Iqbal, Tagore & Possible Worlds

Iqbal- ..so then I said to the Shah of Iran, 'Majesty, I've got more literary genius in my little finger than that bearded fucktard Tagore whom you and King Feisal keep feting and fawning over.'
Interviewer (Sarojini Naidu)- What if your little finger was up Rabi Da's butt hole?
Iqbal- LOLWAT? Why would my finger be up that Bengali fucktard's butt hole? You calling me a fag? Look at my tache. This the tache of a fucking gay boy?
Interviewer- I just assumed. Anyway, the point about genius is that it is not something contingent but rather is an essence and therefore exists in all possible worlds including ones in which your little finger is up the Sage of Shantiniketan's butt hole.
Iqbal- Fair point, Sarojini. Anyway, like I was saying, I've got more literary genius in my little finger that than bearded fucktard Tagore, unless, obviously, my little finger happens to be up his butt hole.
Interviewer- Why is it obvious that your little finger would happen to be up his butt hole?
Iqbal- Because Islam is in danger.

T.S Eliot vs Tagore

Edit- apparently this old ignoramus is wholly wrong about Eliot's Anglicanism. He was close to the great and good Bishop Bell not Cosmo Lang.

This is one of the best articles in the Guardian I've ever read.
Slowly, in between my domestic chores and dutiful visit to the gym, I've been looking up some of the poets mentioned by this marvelously erudite and engaged author.
This is one book I'll buy in Hardback.
Still, in all candor, the more I look things up the more I'm confirmed in my middle-aged certainty that modern poetry is an oxymoron.
The author says Eliot became a global presence quite quickly. Compared to Tagore- post Gitanjali- this is scarcely true. Nishiwaki was an eccentric egghead- an academics' academics. His volume of English verse (unlike Tagore's own Gitanjali) sank without trace. By contrast, Tagore influenced popular Japanese and Chinese poets and song writers- indeed, he still does. I recall reading a poem by Li Chin Fa in an anthology and asking my learned Chinese friend to transcribe the original for me. He shook his head sadly and said 'the original is Tagore. ' I was amazed. I thought of Tagore, much as I think of Eliot now, as a sexless bore who dabbled in Soteriology coz it was a shameful, but ancestral, vocation.
Both Eliot and Tagore were of Unitarian/Brahmo stock. (Emerson was a Unitarian. Recall his 'Brahma'? He'd been reading Raja Ramohan Roy- an Islamicized polyglot scholar and deeply boring Benthamite of the sententious, Amartya Sen sort) Indeed, it was an elder brother of Tagore, a Science guy who regrettably died early, who prevented a crazy (literally) American Unitarian (Charles Dall- look him up and laugh your head off) unifying those two virulently vacuous Victorian sects by, quite properly, expelling non-Brahmins from his Daddy's new Adi ('primeval', therefore pre-Casteist) Brahmo sect.
Eliot, by birth, a Boston Brahmin, soon turned Episcopalian and became the Chesterton of Cosmo Lang's wholly corrupt High Church.
Tagore, however, had moved in the opposite direction. He transcended that bogus 'Brahmin' label. Muslim Bangladesh reveres him. He has written the National Anthem of 2 nations- though Hindutva India hates his wholly secular 'Jana Gana Mana', preferring instead Bankim's 'Hail to the Mother'.

Tagore could become a global poet much more quickly than Eliot because his culture was already global- not the special pleading of diverse sects of precociously drivelling autochthones inhabiting the unlovely littoral of that most atrocious of Oceans- the ungovernable Atlantic.

