by Amartya Sen
Ocampo, however, makes it plain that she very much wanted to get physically closer to Rabindranath: ‘Little by little he [Tagore] partially tamed the young animal, by turns wild and docile, who did not sleep, dog-like, on the floor outside his door, simply because it was not done.’14 Rabindranath, too, was clearly very much attracted to her. He called her ‘Vijaya’ (the Sanskrit equivalent of Victoria), dedicated a book of poems to her, Purabi – an ‘evening melody’ – and expressed great admiration for her mind (‘like a star that was distant’). In a letter to her he wrote, as if to explain his own reticence:
When we were together, we mostly played with words and tried to laugh away our best opportunities to see each other clearly…. Whenever there is the least sign of the nest becoming a jealous rival of the sky[,] my mind, like a migrant bird, tries to take … flight to a distant shore.
Five years later, during Tagore’s European tour in 1930, he sent her a cable: ‘Will you not come and see me.’ She did. But their relationship did not seem to go much beyond conversation, and their somewhat ambiguous correspondence continued over the years. Written in 1940, a year before his death at eighty, one of the poems in Sesh Lekha (‘Last Writings’), seems to be about her: ‘How I wish I could once again find my way to that foreign land where waits for me the message of love!/ … Her language I knew not, but what her eyes said will forever remain eloquent in its anguish.’15
However indecisive, or confused, or awkward Rabindranath may have been, he certainly did not share Mahatma Gandhi’s censorious views of sex. In fact, when it came to social policy, he advocated contraception and family planning while Gandhi preferred abstinence.
Science and the People
Gandhi and Tagore severely clashed over their totally different attitudes towards science. In January 1934 Bihar was struck by a devastating earthquake which killed thousands of people. Gandhi, who was then deeply involved in the fight against untouchability (the barbaric system inherited from India’s divisive past, in which ‘lowly people’ were kept at a physical distance), extracted a positive lesson from the tragic event. ‘A man like me’, Gandhi argued, ‘cannot but believe this earthquake is a divine chastisement sent by God for our sins’ – in particular the sins of untouchability. ‘For me there is a vital connection between the Bihar calamity and the untouchability campaign.’
Tagore, who equally abhorred untouchability and had joined Gandhi in the movements against it, protested against this interpretation of an event that had caused suffering and death to so many innocent people, including children and babies. He also hated the epistemology implicit in seeing an earthquake as caused by ethical failure. ‘It is’, he wrote, ‘all the more unfortunate because this kind of unscientific view of [natural] phenomena is too readily accepted by a large section of our countrymen.’
The two remained deeply divided over their attitudes towards science. However, while Tagore believed that modern science was essential to understanding physical phenomena, his views on epistemology were interestingly heterodox. He did not take the simple ‘realist’ position often associated with modern science. The report of his conversation with Einstein, published in the New York Times in 1930, shows how insistent Tagore was on interpreting truth through observation and reflective concepts. To assert that something is true or untrue in the absence of anyone to observe or perceive its truth, or to form a conception of what it is, appeared to Tagore to be deeply questionable. When Einstein remarked, ‘If there were no human beings any more, the Apollo Belvedere no longer would be beautiful?’ Tagore simply replied, ‘No.’ Going further – and into much more interesting territory – Einstein said, ‘I agree with regard to this conception of beauty, but not with regard to truth.’ Tagore’s response was: ‘Why not? Truth is realized through men.’16
Tagore’s epistemology, which he never pursued systematically, would seem to be searching for a line of reasoning that would later be elegantly developed by Hilary Putnam, who has argued: ‘Truth depends on conceptual schemes and it is nonetheless “real truth”.’17 Tagore himself said little to explain his convictions, but it is important to take account of his heterodoxy, not only because his speculations were invariably interesting, but also because they illustrate how his support for any position, including his strong interest in science, was accompanied by critical scrutiny.
