Image and Interpretation: a Woodblock print of ‘India’ by Rabindranath Tagore Shailendra Bhandare The aim of this paper is to investigate a woodblock print in the Lahiri Collection (Figure 1) and to argue for an interpretation. It is a simple monochrome print which shows a roughly rectangular ‘blotch’-like shape, with a few projections, composed of daubs of black which engulf a human figure in the centre. The figure is devoid of any sexual characteristics, but its posture and composure is feminine and so are certain features of its anatomy, such as slightly broad hips. It appears to wear an upper garment, indicated by contrasting ‘folds’ of small transverse lines just below the chin, and it sports a ‘top-notch’ coiffure, by way of two small semi-circles just above her parted hairline on her forehead. Towards the ends of the projections and also near the feet of the figure there are clear, sigmoid or crescent shapes which add a degree of plasticity, fluidity and vibrancy to the depiction creating a wobble-like visual effect in a pool of black ink. These features are presumably added to make the viewer imagine the print not as a static portrayal, but as an interplay of ‘motion’ within the black depths – a motion generated by the figure within the black daub. Under the figure, the print bears the signature of Rabindranath Tagore in pencil. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a poet, writer, statesman, educator and musician. He was born in Bengal. In literary history, he is best known as the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for literature (1913). Many people are familiar with Tagore's poetry and songs, which are indeed his best-known work, but he was also interested in science, and wrote extensively about politics, philosophy and music. His work and achievements earned him worldwide respect and fame – he could count Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin and Ezra Pound amongst his friends and admirers. Tagore was also an artist. In an artistic career relatively brief as compared to decades of literary output, he created a body of work that makes him one of South Asia's great modern painters. Although much of his artwork dates from the 1920s, when he was already more than sixty years old, a case has been made for early attempts at drawing which date to his youth (PAL 2013). The sketches he made in his later flourish typically have writing alongside them, the pictures merging with the words. He drew on whatever came to hand. But gradually, he began exploring painting with colours. His 1 contributions include portraits, animal motifs, landscapes and inanimate or abstract forms. His work contains elements of fantasy, abstraction and dreams, but he did not seem to follow a particular style or school of painting. He rarely titled his works leaving them open for interpretations. As noted by Partha Mitter, his particular talent in this direction was first observed by Victoria Ocampo, the Argentinian artist in 1924, with whom Tagore had a romantic relationship while convalescing after an illness in Buenos Aires, on his way to Peru. She was also instrumental in organising the first show of Tagore’s art in 1930, which took place at the Galerie du Theatre Pigalle in Paris (MITTER 2007: 66) There is another artistic expression associated with Tagore that the woodblock print in the Lahiri Collection speaks to – it is Tagore’s personal woodblock seal (Figure 2), the design of which is very similar to the one in the print. The seal is composed of Bengali letters that are Tagore’s initials ‘Ra’ and ‘Thā’. It was made by Tagore’s son Rathindranath following his father’s design. The seal itself bears a very close resemblance to the motif of ‘salmon/trout head’ in Art of the Haida people, as astutely noted by Ketaki Kushari Dyson in her paper ‘Rabindranath Tagore and his World of Colours’ (DYSON 2001). The context with the arts of the ‘primitive’ people, in which Tagore was interested, is clearly evident. Dyson observes, “Tagore came to art via primitivistic form-making, making grotesque zoomorphic patterns in black and white. In the context of our investigation, it is important to note that he entered art through the corridor of black and white form-making. He must have studied a lot of artefacts, masks and other ritual-cum-decorative objects from tribal cultures, in life and in reproduction. These gave him some of the ideas for his famous manuscript doodlings, out of which his art emerged.” Tagore’s fascination with abstract shapes emanated from his childhood experience and is noted by Mitter in the following excerpt (MITTER 2007: 73), “I lay with my face to the wall; the faint light drew myriad black and white patterns created by the peeling plaster on the whitewashed walls. I put myself to sleep inventing weird shapes”. It is the synthesis of these childhood memories, combined with an interest in the primitive art of aboriginal civilisations of the world that appears to have distilled Tagore’s attempt at creating the design of the woodblock in the Lahiri Collection as well as his personal seal. 2 However, there is more to these than meets the eye and we need to turn to the making of Rabindranath Tagore and the development of his socio-political ideology