Introduction
Only those are to be judged friendships in which the characters with age have been strengthened and matured.Footnote 1
‘This is The Scoop. Reserve space in the next number for Rabindranath Tagore’, wrote the American poet Ezra Pound from London to Harriet Monroe, editor of the newly founded Chicago magazine Poetry in October 1912.Footnote 2 Unheard of until then in the fledgling literary circles of Chicago, Tagore, whose Gitanjali (collection of poems) had just caused a stir in London, was published in Poetry in December 1912 with an introductory note from Ezra Pound and, through a serendipitous turn of events, soon found himself in the city of Chicago in January 1913 as a guest of the magazine that was the first to publish him in America.
This paper is in part a contribution to the growing biographical literature on Tagore. His visit to the University of Chicago is mentioned in his multi-volume biographies available in Bengali and in the literature on Chicago's modernism in the early part of the twentieth century though not in any detail.Footnote 3 The University of Chicago hosted a lecture by Tagore on 23 January 1913 when he spoke on the topic of ‘Ideals of the Ancient Civilization of India,’ a lecture he repeated later at Harvard and then included it in a revised form in his book, Sadhana.Footnote 4 But there remains no institutional memory of the visit. In 1961, when Humayun Kabir, then the Minister for Scientific Research and Cultural Affairs in the Indian Government, approached the University of Chicago philosopher Richard P. McKeon for advice regarding a ‘proposed Tagore Commemorative Volume,’ the professor had no recollection of the poet's visit to his own university.Footnote 5 The first part of this paper provides a sketch of certain institutional and cultural developments in the city that laid the ground for Tagore's reception in Chicago in 1913. In particular, it tells the story of how he came to give this lecture at the University of Chicago, based on some unpublished and hitherto unknown material preserved in the Special Collections in the Regenstein Library of the University.
The larger interest, however, will be to discuss how Tagore was understood and imagined by sections of the Chicago literati who hosted his visit and by the authorities of the University who invited him to deliver the lecture. To this end, the second part of the paper provides an interpretive reading of the bond of friendship that Tagore developed with Harriet Moody, a prominent entrepreneurial and literary personality of Chicago who hosted Tagore and his family in 1913, and made her apartments in London and New York available to the poet for accommodation on other occasions. Not romantic or even intimate in any obvious sense, it was nonetheless a strong and enduring friendship between two people of very different backgrounds and personalities. The historian Stephen Hay once likened this friendship to ‘a golden thread [running] through all his [Tagore’s] visits to America’.Footnote 6 This paper offers a reading of Tagore's letters to Moody—preserved in the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago—in the light of Moody's views of this friendship as derived from other sources, including some of her letters which are preserved in the Tagore archives (Rabindra Sadan) at Visva Bharati University in West Bengal, India.
What connects the two parts of the paper is the question of how the British Empire cast its shadow on the reception of Tagore's personality and work outside the subcontinent. Whether or not Tagore was a loyal subject of the Empire was, as will be seen in the case of his visit to the university, a matter of crucial concern to the authorities. But it is also clear, both from the history of Tagore's visit to the University of Chicago and from his reception by personalities associated with the magazine, Poetry, that an idealistic view of something called ‘Indian civilization’—of which Tagore was seen as both an embodiment and a purveyor and which was seen as possessing some answers to the major problems that appeared to ail the West—weighed quite substantially with those who promoted his cause in the United States. The pleasure of conversation with a person who was seen as bearing a civilizational message often helped his friends and others to override the tensions that could have arisen from the differences of gender, class, race, or even from the sheer ignorance, on both sides, of actual cultural and historical differences. The relationship between Tagore and Moody is also used to illustrate this point as discussed in the first part of this paper. The tendency to look at the world through a framework of contending civilizations that was once prevalent and that is now rightly critiqued enabled certain human exchanges that would be much more difficult to transact today when the idea of ‘civilization’ lies in ruins. Harriet Moody's unequal relationship to Tagore is treated as a parable of friendship that was made possible by the civilizational discourse that marked the cultural politics of Empire in the period between the two World Wars.Footnote 7
A poet and a city
In a note that she prepared as a tribute to Tagore on his seventieth birthday, Harriet Monroe acknowledged that ‘the founder and editor [of Poetry] had never heard of Tagore’ until Ezra Pound, the magazine's foreign correspondent resident in Britain, had seen Tagore's poems discussed in the London Times. Pound met with the poet who was then visiting England, and ‘induced him to permit the sending of some of the Gitanjali poems to the new poets’ magazine in Chicago’.Footnote 8 Tagore would not have had any reason to know of this new magazine. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse was founded in 1912. It was made possible by a growing sense of cosmopolitanism amongst some of the leading citizens of Chicago when a number of businessmen who had made money in the preceding few decades began to take an interest in building some of the cultural institutions of the city.Footnote 9 Harriet Monroe (1860–1936), editor of the magazine, was born to a lawyer father and worked for some time as the art critic of Chicago Tribune. In 1911, in a gesture that could be read as a sign of the times, she called upon and persuaded a hundred Chicagoans to pledge $50 a year for five years to support a magazine of poetry that would have for its motto a line from Walt Whitman: ‘To Have great poets there must be great audiences too’.Footnote 10 Once the Tagore poems were published, the Chicago Tribune devoted an editorial to discussing the magazine's international aspirations during the course of which it mentioned Tagore. Soon after, writes Monroe in her aforementioned note,
we were amazed to receive a letter signed by a young Tagore in the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) saying ‘My father is visiting me here and would like a few copies of the magazine containing his poems’. This was news indeed—the distinguished Oriental poet, whom I had supposed to be at home if not still in London, was for a time our neighbor in my own state! I wrote to him at once, inviting him to Chicago, and Mrs. William Vaughn Moody, widow of the poet, seconded the invitation with an offer of her generous hospitality.
