Some years ago, while I was online looking for one of Brian Greene’s science festival videocasts, I stumbled instead onto a Tagore song.
Dibaso rajani, ami jeno kar ashay ashay thaki -- “day and night I wait, as though for someone” -- sung not by a Bengali at all, but by Kavita Krishnamurti, from South India, over images of a young woman walking a green Australian shore.
The recording had been gathered and posted by a Bangladeshi Muslim who had built a great online archive of Tagore’s songs.
I have lived more than half my life in Sweden, and I was not looking for Bengal that morning. Yet before the song ended I was in tears, and something I had let grow quiet for decades woke up again.
When I later spoke of it, someone dear to me objected: “But she is not even Bengali.”
I remember my astonishment that the question could be asked. What does that have to do with anything?
The song had reached my heart. That it came in a non-Bengali voice did not make it less mine -- if anything, it made the point I want to make.
Tagore belongs to us so completely that we feel no need to stand at the door and inspect the ID papers of everyone who loves him.
I have seen this many times, far from Bengal. On a long American highway, a fellow cardiologist I had trained with -- a Bangladeshi and a devout Muslim -- played Gram chhara oi ranga matir path through the car stereo, and we drove the better part of an hour without a word, the red-earth road of rural Bengal somehow unrolling across the American plains.
In London, a Bengali oncologist I know spends much of what he earns flying the world to teach Rabindra Sangeet, keeping the songs alive in homes from Toronto to Melbourne.
None of them asked permission, and none asked whether the person beside them prayed to the same God.
I thought of all this on October 10, when a group gathered outside the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy in Segunbagicha and tried to black out Rabindranath Tagore’s face.
The wall was five days old -- a row of Bengali icons along a renovated footpath: Nazrul and Lalon, Zainul Abedin and SM Sultan, Satyajit Ray and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar among them.
The objection, as reported, was to the “West Bengal” figures on a Dhaka wall; a woman smearing the ink said they had come to protest “Indian aggression.”
Four people were later detained and remanded, and a case was filed. For days, the country debated the issue on social media as well as in traditional media.
And then, by the accounts that spread within the hour, something quieter happened at the same wall. A rickshaw-puller who had watched it done, fetched water, and with the gamcha off his own shoulder, wiped the ink away until the face came back.
The story that followed him was that when someone asked why he had bothered, he answered with a single word: Bishwakobi -- the world’s own poet.
A man who may never have finished school, who pulls a rickshaw to live, reached for the very title the scholars reserve for Tagore, and reached for it with a bucket of water in his hand.
I have turned that over for days, because it quietly undoes the whole quarrel. Those of us who left the country needed accidents and decades to find Tagore again -- a wrong turn on the internet, a song over an Australian shore. The rickshaw-puller never lost him.
The poet the diaspora rediscovers is the poet the street never forgot. If that is not what Bishwakobi means, I do not know what the word is for.
My own first response to the ink, I confess, was not anger. Tagore is too vast to be lessened by a bucket of it. You may paint over a portrait; you cannot paint over Amar Shonar Bangla, which the same poet wrote and which is, today, the national anthem of Bangladesh itself.
A nation that sings Tagore each time it honours its own flag cannot black him off a wall without blacking out part of its own throat.
Let me be fair to the grievance underneath the act, for it is not nothing. Bangladesh won its nationhood at terrible cost; it has every right to define itself, to be wary of a large neighbour, and to debate who belongs on its public walls. But a political argument and an act of erasure are not the same thing, and the gap between them is the whole matter.
To purge Tagore as a foreign figure is, first, an anachronism. He was born in 1861 and died in 1941; the Republic of India he is now charged with representing did not exist in his lifetime.
He belongs to a Bengal older than the border drawn in 1947 -- a border real enough, but younger than the language and far younger than its songs.
Nor can he be shrunk to a religious label. Born into a Hindu family, his imagination ran past any single faith, into human dignity, nature, freedom, and the longing of the self for something greater.
A Muslim Bengali does not become a Hindu by singing him; a Hindu Bengali need not endorse his every line to love the music. Cultural inheritance is not religious conversion.
And it is worth remembering who it was they tried to blacken. Tagore did not merely write; his family was the engine of the Bengal Renaissance, the nineteenth-century awakening that remade the Bengali mind as the Italian Renaissance, centuries earlier, had remade Europe’s.
When the Nobel Prize came to him in 1913, he did not keep its money. He sank a large part of it into an agricultural cooperative -- a Krishi Bank -- on his estate at Patisar, in what is now Naogaon, lending to the poorest peasants at rates no moneylender would match.
The face a group tried to black out this month belonged to a man who had already spent his Nobel winnings on the grandfathers of Bangladeshi soil.
And consider where it happened: In Dhaka -- the very city that answered an earlier hostility to Tagore by founding Chhayanaut in 1961, and that kept his songs alive under the banyan tree at Ramna through the years when the Pakistani state discouraged them.
The same city whose love of Rabindra Sangeet was built, in no small part, by women trained in Tagore’s own Santiniketan -- Rezwana Chowdhury Bannya and Aditi Mohsin among them -- who gave Bangladesh the very air of Tagore it now breathes. To black out his face in that city is not to resist a foreign influence. It is to deface one’s own house.
I do not write to condemn the young people who were arrested. They may carry real grievances, and I suspect they are not the villains some would make of them.
But I would ask them the gentler question. You may decide what kind of country you wish to build; you cannot decide, by force, what a people already carries in its chest.
A non-Bengali woman sings Dibaso Rajani, and a Bengali in Stockholm weeps. A Muslim and a sceptic fall silent together over a song on a foreign highway. A rickshaw-puller washes ink from a wall with the cloth off his back.
No decree manufactured that intimacy, and no ink can reach it, because it was never on the wall. It lives in memory -- the one surface a brush cannot touch.
That is why the ink could not hold. You cannot paint Tagore black. The scholars gave him the title; a man with a bucket of water had already proved it.
Rajani K Saha writes from Stockholm, where he is a practising physician.