By contrast to such uncouth, storm tossed, 'Jahilliyat', China and Japan and South East Asia had assimilated Sanskrit and Pali fifteen hundred years previously. Latin America, through 'Krausismo' (Krause actually knew Skt. and tried to teach Schopenhauer a little bit)- not to mention Jesuit scholarship- was already fertile soil.
Indeed, they had easy access to the Sufi-Bhakti synthesis through notions like 'saudosismo'- which is the Sufi 'sauda' or 'suvaida'- so there was nothing surprising about Tagore, himself the student of a Peruvian monk, being so well received on that continent.
The connection between Greece and India, of course, is 2500 years old. Anglo-American pedants say 'Dharma' is untranslatable. Ashoka translated it as Eusebia and Greek people living in India said 'fair dinkum, mate.' (What? Ancient Greeks had Australian accents and were sun-tanned and had washboard stomachs and lived in the vicinity of Earls Court as I still shudderingly recall)
In any case, for purely commercial or geographical reasons, Tagore was far closer, culturally, to China and Japan than Eliot. His family, like Titsingh, had grown rich in Calcutta and it is a fact that many cultivated Indians, like that Dutchman (who had a Bengali son) showed themselves prepared to ' willingly exchange their residence for Japan,' if not to 'sneer at all Indian greatness' (though that greatness departed even before Victoria became Empress) and like Titsingh (but not promiscuously or for sensual pleasure) espoused Japanese wives than whom, indeed, none better exemplify 'pativrata' Beauty, Grace and Fidelity.
Tagore and Aurobindo, briefly, were paired as the poet-prophets of Revolution in India. M.N Roy was the Comintern's man in China, tasked with fomenting an Agrarian Revolution. Young Sarojini Naidu, who sold better than her elders, Eliot & Pound, in England, gave Fenellossa's m/s to Pound to trans-create. Her brother 'Chatto' was a Comintern agent killed during one of Stalin's purge. All the people I mention had imbibed Tagore with their mother's milk.
By contrast, though Auden and Isherwood translated Hindu Scriptures at the behest of Hindu Swamis- Yeats started this horrible trend- they neither inspired nor were connected with any great Revolutionaries.
The Academy claimed Auden. Bengalis chant his verse, but they are all queuing for tenure in some particularly insalubrious 'Social Science'.

Eliot may have studied under Paul Elmer More- whose leonine, Landor like, heroic couplets translating Bhratrihari remain till today of the sort, Richard Rorty, in articulo mortis, found salvific to recall- but it is noteworthy that Crawford's vaunted scholar, who, he quite ludicrously claims 'engaged with Advanced Mathematics'- remained indifferent to Brouwerian 'Vakyapadiya'- in other words, this shmuck could have anticipated the 'linguistic turn', but didn't, preferring to stick with a but Bradleyian foreskin while throwing away his manhood.
Tagore, Thomas Mann says, came across as an old woman- unlike his muscular son. But filial piety constrained Tagore. He was the son of a self proclaimed 'Maharishi' and had to swan around in a Christ-like kaftan because his faux Pundit of a Pater Pantocrator had done so even into his own youngest son's Forties.
In any case, Rabi wasn't the Science guy in his family. Nevertheless, later, after meeting Einstein, he wrote a popular book for kids about Science. He wasn't a high I.Q guy but, with every decade, he got closer to the people- i.e. became less and less of a holier-than-thou Brahmin c-word.