The actual letter from Rathindranath, Tagore's son, shows how little in fact the Tagores for their part knew about the magazine in which the poems had been published. The letter referred to the magazine as Poetry Review and addressed Ms. Monroe as ‘Dear Sir’.Footnote 11
The person who was instrumental to the University of Chicago inviting Tagore to give a lecture was Edwin Herbert Lewis (1866–1934). The two major Bengali biographers of Tagore, Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay and Prasanta Pal, both mention him but get his details wrong.Footnote 12 Edwin Lewis was a professor of English who held two Ph.D.s—one in Latin from Syracuse University that he had acquired in 1892 and one from the English department of The University of Chicago obtained in 1894. He was the first doctorate produced by the latter department. He taught at the University between 1892 and 1899. Whilst teaching at Chicago, he also began to teach at the newly set-up Lewis Institute (1895), a polytechnic school that was founded with help of money bequeathed by a real estate investor, Allen C. Lewis, who took great interest in vocational and practical education. The Institute was set up with the aim of imparting mechanical and liberal arts and training in domestic economy and is said to be the first junior college in the country. From 1899, Lewis became a full-time professor at this Institute where he also had administrative responsibilities and worked until his retirement in 1934. He died in Palo Alto in 1938.Footnote 13
The establishment of the Lewis Institute was also a sign of certain cultural stirrings and demographic developments in the city of Chicago. The city's population grew from around 300,000 in 1870 to more than a million by 1890.Footnote 14 Several developments in the last decade of the nineteenth century point to the city's young but confident and growing cultural profile: in 1882, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts (1879) renamed itself the Art Institute of Chicago; the University of Chicago was set up in 1892, and the World's Columbian Exposition was held in 1893, coinciding with the visit of Swami Vivekananda to the city.Footnote 15
In 1890, Frank Wakely Gunsaulus, a pastor at the Plymouth Congregational Church near where the Illinois Institute of Technology stands today, gave a sermon that became famous in Chicago as the ‘Million Dollar Sermon’. In that sermon, Gunsaulus said that if someone were to give him the gift of a million dollars he could ‘build a school where students of all backgrounds could prepare for meaningful roles in a changing industrial society’.Footnote 16 Inspired in part by this sermon, one of the city's businessmen, Philip Danforth Armour, left money in his will to start an educational institution for the non-elite—the Armour Institute of Technology. This institute and the Lewis Institute later merged in 1940 to form the Illinois Institute of Technology. Gunsaulus served as the director of the Armour Institute from its founding in 1892–93 to his death in 1921. Gunsaulus was also one of those who pledged support to the Poetry magazine from its inception in 1912.Footnote 17
The letter that Harriet Monroe received from Tagore's son, Rathindranath, was dated 9 December 1912. By the fourteenth of that month, enough letters had been exchanged for Tagore to write to Monroe saying that he might come to Chicago for ‘two or three weeks’ during the Christmas vacation, though he mentioned in a later letter (25 December) how greatly reluctant he felt about ‘visiting big towns, where I am likely to be drawn into all kinds of engagements, which bewilder me. To tell you candidly, this is the reason why I am hesitating to go to Chicago or to Boston’.Footnote 18 This was actually no false modesty. Tagore wrote very similar letters to friends back home at this time. On 30 December, for instance, he wrote to his nephew Satyaprasad Gangopadhyay that he was ‘hiding away in a corner of Illinois’ after reaching America. ‘Have avoided the nuisance of big cities’, he wrote, and added: ‘I have received an invitation from Chicago but feel no desire to go there. . .Rathi [Rathindranath, his son] and bouma [lit. ‘bride-mother’, Rathindranath's wife] are visiting Chicago during the Christmas holidays’.Footnote 19 Rathindranath and his wife, Pratima Devi, did meet with Monroe and Edwin Lewis whilst in Chicago. Monroe wrote to Tagore on 3 January 1913: ‘It grieves me that you are in such dread of big cities as to hesitate to come to Chicago’ and promised to make the visit ‘as quiet. . .as you desire’.Footnote 20
Tagore at the University of Chicago
Monroe and her friends felt that Tagore needed to be invited by a prestigious institution of the city. Edwin Lewis wrote to the President of the University of Chicago, Harry Pratt Judson (1849–1927, President 1907–1923), on 17 December 1912 requesting him to invite Tagore to deliver a series of lectures—the original number Lewis had in mind was five—at the University. Judson, however, had not heard about Tagore. It is interesting to see Lewis describe Tagore to Judson as someone who was more ‘level-headed’ than, say, Vivekananda and as a loyal votary of the Empire. ‘May it not be possible’, asked Professor Lewis of the President,
to arrange that Mr. Tagore, the most eminent man of letters in all India, should give five lectures at the University in January or February, on ‘Religious Ideals’? I feel certain that his treatment of the subject would be eminently sane, and that he is a fine speaker.
