In 1878, a seventeen-year-old Tagore set sail for Britain. It was hoped that he would eventually study for the Bar. In the event he stayed for a while with an elder brother and his family in Brighton, put in brief stints in a public school and, in London, with a couple of private tutors with whom he lodged, and spent about three months as a student at University College, London. Almost as soon as he embarked on the voyage to England he began sending letters to a magazine describing his experiences. These were collected in 1881 in Europe Prabashir Patra ("Letters of a European Sojourn"). It attracted considerable attention, partly because it satisfied the Bengali readers' curiosity about the imperial "mother country" and partly because it was the first book to use the colloquial "chalti" form of Bengali.

The ten letters have an explicit intertextual connection with Thackeray's "Travels and Sketches in London", which Tagore quotes and paraphrases. The first letter vividly describes the voyage to England--the torment of mal de mer, the idiosyncrasies of fellow passengers--and caricatures a jingoistic Englishman whom Tagore aptly nicknames John Bull. The second describes the healthy shock of discovering that the real England is very different from the imaginary England of the bookish colonial Indian:

"Before coming to England I had foolishly harbored the hope that this tiny island would resound throughout with Gladstone's rhetoric, Max Mueller's commentary on the Vedas, Tyndall's scientific theories, Carlyle's profound ideas [...] Fortunately, I have been disillusioned. The ladies here are busy at their toilette, the men at work; family life goes on as it's supposed to; and only politics occasionally raises a furore." (My translation.)

Tagore casts an amused eye over the English social scene--masked balls, picnics, flirtations -- but is acerbic in portraying Anglicized Bengalis. These are the true colonial subjects, Naipaul's "mimic men", who have condemned themselves to go about with fractured personalities. To understand this, Tagore advises his readers to observe them in three situations, vis-à-vis English people (they cringe), vis-à-vis ordinary Bengalis (they are rude and contemptuous) and vis-à-vis fellow Anglicized Bengalis (they practice one-upmanship).

The last letter breaks off in the middle of Tagore's stay with the family of an English doctor whom he calls Mr. K but whose real name was Dr Scott. He was then studying at University College, London, where he relished the lectures on English literature.

Tagore's days with the Scotts were the happiest he spent in England. But the expression of this happiness in his letters home, ironically enough, brought about its termination. Tagore's biographer Krishna Kripalani thus describes what transpired:

"His earlier observations on English society and in particular the role and ways of its women, which had been mixed with not a little irony and caustic comment, now underwent a change and he began genuinely to admire the charm and strength of character of women brought up in a free society. This admiration was freely expressed in his letters home and published in Bharati where he compared the position of women in the two societies, western and his own, and sought to show how the same sex was a source of strength to one society and a source of weakness in the other. These outbursts of admiration for the fair sex in England caused a flutter among the elders at home who began to wonder if it was wise to let this impetuous boy loose in England after his elder brother returns home [ ... ]. So a peremptory order went from India that Rabindra was to cut short his studies and return home with his elder brother."

A poem Tagore wrote at this time throws light on what happened: "Du-Din" ("Two Days") is a lament for the end of a brief romance:

And O the regret and shame of it!

I came for two days to this land--only to break A gentle heart!

(Translated by Krishna Kripalani.)

The gentle heart belonged to one of the three Scott girls. Nirad Chaudhuri suggests that Tagore experienced the awakening of the passionate aspect of youth in a manner comparable to that described by Chateaubriand. Be that as it may, the role of Tagore's English sojourn in shaping his mind is indicated in the concluding words of My Boyhood Days: "I went to England but I did not become a barrister. I received no shock calculated to shatter the original framework of my life--rather East and West met in friendship in my own person."