to unravel that. Tagore was driven in his artistic pursuits by his political philosophy and a particular ‘worldview’ that he came to hold in his life. Crucial to the crystallisation of his views and doctrines were his upbringing in an enlightened Bengali Bhadralok (‘Elite Class’ or ‘Gentlefolk’) setting and the political developments that affected early 20th century India. Typically for a Bhadralok young man, Tagore was exposed to a variety of cultural, literary and social stimuli. His father Debendranath was an eminent reformist and founder of a movement which sought religious and social renaissance. Many of his siblings were noted philosophers, musicians, litterateurs and savants. He came from a wealthy landed gentry’s background that afforded him a thorough and rounded education in languages, drawing, history, gymnastics, mathematics and Classics. He went to study further in Britain and in later life, undertook extensive travels both in India and abroad. In 1903, the colonial government mooted the partition of the province of Bengal. Although the measure was taken under the pretext of better governance, the realpolitik behind the move was to subvert nationalist sentiment which was growing in the province by creating a division on religious grounds in the nationalist constituency as West and East Bengal had Hindu and Muslim majorities, respectively. This drew a strong response from the Bengali population, whose ideas of regional ‘nationhood’ were vested more in shared language and culture than the difference in religious belief. The reaction was, however, not homogenous – there were ‘Moderates’ who believed in passive, constitutional resistance and there were the ‘Extremists’ who advocated an armed struggle verging on anarchy and ‘terror’. Tagore’s position was somewhere in the middle – he advocated a ‘constructive’ reaction, mainly vested in the rhetoric of Swadeshi, which centred on the development of Indian society emphasizing ‘self-help’ through isolation from the colonial economic apparatus without necessarily inviting a political clash with the British. Tagore’s vision was thus of a shared and distinct ‘Indian’ identity, focussed on education, mutual co-operation and reconstruction so that “national consciousness reached out to the masses” (SARKAR 1973: 32). The ‘isolation’ that appealed so much to Tagore and which he advocated was consistent with Indian ‘renunciate tradition’, rooted in the philosophic mode of the ancient Vedic period, when seers and thinkers retreated into communities away from civilisation to mull over deeper questions of metaphysics. As a consequence of such a ‘back to basics’ philosophy Tagore also came to reject the idea of a ‘nation-state’ and recommended a more ‘universal’ brand of political 3 consciousness, focussed on space and environment (COHEN 2012: 25-26). This also meant that he essentially rejected the binary between ‘East’ and ‘West’ and formulated a belief in ‘an ethical respect that leads to cultural preservation’ and a ‘non-hierarchical dialogue’ between cultures. Tagore’s pluralistic and encompassing artistic vision was at the core of ‘Kala Bhavan’ (‘Abode of Arts’), the institute of fine arts, which he established at ‘Vishwa Bharati’, the international university founded by him in 1921. Many of the artists of the ‘Bengal School’ were either trained or had strong links to the Kala Bhavan. Tagore travelled widely – he undertook twelve world tours and challenged the notion that India was a colonial, inferior subject nation. His artistic mind was always open to stimuli drawn from other cultures. Given his interest in ‘isolation’ and simplicity, he became greatly interested in primitivism. As early as 1905 he is noted to have shown interest in the art of Haida and Tlingit Americans of the North Pacific and his early creative outbursts in the early to mid-1920s involved sketches of primitive masks. It is interesting to note that in Tagore’s very first exhibition in Paris in May 1930, his work was exhibited alongside African and Oceanic art. Tagore shows a child-like naivety and credulousness in his pictorial works – an aspect which earned him accolades from European and Indian art critiques of the time who were impressed with his ‘automatic’ and auto-didactic expressiveness. This background narrative about Tagore and his art brings us back to the object of our inquiry – the woodblock print in the Lahiri Collection. Art historians have largely ignored an interesting feature of the print, which it shares with the personal seal of Tagore, noted earlier. The outer margins of both resemble the ‘peninsular’ shape of the Indian subcontinent. This gives a very different potency to these designs. While Tagore rejected the idea of a ‘nationstate’ as a political entity, he was intensely patriotic. His love and affection for his motherland was unquestionable and so was his sense of Indian-ness. He was a product of the ‘Bengal Revival’ of the 19th century which was acutely aware of cultural and linguistic interconnections which transcended religious and geographic divides.The Bengali response to the partition of Bengal is evocative of this sense of ‘motherland’ and a regional belonging. It is plausible to view it as an expression which reflects on