He then went on to describe Tagore's father as the founder of the Brahmo Samaj, a reformist Hindu sect that, said Lewis, ‘has always been free from nonsense’ and added, in an implicit but obviously slighting reference to Vivekananda's visit to the city: ‘Chicago has not heard a thoroughly scholarly and level-headed Hindoo since 1893, when Moozumdar [a Brahmo preacher] was here’.Footnote 21
Lewis was trying to assure Judson that Tagore was no rabble-rousing nationalist and that his loyalty to the British Empire was unquestionable. The President's office appears not to have responded to this request with any sense of urgency, for Lewis did not hear back from them for about a month. Indeed, it is uncertain if Lewis was not merely trying to keep Tagore's interest in the prospect of a visit to the city alive when he wrote thus to the poet on 23 December: ‘I called up President Judson. He expressed the liveliest desire to hear your lecture, but said he could not tell until next week—after the holiday recess—whether it would be possible to arrange dates in January’.Footnote 22 The President's secretary, D. A. Robertson, actually wrote to Lewis on 13 January. The President would not arrange for ‘five’ lectures by Tagore; there would be only one lecture, and preferably on ‘his own poetry and modern Bengali literature’ rather than on ‘the religions of India’ as Lewis had suggested.Footnote 23 Lewis wrote back somewhat plaintively to the President's secretary on 15 January. He was no longer sure that the President's office would lend a sympathetic ear to his request: ‘I earnestly beg the President to write directly to Mr. Tagore. . .and invite him. It was I who wrote to him first. I felt it a disgrace that a man who commands an audience of 20,000 people any time he chooses to speak in Calcutta should be within so short a distance of Chicago and not be invited by the most distinguished intellectual interests of our Babylon to appear here’. Lewis was even uncertain that the University would pay Tagore a decent honorarium: ‘As to an honorarium, I don't suppose he will accept one. But. . .I would rather pay $50 myself than see him offered less’. He played up again the allegedly conservative and pro-imperial nature of Tagore's political positions: ‘He is a good spirited man, & England has him to thank that Bengali disaffection did not burst into flame four years ago [around the issue of the first partition of Bengal by Lord Curzon]’.Footnote 24
Tagore, unaware of the work that Lewis had been doing behind the scene, chose to speak on the ideals of civilization in ancient India, and the University, finding the topic closer to religion than to poetry, decided to offer him accommodation at the Quadrangle Club where, as the President's secretary pointed out in an internal memo, ‘University preachers are put up’. And it was again a supposedly conservative, pro-imperial Tagore who proved attractive to the authorities of the University. ‘To Tagore’, wrote the President's secretary in the same memo, inflating by some considerable degrees the sales pitch of Edwin Lewis, ‘the British Government owes more to him than to say any man the present control over the Bengal situation. That hot-bed of Indian disturbances seems to be utterly under Tagore's control and when he speaks in Bengal or Calcutta, he often gets an audience of 22,000 people’.Footnote 25
Misrepresentations of Tagore were not peculiar to his friends at Chicago but they say something about the way the Orient was seen by many intellectuals in the West in the years immediately before and during the Great War. Consider how Harriet Monroe recalled Tagore's 1913 visit in her short reminiscence,
Tagore in Chicago: . . .I remember how excited we were when they [the Tagores] arrived. Devotional poetry is rarely of value considered as poetry, but these were beautiful devotional poems, and the religious feeling they expressed was a tribute to the universal God of all races and creeds.
And again:
We used to spend evenings around Mrs. Moody's fire, listening to the chanting of poems in Bengali, or the recitation of their English equivalents, and feeling as if we were seated at the feet of some ancient wise man of the East, generous in his revelations of beauty. He talked also about his native country and the meaning of that huge word ‘India’, and about his hope for more friendly consideration from the governing powers of the world.Footnote 26
Lewis's and Ezra Pound's initial assessments of Tagore's poetry also contained elements that spoke as much of a lack of comprehension on their part as of their own imaginations of Bengal or more generally the East. In the short introduction Pound wrote of the Tagore poems published in Poetry, he declared these poems to be ‘an event in the history of English poetry and of world poetry. . . . I do not use these terms with the looseness of contemporary journalism.’ And, then, without knowing a word of Bengali, he proceeded to speak in very high praise of the language and its poetry:
These poems are cast, in the original, in meters perhaps the most finished and subtle of any known to us. If you refine the art of the troubadours, combine that with that of Pleiades, add to that the sound-unit principle of the most advanced artist in vers libre, you would get something like the system of Bengali verse. The sound of it when spoken is rather like good Greek, for Bengali is the daughter of Sanscrit which is a kind of uncle or elder brother of the Homeric idiom. . . . The Greeks gave us humanism. The Bengali brings us the pledge of calm which we need overmuch in an age of steel and mechanics.Footnote 27
After such lavish and irresponsible dispensation of praise, it was not surprising that Pound should write complainingly to Harriet Monroe the very next year that ‘Tagore's philosophy hasn't much in it for a man who felt the pangs [of] and has been pestered with western civilization’.Footnote 28
The search for an alternative civilization that would speak to those ‘pestered’ with the Western one and provide them with ‘the calm [they] need[ed] overmuch in an age of steel and mechanics’ can be seen also to be at work in the admiration that Edwin Lewis felt for Tagore as he introduced the poet to readers in Chicago. On 15 January 1917, Lewis presented a paper to the Chicago Literary Club on ‘The Work of Tagore’.Footnote 29 Later, he drew on parts of this essay to write another piece of which only a fragment has survived. This fragment continues a completely unrealistic and enchanted view of Tagore that asserts: ‘Dr. Tagore's own personality is what it is, very simple and full of faith in God, because he was born into one of the finest homes on earth, where no quarreling was ever heard, where he was never plunged into mental struggles on the question of authority’.Footnote 30 Such misunderstandings were common in the history of Tagore's reception in the West; and they were sometimes even productive. Lewis, for instance, got involved in the activities of a Hindusthan Association of America that was set up with its headquarters in Urbana (Illinois) subsequent to Tagore's first visit. Lewis contributed regularly to its magazine, The Hindusthanee Student. His contributions show how deeply images of India, and that of Tagore, were caught up in debates to do with the mechanical-industrial civilization of the United States.Footnote 31 This discussion was, of course, part of a much larger Western discourse in the 1910s and 1920s as to what the West could learn from the ‘ancient ideals’ of India.Footnote 32
