Tagore's Ideas on 'Nationalism' and 'Internationalism'.

http://14.139.211.59 › 07_CHAPTER_04

Was Rabindranath Tagore against nationalism?

In addition, he viewed British control of India as a "political symptom of our social

disease", urging Indians to accept that "there can be no question of blind
revolution, but of steady and purposeful education". In line with this, Tagore
denounced nationalism, deeming it among humanity's greatest problems.

Throughout his life, Tagore remained deeply critical of nationalism, a position that
pitted him against Mahatma Gandhi. Tagore argued that when love for one’s
country gives way to worship, or becomes a “sacred obligation”, then disaster is
the inevitable outcome. “I am willing to serve my country; but my worship I
reserve for Right which is far greater than country . To worship my country as a
god is to bring curse upon it,”

In 1908, Rabindranath Tagore wrote a letter to his friend, A M Bose, and said,
“Patriotism can’t be our final spiritual shelter. 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.” Three years after he wrote this letter — part of Selected Letters of
Rabindranath Tagore, published by Cambridge University Press in 1997 — his
composition, Jana Gana Mana, was sung for the first time at the Calcutta session of
the Congress.

“It would be an uninteresting but a sterile world of mechanical regularity if all our
opinions were forcibly made alike… Opinions are constantly changed and
rechanged only through free circulation of intellectual forces and persuasion.
Violence begets violence and blind stupidity. Freedom of mind is needed for the
reception of truth; terror hopelessly kills it.”

From 1877-1917, Tagore’s stance on Swadeshi and the anti-Partition movement of

Bengal were one with the political climate. But from 1921, as fractures in society
— communal and caste — became apparent, Tagore confessed, “I took a few steps
down the road, and then stopped.” Tagore had warned Gandhi that there remained
a thin line that divided nationalism and xenophobia. Tagore and Gandhi had a long
and argumentative conversation about what Tagore described as the “bondage of
nationalism”.

In the then influential Calcutta journal, Modern Review, Tagore wrote about an
international desire to “achieve the unity of man by destroying the bondage of
nationalism in order to achieve the unity of man”.

India, he argued, didn’t have a “real sense” of nationalism and noted that “even
though from childhood I had been taught that the idolatry of 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 gain truly their India by fighting
against that education which teaches them that a country is greater than the ideals
of humanity.”

Tagore’s dismay for the fervent nationalism that had gripped India was further
shaped by the First World War in 1914. Speaking at Japan after the war, he warned
that “the political civilization” that was overrunning the world was “based on
exclusiveness” and it is “always watchful to keep at bay the aliens or to
exterminate them. It is carnivorous and cannibalistic in its tendencies; it feeds upon
the resources of other peoples and tries to swallow their whole future. It is always
afraid of other races achieving eminence, naming it as a peril, and tries to thwart all
symptoms of greatness outside its own boundaries, forcing down races of men who
are weaker, to be eternally fixed in their weakness.”

Then again, writing in 1933, when Adolf Hitler had been appointed chancellor of
Germany and was rapidly achieving full dictatorial power, Tagore wrote in an
essay, The Changing Age, later compiled into the book, Towards Universal Man:
“Germany, in which the light of Europe’s Culture was at its brightest, has torn up
all civilized values — with what ease has an unspeakable devilry overtaken the
entire country.”

Even in his lifetime, Tagore’s criticism of nationalism didn’t make him a popular
figure. Gandhi had famously commented, on being criticised by Tagore, that “the
poet lives in a magnificent world of his own creation — his world of ideas”.

The poet, though, was hardly unaware of the criticism that his ideas opened him up
to. Writing to his friend C F Andrews in 1921, from New York, speaking critically
of the non-cooperation movement led by Gandhi in India, he admitted to being
“afraid” that he would “be rejected by my own people when I go back to India. My
solitary cell is awaiting me in my Motherland. In their present state of mind, my
countrymen will have no patience with me, who believe God to be higher than my
own country”. He added, “I know such spiritual faith may not lead us to political
success; but I say to myself as India had ever said, ‘Even then – what?’.

