RABINDRANATH TAGORE: THE MAN WHO ENLIGHTENED SERBIA

A personal testimony on the occasion of the centenary of Tagore's Belgrade lectures

Dr. Aleksandar Petrovic *

How did Rabindranath Tagore so deeply touch and subtly enlighten the Serbian culture? Why did his two Belgrade lectures (On Modern Civilization and The Meaning of Art) a century ago, in 1926, attract such intense and still unmatched public attention? The first lecture he gave in Belgrade at the Kolarac Foundation stirred and excited the city. According to the newspaper Politika, when he gave a lecture the following day on the importance of art, the applause for the poet went on and on. I don't know that any poet in Belgrade received a standing ovation like the one that Tagore did. The applause seemed ceaseless and the audience wouldn’t stop; they didn't want to leave. They wanted to keep Tagore in Belgrade forever, transforming one brief moment into eternity. People felt that he not only spoke from the depth and strength of Indian culture, but that he also gave voice to their own true self.

Tagore is the highest expression of the spirit of the East. This is why he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, when the impending war was already felt. Through this award, his work was understood to be a salutary message of harmony between East and West that led beyond the general conflict. However, the Great War, which came the very next year, caused this message to be lost in the labyrinths of history. Nevertheless, Serbian society, which had gone through the most terrible Golgotha of the Great War, was able to feel the healing thought and elated news Tagore brought. It showed this with its grand response to the lectures and the overwhelming feeling of enthusiasm. The audience immediately adopted Tagore’s philosophical and poetic thought, as well as his fight for freedom from Great Britain, as the true path to salvation. Tagore confirmed the truth of their feelings by his words, stating that he had two nests: one Indian, another Serbian. In this context, we can understand his verses from Gitanjali:

Let’s go old memories

Let’s go forgotten melodies

Let mists of the eye thin far away into dissolution

Let weariness be erased, infirmity cease,

Hallowed by the Earth to bathe in your fire…

We begin with this poem that places memory at the center of life. It is more than memory, more than the past, and more than the future. It is the pure present as the center of life and its eternal form. Tagore says that memory is the guardian of life and invites us to see the source from which that which will not disappear in the ephemeralness of time comes. This is very close to the Indian cyclical consciousness, as well as to Platonic anamnesis and Orthodox liturgical memory. Mahatma Gandhi considered the song his Northern Star on his way to spiritual and political freedom. Through this poem, we can see the Five Pillars of Tagore’s Belgrade lectures:

1. The absence of the “I”. His words were separate from the adoration or elevation of his own "I," divested of the distant "I" as a false subject. Leaving the ego perspective is obvious in his verses: You madman, who strives to carry yourself on your own back… Beggar, who knocks on the threshold of your own door… Place your burden in the hands of the one who carries everything and does not look back sadly, your lust extinguishes the lamp as soon as your breath touches it, it is heathen, it doesn’t take its gifts from its unclean hands. Take only what the love of the world offers you, because love is in fact freed from the sense of one's own "I".

Tagore’s greatness lies in these words. Our downfall rests in the illusion of a separate self that leads us into labyrinths of modern individualism, which inevitably ends in a war of all against all. That is what Tagore is actually telling us, and we remember his famous verse that expresses it best: He who plants trees knowing that he would never sit in their shadow, he discovered the meaning of life.  The planting of trees for the common good is a non-utilitarian action; it is not done so that the “I” can sit in its shade. Therefore, Tagore is not only a poet, but the great hallowed teacher, and his lectures are a genuine cultural manifesto and philosophical reinterpretation of the modern world.

2. The free hand that liberates the mind. Tagore liked to write by hand. This is not pure technical skill but an essential matter of human freedom that put him very close to Gandhi, who based the cultural and political liberation of India on a hand freed from the tyranny of technology, which dictates what will be used, what will be worn, what will be aspired to. Tagore, like Gandhi, affirms a free hand that must be a response to a free mind. A free mind cannot serve the computer and end there lost in a post-truth virtual reality. The free hand is the genuine foundation of the world, bringing higher level of education that Tagore says makes our life in harmony with all existence.
3. Leaving mind control. Following the path of freedom, Tagore abandoned school because he felt that school in general actually turns one back to the world and consequently lowers the level of self-consciousness. It transforms a gifted, fresh, curious student into a slave in the galley of mechanized modernity. This is why he tried to develop another type of education. Later, when he was already a significant writer, he created a model school in which he based education on the philosophy of the Upanishads. The Upanishads go deeper into the interpretation of reality and they bring solutions to all the dilemmas that a person has in life. Now we can easily compare a school based on the Upanishads with a present-day school based on computers and their social algorithms. They differ like day and night.

Tagore enrolled in the Presidential College in London. He then moved to University College London, but also left that school and threw himself into the study of Shakespeare's plays. In 1880, he returned to his native Bengal without a single diploma or formal degree, but with many things on his mind. He was full of ideas and desires to express his protest against formal education. As such, he reached high creative expression that would confirm and affirm that he did not run away from organized education in vain.

