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Friendships in the Shadow of Empire: Tagore's Reception in Chicago, circa 1913–1932*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2014

DIPESH CHAKRABARTY*
Affiliation:
Departments of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations, The University of Chicago, USA Email: dchakrabarty@yahoo.com

Abstract

This paper supplies the historical context to the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore's (1861–1941) first visit to the city of Chicago in January 1913 when he spoke at the University of Chicago and established life-long friendships with some of the literary personalities of the city. By focusing on how Tagore came to be received by the University authorities and on his friendship with Harriet Vaughan Moody (1857–1932), the widow of the American writer William Vaughn Moody, it also seeks to trace the role that the themes of ‘empire’ and ‘civilization’ played in determining how the poet was received, understood, and admired by his foreign friends.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

My foremost thanks go to Mukta Dutta Tomar, India's Consul General in Chicago in 2011 who prodded me to write this paper. Thanks are due to audiences at the University of Technology, Sydney, the Australian National University, Canberra, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Visva-Bharati University for their responses to an earlier version of this paper. I am grateful to Devleena Ghosh, Debjani Ganguly, Assa Doron, Heather Goodall, Biswajit Roy, Uday Narayan Singh, Don and Barbara Willard, Bill Brown, James Chandler, Rochona Majumdar, and to referees of this journal for their comments; to Tapati Mukherjee, Director, Rabindra Bhavan, for access to the papers of Rabindranath Tagore; to the staff of the Regenstein Library, The University of Chicago, for their courteous assistance; to Arnab Dey, Gerry Siarny, Ranu Roychoudhuri, Lorena Mitchell, and Esther Mansdorf for their help at different times with my research and computer issues.

References

1 de Montaigne, Michel, ‘Of Friendship’, in Montaigne: Selected Essays, trans. Corron, Charles, Hazlitt, W. and ed. by Bates, Blanchard (New York: The Modern Library, 1949)Google Scholar.

2 Monroe, Harriet, A Poet's Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World (New York: McMillan, 1938), p. 262Google Scholar.

3 Dutta, Krishna and Robinson, Andrew, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (New York: St Martin's Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Tagore, Rathindranath, On the Edges of Time (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1958)Google Scholar; Mukherji, Sujit, Passage to America: The Reception of Rabindranath Tagore in the United States (Calcutta: Bookland, 1964)Google Scholar; Williams, Ellen, Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance: The First Ten Years of Poetry, 1912–1922 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977)Google Scholar. A quite informative essay is Hay’s, Stephen N., ‘Tagore in America’, American Quarterly, 14 (1962), 439463Google Scholar. Leisl Olson's forthcoming book, Modernism Made in Chicago, also has some discussion of this visit.

4 Mukhopadhyay, Prabhatkumar, Rabindrajibani o rabindrasahityaprabeshok, 4th edn (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1977), II, p. 412Google Scholar.

5 Richard Peter McKeon Papers, Box 44, Folder 10. McKeon to Humayun Kabir, 29 June 1960. University of Chicago [hereafter UC], Regenstein Library [RL], Special Collection [Sp. Colln.].

6 Hay, ‘Tagore in America’, p. 443; Mukherji, Passages, p. 70.

7 For more on this, see my paper, ‘From Civilization to Globalization: The West as a Signifier in Indian Modernity’, Inter-Asian Cultural Studies, (Taiwan) 13 (2012).

8 Poetry: A Magazine of Verse Papers, Box 41, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe's typed note, ‘Tagore in Chicago’ eventually published in The Golden Book of Tagore issued to mark the poet's seventieth birthday, p. 1. UC, RL, Spl. Colln. See also Monroe, A Poet's Life, pp. 261–262.

9 See Williams, Harriet Monroe, Introduction.

10 Williams, Harriet Monroe, pp. 17, 21.

11 Monroe, ‘Tagore in Chicago’, pp. 1–2. The actual letter from Rathindranath Tagore read thus: ‘Dear Sir, Mr. Rabindranath Tagore, who has recently arrived here, would appreciate very much if you kindly send him two copies of the December issue of the Poetry Review in which some of his poems were published. Thanking you in anticipation, I remain, Yours truly, R. N. Tagore. Jr.’ The letter was dated 9 December 1912. The address given was 508 W. High Street, Urbana, Illinois. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse Papers [hereafter ‘Poetry Papers’], Box 41, Folder 3, UC, RL, Spl. Colln. The incident is also described in Monroe, A Poet's Life, p. 320.