Introducing Harriet Moody
The person Tagore felt closest to during his time in Chicago, and with whom he forged a particular kind of friendship that lasted until she died, was Mrs Harriet Vaughn Moody (1857–1932). It was to her, after all, that he dedicated his book Chitra, an English rendering of his Bengali play in free verse, Chitrangada. ‘I am sure’, he wrote in a letter dated 14 February 1914 to Mrs Moody, ‘you have got my Chitra by this time and have forgiven me for the liberty I have taken in dedicating it to you without waiting for your permission’.Footnote 33 In a follow-up letter of 10 March 1914, the claim on friendship is stronger. ‘My dear Friend’, it runs,
In memory of the delightful evenings we had, reading Chitra by your fireside, I dedicated that little lyrical drama of mine to you, hoping that the dedication will remind you of how deeply I value your friendship. I purposefully omitted to ask you [for] permission. It was to add to the list of the already numerous transgressions you had allowed your poet in the generous exercise of your forbearance.Footnote 34
Claims of friendship come through strongly in a letter Tagore wrote from Calcutta on 18 February 1915 outlining his intention to visit Japan in September that year. It refers rather playfully to the demands of Harriet Moody's businesses whilst pleading with her to join his party on the trip:
Did we not plan this meeting at your fireside?. . . Don't you plead business. Business should never be one-sided, it must not fix your mind to its profits only, there must come times when you should recklessly rush to losses and be glad. The element of loss is the element of poetry in business. Business would be deadly to the spirit of man if it were wholly successful. There should be at least one poet among your. . .advisers to represent this side—the freedom from the tyranny of the desire for success.Footnote 35
Tagore and Harriet Moody met again for a few days when Tagore visited the United States in 1916 and again in 1920–1921 when he visited the country for about four months and spent a few days in Chicago as her guest. They also met briefly, later and in passing, in Rome and London during the 1920s.Footnote 36 Their letters were not always a two-sided affair. There are some letters from Mrs Moody to Tagore that are now preserved at the Tagore archives in the university he set up.Footnote 37 But from the internal evidence of the letters written by Tagore that are now preserved at the University of Chicago, it can be easily seen that very few, maybe one or two, of them were written in response to letters from Mrs Moody. That fact itself suggests a certain kind of lopsidedness—if not a one-sidedness—to this friendship, a theme I shall revert to in the concluding section of this paper.
Several of Tagore's letters to Harriet Moody have a touch of the sentimental about them. ‘I must tell you how truly your friendship has become a part of our life’, he told her in a letter written from a ship in April 1913.Footnote 38 ‘I thought I would startle you one fine morning in June by presenting myself at your door and quite naturally taking my seat at your breakfast table’, he wrote in a letter dated 13 May 1918, after he had just cancelled a trip to America on account of false rumours being spread in America about his politics, this time painting him as a revolutionary who worked against the British empire.Footnote 39 On 23 December 1920, Tagore sent Mrs Moody a poem as ‘a gift of one who has carried home across the sea the memory of your friendship as one of the best boons that your country has given him’.Footnote 40 The last time Tagore visited the country in 1930, he did not travel to Chicago.Footnote 41 But his letters are full of tender sentiments. ‘Dear friend’, he wrote on 12 October 1930 soon after landing in New York and in words that recall some lines of a famous song of his (ogo bideshini): ‘After a long wandering I have come at last at your gate. But your dear face is not yet seen’.Footnote 42 A few days later he wrote again: ‘I shall never forgive my fate if I ever go away without seeing you. . .’.Footnote 43 This was in 1930. Mrs Moody's businesses had been badly hurt by the Great Depression and she must have pleaded inability to visit Tagore, for he writes on 5 December: ‘I understand your difficulties and it will cause me pain if I know that you have strained your resources too much in order to come to see me. In any case, I am sure of your affection and I am deeply satisfied’.Footnote 44 The last letter from Tagore preserved in the Moody papers is dated 15 December 1930, written a day before he was to leave New York for England. It simply said: ‘Dear friend, Good Bye. With love and kind wishes, Rabindranath Tagore’.Footnote 45 Mrs Moody died in 1932.Footnote 46
Harriet Converse Tilden (Brainard) Moody was born in 1857 in Ohio to a family which came into money after moving to Chicago in the late 1860s. Harriet Moody obtained her parents’ ‘reluctant consent’ to study at Cornell University and came under the influence of her mentor and professor Hiram Corson who taught English literature but was a devoted student of Madame Helena Blavatsky, the Theosophist leader. It is possible that Corson passed on to Ms Moody a certain view of the Orient.Footnote 47 Sometime in the early 1880s Harriet Converse Tilden married Edwin Brainard, ‘a wealthy Chicago lawyer’ and a son of Dr Daniel Brainard, a native of New York trained in Philadelphia who founded Rush Medical College (now incorporated into Rush University) in Chicago in 1837, the same year in which the city received its charter. The marriage was said to have taken place ‘over the violent objections of her father’. The marriage was short-lived and a year after the couple divorced in 1885, Harriet Tilden's once-wealthy cattle-shipper father died leaving her and her mother with not enough money to afford the luxury they were used to. Financial circumstances forced Harriet Tilden Brainard to become a school-teacher but the income was not sufficient. Harriet, we are told, was on the lookout for other opportunities. Here, again, the growing sophistication of the city's middle class’ taste in consumption came to her aid. A friend suggested that Harry Gordon Selfridge (1864—1947)—then an employee in the Chicago departmental store Marshall Fields but later the founder of the famous British Selfridges—was looking for ‘new gourmet food items’ for the chain. Harriet sent off to him ‘some items she had prepared in her mother's kitchen’. So successful were her culinary creations that in 1890 she started her own company, Home Delicacies Association, which flourished between 1890 and 1929. It later expanded into London, thanks to the Selfridge connection.Footnote 48 Over time, she would cater to the railways and ‘fashionable private clients’. In 1920, she opened a restaurant, Le Petit Gourmet, in Chicago's Italian Court. Throughout the 1920s she organized poetry nights where ‘Carl Sandberg, Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay’ and many others would read their work. An unsigned note in Harriet Moody's papers describes the restaurant as a ‘veritable institution of Chicago as well known as the lions at the entrance of the Art Institute’.Footnote 49 Mrs Moody's businesses suffered in the financial crisis of 1929 when she had to sell out. The Italian Court at 615 North Michigan Boulevard, constructed in the 1920s, was razed in the 1960s to make room for office buildings.Footnote 50