4. Insight into modern civilization. According to Politika, Tagore dedicated his lecture to a very contemporary topic, still relevant today: the lack of ideas and the harmfulness of modern civilization. He could not have chosen a more relevant and prescient topic, taking into account the total harm that modern civilization does to life. Without the East, which brings the current of the spiritual strength, the West is helplessly lost in objects, facts, signs, and in the accumulation of different rules, amongst other things. Tagore expresses this beautifully and openly, and then like a prophet he raises his finger and says:

It is the last hour for Europe to graft onto its body,

as always in moments of crisis, the spirit of the East.

It is incredible how prophetic Tagore’s words were. He does not accept technological civilization without the spiritual core of the inner light. Europe will not be saved without the Eastern spirit, no matter how powerful its technology and material wealth seem to be.

5. Poetic enlightening of Serbia Although his stay in Serbia was brief, Tagore undoubtedly influenced the Serbian intellectual elite to reconsider its historical path. At this moment, Serbian society, which by 1926 had been immersed for almost a century in the European grist mill between wartime destruction and interwar forced modernization, was able to listen to such critical words in public. Tagore sincerely addressed the Serbian people: “I am very happy to see a people who are very different in their feelings from other Western peoples. I love these people for their spontaneous feelings, for their warm hearts that know how to inspire. I feel like a bird with two nests, on two opposite sides of the shore. I am happy to be in a country rich in love.” Through the words of Rabindranath Tagore, the true eulogy for the Serbian people comes. They were hearing such words about themselves for the first time and perhaps dared to believe in them as the energy of freedom coming from the depths of hidden memories. So succinctly and so precisely did Tagore describe the soul of the Serbian nation. He did not talk about economic development and how much material wealth the nation had accumulated, along with misery and torment, on its European path. Above all, Tagore was expressing that Serbia made him happy and that he was someone who could feel at home in both nations. Such acceptance by an enlightened poet and prophet is the highest, almost divine recognition and reward that any nation can receive. He built a symbolic bridge between India and Serbia.

Instead of a conclusion. In a word, to make things quite clear, Tagore enlightened the inner world the same way that Nikola Tesla illuminated the outer world. This is the great Glory of Light. Both Tagore and Tesla visited Belgrade for only two days, but their presence in that very short time would come to light eternity.

As Tagore invites us with his verses, let’s go old memories, let’s go forgotten melodies, his memory gives us new energy, real strength, and hope that we will find ourselves on our and Tagore’s way despite the spreading darkness. One century later, Tagore’s message still shines above time and space, enlightening and warming both Serbian and Indian culture. His thoughts and verses swept Belgrade like a great wave that will never disappear, as if time means nothing to Tagore or to us. It makes me especially happy because I know that after another hundred years have passed, someone will be at this same rostrum, here at the Kolarac Foundation, celebrating Tagore’s visit. Swimming -- or rather floating -- on that wave, I already feel the joy of the next century because of someone who will continue the thread on Tagore's loom that connects waves of time into one weave. Tagore already welcomed us with his words in The Gardener more than a hundred years ago, just as we now greet those who will come a hundred years later:

Who are you, reader, reading my poems a hundred years hence?

Open your doors and look abroad.From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of thevanished flowers of a hundred years before.In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sangone spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years.

The symbolic victory over time, real or illusive (or both), is the highest feat that humans can achieve. Thus, our only task is to move toward the goal that memory, like a source of light, sets before us. That is why we end this presentation with a poem that closes the circle with the one first mentioned at the beginning. This is an iconic Tagore song from 1905, Keep Walking Alone (Ekla Chalo Re). It is a powerful personal anthem urging self-reliance, moral courage, and the determination to pursue one’s convictions, even if deserted by others.

If they answer not to thy call walk alone,
If they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall,
O thou unlucky one,
open thy mind and speak out alone.

My Indian friend Swathi Lyengar drew my attention to the existence of another poem with the same title, Ekla Chalo Re, written as a kind of tribute or remake by the Indian poet Gajanan Mishra. The poem, like a signpost, was written deeply identifying with Tagore in order to illuminate for us the essential meaning of his life's path:

Go Alone

There is peace

There is tranquility

In going alone

You are alone here

Like the sun

Like the moon

To enlightened the world

Go alone like the air

Like the water

You are the life-giver

You are my dear

Go alone without

Any attachment

Go alone Go alone

You are the only light

Here in this world

Without You the is

Dark and only dark

This is not just a poem, but a true revelation of a higher level of awareness. And that is precisely Tagore: the Sun and the Moon simultaneously in one who is not only in himself but everywhere in the world and in all of us.

* Professor of Cultural History of India and Cultural Anthropology at University of Belgrade, Head of the Matica Srpska project Serbian – Indian links in Culture thorough History, President of Visarga – Forum of the Serbian-Indian Cultural Initiative, Founder of the Library of Indian Culture, ICCR Fellow, author of the book ‘From Nalanda to Hilandar’

May 5 2026, Kolarac Foundation, Belgrade