Tagore's Critique of Nationalism and Vision of a United World
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- Rabindranath Tagore was a Nobel Prize winning Indian poet who strongly criticized nationalism and its tendency to divide people and lead to conflict and war. - Tagore envisioned a world o…Full description
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Imagining “One World”: Rabindranath Tagore’s Critique of Nationalism
Mohammad A. Quayum
International Islamic University Malaysia
Our mind has faculties which are universal, but its habits are insular.—Rabindranath Tagore
Introduction
In a poem entitled, “The Sunset of the Century,” written on the last day of the nineteenth century, India’smessianic poet and Asia’s first Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), launched a fierce diatribe onnationalism. In a mood of outrage and disenchantment, tempered with intermittent hope, he wrote:The last sun of the century sets amidst the blood-red clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred.The naked passion of the self-love of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the clash ofsteel and howling verses of vengeance.The hungry self of the Nation shall burst in a violence of fury from its shameless feeding.For it has made the world its food.And licking it, crunching it and swallowing it in big morsels,It swells and swellsTill in the midst of its unholy feast descends the sudden shaft of heaven piercing its heart of grossness.(
Nationalism
80)This anti-nationalitarian sentiment—that nationalism is a source of war and carnage; death, destruction anddivisiveness, rather than international solidarity, that induces a larger and more expansive vision of the world—remains at the heart of Tagore’s imagination in most of his writings: his letters, essays, lectures, poems, plays andfiction.
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He was always opposed to the nationalism of
Realpolitik
and hyper-nationalism that breathed meaning intoThucydides’s ancient maxim that “large nations do what they wish, while small nations accept what they must” (qtd.in Chomsky 16) and that in which, as Radhakrishnan said, “self-interest is the end; brute force, the means;conscience is taboo” (163). Radical nationalism that acted as opiate of the people, making them irrational andfanatical, blind to the senses of truth and justice, and willing to both kill and die for it, perpetuating a logic of“lunacy” and war, instead of a cycle of freedom and peace, was an anathema to Tagore. He spurned it as “a cruelepidemic of evil . . . sweeping over the human world of the present age and eating into its moral fibre” (
Nationalism
9); a terrible absurdity that is seeking to engulf humanity in a suicidal conflagration.Tagore was a believer in an interactive, dialogic world, given to a deep sense of sympathy, generosity andmutuality, and in which nations would not be parochial, xenophobic and centripetal, or guided by mere selfishnessand self-aggrandisement, but poised towards a morally and politically enlightened community of nations through theespousal of a centrifugal outlook, multilateral imagination, principal of universality and reciprocal recognitions. Inthis sense Tagore stands a precursor to many of the modern critics and philosophers of post/trans-nationalism andglobalism such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Noam Chomsky. Much like Chomsky, Tagore believed, to put itin Chomsky’s words, that “‘another world is possible’ [by] seeking to create constructive alternatives of thought,actions and institutions,” and by bringing “a measure of peace and justice and hope to the world” (236-37). Tagoreimagined of a commonwealth of nations in which no nation (or race) would deprive another “of its rightful place inthe world festival” and every nation would “keep alight its own lamp of mind as its part of the illumination of theworld” (qtd. in Kripalani 268).Tagore was an avid advocate of inter-civilisational alliance; his vision was given to a symbiosis of the East andWest. He was no doubt furious with the British cruelty and oppression in India during the colonial period, and feltthat the West was often immersed in commercialism, “moral cannibalism” (Dutta 192), “political expediency”(Dutta 164), militarism and “war-madness” (Dutta 193), and was unduly full of contempt for the East; yet he nevergave up hope for a possible union of the East and West, in which the East and the West would meet as equalpartners in a creative engagement; “I believe in the true meeting of the East and the West” (Dutta 172), he affirmedin a letter to Charles Andrews. In a letter to Foss Westcott, Tagore further wrote, “Believe me, nothing would giveme greater happiness than to see the people of the West and the East march in a common crusade against all thatrobs the human spirit of its significance” (Dutta 197). Moreover, he took exception to Kipling’s remark that the East
and the West were too divergent and “‘Never the twain shall meet” by affirming, much like in Emerson’s spirit inhis essay “Compensation,” that the realisation of a unitary and stable world was contingent upon the meeting ofthese two opposing halves, which compensated one another:Earnestly I ask the poet of the western world to realize and sing . . . with all the great power of music whichhe has, that the East and West are ever in search of each other, and that they must meet not merely in thefullness of physical strength, but in fullness of truth; that the right hand, which wields the sword, has theneed of the left, which holds the shield of safety. (Dutta 213)Tagore’s indictment of nationalism elicited furious criticisms from many of his contemporaries, especially in theWest, with the Marxist critic, Georg Lukacs, and the English writer, D. H. Lawrence, leading the pack, making theduo strange bedfellows in their Tagore hatred. Lukacs, who found both Tagore and Gandhi counter-revolutionary,took the opportunity to pounce on Tagore, after the publication of his anti-nationalist, anti-revolutionary novel,
The Home and the World
(1915). In the characteristic tone of one who saw a Cause greater than a living, breathinghuman being, and to whom the abstract was more sanctified than the palpable, Lukacs condemned Tagore as “awholly insignificant figure. . . [Who] survives by sticking scraps of the
Upanishads
and the
Bhagavadgita
into hisworks amid the sluggish flow of his tediousness” (qtd. in Desai 7).
