An Alternative Idea of India

Tagore and Vivekananda

Gangeya Mukherji

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138044470
• eBook ISBN: 9781000083774
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book attempts to unravel the worldview of two prominent Indians of recent Indian history — Tagore and Vivekananda. Both suggested emancipation through political struggles but without transgressing the boundaries of humanism. This is significant, as identifying an enemy was an intrinsic part of nationalistic formulations. The larger philosophy of life, for Tagore and Vivekananda, was to reach out across geographical borders.

In this work, their alternative idea of India is analysed in the larger context of the many formulations of nationalism with special reference(s) to theoretical as well as literary works in European and Indian contexts. The author brings on board critiques that have emerged recently —secularist, feminist and postcolonial — and defends his subjects against them. This book is essentially an intellectual interrogation of two eminent thinkers of their time, and falls within the rubric of intellectual history.

1
The National, the Regional and the Universal

There is a perception that we are living once again ‘at the time of the breaking of nations’, that militant assertions of regional and group identities could lead to devastation. Is it possible to love one’s home country without hating another’s? Can regionalism and universalism coexist? Is regionalism different from nationalism? This study begins by looking at the general historical background of currents in the outside world impinging on India in the 19th and 20th centuries: the making and breaking of nations, the psychological forces that fed insane mass hostilities, and interspersed voices of sanity.

Nationalism: A Brief History of the Concept

The sense of national identity is founded predominantly on the basis of shared language and unique historical traditions.¹ While language was perceived by nation builders as uniting a country, more recently it has also been perceived as an instrument of dominance and hegemony. Man’s distinguishing characteristic, his ‘religious sense’, was also drawn to ‘new religions’ like communism and nationalism (Hayes, 1960, p. 15).

¹ The discussion of nationalism in terms of these two broad categories and their salient features draws largely on Hayes (1960).

Historical tradition is constituted of various strands from the past. Toynbee sees religion as substantially constituting the consciousness of a civilisation and as influencing ideas and social mores. The complex relationship between church, ‘a unified ecclesiastical government’ as distinct from ‘higher religions’, and civilisation, features in his discussion of a ‘tension, latent since our ancestors became human, between Man the social animal and Man the person’ (Toynbee, 1995, p. 334). This stress is ‘reflected socially in the fission of human history, from this point onwards, into the histories of civilisations and the histories of higher religions’ (ibid.). The higher religions have all originated within civilisational ‘frameworks’ from which they have disengaged, albeit incompletely, and the difference between them lies in the ‘degree to which their disengagement has been carried’ (ibid., p. 335).

The second element of a historical tradition is the territorial past, the geography determining the contours of history. The third is the political past: whether the country was initially part of a large empire and dominated by its norms, attaining autonomy later; whether its nucleus had been a tribal state and it had incorporated diverse tribes in the process of its expansion; and whether the predominant element in its governance was democratic or autocratic, on which in turn depended the pluralism of its political system.

Memories of valour are another important constituent of the past: whether a people were traditionally ‘vanquishers’ or ‘vanquished’; whether they had traditional rivals. This factor can assume explosive potential in public sentiment as themes of revenge and vindication gain primacy. The economic past is also constitutive of historical tradition: the class structure, largely determined by the dominant mode of production (agrarian or industrial), informs class awareness; it influences political programmes and feeds the ideologies of class warfare.

Finally, the cultural past of the nation, the history of its intellectual and artistic accomplishments, influences its thought process in diverse ways. The idea of nationhood depends partly on the transformation of loyalties — including loyalties to the individual, family, community, native place, dialect, cultural rituals and symbols — into patriotism for a geographical unit having diverse individuals, communities, topographical features and climates. Such transformation is accomplished through education and other emotional cultivators, such as anthems, memorials, theatre and films.

Cultural nationalism is a dynamic concept, contributing to the ‘fluidity’ of nationalities (see Hayes, 1960, p. 5). Nationality as a category, particularly as an idea, is a historical constant, along with the idea of a differentiated human culture, unlike specific nationalities, which are subject to the vicissitudes of history. Many of the ancient nationalities are no longer extant, ‘quite swallowed up long ago; only their names and some of their monuments remain’; many existing nationalities were not known in early times: ‘Their distinctive languages were not formed in antiquity, but only in the Middle Ages’ (ibid., p. 6).

However, there is a resilience in the attachment of communities to what they regard as the quintessence of their cultural traditions. This has made cultural traditions a source of both identity and protest. Variegated experiments characterised the evolution of nationhood in Europe: the diversification of cultures, such as Norway and Sweden, or Belgium and Holland; the clubbing of cultures, for instance, diverse groups in Russia or the Austrian empire; and the socialist/ communist model that assumed that the fulfilment of basic economic needs would subsume cultural categories. Culture has also frequently become the locus of resistance, often in the form of regional identities that are posited against a ‘western market culture’ today. A ‘counterculture’ is a protest from within a society, against both the uniformity of ‘globalisation’ and the authority of canons. The communist movements floundered on apprehensions regarding a uniform culture eroding traditions. In India, the postcolonial discourse, instantiating the fluidity of ideas of culture, still engages with this unresolved tension between identities, the ‘self ’ and the ‘other’. The interesting historical connotations of this dialectic, between the traditional and the foreign as represented by an ‘alien’ language, including even its influence on native languages through historical associations, will be explored in detail later in this chapter.

