Mystic Poets : Rumi and Tagore

Mystic Poets  : Rumi and Tagore

Jawhar Sircar

January 15, 2018 of ‘Happenings’ Special Issue on  Tagore

        In this world of deafening din and amidst the beastly brutality that is perpetrated every day every where in the name of religion, what keeps the faithful going are the soft gongs of the bell of love. We strain to hear its gentle peal above the depressing cacophony for it reassures us not to lose heart for humanity is but one. For centuries, poets, prophets and singers have revelled in the songs of mystics who have grasped, in flashes that come and go, the essence of our existence that  lies essentially in its oneness with the Creator. Thus, the six centuries and half that separate two savants from two distant lands disappear, as do the rigours and dictates of their different religions, once they bask under the heavenly ray of mystic realisation. The mystic poets and scholars we refer to are Jalal-ad-din Muhammed Rumi of Persia and Turkey and Rabindranath Tagore of Bengal and India. Rumi was born in 1207 and Tagore in 1861 and even though they never sat face to face, they lit the same lamp of eternal truth: of love, peace and hope. Rumi wrote primarily in Persian and Tagore in Bengali. At times, Rumi used Turkish, Arabic and Greek while Tagore spoke and wrote a lot in English. Rumi’s  Masnavi (Mathnawi) is regarded as a masterpiece in Persian, while Tagore’s Gitanjali was the first work from the wide world of the darker majority that lies beyond Europe to be accorded the Nobel Prize. Both have been translated into innumerable languages and are widely read today all over. Their poetry has influenced not only in their own language but the literature of so many other countries as well.

              But where we are concerned, it is not their mastery over the language that draws us but their sheer beauty of conception and the utter fluidity of expression that mesmerises us, long after both have left the world. They stress on the essential unity of mankind and of man with the divine. As Alice Beatrice Chesca puts it so wonderfully: “their lyrics display in their thought a perfect world belonging to a unique spirituality, full of love, God, passion, music, colour and metaphor”.^[1] One comparison will explain how both expressed their undiluted wonder at the handiwork of the Master and reposed their complete faith and unqualified subservience to Him. In his Gitanjali (Tumi Kemon Korey Gana Koro He Guni, Tagore breaks into raptures: 

       “I know not how thou singest, my master!

        I ever listen in silent amazement.

        The light of thy music illumines the world.

        The life breath of thy music runs from sky to sky.

        The holy stream of thy music breaks through

         All stony obstacles and rushes on.

         My heart longs to join in thy song,

         But vainly struggles for a voice.

         I would speak, but speech breaks not into song,

         And I cry out baffled.

         Ah, thou hast made my heart captive

         In the endless meshes of thy music, my master!”^[2]

Rumi expresses his amazement in a similar vein when he exclaims: 

       “You are the master alchemist.

         You light the fire of love

         On earth and in the sky,

         In the heart and soul

         Of every being

         Through your love

         Existence and nonexistence merge.

         All opposites unite.

         All that is profane, becomes sacred again”^[3]

In yet another poem, Music Master, Rumi’s expressions^[4] are even more closer to Tagore’s:

        “We rarely hear the inward music

          But we are dancing to it, nevertheless

          Directed by the one who teaches us

          The pure joy of the sun,

          Our Music Master”^[5]

   

        We can literally quote hundreds of verses and poems where Rumi and Tagore are one and inseparable. But then, on closer examination of their lives we see how different were their backgrounds. Jalal-ad-din Rumi was from a deeply religious background and like his father, he was also a Muslim scholar and teacher of Islamic studies. He is invariably referred to as a religious teacher: in Afghanistan, Rumi is known as Mawlānā, in Turkey as Mevlâna, and in Iran as Molavī. Tagore’s grandfather and father were from a family of feudal lords who were well known capitalist entrepreneurs as well. At the same time, they were also prominent leaders of the new ‘Protestant’ revolution, the Brahmo sect, that broke off from the prevailing religion of Hinduism and were often derided for their faith, ritual and lifestyles. His father was a pious other-worldly man and was, in fact, called Maharshi or the ‘great sage’ of the Brahmo faith. Tagore never wavered from its ideals; he imbibed its passion for discarding Hindu superstitions and rituals, but he rose far above his inheritance. He hardly ever referred to any deity in his works and that was rather difficult given the all-pervasive nature of Hindu polytheism, where every idiom, metaphor and virtue or vice was invariably associated with some god or goddess. In fact, his constantly abstract address of divinity could easily be substituted by the beloved. We must understand that while Rumi spoke to the dominant and, in most cases, the only religion all around him, Tagore belonged to a religious minority, a microscopic minority, whose primary audience consisted of idolatrous Hindus: who were his readers, listeners and audience. He was acutely conscious that his Bengali language belonged equally to the Muslims of the province, who were in a majority according to the colonial census statistics.

          Despite this unenviable situation, Rabindranath Tagore was never uneasy for his words flowed from his heart, rather than his pen. And his very soul was that of a mystic who saw no barrier among religions and a poet who believed passionately in love for God and Man as the distilled essence of all religions. Not a word of his, nor any phrase ever offended the sensibilities of either the Hindus or the Muslims of Bengal who were, unfortunately, quite adversarial at critical junctures of his life. In fact, in the 1950s, the Pakistani regime cracked down on the Bengali language patriots of East Pakistan (now, Bangladesh) for opposing the imposition of Urdu. Tagore was dragged in as the Bengali Muslims considered him to be the greatest exponent of the language for which they had laid down their lives.^[6]. Pakistan made several attempts to wean away the Muslim Bengalis of East Pakistan from Tagore by painting him to be a landed aristocrat (which he was); a religious Hindu (which was not true) and an exploiter who had no sympathy for the toiling Muslim masses: again untrue, as evidenced from Tagore’s life and works. The West Pakistani establishment rummaged through billion of words and expressions that Tagore had written so spontaneously in order to find some proof of being pro-Hindu or of some snobbery or bigotry but it failed altogether.^[7]