Tagore's autobiography, My Reminiscences, also gives an account of his first English visit, but significantly it begins with an apology for the epistolary travel book: "They [those letters] were nothing but the outcome of youthful bravado.[...] These attempts of mine to establish my superiority by revilement might have amused me today, had not their want of straightforwardness and common courtesy been too painful?" It is primarily the send-up of the Anglicized Bengalis that Tagore so deeply regrets. One can only praise the delicacy of feeling Tagore expresses here, but not at the cost of wishing that the letters had not been written. The first impression has a value all its own even if one is ashamed of it afterwards.

In Europe Yatrir Diary ("Diary of a Voyage to Europe"), the record of a round trip made in the latter half of 1890, Tagore's praise of the beauty of English women is reminiscent of earlier Indian travel-writers like Mirza I'tesamuddin and Mirza Abu Taleb:

"It is a pleasure to walk along the street here. One is sure to see a pretty face. Patriots at home will, I hope, forgive my admiration of these fair faces, their red lips and shapely noses and eyes that reflect the blue of the sky. English girls are, indeed, attractive. This statement may cause jitters among my well-wishers at home and amused smiles among my friends. Nevertheless, I must confess that a lovely face is lovely to me. Good looks and a charming smile--what a wonderful human asset they are!" (Translated by Kripalani.)

But there is also a diatribe against colonialism, probably symptomatic of a change in India's political climate; the Indian National Congress was set up in 1885, and so by 1890 a robust and well-defined critical stance towards the colonial power must have become common among the intelligentsia.

In 1916 Tagore traveled to Japan, and three years later published Japan Yatri ("Traveler to Japan"). This was a crucial time in Tagore's intellectual development, for he now went beyond his quasi-mystical romanticism to become a controversial political critic. In Japan and the USA, which he next visited, he delivered the series of lectures later published as Nationalism (1917). At a time when nationalism had mobilized millions for the abattoir of the Great War, and when Indians, in reaction to the iniquities of the Raj, turned to nationalism for ideological support, Tagore stringently criticized its built-in narrowness, its blinkered view of human reality, its irrational worship of state power. This makes Tagore highly relevant to our age, as E. P. Thompson pointed out: "So far from being outmoded, Tagore's commitment to anti-politics and his concern with civil society make him appear at times to be a markedly modern--or perhaps post-modern--thinker". The broad libertarianism that underlies Tagore's stance would later manifest in the sympathetic view of the Soviet Union in Russiar Chitthi ("Letters from Russia", 1931).

The "post-modern" ideas expounded in Nationalism found their way into the travel book on Japan. But the latter is also postmodern in its aesthetics, as the following excerpt on the phenomenological dimension of literature should illustrate: "This morning nature presents herself draped in the green-bordered brown sari of the river, and I am looking at her. Here I am purely an observer. If this observing "I" expressed himself in language, or in line, the result would have been literature, or art. Someone may become annoyed and say, "What is it to me that you are looking at things? It won't fill my belly, or cure my malaria, or raise the yield of my fields". This is quite true; you have nothing to gain from it. But if you are really indifferent to the fact of my being an observer, then the creation of art and literature has no meaning in this world.

You may ask, "What will you call these scribblings of yours, literature or theory?"

Let's not call it theory; there, what is important is the theory, not the theorist. In literature that person is more important, and the theory mere pretext. Consider this blue sky dotted with fleecy clouds; beneath it the earth's glorious green courtyard; and flowing past it the insouciant current of the mendicant river. Amidst all this what is chiefly finding expression is the observing "I"......

....in the inner world too it is the same observing "I" that drifts along. There, too, he who speaks is paramount, what he says mere pretext. As I go along, in the same way that I am looking at the beauty of the world out there, I am also looking at the stream of thoughts and feelings within through the vision of my consciousness." (My translation.)

Tagore's phenomenological sensitivity endows his travel writings, right down to the posthumously published account of Persia, with aesthetic and spiritual value even as they present challenging socio-political ideas. They teach us what Buddhists call mindfulness--the detached alertness to what is going on--and show us how this mindfulness can be transformed into literature.

Kaiser Haq is professor of English at Dhaka University.