I. Introduction
Vast changes have occurred in the
world in the seventy years since Tagore’s death in 1941. Many of these changes
have been profound in their impact. On the positive side, there has been an
unimaginable rise in incomes in Asia, particularly in China and India. Economic growth has been
fast and sustained also in the West, accompanied by a surge in foreign trade
after the adoption of GATT and WTO treaties. Western
Europe reconstructed rapidly after the Second World War, and has
now become a peaceful, borderless, and prosperous union. The world as a whole
has become a ‘flat earth’ due to technological advances in communications and
transport. On the negative side, hundreds of millions still live in extreme
poverty in Africa and in pockets of Asia and Latin America.
Economic growth has hardly reached them, and their development indicators of
literacy, life expectancy and child mortality remain very low. Disparities
among nations, and within nations, continue to be great. The spread of
democracy and human rights have been uneven. Environmental degradation, climate
change, and international terrorism have emerged as major concerns.
The current economic recession
and financial crises around the world, and the continuing problems of religious
polarization, militarism and hostilities, have led the leading countries to
review the architecture of the world order. We may be at the threshold of a new
world order which will govern the next hundred years. It may be appropriate at
this time to look back at some of the Modern Greats of the past century and
re-examine their messages of wisdom for their relevance today.
This paper will attempt to do so
with Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) who was a leading spokesman for
compassionate humanism and culture in India and the world. Tagore lived
in the age of science, as we also do. He was proud of the age of science as we
also are. But we cannot say our lives are universally more secure or healthy in
these times of advanced science and technology than that of our ancestors in
the preceding age. That leads us to ask why this insecurity, why all this
terror, why our so-called modern society has led to progressively less harmony
between the individual and the society. Even while Tagore greatly appreciated
the benefits of science, and made use of science for rural reform which we
shall discuss below, he understood that it is not enough by itself, and that our
hopes and aspirations must be founded on a universalist and democratic
framework. That brings us to his thoughts on humanism, education and culture,
nationalism and internationalism, and their great relevance today.
II. Humanism, nationalism, internationalism
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They
are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards each other in a
spirit of brotherhood.” Article 1,
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations, 1948.
Long before the League
of Nations and the United Nations, Tagore was an internationalist
who critiqued the narrowly defined concepts of nationalism and patriotism. He
wanted all human beings to be treated equally regardless of the country or
nation to which they belonged. He also did not want barriers between people
even within the same nation—the barriers of caste, race, and religion.
Tagore lived and worked during a
period of crucial social and political transformation in India. He
responded to its intense moments in memorable words. A product of the
nineteenth century, he was profoundly influenced by its liberal humanistic
thought and its hope and optimism. He contributed substantially to the making
of a modern India.
By his own admission his formative influences were from a confluence of three
movements which were active in the India of his time: the protestant
religious movement of Rammohan Roy (1772-1833), the literary movement of Bankim
Chandra Chatterjee (1838-94), and the national movement. ‘It [the national
movement] was not fully political but it began to give voice to the mind of our
people trying to assert their own personality’, he wrote. The ‘national
movement’ revived the Indian pride in its past achievement in philosophy and
religion, art and architecture, music and poetry. Pride in his own cultural
traditions did not however blind Tagore to the moral and social degradation of
his country which he directly experienced. Even in his eulogies of India
he was remarkably free from the rhetoric of patriotism. He responded to
European literature with a keen mind and great enthusiasm. The first forty
years of his life was conspicuous by his fond attraction for the Romantic and
the Victorian poets, and Shakespeare, matched equally by his passionate love
for Sanskrit literature in general and for the classical Sanskrit writer
Kalidasa in particular. This catholicity of taste slowly evolved into his deep
and pervasive sense of the ‘universal’ in thought and culture.
Like all the leading intellectuals
of his time, Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902)
and Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) in particular, Tagore also was obliged to
address the question of the relation between India and the West. Like his
compatriots he began by believing in an essential dichotomy between the two
cultures and, for a certain period of time, he talked of a spiritual East and
the materialistic West. But there was an evolution in his understanding when he
discovered for himself a spirituality in Western civilisation too. He located this
spirituality in the West’s dynamism and experimentation and its continuous
pursuit of truth. Equally, he observed and critiqued the West’s arrogant
display of power but believed that it clashed with her ‘inner ideal’. This
criticism led to his controversial lectures on Nationalism in 1916 where he argued that the West’s tremendous
success in science and technology had led to dehumanization and an increasing
greed for power.
