SIR RABINDRA NATH TAGORE BY D. N. BANNERJEA

Tagore is pre-eminently a social reformer. As adherents of the Brahmo Samaj, both he and his people have broken away from caste, purdah and the I spirit of religious insularity. He finds it difficult to believe that caste and nationality are compatible with each other. Politics aim at national solidarity ; caste makes for endless distinctions. A great national unification implies, therefore, a great revolt against caste trammels, a strong impulse towards reconciliation of conflicting interests, the mutual composing of differences, rhythmic heart-beats as the result of engaging in common pursuits as brothers, co-equals. In India, caste is the greatest obstruction in the pathway of reform.

“When I realise the hypnotic hold which this gigantic system of cold-blooded repression has taken on the minds of our people, whose social body it has so completely entwined in its endless coils that the free expression of manhood, under the direst necessity, has become almost an impossibility, the only remedy that suggests itself to me is to educate them out of their trance….If to break up the feudal system, and the tyrannical conventionalism of the mediaeval church, which had outraged the healthier instincts of humanity, Europe needed the thought impulse of the Renaissance and the fierce struggle of the Reformation, do we not need in a greater degree an overwhelming influx of higher social ideas before a place can be found for true political thinking ? Must we not have that greater vision of humanity which will impel us to shake off the fetters that shackle our individual life before we begin to think of national freedom ?

His vision of his country’s future is such as to hold
the imagination in thrall.
“ Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free,
Where the world has not been broken up by narrow domestic
walls,
Where words come out from the depth of truth,
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way in 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 ! “

Since Tagore is the poet of the Renaissance, his millennium is not in the past. And yet no living poet could set greater store by the past traditions and culture of India than he. He is Indian to the backbone, and since he is proud of being an Indian, New India is proud of him. His gospel is that of self-respect, self-reliance and national self-realisation. It is not difficult to understand his national fervour when we bear in mind that a keen sense of nationality is characteristic even of men with world-wide sympathies. Tagore believes in India : a nation. And yet this nation is not to cut itself off from the main currents of modern thought, or isolate itself from the spiritual acquisitions of sister nations, nor yet is India to delude herself with the belief that mere trading on the past would lead to aught but moral degeneracy. But, at the same time, in the spiritual federation of nations, India, according to him, should occupy a place of honour as the Mother of Nations. And who could urge this plea with greater consistency and authority than the poet-prophet of the Indian Renaissance, who, by his literary contributions and an eminently useful and irreproachable life, has enhanced the status of India in the eyes of the intellectual world ?

Tagore’s evangel is : “ cultivate the spirit of invincible optimism ; believe in life ; live worthy of life.” W. B. Yeats endorses this with a statement from someone who asserts that Tagore is the first Indian poet who has not “ refused to live.” But in not “ refusing to live “ Tagore has not only benefited India but has placed in some measure the whole religious world (including Christendom) under a deep obligation. For the bane of the religious life in the past has been a morbid, too overbearing sense of sin, a depressing concentration on the inherent vileness of human interests and attachments, a sense of the remoteness of God from the arena of mundane interests, and a persistent pursuit of “ the soul’s salvation “ instead of the soul’s enrichment through service and love.

One word more about Tagore’s poetry. He is the first Indian poet that introduces a democratic conception of God in religious verse. It is no doubt true that the entire Hindu philosophy of God as an all-pervasive Reality, of which individuals are so many isolated self-expressions, is in its higher phases democratic, in the sense that in its most sublime developments at least, it leaves little scope for crouching and cringing before a localised divinity, seated in aristocratic detachment from human affairs. But students of Indian religious experience also know that sublime intellectual abstractions seldom afford a basis for that passionate devotion to an object of worship which serves as a guide through the experiences of life. In India, though Reason has soared above all limitations and attributes that gather round human personality, in its definition of Divine Essence denying to It even such an important function as character, yet the profound religious instincts of the people have led them to bestow passionate worship on some manifestations of Brahma, the Infinite, the Actionless, the Eternal One, the One without a second, the pure Being.

In the Worship of Ishwara, then, devotees have not refrained from showing abject humility, have used most slighting and even degrading epithets about themselves in their desire to exalt the Object of Worship, the personal God which claims and purifies allegiance.

But Tagore’s personal God is described as “ Brother,” “ Friend,” even though He is “ Lord of my life “ and “ My King.” Compare his beautiful hymn :

“ Day after day, O Lord of my life
I shall stand before Thee, face to face,” etc.

