Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and remained throughout his life a formidable presence on the Indian scene. From a well-known family and personally famous because of his Nobel Prize, he could not be dismissed like M. N. Roy, as a misguided Communist. Gandhi could afford to ignore Roy: he was forced to confront Tagore. In 1921, Gandhi took account of Tagore’s criticisms, and replied with all the deference due to India’s poet laureate: “I regard the Poet as a sentinel warning us against the approach of enemies called Bigotry, Lethargy, Intolerance, Ignorance, Inertia and other members of that brood.”9
Tagore, however, would not be mollified. The Poet chose to challenge the dominant political belief of his age and of modern Indian politics, the gospel of nationalism. Gandhi had extolled the ideal of universal harmony but he had not singled out Indian nationalism as a threat to that ideal. His criticism was rather reserved for the western nation-state system. Tagore asserted that in principle there was no distinction: “Nationalism is a great menace,” he declared, and with this generalization Gandhi may have agreed. But Tagore added: “It is the particular thing which for years has been at the bottom of India’s troubles.”10 Tagore not only proclaimed this position in unequivocal terms, he also made the theme of individual freedom versus the nation-state a central feature of his social and political thought. His critique of nationalism and of its various manifestations in modern India became an indictment of Gandhi’s leadership.
Tagore’s case against nationalism was originally made against the West. At its base was his disillusionment over the events of the Boer War. Appalled with the brutality and futility of that struggle and sensing the deeper implication of the attitudes it represented, Tagore expressed his feelings in a sonnet composed on the last day of the nineteenth century:
The last sun of the century sets amidst the bloodred clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred.
The naked passion of self-love of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the clash of steel and the howling verses of vengeance.
The hungry self of the Nation shall burst in a violence of fury from its own shameless feeding.
For it has made the world its food….11
The book of poems concludes with a warning to India to “keep watch,” and,
Be not ashamed, my brothers, to stand before the proud and the powerful
With your white robe of simpleness.
Let your crown be of humility, your freedom, the freedom of the soul.
Build God’s throne daily upon the ample bareness of your poverty
And know that what is huge is not great and pride is not everlasting.12
The events of the early twentieth century only increased Tagore’s fear of nationalism and his desire for international harmony. In his famous poem Gitanjali of 1912, he yearned for an age of freedom,
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls.13
With the outbreak of the First World War, all Tagore’s fears seemed to him confirmed. His cry of protest came in three lectures on nationalism delivered in 1916. These comprised a frontal attack on an idea which had then reached its apogee, and Tagore directed this attack against nationalism throughout the world: he called his lectures “Nationalism in the West,” “Nationalism in Japan,” and “Nationalism in India.” The primary concern that dominates these lectures is that of the suppression of individual freedom by the cult of nationalism. “This nationalism,” he begins, “is a cruel epidemic of evil that is sweeping over the human world of the present age, and eating into its moral vitality.”14 In Japan, “the voluntary submission of the whole people to the trimming of their minds and clipping of their freedom by their government, which through various educational agencies regulates their thoughts, manufactures their feelings” has led to an acceptance of an “all-pervading mental slavery with cheerfulness and pride because of their nervous desire to turn themselves into a machine of power called the Nation.”15 In the West, nationalism has corrupted the colonizers no less than the colonies. “Not merely the subject races,” Tagore told America, “but you who live under the delusion that you are free, are everyday sacrificing your freedom and humanity to this fetish of nationalism, living in the dense poisonous atmosphere of world-wide suspicion and greed and panic.”16
Tagore was most distressed not with the prevalence of nationalism in the West, but with its infection of India. The idea was a Western importation, but Tagore realized that his own countrymen, and especially his Bengali contemporaries, had developed it into a peculiar Indian type. Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Swami Vivekananda, B. C. Pal, and Aurobindo Ghose were the main philosophers of early Indian nationalism. Ironically, as Tagore was in America, preaching against nationalism, C. R. Das, a prominent Congress leader at that time, was telling his Indian audiences, “I find in the conception of my country the expression also of divinity. With me nationality is no mere political conception, borrowed from the philosophy of the West …. I value this principle of nationality as I value the principle of morality and religion.”17
The greatest disservice nationalism had rendered India, Tagore argued, was to have directed the country’s attention away from its primary needs. “Our real problem in India,” Tagore contended, “is not political. It is social.”18 The nationalist urge leads to a pursuit of political goals to the neglect of pressing social problems. Neither the Congress Moderates nor the Extremists realized this critical need. The former had “no constructive idea,” no sense that “what India most needed was constructive work coming from within herself.”19 They lost power “because the people soon came to realize how futile was the half policy adopted by them.”20 The Extremists pretended to root their program in traditional Indian truths but, in reality, they were nothing but advocates of Western nationalism. “Their ideals were based on Western history. They had no sympathy with the special problems of India. They did not recognize the patent fact that there were causes in our social organization which made the Indian incapable of coping with the alien…the domination in India of the caste system, and the blind and lazy habit of relying upon the authority of traditions that are incongruous anachronisms in the present age.”21 Nationalism cannot prompt a social and moral reform of the nature that is needed; rather, it will only whet the popular appetite for increased political warfare. The real task before India is that of building a good society, and “society is the expression of those moral and spiritual aspirations of man which belong to his higher nature.”22 If India pursues political independence to the exclusion of all else, she may attain a sovereign state; it will be one, however, in which the old social and moral maladies are not purged but magnified. Above all, a narrow quest for political liberty will only obscure India’s real goal, which must always remain that of moral and spiritual freedom for the individual in society:
Our social ideals create the human world, but when our mind is diverted from them to greed of power then in that state of intoxication we live in a world of abnormality where our strength is not health and our liberty is not freedom. Therefore political freedom does not give us freedom when our mind is not free. An automobile does not create freedom of the movement, because it is a mere machine. When I myself am free I can use the automobile for the purpose of my freedom.
