The Indian Testimony
Amiya Chakravarty
Want to read
Buy on Kobo
Rate this book
In a very interesting essay Amiya Chakravarty discusses the Indian philosophy of peace. The great merit of this philosophy consists in the fact that it goes back to first principles. Peace, it insists, is more than a mere matter of political and economic arrangements. Because man stands on the borderline between the animal and the divine, the temporal and the eternal, peace on earth possesses a cosmic significance. Every violent extinction of a human life has a transcendent and eternal significance. Moreover the mind of the universe is, among other things, the peace that passes understanding. Man’s final end is the realization that, in his essence, he is one with the universal mind. But if he would realize his identity with the peace that passes understanding, he must begin by living in the peace that does not pass understanding—peace between nations and groups, peace in personal relationships, peace within the divided and multiple personality. There are many excellent utilitarian reasons for refraining from violence; but the ultimate and completely cogent reason is metaphysical in its nature.
40 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 11, 2017
===
Displaying 1 of 1 review
Mark
321 reviews
3 followers
Follow
April 3, 2022
The pamphlet reflects the religious and nationalistic beliefs of the author, interpreting India’s historical blending of Hindu, Jainism, Buddhist, Islam and Christianity. Pacifism is so greatly the goal that the warring aspects of the Gita are simply dismissed as errant. The violent aspects of the other religious texts and histories are not mentioned. Perhaps the interpretation reflects the enthusiasm of the times for Indian, a young independent nation still setting its borders and relationship with newly formed Pakistan. And the country’s desire to stay neutral in the growing polarization of the Cold War. Yet there is also recognition of young India’s deep challenges in addressing poverty, hunger and population growth.
The forward by Aldous Huxley contains a few statements worth quoting:
“Those who seek simple solutions for complex problems may have the best of intentions; but unfortunately, there is an original sin of the intellect in our habit of arbitrary over-simplification.” (p. 3)
“The principal elements of our complex problem are these: First, some persons are organically tough, aggressive, ruthless, and power-loving. Second, the effective, although not yet the nominal, religion of the twentieth century is nationalistic idolatry. Monotheism, which never enjoyed more than a precarious experience, has everywhere been replaced by the worship of homemade local dieties… The Third major element in our problem is the fact that the population of our planet is increasing much faster than presently available supplies of food and raw materials. Hunger is a principal cause of political revolution and, in a nationalistic context, of war.” (p. 4)
From Chakravarty, we receive this reminder: “the greatest danger comes from minds which will oppose evil with evil and call it good.” (p. 12)
“Violence or evil, in an external form or intent, can never be a cure for violence and evil. Both oppose the law of existence; they deny, arbitrarily, the right of existence of others. In this sense, we have already participated in the crime of homicide if we have mentally considered others to be expendable, if we have denied them the right to live.” (p. 15)
pendle-hill-quaker
Like
Comment
Displaying 1 of 1 review
===
tagoreanworld
https://tagoreanworld.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/tagores-brief-writings/
World Change as conceived by Rabindranath Tagore
Theorising World Change
Chris Marsh
← The Occupy Movement: a commentaryTagorean Swadeshi →
Posted on November 22, 2011 by tagoreanworld
It was probably not easy for Tagore to achieve a balance between active work and the detachment needed for creative writing, as Tagore expressed in one of his many published ‘Thoughts’:
‘Just as it does not do to have a writer entirely removed from the feeling to which he is giving expression, so also it does not conduce to the truest poetry to have him too close to it. Memory is the brush which can best lay on the true poetic color. Nearness has too much of the compelling about it, and the imagination is not sufficiently free unless it can get away from its influence.’[1]
It was perhaps this difficulty which resulted in Tagore’s poetry and prose output containing a vast number of small fragments. Amiya Chakravarty wrote in his introduction to a section on ‘Philosophical Meditations’ in A Tagore Reader that the texts of the Sadhana lectures came from Tagore’s collection of ‘Thought Relics’. When a book of these short prose fragments (103 in the first edition, 192 in the second) were published by Macmillan in 1921, it did not receive much attention from critics.[2] There is a similar picture of fragmentary writing with his poetry.