Tagore’s ‘Indian-ness’ which is very much in accordance with the way he developed his political philosophy. The woodblock from the Lahiri Collection can thus be viewed as Tagore’s attempt to personify ‘India’. The fact that the figure alludes to be a female could suggest this is a representation of either a young mother, or a young, nascent woman who would be full of fecundity and fertility one 4 day, much like ‘India’ freed from the colonial yoke. The plastic, translucent, water-like impression that Tagore chooses to give to its outer shape could also be seen as a reference to creative and fertile aspects of the female figure it engulfs. The idea of ‘India’ personified was indeed not new or unusual. Even in ancient times, we find the Sanskrit epilogue or colophon of the plays written by the Classical dramatist Bhāsa (c. 2nd century BC – 2nd century AD) referring to the terrain of his royal patron as ‘adorned by the Kundalas (ear-ornaments) of the Vindhya and Himalaya mountains’. This is a clear reference to the Gangetic Valley visualised as a ‘face’ with the said mountain ranges adorning its lateral facets, much like ornaments in ears would. The idea had very much come home in the early 20th century and visual imagery of ‘India’ had already been in circulation. Sumathi Ramaswamy mentions a number of instances (RAMASWAMY 2010:16-17), including a very famous icon created by none other than Abanindranath Tagore, Rabindranath’s nephew, in 1905. Militant ideologies, dominant in Maharashtra and Bengal in the early decades of 20th century, often presented India as a ‘weaponized’ woman, reflecting the combatant form of Durga, the mythological incarnate goddess and the destructor of the evil demon Mahisha. Right from the early days of its emergence, geographical aspects had been a prominent part of how the icon was conceptualized and given a visual form. Tagore’s choice of an ‘India’-shaped contour is therefore not unusual. Typically for the artist, it is shown only as a fleeting suggestion, based on abstraction rather than detail and thereby alluding to the primitivist idiom Tagore was so fascinated by . One might wonder, however, about how this interpretation fits in with the ‘anti-Nation’ philosophy that Tagore so emphatically advocated. Tagore denounced political geography as a “discipline that robbed the child of his earth” by imposing unnatural ‘boundaries’ on a terrain that should belong to all (CHAKRAVARTY 1961: 219). Nowhere more than his poetry does Tagore come forth as a deeply patriotic person. So although he was averse to the discipline of geography in a political sense, he was well aware of the role physical features of the terrain play in creating a ‘national consciousness’. In another poem from his collection Utsarga or “The Offering / Dedication” (BASU MAJUMDAR 1993: 19), published two years after he penned Bhārata Bidhātā, Tagore writes: “Oh, the God of Universe, in which form have you appeared to me today? I see you in the Eastern sky, in my own country 5 The blue sky is your forehead Ever bright in limpid light The Himalayas are like your silent blessings Your hands of victory overcome fear The sea kisses your feet Washes the dust off your feet The Jahnavi (the Ganges) is flowing like a necklace on your bosom, I have opened my heart today And see in a moment, You, the God of the Universe, Merged yourself in my ancient land.” Tagore evocatively sees India, his beloved ‘ancient land’, defined largely in terms of its geographical features, as having become one with the God of the Universe. This is a vivid poetic image of his patriotism. Tagore’s verse ‘Bhārata Bidhātā’, written in 1911, is now the national anthem of India. It is interesting to note that in this hymn, Tagore chooses to define India by ‘natural geography’, by her traditional provincial divisions, by her mountains and rivers and by her people. In a letter he wrote in 1927, Tagore mentions – “… (a) song should be written in which all the provinces, rivers and hills of India are strung together in order to impress upon the minds of our people an idea of geography of our country. We are nowadays profuse in the use of the term National Consciousness. But what kind of national consciousness can there be, devoid of actual geographical and ethnological realisation?” As Ramaswamy notes (RAMASWAMY 2010: 141), the ordering of provinces in ‘Bhārata Bidhātā’ suggests that Tagore’s imagination followed the outline of the map of India, albeit incompletely and somewhat idiosyncratically. The outline of the shape seen in the woodblock from the Lahiri collection resonates with this cartographic imagination. The sharp diagonal margin of the daub on the top left tracks the course of the Indus and the soft undulating top right margin can be viewed as the Ganges descending down from the Himalayas, and flowing towards the East. Perhaps, the abstraction of the shape also alludes to the ambivalence about ‘nation’-hood that Tagore himself harboured in his creative expression. 