http://archive.thedailystar.net/beta2/news/tagore-and-nationalism/2 of5 2/21/2014
Tagore and nationalism
Mohammad A. Quayum
Tagore with Gandhi
Today’s buzzwords are ”national security” and ”national interest.” Any action is legitimate in thename of the nation, no matter how remote it may be from truth or justice. How many wars have been waged in the name of the nation? How much innocent blood has it claimed? Yet people are worked up into a frenzy when the idea of the nation is invoked the same hollow hysteria that religion aroused in the medieval era and still does among some in the so-called ”third-world”nations. Nation is the most desirable political institution of our time; a fictive concept, without any scientific grounding, it is still inviolable and enshrined in the modern imagination.
Competing visions of the nation are now pushing the world to the brink of destruction. Metropolitan nationalism, with its robust secular ideology, is bent on wiping out the pan-religious nationalism that still enjoys some acceptance in parts of the ”third world,” considering it an anathema and anachronism. This monocular, exclusivist approach, an attempt by the forces of secularism to appropriate the centre of civilization, has resulted in a cycle of retribution and retaliation, a horrific dance of destruction, opening the doors to a new pandemonium.
Given this present global crisis, in which nations are flying at each other’s throat, sometimes unilaterally and in pre-emptive action, ignoring world opinion, perpetuating a logic of mutual malevolence and fear, it may be appropriate to pause for a moment and review in hindsight the anti-nationalitarian ideology of the Bengali poet, and Asia’s first Nobel Laureate, RabindranathTagore. Tagore’s alternative vision of peace, harmony and the spiritual unity of humankind seems more relevant now than ever. What the world needs in the face of present widespread unrest and agitation, is Tagore’s healing message of love, simplicity, self-reliance and non-violence or ahimsa. Tagore’s critique of nationalism emerges most explicitly in his essays and lectures:
”Nationalism inthe West,”
”Nationalism in Japan,”
”Nationalism in India,”
”Construction versus Creation” and
”International Relations.”
It is also foregrounded in his novels, The Home and the World and Four
Chapters, as well as in several poems of Gitanjali and ”The Sunset of the Century.” In these works, he roundly criticizes nationalism as ”an epidemic of evil” or a ”terrible absurdity,” posing are current threat to mankind’s ”higher humanity,” through the canonization of ”banditry” or the ”brotherhood of hooliganism” (Tagore’s phrases).
Tagore was born in 1861, a period during which the nationalist movement in India was crystallizingand gaining momentum. The first organized military uprising by Indian soldiers against the BritishRaj occurred in 1857, only four years before the poet was born. In 1905, the swadeshi movement broke out on his doorstep, as a response to the British policy of partitioning Bengal. Initially,
propelled by the injustice and irrationality of the act, Tagore got actively involved in the movement, writing patriotic songs with such explosive fervour that Ezra Pound quipped, ”Tagore has sung Bengal into a nation.” But soon after, the movement took a violent turn and he made an about-face, never having anything to do with nationalism again, except to launch a systematic indictment to”destroy the bondage of nationalism.” Even Gandhi’s urgings to join the satyagraha movement, which eventually brought about Indian independence, after the protracted period of colonial rule, in1947, could not alter Tagore’s position on nation and nationalism. In a letter to Gandhi, he questioned the latter’s wisdom, when he asked dismissively, after explaining how in the West many ”higher minds” were trying to rise above the superficiality of nationalism, ”And are we alone to be content with proceeding with the erection of Swaraj on a foundation of telling the beads of negation, harping on others’ faults and quarrelsomeness?”
Tagore’s foremost objection to nationalism lies in its very nature and purpose as an institution. The fact that it is a social construction, a mechanical organisation, modelled with certain utilitarian objectives in mind, makes it unpalatable to Tagore, who was a champion of creation over construction, imagination over reason and the natural over the artificial and the man-made:”Construction is for a purpose, it expresses our wants; but creation is for itself, it expresses our very beings”. As a formation, based on needs and wants rather than truth and love, it could not, Tagoresuggests, contribute much to the moral/spiritual fulfilment of mankind. To him, race was a more natural, and therefore acceptable, social unit than the nation, and he envisioned a ”rainbow” world in which races would live together in amity, keeping their ”distinct characteristics but all attached to the stem of humanity by the bond of love.”
He took the view that since nationalism emerged in the post-religious laboratory of industrial-capitalism, it was only an ”organisation of politics and commerce” that brings ”harvests of wealth,”or ”a carnival of materialism,” by spreading tentacles of greed, selfishness, power and prosperity, orchurning up the baser instincts of mankind, and sacrificing in the process ”the moral man, the complete man… to make room for the political and the commercial man, the man of limited purpose.”
Nationalism, according to Tagore, is not expressive of the living bonds in society; it is not a voluntary self-expression of individuals as social beings, where human relationships are naturally regulated, ”so that men can develop ideals of life in cooperation with one another,” but a political and commercial union of a group of people, in which they come together to maximize their profit,progress and power; it is ”the organised self-interest of a people, where it is least human and least spiritual.”