In 1894, Harriet Brainard bought the property at 2970 Groveland (now Ellis) Avenue where the Tagores—Rabindranath, his son Rathindranath and his daughter-in-law Pratima Devi—would eventually come to stay in January 1913. Harriet's friend and boarder, Martha Foote Crow, who taught English literature at the University of Chicago and who stayed there in the 1890s, introduced her to the young poet and dramatist William Vaughn Moody, then an assistant professor of English and Rhetoric in the same institution. They became deep friends but did not marry until Mrs Tilden, Harriet's mother, who was opposed to their union, died in 1908. This was also the year William Vaughn Moody was awarded an Honorary D.Lit. by Yale. Harriet and William got married in 1909, a year before William Moody died, sadly, of brain cancer at the age of 41.Footnote 51 Harriet Moody went travelling for some time and then threw herself into her businesses and acted as a generous host to many writers and poets who visited the city. Approached by Harriet Monroe, she agreed—though she had initially cried off—to host the Tagores, barely two and a half years after she had become a widow.Footnote 52
This was not an easy decision to make. Harriet Moody has left us her own description of the moment. Widowed, she ‘had been away from home for almost two years, seriously occupied, and. . .had just come home to rest’ when she received a message from Harriet Monroe who ‘had invited a most distinguished poet (Tagore) to give an address here’ and desperately needed her to host him. ‘But I was adamant’, she writes. ‘I had freed myself . . .from all sense of duty or obligation, and I declined to undertake this responsibility’. Next morning, however, her thoughts changed. ‘It came to me that my home, which had been the home of a poet, could not close its doors to a brother poet’. She agreed to host Tagore and his family and ‘got and read his book of verse, most carefully’.Footnote 53 Harriet Moody describes in her own words her first impressions of Tagore: ‘A light powdery snow began to fall just as I was watching for him, and as he arrived, it fell on his picturesque black velvet cap and on his flowing white beard, giving a romantic aspect to his appearance’. Whilst others ‘settled themselves in the unobtrusive places in the living room,. . .the poet came and set beside me, before going to his own room’.Footnote 54 They talked, and thus began a friendship that was to last for the rest of her life.
A parable of friendship
Friendship has been an arresting and difficult question in the philosophical literature on the subject: it is perhaps a universal question for humans that also becomes historically inflected at different times in different places. Tagore's ‘friendship’ with his admirers in Chicago no doubt had a historical and contextual side to it. Nationalism, empire, historically formed patterns of patriarchy and gender-relations, colonial rule, and assumptions of White supremacy and other related issues of the time undoubtedly left their imprint on what Tagore and his correspondents wrote by way of expressing their feelings. One cryptic way in which issues of imperial rule, for example, are referred to in the correspondence and papers researched for this paper is by passing reference to that great and controversial figure of the British Empire in the nineteenth century: Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865—1936). Edwin Lewis’ short 1917 essay ‘The Work of Tagore’ ends by indirectly alluding to Kipling's ‘Ballad of East and West’ in the context of the Great War: ‘. . .in the trenches and the dugouts the sons of gentlemen are not singing McAndrew's hymns to the steam engine, or anything to the effect that East and West shall never meet [implying that the soldiers were now asking for copies of Gitanjali]’.Footnote 55 Tagore himself made an uncharacteristically slighting reference to Kipling in a letter to Harriet Monroe written on 19 December 1919 [1914?], whilst discussing his Prize. He described the nuisance of public adulation but stated that he was yet ‘rejoicing in the fact that the East and the West will ever touch each other like twin gems in the circlet of humanity’ and observed ‘how they had met long before Kipling was born and will meet long after his name is forgotten’.Footnote 56
Indeed, it is ironical today to go back to Kipling's poem, ‘The Ballad of East and West’ so many years after Tagore thought of his prize as a refutation of what was seen as Kipling's dictum. It is ironical because this poem that has been misunderstood for a long time as an arrogant imperialist statement about the immiscibility of the East and the West was actually about the feelings of mutual respect that a British soldier and his Indian counterpart could experience when they suddenly find themselves facing each other in the course of an armed chase across the border on the North-Western Frontier. Here is the first stanza of the poem that has unfortunately always stood for the (mostly unread) whole:
Oh East is East, and West is West
And never the twain shall meet
Till Earth and Sky stand presently
At God's great Judgment Seat.
And here is the stanza that follows:
But there is neither East nor West
Border, nor Breed, nor Birth
When two strong men stand face to face
Tho’ they come from the ends of the earth.Footnote 57
The Kipling poem is incidental—though not irrelevant—to this story. Friendships are, as Mary Lago said of Tagore's friendship with Rothenstein—‘imperfect encounters’.Footnote 58 Besides, letters could be misleading guides to feelings. There is much that goes unsaid in human affairs and much that remains inexpressible.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this paper turns to Tagore's friendship with Mrs Moody and asks the question: how, if at all, the discourse of civilization alluded to earlier made possible this ‘friendship’ that, on today's reading, seems to have been very unequal in more than one respect. One area of obvious inequality is in the very sources used here to reconstruct this friendship. There are some letters from Mrs Moody available in the Tagore archives. But her voice is also available in the biography that a younger woman, Olivia Dunbar, wrote of her in 1947 in which there are some direct quotations from her. It also helps that Dunbar often expresses an understandable impatience with many of Tagore's sentiments, an impatience that Mrs Moody clearly did not share. This makes it easy to distinguish the biographer's voice from that of the subject of the biography.
