Tagore, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism

Perceptions, Contestations and Contemporary Relevance

Mohammad A. Quayum

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000042382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is a fresh examination of Rabindranath Tagore's ideas on nationalism and his rhetoric of cosmopolitanism. It critically analyses the poetics and the politics of his works and specifically responds to Tagore's three lectures on nationalism delivered during the early years of the twentieth century and later compiled in his book Nationalism (1917).

This volume:

• Discusses Tagore's perception of nationalism – the many-sidedness of his engagement with nationalism, the root causes of his anathema against the ideology, ambiguities and limitations associated with his perception and his alternative vision of cosmopolitanism or global unity;
• Cross-examines an alternative view of cosmopolitanism based on Tagore's inclusivist ideology to "seek my compatriots all over the world";
• Explores how his ideas on nationalism and cosmopolitanism found myriad expressions across his works – in prose, fiction, poetry, travelogue, songs – as well as in the legacy of cinematic adaptations of his writings;
• Investigates the relevance of Tagore's thoughts on nationalism and cosmopolitanism in relation to the contemporary rise of religious, nationalist and sectarian violence in the twenty-first century.

A key study on the relevance of Tagore's political philosophy in the contemporary world with contributions from eminent Tagore scholars in South Asia as well as the West, this book will be of great interest to readers and researchers in the fields of literature, political science, cultural studies, philosophy and Asian studies.

Part I

Tagore, nationalism and cosmopolitanism

Perceptions, contestations, ambiguities, limitations and contemporary relevance

1
Antinomies of nationalism and Rabindranath Tagore¹

Sabyasachi Bhattacharya

Rabindranath Tagore’s best-known work, Nationalism (1917), is often mistaken for the sum and substance of his thoughts on nationalism. However, a look at the evolution of his idea over different stages suggests that his thoughts on nationalism cannot be accommodated within the stereotypes of “internationalism” or “anti-nationalism” in which commentators cast him. To focus only on that is a reductionist over-simplification of Tagore’s evolving approach to the antinomies of nationalism as he perceived them.

In our endeavour to understand Rabindranath Tagore’s approach to nationalism we have to recognise three problems that probably hamper the current discourse on the subject. To begin with, a good deal of these commentaries on Tagore are often unhistorical in assuming a homogeneity in Tagore’s thoughts on nationalism; from the 1890s to 1941 they evolved and changed considerably. Unless we follow this evolution and identify the different stages, his denunciation of self-aggrandising nationalism of the West European model in his best-known work, Nationalism, is likely to be mistaken for the sum and substance of his thoughts on the subject. Arguably, a balanced estimation of Tagore’s outlook must include, inter alia, another aspect: his engagement in the critique of naked obscurantism, backward-looking and inimical to the inclusiveness of Indian civilisation – the obscurantism that sometimes dresses itself out of the wardrobe of nationalist rhetoric in India.

The second problem is that many commentators, as we shall see later, have cast Tagore’s ideas about nationalism into a stereotype of “internationalism.” When he wrote his major work on Nationalism in 1917 (commonly used by scholars since that is the one easily accessible in English) there were various concepts of internationalism (for example, President Wilson’s version, the creed of the incipient League of Nations, internationalism of the British Pacifists and even Japan’s own version of internationalism which was actually a rationalisation of Japanese imperialism). Tagore has been interpreted in terms of these stereotypes current in the world of politics. We need to examine whether this stereotype – or that of “anti-nationalism” – appropriately accommodates the individuality of Tagore’s concept of nationalism. The same caveat applies to the efforts of recent scholars who try to assimilate Tagore’s thoughts into their own version of “post-coloniality” (Collins) or “anti-modernism” (Nandy).

Third, the textual study of Tagore’s political writings proves to be insufficient without familiarity with the context in which he wrote, including obscure journalistic writings in those times. And textual study is hampered by the fact that not more than about one-tenth of his political writings are available in English. However, although I will eschew long quotations from his political writings in Bengali in this chapter, I will briefly cite some of those writings when empirical evidence seems necessary to support my argument.

Text and context

“The significance of a piece of writing cannot be understood if one views it in isolation, de-linked from the context in which it was written” (“Rabindranatherrashtranaitik Mat” 337–38), Tagore wrote thus in 1929 in critical response to a book by Sachin Sen, The Political Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore, a prominent journalist of those times. In the same article, Tagore went on to say,

It is appropriate to view in a historical way the evolution of the writings of a man who has been writing for a long time… . It needs to be taken into account that a set of political ideas did not emerge from my mind at a particular time – they developed in response to life experience and evolved over the years.

(“Rabindranatherrashtranaitik Mat” 337–38)

It may be useful to bear in mind this caution from Tagore against generalising too far on the basis of one or two texts like Nationalism and making a reductionist representation of Tagore.

One can broadly distinguish several distinct stages in the evolution of Tagore’s approach to nationalism. It will suffice for the present if we briefly look at the different major phases. Between 1890 (when he first wrote a distinctly political essay) and 1904, his writings were in line with contemporary nationalist discourse in the incipient public sphere in colonial India. What he said, for instance, in his strident protest against the Sedition Bill of 1898 (“Kantha-rodh,” that is, “On Being Throttled,” 1898) and the wasteful extravagance of the contemplated Delhi Durbar (“Atyukti,” 1902) was not unlike the average nationalist writings by Indian public men of those times. However, at the same time a departure was also signalled in his formulation with this concept of a syncretic civilisation in India (“Bharatvarsher Itihas,” 1902) – a concept that was not a part of the creed commonly held by the nationalist intelligentsia of that time.

