‘Tagore at Oxford’ by Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy was published in the Tagore Memorial Special Supplement of The Calcutta Municipal Gazette on 13 September 1941. Rabindranath Tagore got Nobel Prize in 1913, Suhrawardy was at Oxford that time. He met Tagore and recalled his experience with him in this Eassy.
In 1913 when Rabindranath Tagore received the Nobel Prize I was a student at Oxford. In those days we were not many Indians, but we had amongst us a fervent, energetic band of young men, passionately patriotic, inclined to the extreme brand of nationalism and intolerant of moderation in all its forms. Scientific Marxism, the creed of the modern Oxford Indian, was unknown to us, though we also called ourselves socialists, meaning by socialism, in the manner of many contemporary Indian nationalists, a liberal loosely mystical devotion to the idea of the Motherland. It was in 1912 that this group took over the Oxford Indian Club, a vague institution for tea and cakes on a Sunday afternoon founded some time previously by Har Dayal, and transformed it into the Oxford Majlis, which became not only the centre for all kinds of revolutionary debates at Oxford, but a powerful organisation upon which, because of our habit of voting solidly, depended the results of the election for the president ship of the Oxford Union. To our meetings there came all the prominent orators among the students of the University, who sought our approval and suffrage by tempering their views on India according to our liking. We had indeed become a force in University politics, and Oxford Indians of the time were very conscious of their position as they sauntered down the High after dinner and exchanged
uncomplimentary remarks and often blows with English students, who would reply to their anti-British slogans by asking them to go back to their black country. One can understand to what an extent there was an increase in our self-opinionated insolence when the rumour came to our ears that the highest prize in literature was going to be awarded to one who belonged to us. It is difficult now for me to recapture the elation and the ecstasy of those days, but I still remember distinctly that look of awe which was in my landlady’s eyes when she brought in the breakfast with the morning paper containing the scoop, of which we had come to know earlier from ‘Mullickda’ (Basanta Kumar Mullick) who had somehow already met the Tagores in London. Outwardly we, of course, took this sudden rise in our status for granted, but I must confess to a sense of relief that for the first time, after centuries, the India in whose past greatness we profoundly believed, without having much knowledge about it, had been placed once again on the map of the world. Till then we Indians were being looked upon as the degenerate descendants of those who had composed the Vedic hymns (in Max Muller’s translations), or as snake-charmers or theosophists or, at best, terrorists from the banks of the Ganges.
I am ashamed to say that owing to defective upbringing I was then, as I am now, ignorant of Bengali except of the most debased kind, and so I had heard with a certain amount of skepticism of the great popularity of Tagore’s verses, which were being sung, I was told, in every village home in Bengal. Therefore to me, as to those who first came to know of him through translations, the first renderings of his verses in English, not only because of their novelty but for their high personal literary flavour came as a great revelation. I must confess, however, that during that first period not a little of that unbounded appreciation of the newly-initiated which I had for the Poet’s works was due to my knowledge of the association and collaboration with him of Rothenstein, Sturge Moore and particularly Yeats, a name draped in our fancy with magic raiments. About Santiniketan I knew a little more. That year among the newcomers at Oxford there was a particularly chubby youth with a great deal of personal attractiveness, who had been brought up there and who described it to us in glowing colours. This was Apurva Chanda. After Santiniketan he had gone to the Central Hindu College at Benares and had come up to Oxford with a number of young men from that institution. They were all vegetarians, extremely devout, longhaired and soft-spoken. During week-ends their number would become larger by the arrival from Cambridge of similar young men, notable amongst whom was Sri Prakash whom I came to know well afterwards, and it was said of them that in the early morning they gathered under a tree and chanted Vedic hymns. I did not believe there was any vestige of truth in all this except that they all lived in a house in Wellington Square and that behind locked iron-railings there actually was a tree in that square. Notwithstanding, with that thoughtless irresponsibility, which is the charm and the most irritating quality of Oxford undergraduates, I too helped in the diffusion of this legend. The only thing which might have sustained the story was that Apurva with a beatific expression had the habit of half-reciting and half-chanting a few of the Poet’s songs and we used to see in them through our burning imagination a beauty such as never was on land or sea. Apurva’s singing not only took us in, which was easy, as we had no competence except our enthusiasm, but even Philip Heseltine who later on under the name of Peter Warlock made such a name for himself in English music.