Robert Graves, by contrast, was a genius. Crazy? No- just a case of genus irritabile vatum. I can't re-read Eliot without sneering a little. I know so much more than him. So do we all, thanks to Google Search. But Graves? Take his 'love without hope as when the young bird catcher'- okay, I get the 'Celtic' reference and thus could have secured a pass-mark in the Indian U.P.S.C Eng Lit paper- which would have translated into a safe job as a clerk, supposing a question had been posed on that topic, BUT Graves wrote so lucidly, so much for the common man, I'd  have read his 'White Goddess' gratuitously. Even if I got my Govt. job and was kept busy collecting bribes, I'd always be haunted by the knowledge that the forest is a text in the only language of my salvation. English forests,  Greek forests- such Holwege as arise in Hindustani Forests- but are birds which escape and fly, though 'tis but a SUV which drives by.
Eliot, as neutered by Pound, but natal to School Marmish/Social Workerish American Browningian Femininity- his Mum's 'Savanorola' could scarcely be more hilarious than his own sophomoric detournement on the 'smara- mara' syzygy- represents not Modernism but the Credentialized Academy's rodeo which features only its own gelding.
Tagore can't be taught. Bengali kids memorise him coz Mum croons his verses in the kitchen when Granny condemns her cooking.
In that vast, salt pillared, masturbatory desert of my adolescence- where, not Christ was betrayed but barely tempted- Eliot whispered to me. But whispered to me of a career as a Casteist, Credentialized, poseur or pundit.
Eliot indeed is that Buddha of the elite whose 'Fire sermon' distinguishes between Brahmins- who tend a sacred fire to glorify their own genealogy- and Sati, the Fisherman's son, who obviously is just an idiot and thus to be ostracized, unlike, Upali, the barber, who is properly obsequious and parrots what you say.
Eliot has 'taste'. I don't. I'm now a Curry & Chips Cockney. I relish conversations in pubs which turn on obscure gynaecological problems amongst the older of my neighbours. Me being very black and wearing glasses- it's like these Mothers of the Community are able to say what they can't in the G.P's surgery or the underfunded NHS Hospital.
Okay, I just heard myself there. T.S. Eliot is great coz he helped this 'bullshitting' immigrant to turn into a real Londoner over the course of 30 years.
I now love him unreservedly and will definitely buy the hardback edition of this book. As for understanding its contents- why not? That could happen. It's like David Cameron said to me- well, if it wasn't him it was some other French Cambodian lady boy such as abound in these parts- should of gone to Specsavers innit?

Li Po at Nalanda

There was a long tradition in China of attributing innovations in prosody to the influence of Sanskrit. Prof. Victor Mair has written some interesting papers on this topic.

The Chinese may have developed a theory about tonality and established rules for the alternation between heavy (guru) and light (laghu) syllables and so on through contact with some other foreign language but what is interesting is that the Chinese poetic genius did not shrivel up and die after coming into contact with Brahminical  literature.
Indeed, Prof Francois Martin goes a step further and even suggests that the Chinese genius for landscape appreciation itself may have been reinforced by Sanskrit literature-

What has all this to do with Li Po?
Let us hear from an Indian Professor of Chinese descent-

'...China had two great poets, Li Bai and Bai Juyi, both belonging to the Tang Dynasty, who styled themselves as “upasakas”. Li Bai (701-762), whose poetic gems are suffused with the aroma of Chinese whiskey, has left behind a poem “who am I?” which reads:

“Blue-Lotus Upasaka is my self-styled title,

An angel from Heaven I’m banished to this world,

My fame has been buried beneath the liquor of the pubs

And I have measured thirty springs with my wine cups.

Who am I ? Why on earth should anyone thus inquire?

I am Golden-Millet Maiterya’s next life.”

(See Tan Chung, Classical Chinese Poetry in the Classics of the East series, Calcutta: The M.P. Birla Foundation, P. 143, with translation modified.)

This “Golden-Millet Maiterya” was the legendary Indian Buddhist layman, Vimalakirti whose Chinese name reads “wei-mo-jie” (the transliteration of the Sanskrit). Another famous Chinese poet, Wang Wei (701?-761) had a second name in “Wang Mojie”, i.e. he tried to demonstrate in both his names that he was “Wang Vimalakirit” -- “Wang” being his surname. Here we see Li Bai and Wang Wei vying with each other to claim themselves as the reincarnation of Vimalakirti who was the Indian symbol for a man highly enlightened (even more enlightened than the Bodisattvas) but remained married in the mundane world. I dare say that all the Chinese intellectuals who had self-styled themselves “Jushi” had cast themselves in this Vimalakiriti mould.'