6 A thought about what the central figure conveys would also be pertinent here. It is interesting that in the final stanza of Bhārata Bidhātā, he alludes to ‘India’ as a female waiting to be awakened and rescued from ‘dark evil dreams’. While this has a certain resonance with the central figure, it is also worthwhile to note that the female form resembles closely to the famous bronze figurine of a ‘Dancing Girl’ (Figure 3), discovered at the site of Mohenjo Daro, on 26th January 1927 excavations by archaeologist Daya Ram Sahni (POSSEHL 2002: 203). Mohenjo Daro had gained wide publicity in the excavation seasons of 1922-24 as a centre of the ‘Indus Valley Civilisation’, following the announcement of its discovery by John Marshall, the director of the Archaeological Survey of India in September 1924. The civilisation was dated to the ‘Bronze Age’ and contemporary to the Mesopotamian civilizations, three or four millennia before Christ. This dating gave a massive boost to the nationalist cause in India. Modern Indians could now lay claim to a past older than Egypt, the font of antiquity in the Western World. Not only the Indus cities were older than any other remains of material culture in the Indian subcontinent, they also exhibited a seemingly avantgarde awareness about ‘modern’ civil concepts such as public drainage, bath houses and sanitation. The artefacts from Mohenjo Daro were first exhibited in the Indian Museum of Calcutta in December 1924 and leading English newspapers of the city like ‘The Statesman’ and ‘Amrit Bazar Patrika’ wrote long reports on the discovery (LAHIRI 2005: 274-279). The editorial in the ‘Patrika’ read, “What Indian is there who will not feel proud that the civilization of his country thus reached up to the hoary age of the third or fourth millennium BC?… The systematic excavation of these sites is not simply of provincial but of national importance...” The resemblance the central figure in the woodblock bears with the other – not so famous – bronze maiden found at Mohenjo Daro is even more startling (Figure 4). This figurine was discovered in the last 1930-1931 season of excavations, conducted by the archaeologist E.J.H. Mackay, and published in 1938 (POSSEHL 2002: 114). Here we see the posture of the figurine, the positioning of the hand, the curvilinear jewellery she wears on her neck, all reflecting in the central image of the Tagore woodblock. This figurine, much like the Tagore image, is also devoid of overt sexual characteristics like breasts but her femininity is shown mainly through the curves of her hips and her body form. 7 A person as perspicacious as Tagore would certainly have been visually aware of the artefacts that were being unearthed in sites of Indus Valley civilisation. Its earliest reports and the eventual publication of the excavation are closely contemporaneous with his experimentations with Art. His literature makes many references to India as an ‘ancient land’ reflecting on the Vedic Age as the origin of the Indian Tradition, but the discovery of a past distinctly older must surely have stirred his patriotic imagination. As art historian Prithwish Neogy has observed, Tagore’s art after 1929 shows that “forms came to acquire gesture anticipating a preponderance of memory. Rhythmic vitality came to be increasingly overlaid with uninhibited, indiscrete emergence of recollected images.” (NEOGY 1961: 200) Tagore refused to explain his art works. In 1930, in a talk at the India Society in London, he politely chose to remain silent about the meaning of his pictures much as “they are. It is for them to express and not to explain…” (MITTER 2007: 77). With such a standpoint, the task of rendering his works accessible is left to the interpreter. Within the context presented here, there is room to interpret the woodblock print as a personified ‘India’. Image and interpretation thus come together as homage to one of the giants of 20th century Indian Art. 8 Figure 1 9 Figure 2 10 Figure 3 11 Figure 4 12 Bibliography BASU MAJUMDAR, A. K., 1993: Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet of India, Indus Publishing House, New Delhi CHAKRAVARTY, Amiya, 1961: A Tagore Reader, Beacon Press COHEN, Jasmin, 2012: “Nationalism and Painting in Colonial Bengal”, Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection Paper 1646 - http://digitalcollections.sit.edu/isp_collection/1646 (last accessed on 19 February 2015) DYSON, Ketaki Kushari, 2001: ‘Rabindranath Tagore and his World of Colours’, http://www.parabaas.com/rabindranath/articles/pKetaki2.html (last accessed on 19 February 2015) LAHIRI, Nayanjot, 2005: Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization was Discovered, Permanent Black, New Delhi MITTER, Partha, 2007: The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-garde 1922-1947, Reaktion Books Ltd, London NEOGY, Prithwish, 1961: ‘Drawings and Paintings of Rabindranath Tagore’, in Rabindranath Tagore: A Centenary Volume 1861-1961, ed. Dr. S. Radhakrishnan (1986 Reprint), Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi PAL, Pratapaditya, 2013: ‘The Tender Shoots: Some Early Drawings of Rabindranath Tagore’, Marg, volume 64, no.3, March 2013 POSSEHL, Gregory, 2002: The Indus Civilization: a Contemporary Perspective, Altamira Press, Oxford SARKAR, Sumit, 1973: The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908, People’s Publishing House, New Delhi RAMASWAMY, Sumathi, 2010: The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India, Duke University Press 13