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Lawrence, on the other hand, felt outraged bywhat he called the “wretched worship-of-Tagore attitude” and admonished that Tagore was a “horribly decadent[figure] reverting to all forms of barbarism in all sorts of ugly ways.” Lawrence further said, creating the sameus/them, West/East hierarchical binary, which Tagore had found disagreeable in Kipling’s imagination, “ourEuropean civilization stands [far higher] than the East, India, or Persia ever dreamed of” (qtd. in Kripalani 278).Lawrence’s arrogance and contempt in the above statement only ratified Tagore’s claim that the chasm betweenthe East and the West was created by the West’s unwarranted contempt for the East, which in return generatedhatred in the East against the West. His response to such contempt was, “The blindness of contempt is morehopeless than the blindness of ignorance; for contempt kills the light which ignorance merely leaves unignited”(Dutta 209). Tagore urged the West to overcome its “logic of egoism” (Dutta 211), ignoble triumphalism, “forcibleparasitism” (Dutta 210) and intentional ignorance, and seek to understand the East in a true spirit of creativity,fellowship and welfare of humanity. He reminded that the British belligerency and its singular passion for powerand wealth during the colonial period turned the world into a cauldron of animosities; the way to conquer the world,Tagore said, was not war but active sympathy. In his novel
The Home and the World
, his protagonist, Nikhil, burstsout against the British atrocities in India as well as the atrocities perpetrated by the Indian nationalist terrorists:It was Buddha who conquered the world, not Alexander—this is untrue when stated in dry prose—oh whenshall we be able to sing it? When shall all these most intimate truths of the universe overflow the pages ofprinted books and leap out in a sacred stream like the Ganges from the Gangotri? (134-35)However, in spite of the derogatory remarks made by Lukacs and Lawrence, and the attempts to dismiss him as asentimental alarmist by others, Tagore’s assertive denunciation of the Nation proved prophetic with the outbreak oftwo world wars, costing millions of lives; UK’s war in Kenya in the 1950s, to quell the rebels against its colonialrule, costing 150,000 lives (Chomsky 183); the genocide in Bangladesh by the Pakistani junta in 1970, claiming atoll of three million lives
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(to name only a few of the gigantic evils perpetrated in the name of the familiar devil,radical nationalism, in the twentieth century), but most importantly, the nuclear arms race that pushed the world tothe brink of destruction in the 1960s. The Cuban missile crisis was the most dangerous moment in human history,Chomsky reminds us. In October 1962, during the height of the crisis, he explains, it was one Soviet submarineofficer named Vasili Arkhipov who saved the world by blocking “an order to fire nuclear armed torpedoes onOctober 27. . . when the submarines were under attack by US destroyers” (Chomsky 74). Thus, ironically, this worldof pomp and finery, wealth and power, at its height of crisis, was left to the wisdom of one person; and hadArkhipov been as “insane” as some of the other nationalist chauvinists, the world would have almost surely beenextinct now through a major nuclear warfare—if not the world, the Northern Hemisphere.After humanity was plentifully gorged with the blood of some 50 million people, killed in violent circumstancesin the twentieth century, mostly in wars that invoked the nation in one form or another, many had thought that peaceand sanity would return to the world, especially since the Cold War was over.
