‘The Myriad-Minded Man’: A more human, more fragile Rabindranath Tagore in this biography
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It is Baishe Srabon again, the date on the Bengali calendar when Rabindranath Tagore passed away at the age of 80. On that August day in 1941, the monsoon skies had opened up, yet thousands of people turned up to pay their last respects to Bengal’s greatest creative artist and humanist. Then, the crowd swelled into a mob, and the final procession turned into a grotesque affair. There were stories of a virtual stampede, and people – no one was sure who they were – wild with grief started pulling at the poet’s hair. The result was that Tagore’s own family and loved ones were pushed out. A Tagore worshipper on my mother’s side of the family was amongst the crowd. Determined to offer a pranam, he reached out for the great man’s feet but ended up with a tuft of his silver hair in his palm. Terrified and ashamed, he quickly got away, but most of the crowd carried on lustily.
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Tagore’s last journey was, somehow, a culmination of what he had faced throughout his life, admittedly to a lesser degree. The Bard of Bengal had been composing and writing since his early youth. He had no dearth of admirers, but...