Mohammad A. Quayum
A
merican writer Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Certainly, Tagore was above this puerile mindset. He was never concerned about perceived inconsistencies in his work, as his mind was large and dynamic and given to multiple viewpoints. It was also free to evolve with time, an important consideration for Tagore as freedom of thought was vital to him in his search for truth. In his interview with the Russian newspaper Izvestia, he stated, “Opinions are constantly changed and re-changed only through the free circulation of intellectual forces and moral persuasion.” This freedom and the possibility of mutation of existing ideas led to occasional disparities and incongruities in his views. In a letter to his friend Pramatha Chaudhuri in January 1885, Tagore acknowledges the presence in his mind of a constant tension between “two opposing forces [that were] constantly in action” and which worked like the “swing of the pendulum.” Isaiah Berlin saw this push and pull tendency in Tagore’s imagination – of not giving in to one side of the argument but considering both and trying to tread “the difficult middle path” – as “the rarest form of heroism.”
Given this polarity and the subsequent incongruity and ambiguity in Tagore’s imagination, it is not surprising that his critics have interpreted him in various and often contrary ways. For instance, while Tagore was appreciated as a religious and spiritual poet by his Western contemporaries, in India some have labelled him an apostate. Some critics hold the view that “Tagore was intolerant, bigoted and anti- Muslim in his consciousness,” yet conversely, I have argued that he was a champion of Hindu-Muslim unity, and that his critical gaze focused primarily on the Hindu Brahmins. As prominent historian Ramachandra Guha observes, “He had been accused of being anti-Western by some, of being a colonial agent by others, seen as too much of a patriot by the foreigner and as not patriotic enough by the Indian.” In 1916, Tagore was the subject of an assassination plot in the US by the Ghadr Party for his lukewarm support of India’s freedom struggle, but in 1917, when he wanted to dedicate his book Nationalism to US President Woodrow Wilson, it was not allowed as Tagore was suspected of “being involved in anti-British plots hatched by Indian revolutionaries (Ghadrites) in America.”
Tagore, as we know, was an avowed critic of nationalism. He lambasted nationalism in many of his works, most visibly in his book Nationalism, but also in various poems, novels, short stories, plays, letters, lectures, essays and articles. Critics generally agree that Tagore was firmly opposed to nationalism as defined in the Western sense, and favoured a cosmopolitan worldview instead. For example, in a letter to Aurobindo Mohan Bose, dated 19 November 1908, Tagore wrote, “I took a few steps down that road [of nationalism] and stopped: for when I cannot retain my faith in universal man standing over and above my country, when patriotic prejudices overshadow my God, I feel inwardly starved.”
Tagore’s tirades against nationalism were so pronounced and strident that one would think that it would be almost impossible to sell him as a nationalist. Yet, in spite of all that he had to say denouncing nationalism, paradoxically a number of his critics and admirers have come to think of him as a nationalist, even a forerunner of Indian nationalism, who helped shape India’s nationalist perspective. Foremost among them is Nehru, who in his book The Discovery of India, comments, “More than any other Indian… [Tagore] has helped to bring into harmony the ideas of the East and the West, and broadened the bases of Indian nationalism.” Likewise, Guha argues that despite Tagore’s strong anti-nationalist stance, his writings created formative influences on the nationalist thinking of both Gandhi and Nehru, forcing both of them to embrace a kind of nationalism that was inclusive, not exclusive, and “that sought not just political freedom for the Nation but equal rights for all its citizens.”
{ Also read : “IDOLATRY OF NATION” IS VIOLENCE ON HUMANITY }
In 2016, Trinamool Congress MP Sugata Bose had the following to say in Parliament: “I sometimes fear that those who are defining nationalism so narrowly will end up one day describing Rabindranath Tagore as anti-national if they read some of the sentences in his book on nationalism.” All these indicate that in spite of Tagore’s vociferous condemnation of nationalism, there is an increasing tendency, especially in India, to affiliate him with nationalism and nationalist politics, either to obtain leverage from his genius or to ensure his virtuosity cannot be used against the establishment.
Part of the enigma, of course, arises from Tagore’s incongruity as a writer and his ambivalent imagination. He was an anti-nationalist who nevertheless loved and supported his country perhaps more than anyone else at his time. He always had the well-being of his country at heart, although never to the exclusion of other countries or ahead of his own moral sensibility.