(Do read this whole, magnificent, book here. The distinguished author is the son of the Most Venerable Tan Yun Shan about whom I've blogged earlier)

Li Po (Li Bai) drank a lot- he drowned drunkenly trying to rescue the reflection of the moon- how is he an upasak? The answer is provided by Vimalkirti's 'Field theory' of Buddhahood- an update on the Avatamsaka Sutra's Occassionalist monadology- whereby a relationist dynamics is added to what is otherwise reflection simply. I think this is comparable to 'adi vigyan'- the original science of throwing off your own evils onto a reflection- evolving into Shantideva's 'paratama parivartana'- whereby swopping selves saves both parties. Meditators, he tells us, dive into Hell to rescue all beings. Thus, it appears, those who are born intoxicated have no fear of intoxicants. Those destined to rescue all Hell-dwellers are joyous simply. Shantideva, who lived around the same time as Bai Juyi , is sometimes depicted as having a transgressive life-style- drinking wine and shacking up with a washer-woman- but what is unquestionable is that he and Bai Juyi shared a bottomless compassion for the common people. There is a story that the latter's mother drowned in a well, while bending down to admire the beauty of some flowers, and this led to a charge of filial impiety being made against him by his enemies because he had written a poem titled 'the new well' and another on admiring flowers. 

Sadly, Shantideva's Nalanda- ably enough served by the existing Institute there- is now connected with Amartya Sen's projected International University. What we moderns term Scholarship, it seems, is not just too leaky a vessel to cross the Ocean of Samsara, it is not even sufficiently sea worthy for a simple booze cruise to rescue the Moon's reflection and thus cast up at the Tavern at the end of the river of stars.

Yet Sen was born in the Shantiniketan of Tan Yun Shan. There is a lesson here which, as Gandhi was wont to say, all who run may read.
Mind it kindly.

Yeats & Tagore

There's an excellent article on Tagore, by Seamus Perry, in the TLS here. When I say excellent, I don't, of course, mean it's any good but it is in the TLS and that's excellent.  I mean it would have looked decidedly odd in the pages of Viz magazine and I'd have kittens if it suddenly started streaming onto the roll of luminous toilet paper I've recently invested in.

The points Perry Sahib fails to mention are-
1) Tagore's dad was the head of a High Victorian Hindu sect. Thus, Tagore had a great big beard and wore robes and affected a sort of Christ-like absence of brains and bollocks.  But, Tagore only did this out of filial piety. He wasn't an authentic nut-job.
2) Tagore didn't want to be a land-lord. He liked travelling about by river-boat but he'd have preferred doing it as a beggarly and minstrel baul, rather than in the unholy guise of a glorified Rent-collector. His one small rebellion- but a rebellion sanctioned by his father's own example- was to reject the sort of education which would have enforced baristari or magistari (being a Barrister or Magistrate) upon him- as had happened to others of his family before he was born.
3) Tagore wasn't quite as well up on European literature as a lot of the other Bengalis back home. In a sense he was going against the grain by pretending to be a sort of rustic baul singer- but without the earthy humour, the not-shite metaphysics, the actual as opposed to ersatz poetry of even imported bauls like Anthony Firinghee. Still, as a family man, he had the sense of social responsibility to point young Bengal in a less pestilential direction than that taken previously by Michael Madhusudhan Dutt or, later, by Aurobindo. The fact is mythologies are immiscible save graphically by working class lads like Alan Moore. Otherwise, they're just nasty Nazi posturing- like Yeats's gyres or Pound's paranoid Cantos- or else the sort of idealistic cult of assassination which drove Gayatri Spivak's great-aunt (vide 'Can the subaltern speak') to hang herself while menstruating.
4) Tagore knew a lot about actual people. He knew servants were tyrants, teachers witless bullies, culture vultures worthless sociopaths, the British middle class stupid and provincial in England and brutal, cynical and provincial while serving in India, the poorer class of peasants pathetically credulous and helpless to fend off exploitation by the slightly better off of their bretheren, the Revolutionaries criminal psychopaths, the Loyalists self-deluding bores, the... etc.  But Tagore couldn't denounce the confederacy of dunces he saw all around him. His social position forbade it. So he wrote what he did- his diffuse lacrimae rerum sentiment arising from not the memory of a Trojan War but yearning across incompossible identity classes (kids and grown ups, husbands and wives, little peasant girls and ill paid Post Masters) as its Timeo Danaos Wooden horse- and left it to posterity to read between the lines.
5) Seamus Perry writes- 'Far from the exquisitely lapidary mode of the English Gitanjali, “I Won’t Let You Go!” tells a largely aimless story: as he is leaving home on a business trip one day, Tagore hears his four-year-old daughter assert, “I won’t let you go”, “As if only saying / ‘I won’t let you go’ was enough”. It is a moment of no great consequence, but Tagore unwinds the story of the rest of his day, throughout which he fondly and sadly remembers his little girl’s protest – a lengthening poem which could have gone on yet longer, part of the amused poignancy of which is its own reluctance to bid a more timely farewell.'
What Perry doesn't say is that, notwithstanding the splendid physique and spotless character that was his genetic and properly entailed inheritance, Tagore's family was much besieged by death. No descendants in the direct line much survived my dawning day. It is the very muscular longevity of the father, not the frailness of the child, which, not nihilates, but abnegates the Universe by the quoted- 'I won't let you go'.  But abnegates it in a nice manner, the Gentleman-Babu has retired from the feast, he had no appetite for it in any case, but he does so with a seemly show of boneless haut embourgeoisement, lest the swinish poetasters (shitheads like me) too lose their zest for an envious and parasitical punishing of his stock of  butter and honey mead. 