Nationalism and Colonialism
Tagore was predictably hostile to communal sectarianism (such as a Hindu orthodoxy that was antagonistic to Islamic, Christian or Sikh perspectives). But even nationalism seemed to him to be suspect. Isaiah Berlin summarizes well Tagore’s complex position on Indian nationalism (even though he oversimplified Tagore’s view of the origin of political liberty):
Tagore stood fast on the narrow causeway, and did not betray his vision of the difficult truth. He condemned romantic overattachment to the past, what he called the tying of India to the past ‘like a sacrificial goat tethered to a post’, and he accused men who displayed it – they seemed to him reactionary – of not knowing what true political freedom was, pointing out that it is from English thinkers and English books that the very notion of political liberty was derived. But against cosmopolitanism he maintained that the English stood on their own feet, and so must Indians. In 1917 he once more denounced the danger of ‘leaving everything to the unalterable will of the Master’, be he brahmin or Englishman.18
The duality Berlin points to is well reflected also in Tagore’s attitude towards cultural diversity. He wanted Indians to learn what was going on elsewhere, how others lived, what they valued, and so on, while remaining interested and involved in their own culture and heritage. Indeed, in his educational writings the need for synthesis is strongly stressed. It can also be found in his advice to Indian students abroad. In 1907 he wrote to his son-in-law Nagendranath Gangulee, who had gone to America to study agriculture:
To get on familiar terms with the local people is a part of your education. To know only agriculture is not enough; you must know America too. Of course if, in the process of knowing America, one begins to lose one’s identity and falls into the trap of becoming an Americanised person contemptuous of everything Indian, it is preferable to stay in a locked room.
Tagore was strongly involved in protest against the Raj on a number of occasions, most notably in the movement to resist the 1905 British proposal to split in two the province of Bengal, a plan that was eventually withdrawn following popular resistance. He was forthright in denouncing the brutality of British rule in India, never more so than after the Amritsar massacre of 13 April 1919, when 379 unarmed people at a peaceful meeting were gunned down by the army, and two thousand more were wounded. Between 23 and 26 April, Rabindranath wrote five agitated letters to C. F. Andrews, who himself was extremely disturbed, especially after he was told by a British civil servant in India that, thanks to this show of strength, the ‘moral prestige’ of the Raj had ‘never been higher’.
A month after the massacre, Tagore wrote to the Viceroy of India, asking to be relieved of the knighthood he had accepted four years earlier:
The disproportionate severity of the punishments inflicted upon the unfortunate people and the methods of carrying them out, we are convinced, are without parallel in the history of civilized governments, barring some conspicuous exceptions, recent and remote. Considering that such treatment has been meted out to a population, disarmed and resourceless, by a power which has the most terribly efficient organisation for destruction of human lives, we must strongly assert that it can claim no political expediency, far less moral justification…. The universal agony of indignation roused in the hearts of our people has been ignored by our rulers – possibly congratulating themselves for imparting what they imagine as salutary lessons…. I for my part want to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen who for their so-called insignificance are liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings.
Both Gandhi and Nehru expressed their appreciation of the important part Tagor
e took in the national struggle. It is fitting that, after independence, India chose a song of Tagore’s (‘Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka’, which can be roughly translated as ‘the leader of people’s minds’) as its national anthem. Since Bangladesh would later choose another song of Tagore’s (‘Amar Sonar Bangla’) as its national anthem, he may be the only one ever to have written the national anthems of two different countries.
Tagore’s criticism of the British administration of India was consistently strong and grew more intense over the years. This point is often missed, since he made a special effort to dissociate his criticism of the Raj from any denigration of British – or Western – people and culture. Mahatma Gandhi’s well-known quip in reply to a question, asked in England, on what he thought of Western civilization (‘It would be a good idea’) could not have come from Tagore’s lips. He would understand the provocations to which Gandhi was responding – involving cultural conceit as well as imperial tyranny. D. H. Lawrence supplied a fine example of the former: ‘I become more and more surprised to see how far higher, in reality, our European civilization stands than the East, Indian and Persian, ever dreamed of…. This fraud of looking up to them – this wretched worship-of-Tagore attitude – is disgusting.’ But, unlike Gandhi, Tagore could not, even in jest, be dismissive of Western civilization.