We must never forget 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. Those who have made the gain of money their highest end are unconsciously selling their life and soul to rich persons or to the combinations that represent money. Those who are enamored of their political power and gloat over their extension of domain over foreign races gradually surrender their own freedom and humanity to the organizations necessary for holding other peoples in slavery. In the so-called free countries the majority of the people
are not free, they are driven by the minority to a goal which is not even known to them. This becomes possible only because people do not acknowledge moral and spiritual freedom as their object. They create huge eddies with their passions, and they feel dizzily inebriated with the mere velocity of their whirling movement, taking that to be freedom. But the doom which is waiting to overtake them is as certain as death for man’s truth is moral truth and his emancipation is in the spiritual life.
The general opinion of the majority of the present-day nationalists in India is that we have come to a final completeness in our social and spiritual ideals, the task of the constructive work of society having been done several thousand years before we were born, and that now we are free to employ all our activities in the political direction. We never dream of blaming our social inadequacy as the origin of our present helplessness, for we have accepted as the creed of our nationalism that this social system has been perfected for all time to come by our ancestors…. This is the reason why we think that our one task is to build a political miracle of freedom upon the quicksand of social slavery…. Those of us in India 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. We must remember whatever weakness we cherish in our society will become the source of danger in politics. The same inertia which leads us to our idolatry of dead forms in social institutions will create in our politics prison-houses with immovable walls. The narrowness of sympathy which makes it possible for us to impose upon a considerable portion of humanity the galling yoke of inferiority will assert itself in our politics in creating the tyranny of injustice.23
Many of the ideas Tagore voices in the above passage are in profound agreement with those of Gandhi. They agree ultimately on the primary need for social reform in India, as well as on the essential meaning of swaraj. Tagore’s unique position concerned Indian nationalism: he attacked it as an unmitigated evil that could only thwart the quest for swaraj. This inevitably sparked a controversy with India’s arch-nationalist, Mahatma Gandhi.
“Indian nationalism is not exclusive, nor aggressive, nor destructive. It is health-giving, religious and therefore humanitarian.”24 This is Gandhi replying to Tagore’s criticisms and the view he expressed here accurately represents his general position on Indian nationalism. It may rightly be argued that Gandhi did not advocate many of the forms of nationalism that had sprung up around 1900 in Bengal. Gandhi did not see the nation as a transcendent entity, possessed of a soul and a form of freedom of its own, apart from its individual human components. He thought of swaraj in terms, first, of the individual, and then of society. Yet, although Gandhi was not an exponent of nationalism after the fashion of B. C. Pal or C. R. Das, his ideas did support other forms of nationalism, which he frankly endorsed, and which, as Tagore soon discovered, posed threats to individual freedom.
In March 1919, Gandhi called upon the people of India to observe April 6 as a mass hartal, a day of fasting, public meetings, and suspension of labor. The intent was to mobilize popular opposition to the government’s enactment of the Rowlatt Bills; the effect of the hartal was to demonstrate the considerable power potential of the noncooperation program. On April 12, Tagore wrote to Gandhi from his home of Shantiniketan urging him to exercise caution in the use of noncooperation. The letter represents the first written evidence of Tagore’s qualms over Gandhi’s emerging political leadership. “Power in all its forms is irrational,” Tagore began, “it is like the horse that drags the carriage blind-folded.” He expressed his concern over recent acts of government repression, and questioned the good that could result from pressing the campaign further. “I have always felt,” he continued, “and said accordingly, that the great gift of freedom can never come to a people through charity. We must win it before we can own it. And India’s opportunities for winning it will come to her when she can prove that she is morally superior to the people who rule her by their right of conquest.” The present noncooperation movement, he implied, did not seem to him representative of India’s moral superiority, and he concluded this letter with these telling lines: “I pray most fervently that nothing that tends to weaken our spiritual freedom may intrude into your marching line, that martyrdom for the cause of truth may never degenerate into fanaticism for mere verbal forms, descending into the self-defence that hides itself behind a moral name.”25
Tagore sailed for England and America early the next year. While abroad, he seems to have made up his mind as to whether Gandhi’s movement had in fact “degenerated into fanaticism for mere verbal forms,” hiding itself “behind a moral name.” “I wish I were the little creature Jack,” he wrote from Chicago in reference to the noncooperation campaign, “whose one mission is to kill the Giant Abstraction, which is claiming the sacrifice of individuals all over the world under highly tainted masks of delusion.”26 In July 1921, he returned to India, after fourteen months abroad, to confront the campaign at its peak. His battle against “the Giant Abstraction” soon began in earnest.