12 Mukhopadhyay, Rabindrajibani, p. 412 describes him as a professor at the University of Chicago but Lewis had ceased to be a professor at the University towards the end of the 1890s. Pal, Prasantakumar, Rabijibani, 1908–1914 (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1993), VI, p. 351Google Scholar calls him the ‘director’ (adhikarta) of Lewis Institute. Lewis was a professor at the Institute, but never its director though he held several administrative positions. See biographical notes in Edwin Herbert Lewis Papers, UC, RL, Sp. Colln.

13 See biographical notes in Edwin Herbert Lewis Papers, UC, RL, Sp. Colln.

14 Dennis McClendon, ‘Chicago Growth, 1850–1890: Maps by Dennis McClendon’ (no year given), <http://tigger.uic.edu/depts/ahaa/imagebase/chimaps/mcclendon.html> [accessed 8 February 2014].

15 See, for example, the discussion in Cahill, Daniel J., Harriet Monroe (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1973)Google Scholar, Chapters 1. 2.

16 Illinois Institute of Technology, ‘The Sermon and the Institute’, 2013, <http://www.iit.edu/about/history/> Click on link then use search facility phrase ‘Sermon and the Institute’ [accessed 8 February 2014].

17 Williams, Harriet Monroe, pp. 16–17.

18 Tagore to Harriet Monroe, letters dated 14 December 1912 and 25 December 1912 in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse Records, Box 41, Folder 3, UC, RL, Sp. Colln. In his letter of 4 January 1913, Tagore actually said: ‘Please do not think for a moment that I shall leave this country without visiting Chicago and thanking you for the kind feelings you have towards me’.

19 Tagore's letter to Satya dated 30 December 1912 in ‘Letters’, Rabindrabiksha, ed., Anathnath Das, No. 29, 7 August 1996 (Santiniketan: Visva-Bharati, 1996), p. 28.

20 Harriet Monroe to Tagore, 3 January 1913 cited in Pal, Rabijibani, VI, p. 352.

21 Administration Records of the Presidency of Harry Pratt Judson, Box 80, Folder 8. E. H. Lewis to President Harry Pratt Judson, 17 December 1912. UC, RL, Spl. Colln.

22 E. H. Lewis to Tagore, 23 December 1912 cited in Pal, Rabijibani, VI, p. 352.

23 Administration Records of the Presidency of Harry Pratt Judson, ‘Secretary to the President’ to Lewis, 13 January 1913, in Box 80, Folder 8. UC, RL, Sp. Colln. David Allan Robertson (1880–1961) was an alumnus of the University of Chicago. He was a junior faculty member in the Department of English from 1904 to 1923, and also had the title of Dean from 1919 to 1923. He then served as an Assistant Director of the American Council of Education from 1924 to 1929. Personal communication from Professor John Boyer, Dean of the College, The University of Chicago, dated 26 December 2012.

24 Lewis to Mr Robertson, 15 January 1913. Administration Records of the Presidency of Harry Pratt Judson, Box 80, Folder 8, UC, RL, Spl. Colln. In her autobiography, Harriet Monroe remembers Tagore from his 1913 visit as being ‘bitter about the British subjection of his country’ that he likened to ‘a great steel hammer, crushing persistently the spirit of the people’. Monroe, A Poet's Life, p. 321.

25 Memorandum to Mr James A. Field from ‘DAR’, dated 14 January 1913. E. H. Lewis Papers, Box 8, Folder 7. UC, RL. Spl. Colln.

26 Records of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Box 41, Folder 3: Typescript titled ‘Tagore in Chicago’, pp. 1–2. UC, RL. Sp. Colln.

27 Pound, Ezra, ‘Tagore's Poems’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 1 (1912), p. 92Google Scholar.

28 Pound to Monroe, 22 April 1913 cited in Williams, Harriet Monroe, p. 64.

29 Lewis, Edwin Herbert, The Work of Tagore (Chicago: Chicago Literary Society, 1917)Google Scholar, Papers of Edwin H. Lewis, Box 8, Folder 7. UC, RL, Sp. Colln. This essay was read before the Chicago Literary Club on 15 January 1917 and 275 copies were printed for the members. See note published at the end of the paper.

30 Untitled and unfinished essay in Papers of Edwin Herbert Lewis, Box 8, Folder 7, UC, RL, Sp. Colln.

31 The issues of The Hindusthanee are available on the web at <http://www.saadigitalarchive.org> and type ‘The Hindusthanee’ in the keyword search dialogue box and a list of available publications will be shown [Accessed 12 March 2014].

