Boom to Busts – Frank McNally on an Irish-Indian cultural exchange

Their births in British India and literary vocations aside, the imperialist Rudyard Kipling and the anti-imperialist Rabindranath Tagore have little else in common.

But there is one other, rather curious similarity: they both wrote classic novels about life on the subcontinent in which the hero was an Irish orphan.

In Kipling’s Kim (1900), the protagonist’s identity is revealed on page 1: “... his mother had been nursemaid in a colonel’s family and had married Kimball O’Hara, a young colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, an Irish regiment”.

Page 2 tells us that the mother succumbed to cholera, after which the father took to opium, “and died as poor whites die in India”. Thus, little Kim was left to grow up a child of the streets and become an undercover agent in the “Great Game” between Britain and Russia, the book’s main theme.

Blowing a Gaskin – Frank McNally on gasconades, gasúns, and Ireland’s Bay of Naples

---

In the long run – Alison Healy on the bizarre Olympic marathon of 1904

---

Valour invalidated – Frank McNally on a mysterious Irish anti-hero: the “Great Gaiscí”

---

Frank McNally on royal typos, Tennyson’s Tories, and the mystery of ‘Operation Sonnet’

---

In Tagore’s Gora (1910), by contrast, the eponymous hero grows to adulthood under the impression that he is a pure Bengali Hindu. Despite the hint contained in his pet-name, which means “whitey”, he is a staunch nationalist with a fierce attachment to his supposed cultural traditions.

Then one day, his adoptive parents break it to him gently that his real mother died in childbirth and his father was killed in the Sepoy mutiny. “His name was ...” begins the foster father, before Gora cuts him off: “I don’t want to know the name.” Whereupon the foster-father adds merely: “He was an Irishman.”

Like Kim’s, Gora’s confused identity serves its author’s purposes, teasing out Tagore’s complex ideas on Indian nationalism, tradition, and religion, some of which would put him at odds with Mahatma Gandhi.

***

Tagore was already a famous writer when, during a trip to London in 1912, he met WB Yeats and presented a sheaf of his translated poetry.

Already infatuated with eastern mysticism, Yeats became besotted with Tagore’s work, writing: “I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses or in restaurants.”

Yeats arranged English publication, adding to Tagore’s celebrity in the west, which probably peaked when in 1913 became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Tagore was then awarded a knighthood in 1915 but renounced it in 1919 as a protest at the Amritsar massacre, when British troops killed hundreds of unarmed separatist protestors.

In later years, he went somewhat out of fashion in Europe, to the extent that Graham Greene once questioned if “anyone but Mr Yeats can still take his poems very seriously”.

But by 1935, even Yeats was having doubts: “Damn Tagore”, he wrote. “We got out three good books ... and then, because he thought it more important to see and know English than to be a great poet, he brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation.”

Some of Tagore’s greatest fans agree that his work does not translate well in English and that was badly served by some of his own attempts. He remains a towering figure in Bengali and Indian literature, while elsewhere being largely forgotten.

***

Writing of him in the New York Review of Books some years ago, Amartya Sen referred to the “boom and bust” of Tagore’s reputation in the west.

That phrase has recently taken on a different quality in Ireland, at least. It had escaped me until I jogged past it earlier this year that Dublin’s St Stephen’s Green now has a bust of Tagore, installed in 2011 as a gift from the Indian government.

And I was reminded of the bust again this week by an email from Waterford woman and former senator Katharine Bulbulia. Thanks to whom, I now know that a reciprocal sculpture – of Yeats – has just been unveiled in India.

Katharine’s unusual surname comes via her husband, Abdul, who was born in South Africa to an Indian family and came to Ireland to study at the Royal College of Surgeons.

When the Tagore sculpture appeared in Dublin, the Bulbulias decided that one of his former Irish friend and collaborator should go the opposite direction. This was duly commissioned from sculptor Rory Breslin and paid for by a Bulbulia family bequest.

The result was dispatched to Delhi back around 2013. After which, it seemed to get lost – if not in translation, then in local bureaucracy, exacerbated by the pandemic.

Then finally, this year, the sculpture was unveiled at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai, thanks in large part to Ireland’s consul general there, Anita Kelly.

It remains to be seen whether the Yeats-inspired boom in Tagore’s western reputation, circa 1912, can ever be replicated. In the meantime, thanks to Irish-Indian philanthropy, a bust-to-bust cycle has now been completed.

* This article was amended on August 31st, 2023 to correct a factual error.