The Green Imagination

Rabindranath Tagore’s understanding of his own culture—and indeed of his own consciousness—is mediated through a belief in the Indian subcontinent as being a ‘vast land of forests’, or even a large forest.

When the first Aryan invaders appeared in India it was a vast land of forests, and the newcomers rapidly took advantage of them. These forests afforded them shelter from the fierce heat of the sun and the ravages of tropical storms, pastures for cattle, fuel for sacrificial fire, and materials for building cottages. And the different Aryan clans with their patriarchal heads settled in the different forest tracts which had some special advantage of natural protection, and food and water in plenty. Thus in India it was in the forests that our civilisation had its birth, and it took a distinct character from this origin and environment.

What does it imply, when one sees an entire civilization as having originated in a forest? What makes it different from a civilization that, for instance, is biblically said to have found its birth in a garden, as the civilizational culture of Rabindranath’s colonizer had?

India’s literature and culture, of thinking and of living, comes from the culture of the forest. Rabindranath rarely lets go of an opportunity to emphasize this. In ‘Religion of the Forest’ he contrasts this with European civilization. ‘This ideal of perfection preached by the forest-dwellers of ancient India runs through the heart of our classical literature and still dominates our mind. The legends related in our epics cluster under the forest shade bearing all through their narrative the message of the forest dwellers. Our two greatest classical dramas find their background in scenes of the forest hermitage, which are permeated by the association of these sages.’ He is linking Kalidasa, Shakuntala, sages, historical and mythical, and forest dwellers with his contemporaries, with himself. It is an unexpected leap, even a conceit, to ask, to investigate, intellectually and spiritually, what links us, and what survives of the tradition of the forest and of forest thinking in us, in the twentieth century.

Bibhutibhushan, in Aranyak, sees the dissonance between forest dwellers and a city person such as himself, the forest and ‘Bharatvarsha’. Rabindranath’s energy lies in the opposite direction, in seeking continuity. Europe derives its cultural métier from the sea: ‘The history of the Northmen of Europe is resonant with the music of the sea. That sea is not merely topographical in its significance but represents certain ideals of life which still guide the history and inspire the creations of that race. In the sea, nature presented herself to those men in her aspect of a danger, a barrier which seemed to be at constant war with the land and its children . . . he fought and won, and the spirit of fight continued in him. This fight he still maintains; it is the fight against disease and poverty, tyranny of matter and of man.’ He identifies this spirit of fighting, of taming the untamed, with European culture.

Understanding cultures through the elements, through the opposition of land and water, and through the indulgence of plant life and its related accessories of thinking and living allows Rabindranath to see cultures and collectives without vilifying them. India’s culture of leisure, of the necessity of rest, of optimism, of a natural cosmopolitanism that comes from the accommodativeness of the forest, where there is room for everyone, where no one is rejected, and of ananda, a spirit that Rabindranath understands as genetic to this place and its people, is a gift of forest living. ‘…‘in the level tracts of Northern India men found no barrier between their lives and the grand life that permeates the universe. The forest entered into a close relationship with their work and leisure, with their daily necessities and contemplations. They could not think of other surroundings as separate or inimical. So the view of the truth, which these men found, did not make manifest the difference, but rather the unity of all things. They uttered their faith in these words: Yadidam kinch sarvam prana ejati nihsratam (All that is vibrates with life, having come out from life)’. This is a challenge to the European post-Renaissance anthropocentric understanding of life; man is not at the centre—he is, like all other forms of the living, only a manifestation of life, he is merely one of many, none of whom are rejected by the structure of the forest. ‘According to the true Indian view, our consciousness of the world, merely as the sum total of things that exist, and as governed by laws, is imperfect. But it is perfect when our consciousness realises all things as spiritually one with it, and therefore capable of giving us joy. For us the highest purpose of this world is not merely living in it, knowing it and making use of it, but realising our own selves in it through expansion of sympathy; not alienating ourselves from it and dominating it, but comprehending and uniting it with ourselves in perfect union’.

