Some Vietnamese nationalists hailed him as a spiritual guru. Others called him a capitalist bloodsucker. Such was the mixed reception that Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore received in Saigon in 1929.
“[R]adical and moderate forms of Vietnamese nationalism reflected both appreciation and criticism of Tagore’s views of Indian nationhood,” Chi P. Pham explains. The presence of the deeply pacifist Tagore, who was known for his vision of pan-Asian unity, fanned the debate on how Vietnam’s revolutionaries should chart a future without the French.
At the time, the political ideas of Calcutta-based intellectuals like Tagore were hugely influential in public debates about anticolonialism throughout Asia. Scholars who trace the circulation of ideas in this period largely focus British imperial cities such as Bombay (now Mumbai), Singapore, and Rangoon (Yangon) in what is now Myanmar. Yet Pham finds that many intellectuals in Vietnam were also receptive to Tagore’s emphasis on Indian spirituality and a “Greater India” cultural sphere that extended to Southeast Asia.
In that vein, newspaper articles and photographs covering Tagore’s visit presented him “as a sacred character—that is, as Annam’s savior from cultural decline,” as Pham puts it. For example, more than one journalist waxed lyrical in print about the hypnotic nature of his “strangely bright eyes,” while artist Lê Trung Nghĩa painted Tagore as a meditating sage.
Other writers used their prose to publicly laud the influence of India on Vietnamese culture. Drawing connections between Tagore’s poetry and classical Vietnamese forms, they saw “India as an original source of Asian civilization and Annam as inseparable from that history,” Pham notes.
By couching their opinions in such rhetoric, intellectuals like Dương Văn Giáo—a leading nationalist who hosted Tagore in Saigon—“attempted to revive cultural connections to Asia as a way to link their political struggle to those of other colonized nations,” Pham adds.
On the other hand, other Vietnamese nationalists were souring on Tagore, as his message of collaboration and his opposition to nationalism did not live up to their revolutionary expectations. Coverage of Tagore in L’echo Annamite, which was sympathetic to political radicals, had been favorable throughout the 1920s, when Tagore was celebrated for his anticolonial stance.
By the time of Tagore’s visit, however, Pham points to negative articles by two authors who, in her words, “expressed a view that Tagore’s celebration of ‘universal peace and brotherhood’ were not pertinent to the material conditions of colonized peoples.” In one of these essays, the author criticized Tagore’s call for East–West collaboration while Vietnam was being violently exploited and subjected to European rule,” Pham observes.
Another writer, Hi Vọng, lambasted Tagore for not addressing the “ferocious appetites, depressing materialism, exasperated hatred, and increasingly bloody conflicts” faced by Vietnamese people. He rejected Tagore’s view of martyrdom as a spiritual ideal. Rather, he promoted political violence as a necessary vehicle for achieving freedom from colonialism in Vietnam and in other countries.
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In this regard, Tagore’s radical Vietnamese critics resembled their counterparts in China and Japan, who had rejected Tagore’s universalist appeals as they pursued their own nationalist agendas.
Vietnamese Marxist intellectuals also criticized Tagore “as someone whose appearance and ideas represented an elite bourgeois lifestyle,” Pham reports. That’s as newspapers revealed that Tagore had dined in first class en route to arriving in Saigon, attended champagne receptions in his honor, and was housed in a villa.
One journalist and editor stridently declared, “It is wrong to raise the flags of peasants and youths to welcome Tagore!” while Tagore’s champagne consumption was compared to “sucking the blood of Annamese people,” as Labor Party leader Lê Thành Lư colorfully phrased his condemnation.
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Given Tagore’s interests in peace, art, and spirituality, “Tagore was portrayed as having ignored the masses of lower-class people” and their needs, writes Pham. She notes that many such comments “echoed contemporary class criticisms about this Indian intellectual in the works of some Bengali and Western readers.”
Pham concludes, “Tagore’s dynamic and often fraught reception in colonial Vietnam informed the varied and complex debates about Vietnamese nationalism. “It reflected a context in which Vietnamese intellectuals of diverse political backgrounds sought transnational networks of politics and knowledge for anticolonial models that could liberate their nation from French colonialism.”
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