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But that was not to be. As the worldhad barely crossed the portal of a new millennium, and stepped into the twenty-first century, it found itself againbattered in torrents of blood and locked in a devil dance of destruction. The “jihadists” (by which I refer not only tothe radical Islamists but also the ferocious jingoists, who seem equally enthusiastic in violence and to kill innocentcivilians with utter abandon like the “terrorists”) have struck again and the world has suffered colossal disasters. Thehorrendous events of 9-11 which caused “the most devastating instant human toll on record, outside of war”(Chomsky 218); America’s military response to 9-11, defying world opinion,
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with massive coordinated bombingsin Afghanistan, which turned “major urban concentrations [in the country] into ‘ghost towns’” (Chomsky 200)—acampaign, in which, the veteran Spanish journalist Miguel Angel Aguilar says, “we were trying to kill mosquitoes
with bombs. Innocents were killed and democracy suffered and we are no safer” (Alterman and Green 235);America’s “pre-emptive/preventive” war in Iraq, which Paul O’Neill painfully explains to Ron Suskind, Americastarted hatching at the very first meeting of the current American president with the National Security Council, on“January 30, ten days after his inauguration” (70)
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—such destructive events, which have changed the world, leavinghumanity peering into the abyss of the future, have all been undertaken in the name of national safety and nationalsecurity, whether it is the pan-Islamic religious nationalism of the militants or secular nationalism of the West.However, we are not done yet, security of the homeland has not been achieved, as President Bush has
thoughtfully
declared, “There is no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland” (Chomsky 207).Perhaps respite will come only when the “pious warlords” (Dutta 191) after all their calculated savagery andsacrifices to the “dark gods of war” (Dutta 191) will have successfully realised Bertrand Russell’s sombre predictionabout world peace:After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to thepoint at which it has generated Neroes, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, I believe is a passingnightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return. (qtd. inChomsky 237)Nationalism and TagoreBenedict Anderson defines the nation as “imagined community” but acknowledges that it is “notoriouslydifficult to define, let alone to analyse” “Nation, nationality, nationalism” (3). Hugh Seton-Watson maintains, “no‘scientific definition’ of the nation can be devised” (5). Ernst Gellner observes that nationalism is an ‘invention,’‘fabrication’: “Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they donot exist” (169). Despite its “mythical” quality, and the difficulties involved in defining it, the phenomenon stillenjoys profound political and emotional legitimacy in modern society. Bill Ashcroft et al. affirm that in spite of “allits contentiousness, and the difficulty of theorising it adequately, [nation/nationalism] remains the most implacablypowerful force in twentieth century politics” (151).Nationalism as a political expression, with people sharing a common geographical boundary and some unifyingcultural/political signifier is relatively new, although cultural nationalism has prevailed since the beginning ofsociety. Anderson suggests that the nation as a political institution is the product of European Enlightenment andIndustrial Revolution. He argues that the rise of nationalism in Western Europe was made possible by the decline, ifnot the death, of religious modes of thought, in the wake of the rationalist secularism of the Enlightenment, or theAge of Reason. The guiding principles of this intellectual movement were the glorification of reason and faith inhuman dignity, both of which were sufficient to break down the old belief systems that gave centrality to the churchand a theocentric worldview. Thus a more pragmatic and worldly socio-political system of nationalism emerged tosuit the post-religious, secular world. Anderson explains, “What then was required was a secular transformation offatality into continuity, contingency into meaning . . . few things were (are) better suited to this end than an idea ofnation” (11).Ernest Gellner, on the other hand, attributes the emergence of nationalism to the rise of industrial-capitalism inthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The epochal shift of human society from pre-industrial to industrialeconomies, he argues, set up the conditions required for the creation of larger social units and economies that wouldbe culturally “homogenous” and cooperative as workforce, thus paving the way for the formation of the morecomplex and intricate social organisation of the nation-state. Effectively, the expansion of the workforce and themarket made the earlier pre-industrial, tribal societies and their structures both inadequate and obsolete.Timothy Brennan examines the role of literature, especially the novel, in the formation of nationalconsciousness during its early period: “the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries”(173). He maintains:It was the
novel
that historically accompanied the rise of nations by objectifying the ‘one, yet many’ ofnational life, and by mimicking the structures of the nation. . . . But it did more than that. Its manner ofpresentation allowed people to imagine the special community that the nation was. (173)Despite literature’s such active complicity in the formation of the institution and the global acceptance ofnationalism as the only legitimate form of political organisation, India’s myriad-minded poet, RabindranathTagore—whom Bertrand Russell considered “worthy of the highest honour” (qtd. in Kripalani 358), and Ezra Pounddeemed “greater than any of us” (qtd. in Kripalani 227) as a poet—shared not an iota of positive sentiment towardsthe ideology. His foremost objection came from its very nature and purpose as an institution. The very fact that it isa social institution, a mechanical organisation, modelled on certain utilitarian objectives in mind, made itunpalatable 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” (“Construction
versus
Creation,” Soares 59).Tagore took the view that since nationalism emerged in the post-religious laboratory of industrial-capitalism, itwas only an “organisation of politics and commerce” (
Nationalism
7), that brings “harvests of wealth” (
Nationalism
5), or “carnivals of materialism” (Soares 113), 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 . . . tomake room for the political and commercial man, the man of limited purpose” (
Nationalism
9). Nationalism,according to Tagore, is not “a spontaneous self-expression of man as social being,” where human relationships are
naturally
regulated, “so that men can develop ideals of life in co-operation with one another” (
Nationalism
5), butrather a political and commercial union of a group of people, in which they congregate to maximise their profit,progress and power; it is “the organised self-interest of a people, where it is least human and least spiritual”(
Nationalism
8). Tagore deemed nationalism a recurrent threat to humanity, because with its propensity for thematerial and the rational, it trampled over the human spirit and human emotion; it upset man’s moral balance,“obscuring his human side under the shadow of soul-less organisation” (
Nationalism
9).Thus, Tagore called into question both the constructed aspect of nationalism, which stifled the innate andinstinctive qualities of the human individual, and its overemphasis on the commercial and political aspects, at theexpense of man’s moral and spiritual qualities. Both of these limitations reduced nationalism to an incomplete,monolithic and unipolar ideology—essentially inadequate for human beings given to an inherent multiplicity andseeming contraries, that needed to be unified and synthesised, through a process of soulful negotiation and strikingof an axial line between opposites, to create the whole and wholesome person.As seen previously, Tagore also found the fetish of nationalism a source of war, hatred and mutual suspicionbetween nations.
