Were there two Rabindranath Tagores? Or rather, was there one Rabindranath and one Tagore? I've been wrestling with this question for years. It underlies a maddening problem of nomenclature. In writing about India's greatest modern writer, which name should we use? In Bengali he is known as Rabindranath. As such, he is the supreme Bengali poet. The solar imagery of the name has been irresistible to many of the lesser Bengali poets who have written poems about him. He is the sun: they, at best, are the planets circling round him. Rabindranath himself could not have been unaware of this when he wrote, in a brief poem:

"How easy it is
To mock the sun:
The light by which
it is caught
Is its own."

That is my translation, not his Bengali words; but the personality it expresses -- proud, sensitive to criticism, fearless of truth, conscious of greatness -- is that of the Bengali Rabindranath. The same voice spoke when a huge delegation came to Santiniketan by a special train on November 23, 1913, to felicitate him on the Nobel Prize, and he turned them away with bitter irony, castigating the hypocrisy of those who had attacked him before and were congratulating him now.

Yet can we deny that "Tagore" existed too? The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Tagore, not to Rabindranath. The books that the prize made famous, which were translated into the world's major languages, were all by Tagore, not Rabindranath. India outside Bengal knew him more through those books than through his Bengali writings. When Bangladesh adopted Amar Sonar Bangla as her national anthem, she chose a song by Rabindranath; but when Jana-gana-mana became the national anthem of India it was because Tagore had written:

"Where the mind is
without fear and the head
is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not
been broken up into fragments
by narrow domestic walls...
Into that heaven of freedom,
my Father, let my country awake. "

True, Rabindranath towards the end of his life often expressed regret that he had done the English versions that had made him world-famous: they were, as he said in a letter to Amiya Chakravarty, "self-mockery"; and to William Rothenstein he wrote that his western fame had been "an accident" and that he felt "almost ashamed that I whose undoubted claim has been recognised by my countrymen to a sovereignty in our own world of letters should not have waited till it was discovered in its own true majesty and environment". The image that those translations had projected, reinforced so indelibly by W.B. Yeats in his well-intentioned but deeply ignorant Introduction to Gitanjali, became a terrible burden. It cramped the free poetic spirit in him, the Rabindranath whose Bengali writings in prose and verse could be deft and witty and charming in a way that his western admirers could never imagine. To his friend Charles Freer Andrews, Rabindranath wrote in 1921 from New York:

"When the touch of spring is in the air, I suddenly wake up from my nightmare of giving 'messages' and remember that I belong to the eternal band of good-for-nothings; I hasten to join in the vagabond chorus. But I hear the whisper around me: 'This man has crossed the sea', and my voice is choked."

Yet Tagore and Rabindranath were not entirely separate entities. Rabindranath would not have wished to disown the Tagore who resigned his knighthood in protest at the Amritsar massacre of 1919; who spoke at the very end of his life of the crisis in civilisation that World War II had brought; who engaged in passionate debate with Gandhi; who, far more than by his personal predicament, could feel choked by evil and injustice.

Prashna (1932) is one of his greatest Bengali poems, but its voice is Tagore's, as well as Rabindranath's:

"My voice is choked today;
I have no music in my flute:
Black moonless night Has imprisoned my
world, plunged it into nightmare.
And this is why, With tears in my eyes,
I ask: Those who have poisoned
your air, those who have extinguished your light,
Can it be that you have forgiven them?
Can it be that you love them?"

Above all, in Visva-bharati -- the creation that meant more to him than any other, though it brought him most heartache -- Tagore and Rabindranath came together. Sensitive visitors to Santiniketan will encounter that dual spirit. They will sense the Rabindranath who brought up his family there -- alone, after his wife died in 1902; whose many gifted relatives linked him to the leading trends of the Bengal Renaissance; who taught the children of his school under mango trees; who preached eloquent Bengali sermons in the glass-panelled Prayer Hall; who drew and painted; who sang his songs; who shuttled sleeplessly between the various houses of Uttarayan. But they will also feel the presence of Tagore, whose fame attracted famous foreign scholars to teach at Santiniketan; who received, in extreme old age, a doctorate conveyed to him by representatives of Oxford University; who left to the archives of Rabindra Bhavana a vast international correspondence.

If elsewhere the two aspects -- and the two names -- seem less in synchrony; whether when reading, say, reviews of his English books in the western press, which are seldom informed by any knowledge of his Bengali background; or, at the other extreme, when listening to Rabindrasangeet or recitations of his poems in Bangladesh, a country that has little need of English and only knows Rabindranath, not Tagore; that is because of his purnata, the completeness with which he embodied the entire subcontinent and its modern involvement with the West. If East and West are sometimes in conflict in his name, as well as in unity, that is true of the subcontinent as a whole.

Yet the fact that the two did come together, in that name, offers hope. That was his real prophetic role: to point us towards a new, post-twentieth century purnata, reconciling not so much East with West but poetry with prose, art with morality, idealism with realism, religion with science.

This promise was expressed in another brief poem. It is by Rabindranath, certainly; but in its restless aspiration, Tagore is present too:

"Tumultuous days
Rush towards night.
Seas are the goal
Of streams in full spate.
Impatient spring-flowers
Long to be fruit."
Restlessness strives
To be calm and complete."

C. William Radice is professor of Bengali language and literature, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.