Now, let us look at Yeats. He wasn't really a Celtic genius at all. His ancestors were English and priggishly English they remained till plundering Ireland rendered them at last merely aesthetic and shabby genteel. The last of the Aisling poets, having built the Hammersmith line- you can still hear a sort of banshee wail as the train pulls into Earls Court- was perishing in the Halford Road, Poor House, the place where the Primary School now stands, while Yeats, at Edith Villas, was taking his first baby steps in literary London. Thus Yeats's Cuchulain and Countess Cathleen and so on were about as authentic as Tom Moore's 'Lalla Rookh'. Tagore on the other hand, despite being born a Brahmo, could easily have become a baul. If Anthony Firingee could go from Portuguese Catholicism to composing Agamani verse, Tagore could have done more. Bengali was his mother's milk. Unfortunately, Tagore couldn't simply use Vaishnav or Sakta imagery in a straightforward way without people saying that his Dad and his Grand Dad, 'Prince' Dwarkanath, and so on all the way back to his 'Pir Ali' ancestors, were simply time-serving heretics and whited sepulchres and probably lechers and panders into the bargain.

So Tagore is vague in his imagery and veiled in his criticisms of the political currents of his time and comes across as bit of an old woman. But he was actually no such thing. Thomas Mann was agreeably surprised that Tagore's son was a strapping young fellow. Tagore himself was got up in robes- because he felt he owed it to his own dear departed Dad, the Maharishi. But he didn't impose that sort of nonsense on his sons or the young people at Shantiniketan. My feeling is, he worked things so his family, or the class he represented, could make the psychological break from financial dependence on rack rented country estates for their sense of identity and amour propre.

Whereas Yeats- the landless landlord told off by Joyce, the shiftless tenant- turns, from a sham presentment of Irishry, to elitism and occultism and monkey glands and being a fucking Senator; Tagore's trajectory was minimally mischievous.

I remember, many years ago, reading an anthology of Chinese poetry leant me by a colleague.
I was entranced by a poem by Li Chin Fa and asked my friend about it. He grimaced. Apparently friendship was impossible between us, because the poem in question had been written under the influence of Tagore. That's why I'd liked it.
I thought this remarkable because my love for Chinese poetry sprang from the belief that it was solely concerned with failing one's exams and drinking alone- two themes which featured prominently in both our then careers in the City of London- but in Li Chin Fa, alas!, not at all.