On August 29, Tagore delivered at a Calcutta public meeting an address entitled “The Call of Truth.” A remarkable commentary, it offered both a trenchant criticism of Gandhi’s leadership and an eloquent defense of individual freedom with which Gandhi, above all Indian leaders of this time, had identified himself. Tagore begins his remarks with a proposition shared by Gandhi: it is in our nature to struggle for the self-realization and freedom of swaraj. This must remain an individual’s highest aim, to gain knowledge and mastery of one’s self.27 Reiterating a maxim that both he and Gandhi had stressed for the last decade, Tagore said, “They who have failed to attain Swaraj within themselves must lose it in the outside world too.”28 Political independence was a great desideratum, but it was not swaraj. Nor could it promote swaraj if not accompanied by a transformation of an individual’s moral values. Tagore often expressed his ideas through metaphor. In “The Call of Truth” he drew on this medium to set forth his conception of the relation of social and moral to political reform. The metaphor is his own, but the idea was shared by Gandhi:
When we turn our gaze upon the progress of other nations, the political cart-horse comes prominently into view—on it seems to depend wholly the speed of the vehicle. We forget that the cart behind the horse must also be in a fit state to move; its wheels must have the right alignment, its part must have been properly assembled. The cart is the product not simply of materials on which saw and hammer had worked; thought, energy and application have gone into its making. We have seen countries that are outwardly free, but as they are drawn by the horse of politics the rattle rouses all the neighborhood from sleep and the jolting makes the limbs of the passengers ache; the vehicles break down repeatedly on their way and to put them in running order is a terrific business. Yet they are vehicles of sort, after all. The fragments that pass for our country not only lack cohesion but are comprised of parts at odds with one another. To hitch it to anger or avarice or some other passion, drag it along painfully with much din and bustle, and call this political progress! How long could the driving force last? Is it not wiser, then, to keep the horse in the stable for the time and take up the task, first, of putting the vehicle in good shape?29
From this passage may be anticipated the nature of the criticism that follows: it consists, in effect, of Tagore turning Gandhi’s own arguments against him. While abroad, Tagore says, he had heard nothing but high praise of the noncooperation movement. He had come to believe from this that India was at last on the path to “real liberation.”30 Then, in a chilling paragraph, he tells of what he found on his return to India: “So, in the excited expectation of breathing the air of a new-found freedom, I hurried back to my homeland. But what I have seen and felt troubles me. Something seems to be weighing on the people’s spirit; a stern pressure is at work; it makes everyone talk in the same voice and make the same gestures.”31
This climate of opinion, Tagore believed, was a mani
festation of nationalism at its worst. “Slave mentality” of this nature rather than alien rule, is “our real enemy and through its defeat alone can swaraj within and without come to us.”32 Gandhi’s directives, which urged among other things the manual spinning of yarn and burning of foreign cloth, were not being weighed by critical minds; rather, they had been accepted as dogma. And, “As dogma takes the place of reason, freedom will give way to some kind of despotism.”33 Tagore himself remained highly critical of Gandhi’s directives. He found Gandhi’s dicta on spinning and cloth-burning negative and destructive. “Swaraj is not a matter of mere self-sufficiency in the production of cloth. Its real place is within us, the mind with its diverse power goes on building swaraj for itself.”34 Gandhi’s tenets of swaraj and swadeshi struck Tagore as medieval in their compulsive desire for simplicity; they closed doors to economic advance. In their rabid advocacy of a narrow form of swadeshi they cramped Indian attitudes into a restrictive provincial mold, inhibiting the mind’s “diverse power” to go on “building swaraj for itself.” “As everywhere else, swaraj in this country has to find its basis in the mind’s unfoldment, in knowledge, in scientific thinking, and not in shallow gestures.”35 Gandhi’s approach to social reform, Tagore contended, would not stimulate the “mind’s unfoldment,” but rather restrict its development and lead to its atrophy. On a national level this approach would result in a deplorable attitude of isolationism and hostility toward the rest of the world. “The Call of Truth” ends with a characteristic appeal to answer the “urgent Call” of “universal humanity” by shedding the limitations of narrow nationalism, and recognizing “the vast dimensions of India in its world context.”36
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