InThe Home and the World
, Nikhil, Tagore’s alter ego in the novel, who is patriotic but wouldn’tplace nation above truth and conscience says, “I am willing to serve my country; but my worship I reserve for Rightwhich is far greater than country. To worship my country as a god is to bring curse upon it” (29). However, Nikhil’sfriend, Sandip, a charismatic but unconscionable nationalist, to whom any action in the name of the nation is right,no matter how far it may be from truth or justice, exclaims, “country’s needs must be made into a god” (61), and onemust “set aside . . . conscience . . . by putting the country in its place” (224). Tagore saw this radical view of Sandip,in which the nation is apotheosised and placed above truth and conscience, as a recipe for disaster. It breedsexclusivism and dogmatism through the Hegelian dichotomous logic of self’s fundamental hostility towards theother; thus every nation becomes narcissistic and considers the presence of another a threat to itself; waging waragainst other nations for its self-fulfilment and self-aggrandisement becomes a justifiable and even “holy” act.Tagore explains:The Nation, with all its paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its flags and pious hymns, its blasphemousprayers in the churches, and the literary mock thunders of its patriotic bragging, cannot hide the fact thatthe Nation is the greatest evil for the Nation, that all its precautions are against it, and any new birth of itsfellow in the world is always followed in its mind by the dread of a new peril. (
Nationalism
17-18)Tagore argued that British colonialism found its justification in the ideology of nationalism, as the coloniser came toIndia and other rich pastures of the world to plunder and so further the prosperity of their own nation. They werenever sincere in developing colonised countries/nations, as to convert their “hunting grounds” into “cultivatedfields” (
Nationalism
12) would have been contrary to their national interest. Like predators (and nationalism, as wesaw above, inherently cultivates a rapacious logic), they thrived by victimising and violating other nations, andnever felt deterred in their heinous actions by the principles of love, sympathy or universal fellowship. The logic issimple but cruel, and is sustained by a privileging norm, that in order to have rich and powerful nations, somenations ought to be left poor and pregnable: “Because this civilization is the civilization of power, therefore it isexclusive, it is naturally unwilling to open its sources of power to those whom it has selected for its purposes forexploitation” (
Nationalism
13). By its very nature as an organisation, Tagore argued, nationalism could ill afford anyaltruism in this regard.One might think that Tagore’s critique of nationalism is a little lofty and far-fetched—“too pious” as Poundmight have said; his arguments are layered in atavistic spiritualism and romantic idealism. However, much of whatTagore said is intellectually valid and some of it is borne out by contemporary post-colonial criticism. Critics concurthat nation is a necessity, it has laboured on behalf of modernity, and it helps to bolster the present civilization; as apolitical organisation it befits the social and intellectual milieu of present-day society, but they hardly claim itsmoral 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 vulnerable toregressing into more natural social units of clan, tribe and race, or language and religious groups. Its very formativeprocess introduces a self-deconstructing logic in it. The process of formation/invention further makes it a potent site
of power discourse; although it is meant to stand for horizontal comradeship, exploitation and inequality remain adaily occurrence in its body, and the nation never speaks of the hopes and aspirations of its entire “imaginedcommunity.” In conceiving its overarching ideologies it often places the dominant group at the centre, pushing theminority population to the periphery. Thus, instead of a fraternity, it creates a new hierarchy and hegemony withinits structure, and exposes the fracture between its rhetoric and reality. Fanon expresses this misgiving, when he says,“National consciousness, instead of being the all-embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the wholepeople [becomes] a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been [when] the nation is passed over for therace, and the tribe is preferred to the state” (156).Several post-colonial critics agree with Tagore’s view that nationalism begets a disquisition of intolerance and“othering.” Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson and Tom Nairn have pointed out the irrationality, prejudice andhatred that nationalism generates, and Leela Gandhi speaks of its attendant racism and loathing, and the alacrity withwhich citizens are willing to both kill and die for the sake of the nation. I have also pointed out in the introduction ofthe essay how nationalism is often used as a pretext for terrorism, factional or state, and war. Sometimes these wars,especially by the rich and powerful nations, are disguised with expressions of noble intent, such as “liberating thepeople from an evil dictator” and/or “introducing democracy.” But such rhetoric is always disingenuous. In a letterto Yone Noguchi, a Japanese writer who had asked for Tagore’s moral support for Japan’s invasion of China in1937, in the name of “saving China for Asia” (Dutta 192), Tagore roundly criticises Noguchi for his naiveacceptance of the grotesque rhetoric meant to veil an adventure of greed:I was amused to read the recent statement of a Tokyo politician that the military alliance of Japan with Italyand Germany was made for ‘highly spiritual and moral reasons’ and ‘had no materialistic considerationsbehind it.’ Quite so. What is not so amusing is that writers and thinkers should echo such remarkablesentiments that translate military swagger into spiritual bravados. (Dutta 192-93)Thomas Jefferson’s observation on the world situation of his day sums up the hypocrisy behind such use of exaltedlanguage in war, most tellingly:We believe no more in Bonaparte’s fighting for the liberties of the seas, than in Great Britain’s fighting forthe liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth, and theresources of other nations. (qtd. in Chomsky 48)Jefferson’s point further helps bolster Tagore’s claim that the discourse of nationalism overlaps with the discourseimperialism; the imperialist nations adopt the role of the Lacanian grand Other and seek to inscribe their authorityunilaterally over the colonised nations; they are not impelled by the ideology of benevolence towards the colonisedcountries. Tagore describes them as aggressive people essentially driven by greed; who “go out of their way andspread their coat-tails in other peoples’ thoroughfares, claiming indemnity when these are trodden upon” (Dutta255). According to Amy Cesaire, the imperial objective is to “thingify” the colonial subjects, and Fanon suggest thatthe colonisers are inherently bent upon not only plundering the wealth of the colonised nations but also to rob themof their culture: “By a kind of perverted logic, it turns the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, anddestroys it” (154). A classic example of this later instance was the introduction of English language in India in 1835with the view of anglicising a group of Indians who would serve the colonial cause.Tagore and Indian NationalismTagore was opposed to the idea of the nation; he was even more fiercely opposed to India joining thebandwagon of nationalism. This would compromise India’s history and identity as a culture and bring it under theshadow of the West. He warned:We, in India, must make up our minds that we cannot borrow other people’s history, and that if we stifleour own we are committing suicide. When you borrow things that do not belong to your life, they onlyserve to crush your life. . . . I believe that it does India no good to compete with Western civilization in itsown field. . . . India is no beggar of the West. (Soares 106)Tagore was born in 1861, a period during which the nationalist movement in India against the British rule wascrystallising and gaining momentum. In 1857, only four years before the poet was born, the first military uprisingfor self-rule broke out in India. In 1905, the
Swadeshi
movement started on Tagore’s doorstep, as a response to theBritish policy of partitioning Bengal. Although apolitical by temperament, Tagore at first was drawn to themovement and started giving lectures and writing patriotic songs with such fervour that Ezra Pound quipped,“Tagore has sung Bengal into a nation” (qtd. in Desai 8). But soon after, Tagore saw the movement turning violentwith the nationalists agitating against innocent civilians who were indifferent to their cause, and especially theMuslims who were in favour of the partition for practical as well as political reasons (the partition gave the Muslimsof East Bengal a new capital in Dhaka). A champion of non-violence or
Ahimsa
, Tagore found it difficult to accept
the insanity of the nationalists in their burning of all foreign goods as a mark of non-cooperation, although it washurting the poor in Bengal who found homemade products more expensive than foreign goods. He was furtherdisheartened to see that many of the impassioned youths turned to the cult of the bomb, hoping to liberate theirmotherland from the yoke of foreign tyranny by violence and terror. Thus, finally, Tagore withdrew from themovement, when a young Bengali radical, Khudiram Bose (widely regarded a hero in the annals of Bengal), hurled abomb, killing two innocent British civilians, in 1908.
