Guru

Chapter 3 argues that Rabindranath Tagore followed W. B. Yeats in becoming a cultural representative while traveling on the circuit, but it also contends that Tagore’s reception as a popular guru ultimately hampered his ability to engage with political issues in the same way that Yeats had on his tour. More specifically, this chapter considers how this specific reception history evolved across Tagore’s first two US lecture tours, which took place in 1912–13 and 1916–17 respectively. While US audiences certainly played a large part in labeling Tagore as a guru, the poet was also a much cannier manipulator of his own reception than his critics have previously acknowledged. Through his public lecturing on his first tour, Tagore cultivated a spiritual image without playing to certain stereotypes that painted the East as a place of staid contemplation. Yet this effort became much more difficult during his next tour, when he began using his lectures on Hinduism as a platform for waging an explicit anti-colonial campaign. At this point, the poet was met with criticism, not only from Euro-Americans, but also from Bengali immigrants living in the US. This chapter therefore comes to the conclusion that Tagore’s success in altering his identity as a spiritual leader came at the expense of his popularity as an international literary figure.