Despite such scathing criticisms
Tagore remained a pioneer of the intellectual union of East and West. There
again he put his faith in people and not in governments. He believed that despite
the West’s ruthless politics, there was no absence of martyrs in the West who
sacrificed their lives for the wrongs done by their governments. That is how he sought to turn our minds
towards the ideal of the spiritual unity of man. He wrote, ‘In India what is
needed more than anything else is the broad mind which, only because it is
conscious of its own vigorous individuality, is not afraid of accepting truth
from all sources’.
It is not uncommon for a person
to believe in the equality of all men, and yet to regard his or her own country
in an exclusionist sense. However, Tagore’s strong faith in man led him to an
inclusive approach. He was able to shake off all shackles of traditional
Hinduism, and arrive at a non-parochial and inclusive concept of India.
This was in a sense a rediscovery of the concept first presented by Rammohan
Roy in 1823, but Tagore established it, rooted it in Indian history, and
propagated it throughout the country. The history of India had a special message for
Tagore. He saw it not so much as a synthesis, as is generally said, but as a
‘mixture of ideas’ and an ‘interpenetration of opposites’. To him it was not
the history of Aryans and non-Aryans, not the history of Hindus, nor a history
of Hindus and Muslims taken together. He did not see the coming of the British
as an accidental intrusion. His essays written during 1898 and 1904 convey an
intuitive sense of history. He distanced himself as much from the colonialist
historiography as he did from a Hindu nationalist view of the past. His
country’s social civilization, he wrote, was founded on ‘an adjustment of
races, to acknowledge real differences between them, and yet to seek some basis
of unity …’ His inclusive nationalism and non-parochial interpretation of India’s
history became a powerful agent of ideas for the freedom movement that Gandhi
and Nehru led between the two world wars.
The idea of India expressed so eloquently by Nehru in 1947,
was quite in conformity with Tagore’s idea of India, which the Indian nation has
cherished ever since. To quote from Nehru’s famous speech on August 14, 1947:
“…what shall be
our endeavour? To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the
peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and
disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to
create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice
and fullness of life to every man and woman……………….All of us, to whatever
religion we may belong, are equally the children of India with equal rights,
privileges and obligations. We cannot encourage communalism or
narrow-mindedness, for no nation can be great whose people are narrow in
thought or in action.”
Several factors contributed to
Tagore’s inclusive approach, which was so strongly championed by Nehru. First,
his father was a leading reformer of the Hindu society and religion, adopting
the monotheistic Vedic variant introduced by Rammohan Roy at the beginning of
the nineteenth century. Thus Tagore grew up in a household in which the spirit
of scrutiny, creativity, and reforms dominated. Second, his exposure beginning
in 1892, to the great poverty and indignities suffered by the Muslim peasantry
in his family’s agricultural estates, as well as his friendship with Christians
like Sister Nivedita (1867-1911), Brahmabandhab Upadhyaya (1861-1907),
Rewachand (1868-1945), also some years later Charles Andrews (1871-1940) and
William Pearson (1881-1923), convinced him that they rightfully belong to the same
brotherhood of man. He wrote, ‘On us today is thrown the responsibility of
building up a greater India
in which Hindu and Muslim and Christian will find their place’. This reasoning
found expression in his well-known poem in 1911, beginning with the lines,
He mor chitta, punya tirthe jagore dhire
ei
bharater maha-manaber sagoro-tire.
‘On the
sacred shores of the ocean of humanity of this India,
Awaken, my heart!’
Tagore’s song ‘jana gana mana adhinayaka’ (1911) invoking the same goal of a larger
humanity was chosen as our national anthem by Gandhi and Nehru, and remains a
symbol of modern India’s
legacy of universal humanity. The Constitution of India upholds that legacy.
III.
Education
“To accept the truth of our own age it will
be necessary to establish a new education on the basis, not of nationalism, but
of a wider relationship of humanity”.
Rabindranath Tagore, Visva-Bharati,
1919, pp. 9-10. (Translated by UDG).
