Some 4,000 km from undivided Bengal, where he was born, a bust of Rabindranath Tagore stands on a busy street in Seoul’s Jongno district, near Marronnier Park, silently observing scores of passersby. It was erected in 2011 in a university neighbourhood by the South Korean government to commemorate the Nobel laureate’s 150th birth anniversary, in coordination with the Indian embassy.
Around the world, particularly in countries where Tagore travelled—from the US to Japan—it is not uncommon to find statues and plaques commemorating one of South Asia’s most prominent literary and political figures. But the memorial to Tagore in South Korea is unique.
This is because although Tagore never visited the Korean Peninsula, his work left a deep impact on people in Korea during their fight for freedom from Japanese colonisation.
While Tagore did not reach Korea’s shores during his lifetime, he did travel to neighbouring China and Japan between 1916-1924. It was during this time that Tagore got an opportunity to understand the socio-politics that were unfolding. These were very different from the perceptions that he had formed while back in his homeland.
“When Tagore visited Japan for the first time in 1916, he was disappointed to see that Japan was imitating the ways of the imperialist West. His indictment of Japan on the path of war cost him ovation and affection with which he was initially greeted,” says Dr Pankaj Mohan, one of India’s leading experts on the colonial history of Korea and Korea-India relations.
That Tagore never visited Korea was not for the paucity of invitations. Sometime during the 20th century, Korean intellectuals discovered his works in translation. “In the early 1920s, about 250 of Tagore’s works were introduced. And in the history of Korean translated literature before Independence, there is no example of so many works by a foreign poet being translated,” says Professor Kim Woo Joo, who teaches Hindi literature at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul. He obtained his Ph D from Visva Bharati University in Bolpur, West Bengal.
While Tagore knew little about the extent of Japan’s brutal colonial practices and heaped praise on the Empire in what was called pan-Asian solidarity, Korean intellectuals who looked up to him as an anti-colonial figure very much knew of Tagore’s opinions on Japan and tried to inform him about their lived realities.
t was in Japan that Tagore first met Koreans who had been living under Japanese imperial rule. And this truly shaped his opinions on the empire’s colonial policies. Japan’s colonisation of the Korean Peninsula from 1910-1945 was brutal. While imperialist policies meant the imposition of several rules and curbs on freedoms and the human rights of Koreans, there were also other forms of violence.
Approximately 1,50,000 Koreans were forced to work in factories and mines in Japan during the Second World War. Thousands of Korean girls and women were also forced into sexual slavery in military brothels. These historical occurrences have remained points of contention between Japan and South Korea since both countries formally established diplomatic relations in 1965.
Dr Mohan points to the writings of Charles Freer Andrews, an English Anglican priest and social reformer who also worked for the cause of Indian independence and was a close friend of both Mahatma Gandhi and Tagore.
“Charles F. Andrews, who accompanied the poet to Japan, noted: ‘When (Tagore) spoke out strongly against the militant imperialism which he saw on every side in Japan and set forward in contrast his ideal picture of the true meeting of East and West, with its vista of world brotherhood, the hint went abroad that such ‘pacifist’ teaching was a danger in war time and that the Indian poet represented a defeated nation’,” Dr Mohan says.
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