In other words, he was an anti-nationalist who was not necessarily opposed to the idea of “nation” for his country but to the ways in which its identity and future was being defined and charted. In his novel The Home and the World, Tagore’s protagonist and doppelganger Nikhil says, “I am willing to serve my country; but my worship I reserve for Right which is far greater than country. To worship my country as a god is to bring a curse upon it.” This willingness to serve the country while shunning the concept of revering Nation as Deity, undoubtedly makes his readers wonder how to arrive at a fair assessment of Tagore and his vision of nationalism; how to locate him in the context of his country vis-a-vis the ideology he opposed.
Tagore was an anti-nationalist who, paradoxically, as Ezra Pound wrote in a letter to Harriet Monroe, “[had] sung Bengal into a nation.” Pound made that statement in 1912, long after Tagore had renounced nationalist ideology in his letter to Aurobindo Mohan Ghose cited above. Moreover, bewildering though it may seem, Tagore is the only person in history who has been associated with four national anthems: he wrote and composed “Jana Gana Mana,” the national anthem of India; did not write but composed “Bande Mataram”; did not write but composed the national anthem of Sri Lanka; and wrote and also set to music the national anthem of Bangladesh.
This is extraordinary for someone who was an avowed anti-nationalist and saw nationalism, to quote from his different works, as “an epidemic of evil,” “a source of war and violence,” a thing of “moral perversion” and “the greatest menace to man.” Tagore first sang “Bande Mataram” at the 1896 session of the Indian National Congress, and it became hugely popular during the Swadeshi movement and later the Swaraj movement. It was adopted as the Congress Party’s national anthem and sung by its Working Committee Members at all their gatherings. For the entire duration of India’s independence movement, “Bande Mataram” remained a source of untold inspiration and sometimes even an incitement to violence for nationalist “troopers.” The song attained a cultish status, especially in Hindu political circles, and was described by Aurobindo Ghosh in 1907 “as a ‘mantra,'” or motivating chant. “The mantra had been given and in a single day a whole people had been converted to the religion of patriotism,” he stated.
Thus, ironically, although Tagore did not actively support Gandhi’s Swaraj movement, the song he composed and first sang at a Congress gathering continued to play its magic role, as thousands of people marched in demonstrations and went to jail for singing this song. Interestingly, when Tagore was asked by Rothenstein and Yeats to sing “Bande Mataram” at the dinner organised in his honour by Yeats in 1912, he refused to sing it but hummed the tune instead. It is unlikely that Tagore actually could not remember the lyrics of the song; it is more plausible that he chose not to perform a ritual of nationalism for this group from which he had continued to distance himself since 1907, when he decided to withdrew from the Swadeshi movement.
Apart from “Bande Mataram,” which Aurobindo once described as the “National Anthem of Bengal” and which generally enjoys the status of India’s “national song” (although it has no constitutional status), Tagore is also the author and composer of two national anthems, those of India and Bangladesh, and composer of the Sri Lankan national anthem. Obviously, these songs have been igniting nationalist sentiment in the hearts of millions of people every year in these countries. They encourage the people to embrace and extol an ideology that the author himself had so vociferously condemned and was so deeply opposed to, and they will continue to do so for who knows how long.
That is where the major irony and dichotomy of Tagore’s imagination lay; he who spurned and castigated nationalism, or “idolatry of the nation,” was to become a source of fetishisation of the nation through two of his songs. Though a fervent critic of Gandhi’s Swaraj that led to “unproductive hatred of the foreigner,” his songs now symbolise nationalism in at least two countries.
Moreover, Tagore believed in freedom of the individual, which is to say that the individual should have absolute freedom to accept or reject an idea or practice – but so far as his two national anthems are concerned, the citizens of these countries have little choice in the matter, as it is their “sacred obligation” to stand up every time the national anthem is played. In a supreme court ruling in India in 2016, it was made “mandatory for movie halls to play Jana Gana Mana and for people to stand up as part of their ‘sacred obligation’ to the national anthem.” In Bangladesh, too, as Farooq writes in Banglapedia, “There are approved rules of showing respect to the national anthem by civilians and persons in uniform, and there are rules regarding singing the national anthem at educational institutions and all other public places.”