When first formulating his ideas
for a new Indian education, Tagore was clearly responding to the ‘cultural
dislocation’ of a colonised
country. His mind was filled with what he wrote in his essay Tapoban in 1909 (in English translation
‘The Message of the Forest’, 1919): ‘The forest, unlike the desert or rock or
sea, is living; it gives shelter and nourishment to life. In such surroundings
the ancient forest-dwellers of India
realised the spirit of harmony
with the universe and emphasized in their minds the monistic aspects of truth.
They sought the realisation of
their soul through union with all’. He wrote poetically of how ‘the voice in
the Vedic tongue’ guided him to the idea of a Brahmacharya Ashram or a
hermitage when starting his school in Santiniketan.
But he was soon to decide that a
Brahmacharya Ashram was not his notion of a new and modern education. He valued
some of its features such as following a life of simplicity for the students
and teachers of the school alike. He also greatly valued the need for a forest,
or a tapoban- like place, which, in his plan for the Santiniketan
school, was to be a quiet rural environment surrounded by nature and away from
the confines of a city. He knew that was the closest he could get to
establishing an intimate community of teachers and students as in the
hermitages of the past. But his ideal school had to be much more than that,
especially with regard to opening up the students’ minds to a relationship with
the world. Almost as soon as the Brahmacharya Ashram began to function he spoke
out his disapproval of the institution in the following words, ‘I have no
desire to magically resurrect some ancient dead thing. It is not my business to
bring back the past. I want to work for something which though implicit is yet
strongly current, that which is not dead and which is natural to India.
The projects we start fail because we blindly try to get along without
acknowledging it ... to say that it is possible to resurrect India’s past but
not possible to integrate another country’s historical time with India’s, and
to attempt to implement this, is vain and leads to destruction, not to new
life’.
He opened up his Santiniketan
school to those who believed in East and West alike, in peace and goodwill,
without distinction of caste and creed and away from nationalist politics.
Tagore was a strong critic of the British Empire
but he did not want that to get in the way of his mission to break out of the
isolation that colonial rule and militant nationalism imposed. He argued that
the lessons of the First World War proved that ‘tomorrow’s history’ must begin
with a chapter on ‘internationalism’ and that education must be in harmony with
the times. In his 1919 essay A Centre of
Indian Culture, he raised the crucial question of what must be the
religious teaching given at such a centre? He pointed out how ‘India’ or
‘national’ tended to be identified with ‘Hindu’ which he argued was limited to
only one historical aspect of India. He deplored the fact that India
was divided by religious and social barriers and asked, ‘Can there be no wide
meeting place where all sects may gather together and forget their
differences’? This fundamental question became even more urgent with the bitter
lessons of the First World War when he began to proceed gradually to transform
Santiniketan into a world university to which scholars from the East and West
would be invited to meet and study each other’s cultures. He named this
university ‘Visva-Bharati’ and chose an excerpt from a Vedic text as its motto
when inaugurating the institution in 1921:
Yatra visvam bhavati ekanidam
‘where the whole world forms its one
single nest’
In the midst of an unprecedented political unrest and
excitement, and against the whole force of the popular sentiment for the Non-cooperation
Movement, he stated his views with passion in two essays, ‘Satyer Abahan’(1921,
The Call of Truth) and ‘Sikshar Milan’ (1921, The Union of Cultures). Those
essays stated his goal of bringing the West on terms of equality to the India of his aspiration --- which for him had to
be an India of multiple
cultures, an India where the
impoverished village is given education and dignity of life, an India
building its strength and nationhood by uniting castes and communities under an
enlightened leadership. He recognized that the colonial education system was
out of touch with Indian life. This was why he pressed for an education to first understand this
weakness, and then endeavour to bridge the gap by working for village
reorganization as an essential part of a ‘new’ education based on self-reliance
and human dignity. He wanted this education to combine local or indigenous
knowledge with modern scientific know-how from which both sections of Indian
society could learn and make progress. Visva-Bharati’s ‘mission of rural
construction’, he wrote, was to ‘retard’ the process of ‘racial suicide’. He
held firmly that organizing the villages would be the right way to spread
‘national consciousness’. He argued that ‘national unity’ could become a
reality only when the masses get a gut feeling about it, and that could happen
if the educated classes and the masses unite in a common programme of work.