The Oxford Majlis used to invite all prominent Indian politicians, who happened to be in England, as well as a great many English public men with interest in India. In fact, it was a loved game of ours to get hold of a well-known Indian political leader, cajole and flatter him, lavish hospitality upon him, invite him to the Majlis meeting and then skin him alive, proving to him that he was a worthless worm, who, inspite of his nationalistic pretensions, had done nothing else all his life but lick the boots of British imperialism. For, in those days if one thing we hated above everything else, it was experience. Naturally Indian public men in England used to dislike us, because of our bad name, yet they always came, almost afraid of annoying us by refusing our invitation, which would usually be entrusted to me as I had developed a gift for treacherous blandishment. I used to arouse their interest in us by mock humility, pretending that we were thirsting to be taught, while all along I knew what fate awaited them once they walked into our parlour. I coud give a long list of distingusihed Indians who were thus brought to Oxford by me ; only one person tamed us, that was Sarojini Naidu, another was consistently obdurate and that was Jinnah. Even in those days he was a difficult person.
So it is quite intelligible, if, given our reputation, we were a little afraid that the Poet might not accept our invitation. I was asked to proceed to London and explain to him, should occasion arise, that as far as he was concerned, we had transformed ourselves into a domesticated herd of antelopes.
Whilst I was casting and re-casting the speech I was to make, posturing in the presence of my closet friend in my rooms, two circumstances made my task easier. Firstly, we heard that the Poet had already been invited by Manchester College to come and address a gathering there and that he had consented. So I had only to request him to divide his time between them and us when he came over. Secondly, the Poet’s son and daughter-in-law were visiting Oxford and some of us were asked by ‘Mullickda’ to luncheon to meet them.
‘Mullickda’ was the doyen of the Indian student community not only in years, but also in material prosperity. He did not live at college or in digs, as all of us did, but in a large boarding-house on Woodstock Road, where, according to report, he was being cruelly rooked. He was the naivest and best of men, exceedingly generous to all of us, paying up our debts and spoiling us with gifts. Nevertheless, his lunches were extremely boring because of that flair of his, which he has retained till this day, of gathering round an abundant table men and women the most incompatible in taste and temperament. He was already promulgating some sort of a philosophic doctrine of his own backed by lavish hospitality and no wonder in that city of large leisures he was drawing to himself people of widely divergent types. ## Inspite of the great affection we all, and particularly I, had for him, I accepted his invitation with an inward fear at the prospect of being wedged in, as had happened before, between a lean clergyman from Pusey House bent on saving my soul and the fast-extinguishing charms of the widow of a defunct professor. Therefore this particular luncheon turned out to be such a delightful surprise. Incongruous people there certainly were present but the grace of Pratima Devi and the spontaneous urbanity of Rathi Babu gently smoothed down all the angles and for a short while we were happily enveloped in the kindly atmosphere of a Bengal home. I shall always be thankful to ‘Mulickda’ for the opportunity he gave me of knowing these noble persons for whom my affection has since then ever been on the increase. Coupled with the gratitude which I like many others feel towards them for their unchanging kindness and goodness is my great admiration for that fine and rare talent for decorative art on the stage which makes Pratima Devi unique among our artists.
On arriving at Paddington station I took a taxi to Chelsea where the Poet and his suite were putting up in a big house. I was introduced into a large-sized room where I first saw the Poet. He was sitting on a divan and along the walls there were many chairs occupied by men and women, Indian, British and continental, who sat in rapt silence, as in a prayer-hall. In one corner of the room an Englishwoman was modeling the Poet’s head in clay whilst in another a fierce young man, a Pole perhaps, was sketching, as I saw from a corner of my eye, the fine folds of his robe. The windows were wide-open on to the Embankment and I do not now remember if incense was burning in that room, but if it was not, it ought to have been because the atmosphere was so charged with awe and admiration. My visit was formal as the Oxford programme had already been fixed upon by Rathi Babu. Disconcerted as I felt at the collusive silence of the place, I was a little relieved at the thought that the invitation I had brought need not, by being communicated in words, strike a harsh note in that stillness. At that time I thought that the Poet’s immobility and his closed eyes were due to his posing for the artists in the room, but since I have understood better for he possessed the rare quality of being able to withdraw within himself at will and relapse without effort into the statuesque. That capacity for complete aloofness in the midst of contacts, that sudden communion with the inner life in the intervals of spoken words, that faculty of abstracting oneself from one’s surroundings, he shared with the prophets and the visionaries. Such men one may come to know very well and yet never be familiar with.