Even in his powerful indictment of British rule in India in 1941, in a lecture which he gave on his last birthday, and which was later published as a pamphlet under the title Crisis in Civilization, he strains hard to maintain the distinction between opposing Western imperialism and rejecting Western civilization. While he saw India as having been ‘smothered under the dead weight of British administration’ (adding ‘another great and ancient civilization for whose recent tragic history the British cannot disclaim responsibility is China’), Tagore recalls what India has gained from ‘discussions centred upon Shakespeare’s drama and Byron’s poetry and above all … the large-hearted liberalism of nineteenth-century English politics’. The tragedy, as Tagore saw it, came from the fact that what ‘was truly best in their own civilization, the upholding of dignity of human relationships, has no place in the British administration of this country.’ ‘If in its place they have established, baton in hand, a reign of “law and order”, or in other words a policeman’s rule, such a mockery of civilization can claim no respect from us.’
Critique of Patriotism
Rabindranath rebelled against the strongly nationalist form that the independence movement often took, and this made him refrain from taking a particularly active part in contemporary politics. He wanted to assert India’s right to be independent without denying the importance of what India could learn – freely and profitably – from abroad. He was afraid that a rejection of the West in favour of an indigenous Indian tradition was not only limiting in itself; it could easily turn into hostility to other influences from abroad, including Christianity, which came to parts of India by the fourth century, Judaism, which came through Jewish immigration shortly after the fall of Jerusalem, as did Zoroastrianism through Parsee immigration later on (mainly in the eighth century), and, of course – and most importantly – Islam, which has had a very strong presence in India since the eighth century.
Tagore’s criticism of patriotism is a persistent theme in his writings. As early as 1908, he put his position succinctly in a letter replying to the criticism of Abala Bose, the wife of a great Indian scientist, Jagadish Chandra Bose: ‘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.’ His novel Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) has much to say about this theme. In the novel, Nikhil, who is keen on social reform, including women’s liberation, but cool towards nationalism, gradually loses the esteem of his spirited wife, Bimala, because of his failure to be enthusiastic about anti-British agitations, which she sees as a lack of patriotic commitment. Bimala becomes fascinated with Nikhil’s nationalist friend Sandip, who speaks brilliantly and acts with patriotic militancy, and she falls in love with him. Nikhil refuses to change his views: ‘I am willing to serve my country; but my worship I reserve for Right which is far greater than my country. To worship my country as a god is to bring a curse upon it.’*
As the story unfolds, Sandip becomes angry with some of his countrymen for their failure to join the struggle as readily as he thinks they should (‘Some Mohammedan traders are still obdurate’). He arranges to deal with the recalcitrants by burning their meagre trading stocks and physically attacking them. Bimala has to acknowledge the connection between Sandip’s rousing nationalistic sentiments and his sectarian – and ultimately violent – actions. The dramatic events that follow (Nikhil attempts to help the victims, risking his life) include the end of Bimala’s political romance.
This is a difficult subject, and Satyajit Ray’s beautiful film of The Home and the World brilliantly brings out the novel’s tensions, along with the human affections and disaffections of the story. Not surprisingly, the story has had many detractors, not just among dedicated nationalists in India. Georg Lukács found Tagore’s novel to be ‘a petit bourgeois yarn of the shoddiest kind’, ‘at the intellectual service of the British police’, and ‘a contemptible caricature of Gandhi’. It would, of course, be absurd to think of Sandip as Gandhi, but the novel gives a ‘strong and gentle’ warning, as Bertolt Brecht noted in his diary, of the corruptibility of nationalism, since it is not even-handed. Hatred of one group can lead to hatred of others, no matter how far such feeling may be from the minds of humane nationalist leaders like Mahatma Gandhi.