Such was the ‘sacrifice’ needed, he wrote, to make the country ‘our own’. He
criticized the Indian National Congress for looking to our alien
government to do the work that had to be done ‘by us’ for the country that was
‘our own’.
He knew squarely we were faced with two stupendous
problems: first, the poverty of our intellectual life and, second, the poverty
of our material life. The Santiniketan-Sriniketan institution or Visva-Bharati
– a world university in rural Bengal – became his life-long activity to build a
centre of cultures which would not only be a centre of intellectual life in India
but also a centre of her economic life. He wrote, ‘Our education should be in
full touch with our complete life, economic, intellectual, aesthetic, social,
and spiritual; and our educational institutions should be the very heart of our
society. It must cultivate land, breed cattle, weave cloth, and produce the
necessities of life, calling science to its aid, and uniting teachers and
students in productive activities on cooperative principles whose motive force
is not the greed of profit’. At the start this programme was limited to three
villages in the south-west of Santiniketan where his school for urban boys and
girls was established in 1901. With the problems of over three hundred million
people staring him at the face, Tagore could only have hoped that his efforts
would touch the hearts of his village neighbours at Santiniketan and would help
them reassert themselves in a bolder social order. ‘I alone cannot take
responsibility for the whole of India’,
he wrote. ‘But even if two or three villages can be freed from the shackles of
helplessness and ignorance, an ideal for the whole of India would be established. These
two or three villages must be liberated fully; all must have education; there
must be joy in these villages with songs and readings as in the past’.
These ideas of a new education
were founded upon an urge and an instinct to create a new type of humanity
whose scientific-technological progress and economic development would grow
through dialogue and respect for values. That was the persistent basis of
Tagore’s debate on India
and the world in his powerful and spirited writings on education, culture,
science, nationalism, internationalism. These give meaning to his stand against
colonialism, discrimination and dehumanization. They give coherence to his
faith in the relationship between human beings and their environment. All of his arguments were drawn directly from
his life experience of the social and natural environment in which he lived a
hundred fifty years ago, and we still do today. His 1919 essay City and Village says it all.
IV. National Policy, Society and Values
“Nehru’s pan-Asianism and his determination to stay ‘non-aligned’ in
the Cold War
…………bear the mark of Tagore’s thought.”
Ramachandra Guha, The Hindu,
November 23, 2008
India’s
history after Independence
is a complex story with far-reaching ramifications across all aspects of its
society. But the two most prominent features of its personality in the early
years were its foreign policy and its approach to economic development.
Nehru’s famous foreign policy of
‘non-alignment’ sought to avoid taking sides in the Cold War. This gave India
freedom to choose, and to reason things out before making commitments on the
basis of short-term expediency alone. India had also hoped to bring about
greater harmony and moderation in world affairs, and to project an image that
suited the reemergence of a compassionate and wise civilization. This was very
much in line with Tagore’s philosophy and understanding of history. If Nehru or
Krishna Menon sounded too high-minded at times, it was an echo of what Tagore’s
audiences must have felt during his lectures on nationalism in USA and Japan in 1916.
India’s approach to economic
development began with planning. At its simplest, planning is simply a tool for
understanding the possibilities and prospects of the economy. It was seen as a
useful way of organizing statistics on the economy, about which the new leaders
had little organized knowledge. But the government also adopted a highly
interventionist policy, characterised by extensive controls at all levels (this regime of controls became popularly known as the "Control Raj"). Along with that, the government adopted an
‘inward-looking’ or insular policy behind high tariff barriers and quotas. It
was only after 1991, that India
started to moderate or reverse these policies
The extensive controls and state
ownership that accompanied insular policies, especially during the 1960s and
1970s, would certainly have been deplored by Tagore. They would not have
appealed to his sense of freedom nor
survived his penchant for reasoning.
This is apparent from his observations on the Soviet Union
in 1930, although he did appreciate Soviet achievements in the field of
education. A market-oriented outlook, in contrast to the "Control Raj",
is also expected from a man of his background. Since the early days of his
ancestor Nilmoni (d.1793), the fortunes of the Tagores were linked to
trade-related businesses with the British. Tagore’s grandfather, Dwarkanath Tagore (1794-1846),
was a hugely successful entrepreneur and the first independent merchant of the
British Raj.