I have seen him later once in Paris after a lively conversation in a company of which he was the very soul, for he could be humorous, playful, almost childlike, chill into a beautiful stone mellowed with age, making me think of what Hammurabi would have looked like had that great Babylonian law giver ever had the chance of being modeled by a Grecian master. On that occasion I was maliciously amused to see the consternation of the charming and exuberant Comtesse de Noailles, who was sponsoring the exhibition of the Poet’s paintings in Paris and was treating him before all the assembled artists and writers as her special preserve.
I am not sure who was the president of the Majlis that year whether it was Shaheed (the writer’s younger brother H.S. Suhrawardy) or Kiran Sankar Roy, but he was of short stature, for I remember how the Poet in his flowing robes loomed large above him as he alighted from the train at Oxford station. Beside the entire Indian colony on the platform there were a number of English people headed by Estlin Carpenter, vigorous and bearded, who was to be the Poet’s host. The arrangement was that our visitor was to dine that night with the committee of the Majlis at the Randolph Hotel, breakfast in my rooms the next morning, deliver his address at Manchester College in the early afternoon and then attend the large reception the Majlis was giving him at a hired hall in the city. The whole of that morning we were busy fixing up details, the most important of which to us was to arrange to garland the Poet when he arrived by train. We gave, interrupting one another, instructions to the best florist at Oxford as to what kind of garland one uses on such occasions in India, carefully suppressing the fact of the sharpwire, which has lacerated the breast of many a distinguished Indian, and we were promised that a suitable object would be delivered at the station in time. Our horror can be imagined when the president turning to the florist’s assistant, who had arrived breathless just at that very moment, unpacked the thing from tissue paper and held aloft in the air before the Poet’s bowed head a funeral wreath, stiff in wireframe, decked with wide-staring white flowers.
One could not find anywhere a happier set of young men as during that evening in a private room at the Randolph Hotel. The Poet was in great form. He was talking to us all the time, commenting on the changes that had taken place since his last visits to Europe, he spoke of India, now solemnly and now playfully (we were too intense about India to enjoy that particular mood of his) and then listened with comprehending indulgence to our wild talks, in which we attempted to outshine one another. He ate little of the food, the menu of which I had prepared after careful thought, and I was a little glad to see how he banished one after another those culinary inanities which go under the name of vegetarian dishes in England. Rabindranath was a great connoisseur of the fine things of life, and also understood good food. In fact, he was not of those, who glorify their failing digestion with reference to the high ideals of our traditional asceticism. I have always received encouragement at his hands for my frivolous advocacy of gastronomy. I remember him once at Santiniketan as he sat reclining on a low arm-chair and listened with smiling attention to a long confession of mine as a glutton in many lands. He was so interested that I am told it was one of those rare occasions when he did not order the meeting to be interrupted for the sake of the evening prayer, which it is customary to offer there.
The Poet came a little late to breakfast to my place the next morning as he had lost his way in Christ Church meadows and was full of the enchantment of Oxford. His visit had taken place during the summer term when Oxford was in her most beautiful month with laburnums hanging down in full bloom and the ivies on the old walls of colleges a mass of scarlet flame. It was a delight going round with him down the narrow lanes and along the broad stone thorough-fares and sharing in his joy at the sight of so much squandered loveliness. Only we were never alone as his unusual appearance attracted a large crowd that followed us about. That evening my landlady’s little daughter told me she had seen me in the streets with Father Christmas. She did not know what treasures he had brought into our lives that year. Before luncheon, propped up on bright cushions, he sat on a punt, as we took him down that part of the river where it narrows under overhanging branches. He sat stone-still all the while in his shining garments of white and in the noon-haze I fancied to myself Orpheus, sculpted on the prow of some Hellenic boat, mirrored in the waters of the Ionian seas.
One thing I noticed that afternoon in the vast hall of Manchester College, cram-full with a brilliant and awe-inspired crowd of professors, dons and undergraduates, that the Poet’s voice was ill-suited to large audiences. When he first spoke to me, I was struck by a certain discrepancy between his appearance, on which nature had showered her most exquisite gifts of beauty and dignity, and his voice, which did not seem to belong to his magnificent exterior. In itself the voice was melodious and expressive but it might have belonged to anyone else. It possessed a fine timbre but lacked in tonality. I have always wanted to ask members of his household whether a voice like his was capable of being raised in discussion or reprimand. I suspect, where he ever moved to anger, which I doubt, he would probably employ the subtler instruments of irony and humorous innuendo. I hope the newly-baked fanatics of the Poet will not accuse me of disrespect towards him for these observations of mine. That would be very unfair because my love and reverence for him, since I first met him, has bordered on adoration. I am trying with difficulty to delve into my memory and I am faithfully recording my first reactions to him before more frequent contacts made me get used to his ways.
