“Where the Mind is without Fear…” Tagore’s tryst with USA

During World War II, when Paris fell in June 1940, Tagore sent a telegram to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the handwritten draft of which was published in Tagore and America. It is a plea to the President and the United States:“Today, we stand in awe before the fearfully destructive force that has so suddenly swept the world. Every moment I deplore the smallness of our means and the feebleness of our voice in India so utterly inadequate to stem in the least, the tide of evil that has menaced the permanence of civilization. All our individual problems of politics to-day have merged into one supreme world politics which, I believe, is seeking the help of the United States of America as the last refuge of the spiritual man, and these few lines of mine merely convey my hope, even if unnecessary, that she will not fail in her mission to stand against this universal disaster that appears so imminent.” This corroborates Rabindranath Tagore’s standing and concern as a world citizen and humanist whose influence on the Western World was sealed with the translation of the verses of Gitanjali (The offering of songs) and the bestowal of the Nobel Prize—both in the year 1913. Tagore’s earliest visit to the United States in 1912 followed the first publication of his poetry in Chicago’s literary journal Poetry. Between 1912 and 1930, Tagore visited the United States five times, travelling from coast to coast and receiving a warm welcome. Many years later, during the 1961 centenary celebrations of Tagore’s birth in which private organizations and top universities of the US like Harvard and Yale participated with a similar fervour, President Kennedy quoted a “majestic verse” from Gitanjali that “might serve as today’s universal prayer”.