Rabindranath then proceeds to make a very important declaration— that the classical writers whose poems and plays are set in the forest were writing when the age of the forest was already over. This is our literary tradition then, that makes them our ancestors: in both, in them and in us, the forest is a memory, a biological memory, where it is not nostalgia for forest living that determines literary form alone but where the forest gives ethical and intellectual direction to the worldview. ‘When Vikramaditya became king, Ujjayini a great capital, and Kalidasa its poet, the age of India’s forest retreats had passed . . . In Kalidasa’s drama, Shakuntala, the hermitage, which dominates the play, overshadowing the king’s palace, has the same idea running through it the recognition of the kinship of man with conscious and unconscious creation alike’. What Rabindranath is trying to suggest is quite revolutionary—that no matter whether it is a Sanskrit poet from 1,500 years ago or him, or us, a hundred years later, we are all inevitably latecomers, that ‘nature’ has been imagined in a prelapsarian way by poets as much as historians. It is revolutionary because it frees us from being throttled by nostalgia and allows us to renew and remake our relationship with the natural world with greater immediacy, without the burden of recreating what is lost or what possibly had no existence outside the human imagination.

A poet of a later age, while describing a hermitage in his Kadambari, tells us of the posture of salutation in the flowering lianas as they bow to the wind; of the sacrifice offered by the trees scattering their blossoms; of the grove resounding with the lessons chanted by the neophytes, and the verses repeated by the parrots, learnt by constantly hearing them; of the wild-fowl enjoying vaishva-deva-bali-pinda (the food offered to the divinity which is in all creatures); of the ducks coming up from the lake for their portion of the grass seed spread in the cottage yards to dry; and of the deer caressing with their tongues the young hermit boys. It is again the same story. The hermitage shines out, in all our ancient literature, as the place where the chasm between man and the rest of creation has been bridged.

Even as he posits this against the ‘passion’ and ‘fury’ of Shakespeare’s plays, and how India’s classical literature reminds us of the coexistence of everyone and everything and the resultant peace, not chaos but calm, Rabindranath makes us aware of the spirit of indolence seemingly indulged by nature that the classical poets are aiming to create through the gestures and postures of language. ‘Posture’, ‘salutation’, ‘chanted’—these are as artificial an understanding of nature as is the idea of ‘hermitage’ itself.

We are given a model of monarchy whose ethos, ethics, and structure are dependent on the king finding their way through a forest: ‘King Dilipa, with Queen Sudakshina, has entered upon the life of the forest. The great monarch is busy tending the cattle of the hermitage. Thus the poem opens, amid scenes of simplicity and self-denial.’ Rabindranath chooses to read the Ramayana as the human’s relationship with the forest, with nature, of interest and curiosity and coexistence:

In the Ramayana, Rama and his companions, in their banishment, had to traverse forest after forest; they had to live in leaf-thatched huts, to sleep on the bare ground. But as their hearts felt their kinship with woodland, hill, and stream, they were not in exile amidst these. Poets, brought up in an atmosphere of different ideals, would have taken this opportunity of depicting in dismal colours the hardship of the forestlife in order to bring out the martyrdom of Ramachandra with all the emphasis of a strong contrast. But, in the Ramayana, we are led to realise the greatness of the hero, not in a fierce struggle with Nature, but in sympathy with it, Sita, the daughter-in-law of a great kingly house, goes along the forest paths. We read:

‘She asks Rama about the flowering trees, and shrubs and creepers which she has not seen before. At her request Lakshmana gathers and brings her plants of all kinds, exuberant with flowers, and it delights her heart to see the forest rivers, variegated with their streams and sandy banks, resounding with the call of heron and duck.’

The worship of Ram, the hero and his heroism that has driven the country in the last few decades, the overwhelming human-centredness in the interpretations of the epic, is rejected by Rabindranath for this model of forest living that gives dignity to all its residents. Only such a life will bring ‘sachhidananda’, pure consciousness, pure bliss, says the poet. Such a view he finds missing in Shakespeare and Milton, for instance, though he registers Shakespeare’s unease with kings and their courtly life. In Paradise Lost Rabindranath misses the sense of real ‘kinship’ between humans and animals and plants; the focus on man disturbs him. Comparing literary—and ecological—cultures, he writes: ‘Not that India denied the superiority of man, but the test of that superiority lay, according to her, in the comprehensiveness of sympathy, not in the aloofness of absolute distinction’. India’s pilgrimage sites, he notices, are in forested hills, ‘man is free, not to look upon Nature as a source of supply of his necessities, but to realise his soul beyond himself ’. This is Rabindranath’s plant philosophy—not the garden, where man is king and controller, but the forest and its natural cosmopolitanism, and it was this that he would try to recreate in Santiniketan, in the gardens of Uttarayan, and in Sriniketan.

(Excerpted with permission from Sumana Roy’s Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal; published by Oxford University Press)