The second phase, 1904–07, saw Tagore’s participation in the Swadeshi agitation against the partition of Bengal. One departure from the position of other contemporary nationalist spokespersons in Bengal was Tagore’s emphasis on the need to push beyond efforts to attract the British Indian government’s attention in order to develop a social reconstruction programme (“Swadeshi Samaj,” 1904) so as to attain “self-empowerment” (“Atmasakti,” 1905). In the third phase, roughly from 1907–16, Tagore became critical of the inadequacy of the militant nationalist (biplabi) ideology and more generally of the nationalist programme of action (“Path o Patheya,” 1908). It is well known that this became a major theme in Tagore’s creative writings as well, for example, the novel The Home and the World (Ghare Baire, 1916) and later in Four Chapters (Char Adhaya, 1934).

The outbreak of World War I had a deep impact on Tagore’s mind. The 1917 publication of his lectures in Japan and the United States, on aggrandising nationalism leading to the World War, marked a new phase. Tagore’s writings in this phase are widely known because a good deal of them was written by him in English. That phase comes to an end in the late 1920s when Tagore’s attention focused not so much on the evils of European nationalism but on the fault lines in the nationhood of the Indian people. While he had spoken of the problem of Hindu-Muslim relationship and the subordination of the backward castes in his earlier writings, Tagore’s thoughts on nationalism dwell on communalism and casteism more than ever in the late 1920s and the 1930s – the last years of his life. Commonly, Tagore’s critique of nationalism from 1917 onwards monopolises scholarly attention, but Tagore’s anti-communal and anti-casteist position merits equal attention.

Many of these ideational tensions in Tagore’s thoughts on nationalism appear to move towards a resolution in Tagore’s approach in the last years of his life in the ideas he expounded in his Hibbert Lectures at Oxford (The Religion of Man, 1931), in his political essays in Bengali in the late 1920s and the 1930s (Kalantar, 1934) and his last public statement at Santiniketan in 1941 – “Crisis in Civilization.” Perhaps we can surmise that he postulated the resolution of the antinomies of nationalism in a philosophy of humanist universalism.

Tagore’s intellectual evolution over many decades, evident even in this very brief overview, is often out of sight in the contemporary discourse on his political thought. Moreover, as E.P. Thompson has remarked in his book on his father Edward Thompson, Tagore’s friend and biographer, that discourse has suffered from the tyranny of fixed categories. Thompson is critical of “the abbreviated categories which often close enquiry before it has commenced” and “obliterate the complexities of the past” (69). Michael Collins, in his recent work on the political ideas of Tagore, launches a sharp critique of the “post-colonialist” and “subaltern” approach to Tagore on this ground; the “post-colonial construction of Tagore … is one that is vastly over-simplified and largely unsupported by any meaningful discussion of textual and archival evidence,” and thus Tagore becomes “a straw man for postcolonial critique” (Collins 153).² Collins’ own view is complex and interesting. One of his judgments is that “Tagore was a pioneer of the idea that anti-colonialism should take the form of a non-instrumental rejuvenation of society and religion and hence his position stood in contradistinction to a straight forward dialectic between colonialism and nationalism” (Collins, qtd. in Tuteja and Chakraborty 19).

Reductionist reading

While Collins is right in underlining the originality of Tagore’s views on society, it is not clear how it follows that Tagore’s position was contrary to a dialectic between colonialism and nationalism in India. Arguably, what Tagore wrote suggests that he recognised a contradistinction between anti-imperialism and nationalism, but this cannot be reduced to the denial of “dialectics between colonialism and nationalism.” Further, it is difficult to agree with what he says, under the subtitle “The Philosophical Grounding of Anti-nationalism,” that “Tagorean anti-nationalism was almost exclusively borne out of Indian philosophical and theological traditions and from autochthonous historical experience” (Collins 78).³ Attribution of genealogy to ideas is always difficult to establish in intellectual history. No doubt Indian philosophical and theological traditions infused Tagore’s thoughts in a general way but in this instance the distance between a thing like nationalism and those philosophical traditions is very great.

The view that Tagore was “anti-nationalist” is not uncommon today; it is the consequence of dependence on a handful of his writings – chiefly Nationalism, a reductionist reading of Tagore’s writings – and a lack of awareness of the different stages of the evolution of his thoughts on nationalism. Further, it is also the consequence of the fact that the large corpus of his political writings before the publication of Nationalism, as well as a great deal thereafter, was in Bengali and not available in English translation. (This may be part of the problem with Collins’ work; indeed, his publisher declares that the book is an interpretation of “Tagore’s English language writings,”)

Reductionism in another form is perhaps in evidence in an otherwise insightful commentary on Tagore by Ashis Nandy. For Nandy, Tagore was one of those who sought an alternative to nationalism that was free of the taint of “any Enlightenment concept of freedom” and upheld a “distinctively civilisational concept of nationalism embedded in the tolerance encoded in various traditional ways of life in a highly diverse plural society” (Nandy x–xi). Thus, Nandy finds in Tagore an indigenist anti-modernist who is faithful to tolerance, which is encoded and embedded in tradition. Sumit Sarkar has commented, “what I find difficult to accept is the attempt to assimilate Rabindranath – despite the well-known debates with Gandhi – into Nandy’s own favourite kind of anti-modernism” (117). Here Sarkar’s criticism is perfectly valid. Perhaps the basic problem is that the representation of Tagore in terms of the stereotypes of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Tagore, nationalism and cosmopolitanism: perceptions, contestations, ambiguities, limitations and contemporary relevance
• Part II Nationalism and cosmopolitanism: interrogating the genres
• Index