II
Like nationalism, Tagore’s perspectives on patriotism are also characterised by certain paradoxes and ambiguities; he was a fervid patriot, yet he openly denounced and deplored the sentiment of patriotism. We know that Tagore wrote many songs celebrating his native land and paying homage to its beauty and fecundity, of which, as mentioned earlier, two have become the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
Yet he loathed being called a patriot and derided the concept vehemently in many of his writings. For example, in a letter to Aurobindo Mohan Bose, responding to some harsh comments on his view of nationalism by Abala Bose, wife of the celebrated scientist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, Tagore commented,
“Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live.”
In a letter to C.F. Andrews, with whom Tagore had a friendship of, in Uma Das Gupta‘s phrase, “largeness and freedom,” he further wrote, “This is the ugliest side of patriotism. For in small minds, patriotism dissociates itself from the higher ideal of humanity. It becomes the magnification of self, on a stupendous scale – magnifying our vulgarity, cruelty, greed; dethroning God, to put up this bloated self in its place.”
So why this dichotomy in Tagore’s sensibility? Why did he reject something that seemed an integral part of his imagination? There are various possibilities. First of all, Tagore saw nationalism and patriotism as inseparable twins; both had a cultish nature that amplified the “vulgarity, cruelty, [and] greed” in people and sought to replace humanity and God with a bloated sense of self and the nation. As pointed out by Aurobindo in a previous statement, patriotism was a sort of a “religion,” which, like religious orthodoxy, could engender, in Tagore’s own phrases, “abnormal vanity,” “moral callousness” and “a spirit of persecution” in its followers. In this context, Martha Nussbaum‘s response to Richard Rorty‘s appeal to Americans not to “disdain patriotism as a value” seems pertinent. Comparing Nikhil’s cosmopolitan worldview in The Home and the World to Rorty’s, Nussbaum explains, “I believe, as do Tagore and his character Nikhil, that this emphasis on patriotic pride is both morally dangerous and, ultimately, subversive of some of the worthy goals patriotism sets out to serve…. Richard Rorty’s patriotism may be a way of bringing all Americans together; but patriotism is very close to jingoism, and I’m afraid I don’t see in Rorty’s argument any proposal for coping with this very danger.”
It is perhaps because of this inherent danger in the sentiment of patriotism – that it could easily translate into jingoism and reveal itself either on the battlefields of Europe (as in the case of the two World Wars) or in the religious riots in South Asia (as it happened in Delhi earlier this year, instigated by Modi’s ultra-Hindu-nativist-xenophobic nationalism) – that Tagore remained ambivalent about the concept.
Another possible explanation is that, to Tagore patriotism was a personal experience that “comes out of a quest.” It was not a matter of fancy or whim, simply because one was born in a particular land. “Those who think that the country is theirs simply because they have been born in it are creatures besotted by external things of the world,” Tagore stated. To make desh into swadesh, a country into one’s own country, one had to apply one’s atmasakti, or the power of self-making, and reimagine the land through “one’s own knowledge, intelligence, love and effort.” Therefore, to Tagore patriotism possessed added meaning and significance to its political and popular usage; it had an imaginative and a spiritual side that eluded most people, who professed their love and loyalty to a country merely because they were its inhabitants. Moreover, Tagore believed in the harmony and co-existence of the opposing spirits of attachment and detachment. “In their union dwells the ideal of perfection,” he wrote in “The Fourfold Way of India.” In the context of patriotism, this means that while one should love one’s country, one should still remain spiritually detached from it. “The harmony of bondage and freedom is the dance of creation,” Tagore explained. He developed this idea beautifully using the metaphor of walking: “In the act of walking, attachment is in the step that the foot takes when it touches the earth; detachment is in the movement of the other foot when it raises itself.” Given this metaphysical aspect to Tagore’s understanding of the concept, it is no surprise that he actively distanced himself from and disparaged the same idea when it was discussed among politicians and the masses in mundane everyday speech.
