The Argumentative Indian

by Amartya Sen

  He would have been much happier with the post-war emergence of Japan as a peaceful power. Then, too, since he was not free of egotism, he would also have been pleased by the attention paid to his ideas by the novelist Yasunari Kawabata and others.21

  International Concerns

  Tagore was not invariably well-informed about international politics. He allowed himself to be entertained by Mussolini in a short visit to Italy in May–June 1926, a visit arranged by Carlo Formichi, professor of Sanskrit at the University of Rome. When he asked to meet Benedetto Croce, Formichi said, ‘Impossible! Impossible!’ Mussolini told him that Croce was ‘not in Rome’. When Tagore said he would go ‘wherever he is’, Mussolini assured him that Croce’s whereabouts were unknown.

  Such incidents, as well as warnings from Romain Rolland and other friends, should have ended Tagore’s flirtation with Mussolini more quickly than it did. But only after he received graphic accounts of the brutality of Italian fascism from two exiles, Gaetano Salvemini and Gaetano Salvadori, and learned more of what was happening in Italy, did he publicly denounce the regime, publishing a letter to the Manchester Guardian in August. The next month, Popolo d’Italia, the magazine edited by Benito Mussolini’s brother, replied: ‘Who cares? Italy laughs at Tagore and those who brought this unctuous and insupportable fellow in our midst.’

  With his high expectations of Britain, Tagore continued to be surprised by what he took to be a lack of official sympathy for international victims of aggression. He returned to this theme in the lecture he gave on his last birthday, in 1941:

  While Japan was quietly devouring North China, her act of wanton aggression was ignored as a minor incident by the veterans of British diplomacy. We have also witnessed from this distance how actively the British statesmen acquiesced in the destruction of the Spanish Republic.

  But distinguishing between the British government and the British people, Rabindranath went on to note ‘with admiration how a band of valiant Englishmen laid down their lives for Spain’.

  Tagore’s view of the Soviet Union has been a subject of much discussion. He was widely read in Russia. In 1917 several Russian translations of Gitanjali (one edited by Ivan Bunin, later the first Russian Nobel laureate in literature) were available, and by the late 1920s many of the English versions of his work had been rendered into Russian by several distinguished translators. Russian versions of his work continued to appear: Boris Pasternak translated him in the 1950s and 1960s.

  When Tagore visited Russia in 1930, he was much impressed by its development efforts and by what he saw as a real commitment to eliminate poverty and economic inequality. But what impressed him most was the expansion of basic education across the old Russian empire. In Letters from Russia, written in Bengali and published in 1931, he unfavourably compares the acceptance of widespread illiteracy in India by the British administration with Russian efforts to expand education:

  In stepping on the soil of Russia, the first thing that caught my eye was that in education, at any rate, the peasant and the working classes have made such enormous progress in these few years that nothing comparable has happened even to our highest classes in the course of the last hundred and fifty years … The people here are not at all afraid of giving complete education even to Turcomans of distant Asia; on the contrary, they are utterly in earnest about it.22

  When parts of the book were translated into English in 1934, the under-secretary for India stated in Parliament that it was ‘calculated by distortion of the facts to bring the British Administration in India into contempt and disrepute’, and the book was then promptly banned. The English version would not be published until after independence.

  Education and Freedom

  The British Indian administrators were not, however, alone in trying to suppress Tagore’s reflections on Russia. They were joined by Soviet officials. In an interview with Izvestia in 1930, Tagore sharply criticized the lack of freedom that he observed in Russia:

  I must ask you: Are you doing your ideal a service by arousing in the minds of those under your training anger, class-hatred, and revengefulness against those whom you consider to be your enemies? … Freedom of mind is needed for the reception of truth; terror hopelessly kills it…. For the sake of humanity I hope you may never create a vicious force of violence, which will go on weaving an interminable chain of violence and cruelty…. You have tried to destroy many of the other evils of [the tsarist] period. Why not try to destroy this one also?

  The interview was not published in Izvestia until 1988 – nearly sixty years later.*

  Tagore’s reaction to the Russia of 1930 arose from two of his strongest commitments: his uncompromising belief in the importance of ‘freedom of mind’ (the source of his criticism of the Soviet Union), and his conviction that the expansion of basic education is central to social progress (the source of his praise, particularly in contrast to British-run India). He identified the lack of basic education as the fundamental cause of many of India’s social and economic afflictions:

  In my view the imposing tower of misery which today rests on the heart of India has its sole foundation in the absence of education. Caste divisions, religious conflicts, aversion to work, precarious economic conditions – all centre on this single factor.

  It was on education (and on the reflection, dialogue and communication that are associated with it), rather than on, say, spinning ‘as a sacrifice’ (‘the charka does not require anyone to think’), that the future of India would depend.

  Tagore was concerned not only that there be wider opportunities for education across the country (especially in rural areas where schools were few), but also that the schools themselves be more lively and enjoyable. He himself had dropped out of school early, largely out of boredom, and had never bothered to earn a diploma. He wrote extensively on how schools should be made more attractive to boys and girls and thus more productive. His own co-educational school at Santiniketan had many progressive features. The emphasis here was on self-motivation rather than on discipline, and on fostering intellectual curiosity rather than competitive excellence.

