England’s Chum

Letters

Vol. 10 No. 11 · 2 June 1988

From Andrew Robinson

I must protest against John Bayley’s assertion, in his review of Nirad Chaudhuri’s autobiography (LRB, 5 May), that ‘with their knowledge of English literature, educated Bengalis could see that [Tagore’s poetry] was no good in English and began to wonder if it could therefore be any good in Bengali either.’ This is neither an accurate statement of Chaudhuri’s analysis of Tagore, nor true. It quite misses the fact that there were many educated Bengalis in the period in which Tagore established his reputation as a poet in Bengal (from 1880 onwards) whose confidence in their own language (as well as their remarkable ability in English) left them in no doubt of Tagore’s greatness. They did not need the recognition given him in the West from 1912 onwards to confirm this impression for them. Unfortunately, they do not fit comfortably into Chaudhuri’s entertaining but partial theme of Bengali decline, and so Professor Bayley is probably unaware of their existence. They include the remarkable grandfather and father of the film-director Satyajit Ray, the second of whom was the first Bengali to publish an essay on Tagore in the West, before the award of the Nobel Prize to him in November 1913.

Andrew Robinson
London N1