32 When the well-known historian of Asian art, A. K. Coomaraswamy, and his wife came to stay with Mrs Moody around 1916—on Tagore's introduction—Coomaraswamy was apparently in the habit of pronouncing that ‘India. . .is now finished, and that the only soil upon which ancient Indian artistic ideals can flourish and develop is the soil of the west’. Harriet Moody's letter to Alice Corbin Henderson cited in Dunbar, p. 130. Dunbar, unfortunately, did not care much about carefully dating the letters she quoted from.

33 Papers of Harriet Brainard Moody [hereafter PHBM], Box 2, Folder 22, Tagore to Moody, 14 February 1914, UC, RL, Sp. Colln.

34 PHBM, Box 2, Folder 22, Tagore to Mrs Moody, 10 March 1914. UC, RL, Sp. Colln.

35 PHBM, Box 2, Folder 22, Tagore to Harriet Moody, Calcutta, 18 February 1915. UC, RL. Sp. Colln.

36 See Mukhopadhyay, Prabhatkumar, Rabindrajibani o rabindrasahityaprabeshok (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, circa 1953; repr. 1992), III, pp. 6675Google Scholar; Pal, Prasantakumar, Rabijibani (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 2001), VIII, pp. 6166Google Scholar.

37 These letters may be found in File No. 246, Papers of Rabindranath Tagore (hereafter Tagore Papers or TP), Visva-Bharati University (hereafter VBU), Santiniketan, India.

38 PHBM, Box 2, Folder 22, Tagore to Harriet Moody, 16 April 1913. UC, RL, Sp. Colln.

39 PHBM, Box 2, Folder 22, Tagore to Harriet Moody, Calcutta, 13 May 1918. UC, RL, Sp. Colln.

40 PHBM, Box 2, Folder 22, Tagore to Harriet Moody, Mama Farms, Napanoch, 23 December 1920. UC, RL, Sp. Colln.

41 Mukhopadhyay, Rabindrajibani, III, pp. 425–429.

42 PHBM, Box 2, Folder 22, Tagore to Harriet Moody, 12 October 1930. UC, RL, Sp. Colln.

43 PHBM, Box 2, Folder 22, Tagore to Harriet Moody, 16 October 1930.

44 PHBM, Box 2, Folder 22, Tagore to Harriet Moody, 5 December 1930.

45 PHBM, Box 2, Folder 22, Tagore to Harriet Moody, 15 December 1930. UC, RL, Sp. Colln. The letter cited in note 34 gives Tagore's date of departure from New York.

46 See the letter from Edith Kellog, Harriet Moody's secretary to Tagore: ‘The last two or three years of his life seem to me to have been very tragic; but she was working hard all the time, trying to recover her fallen fortunes’. Edith Kellog to Rabindranath Tagore, 12 November 1932. TP, File No. 246, VBU.

47 Dr Eugene Corson, the son of Professor Corson, dedicated his book on Madame Blavatsky to Harriet Moody as ‘she had suggested [it] to me’. Dunbar's, Olivia HowardA House in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), p. 22 n. 5Google Scholar.

48 In an untitled manuscript article on the history of the Home Delicacies Association, Harriet Moody notes that the first demand was for ‘home made ginger bread’ for Marshall Field's ‘new tea room’. PHBM, Box 3, Folder 2. UC, RL, Sp. Colln.

49 PHBM, Box 3, Folder 3. UC, RL, Sp. Colln.

50 I have used Olivia Howard Dunbar's A House in Chicago and the following web-based sources to put together some of the basic facts of Harriet Moody's life: ‘Guide to the Harriet Brainard Moody Papers, 1899–1932’, <http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.MOODYHB> [accessed 8 February 2014]; and search for ‘History of the Rush Medical College’ at URL <http://www.rushu.rush.edu> [accessed 8 February 2014].

51 ‘Guide to the Harriet Brainard Moody Papers, 1899–1932’, <http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.MOODYHB> [accessed 8 February 2014].

52 Dunbar, A House in Chicago, p. 93.

53 Moody, William Vaughn, Letters to Harriet, ed. by Mackaye, Percy (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1935), p. 407Google Scholar. The situation is also described in Monroe’s, A Poet's Life, p. 320: ‘Alice [Corbin] and I found ourselves in a predicament. Poetry had no fund for entertainment, and neither of its editors could make room, in her contracted family quarters, for this foreigner from afar and his son and daughter-in-law. . . . So once again Mrs. Moody, friend of poets, came to the rescue’.

54 Moody, Letters, p. 407. Monroe (A Poet's Life, pp. 320–321) thus describes her impressions of Tagore's appearance: ‘Tagore was a patriarchal figure in his gray Bengali robe, with a long gray beard fringing his chin. His features were regular and Aryan, his skin scarcely darker than a Spaniard’s’.

