In the summer of 1959, a Rockefeller grant enabled me to visit England, the USA and some countries in Europe, to meet writers in different languages. During my tour I was invited by the Oxford University Press (OUP), London, and the Grove Press, New York, to write a full-length biography of Rabindranath Tagore which they proposed to publish in collaboration. The offer was no doubt prompt-ed by the approaching birth centenary of Tagore (in May 1961) when the publishers might reasonably expect a revival of western interest in his life and work. I welcomed the proposal but hesitated to undertake the responsivity which would involve research in a long and eventful life and a careful re-reading of all his voluminous writings in a language not my own. But the publishers and other friends pressed, and I agreed. My personal devotion to Tagore and my almost idolatrous admiration of his literary genius outweighed all other considerations.
I took the work in hand the following summer, and as I laboured through it, one query haunted me again and again. Wherefrom did Rabindranath derive his versatility of talent and interest, his comprehensiveness of outlook basically secular, his love of music and the arts, his active interest in the revival of theatre (normally taboo to Brahmos of the period), and his overflowing creativeness bursting all bounds of the conventional form? Although a genius happens and is not made, no one can wholly escape the influence of heredity and environment. Was there any-thing in Tagore heredity that could suddenly flower into so many-petalled a lotus of genius?
I could not persuade myself that Rabindranath derived his many-splendored genius from the redoubtable Maharshi, austere and single-minded, seated solemn and aloof on a Himalayan peak of religious contemplation.
Rabindranath, though he was proud to deem himself a beloved disciple of his father, was most unlike the Maharshi, except when he chose to don a prophet's robe and preach a sermon from the pilpulist or platform turned pulpit. He was not only myriad-minded as a literary phenomenon, put was a very genuine and ardent (though seemingly somewhat passionless) lover of life in all its manifold play. His feet were planted firmly on earth and his eye observed calmly, but not unsoften with a Shavian twinkle of amusement, what went around him, even while he wrote his exquisite religious lyrics which brought him world fame. I also discovered that as he grew older and the Maharshi's spell on him weakened, he was stead-ily liberated from his earlier inhibitions, became more liberal-minded, more tolerant of dissent, of the unfamiliar, even of the wayward, more universal in outlook, his sympathies transcending his race, religion and nation.
I became curious to look into his ancestry, beyond the Maharshi's magic curtain. Thus I stumbled against Dwarkanath about whom hardly any mention was made in the family or at Santiniketan where I spent many years.
Raja Rammohun Roy was talked of, admired and idolised, but his main collaborator and comrade, Dwarkanath, who had stood by India's first great modern rebel till the end and not only till the end but long after, when many a religious disciple deserted his new faith, he, Dwarkanath, was almost totally ignored, as though his memory was a blot on the family encutcheon. This only whetted my curiosity about a man who was so admired in his lifetime and so ignored after his death.
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