to rescue it from the bondage of stagnation that produces impurities, to make it a great channel of communication between all human races.’[7]
Tagore’s observation was a camouflaged cutting comment on the Western ethos of pursuing Power at the expense of others’ perhaps unaware of the Chinese psyche when China was miffed with defeat and humiliation at the hands of world powers. The crux of the issue here is about Power which China desperately wanted so that she would no longer remain a weaker and victimized membwe of the world that Might was right. Though both have been age-old civilizations of the longest period in history, and both have been repressed and exploited by the West, China and India have responded entirely differently to the Western challenges. The Indian response to the Western challenge as well as her success was to first awaken people’s ardent affection for traditional wisdom as bestowed by their ancestors and, then, to overthrow the colonial rule by her powerful show of solidarity through the Independence Movement led by Mahatma Gandhi. China took an entirely different route by first choosing the Western aggressors as her gurus, then with a Western mindset discarding the tradition of her ancestors and proceeding to overthrow the ancient regime of the old ethical teachings of China.
Tagore stood at the forefront of the Indian response to the modern Western challenges. He not only wished China to behave in the Indian manner, but thought that the Chinese civilization would be sagacious enough to uphold and carry forward her traditional values to encounter the corrosive influence of Western materialism. In his Bengali essay published in ‘Samajbhed’ (Social Differences) in 1901 Tagore observed:
‘The expansive China is restrained not by the command of the sword but disciplined by the commandments of religion. This religion comprises the relationship of fathers and sons, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, neighbours and rural people, the king and the subjects, the preacher and the preached, all alike. Whatever upheaval hits it from outside, whoever ascends the throne, this religion controls the colossal masses of gigantic China from within. If she is hurt in her religion, China experiences death pangs and turns cruel in self-defence.’[8]
We have no doubt that the word ‘religion’ in the quote is ‘dharma’ in Tagore’s original which is a Bengali word inherited from Sanskrit. The word denoting ‘religion’ in modern Bengali is a synonym of the Chinese word ‘Dao/Tao道’ which was the very Chinese translation of the Sanskrit word ‘dharma’ when Buddhism first introduced it to China two thousand odd years ago (later replaced by ‘fa法’). This brings Tagore closer to his Chinese contemporary, Zheng Guanying郑观应(a leader in the ‘self-strengthening movement自强运动’), who said famously in his well-known book Shengshi weiyan盛世危言 (Alarming Talks of the Booming Era) attributing Chinese civilizational strength to the synthesis of ‘Dao/Tao道’ (spiritual culture) and ‘Qi器’(gadgets/material culture). Zheng observed that in modern times China’s ‘fall back into the unreal’ coincided with Europe’s ‘advance into the real’ and that ‘within the unreal there is the real of Tao, within the real there is the unreal of Qi’[9]. Tagore looked more confidently at the sustainability of the Chinese Tao than Zheng Guanying who knew the Chinese weakness better than Tagore. But, both Tagore and Zheng were advocating the revitalization of the traditional Tao-Qi dyad though Zheng’s fervent advocacy for emulating the Western ‘Qi’ was not Tagore’s cup of tea.
Zheng Guanying passed away in 1922, two years before Tagore’s China visit while China continued on the road of emulating and worshipping the West. Because of the complexity of China’s being ruled then by the Manchu government, this new trend was gravitating towards the extreme reaction of tradition-baiting with ever increasing intensity. The patriots first turned their wrath towards the Manchu rulers, then towards the millennial Confucian tradition. Tagore had already noticed this trend before he embarked on his mission in China. He called the West flatterers ‘our Eastern schoolboys’ and said this in a lecture in China:
‘Some of our Eastern schoolboys may at once jump to conclusion that this rebellion must take form in imitation of the West. But they should know that while dead custom is plagiarism from our own past life, imitation would be plagiarism from other people’s life. Both constitute slavery to the unreal. The former, though a chain, at least fits our figure; the latter, for all its misfit, is just as much a chain.’[10]
On the surface, things were as smooth as foreign tours could go. Occasional press criticism appeared before Tagore’s arrival and dogged Tagore’s travel in China. But it was too feeble to mar the festivity and Tagore fever. Displeasure surfaced when Tagore was in Beijing, and, by providence, after Tagore had spent the happiest day on the trip on May 8 celebrating his 63rd birthday (when he was presented with the Chinese name, and the Chinese performance of his opera Chitra by his Chinese hosts). The next day (May 9), Tagore delivered his main speech of the trip in the Zhenguang Theatre真光影戏院in Beijing, and some students distributed protest leaflets among the audience the contents of which was later translated to Tagore. He was frustrated and decided to cut short his China trip, delivering his last talk in Beijing on May 12. Tagore leftBeijing on May 20 by the night train, was sent off warmly at the station by 200 Chinese and foreign admirers. Afterwards, he delivered only two talks, one on May 25 at Hankow汉口(now Wuhan武汉) and another, the ‘Leave Talk’ (these are the words in the Talksin China) in Shanghai上海on May 28.