55 H. E. Lewis, The Work of Tagore, p. 16.

56 Tagore to Harriet Monroe, 31 December 1913. Records of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Box, 41, Folder 3. UC, RL, Sp. Colln.

57 Kipling, Rudyard, Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads (New York: Macmillan, 1897), pp. 311Google Scholar. See also the comments in Smid, Robert W., Methodologies in Comparative Philosophy: The Pragmatist and Process Traditions (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2009), p. 1Google Scholar.

58 Lago, Mary M., Imperfect Encounter: Letters of William Rothenstein and Rabindranath Tagore, 1911–1941 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972Google Scholar).

59 Tagore's undated (1913) letter cited in Pal, Rabijibani, II, (Calcutta: Bhurjapatra, 1985), p. 362.

60 Dunbar, A House, pp. 94–95.

61 Dunbar, A House, p. 94. Emphasis added.

62 Rattray, R. F., Poets in the Flesh: Tagore, Yeats, Dunsany, Stephens, Drinkwater (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Golden Head Press Ltd., 1961), p. 4Google Scholar.

63 Tagore's letter to Satyaprasad Gangopadhyay, 8 November 1912 in Rabindrabiksha, vol. 29, 7 August 1996 (Santiniketan: Visva-Bharati, 1996), p. 26.

64 Cited in Dunbar, A House, p. 104.

65 Tagore to Harriet Moody, 22 January 1914 in PHBM, Box 2, Folder 22, UC, RL, Sp. Colln. Dunbar, A House, p. 105.

66 Tagore's letter to Rothenstein cited in Mukhopadhyay, Rabindrajibani, II, pp. 446–447, n. 2. Tagore used this simile in some of his Bengali writings and speeches too. It was difficult for him to handle this sudden adulation by many who had lampooned and made fun of his writings in the past. Mohitlal Majumdar, the Bengali poet and critic, was reported to have said that in a public speech Tagore likened many of these ‘admirers’ to ‘village boys who tie a tin to the tail of a dog and chase it through the streets with shouts’. Pal, Rabijibani, VI, p. 451 citing Nirad C. Chaudhuri, ‘Tagore and the Nobel Prize’, The Illustrated Weekly of India, 11 March 1973.

67 Dunbar, A House, p. 105.

68 Dunbar, A House, p. 133. On Mrs Moody's habit of ‘capitalizing’ ‘the Poet,’ see p. 131.

69 Tagore's letter quoted in Pal, Rabijibani, VIII, p. 49. His feelings of ambivalence about raising money in America by going on lecture-tours began with the very first of such tours in 1916 when he wrote to Harriet Monroe complaining about his lack of leisure: ‘I shall try to look cheerful and go on dancing to the tune of your American dollar’. Tagore to Monroe, 6 October 1916. Records of Poetry, Box 41, Folder 3. UC, RL, Sp. Colln.

70 Dunbar, A House, p. 227.

71 Derrida, Jacques, Politics of Friendship, trans. Collins, George (London: Verso, 1997)Google Scholar. On some of these questions, also see Gandhi, Leela, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

72 Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. by Jonathan Barnes, The revised Oxford Translation, II (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 1729–1867 and pp. 1922–1981 respectively; Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Friendship’, pp. 59–73.

73 Derrida, Politics, p. 1. On the attribution (by Diogenes Laertius) of the statement to Aristotle, see pp. 207–211.

74 Derrida, Politics, pp. 7, 8. Cf. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, Book VII, p. 1960: ‘. . .its [primary friendship’s] function is an activity, and this is not external, but in the one who feels love’. See also p. 1961. Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, p. 1828.

75 Derrida, Politics, p. 10. Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, p. 1832: ‘Most people seem, owing to ambition, to wish to be loved rather than to love. . .’.

76 Derrida, Politics, pp. 10–11. Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, p. 1829: ‘. . .love may be felt just as much towards lifeless things’. See also Eudemian Ethics, Book VII, p. 1960.

77 ‘. . .love is like activity, being loved like passivity.’ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book IX, p. 1846.

78 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, p. 1832.

79 Moody, Letters, pp. 407–408.

80 See ‘Online etymological dictionary’. <http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search> [accessed on 8 February 2014].

81 PHBM Tagore to Mrs Moody, 10 March 1914. UC, RL, Sp. Colln.

82 Records of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Box 41, Folder 3: Typescript titled ‘Tagore in Chicago’, pp. 1–2. UC, RL. Sp. Colln.

83 Harriet Moody to Tagore, 31 January 1913, File No. 246, TP, VBU.

84 Moody to Tagore, 9 May 1913, File No. 246, TP, VBU.

85 Moody to Tagore, 21 November 1913, File No. 246, TP, VBU.