Tagore deemed nationalism a recurrent threat to humanity, because with its propensity for the material and the rational, it trampled over the human spirit and human emotion; it upset man’s moral balance by subjugating his inherent goodness and divinity to a soul-less organisation. Tagore found the fetish of nationalism a source of war and mutual hatred between nations. The very deification of nation, where it is privileged over soul, god and conscience, cultivates absolutism,fanaticism, provincialism and paranoia. Thus every nation becomes inward-looking and considers another a threat to its existence, while war is hailed a legitimate, or even ”holy,” action for national self-aggrandisement or self-fulfilment. Both its existence and success, as an institution or a discourse, is grounded in the binary of self/other, us/them; every nation operates for itself, and the presence of the other is but a recurrent and looming peril to this self. Tagore maintained that British colonialism found its justification in the ideology of nationalism, as the colonisers came to India and other rich pastures of the world to plunder and so further the prosperity of their own nation. They were never sincere in developing colonised countries/nations, as to convert their ”hunting grounds” into ”cultivated fields” would have been contrary to the irnational interest. Like predators (and nationalism inherently cultivates a rapacious logic), they thrived by victimising and violating other nations, and never felt deterred in their heinous actions by the principles of love, sympathy or fellowship. The logic is simple but cruel, and is sustained by aprivileging norm, that in order to have rich and powerful nations, some nations ought to be left poor and pregnable: ”Because this civilization is the civilization of power, therefore it is exclusive, itis naturally unwilling to open its sources of power to those whom it has selected for its purposes of exploitation.”
By its very nature as an organisation, nationalism could ill afford any altruism in this regard. One might think that Tagore’s critique of nationalism is lofty and far-fetched, or ”too pious,” as Pound might have said; his arguments are layered in atavistic spiritualism and romantic idealism. But he was a practical-idealist, an inclusivist and a multilateral thinker. ”I am not in favour of rejecting anything,” he wrote, ”for I am only complete with the inclusion of everything.” He believedin the symbiosis of body and soul, physical and spiritual, wealth and conscience. The lord of poetry was also an effective and efficient landlord; he was ascetic and yet worldly; he cherished seclusionat moments of creativity but still remained very much a public figure, both at home and abroad achirapathik, he went from place to place and country to country, ever acting as an unofficial ambassador of (united) India. His critique of nationalism was that of a wholesome and holistic thinker arguing against discourses couched in essentialism and one-sidedness that champion power and wealth but not soul and conscience, greed but not goodness, possessing but not giving, self-aggrandisement but not self-sacrifice, becoming but not being.
Much of what Tagore said is no doubt intellectually valid and some of it is borne out by contemporary post-colonial criticism. Critics concur that nation is a necessity, it has laboured on behalf of modernity, and it helps to bolster the present civilization; as a political organization it befits the social and intellectual milieu of present-day society. However, they hardly claim its moral authority, or its beneficial role in the reinforcement of human virtue. Critics also view the constructed aspect of nationalism as a weakness in the ideology. It is always vulnerable to regressing into more natural social units of clan, tribe and race, or language andreligious groups. Its very formative process introduces a self-deconstructing logic in it. The processof its formation/invention further makes it a potent site of power discourse; although it is meant to stand for a horizontal comradeship, exploitation and inequality remain a daily occurrence in its body, and the nation never speaks of the hopes and aspirations of its entire ”imagined community.” In conceiving its overarching ideologies it often places the dominant group at the centre, pushing the minority population to the periphery. Thus, instead of a fraternity, it creates a new hierarchy and hegemony within its structure, and exposes the fracture between its rhetoric and reality.
Several post-colonial critics also agree with Tagore’s view that nationalism begets a disquisition of intolerance and othering. Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson and Tom Nairn have pointed out theirrationality, prejudice and hatred that nationalism generates, and Leela Gandhi speaks of its attendant racism and loathing, and the alacrity with which citizens are willing to both kill and die for the sake of the nation. Like Tagore, contemporary critics also point out how self-serving nationalism legitimises colonial/imperial discourse, in which the lesser nations are oppressed and exploited by the colonising /imperial Other for its own advancement. A colonising nation is never benevolent to its colonised subjects, as its objective is to inscribe its authority on its colonised people through a power discourse, and plunder them of both their wealth and culture; to empty their coffers as well as their heads, so that in the process they are left impoverished, dehumanised and thingified.
Tagore was opposed to the idea of the nation; he was even more fiercely opposed to India appropriating the idea. He believed, it would compromise India’s history and culture, and make it a ”beggar of the West.” His predictions have come true, because although India is now politically free, its joining the bandwagon of nationalism has cast the shadow of western civilisation over it. The appropriation of nationalist ideology has erased the sense of India’s difference as a society capable of standing on its own; and the forging of links with the West has allowed neo-colonialist controls to operate over the country both explicitly and implicitly, spelling political and cultural doom for its people. Perhaps it is time for India and the rest of humanity to rise from their horrific moral slumber and take note of the path that Tagore sought to pave for the world the path of love, justice, honesty, equality and the spiritual unity of all mankind. Though not anti-modern oranti-progressive, throughout his life Tagore aspired to redeem modern man from the tyranny of money, matter and machine. His vision of a free world, free from the fetters of materialism and nationalism, is most passionately expressed in the following poem, written in the form of a supplication for India but meant, by extension, for all mankind:
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;Where words come out from the depth of truth;Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father,let my country awake.
The world that the poet envisions in the above poem stands superior to the violent, war-ravaged world of ”getting and spending” (Wordsworth’s phrase), of jealousy, suspicion and mutual fear that we currently live in. It is a world of love, truth, harmony, creativity and conscience, with no artificial walls to separate its people or to keep their souls, or personal humanity, in bondage; in which, as Tagore puts it elsewhere, every country would
”keep alight its own lamp of mind as its part of the illumination of the world” and no country would deprive another ”of its rightful place in the world festival.”
MOHAMMAD A. QUAYUM IS
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT THE INTERNATIONAL ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY MALAYSIA
AND ADJUNCT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND CREATIVE WRITING AT FLINDERS UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA.
E-MAILMQUAYUM@GMAIL.COM.