Ultimately, Yeats is a poet I still read, Tagore a bore who proves Spinoza's lemma that to feel pity is unethical. This is because I'm a shit-head. For the best of reasons, Tagore tries hard to pretend he's stupid and self-involved and under-educated, but in the end he fails. Yeats tries hard to pretend he's an adept of something immeasurably larger and cosmic and universal and...also fails. But since we're trying to be Yeats- coz we aren't Tagore- Yeats is our man and, pace William Radice, his Gitanjali Tagore's.

M.N Roy vs. Tan Yun Shan

M.N Roy was a Bengali revolutionary sent to America by Bagha Jatin to procure arms and recruits for the overthrow of the British. While in America, Roy became a founder member of the Mexican Communist party. Later, welcomed by Lenin to the U.S.S.R, Roy achieved international fame as the the Comintern agent tasked with fomenting an agrarian revolution in China- a thankless job which earned him the well merited ire of the Chinese Communists and exposed Roy to the danger of being purged in a show trial back in Moscow.  Jail in British India being preferable to Stalin's Gulags, Roy abandoned doctrinaire Communism for a progressive humanism of the sort that appealed to Nehru, Bose, J.P and so on.. He died in 1954 already disillusioned with politics but still believing that it could be reconstituted as a sphere where men of the stamp of Tiger Jatin might yet flourish.

Tan Yun Shan, eleven years younger than Roy, was a Chinese scholar who came to India under the spell of Rabindranath Tagore and became one of the ornaments of Shantiniketan. His uniqueness was that he enjoyed good personal relations with Gandhi, Nehru, Indira as well as Mao and Chou En Lai. A man of extraordinary spirituality, he was close to the Dalai Lamas and made an unrivaled contribution to Buddhism in India as well as overseas.

In mentioning these two great men who could have served as a bridge between India and China, the question arises as to whether relations between the two countries could have turned out differently. More specifically, focusing solely on Bengal, whether Partition, vitiated the role that Bengali Communists like Roy, or Chinese scholars like Tan who had become Bengali (his daughter stood first at Uni in Bengali and took a PhD in the subject) could have played in finding a solution to the Tibetan question which would have been beneficial to its people and enabled its neighbors to enjoy ever improving relations on the basis of its peace and prosperity.

I'm kidding.

Tan Yun Shan saw his beloved Shantiniketan turn into a Govt. funded University. But he didn't lose heart. He had a religious project in Bodh Gaya to dedicate himself to. Not even the Secular Scientific Socialists can discover a way of Nationalizing the Buddha- something Tagore would have understood.
M.N.Roy, too, didn't die an utterly futile death. He came back to India, did his porridge- he got 6 years, the Brits were clearly better chaps than the Bolsheviks- and didn't become a Minister or even an M.L.A.
Thus he kept faith with Tiger Jatin and died without shaming that higher type of humanity which the ever burgeoning sphere of Politics has rendered utterly extinct.
For which I personally blame David Cameron
That boy aint right.