Many cultural and historical differences separated Rabindranath Tagore and Harriet Moody from each other. Their perceptions of each other—at least in the way they represented them in writing—were coloured by these differences. Below is what Tagore wrote to a friend back home from Chicago about Mrs Moody. Early impressions, but the grid of sentiments is recognizably gendered in a culture-specific way and in fact assimilates Harriet Moody to the character of the mother created by Tagore himself in his famous novel, Gora, which was written and published between 1907 and 1909:
I really like Mrs Moody a lot. . . . There is a natural generosity in her hospitality. Her heart pours out motherly feelings in abundance and they flow in diverse streams. It is not just us [Tagore's family], these feelings comfort whoever comes into contact with her. Not for a single day since arriving here have I felt like I was staying with someone who is not one of my own. . . . There is another quality of women here that. . .leaves me enchanted. I have noticed that their wifely devotion is not constricted in any sense. . . . She [Mrs Moody] cares for her husband's work, his writings and for all his [other] pursuits in life as she would for a child. I feel so happy to see that no aspect of his work is alien to her heart. . . . She is highly educated. . .and may even be called wealthy. This combination of [worldly] efficiency with a capacity to feel for others is what I consider the ideal of womanhood. And when you add to that education and a sense of literature, you add gemstones to gold. . . . [I]t is this highest expression of womanhood that pleases me the most. This is what I have sought to express in [the character of] Anandamoyee in [my novel] Gora.Footnote 59
How did Harriet Moody feel about Tagore's claims on her friendship? Some of the comments made by her biographer Olivia Dunbar give a glimpse of the relationship as it may or could have seemed from Harriet Moody's side, or at least from the perspective of her biographer. ‘The younger Tagores’, writes Olivia Dunbar combining a biographer's distance from and empathy for her subject's feelings, ‘. . .in filial deference to Rabindranath, scarcely spoke at all in his presence. . . . [And] Harriet was an eager seeker of wisdom; Tagore, the seer, was accustomed to dispense it. Figuratively kneeling at the feet of the Oriental, the middle westerner did not find herself repulsed’.Footnote 60
Clearly, this was not a friendship between two people who were equal or similar in any obvious way. Nor was Tagore an easy person to be around. Here is Dunbar again: ‘During the weeks that followed, for this visit was no overnight affair, East and West accomplished a happy fusion. It is possible, of course, that the adjusting was largely on the part of the Occidentals, for Mr Tagore may have been a little exigent in an unintentional and charming way’. A note from Harriet Moody written to a friend at this time indirectly supports Dunbar's observations: ‘I am more than sorry to have missed seeing you when you were in Chicago. I am sure it would be difficult for you to imagine just the kind of restraint that fell over my household because of the presence in it of Mr Tagore. Not that he would wish to restrain us in any way; but his preoccupations of mind are such as to leave him quite oblivious of the current [of] life about him and the result is that we have to adjust ourselves when he is here, to possible changes in his plans’. Dunbar comments: ‘Evenings in 2970 were now devoted to listening to Mr. Tagore, either to his talk, which did not mean conversation, or to his reading of his own poetry’.Footnote 61
In parenthesis, we may also note Tagore's usual dependence on people around him for the management of everyday chores. It would be wrong to suggest that such dependence was something he forced on others. As in Mrs Moody's case, the behaviour was often a mark of the unusually deep reverence that people felt in his presence. R. F. Ratray, who looked after Tagore during his trip to Boston in 1913, wrote: ‘[I]t was rather trying that he [Tagore] was so helpless in practical matters, leaving them to others. But others felt it to be a privilege to serve him’.Footnote 62 However, it is difficult for us not to miss the complete absence of any self-irony in a letter that Tagore wrote home soon after reaching Urbana. ‘Bhai [Brother] Satya’, he wrote to his nephew on 8 November 1912, ‘we have arrived in America. We have rented a house in Illinois and our domestic life is in full swing. It is almost impossible to get servants or maid-servants here. . .the housewives here do all household work themselves, and even the head of the family has to pitch in. Yesterday afternoon we saw a local professor washing his own clothes. One advantage is that this [labour] carries no indignity—for everyone except the very rich is in the same situation. We are not very rich either, so we have had to adopt the same means’. ‘We’? The very next sentence in the letter clarifies, almost unselfconsciously, who the ‘we’ of Tagore's sentence was: ‘Bouma [daughter-in-law; Tagore translated the expression as ‘bride-mother’] is doing all the work of cooking, feeding [us], and cleaning the house’.Footnote 63
