Letters: Understanding Tagore

“The unread Tagore” (May 11) is really interesting but it seems to have got it all wrong as it seems to suggest that the author has read very little of Rabindranath Tagore. The article, worked out on the now-abandoned, hackneyed and old theory of deconstruction of splitting personalities, borders on the imitative and self-forgetful Indian psyche with a penchant for a refrain on western fetishism. While Tagore was looking for individuality, universalism and harmony, the author understood very little and carved out Tagore’s one, two and three in the traditional western style. None in India is xenophobic and deifies Tagore, and there is very little scope for an apotheosis. Then why be an unnecessary apostate to earn brownie points, trying to analyse pathologically the mystic mind and “oceanic feelings” that Tagore harboured, on his route to harmony? What is particularly intriguing is the author’s pronounced gullibility in falling a prey to western lucubrations with less of alacrity and more of emotionality. The author should realise that “the problem of all existence continues to be the problem of harmony” and even after 100 years of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and pathological anatomy of mysticism, the world hasn’t improved. It is high time that “imperialist intellectuals” understood the hair line between a sceptic and a non-believer, the latter still being mostly unproductive and parasitic.

Nirmalya Mukherjee, Kolkata