AGORE’S IDEA OF NATIONALISM AND THE CONTEMPORARY INDIA

Manojit Mandal, English, Jadavpur University.

“Nationalism is a great menace. It is the particular thing which for years has been
at the bottom of India's troubles.”

The above statement if made in the present day India may invite an antinational
tag and would certainly call for penal action under the Indian sedition laws against
the averer. We are fortunate that Tagore had left us even before the last sun of
the Empire set down in the Indian sky. Indeed, Tagore was severely reprimanded
by his own countrymen after the lectures delivered on Nationalism in his own
time. But more importantly the question really is: Was Tagore accepted in
America whose high ideals of liberalism and openness had fascinated him beyond
any fathomable doubt? In fact, the lecture on “Nationalism in India” was
delivered on American soil during his visit to USA in 1916; and the answer to this
question can be found in Tagore’s aborted attempt to dedicate his book on
“Nationalism” to the then American President, Woodrow Wilson through the
President of Macmillan Company, which published it in 1917 (Mukharjee 87). The
apparent ground for rejecting Tagore’s request by the US State Department,
claimed by Sujit Mukharjee, was owing to Tagore’s alleged involvement in anti-
British plots hatched by the Indian revolutionaries in America; and this was
secretly reported to the American security system by the British Ambassador
based on their intelligence report. Reaction from Tagore’s Japanese friends-
incidentally, there was lecture on Nationalism in Japan as well given by Tagore
during his visit to Japan in 1914- was no better either. Inoue Tetsujiro, a Professor
at the Tokiyo Imperial University criticized Tagore as a representative of a “ruined
nation” (qtd in Das 771). And it is needless to repeat how Tagore was treated at
home even among his old friends in the Congress Party after his scathing attacks
on the nationalists-whether the Extremists or Moderates. Extremely “ill-timed”,
as called by Krishna Kripalani, were his “lectures on Nationalism”(qtd in Das 771).

With the turn of the last century nationalism started to assume a definite
ideological significance synonymous with struggle for independence-swadeshi
movement-to resist the unspeakable tyranny of the British imperialists. However,
the anti-colonial struggles soon witnessed two sharply divided groups-the
moderates and the extremists. Tagore, too, actively participated in Indian politics:
composed explicit political songs and even hit the streets of Calcutta during the
anti-partition movement of 1905. By the time a teenage revolutionary Khudiram
Bose was hanged because of his unsuccessful attempt to kill a tyrant British
administrator, nationalism had already become a religion in Bengal and in the
entire country. Nevertheless, after 1909 Tagore withdrew himself from all such
direct political acts and moved to the quiet of Santiniketan from the hustle of
Kolkata and started living there as a “Sage of Santiniketan” as Sabyasachi
Bhattacharya would call him (108). Was it because of the hanging of an innocent
boy driven and/or misled by violent passion for nationalism? Or, was it because of
the gradual transmutation of the moderates into the rising indigenous
bourgeoisie? Or, was it for Tagore’s search for an abode of peace to give the
fullest expression to his creative oeuvre?

