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‘The More You Think of It, the Less the Difference’: Rebirth and Animals in Thoreau and Tagore

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Abstract

The British Romantics and American Transcendentalists were deeply influenced by translations of Indian philosophical and literary texts. These writers in turn influenced English-educated Indians in the late colonial period. Living at opposite ends of the globe at different times and in vastly different societies, Thoreau and Tagore, in different but overlapping ways, drew on the Hindu concept of rebirth to explore human relationships with non-human animals. This essay presents an overview of their imaginative forays in this regard, and examines in particular Thoreau’s translation of an extract from the ancient Sanskrit text, the Harivaṃsha and Tagore’s story Strīr Patra (A Wife’s Letter).

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Notes

  1. Studies of Tagore and the Transcendentalists include Yeager Hudson, Emerson and Tagore: The Poet as Philosopher (Cross Cultural Publications, Asia & the Wider World Series, 1988), and Fakrul Alam, “Luminous with Vision: Rabindranath Tagore, Thoreau and Life-centered Education Amidst Nature,” Rabindranath Tagore and National Identity Formation in Bangladesh: Essays and Reviews (Dhaka, Bangla Academy, 2012).

  2. Many thanks to Professor R. W. Desai, who introduced me to Thoreau’s translation of the extract from the Harivaṃsha. An earlier version of the Thoreau part of this paper was presented at a 2017 symposium, ‘Steps towards a Global Thought’ at Brown University, and an expanded version of the Tagore part of this paper was presented in March 2020 at a symposium on Tagore and Gender at the University of North Bengal. I follow the ISO scheme of transliteration with the following exceptions: proper names; titles of well-known texts, such as the Bhagavad Gita; words that have become assimilated into English, such as yoga and yogi; and rendering of the initial sound in chakra as ch, not c, and the initial sound in Shri as sh, not ś.

  3. Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880 (Paris 1950; English Translation New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), is the seminal text on the topic. John Drew, India and the Romantic Imagination (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987) focuses on the British Romantics. See also S.R. Swaminathan, Vedanta and Shelley (Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1997). On the American Transcendentalists, see Arthur Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism: A Study of Emerson, Thoreau and Alcott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932); Sreekrishna Sharma, “A Short Study of the Oriental Influence upon Henry David Thoreau with Special Reference to His “Walden,”’ Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien 1 (1956), 76–92; and Arthur Versluis, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

  4. Ruth Vanita, ‘Gandhi’s Tiger, Multilingual Elites, the Battle for Minds, and English Romantic Literature in Colonial India,’ Postcolonial Studies, 5:1 (2002), 95–112, reprinted in Vanita, Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2005).

  5. See Alan D. Hodder, ‘“Ex Oriente Lux”: Thoreau’s Ecstasies and the Hindu Texts,’ The Harvard Theological Review 86: 4 (October 1993), 403–438; 409–10.

  6. See Robert Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading: A Study in Intellectual History with Bibliographical Catalogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) for a list of the books (which Thoreau termed a “princely gift” and for which he built a special case of driftwood). See also William Bysshe Stein, ‘A Bibliography of Hindu and Buddhist Literature Available to Thoreau through 1854,’ ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 47 (1967), 52–56, for the books Thoreau read before 1855.

  7. Webb Miller, I Found No Peace (Garden City 1938), 238–39. See also George Hendrick, ‘The Influence of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” on Gandhi’s Satyagraha’ The New England Quarterly 29:4 (Dec 1956), 462–71.

  8. Webb Miller, 238.

  9. Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing (2001; New York: Routledge, 2016), 110, note 6.

  10. Ruth Vanita, ‘Lamb Unslain: Non-Human Animals and Shelley’s Panentheism,’ Yearly Review (journal of the Department of English, Delhi University), December 1992, updated version in Godly Heretics: Essays on Alternative Christianity ed. Marc Paolo (McFarland & Co., 2012), 98–113.

  11. See Lisbeth Chapin, ‘Science and Spirit: Shelley’s Vegetarian Essays and the Body as Utopian State,’ in A Brighter Morn: The Shelley Circle’s Utopian Project, ed., Darby Lewes (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), 123–42; Timothy Molton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). On the connection of Shelley’s thought to late Victorian vegetarians, see Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

  12. ‘Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths,’ Pew Research Center, 9 December 2009 https://www.pewforum.org/2009/12/09/many-americans-mix-multiple-faiths/, accessed 10 July 2020.

  13. Peter A. Obochowski, ‘Emerson, Evolution and the Problem of Evil,’ The Harvard Theological Review 72/1 & 2 (1979), 151–53.

  14. Paul Friedrich, The Gita within Walden: A Social Movement Perspective (New York: State University of New York Press, 2008).

  15. Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition (1972; Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), 16–17; see also 34, 42–46.

  16. The Journals of Henry David Thoreau ed., Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906, 14 Vols), VII, 419.