As an internationalist, Tagore
surely would have preferred open trade policies. For example, he always opposed
boycotts of foreign goods whenever such proposals came up, whether from Gandhi
or from others. He would have also opposed barriers to cultural integration. He
would have welcomed globalization among different cultures and languages, and
he would have been wary of protecting national cultures by excluding foreign
cultures.
Gandhi’s advocacy of the
household spinning wheel, or Charka,
did not make sense to him at all, as he felt it would not be economic. This was
later confirmed to be so by Amartya Sen in his Ph.D. thesis. Once again,
Tagore’s position revealed his instinctive distrust of ad hoc exhortations for political gain.
Because of that instinct and
because of his strong feelings about secularism, he also would have been
concerned about the ad hoc
introduction of parochial personal laws which vitiate the Indian Constitution. He
would have questioned the Directives on special treatments for Scheduled Castes
and Other Backward Classes, which enhance discrimination among Hindus, and also
among Hindus and non-Hindus. These policies were meant to be short-term
expedients, but they have become permanent anomalies in Indian political and
social life.
Tagore was an early
environmentalist with a strong sense of aesthetics, who adored wide-open spaces
and the riverine areas of Bengal. He disliked
smoke-stacked industry and other ugly and noisy aspects of urban life. He felt
that mechanization and assembly-line production would strip away freedom and
dignity from human beings; this was the theme of his powerful play, Rakta Karabi (1923).
Throughout his life he was
a passionate champion of women’s rights and empowerment, like Rammohan Roy and Iswar
Chandra Vidyasagar (1820-91) before him. The first story he ever wrote,
Bhikharini, was all about the
misfortunes and abuses that a mother and her daughter had to suffer. He was
only 16 at the time when he wrote this. His school in Santiniketan was
coeducational, which was a major break from accepted social norms. And the
characters of women protagonists he developed in one novel after another were
an early expression of the empowerment of women we see in our national life
today.
The poverty that Tagore
encountered in the country-side in Bengal in late
nineteenth century could not have been less dire than the poverty of the serfs
in Czarist Russia, which had so moved Chekov and Tolstoy. His approach to
dealing with poverty was through the spread of basic education with the goal of
self-reliance, the application of science and technology to agriculture, the
provision of cooperative credit, and the setting up of cottage industries. Most
important of all in Tagore’s scheme of things was to establish a relationship
with the village based on a genuine attempt to understand its problems, whether
in every instance successful or not. Some important results were obtained from
the Sriniketan experiment. Health work in the villages reduced the number of
deaths from epidemic over a period of time. Rotation of crops helped the growth
of agricultural productivity. A large number of villagers obtained employment
in the industries department, albeit assisted by the requirements of the Second
World War. The long term effect of the Sriniketan enterprise was seen in the full
flowering of the rural development strategies in post-independent India
through the government’s Block Development Schemes, its Community Project and
its Cottage Industries movement.
The things that would have most
disappointed Tagore about the developments after Independence are first, the failure to
provide basic education and health care to the underprivileged. Tagore would
have accepted the lead of the government in this area, as in China, Vietnam and other countries which
have rapidly reached high literacy levels. The elimination of social
backwardness and poverty would have been very high on his agenda were he alive
today. The second area which would have disturbed him greatly would have been
the rise of sectarianism and the politics behind animosities toward, and occasional
hostilities against, religious minorities. Thirdly, he would not have endorsed
modes of political dissent which bypass the Constitution and lead to anarchy. Methods of opposition which may arguably have
been acceptable under the colonial rule of Britain
would not have been acceptable to him under the democratic framework after Independence.
Like Tagore we also live in the
age of science and internationalism. Today we call it globalization, and our
education is still similar to Western-style colonialist education. Given how
troubled our world is becoming, there is a growing awareness of the need to
reconcile the values of ‘universal’ and ‘diversity’, a conviction that Tagore
pioneered not only in thought but also in his life of action. There was not a
great deal he or any one individual could do to bring change to an unequal and
unjust world. But he was never indifferent to the need, and he tried hard to
make a difference with whatever constructive work was possible for him. We can
try to make that his legacy in our individual lives.
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