Be that as it may, Tagore never returned to active politics after 1909 although he
would produce a great body of literature with definite political implications
including those great novels-Gora and Ghare Baire - and not least the
essays/lectures concerning contemporary politics in India and in the world. Both
Gora and Ghare Baire deal with Tagore’s vision of an India premised on the idea
of non-violence, tolerance, yielding together opposite views, education and
amalgamation of different castes and religious sects. He was extremely critical
about masculine caste Hindu notion of the protagonist in Gora and his attempt to
paint India in that light. Likewise, he was vehemently averse towards the
unscrupulous means adopted by the revolutionaries led by Sandip to achieve their
narrow political goals. It is not a mere coincidence that this was the period when
Tagore started to show his uncanny interest in translating his writings, especially
the poems in Gitanjali, into English (Chakraborty Introduction). It was an attempt
to achieve international recognition notwithstanding the apparent dichotomy in
adopting the language of the imperialists while doing so. This was the period
when Tagore met W.B. Yeats (1912) and a famous friendship began in the world
literature and culture; the rest was history: he became the first Asian to receive
the Nobel Prize. The Tagore-Yeats symbiosis, I think, was growing not merely as
the meeting of two myriad-minded poetic geniuses but also owing to the fact that
both of them found themselves in a similar kind of colonial/political situations at
their respective countries. Both struggled under the same colonial rule; both had
issues with the nationalists and their mode of anti-colonial struggles at home; and
both started imagining freedom for their countries by way of, what Frantz Fanon
would call decolonization- dismantling the masters’ house by using the masters’
tools themselves. English language and literature, the great tradition of the
English minds-from Shakespeare, Milton to the Romantics and Matthew Arnold-
embedded in the liberationist culture of the British would become definitive sites
of revisit, if not inspiration for both to articulate the dreams and aspirations of
their countrymen struggling under the British colonial rule. Edward Said in his
“Yeats and Decolonization” has very cogently argued about how an act of
imagination, an act of writing becomes a power to construct one’s nation
struggling under offshore colonial oppression (265-66). Said has peripherally
referred to Tagore in the same essay (281). I wish to extend his argument in this
paper as creativity for Tagore especially after his withdrawal from direct political
involvement, became an act of narrating and imagining Indian nation, and while
doing so he did not necessarily reject everything that was English (Nikhiless in
Ghare Baire or Home and the World) rather attempted to trace a fine distinction
between two categories of Englishmen-Chhoto O Baro (“Small and Great”) in the
collection his essays, Kalantar (1917). The tradition of the creative English minds,
he calls, the ‘Great’ English and the colonial administrators/bureaucrats ruling
India directly are the ‘Small’ English (1917).

The point that I wish to drive home here is this: contrary to the popular notion
about apparent mellow, lukewarm and convenient nationalist trends found in
Tagore’s writings and practices he always dreamt of an independent India with
not just political freedom but freedom in the real sense of the term: freedom
from caste oppression, religious fanaticism and socio-economic unequilibrium.
“We must never forget”, he writes, “in the present day that those people who
have got their political freedom are not necessarily free, they are merely
powerful. The passions which are unbridled in them are creating huge
organizations of slavery in the disguise of freedom”(‘Nationalism’ 1916). “Those
of us in India”, he continues, “who have come under the delusion that mere
political freedom will make us free have accepted their lessons from the West as
the gospel truth and lost their faith in humanity” (1916). As Himani Banerjee in a
very recent article talks about Tagore’s dream projects in Santiniketan and
Sriniketan as a micro model of an ideal India based on the notion of a completely
liberationist pedagogy and practice where the world meets not just to free India
but humanity at large(2016). By drawing on Antonio Gramsci and Paolo Freire,
Banerjee argues that by developing Santiniketan and Sriniketan Tagore gave a real
shape to his dream project of decolonization and his idea of an Indian nation
against the prevalent idea of a nation as a people of “organized power…which
incessantly keeps up the insistence of the population on becoming strong and
efficient”(2016).

Therefore, the popular brand of nationalism practiced by the indigenous political

elites in India would be totally denounced by Tagore. He contends that in India we
have no real nationalism but a mere “idolatory of Nation”: we worship it more
than God or humanity: it appears to be a kind of religion which overpowers the
moral/rational self of man, according to him (‘Nationalism’ 1916). In place of such
frenzied nationalism Tagore postulates the idea of cultural nationalism based on
the principles of complete education and self-development particularly of the vast
contingent of people living in the rural parts of India. In the second decade of the
last century Tagore rightly believed that the process of nation building would be a
complete project only if the poorest of the poor were included in that grand
narrative and the whole nation achieved, what he had earlier called, atma-shakti
or self-empowerment in the collection of essays by the same name (1901). This
quintessential moment in the history of India, according to him, would mark
beginning of a counter hegemonic challenge to the ruthless colonial oppression,
and not just Every Indian but Every Man would enjoy the taste of real freedom.
For Tagore only the moral Man or the Maha Manab (Great Man) endowed with a
finer sense of tolerance and culture can liberate humanity from the darkest
period of history, when the world was engaged in a brutal war to fulfill their
narrow goals of power and material wealth. Tagore had the firm believe that India
in particular and the East in general would give birth to that Saviour to restore the
world from imminent destruction (‘Nationalism’ 1916).