  17. Journals, II, 306, entry dated 16 July, 1851.

  18. Arthur Versluis acknowledges that Thoreau’s translation of a selection from the Harivaṃsha ‘demonstrates at the least his interest in the doctrine of reincarnation or rebirth’ (81).

  19. On the radical lengths to which Thoreau carried his identification with Hindu philosophy and theology, and the criticism he faced for doing so, see Hodder, ‘Ex Oriente Lux,’ 403–438. Hodder also lists several Hindu philosophical and literary books that Thoreau read in the early 1850s. David Scott, ‘Rewalking Thoreau and Asia: “Light from the East” for “A Very Yankee Sort of Oriental,”’ Philosophy East and West 57:1 (January 2007), 14–39, correctly argues that Thoreau was much more influenced by Hindu than by Buddhist thought.

  20. Journals, VII, 275, entry dated August 28, 1841.

  21. Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience (1854; New York: Penguin, 1986), 51. All references are to this edition.

  22. Journals, II, 271, entry dated June 26, 1851.

  23. Journals, II, 271, entry dated June 26, 1851.

  24. On Tagore’s engagement with Vedanta philosophy, see Ankur Barua, The Vedāntic Relationality of Rabindranath Tagore: Harmonizing the One and its Many (London: Lexington Books, 2019) and Pramathesh Bhattacharya, ‘The Impact of the Upanishads on Rabindranath Tagore’s Poetics and Poetry,’ Points of View XVIII: 2 (Winter 2011), 78–87. On Tagore’s engagement with animals (but not in the context of rebirth), see Joanna Tuczynska, ‘Animals in Rabindranath Tagore: Compassionate Love in the Idea of Organic Unity,’ Rupkatha Journal VIII: 1 (2016), 59–67.

  25. Glimpses of Bengal: Selected from the letters of Sir Rabindranath Tagore, 1885-1895 (1920), 9 August 1894.

  26. Glimpses of Bengal, 9 August 1894.

  27. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Religion of the Forest,’ in Creative Unity (Macmillan & Co., 1922), 62.

  28. Ibid, 62.

  29. Journals, XIII, 154, February 18, 1860. Mary Hosmer Brown also quotes him as saying, ‘The best part of an animal is its anima (its soul), but the scientists never get any further than its shell….’ ‘Henry David Thoreau’ in Brown, Memories of Concord (Boston: Four Seas Company, 1926), 99.

  30. Journals, II, 398, 18 August, 1851.

  31. Journals, X, 304, 18 March 1858.

  32. Mary Hosmer Brown, Memories of Concord, 99.

  33. Glimpses of Bengal, entry dated 22 March 1894.

  34. Mani Rao interprets Thoreau’s desire to be vegetarian as inspired more by an aspiration towards purity than by concern for animals (both are important elements in the Hindu texts that Thoreau read). Mani Rao, ‘Caterpillar to Butterfly – Thoreau’s Dietary Journey,’ Thoreau Society Bulletin 270 (Spring 2010), 1–4.

  35. Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau ed., F. Sanborn (Boston: Mifflin, 1894), 210. To Blake, 20 November 1849.

  36. Journals, VII, 279, September 1, 1841.

  37. M.A. Langlois, Harivansa ou Histoire de la Famille de Hari (Paris: Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1834).

  38. In the critical edition, and in Langlois’ French translation, they are chakravāka birds in their last bird incarnation, which Thoreau translates as wild ducks. In the version edited by Pandit Ramachandrashastri Kinjawadekar and published by the Chitrashala Press in 1936, however, they are swans in the last bird incarnation.

  39. Or perhaps it is not so unusual, after all. I once asked a colleague who was a botany professor at Miranda House what she would like to be if she were reborn; I meant did she want to be a man or a woman, but she replied, ‘A bird.’.

  40. Ruth Vanita, ‘“I’m an Excellent Animal”: Cows at Play in the Writings of Bahinabai, Rukun Advani, Suniti Namjoshi and Others,’ in Vanita, Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile op cit., 290–310, and ‘Goddess, Lesbian, Cow: Teaching Suniti Namjoshi in Montana,’ Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women’s Writing ed. Deepika Bahri and Filippo Menozzi (MLA Publications, 2021). See also Ruth Vanita, The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics: Debates on Gender, Varna and Species (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2022), especially Chapter 11, ‘Kindness to Animals: The Dharma Most Available to All.’.

  41. Journals, II, 325, July 21, 1851.

  42. Journals, VI, 452, August 18, 1854.

  43. Journals, II, 67–68, September 1850.

  44. My Reminiscences (New York: Macmillan 1917), 218–19.

  45. Rabindranath Tagore, Mashi and Other Stories (London: Macmillan, 1918), 148–149.

  46. “A Wife’s Letter” translated by Prasenjit Gupta. All quotations are from this translation. https://parabaas.com/translation/database/translations/stories/gStreerPatra1.html

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    Ruth Vanita

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Vanita, R. ‘The More You Think of It, the Less the Difference’: Rebirth and Animals in Thoreau and Tagore. SOPHIA 62, 433–447 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-023-00957-0

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