In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore received the I Nobel Prize in Literature. World famous overnight, his writings were translated into numerous languages. Meanwhile, in Slovenia, a young, still anonymous poet felt strongly drawn to the newly available works of the Indian bard. This young man was Srečko Kosovel, who is today hailed as Slovenia's leading avant-garde poet of the interwar period. But what could Kosovel, then barely out of his teens, have in common with a figure of Tagore's stature?
Deeply affected by Italy's conquest of parts of Slovene-populated territory, Kosovel was able to identify with Tagore and relate to the historical predicament of colonial subjugation. Despite coming from different backgrounds, they were kindred spirits-a dynamic, creative ideal of universalism lay at the core of their concerns. As a 'true' universalist, in the sense of feeling empathy with the less fortunate, it was more in the spirit of equality that Kosovel approached Tagore.
This volume is the first comparative study of the writings of these two poets who lived worlds apart but spoke in strikingly similar voices. It explores the links between India and East-Central Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century and gives expression to responses from within Europe that have largely been overlooked in postcolonial and cultural studies.
This book has grown out of the research conducted for a PhD T degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) under the mentorship of William Radice. It is to him that I owe my foremost words of gratitude. I will remain forever indebted to him for opening the doors of the world of Tagore scholarship and Bengali studies for me, and for setting such an inspiring example of combining rigorous scholarship with creative literary work. This book is my own attempt at turning literary interest into academic research and I wish to thank the following institutions and individuals who enabled me to carry the project through the various stages to its completion. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support received from the Arts.
and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) fee-only doctoral award for the second and third years of my research, as well as a fieldwork grant, and the supplementary maintenance grant received from the Slovenian Ministry of Culture for postgraduate studies abroad. At the same time, without further financial assistance from both my parents, whose all-round support surpasses any words of acknowledgement, I would have had to struggle incomparably more with the practical realities of life. The one-year Ad Futura grant to join the Science and Research Centre of Koper, University of Primorska, has allowed me to continue my research in modern Indian cultural history, while facilitating my transition back to Slovenia. The one individual who has been hugely supportive in this is Lenart Škof, one of the few Slovene scholars pursuing research on India-related subjects, and to him I would like to extend a special word of thanks. The Indian Council for Cultural Relations Tagore Fellowship for 2011-12 not only sustained me through another year, but also gave me a year-long opportunity to live in Kolkata researching the theme of hospitality in relation to Tagore's ideas and creative writing at the Department of Bengali, Presidency University. Special thanks go to Dobariya Bhattacharya for his support throughout. In this period, I benefited immensely from conversations I had with various scholars, often combined with invitations to their homes. Heartfelt thanks go to Swati Lal and Ananda Lal whose warm household I have come to associate over the years with the best of Bengali hospitality and cosmopolitan intellectual rigour. With Nandini Bhattacharya, 1 engaged in hours of stimulating conversation and I wish to thank her for hosting me at West Bengal State University as well as introducing me to the English Department staff there, including Anupama Choubey, whose help with Bengali sources has been invaluable to me ever since. I am grateful to Debashish Raychaudhuri and his family, including the brilliant Rabindrasangeet singer, Rohini Raychaudhuri, who kindly collaborated with me alongside her father at a literary event exploring connections between India and Slovenia that was hosted by the Slovene Embassy in India with the Honorary Consul of the Republic of Slovenia in Kolkata. Amit Chaudhuri's sharp insights on Kosovel's poetry at the same event and his fresh approach to Tagore that liberates him from the national iconic status have been very important for my work. Equally important have been my frequent collaborations with the wonderful poet and translator Stephen Watts, not only for sharpening my ability to appreciate poetry in general, but also for enhancing my sensibilities as a translator; not to mention the stimulus exuding from his own appreciation of both Bengali and Slovene literatures.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, two remarkable I individuals who lived worlds apart spoke up in strikingly similar voices. At first sight, theirs is a strange alignment-also a bold one. For who would dare put a towering poet-philosopher on par with a budding, however talented, writer whose life was cut short just as his artistic voice was beginning to gather momentum. And yet, this is not the first time that Rabindranath Tagore and Srečko Kosovel have been caught between the covers of the same book. If you were to pick up the primer from my early school days in what was then still Yugoslavia, you would find both the Slovene poet and the Bengali writer amidst its pages. While, no doubt, this education policy was spurned by Tito's involvement-along with that of Nehru, Nasser, and Sukarno-in the Non-aligned Movement in the 1960s, which opened up Yugoslavia to the Global South, the interest in Tagore amongst Slovenes has an altogether longer and a more personal-history: This book is the first to explore the various facets of that history.
In the 1920s, at the height of Tagore's reputation in continental Europe, Srečko Kosovel (1904-1926) penned these lines:
In green India among quiet trees that bend over blue water lives Tagore.
Almost a century later, for the occasion of the centenary of the publication of Tagore's English Gitanjali: Song Offerings (1912). William Radice, one of Tagore's foremost translators into English, used these four lines as an epigraph to his translation of the award-winning col. lection of poems, in itself a real act of literary excavation and creative restitution that brings the 'real' English Gitanjali to the reader for the first time. Srečko Kosovel would never have thought it possible that one day the opening lines of his most explicit tribute to the Indian contemporary he read and admired so much, the poem 'In Green India, would share book space with the Laureate. Indeed, it would be hard to think of a bigger compliment to the then barely known poet who looked to Tagore convinced that there was no one greater than him on the horizon at the time. Thrown about on the rough seas of the post-Great War Europe, the young poet was only too eager to jump into Tagore's 'Golden boat' incidentally the title he borrowed from his Indian 'mentor' for his first collections of poems.
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