Not only was Tagore's friendship with Mrs Moody unequal, the exchanges themselves were sometimes strange, at least from the point of view of Moody's biographer. It is not at all clear from the correspondence that Tagore understood or appreciated Harriet Moody's business acumen or the challenges she faced in that domain. If Harriet Moody had anything of her biographer's taste in feelings and self-expression, a certain clash of sentiments in this genuine friendship would have been unavoidable. Some of Tagore's letters to Mrs Moody concerned, for example, his own feelings of harassment at the public adulation he was subject to in India upon receiving the Nobel Prize. ‘I am passing through an ordeal’, he writes in a letter dated 23 December 1913. ‘My time is uselessly wasted in trivial formalities. I am also assailed by the curiosity of the multitude. This burden of wasted days which brings me neither work nor rest is an enormous strain for me’.Footnote 64 ‘A few months later’, Dunbar continues in a disapproving tone, ‘Harriet found herself appealed to in so urgent a strain that it must have chagrined her to acknowledge that in this case no solacing action was really within her power’. The comment was caused by a letter that Tagore wrote on 22 January 1914: ‘I am still suffering from Nobel Prize notoriety and I do not know what nursing home I can go to. . .[to] get rid of this my latest and my greatest trouble. To deprive of me of my seclusion is like shelling an oyster—the rude touch of curiosity is all over me. I am pining for some shade of obscurity. . . . Why do I not have a word of sympathy from you in my time of distress?’Footnote 65
Readers of Tagore will know that he wrote in very similar terms to other correspondents as well, both within Bengal and outside. There are many letters in Bengali that he wrote in this vein but a quote from an English letter to the British painter, Sir William Rothenstein, written on 18 November 1913 describes his plight caused by public adulation in Bengal that had reached manic proportions: ‘. . .it is a very great trial for me. The perfect whirlwind of public excitement it has given rise to is frightful. It is almost as bad as tying a tin at a dog's tail making it impossible for him to move without creating a noise and collecting crowds all along’.Footnote 66 In Bengali, the sentiment sounds particularly playful and self-mocking; but they also speak of an inner sense of loneliness that perhaps made Tagore look for solace in the friendship of someone like Harriet Moody. Moody's biographer Dunbar, however, could not think her way to imagining what an appropriate response could have been on Harriet's part. Tagore's letter represented a cultural impasse for her. She comments, somewhat acidly but not unreasonably from her own point of view: ‘Few of the notable persons to whom this prize has been awarded, particularly when awarded in absentia, can have found the experience so upsetting’.Footnote 67
But consider Harriet Moody's own feelings—as expressed in the few letters quoted in her biography. Her admiration for Tagore, whom she often capitalized as ‘the Poet,’ remained deep and genuine throughout her life. She once wrote to a friend during the second visit of Tagore (circa 1916): ‘Nothing I can say of Mr. Tagore is altogether adequate. He is himself inexpressible and in many ways more uplifting in his influence than ever, though perhaps a trifle less simple in his outer bearing [after the award of the Nobel Prize]’.Footnote 68 Yet she was also deeply disappointed that Tagore, once the reception to him cooled in the United States towards the end of the 1910s (caused in part by word about his alleged opposition to British rule in India) and his efforts to raise money for his university proved abortive, turned away from the country, seeing it as coldly capitalist and lacking a soul. As Tagore wrote to his friend Charles Freer Andrews on 17 December 1920: ‘I should not let my dignity be soiled by the sordid touch of her [American] dollars;—mere lack of means should not be allowed to mock the majesty of soul, seeking its crown in the foolscap of the bank cheque’.Footnote 69 Mrs Moody was pained by this attitude. She wrote to her friends Frank and Mary Swinnerton in August 1925:
I don't know whether you feel as I do, but to me it always seems that Robi Babu's absolute severance from his exterior environment unfits him for getting the real quality of American life or from knowing the deeper truth about his friends and our outstanding leaders, although his own magnificent initiative is of course valuable. But I feel that it is somewhat defeating to have it so coupled with misapprehension about others. Nothing but his settled conviction that America is hostile, mediocre and commercial has prevented his coming back this time.
Olivia Dunbar comments in Mrs Moody's biography that ‘These may have been the first or perhaps the only almost-critical words that ever came from this most constant of the philosopher's disciples. But her devotion to him was by no means lessened’.Footnote 70
As one can see, Mrs Moody was charging her favorite poet-philosopher with nothing less than the accusation that he did not understand America, her country. Tagore, for his part, could also complain—having been rebuffed by American financiers—that they did not understand his mission in India. Yet what allowed this friendship to be continued on both sides across the 1920s when Tagore and Mrs Moody could not or did not meet? What did they each get out of this very ‘imperfect encounter’? What light does this story shed on what might be called, after Derrida, the ‘politics of friendship in the age of Empire’?Footnote 71
A slight detour into Derrida's discussion of Aristotle on friendship may actually help to see eventually how the ‘the civilizational framework’ of the inter-war period may have helped to sustain the relationship between Tagore and Moody, a relationship that today would have been plagued by understandable contemporary anxieties about inequalities of gender, race, and culture. The point is that confidence is needed in order to decide whether to invest in a friendship in the face of certain obvious elements of inequality, hierarchy, or difference. From where did Mrs Moody draw the confidence she needed to sustain her role as a ‘refuge’ for Tagore?