  Much of Rabindranath’s life was spent in developing the school at Santiniketan. The school never had much money, since the fees were very low. His lecture honoraria, ‘$700 a scold’, went to support it, as well as most of his Nobel Prize money. The school received no support from the government, but did get help from private citizens – even Mahatma Gandhi raised money for it.

  The dispute with Mahatma Gandhi on the Bihar earthquake touched on a subject that was very important to Tagore: the need for education in science as well as in literature and the humanities. At Santiniketan, there were strong ‘local’ elements in its emphasis on Indian traditions, including the classics, and in the use of Bengali rather than English as the language of instruction. At the same time there were courses on a great variety of cultures, and study programmes devoted to China, Japan and the Middle East. Many foreigners came to Santiniketan to study or teach, and the fusion of studies seemed to work.

  I am partial to seeing Tagore as an educator, having myself been educated at Santiniketan. The school was unusual in many different ways, such as the oddity that classes, excepting those requiring a laboratory, were held outdoors (whenever the weather permitted). No matter what we thought of Rabindranath’s belief that one gains from being in a natural setting while learning (some of us argued about this theory), we typically found the experience of outdoor schooling extremely attractive and pleasant. Academically, our school was not particularly exacting (often we did not have any examinations at all), and it could not, by the usual academic standards, compete with some of the better schools in Calcutta. But there was something remarkable about the ease with which class discussions could move from Indian traditional literature to contemporary as well as classical Western thought, and then to the culture of China or Japan or elsewhere. The school’s celebration of variety was also in sharp contrast with the cultural conservatism and separatism that ha
s tended to grip India from time to time.

  The cultural give and take of Tagore’s vision of the contemporary world has close parallels with the vision of Satyajit Ray, also an alumnus of Santiniketan, who made several films based on Tagore’s stories.23 Ray’s words about Santiniketan in 1991 would have greatly pleased Rabindranath:

  I consider the three years I spent in Santiniketan as the most fruitful of my life…. Santiniketan opened my eyes for the first time to the splendours of Indian and Far Eastern art. Until then I was completely under the sway of Western art, music and literature. Santiniketan made me the combined product of East and West that I am.24

  Fifty Years after Independence

  What India has or has not achieved in its half century of independence is becoming a subject of considerable interest: ‘What has been the story of those first fifty years?’ (as Shashi Tharoor asks in his balanced, informative and highly readable account of India: From Midnight to the Millennium).25 If Tagore were to see the India of today, half a century after independence, nothing perhaps would shock him so much as the continued illiteracy of the masses. He would see this as a total betrayal of what the nationalist leaders had promised during the struggle for independence – a promise that had figured even in Nehru’s rousing speech on the eve of independence in August 1947 (on India’s ‘tryst with destiny’).

  In view of his interest in childhood education, Tagore would not be consoled by the extraordinary expansion of university education, in which India sends to its universities six times as many people per unit of population as does China. Rather, he would be stunned that, in contrast to East and South East Asia, including China, half the adult population and two-thirds of Indian women remain unable to read or write. Statistically reliable surveys indicate that even in the late 1980s nearly half of the rural girls between the ages of 12 and 14 did not attend any school for a single day of their lives.26

  This state of affairs is the result of the continuation of British imperial neglect of mass education, which has been reinforced by India’s traditional elitism, as well as upper-class-dominated contemporary politics (except in parts of India, such as Kerala, where anti-upper-caste movements have tended to concentrate on education as a great leveller). Tagore would see illiteracy and the neglect of education not only as the main source of India’s continued social backwardness, but also as a great constraint that restricts the possibility and reach of economic development in India (as his writings on rural development forcefully make clear). Tagore would also have strongly felt the need for a greater commitment – and a greater sense of urgency – in removing endemic poverty.

  At the same time, Tagore would undoubtedly find some satisfaction in the survival of democracy in India, in its relatively free press, and in general in the ‘freedom of mind’ that post-independence Indian politics has, on the whole, managed to maintain. He would also be pleased by the observation made by E. P. Thompson (whose father Edward Thompson had written one of the first major biographies of Tagore27):

  All the convergent influences of the world run through this society: Hindu, Moslem, Christian, secular; Stalinist, liberal, Maoist, democratic socialist, Gandhian. There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East that is not active in some Indian mind.28

  Tagore would have been happy also to see that the one governmental attempt to dispense generally with basic liberties and political and civil rights in India, in the 1970s, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (ironically, herself a former student at Santiniketan) declared an ‘emergency’, was overwhelmingly rejected by the Indian voters, leading to the precipitate fall of her government.