William Radice, leading academic, translator and authority on Tagore’s creative writing, made a major contribution to reviving interest in Tagore in Britain and internationally with his Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Poems in 1985 and then Selected Short Stories in 1991.[3] In 2001 Radice published Particles, Jottings, Sparks his translation of three books of Tagore’s ‘brief poems’.[4] Radice begins his introduction to that work by considering the question of why Tagore never wrote an epic, and goes on to describe the ‘big in small’ content in the poems which Tagore called kabitika, which would be ‘poemlet’ in English. The earliest of the Bengali originals which Radice translated was Kanika (‘Particles’) from 1899, containing 110 poemlets.[5]
There are thousands of ‘thought relics’ and ‘poemlets’ in Tagore’s complete oeuvre, and they are still being collected. Radice says that these fragments were Tagore’s outbursts of feelings ‘when he felt burdened by all the responsibilities and activities he took on to himself’. Radice evidently considers that Tagore was too much on the kama-yoga path, but he is being disingenuous when he writes: ‘Unfortunately, as Sisir Kumar Das rightly says, “the truth was that he was not only a poet.”’ Radice has taken Das’s words out of context, as we can see from the longer quotation I included earlier.[6]
Radice has voiced his opinion in public about Tagore scholarship today, which is that too much attention is paid to Tagore’s ideas and not enough to his poetry.[7] Scholars who are more interested in Tagore’s ideas might counter Radice’s view by wondering how it was that Tagore wrote so much poetry, particularly those thousands of fragments. In 1904, in one of his rare autobiographical pieces, Tagore suggested he had ‘no control’ over his poetry writing:
‘When I look back on this process of my writing poetry for so long I can see this clearly – it’s a business over which I have had no control. When I was writing, I thought, it is I who am writing, but now I know that’s not true. Because these poems are fragments and in them the significance of the whole body of the poetry is incomplete. And what that significance was I had no idea. I had been adding one poem to another, blind to the consequence. The little meaning of each one I imagined I saw as a given point. Now taking them as a whole I see well enough that a single continuous significance flowed through them all.’[8]
As this piece continues, no point to it all emerges: ‘the poetry remained a riddle and the life likewise’. Tagore is confirming an impression I have had that poetry writing for him was something like an ‘obsessive compulsive disorder’. I came across a small piece of evidence of this in an archive. His colleague Leonard Elmhirst, who accompanied Tagore on his travels in 1924 and 1925, related in a journal entry how on one of the ocean voyages, he used to help the Poet, who had been unwell, to sit up in his bunk each morning to write a poem, before which he could not engage with any other matters.[9] From Tagore’s two autobiographies about his boyhood and youth, one can see that a child psychologist might say that this lonely child wrote poems to get attention. Radice hazards a counterpart to that, with his footnote about critics and biographers being ‘shy of probing Tagore’s psychology’, and then referring to an exception to this in a book by Manasi Dasgupta ‘which sees Tagore’s unrelenting efforts in the practical sphere as stemming partly from fear of his father’s disapproval of purely literary activity’.[10]
Advertisements
REPORT THIS AD
Thousands of Tagore’s poems in manuscript have been collected, originally by himself and by servants and staff, family members, colleagues, friends and acquaintances, and are now preserved in archives. An enormous number of his poems have been published in magazines and in books. Tagore’s other literary writings were also collected, published and archived, as were his many addresses and lectures. Some commentators have suggested that this hoarding of Tagore’s work is not altogether a good thing, including the Poet himself, with a verse Radice quotes:
‘Why fill your bags with my every verbal scrap?
‘Things that belong to the dust should be left to drop.’[11]
Edward Thompson, commenting on Tagore’s life and work in 1921, said that Tagore ‘has written a great deal too much’,[12] and Ashis Nandy wrote in 1999 that some of Tagore’s work is mediocre and dated, and that a ‘leaner and a less flabby Tagore has a better chance of survival as a relevant creative mind in the rest of the world in the twenty-first century’.[13] Another factor is that the sheer mass of writing is so impressive that it obscures the fact that there are aspects of Tagore’s work that one wishes Tagore had written more about.