He fiercely expressed that we should follow our Upanishads and our saints who
taught us the idea of fraternity, brotherhood and equality, which can make any
country strong. It was really important for our divided society. He highlighted the
part how we Indian’s get intimidated by the idea of westernisation and stated that
forgetting our roots had become the major reason why we get confused with the
true essence of national self-consciousness. He says that there is a need to prove
our humanity by solving the internal differences through mutual help and finding
some true basis for reconciliation.

Rabindranath Tagore’s reflections on the concepts and practice of the civilisation,

nationalism and community are directly concerned with the nature of modern
political power and its underlying assumptions about human life. It should not be
some political contract; it has to have some social grounding.

Here the idea of moral men is very central and that is also connected with
Aurobindo’s definition of nationalism that looks at it in a wider global situation
which says the concept of humanity is much bigger than the narrower concept of
nationalism, and in all of that, the individual role is really important is what Tagore
tried to reflect.

Tagore’s idea of nationalism can be understood by following quotes from his book:

“I am not against one nation in particular, but against the general idea of all
nations. What is the nation? The wisdom of the nation is not in its faith in
humanity, but in its complete distrust… yes, this is the logic of nation. And it will
never heed the voice of truth and goodness. It will go on in its ring-dance of moral
corruption, linking steel unto steel, and machine unto machine; trampling under its
tread all the sweet flowers of simple faith and living ideals of the man.

“Nationalism is a great menace. It is the particular thing which for years has been
at the bottom of India’s trouble.

He considered the ideals of nationalism inherently problematic because it leads to

moral corruption, moral degenerations and mistreatment and contrary to simple
living or moral ideals of individuals. He utterly said that nationalism was
something that serves nations self-interest; it doesn’t serve the individual self-
interest, which is not at all acceptable.

As indicated by him, patriotism, whenever passed up power would unleash

devastation in India. Patriotism, as indicated by him, isn’t an unconstrained self-
articulation of man as a social being but instead a political or business association
of a ground of individuals in which they gather to expand their benefit, progress
and force. It is simply the sorted out enthusiasm of a people, where it is least
human and least otherworldly. He regarded patriotism a repetitive danger to
humankind because of its affinity for the material and the normal it stomped on the
human soul and human feeling. It agitates man’s ethical parity.

He asserts that India has never had a genuine feeling of patriotism and that
patriotism has for quite a long time been at the base of India’s difficulties. India
should battle against the instruction, which instructs them that a nation is more
prominent than the beliefs of humankind. He stated, “When you get things that
don’t have a place with your life then they just serve to pound your
life.” Therefore, India, as he would like to think, ought to follow her fate instead of
only mimicking the West.

Patriotism was a favourable place for government. Tagore likewise found the
fixation on patriotism as a wellspring of war, disdain and shared doubt between
and among the countries. He saw patriotism as a threat to humankind. He was
against the possibility of the country; he was much more wildly contradicted to
Indian joining the temporary fad of patriotism. As indicated by him, this would
bargain India’s history and way of life as a culture and bring it under the shadow of
the West.

His hostility to patriotism isn’t that he was not enthusiastic to patriotism or that he
was against it. He had faith in an advantageous interaction of the East and West, a
profound affiliation or a living connection between the two societies, innovative
solidarity that was conceivable just when the East had found its spirit and
character.

He never permitted his adoration for his nation to hold up the traffic of his
affection for reality, equity and humankind. He didn’t submit to a public
cognisance, yet, to world awareness — a “visvabodh”, in which each nation would
keep land in its light of brain as its offer in the brightening of the entire world or
humankind. As per him, one method of accomplishing a feeling of all in all among
the isolated individuals is to resuscitate the old foundation of network celebrations
and spread it all over.

Tagore’s vision may appear to be hopeful; however, it is maybe, not unreachable.

It requires a compassionate mediation into present selfish and pugnacious
patriotism, through the presentation of a good and profound measurement in the
organisation. The focal worry of his plan was to feature the bay that would
unavoidably show up between patriotism at the political level and network
cognisance at the social level, except if the last was permitted to develop at the
same time, if not in front of the previous.

His approach in this regard is considered by the contemporary scholars as one of a

post colonial approach.