A similar kind of ambivalence appears in Tagore’s treatment of the concept of cosmopolitanism. We know that throughout his writings Tagore spoke about creating a world culture and bringing humanity together in “one nest.” He longed for a world that was “free from all antagonisms of race, nationality, creed or caste” and that “[had] not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls.” In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1913, Tagore categorically stated, “India is there to unite all human races.” In a letter to his son Rathindranath, dated 11 October 1916, he further stated, “The age of narrow chauvinism is coming to an end – for the sake of the future, the first steps towards this great meeting of world humanity will be taken on this very fields of Bolpur” (where Tagore’s institutions Santiniketan and Visva Bharati are located).
In spite of such supra-national aspirations and desire to create a mahajati (grand human community) through the harmony of all human races, Tagore – somewhat curiously – spurned the idea of cosmopolitanism on at least one occasion. Pairing it with nationalism in his book Nationalism, he disdainfully stated, “Neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship is the goal of human history.” This statement seemingly undercuts everything that Tagore envisioned with regard to creating a global fellowship of humanity and cultivating cultural cooperation and an international mind.
So why did Tagore make such a dismissive comment on cosmopolitanism? Perhaps it was his attempt to reject the type of specifically political cosmopolitanism that was developing in Asia around the same time, in which the British Empire was expected to evolve into a new cosmopolitan super-state, and nationalism to be realised in a federation of nations. The leaders of this project included such cosmopolitan visionaries as Dr. Lim Boon Keng in Singapore, Anand de Souza in Sri Lanka and the Theosophists in India, headed by Anne Besant. These individuals, as Mark R. Frost explains, did not give up their “nationalist aspirations” but rather, wanted to tie it “to demands for a ‘reconstructed’ British Empire, an imperial federation and even a League of Nations that would… eventually (following the end of global hostilities [after World War I]) usher in a new age of peace and brotherhood.”
For example, Dr. Lim Boon Keng, a Chinese nationalist and Empire loyalist, envisioned the great potential of the British Empire to bring about a “great union” and a “cosmic harmony” in which the Empire itself would act as the vehicle. To attain such “unity” and “oneness” of humanity, Lim “advocated the further extension of English as the lingua franca of the British Empire.” In Sri Lanka, likewise, de Souza dreamed of a “World-Britain” in which the British Empire would turn into a “commonwealth of nations,” wherein “No more shall we be two empires – ‘White’ and ‘coloured’ under a single name – but one, where all shall have rights as they are able to bear responsibility.” Similarly, in India, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, one of the adherents of Besant’s political ideas, when asked why he was not in favour of India separating from the Empire like the Sinn Feiners in Ireland, replied, “We want to be in the Empire on terms of equality. We do not want to separate ourselves, but we want to extend within the League of the Empire.”
Tagore was not interested in any such political cosmopolitanism that would transform the Empire into a gigantic nation, in which the individual would still have to sacrifice his/her moral qualities for some political and commercial gain and surrender his/her spontaneous self to a virulent self-seeking and artificial life, which would bring power and prosperity but no inner fulfilment or lasting peace.
Tagore’s cosmopolitanism was more cultural and spiritual in nature, in which the individual would be expected to share a sense of hospitality and sympathy towards all fellow human beings, and maintain a sense of openness to the world around him. Kwame Anthony Appiah is of the view that a principle characteristic of cosmopolitanism is a feeling of obligation to others, beyond family and kinship ties, “or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship,” an interest in the values and practices that lend significance to other people. Tagore’s cosmopolitanism shares these spiritual-cultural qualities advocated by Appiah and others, as opposed to the League of Empire type of cosmopolitanism championed by those contemporaries named above.
Rejecting political unity vis-à-vis spiritual unity, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech Tagore affirmed, “Therefore, no superficial bond of political unity can appeal to us, can satisfy us, can ever be real to us…. We must discover the most profound unity, the spiritual unity between the different races.”
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Notes Text title changed and is a copy-edited version of essays that appeared in The Daily Star March 28 and April 24 2020. With kind permission of author.
Mohammad A. Quayum is a faculty member at College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University of South Australia, Adelaide. He is the author of Beyond Boundaries: Critical Essays on Rabindranath Tagore (Bangla Academy, 2014) editor of The Poet and His World (Orient Longman, 2011) and Tagore, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism (Routledge, 2020).
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