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This sudden withdrawal of Tagore was seen as an act of betrayal by many of the nationalists, but nothing couldalter his decision. He would not have anything to do with a movement that was hijacked by the Bengali
Bhadroloks
(elites) for their vested interest, and that saw the individual through the prism of a giant Cause. Tagore’s response to his critics was fictionally articulated in both
The Home and the World and Four Chapters (both seen as Tagore’s profound testament to non-violence). In both the novels, Tagore dramatises how exploitation, violence and killingbecome ritual acts when the individual sacrifices his/her self to an abstraction, and nationalism is put on a pedestal,sacrificing righteousness and conscience; how the nationalist movements in Bengal and later, during Gandhi’s
Satyagraha
movement, in India, often veered into terrorist movements because of the excessiveness of thenationalist leaders, and sometimes their tendency to abuse the movement for personal political gain, as, for example,do both Sandip and Indranath, respectively in
The Home and the World
and
Four Chapters
. Both Sandip andIndranath, begin as charismatic nationalist figures, but gradually become self-obsessed and vainglorious in theircause, losing sight of their
dharma
of dispassionate, disinterested action (as advised by Krishna to Arjuna in
The Bhagavad Gita
), and use violence as a fetish for personal gain; thus their early optimism is replaced later by a senseof
nada
.Tagore and Gandhi were on friendly terms, and in many ways Tagore was a precursor of Gandhi; it was Tagorewho gave the title “Mahatma” (the great soul) to Gandhi, and in return Gandhi dubbed Tagore “Gurudev” (thevenerable teacher) and greeted him as “poet of the world.” Romain Rolland once described a meeting betweenTagore and Gandhi as one between “a philosopher and an apostle, a St. Paul and a Plato” (qtd. in Desai 7). YetTagore and Gandhi never saw eye to eye on the way towards India’s future, as Tagore stubbornly refused to supportGandhi’s nationalist movement against the British rule. Unlike Gandhi, Tagore believed that political freedom andattainment of a nationalist identity by driving the British out was not the right solution for India’s problems; “I amnot for thrusting off Western civilization and becoming segregated in our independence. Let us have a deepassociation” (Soares 106), he said in his characteristic hopefulness. In a letter to an American lawyer Myron H.Phelps, he rhetorically stated, “Must we not have that greater vision of humanity which will impel us to shake offthe fetters that shackle our individual life before we begin to dream of national freedom?” (Dutta 240). Tagore tookthe view that what India needed was not a “blind revolution” (Dutta 240) or the “miracle of [political] freedom[built] upon the quicksand of social slavery” (Soares 115), “but steady purposeful education” (Dutta 240), or anevolution from within; “what India most needed was constructive work coming from within herself,” he argued in“Nationalism in India” (Soares 108). He believed that a “thought impetus” (Dutta 240) similar to the oneexperienced by Europe during the Renaissance that broke up “the feudal system and the tyrannical conventionalismof the Latin Church” (Dutta 240) was the right remedy for a country languishing on the “dry sand-bed of deadcustoms” (Dutta 166).Tagore maintained that India’s immediate problems were social and cultural and not political. India is the worldin miniature, this is where the races and the religions have met; therefore she must constantly strive to resolve her“burden of heterogeneity,” by evolving out of “these warring contradictions a great synthesis” (Dutta 239). First andforemost, India must address the caste issue. The caste system has become too rigid and taken a hypnotic hold on themind of the people; what was once meant to introduce social order by accommodating the various racial groups inIndia, has now become a gigantic system of cold-blooded repression. India ought to come out of this socialstagnation by educating the people out of their trance; only when the immovable walls of society were removed, ormade flexible, will India regain her vitality and dynamism as a society and find true freedom. What is the purpose ofpolitical freedom when the elites in society are exploiting the lower classes, especially the untouchables
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soruthlessly?In his short story, “Purification,” he exposes the absurdity of Gandhi’s
Satyagraha
movement and the hypocrisyof the Indian nationalists by showing how selfish and superficial the nationalists were in their quest for freedom;they were fervently opposed to the British oppression, but oppressed the poor as well as the untouchablesthemselves; they wanted dignity and respect but wouldn’t allow the same to their less fortunate brethren. Kalika, ayoung wife and a nationalist dogmatist, who badgers her husband, a moderate but sensitive person, for not beingfervent enough, refuses to come to the aid of an old municipal sweeper, who is being assaulted by a group oforthodox Hindus for accidentally touching someone in the crowd, just because he is an untouchable. Such“mendicant politics” (Dutta 167) that fails to tear down the customary barriers between people, was of little worth to