We now come to his political and social philosophy, or rather his attempts at evolving one. In “ Nationalism “ (Messrs. Macmillan & Co., 1917 : page 97) Tagore uses these words : “ Our real problem in India is not political. It is social. This is a condition not only prevailing in India, but among all nations. I do not believe in an exclusive political interest. Politics in the West have dominated western ideals, and we in India are trying to imitate you.” We have no quarrel with Sir Rabindra Nath the Poet in his not believing “ in an exclusive political interest.” It would be just as hard for some of us not endowed with poetic gifts to believe “ in an exclusive poetic interest.” Gifts may not determine one’s launching on a political career, but training is indispensable, and the securing of a thorough training involves time which people engrossed in art or literature or kindred pre-occupations can ill afford to spare. If training is essential, knowledge of problems and public affairs is a thousand times more so. Then again, there are people who temperamentally find it in the line of the least resistance to write verse, but would at once suffer a complete mental collapse, if asked to mount a political platform or offer mediation in a political emergency.

But does Sir Rabindra Nath mean that the education of the masses is not necessary ? If it is according to him necessary, then how can it be secured without keen political agitation based on an intelligent dispassionate study of facts ? Or does the poet-laureate of Asia mean that the judicial machinery as it exists in India to-day stands in no need of overhauling and police methods in no need of revision ?

And yet it is the merest platitude that no farreaching changes in the administration of justice or in methods of government have ever been brought about except under the pressure of an intelligent and organised political demand. Surely, it must have occurred to Tagore that there are vital political problems in India, which it were sheer cowardice and mental perversity to ignore or minimise. Why, the moment one begins to study such humdrum though harassing questions as Indian famines and appalling mortality by the plague, in one’s endeavour to trace the root causes and suggest remedies, one is at once brought face to face with the quasi-political aspects of these oft-repeated phenomena.

It is only as a nation that India can take her place in the counsels of the nations. It is all very well to talk of International Brotherhood, but we cannot dispense with the preliminary stage of nation-building, and no free nation would admit us to her brother-hood unless we go there as the accredited representatives of “ India : a Nation.” The task that faces Indian nationalists to-day is stupendous, and the courage with which they face difficulties of vast magnitude that beset the path of nation-building, should call forth our admiration instead of provoking our amusement.

Besides, commercial enterprises and vast organisations for the exploitation of weaker races and poorer individuals do not exhaust the contents of nationality. A nation has a vast heritage of ideals, dreams and aspirations bequeathed from the past and waiting to be developed for the future, and only as members of a nation can we appraise our own traditions or rightly value the acquisitions of other races. Besides, there are internal problems awaiting solution at the hands of any one nation. We have heard of broad-minded Englishmen and sympathetic Frenchmen, but we have not yet come upon one that was a representative of all the nations.

But Tagore is on much weaker ground when he expounds his views on nationalism; “ Nationalism is a great menace,” he begins. “ It is the particular thing which for years has been at the bottom of India’s troubles. And inasmuch as we have been ruled and dominated by a nation that is strictly political in its attitude, we have tried to develop within ourselves, despite our inheritance from the past, a belief in our eventual political destiny.” (Ibid. pp. in, 112). And yet, curiously enough, Tagore completely stultifies himself by the astounding declaration that “ India has never had a real sense of nationalism. Even though from childhood I had been taught that idolatry of the nation is almost better than reverence for God and humanity, I believe I have outgrown that teaching, and it is my conviction that my countrymen will truly gain their India by fighting against the education which teaches them that a country is greater than the ideals of humanity. The educated Indian at present is trying to absorb some lessons from history contrary to the lessons of our ancestors.”

Before we proceed to unravel the amazing inconsistencies that are sown thick in these otherwise beautiful and touching passages, we should like to give in Tagore’ s own words, his definition of a nation. “It is the aspect of a whole people organised for power “ (p. no 110).

We do not accept the definition, for it is the most tortuous and one-sided that could possibly catch the eye. Yet we should like to analyse his own statements in the light of his definition. A moment ago, we quoted Tagore’ s dictum that nationalism  “ which for years has been at the bottom of India’s troubles “ is a great menace. But has any student of Indian history—even of recent Indian history— ever heard of the whole Indian people “ organised for power ? “ There is nothing more conspicuous among, at any rate, the illiterate masses of humanity inhabiting the various parts of India, than their seeming heterogeneity and disparity from other communities. If the whole of India were “ organised for power “ British ascendancy there would have been rather difficult to establish.

But Sir Rabindra Nath takes our breath away when he tells us, in a half-humorous manner that “ In the beginning of the history of political agitation in India . . . there was a party known as the Indian Congress ; it had no real programme. They had a few grievances for redress by the authorities.” And yet Reuter tells us that Tagore shared with Mrs. Besant, the president-elect of the Indian National Congress (which according to Sir Rabindra Nath was and is presumably, no longer in existence), and Mr. Surendra Nath Banner jea the honours of the national assembly that had met to demand Home Rule within the Empire. And what is more interesting is that Tagore specially composed a beautiful ode for the occasion. And yet he coolly tells us that “there was a party known as the Indian Congress” ( Ibid. p. 112).