Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s and Home Minister Amit Shah’s attempts at appropriating Rabindranath Tagore without a basic understanding of his aesthetics and ideology are questionable. Politicians should ideally refrain from meddling with artists and writers from a different – often superior – intellectual sphere. Has either Modi or Shah read a single poem, short story, novel or play written by Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, when British poets WB Yeats and Ezra Pound worked with him on the English translation of Gitanjali, and recommended it for the coveted award.
Yeats and Pound were impressed by the theme of divine love expressed in Gitanjali, at a time when World War I threatened to destroy the world. But, more significantly, Tagore’s view of the futility of war influenced another British poet, Wilfred Owen, who was enlisted as a soldier in World War I against his will. After Owen’s death on the battlefield, his distraught mother…