Tagore’s highly prophetic ideas enumerated in the first half of the last century are
being dearly revisited in the contemporary Indian academic institutions as also in
the larger society through series of open discourses. His idea of nationalism is
invoked not just by the teachers and scholars but by hundreds of students in the
backdrop of certain unfortunate and despicable events including the sad death of
a Dalit student in a central University. Exactly 100 years after Tagore’s rumination-
India is many countries packed in one geographical receptacle- we still surmise:
are we really one nation? Or are we simply stitched together by an implicitly
repressive political system that refuses to recognize the divergent groups of
people dreaming to live independently within the geo-political space called
“India”. The recently fought furious debates not just in the renowned academic
institutions but on the floors of the Indian Parliament have suggested time and
again that there still exist many “Indias” within India; and any repressive rejection
of that diversity may possibly sow the seeds of political dissent/insurrection in
contemporary India. A renowned Harvard Historian turned Parliamentarian, Prof.
Sugato Bose warned his compatriots of such jingoistic nationalism first, by quoting
Tagore’s words mentioned at the beginning of this paper in the Parliament and
thereby, extending the same argument in a newspaper interview(2016). In his
opinion, Tagore basically warned Indian patriots not to imitate the monstrous
features of the western nation states because he knew nationalism had two sides-
the oppressive side leads to war, conflict, even denial of the rights to the citizens.
His warning is more relevant now than it was 100 years ago-but today’s leaders
have not read Tagore. They do not understand what a generous concept
nationalism can be as Bose wonders (2016).

Whether it is fair and wise to compare the contemporary Indian political class
including the system of present governance with the repressive colonial state
apparatus of Tagore’s time –I leave it to the wisdom of the readers. Nevertheless,
it can certainly be contended that it is not just India or the world at large but the
whole gamut of human civilization itself is at the moment in the crossroad of
unenduring pain and suffering especially since the turn of this century; history has
been passing through “cunning passages, contrived corridors” (Eliot 1920) as the
world has been witnessing unprecedented seismological changes in every sphere
of life. In the name of free and open economy a series of neocolonial powers led
by the USA started to dominate the world in the form of surrogate imperialism;
this is resisted with indiscriminate killings of innocent people by a number of
global terror outfits and other extremist groups; the same would in turn be
countered with international war on terror and thus destroying scores of lives in
the process. If one can count the ratio of people died in the last few decades it
would certainly match the number of deaths during the last recognized World
War. The contemporary world has been playing so havoc with humanity that the
Pope of Vatican about two years ago lamented, “.. we are at the moment
witnessing a kind of third world war…and there is no escape from it”(2014). I do
not really wish to wind up by sharing the extreme pessimism of the Pope as I
shall, like many of the disillusioned citizens of world, invoke Tagore’s vision of the
incarnation of a Moral Man (Maha Manab) or a collective inner soul to save
humanity from gradual annihilation.

Works cited:-

Banerjee, Himani, “A Trasnformational Pedagogy: Reflection on

Rabindranath’s Project of Decolonization”, in Sangeeta Dutta &
Subhoranjan Dasgupta eds. Tagore: The World as His Nest, Jadavpur
University Press, Kolkata, 2016.
Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi, Rabindranath Tagore: An interpretation,

Penguin Viking, New Delhi, 2011

Chakraborty, Bikash, Poets to A Poet, 1912 to 1940; Calcutta, Visva-

Bharati, 1998.

Das, Sisir Kumar, The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Vol.II ,

Sahitya Academy, New Delhi, 1996.
Eliot, T.S., “Gerontion” in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, OUP, New Delhi,
2001.
Mukharjee, Sujit, Passage to America, Bookland, Calcutta, 1964.
Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism, Vintage, London, 1994
Tagore, Rabindranath, “Chhoto o Baro” in the collection of essays,
“Kalantar”, Rabindrarachanabali, Vol.XII, Visva-Bharati Granthan Vibhag,
Kolkata, 1986.
Tagore, Rabindranath, “Atma Shakti”, Rabindrarachanabali, Vol.II, Visva-
Bharati Granthan Vibhag, Kolkata, 1986.
Tagore, Rabindranath, “Nationalism in India”, from The English Writings of
RabindranathTagore, Vol.II ed. Sisir Kr Das, Sahitya Academy, New Delhi,
1996.
The Pope Benedict qtd in The Times of India, Kolkata, July 12 2014.
The Sugata Bose Interview, The Times Of India, Kolkata, March 11 2016.