Origins and ends

After months of controversy,Rabindranath Tagores set of twelve paintings have been sold at Sothebys. These paintings had been gifted by Tagore himself to Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst,who set up the Dartington Trust that now auctioned the artworks. However,that did not deter those who fancied themselves custodians of the Tagore flame,including West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and other Kolkata-based intellectuals,from opposing this sale. Bhattacharjee even requested prime ministerial intervention to ensure that Gurudebs paintings,priceless treasures of Indian culture could be brought home to India. That was further complicated by the fact that the standard legal instrument in such cases,the Antiquities Act,does not apply to Tagores relatively young artworks.

This kind of clinginess about our cultural artifacts has become standard-issue in India,but it seems particularly absurd when it centres on a famously cosmopolitan figure like Rabindranath Tagore. He was curious about the world,and he cared about the connections between a sense of national identity and a common humanity,and he would never allow one to constrict the other. Tagore travelled to England and the United States in 1912-13,Japan and the United States in 1916,Europe in 1921,China and Japan in 1924,Latin America in 1924-25,Europe in 1926,Southeast Asia in 1927,Europe and the United States in 1930,Iran and Iraq in 1932,and Sri Lanka in 1934. Though he was a fierce and inspiring anti-colonial activist,he was resolutely universalist,eager to discover the cultural hinges between India and East Asia. He might have written Jana Gana Mana,but his was not a narrow representation of anthem and flag.

However,Tagores legacy has been confined not only by such nationalist-retentionist cultural property ideas,but also by his own Visva Bharati University,which had wanted to extend copyright past its fifty-year-mark and more,and block any publishers from reprinting,translating and annotating his writings. That clamp was lifted nearly a decade back,and now Tagore translations abound in the market,are freely available online,and he is more widely read and loved than ever before.