Talk to Rabindranath Tagore

In their own words

Each quotation as published in the source named under it. Words first written in another language are given in English translation.

• “My brothers, when the red light of conflagration sends up its crackle of laughter to the stars, keep your faith upon those stars and not upon the fire of destruction.”

Questions to ask

• Why did you disagree with Gandhi about the spinning wheel?
• What did you and Einstein actually argue about?
• Why did you give back your knighthood?
• What should a school be like, if you could design one today?
• Which of your songs do you love most, and why?

Which Tagore picks up

• 1930Berlin and Caputh, Germany. Aged 69, on a long Western tour after his Hibbert Lectures at Oxford, exhibiting his paintings in Europe and meeting Albert Einstein for conversations on truth and reality.
• 1891Shelaidaha, East Bengal. Aged 30, managing the family's zamindari estates from a houseboat on the Padma and writing the short stories later collected as Galpaguchchha.
• 1913Santiniketan. Aged 52, running his small ashram school when news arrives in November that he has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• 1919Calcutta. Aged 58, writing to the Viceroy to give up his knighthood in protest at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the Punjab repression.
• 1934Santiniketan. Aged 72, publicly disagreeing with Gandhi's claim that the Bihar earthquake was a divine punishment for untouchability.

Questions about Tagore

Who was Rabindranath Tagore?

Bengali poet, songwriter, novelist, painter and educator from the Jorasanko Tagore family of Calcutta. In 1913 he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, largely on the strength of the English Gitanjali, and he founded the school at Santiniketan and the Visva-Bharati university. His songs (Rabindrasangeet) include the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.

Can you talk to Tagore with AI?

Yes, in the Yuga app for iPhone and Android. You talk out loud with an AI recreation of Tagore, set in Berlin and Caputh, Germany, 1930. It draws on their own writing and well-sourced accounts of their life, and it can still get things wrong, so check anything important against the sources.

Is that really Tagore's voice?

No. Recordings of their voice survive, but Yuga's voice is designed from how it sounded, not cloned from them. Every call is labelled an AI recreation.

What did Tagore say about Nationalism?

The Western nation-state is a mechanical organisation for power and profit that crushes the living society of people; India should not imitate it but look for its own social basis of unity. Source: Nationalism (lectures in Japan and the USA), 1917.

What did Tagore say about Jallianwala Bagh and the knighthood?

After the Amritsar massacre and the Punjab repression, he felt bound to stand with his humiliated countrymen and asked the Viceroy to relieve him of his knighthood. Source: Letter to Lord Chelmsford, May 1919.

What did Tagore say about Non-cooperation and the charkha?

He admired Gandhi but objected to the burning of foreign cloth and to the spinning wheel as a universal duty. Mechanical obedience to a single programme, he argued, would stifle thought, and India's freedom had to come through knowledge and constructive work. Source: 'The Call of Truth', Modern Review, 1921; 'The Cult of the Charkha', Modern Review, 1925.

How Tagore talks

Lyrical but precise. In English he speaks in long, balanced sentences with images from nature such as rivers, lamps, birds and the seasons, and then lands on a plain moral point. In argument he is courteous and firm, and he never raises his voice. A gentle, teasing humour runs through his talk, especially about his own fame and his beard.