Rabindranath Tagore, the Communist Manifesto, and World Literature || Azfar Hussain

Rabindranath Tagore read the Communist Manifesto not because he wanted to read it in the first place but because his grandnephew Soumendranath Tagore--that odd ball out, that "damn communist," as he used to be called, in the famous Tagore family--really wanted Rabindranath to edit the draft of his (Soumnendranath's) translation of the Communist Manifesto itself. Indeed, the very first translation of the Manifesto to have appeared in India was in Bengali; and it was probably Soumendranath Tagore's own Bengali translation, at least partly edited by Rabindranath Tagore himself.

But, no, the non-Marxist Tagore did not end up hating the Manifesto. In fact he went to the extent of borrowing and mobilizing the Manifesto's idea of what might be called "capitalist globalization" in his by-now-famous essay called "Shikhkhar Milon"--an essay which is not only about humanist and "liberal" education as such but also about political economy. Even more significantly, what interested Tagore was the idea of "World Literature"--one that didn't reach Tagore directly at that point via Goethe who coined the term "Weltliteratur" (World Literature), but one that, for Tagore, emanated from the Communist Manifesto itself, although Tagore read Goethe later.

It's not for nothing that Tagore ended up writing an entire essay called "Visyasahittaya" (World Literature) in which he also rehearses the Hegelian idea of totality mediated by Marx, while of course inflecting that idea by his own liberal-humanist predilection for seeking "unity." Mark, then, what Tagore says in his piece on what he enjoys calling "World Literature": "It's time we pledged that our goal is to view universal humanity in universal literature by emancipating ourselves from rustic uncatholicity; that we shall recognize a totality in each particular author's work, and that in this totality we shall perceive the interrelations among all human efforts at expression."