The cue is taken from a point Derrida makes in the course of reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics via Montaigne's essay, ‘Of Friendship’, without thereby having to commit ourselves—as Derrida also does not—either to Aristotle's sense of social hierarchy or his politics of gender.Footnote 72 Opening with the apostrophe attributed to Aristotle, ‘O my friends, there is no friend’, Derrida meditates on the seeming contradiction of this statement: ‘if there is “no friend”, then how could I call you my friends, my friends?’Footnote 73 As he moves carefully through Aristotle's texts, Derrida reads the contradiction as indicative of the ‘two times’ (deux temps) or the contretemps that make up the structure of friendship, thus playing both on the meaning of this word (small disagreement, unexpected setback) and its formation (contre = other, temps = time). He then expounds as follows—reading Aristotle faithfully but creatively—on the relation of friendship with the question of time. True friends are rare and finding them involves selection and judgment and thus time. But once made and stabilized, friendship belongs to another order of time where the passage of days on the calendar cannot corrode it. The highest order of friendship thus involves a decision—a judgment—to love, even before one knows that one will be loved in return. Derrida then develops Aristotle's propositions into the statement: ‘it is more worthwhile to love than to be loved’.Footnote 74 The highest order of friendship—one that is not based on utility or pleasure, as Aristotle would put it in his schema—places a greater premium on the act of loving—‘to love’—than on being the object of human love. Those who ‘prefer to be loved’, says Derrida, again following Aristotle's lead, ‘seek honours, distinction, signs of recognition’.Footnote 75 ‘To love’ thus represents a position devoid of the utility, pleasure, or narcissism that marks the position of the beloved. It is also necessarily the more human position in friendship as the object of one's affection need not be a living human being, it could be a deceased person or even inanimate, as Derrida points out, extending Aristotle.Footnote 76
If Tagore saw in Harriet Moody a ‘mother,’ that is a source of comfort, a refuge—which is what his letters cited above would suggest—then he put himself in the place of being-loved and not in the experience of what Aristotle would have called ‘primary friendship’ where loving was the more important activity than that of being loved.Footnote 77 For Aristotle, mothers were a figure of primary friendship even in the apparent inequality of the mother-child relationship, for the ‘desirable’ side of friendship, Aristotle wrote, ‘lie[s] in loving rather than in being loved, as is indicated by the delight mothers take in loving’.Footnote 78 It is not suggested that Harriet Monroe's feelings were actually those of a mother, whatever Tagore may have made of them. The figure of the mother stands here for a certain measure of generosity that stems from the confidence of one's judgment and decision to be a friend. Moody's own words suggest that she was aware of the social and historical differences, or even of the inequalities, that were inherent in this relationship. There was little between them of what we today would regard as ‘conversation’ between equals. The verbal transactions appear to have been mostly one-sided—‘he was the one who talked straight on, without waiting for a reply’. Yet she did not take long to sense a communion with Tagore—‘it seemed as if he were speaking from the depths of my own being’—and thus made the decision to care for him, to offer him her friendship ‘for there was never a moment when he was strange to me’. With hindsight and through the work of memory, Harriet Moody telescoped the process by which she decided to be a friend of Tagore's into the very first moment of their meeting. ‘I had just come from an ocean journey’, she wrote narrating the impact of Tagore's arrival in her house on that fateful day of 19 January 1913:
The poet's voice was like the lapping of waves, quiet, rich, sustained. I was soothed and heartened as I listened to him. He was one who talked straight on, without waiting for a reply. This did not seem in the least wearisome. Like all significant conversations, it seemed as if he were talking from the depths of my own being. It was as if we were conferring, after a long separation, about the fundamental doctrines of a common early home, under the teaching and influence of the same father and mother. There was never a moment when he was strange to me, although he commanded my quiet reverence.Footnote 79
The strength of generosity is written all over that concluding phrase: ‘he commanded my quiet reverence’. ‘He commanded’ and her reverence was ‘quiet’—there is no illusion here about inequality and hierarchy signalled by speech. Yet ‘there was never a moment when he was strange’, which also means the reverence offered was sure of itself. It was not conflicted in any way. There was no conversation as commonly understood and yet, says Moody, there was a ‘significant conversation’. There is a word that Tagore once used to express the strength he sensed in Mrs Moody. The word was ‘forebearance’, an originally legal sixteenth-century word referring to a process of delaying—that is, not foreclosing—on debts that might be owed to oneself.Footnote 80 He used the word in the letter he wrote to Harriet Moody when telling her that he had dedicated his play Chitra to her: ‘the already numerous transgressions you had allowed your poet in the generous exercise of your for[e]bearance’.Footnote 81 What thus took Tagore's relationship with Harriet Moody forward and gave it the quality of friendship was his recognition of her strength—though he expressed it in the culturally-specific idiom of motherhood and through the metaphor of forebearance—and Harriet Moody's capacity and willingness to take joy in the activity of loving rather than in the passivity of being loved.
But the point being made here is not biographical, or at least not merely biographical. How does one understand Harriet Moody's statement that ‘there was never a moment’ when Tagore was ‘strange’ to her, although ‘he commanded [her] quiet reverence’—in the face of all the evidence of strangeness and inequality that both Dunbar and Moody herself furnish? Leaving aside what may have been purely matters of personality with both Tagore and Moody, the phrase about Mrs Moody's ‘quiet reverence’ takes us back to the scene in her living room as described by Harriet Monroe (see above): ‘We used to spend evenings around Mrs. Moody's fire, listening to the chanting of poems in Bengali, or the recitation of their English equivalents, and feeling as if we were seated at the feet of some ancient wise man of the East, generous in his revelations of beauty’.Footnote 82 Tagore thus seems to have come across as ‘some ancient wise man of the East’ bearing in his person a civilizational message to weary souls of the West. On this point, the few letters from Mrs Moody that survive in the Tagore archives are telling. On 31 January, soon after the first visit by the Tagores, Harriet Moody wrote to Rabindranath to say with ‘reverent affection’: ‘I cannot tell you what you have done for me’.Footnote 83 Addressing him as ‘Dear Friend and Beloved Master’, she wrote on 9 May of the same year describing—indeed, the Christian associations are hard to miss—how a letter from the poet had not only called her to an ‘uplifted mood’, it also showed her that ‘you have walked upon the waves and they have not flowed over you’.Footnote 84 A letter dated 21 November 1913, congratulating Tagore on his being awarded the Nobel Prize, explains the quasi-religious aspect of her friendship: ‘. . .for myself, it is a mystic joy that you have dwelt within my walls, and have given me this great privilege of calling you my friend’.Footnote 85
Thus, Tagore saw himself as a bearer of a civilization he called ‘Indian’; his friends in Chicago thought of it as something ‘Eastern’. Mrs Moody's relationship to this civilization as she saw it embodied in the poet was quasi-religious or, in her words, ‘mystic’. She was aware of the differences, inequalities, and the asymmetries of this friendship: he was not a good listener, he did most of the talking, one's plans had to be re-adjusted to suit his presence. Yet she gave freely and confidently of her affection and forebearance. A certain way of understanding the world through a framework of ‘civilizations’ once worked simultaneously as a justification as well as a powerful critique of the Empire. But this particular story of friendship shows how it also made it possible for unexpected friendships to flourish across many obvious inequalities and hierarchical differences.
