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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

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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.

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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 ‘world-

view’ 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

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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 ‘nation-

state’ 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 inter-

connections 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

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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

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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.

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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 avant-

garde 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.

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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.

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Figure 1

10

Figure 2

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Figure 3

12

Figure 4

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Bibliography

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Publishing House, New Delhi

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