You might not know that Rabindranath Tagore’s first sustained experience of America was not New York or San Francisco, but the farming/university town of Urbana, Illinois. He went there in 1912, to visit his son Rathindranath, studying at the University of Illinois. Father Rabindranath had wanted his son not to study literature or the arts at a place like Oxford or Cambridge (or London, as Rabindranath himself had done), but rather agricultural science in the service of what Tagore hoped would turn into a program for village development.
You might expect this small-town Illinois experience in 1913 to have been a lesson in culture shock for the cosmopolitan (soon to be world-famous) Tagore, who just a few weeks earlier had been dining with the cream of the crop in literary London. But no, Tagore fit right in, impressing the local Unitarians and making friends as he would do wherever he went in those years. He quickly moved from Urbana to Chicago, where he was a hit with the literati there, and from Chicago he started getting invitations to lecture at some major universities, which he accepted.
Tagore actually made five trips to the US, starting in 1912, and ending in 1930, according to his biographers Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, in their excellent (but out of print!) book Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man. (Note: Their book is the source for most of the information in this post.) By looking at those trips in particular, we can get an image of the man rather different from the aristocratic ‘Gurudev’ that most people know. Tagore came to America, first, to visit his son (who did not stay long), then to raise money for his new university at Shantiniketan. But above all, he came to argue with Americans about American business, industry, and war. What he said and how it was received tells an interesting story about both Tagore and the U.S. in those days. Continue reading