Iqbal vs. Tagore

Iqbal vs. Tagore? Is it a fair comparison? Tagore's family were rich, cultured, honoured and lived a sophisticated, cosmopolitan life.
Iqbal's grandfather was a Kashmiri Hindu given the choice of death or conversion to Islam after a charge of embezzlement was brought against him. Iqbal's father was a well to do tailor who did his best to enable his son to come up educationally. Thus, whatever his personal qualities, or however pious and upright the conduct of his father, Iqbal was not classed as 'Ashraf'- he was a mere plebeian from the point of view of the Muslim aristocrats of Punjab.
Unlike Faiz, for whom Persian was a family language, Iqbal did not learn elite diction from 'the old women' in his paternal house. Urdu purists claim to detect 'Punjabisms' in his language, while his Persian poetry- through praised by Iran's Supreme Guide- is not idiomatic and hence lacking in lyrical fervor.
Iqbal's English is very good- but it is the language of the academic- and Iqbal's philosophy, such as it is, more concerned with keeping up with current European fads and relating them, by no means critically, to Islamic thinkers- in other words, his work is simply an exercise in chauvinistic special pleading for a sectional interest within the British Empire.
However Iqbal, unlike Tagore, is very much a living force today. His characteristic confusion of ideas, grandiose diction, and sense of inferiority and injured racial pride are the hallmark of Post Colonial discourse. He was a true Prophet in that his works helped create, and now help sustain, a Nation which is nothing but his very own pathology writ large, poised to infect the whole world with its madness.
Tagore, on the other hand, after an early flirtation with the Revolutionaries, warned against chauvinistic nationalism, set his face against militarism, and preached a Humanistic Universalism at precisely the time when that message was most needed. Isaiah Berlin praises Tagore. E.M. Foster prefers Iqbal. India, for Foster, was nothing but muddle, confusion and noise. Iqbal, then, was Indian. Tagore merely High Victorian pi-jaw.

Googling Iqbal vs. Tagore, I found this- on a Pakistani discussion board-

'Now one of our notable research scholars M Ikram Chughtai, Director of the Urdu Science Board, has come up with a clear answer based on some new research. The current issue of the Lahore-based monthly Al-Ma'arif carries his revealing article on Iqbal and Tagore.

Chughtai has presented some interesting details. He tells us that despite being contemporaries and compatriots, the two poets never met each other. They did not even exchange letters. No written proof of a contact between them is traceable. However, it is said that once Tagore, while in Lahore, tried to meet Iqbal. He paid a visit to his Mayo Road residence but Iqbal was absent, gone to Bhopal for his medical treatment. Once back in Lahore, Iqbal perhaps could have written to Tagore and express his regrets. He did not. And there was a reason; Iqbal resented Tagore receiving the Nobel Prize. Chughtai says "Tagore's award had been hovering on Iqbal's mind throughout his life and he, directly or indirectly, could not free himself from this 'award complex'.

Chughtai has also made a detailed mention of the abortive efforts made by Iqbal and his well-wishers to get a Nobel for him. Soon another development was to take place which was to further sadden the Iqbal: King Raza Shah Pahlavi of Iran extended an invitation to Tagore to visit his country. He went there in 1932. As a royal guest, he was given tremendous welcome in many cities of Iran. While in Tehran, he received a similar invitation from the King of Iraq. In Baghdad, Tagore was received by King Faisal himself.

Chughtai assures us that Iqbal was greatly 'shocked' by these invitations and warm welcomes extended to a poet who he considered to be his rival. In one of his recently discovered letters, he wrote to Ghulam Abbas Akram, the then foreign minister of Iran, that Tagore was a non-Muslim and that "Tagore did an injustice to the Indian Muslims. He told the Muslims of Mesopotamia to persuade the Indian Muslims to cooperate with the Hindus for the freedom of India."

Tagore's attitude towards Iqbal was different. It can be felt in his two messages, one sent to Inter-collegiate Muslim Brotherhood of Lahore which celebrated Iqbal Day in January 1937 and the other of condolence on Iqbal's demise in 1938. In these messages the Bengali Nobel Laureate acknowledged Allama's greatness as a poet and universal value of his poetry.

Against this background, it is not surprising that the compilers and editors of the speeches and statements of Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah have expurgated the Quaid's statement issued on Tagore's death. The Quaid had paid rich tributes to the Bengali writer, saying "I am certainly grieved to hear the sad news of the death of one of the greatest of India's poets, philosophers and social workers. I had the privilege of knowing him from my younger days and the last time I had the honour of meeting him was in London in 1929. His very frank and illuminating discussions were a great source of encouragement. Above all, he was a true patriot and was always ready to understand and appreciate the opposite point of view. In his convocation address to the Gurmukhi University he made very weighty and frank observations about the slogan 'India is one and indivisible' which should be studied by every Indian. "It is an irreparable loss to India. Poet Tagore will live through his works with us".