Tagore. His hope was that if India could establish equanimity between the various races and religious groups,through a basis of social co-operation and regeneration of the spirit, then she could hold herself as a model of unityfor the rest of the world.Tagore emphasises racial and religious unity persistently in his writings. In a beautiful hymn to India, entitled
Bharat Tirtha
(“The Indian Pilgrimage”), he urges all Indians to unite across race, class and religion, shedding theirdifferences, to fulfil the noble destiny of their homeland, standing above the whirlwind of dusty politics:Come, O Aryans, come, non-Aryans, Hindus and Mussulmans—Come today, O Englishmen, come, Oh come, Christians!Come, O Brahmin, cleansing your mindJoin hands with all—Come, O Downtrodden, let the burdenOf every insult be forever dispelled.Make haste and come to Mother’s coronation, the vessel auspiciousIs yet to be filledWith sacred water sanctified by the touch of allBy the shore of the sea of Bharat’s Great Humanity!(qtd. in Quayum, “Touched by a Divine Afflatus 14)Tagore was of the view that such unity and plurality of consciousness could be achieved only through propereducation of the people, eradication of poverty through modernisation and cultivation of freedom of thought andimagination; “Freedom of mind is needed for the reception of truth” (qtd. in Sen 95), he said. It was education, andnot adulation for the
Charka
(the spinning wheel) that Gandhi suggested, which could liberate India from thetyranny of the past and the towering misery of unreasoned, unbridled orthodoxy. When Gandhi chastised Tagore forhis disregard for the
Charka
as well as
Swaraj
saying, “Every one must spin. Let Tagore spin like the others. Lethim burn his foreign clothes; that is his duty today. God will take care of the morrow” (qtd. in Kripalani 72), Tagorerespectfully replied, “The charka does not require anyone to think; one simply turns the wheel of the antiquatedinvention endlessly, using the minimum of judgment and stamina” (qtd. in Sen 74).To break the spell of stasis through intellectual/cultural revival and find freedom, India ought to keep itself opento the West and not become insular from the rest of the world through the appropriation of a provincial nationalism;“We of the Orient should learn from the Occident . . . to say that it is wrong to cooperate with the West is toencourage the worst form of provincialism and can produce nothing but intellectual indigence” (qtd. in Kripalani294). The West could in fact help liberate India from its “mind-forg’d manacles” and lift the dead weight of traditionfrom its soul through a constructive engagement and inducement of energy, strength, elasticity, tolerance, resolveand courage among its people—qualities that the West possessed but India lacked. Tagore’s vision of a free India—free from the fetters of materialism, nationalism as well as religious and racial orthodoxy—actively seeking acommon destiny with the rest of mankind, constantly evolving towards a global society, is most ardently andexpressly expressed in the following poem in
Gitanjali
, written in the form of a supplication: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 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. (27-28)Tagore could perhaps be faulted for impracticality; his vision for India was too sublime and unrealisable in animperfect world. His wish that the West could help India in her mission was also impracticable, especially since heknew that the West came to the subcontinent, as he recounted in his essay “East and West,” “not with theimagination and sympathy to create and unite, but with a shock of passion—passion for power and wealth” (Dutta206). West had its own axe to grind; in spite of their “superior force of character” (Dutta 128), they were notinterested in the “nest-building of truth” (Dutta 214) but in money, machine and matter. Yet his transcendent thoughtprovides a testament to his noble and beautiful mind, and strikes a cord in the moral person in each of us.Moreover, the on-going violence in the subcontinent vindicates his position.
9
India has since been broken upinto three countries: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; ten million people were made homeless in the aftermath of theindependence of India and Pakistan in 1947, one million of which also lost their lives in inter-religious riots(Wolpert 348); two major wars have been fought in the subcontinent, with border skirmishes and threats of furtherwars, including a nuclear war, casting a shadow of desperation on the people; several riots have also broken out
between the Hindus and the Muslims, claiming thousands of lives.