            Rumi, on the other hand, had no such circumstances to tackle but he had to contend against the deep rooted religiosity of Muslims that could be rather intolerant at times. He was a Sufi mystic who could transcend the mandate of orthodoxy and talk freely of wine, love and songs. But none could question his utter devotion as a Sunni Muslim as well, who was an expert in the scriptures. Rumi belonged to the class of Islamic philosophers that includes Ibn Arabi the Andulasian theologian and Mulla Sandra of Iran who are regarded as the greatest philosophers of Islam and Sufism. These transcendental philosophers are often studied together in traditional schools Islamic mysticism, philosophy and theosophy throughout the Muslim world. Rumi, whose chief message is the unity of being, imbibed the theosophy or transcendental philosophy with his heart and soul. It is in this context that we appreciate Rumi as a thirteenth-century Muslim scholar who took Islam seriously and declared openly that:

         “I am the servant of the Qur'an as long as I have life.
          I am the dust on the path of Muhammad, the Chosen one.
          If anyone quotes anything except this from my sayings,
          I am quit of him and outraged by these words.”

     Rumi asserts what he sincerely believed in: "The Light of Muhammad has become a thousand branches (of knowledge), a thousand, so that both this world and the next have been seized from end to end. If Muhammad rips the veil open from a single such branch, thousands of monks and priests will tear the string of false belief from around their waists.”^[8] We need to appreciate the state of knowledge in the thirteenth century when Islam appeared as a great tsunami of energy that had gripped the known world that was still rife with brutality and primitively cruelty. The Western world was caught in negative orthodoxy of the medieval ‘Dark Ages’ and religious reform movements were centuries away: as were the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Tagore lived six and a half centuries later when Science had come to dominate the world and was naturally less orthodox. In fact, as one who was from a reforming mission, he could not afford to be identified with any religion or religion per se. Other than this essential requirement was also the very philosophy that guided the poet laureate: universal brotherhood as a panacea to the rival and often bitter claims of rival religions in India and the world in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. 

     Orthodoxy notwithstanding, Rumi’s depth of spiritual vision extended beyond narrow sectarian concerns. His belief in the superiority of Islam does not instil any hatred for other religions, for he believed that "the Light of Muhammad does not abandon a Zoroastrian or Jew in the world. May the shade of his good fortune shine upon everyone! He brings all of those who are led astray into the Way out of the desert."^[9] As a true Sufi, he explains that:

       “On the seeker’s path, wise men and fools are one.
        In His love, brothers and strangers are one.
        Go on! Drink the wine of the Beloved!
        In that faith, Muslims and pagans are one”^[10]

        Tagore, on the other hand, was more open to the finest that different religious philosophies had to offer: the Upanishads, Vaishnavism, the Brahmo Samaj, the Bhagavad Gita, modern Western thought and literature, Christianity, and the liberal and humanism. Yet, both were eternally hungry in their quest to be one with the Creator of this wondrous universe and that is where their mystic love dominated their intellectual cravings. In Tagore’s words:

     “Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

      He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground

      And where the path-maker is breaking stones.

      He is with them

      In sun and in shower,

      And his garment is covered with dust.

      Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him

      The bonds of creation;

      He is bound with us for ever.

      Meet him and stand by him in toil

      And in sweat of thy brow.”^[11]

               Rumi had penned similar verses on how God lies amongst the downtrodden and not in opulence, but these lines explain how he had completely surrendered to the Almighty.

             “We sleep in God's unconsciousness,

               We wake in God's open hand.

               We weep God's rain,

               We laugh God's lightning.

                We are then

                in this complicated world-tangle,

                That is really the single straight

                 line down at the beginning of Allah!

                 Nothing. 

                 We are

                 emptiness.”^[12]

              We can go on for hours and days on how two great masters separated by thousands of miles and so many centuries of time could speak in a similar vein. This is just a small sample of how those who can cross the reality of physics for the underlying metaphysics that binds us all.

       

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^[1]The Oriental Culture and its Eternal Fascination; Acta Universitatis Danubius, Romania, Vol 5, No. 1/2011, p 177.

^[2] geetabitan.com, from translation made by Tagore himself.

^[3] Quoted in Chesca’s article quoted above.

^[4] Mustafa Zaman Abbasi: Breeze of Tagore, Rumi and Lalon, p 165 in Anne Teresa Tymieniecka: Sharing Poetic Expressions: Beauty, Sublime, Mysticism in Islamic and Occidental Culture. Springer

^[5] The Essential Rumi. Music Master https://www.wattpad.com/415867572-the-essential-rumi-completed-music-master

^[6] Anisuzzaman: Claiming and Disclaiming a Cultural Icon: Tagore in East Pakistan and Bangladesh. University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol 77, no 4, Fall 2008, pp 1958-69.

^[7] Fakrul Alam: Tagore and National Identity Formation in Bangladesh, p 225 ff in Debashish Banerji: Rabindranath Tagore in the 21st Century: Theoretical Renewals. Springer India 2015.

^[8] Ibrahim Gamard, Rumi and Self Discovery, Dar al Masnavi

^[9] Ibrahim Gamard, Rumi and Islam, p. 163

^[10] Amin Banani and Anthony A. Lee: Rumi: 53 Secrets from the Tavern of Love, translation.  p. 3

^[11] Open Thine Eyes, Gitanjali

^[12] The Essential Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks et al. 1995. Castle Books, New Jersey.