Das Gupta has specialised in ‘the relatively unknown’ aspects of Tagore’s life, ‘as an educator and rural reformer’.[14] She found in her research on the Institute of Rural Reconstruction, known as Sriniketan, that Tagore never wrote a full and coherent account of his practical projects, and that much of his thinking has to be pieced together from occasional comments.[15] Clearly this does not mean that Tagore’s practical projects, his ‘life’s work’, were not important enough to warrant a book-length monograph. It means that it was not his style to compose a full and coherent account on that or on any subject. As we have seen, fragmentary writing in prose and poetry are more typical. This is not to denigrate Tagore’s writings, or to make excuses for them – or to suggest that Tagore was any less of an intellectual. He was a great thinker as well as a great activist, as is shown by some of his substantial essays, such as those which first impressed me: ‘City and Village’ and ‘Society and State’ and others which were selected for translation for the centenary collection Towards Universal Man.[16]
[1] ‘Thoughts from Rabindranath Tagore’, in A Tagore Reader, ed. by Amiya Chakravarty (London: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 276-9 (p. 276).
[2] Notes, in The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Volume THREE: A Miscellany , ed. by Sisir Kumar Das (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996), pp. 967-1013 (p. 967).
[3] William Radice, ed. and trans., Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2005 [1985]); Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Short Stories (London: Penguin, 2005 [1991])
[4] Rabindranath Tagore: Particles, Jottings, Sparks: The Collected Brief Poems, ed. and trans. by William Radice (London: Angel, 2001)
[5] Radice, Introduction, in Particles, Jottings, Sparks, pp. 1-33 (pp. 1-9)
[6] [in-chapter ref]
[7] William Radice, comment made during the Panel Discussion, at the conference ‘Revisiting Rabindranath’ organised by the Tagore Centre UK, 6-8 May 2011.
[8] Rabindranath Tagore, Of Myself (Atmaparichay), trans. by Devadita Joardar and Joe Winter (London: Anvuil, 2006), p. 17.
[9] From an entry in travel diaries in the ‘Leonard Elmhirst Papers’ in the Dartington Archive.
[10] Radice, p. 30.
[11] Radice, p. 21.
[12] E. J. Thompson, Rabindranath Tagore: His Life and Work (Calcutta: Associated, 1921), p. 70.
[13] Ashis Nandy, ‘Violence and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century: Rabindranath Tagore and the Problem of Testimony’, in Rabindranath Tagore: Universality and Tradition, ed. By Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandir (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2003), pp. 264-81 (p. 278).
[14] Uma Das Gupta, Preface, in Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. ix-xi (p. ix).
[15] Uma Das Gupta, ‘Rabindranath Tagore on Rural Reconstruction: The Sriniketan Programme, 1921-41’, Indian Historical Review, 4 (1978), 354-78 (p. 364).
[16] Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Society and State’, in Towards Universal Man (London: Asia Publishing House, 1961), pp. 49-66; ‘City and Village’, in Towards Universal Man, pp. 302-22.
Share this:
===
Amiya Chakravarty
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For film director, see Amiya Chakravarty (director).
Amiya Chakravarty
.jpg)
Born
Amiya Chandra Chakravarty
10 April 1901
Serampore, British Raj (now India)
Died 12 June 1986
Santiniketan, West Bengal, India
Amiya Chandra Chakravarty (1901–1986) was an Indian literary critic, academic, and Bengali poet. He was a close associate of Rabindranath Tagore, and edited several books of his poetry. He was also an associate of Gandhi, and an expert on the American catholic writer and monk, Thomas Merton.