Gora vs. Kim- Tagore vs. Kipling

Two Noble laureates born in the same decade, in the same part of the world, write novels, in the same decade, set in the same part of the world, focusing on a young lad who is actually ethnically British but who grows up thinking he is Indian. Kipling's Kim and Tagore's Gora are both about a quest for identity and have features of the classic bildungsroman.

Kipling's novel has been successfully adapted by Hollywood and, for all I know, perhaps Gora, too, has made it to the screen.
What are the differences between the two books?
Kim is exciting, full of strong memorable characters- no 'native', 'woman', or 'lower class' person is shown to be pallid, impotent or wholly heteronomous- and it has apoorvata in connection with Vedic spirituality. This follows from Kim ('who am I?') being identified with Visvamitra (friend-of-all-the world), who taught Lord Buddha the Vedas and who, in the Rg Veda, is depicted as having special powers over Rivers. Hence, Kim gets to guide the Lama to the river he seeks. No doubt, a thorough researcher will be able to point out that some Theosophist or other had written an article about Visvamitra and Vamadeva or something and that Kipling took the idea from there. Still, theosophists published all sorts of nonsense. It took Kipling's genius to fasten on something which
a) shows Veda is relevant to present day
b) adds apoorvata to our scripture reading
such that the Indian reader can say 'Bravo! A story for both children and adults- meaningful in every age!"
Now look at Gora.
1) It was already thirty years out of date at the time it was published- a major drawback given that Young Bengal was changing extremely fast and, in any case, unlike Turgenyev 's generation, Tagore's had no special importance.  By contrast, the Jugantar revolutionaries led extremely exciting lives. They had broad horizons. They were not mired in the madhouse of caste. What Thomas Mann said about Tagore's son- viz.  'he is brown and muscular- i.e masculine'- was even more true of the revolutionaries and the poetry of Kazi Nazrul, whereas Mann's criticism of Tagore- 'pallid... a nice old English lady..."- can be applied equally to the fastidious Brahmo's neo-Brahminical aesthetic.
Tagore, after a notable false start, simply fails to reflect the muscularity and broad horizons of the new generation. I'm not speaking of Aurobindo and Vivekananda but Bagha Jatin, M.N. Roy etc- in ardour and aspiration they were not exceptions, but, in fact, set the trend. I have read that Tagore himself was involved in their plot but also that the Ghaddaar's tried to assassinate him- surely a grand theme for a play- but, no, Tagore gave us Red Oleanders instead. Since Tagore himself wasn't a particularly wishy washy fellow why do we get stuck with this idea that Bengali men are all "Mamma's boys"- so good, so polite, never gets into fights, talks nonsense at such a rate that even the police spy will certify that he is 'good character- i.e. no testicles'."
2) Kim shows the Hindu Bengali and the Muslim Afghan working together to resist Russian encroachment in Afghanistan. In 1979, India should have been the first country to come forward to work with Pak to get Soviets out of that country. India shares responsibility for the terrible legacy of that aggression. What does Gora show? Sympathy for the poor and a sort of backhanded admiration for Islam. But the novel is essentially a silly and meaningless debate within high caste, comprador,  Hinduism that was of no interest to anybody under 50 years of age even at the time of publication.

Kim illustrates Kipling's belief that 'children, in India, have no caste' (Todd's amendment) and consequently they alone know India and should have a say in how to rule it. Gora illustrates Tagore's belief that Bengalis have no testicles and talk incessant shite.
Gora is venerated in India as a great work of art. Kim, however, has been vomited on by Edward Said. The vomit will, in time, be wiped off. Veneration for Gora, however, serves no useful end.