I do not remember either the subject or the gist of the Poet’s lecture; I was too much under the influence of his enchanting personality, as he sat slightly-bowed on his high chair reading out from a manuscript, detached and patriarchal, to listen to his words. My eyes have always given me greater pleasure than my ear. I know that evening I felt serenely peaceful as I hurried along after the meeting to catch up the fast-striding figure of Robert Bridges, who had come all rigged up in his full academic robes to do honour to the Indian poet, and walked part of the way with him. Bridges did not speak, he evidently did not wish to share his impressions with me. He was a curious old man, garrulous on occasions and then suddenly silent. When parting from me he asked me in that kindly curt tone, which was so characteristic of him, to come to tea the next afternoon when he had invited Tagore to his house.
Robert Bridges lived in a large house on a hill six miles from Oxford. In those days the road to it was long and difficult and to come to him one had to traverse meadows, pass by farmsteads and then climb a wood within which ensconced lay his house. This gave to each visit to him the flavour of a pilgrimage. During his lifetime he had already become legendary. There were plenty of stories about his whimsicality and crankiness and though he was the kindest of men, as some of us Indians had occasion to know, he had a reputation for being abrupt and rude. Of all men I have met he acted up to the injunction of Christ to his Apostles to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. He would be often seen, like some large bird, ranging the hillside with his broad-brimmed hat closely set over his head and his loose black cloak flapping behind him. He rarely came down to Oxford, and when he did, people would stand about watching his tall figure slouching from the larger roads to the quiet lanes. He sometimes stood for hours before a bookstall in the street, reading a book he had picked up unmindful of the crowd behind him. He and Rabindranath Tagore were the two most beautiful old men I have ever seen. And yet I thought that afternoon when I saw them together how different they were in the quality of their attractiveness. There was nothing of the sage, rather of an overgrown schoolboy, about Bridges. With his splendid face marked accurately with winkles, like a perfect autumn leaf, his healthy complexion and spare figure he looked as one who had always lived the outdoor life in touch with fields and animals. There was manly energy in his large frame and even in his long unkempt hair. In other ways too there could be no greater contrasts than he and Tagore and I thought that there in that house for once, physically, the East had met the West. For no poet in England was so indigenous as Bridges, so un-exotic, so classically free from the touch of the Orient. And Tagore in my eyes represented the melody, the abundance, the grace of the East ; to him Beauty came as she flowed down streams or awoke on the sprays of the breeze-tossed corn ; she came to him naturally as the cherished one to her lover. Whereas to Bridges she was a burden; with him there was a constant struggle to reduce the conflict between language and mood to the counterpoints of harmony, to force Beauty into the fierce shackles of tone and rhythm. I know this is not saying all. There is probably no deep difference after all between the East and the West, but it is true that each moulds in its own manner human passions and temperaments. Anyway, it is good that Beauty has many moods, she yields to him who fights for her as to him who succumbs to her.
I have seen Rabindranath Tagore at Chilswell, Bridges, home, twice, once then and about a dozen of years later. I cannot quite disengage in my memory the incidents of the two occasions. I remember, however, one evening when the two sat together on a jutting hillock in the corner of the garden, which commands a superb view of Oxford. In fact, in 1914, Bridges had once said to me that were Germans ever to occupy his house, what a wonderful emplacement that hillock would afford to artillery reared to destroy completely with one shattering shot the eternal beauty of Oxford. For it is true that from the bench on which the two poets sat all the ugly accretions of modern Oxford were hidden by rolling uplands and one could only see the proud towers and spires against the sunset. Such must have been the vision of the lovely city that first burst upon the sight of Erasmus as he trudged along the road from his distant home to find in her the solace of faith tempered with reason. Tagore had come over in a hansom-cab and I was going back to Oxford on foot. After he had left, Bridges excitedly spoke how that evening, more than he could from his works, he had come to understand Tagore’s wise spirit. Then turning brusquely he added : Tagore is an extraordinarily good-looking fellow. There is something Assyrian, Old Asiatic. Do you think he puts gold in his beard? When I suggested that it was the colour of the sunset that had been playing on their faces, he broke into a loud schoolboy laughter and said : You cannot know the vanity of poets. And striding to the mirror on the wall of his vast study he carefully combed with his fingers his hair and beard tousled by the wind.