Chakravarty was honoured for his own poetry with the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1963. He taught literature and comparative religion in India for nearly a decade and then for more than two decades at universities in England and the U.S. In 1970, he was honoured by the Government of India with the Padma Bhushan award.[1]
Education and career[edit]
He studied in Hare School, Calcutta and graduated from St. Columba's College, Hazaribagh, which was then under Patna University.[2] He joined Visva-Bharati University in 1921 as a student. Later, he became a teacher there.[citation needed]
He was literary secretary to Rabindranath Tagore from 1924 to 1933. During this time, he was a close associate of the poet. He was Tagore's travel companion during his tours to Europe and America in 1930 and to Iran and Iraq in 1932.[3]
He was also a close associate of Mahatma Gandhi, walking with Gandhi in the Salt March of 1930.[4]
Following his 1933 journey with Tagore, he left India to study at Oxford University, and in 1937 earned a D.Phil. He worked at Oxford as a senior research fellow from 1937 to 1940. During this time, he also taught in Selly Oak College in Birmingham as a lecturer. He moved back to India in 1940 to become a professor of English at the University of Calcutta.[3]
In 1948, Chakravarty moved to the US to join the Department of English in Howard University. He was a visiting fellow in English at Yale University, and a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton during 1950–51.[5] In 1953, he became a professor of Comparative Oriental Religions and Literature, Boston University.[6][7] He also held professorships at Smith College and later the State University of New York at New Paltz.[citation needed]
He wrote both poetry and prose and a number of articles in journals of India, England and the United States. He wrote many verse collections in Bengali, most notable among these are Chalo Jai and Ghare Pherar Din.[8] His poetry reflects idealism, humanism and a great love of nature and beauty.[8] He was awarded the Unesco Prize for his book, Chalo Jai. In 1963, he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for Ghare Pherar Din. He authored the book Dynasts and the Post-war Age in Poetry, which is a critical work on Thomas Hardy's poetry.[2][9]
Chakravarty met with many of the notable figures of his time, including Jawaharlal Nehru, Albert Schweitzer, Boris Pasternak, Albert Einstein and Thomas Merton.[citation needed]
He visited Merton in November 1966 at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Merton later dedicated his book, Zen and the Birds of Appetite (1968), to Chakravarty.[citation needed]
He served as a delegate to the United Nations for India [10]
Chakaravarty edited a number of English translations of Tagore's works. Most well known among these are: A Tagore Reader (1961) and The Housewarming and other Selected Writings (1965). He was also a consulting editor for The Asian journal of Thomas Merton by Thomas Merton.[11]
Recognition[edit]Padma Bhushan from the Govt. of India (1970)[12]
The Deshikottama from Visva-Bharati
Sahitya Akademi Award (1963)[13]
References[edit]
^ "Padma Awards" (PDF). Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. 2015. Archived from the original (PDF) on 15 October 2015. Retrieved 21 July 2015.
^ Jump up to:a b p247, Religious Faith and World Culture, Amandus William Loos, ISBN 0-8369-1976-9, from Google books result
^ Jump up to:a b A document from peacecouncil.net Archived 6 January 2009 at the Wayback Machine
^ A speech by Richard Hughes Archived 3 January 2009 at the Wayback Machine
^ "entry from Institute for Advanced Study's Community of Scholars database". Archived from the original on 25 November 2015. Retrieved 15 January 2013.
^ Boston University Article on Theological Education Archived 21 March 2005 at the Wayback Machine
^ An introduction from a page in gospelink.com[permanent dead link]
^ Jump up to:a b p 510, Modern Indian Literature, an Anthology: Volume I, K. M. George, Sahitya Akademi, ISBN 81-7201-324-8, from Google books result
^ List of Early Criticism on Thomas Hardy's works Archived 15 May 2008 at the Wayback Machine
^ Thomas Merton(1985). The Hidden Ground of Love
^ "ISBNDB page for Thomas Merton's books". Archived from the original on 4 June 2011. Retrieved 21 April 2008.
^ "Padma Awards Directory (1954–2009)" (PDF). Ministry of Home Affairs. Archived from the original (PDF) on 10 May 2013.
^ List of Sahitya Akademi Award recIpients (Bengali) Archived 10 April 2008 at the Wayback Machine
External links[edit]Visva-bharati page on Amiya Chakravarty
Excerpts from a 1993 book on Amiya Chakravarty
Influence of Baudelaire on Bengali Poetry
William Penn Lecture by Amiya Chakravarty on Gandhi's work and message (1950) Archived 3 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine
show
v
t
e
Padma Bhushan award recipients (1970–1979)
show
Authority control databases
Categories: 1901 births
1986 deaths
Bengali male poets
Bengali-language poets
Visva-Bharati University alumni
Alumni of the University of Oxford
Academic staff of the University of Calcutta
Howard University faculty
Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars
Boston University faculty
Rabindranath Tagore
Indian literary critics
Recipients of the Padma Bhushan in literature & education
Recipients of the Sahitya Akademi Award in Bengali
20th-century Indian poets
Poets from West Bengal
===