10
India still remains a poor country, with politicalcorruption rife, and plights of the downtrodden a daily reality. Tagore’s prediction that joining the bandwagon ofnationalism would make India a beggar of the West has also come true. Although India is a free country now(ironically broken up into three fragments), the appropriation of nationalist ideology has erased the sense of India’sdifference as a society, capable of standing on its own; forging of links with the West on unequal terms (since Indiahas merely copied the Western thoughts and has nothing to offer of her own) has allowed neo-colonialist controls tooperate over the country both explicitly and implicitly, spelling political and cultural doom for its people. Finally,India’s assumption of a separate identity by driving the British out has also dealt a blow to the possible realisation ofTagore’s vision for “one world,” at least for the time being, since anti-colonial nationalism also carries the seeds ofprovincialism and cultural particularism.ConclusionIn
My Reminiscences
, Tagore humorously recollects that when he was young he was brought up under the ruleof the servants, who were not only negligent but also oppressive. To avoid their responsibility, they would often putthe young Tagore at a spot in the servants’ quarter, draw a chalk line around him, and warn him “with a solemn faceand uplifted finger of the perils of transgressing the circle” (Dutta 57). Tagore, aware of the fate of Sita in
Ramayana
, for overstepping a similar circle by her husband, would accede to the forceful confinement, but wouldfeel a defiant wish to wipe out the chalk line and find the horizon. This childhood experience became the poet’slifelong companion; he would feel muffled by any confining circle and challenge it with utmost vigour. The nationalboundary was another such arbitrary “circle” for him that circumscribed his wish to be one with the rest of mankind.He would not accept such thorny hedges of exclusion or the labels and divisions that stood on the way to theformation of a larger human community. He said that if nationalism is something imaginary, humanity has toreadjust their imagination by being more inclusive and encyclopaedic, or by extending the horizon of their mind’seye, so that the fellowship of the species does not stop at a geographical border, like commodities. He affirms:Therefore man will have to make another great moral adjustment which will comprehend the whole worldof men and not merely the fractional groups of nationality. The call has come to every individual in thepresent age to prepare himself and his surroundings for this dawn of a new era, when man shall discover hissoul in the spiritual unity of all human beings. (Soares 104-05)Tagore’s process calls for a two-way ambiguous negotiation so that nations or communities can flourish and findtheir own fulfilment and yet rise above exclusivism and provincialism to forge an international community. It is likefinding an axial line or a middle ground by shunning excesses, somewhat similar to the Emersonian “doubleconsciousness,” where the individual is required to keep his independence and yet not lose his sympathy; or theWhitmanesque celebration of the “self” and the “en-masse,” or “I” and “you,” in one breath. The moment we spurnnational narcissism or chauvinism, and rise above the dichotomous reasoning of self/other, we become part of theTagoresque “one world,” through a recurrent dialogic process.But to attain that stage, a more fundamental change is required. Currently, the nation is but an organisation of“politics and commerce,” focused on power and wealth. As an institution, its chief interest lies in the material wellbeing of its people but not their moral or spiritual health. It reckons the individual’s head and stomach but not hisheart, where the soul dwells. This will need to be altered through the restoration of the soul to its rightful place.Without the soul, the individual is like a torn-away line of verse looking for the other line that could give it fullnessthrough a rhyme but has been smudged. Soul is what brings creativity and sympathy to the self, and makes theindividual human and humane. In an interview with Einstein, Tagore said, “My religion is in the reconciliation ofthe supernatural man, the universal human spirit, in my own individual being” (Dutta 233). This three wayreckoning of the self—in the individual, in humanity and in god, all connected by an invisible thread—brings theworld together in one nest. This is the higher unity of humanity, which is different from corporate globalisation orwhat Tagore calls, the “mere political or commercial basis of unity” (Soares 105) between nations. His vision isgiven to a “magnificent harmony” that he believes is the ultimate destiny of humankind: the enlightened individualsand nations coming together to form an enlightened global society. Tagore explains this process, using a metaphorsimilar to Whitman’s “grass” in “Song of Myself”:As the mission of the rose lies in the unfoldment of the petals which implies distinctness, so the rose ofhumanity is perfect only when the diverse races and nations have evolved their perfect distinctcharacteristics but all attached to the stem of humanity by the bond of love. (qtd. in Quayum, “In Search ofa Spiritual Commonwealth” 32-33)Tagore’s vision might seem idealistic but it is not unattainable. It calls for a humanitarian intervention into presentself-seeking and belligerent nationalism, through the introduction of a moral and spiritual dimension in the
institution. It also requires us to step out of history to reinvent a new future for ourselves that respects human dignityand sees every individual and nation as equals, in a true democratic spirit.The risks for us not to take up Tagore’s trajectory are too high. The current form of nationalism that worksrationally within a “lunatic” doctrinal framework is threatening our very survival. Violence is spreading around theworld like virus. Our vast killing power is multiplying everyday with the introduction of yet more sophisticatedammunition in our arsenal. Paul Hirst, a leading international social theorist, has predicted that with the prospects ofclimate change that might attenuate our resources and result in mass migration from a loss of “habitable land inhighly populated areas like Bangladesh or the southern coast of China,” or “desertification or water shortages in theMiddle East or Southern Europe” (2); increase in the global income inequality; accretion of human rights violationworldwide; America’s quest for global dominance and challenges from “new ‘beggars’ armies” to the militaryhegemony, as well as the general selfishness of the developed nations, threatens the world with a “conflict riddeninternational environment” (2) in the twenty-first century, with the prospects of several conventional wars, “tolimited nuclear war” (2). Such a prospect casts gloom and doom on humanity. Perhaps it is not too late for us towake up from our horrific moral slumber and accept the path of international solidarity, peace, harmony and justicepaved by the Indian enlightened humanitarian poet, Rabindranath Tagore; by challenging the reigning ideologicalsystem of self-seeking nationalism and jingoism, we could still avert the all-consuming nightmare before us andalter the damning course of history.