  Rabindranath would also see that the changes in policy that have eliminated famine since independence had much to do with the freedom to be heard in a democratic India. In Tagore’s play Raja O Rani (‘The King and the Queen’), the sympathetic queen eventually rebels against the callousness of state policy towards the hungry. She begins by enquiring about the ugly sounds outside the palace, only to be told that the noise is coming from ‘the coarse, clamorous crowd who howl unashamedly for food and disturb the sweet peace of the palace’. The viceregal office in India could have taken a similarly callous view of Indian famines, right up to the easily preventable Bengal famine of 1943, just before independence, which killed between two and three million people. But a government in a multi-party democracy, with elections and free newspapers, cannot any longer dismiss the noise from ‘the coarse, clamorous crowd’.*

  Unlike Gandhiji, Rabindranath would not resent the development of modern industries in India, or the acceleration of technical progress, since he did not want India to be shackled to the turning of ‘the wheel of an antiquated invention’. Tagore was concerned that people not be dominated by machines, but he was not opposed to making good use of modern technology. ‘The mastery over the machine,’ he wrote in Crisis in Civilization, ‘by which the British have consolidated their sovereignty over their vast empire, has been kept a sealed book, to which due access has been denied to this helpless country.’ Rabindranath had a deep interest in the environment – he was particularly concerned about deforestation and initiated a ‘festival of tree-planting’ (vriksha-ropana) as early as 1928. He would want increased private and government commitments to environmentalism; but he would not derive from this position a general case against modern industry and technology.

  On Cultural Separatism

  Rabindranath would be shocked by the growth of cultural separatism in India, as elsewhere. The ‘openness’ that he valued so much is certainly under great strain right now – in many countries. Religious fundamentalism still has a relatively small following in India; but various factions seem to be doing their best to increase their numbers. Certainly religious sectarianism has had much success in some parts of India (particularly in the west and the north). Tagore would see the expansion of religious sectarianism as being closely associated with an artificially separatist view of culture.

  He would have strongly resisted defining India in specifically Hindu terms, rather than as a ‘confluence’ of many cultures. Even after the partition of 1947, India is still the third-largest Muslim country in the world, with more Muslims than in Bangladesh, and nearly as many as in Pakistan. Only Indonesia has substantially more followers of Islam. Indeed, by pointing to the immense heterogeneousness of India’s cultural background and its richly diverse history, Tagore had argued that the ‘idea of India’ itself militated against a culturally separatist view – ‘against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one’s own people from others’.

  Tagore would also oppose the cultural nationalism that has recently been gaining some ground in India, along with an exaggerated fear of the influence of the West. He was uncompromising in his belief that human beings could absorb quite different cultures in constructive ways:

  Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin. I am proud of my humanity when I can acknowledge the poets and artists of other countries as my own. Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of man are mine. Therefore it hurts me deeply when the cry of rejection rings loud against the West in my country with the clamour that Western education can only injure us.

  In this context, it is important to emphasize that Rabindranath was not short of pride in India’s own heritage, and often spoke about it. He lectured at Oxford, with evident satisfaction, on the importance of India’s religious ideas – quoting both from ancient texts and from popular poetry (such as the verses of the sixteenth-century Muslim poet Kabir). In 1940, when he was given an honorary doctorate by Oxford University, in a ceremony arranged at his own educational establishment in Santiniketan (‘In Gangem Defluit Isis’, Oxford helpfully explained), to the predictable ‘volley of Latin’ Tagore responded ‘by a volley of Sanskrit’, as Marjorie Sykes, a Quaker friend of Rabindranath, reports. Her cheerful summary of the match, ‘India held its own’, was not out of line with Tagore’s
pride in Indian culture. His welcoming attitude to Western civilization was reinforced by this confidence: he did not see India’s culture as fragile and in need of ‘protection’ from Western influence.

  In India, he wrote, ‘circumstances almost compel us to learn English, and this lucky accident has given us the opportunity of access into the richest of all poetical literatures of the world.’ There seems to me much force in Rabindranath’s argument for clearly distinguishing between the injustice of a serious asymmetry of power (colonialism being a prime example of this) and the importance nevertheless of appraising Western culture in an open-minded way, in colonial and post-colonial territories, in order to see what uses could be made of it.

  Rabindranath insisted on open debate on every issue, and distrusted conclusions based on a mechanical formula, no matter how attractive that formula might seem in isolation (such as ‘This was forced on us by our colonial masters – we must reject it’, ‘This is our tradition – we must follow it’, ‘We have promised to do this – we must fulfil that promise’, and so on). The question he persistently asks is whether we have reason enough to want what is being proposed, taking everything into account. Important as history is, reasoning has to go beyond the past. It is in the sovereignty of reasoning – fearless reasoning in freedom – that we can find Rabindranath Tagore’s lasting voice.

  6

  Our Culture, Their Culture*

  The works of Satyajit Ray (1921–92) present a perceptive understanding of the relation between different cultures, and his ideas remain pertinent to the major cultural debates in the contemporary world – not least in India. In Ray’s films and in his writings, we see explorations of at least three general themes on cultures and their interrelations: the importance of distinctions between different local cultures and their respective individualities, the necessity to understand the deeply heterogeneous character of each local culture (even that of a community, not to mention a region or a country), and the great need for inter-cultural communication while recognizing the difficulties of such intercourse.