The nation celebrated Rabindranath Tagore’s birth anniversary on May 9. His songs were sung, his poems were recited, discussions were held on his monumental contribution to the reawakening of the soul of India then mired in cultural decadence. But I wonder whether any serious discourse was held on his concept of nationalism and also over whether it still remains relevant in the fast-changing cultural matrix of India. It is an immensely interesting subject though. Tagore’s view of nationalism was clear and he continued to express it forcefully with an invincible courage of conviction even in the face of fierce criticism that it triggered from the nationalist bloc.
The early 1920s was a tumultuous time for the nation with Mahatma Gandhi piloting the freedom movement through passive resistance and boycott of British goods and his followers championing Swadeshi-tinged nationalism of Gandhian variety with all their might and main. The poet was alarmed over the xenophobic, exclusive kind of emotions being stirred up in the name of nationalism.
He spoke against it, saying that they were preaching a hide-bound, crude kind of nationalism which was whipping up wild passions that, he thought, was an antithesis of the inclusive soul of eternal India which not just embraces the world on its hospitable bosom but stirs the soul up from the deep within with a call to shed the baser passions of life while climbing the ascending steps towards a luminous summit of human existence.
“If any nation, while priding itself on its exclusivity, seeks to guard the essence of its civilization by shutting out the world, the effort is bound to fail. For, it dries up the fount of civilization, stultifying its free flow that leads inevitably to decay. Should we say that we want to rest satisfied with the small ends keeping at bay the larger mission of the nationIJ Can a nation realize its truth in sterile seclusion by erecting prohibitive frontiers all aroundIJ” he asked.
The Congress leaders were stung to the quick. Chittaranjan Das, one of the nationalist stalwarts of the time, tore into Tagore, ridiculing him while alluding to his supposed transformation from a staunch nationalist which he once was during the Swadeshi Movement of mid- 1900s to the present ‘Sir Rabindranath’ who was denouncing nationalism while trashing the nation’s craving for freedom. “Tagore propagated his ideas (denouncing nationalism) with vigour while in America,” Das said.
Das made his stance on the controversy clear in his speech read out in his absence (he was in jail then) during the Ahmedabad session of the Congress in 1921. “We stand for freedom, because we claim the right to develop our own individuality and evolve our own destiny along our lines, unembarrassed by what Western civilization has to teach us and unhampered by the institutions which the West has imposed on us. But here a voice interrupts me, the voice of Rabindranath, the poet of India. He says: ‘The Western culture is standing at our door; must we be so inhospitable as to turn it away, or ought we not to acknowledge that in the union of the cultures of the East and the West is the salvation of the worldIJ’ But I have two observations to make to the criticism of Rabindranath: first we must have a house of our own before we can receive a guest; and secondly, Indian culture must discover itself before it is ready to assimilate Western culture. In my opinion, there can be no true assimilation before freedom comes,” Das said.
Tagore was fully aware of the fact that the ideas of nationalism he was espousing was at grim odds with the idea of nationalism which was driving the freedom movement and he was, therefore, vulnerable to criticism and even to scorn. Yet, he used to come down from the Olympian heights of blissful creativity with an amazing regularity and allow himself to be caught, as if deliberately, into the tumults of politics. He sounded serious on the matter with total concern of a patriot which could hardly be brushed aside as the characteristic flutter of a poet. He told Gandhi straight in his face when the two met at Jorasanko, Tagore’s ancestral house in Calcutta, in September 1921 that it was far from moral to preach untruths to sustain a movement which was professed to be founded on truthfulness. He cited the instance of the protagonists of Swadeshi goading the people to shun Western textiles branding them impure.
Embarrassed by such criticism from Tagore, the nationalists sought to defend their view, saying that the crude methods they were then employing to arouse a spirit of nationalism in the people was an expedient of the critical time and they would no longer be used after the country was free. However, such explanation of expediency did not convince Tagore in the least.
“Some people are telling me that cramping the mind of the nation in a narrow groove is a necessity till the country is free. Why things should be so even for a few yearsIJ Their argument is that we would attain Swaraj through these means. But would the Swaraj to be attained through such crude means become the Swaraj we aspire forIJ” he wondered.
Another thing. Tagore was equally fiercely critical of Hindu nationalism which was entwined with Swadeshi. His view was that it was a euphemism for a crude religious hysteria, an urge to ruthless majoritarianism in the name of superiority of one religion to others.
He defined it as shackling the soul of India into a narrow bog where the real universal religion once dawned in the Himalayan seclusion when the Rishis sang of the oneness of mankind, proclaimed that truth is lying in all religions, denoting the same destination and leading mankind through myriad means towards it.
He warned that this twisted Hindu nationalism being propagated with wild vigor would turn out to be an excrescence on the luminous body of timeless India and it would inevitably wake the baser elements of the people in course of such churning, resulting in the widening of the fissures within, fratricidal violence unleashed in the name of combative religions.
And in the process, the deeper soul of the Upanishadic Hinduism that stirs one up from deep within for a fulfilled life based on renunciation and the evolution of the soul from the lower to the higher realms would get thwarted and India would be robbed of its transformational, assimilative mission for the world.