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This is the second part of the two-part article Rabindranath Tagore in Iran. Read the first part here.

The flight that carried Rabindranath Tagore to Iran took off from Calcutta (now Kolkata) early in the morning of April 11, 1932 and made four pit stops at Allahabad, Jodhpur, Karachi and Jask, before it landed in Iran’s Bushehr on April 13. This was really Tagore’s first substantive experience of air travel, and his ruminations on the experience, captured in his inimitable prose in the travel diary Parasya-Yatri (‘Travelling around Iran’), are as wonderful to read as they are insightful:

The higher the airplane climbed, the feebler our senses’ ties to mother earth became, until we were left with sight alone, that too at several removes from what we were experiencing, not intimately. The world that I had come to know via myriad attestations as concrete and infinitely variegated grew fainter – and what was three-dimensional reality now morphed into a two-dimensional picture. Creation manifests itself in many different shapes and forms within defined structures of integrated spacetime. When the contours of those structures begin to grow fuzzy, creation rolls towards evanescence. As the earth faded into a blur before our eyes, its identity became tenuous, and its existential claims on our minds weakened.

The higher the airplane climbed, the feebler our senses’ ties to mother earth became, until we were left with sight alone, that too at several removes from what we were experiencing, not intimately. The world that I had come to know via myriad attestations as concrete and infinitely variegated grew fainter – and what was three-dimensional reality now morphed into a two-dimensional picture. Creation manifests itself in many different shapes and forms within defined structures of integrated spacetime. When the contours of those structures begin to grow fuzzy, creation rolls towards evanescence. As the earth faded into a blur before our eyes, its identity became tenuous, and its existential claims on our minds weakened.

These musings then lead to the startling realisation that 

……under such situations, when man sets out to rain countless incendiaries from an aeroplane on the hapless below, he can become truly sinister. His fury is not the least tempered by his sense of the possible culpability of his victims, because all accounting of guilt and liability has been rendered irrelevant at that height. Man has a natural affinity for the real world, and when that reality itself turns foggy, the very basis of that affinity evaporates. The philosophical injunction of the Gita also served the purpose of an aircraft: it lifted Arjuna’s habitually compassionate soul to such dizzying heights as to make the killer and the killed, friend and foe perfectly indistinguishable from one another. In his arsenal, man has numberless such metaphysical airplanes with which to occlude reality, and they proliferate in the arenas of his imperial, social and religious doctrines. Those who are destroyed by projectiles hurled down from the lofty heights of those sophisticated doctrines can only draw solace from the aphorism: ‘the body may be destroyed but the soul isn’t’. 

……under such situations, when man sets out to rain countless incendiaries from an aeroplane on the hapless below, he can become truly sinister. His fury is not the least tempered by his sense of the possible culpability of his victims, because all accounting of guilt and liability has been rendered irrelevant at that height. Man has a natural affinity for the real world, and when that reality itself turns foggy, the very basis of that affinity evaporates. The philosophical injunction of the Gita also served the purpose of an aircraft: it lifted Arjuna’s habitually compassionate soul to such dizzying heights as to make the killer and the killed, friend and foe perfectly indistinguishable from one another. In his arsenal, man has numberless such metaphysical airplanes with which to occlude reality, and they proliferate in the arenas of his imperial, social and religious doctrines. Those who are destroyed by projectiles hurled down from the lofty heights of those sophisticated doctrines can only draw solace from the aphorism: ‘the body may be destroyed but the soul isn’t’. 

Looking back, this feels like epiphany. Large-scale aerial bombardment of civilian populations was still relatively unknown at that point. Vietnam was a good forty years away, Dresden about thirteen. Even Guernica, that acclaimed pioneer of aerial killing, was five years down the road. Tagore’s travelogue of Iran must therefore count among........

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