“And into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country
awake...”
Rabindranath Tagore. A name associated with mysticism and
romantic poetry. A name that no Indian can fail to recognize. And a name, which
increasingly began to give voice to the minds of the colonized and oppressed,
and expressed a passionate desire to be identified as one of them, after
failing in his quest to blend the spiritual and romantic notions of an
individual’s soul with the divine.
Rabindranath Tagore had multitudinous facets to his
personality and one of those was his fierce criticism of Nationalism. His
antipathy to the conventional idea of a Nation was legendary. He felt that
nationalism was not a spontaneous self-expression of man as a social being but
a great menace which was “supremely dangerous to humanity”. It was a “terrible
absurdity” which had rapaciously thriven long upon mutilated humanity.
He denounced Nationalism, condemning it to be self-idolatry
and criticized it to be a neatly compressed bale of the dregs of humanity,
bound in iron hoops, and labeled with scientific precision. This marked
animosity of his with the ideal of a Nation was immortalized when he warned the
masses that they, who were living under a delusion that they were free, were
actually sacrificing their freedom and humanity to the fetich of nationalism
and living in a dense, noxious atmosphere of worldwide suspicion, greed and
panic. He astringently accused nations for fixing their fangs deep into the
naked flesh of the world and systematically petrifying its moral nature in
order to lay a concrete foundation for its gigantic abstractions of efficiency.
But in spite of all these scathing comments, he was essentially a humanitarian
who has faith that man would have his new birth, in the freedom of his
individuality, from the shrouded vagueness of abstraction.
Tagore was a political dissenter in India who was against
Mahatma Gandhi’s ‘Cult of the Charkha’. He felt that the Swadeshi Movement was
predominantly led by the wealthy, orthodox and reactionary Hindus with little
or no connection to the lower strata of society, especially the Muslims. He has
superbly articulated the darker strains of political intrigue that were the
undercurrent to this movement in his 1915 novel ‘Ghare Baire’. His experiences
in the Swadeshi Movement indisputably played a critical role in his antagonism
to Nationalism in its radical avatar.
Tagore always emphasized on the loftier ideals of humanity
instead of acclimatizing to the patriotic rhetoric of his times. He believed
that every manifestation of patriotism becomes the magnification of the self on
a stupendous scale – it magnifies our vulgarity, cruelty and annihilates every
notion of humanity. He violently protested against the ruthless lust of
arrogant, imperialistic power-seeking individuals, who were suppressing the
voice of the people in order to gain supremacy.
Tagore was a man who eloquently expressed the unspoken
desires of the Indian consciousness at that time. Through his relentless tirade
against the tralatitious political, cultural and social superstitions, he
peeved many of his detractors. He was criticized for being an apostate and his
ideals were perceived as being up in the air. He was reduced to being a figure
of merely parochial significance and was assumed to remain only a
hagiographical legend in Bengal.
Rabindranath Tagore has left a colossal legacy behind,
political included. His alternative, out-of-the-box vision has become more
appropriate in the modern world, filled to the brim, as it is, with fanaticism
and zealotry. It is time we gave it the importance it deserves.