Admiration and Criticism of Japan
Tagore’s reaction to nationalism in Japan is particularly telling. As in the case of India, he saw the need to build the self-confidence of a defeated and humiliated people, of people left behind by developments elsewhere, as was the case in Japan before its emergence during the nineteenth century. At the beginning of one of his lectures in Japan in 1916 (‘Nationalism in Japan’), he observed that ‘the worst form of bondage is the bondage of dejection, which keeps men hopelessly chained in loss of faith in themselves’. Tagore shared the admiration for Japan widespread in Asia for demonstrating the ability of an Asian nation to rival the West in industrial development and economic progress. He noted with great satisfaction that Japan had ‘in giant strides left centuries of inaction behind, overtaking the present time in its foremost achievement’. For other nations outside the West, he said, Japan ‘has broken the spell under which we lay in torpor for ages, taking it to be the normal condition of certain races living in certain geographical limits’.
But then Tagore went on to criticize the rise of a strong nationalism in Japan, and its emergence as an imperialist nation. Tagore’s outspoken criticisms did not please Japanese audiences and, as E. P. Thompson wrote, ‘the welcome given to him on his first arrival soon cooled’.19 Twenty-two years later, in 1937, during the Japanese war on China, Tagore received a letter from Rash Behari Bose, an anti-British Indian revolutionary then living in Japan, who sought Tagore’s approval for his efforts there on behalf of Indian independence, in which he had the support of the Japanese government. Tagore replied:
Your cable has caused me many restless hours, for it hurts me very much to have to ignore your appeal. I wish you had asked for my cooperation in a cause against which my spirit did not protest. I know, in making this appeal, you counted on my great regard for the Japanese for I, along with the rest of Asia, did once admire and look up to Japan and did once fondly hope that in Japan Asia had at last discovered its challenge to the West, that Japan’s new strength would be consecrated in safeguarding the culture of the East against alien interests. But Japan has not taken long to betray that rising hope and repudiate all that seemed significant in her wonderful, and to us symbolic, awakening, and has now become itself a worse menace to the defenceless peoples of the East.
How to view Japan’s position in
the Second World War was a divisive issue in India. After the war, when Japanese political leaders were tried for war crimes, the sole dissenting voice among the judges came from the Indian judge, Radhabinod Pal, a distinguished jurist. Pal dissented on various grounds, among them that no fair trial was possible in view of the asymmetry of power between the victor and the defeated. Ambivalent feelings in India towards the Japanese military aggression, given the unacceptable nature of British imperialism, possibly had a part in predisposing Pal to consider a perspective different from that of the other judges.
More tellingly, Subhas Chandra Bose (no relation of Rash Behari Bose), a leading nationalist, made his way to Japan during the war via Italy and Germany after escaping from a British prison; he helped the Japanese to form units of Indian soldiers, who had earlier surrendered to the advancing Japanese army, to fight on the Japanese side as the ‘Indian National Army’. Rabindranath had formerly entertained great admiration for Subhas Bose as a dedicated nonsectarian fighter for Indian independence.20 But their ways would have parted when Bose’s political activities took this turn, although Tagore was dead by the time Bose reached Japan.
Tagore saw Japanese militarism as illustrating the way nationalism can mislead even a nation of great achievement and promise. In 1938 Yone Noguchi, the distinguished poet and friend of Tagore (as well as of Yeats and Pound), wrote to Tagore, pleading with him to change his mind about Japan. Rabindranath’s reply, written on 12 September 1938, was altogether uncompromising:
It seems to me that it is futile for either of us to try to convince the other, since your faith in the infallible right of Japan to bully other Asiatic nations into line with your Government’s policy is not shared by me…. Believe me, it is sorrow and shame, not anger, that prompt me to write to you. I suffer intensely not only because the reports of Chinese suffering batter against my heart, but because I can no longer point out with pride the example of a great Japan.