Broadly defined, nationalism is the assumption of an identity by a group of people primarily on the basis of territory, language, religion and culture. Its political manifestation as the sovereign nation has become a basic category of historical analysis, along with the industrial system, since the beginning of the industrial age (Toynbee, 1995, p. 34). Although originating in intellectual circles, as do most concepts, nationalism gained its transformative power with its general acceptance. In the 19th century, which Walter Bagehot called the ‘century of nation building’, the concept of nationalism became one of the most powerful forces influencing history, causing the maps of the western world to be drawn and redrawn.

The materialisation of the idea of nationalism as the ‘nation-state’ was a complex process. Well into the 20th century, a nation was defined by Stalin as ‘a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up, manifested in a community of culture’ (Stalin, 1936, p. 8). Aspects of this historical evolution are, however, contested in contrary formulations of the nation as a product of historical amnesia (Renan, 1996), or as an imagined community (Anderson, 2001). For Einstein, nationalism was ‘an infantile disease . . . the measles of mankind’ (see Prasad, 2002). The exclusionary element has been predominant in nationalism. On one plane it ‘connotes a tendency to place a particularly excessive, exaggerated and exclusive emphasis on values, which leads to a vain and importunate overestimation of one’s own nation and thus to a detraction of others’ (Boehm, 1963, p. 231). On another plane, it denotes, as in Camille Julian’s search for spiritual France even while dealing with periods thousands of years preceding the existence of his country, an ‘extreme case of the emotional and intellectual substitution of a nation for Mankind’ (Toynbee, 1995, p. 36).

This idea of the nation perhaps has its roots in primitive tribalism. Later, other factors such as the advent of agriculture, the emergence of military empires, the rise and spread of powerful religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, and the development of languages like Sanskrit, Chinese, the Semitic group of languages and Latin, facilitated the supplanting of tribalism by larger ideas of identity. Perhaps the privileged classes, with their education and exposure to cosmopolitan ideas, were more inclusive in their loyalties, which had larger dimensions. The less privileged were prone to more local attachments.

The Egyptians, Jews, Greeks, Armenians and Persians had begun to have a fairly sharp sense of national identity in the ancient period. However, these identities were less dominant than those emerging in later times, for instance among the Romans and the Greeks during the 4th century, the French and the Provencal during the Albigensian Crusade, the Slavs and Teutons during their 15th century conflict, and the English and the French during their Hundred Years’ War (Hayes, 1963, p. 240).

The Old Testament refers repeatedly to a chosen people, beginning with Genesis, where God changes Abram’s name, meaning ‘exalted father’, to Abraham, meaning ‘father of many’, promising him the land of Canaan, and to make him the father of many nations. But the Old Testament’s vision of the nation, as a community comprising various strands, is not a militant idea hostile to the alien. Samuel, apprehensive that men would serve their state and not God, reluctantly granted the state that the elders desired. Amos reminded the Jews that the chosen people were not only to be rewarded over all the rest, but their crimes would be punished with greater severity, and that God’s clemency towards other peoples was reflected in the Philistines’ escape from Caphtor, and the deliverance of the Syrians from Kir. Isaiah’s vision of God blessing ‘Egypt My people’, ‘Assyria the work of My hands’, and ‘Israel My inheritance’, is a vision of peaceful coexistence among peoples.

As Zion meant living in accordance with the Lord’s word, the Jews were perhaps the first nationalists, searching ‘for the meaning of the Jewish National Idea’ (Kohn, 1963, p. 180):

From the ancient Hebrews nationalism everywhere took over these two concepts: the first of a unique and exclusive relationship, God or history having selected one people as preeminently called upon to serve a Cause, often the greatest and ultimate Cause; and, secondly, the concept of a part of this earth being singled out by destiny and mystery to be owned forever by the one people (ibid., p. 179).

When Jochanan Ben Zakkai, Hillel’s disciple and the foremost representative of Judaism in Jerusalem, left the Zealots and escaped the besieging Roman army with its commander’s approval, to found his academy outside its walls at Jabneh, ‘the state perished. Judaism survived’ (ibid., p. 181). Thus, the spiritual content of religious traditions are perhaps better conserved when religions are effectively delinked from national aspirations. In the particular case of Judaism, this incident constitutes one of the high-water marks in the development of its spiritual rather than political tradition.

The ‘archaistic form of utopianism’ of modern nationalism unfolded in resentment towards its ‘cultural debt to the civilization of which it is itself merely a fragment’, and in its attempt to create ‘a parochially national culture which can be declared free from foreign influence’ (Toynbee, 1995, p. 245). It aspired to ‘recapture the ostensible purity of an age of national independence prior to the one in which it finds itself incorporated in the larger society of a supra national civilization’ (ibid.). This phenomenon, akin to tribalism, gained stature with the onset of the 17th century in Europe. The Treaty of Westphalia accepted in principle the secularisation of the polity, wherein specific states became more important than the concept of a pan-European Christendom.

The upsurge of national feeling in England is expressed and appreciated in writers from Milton and Locke to Blackstone and Burke. 18th century nationalism in England acquired cultural overtones, although political control remained firmly in the hands of the upper classes, which controlled parliament and passed off their self-interest as that of the nation. France, on the other hand, seeking to abolish all privileges after the revolution, introduced a new type of nationalism. The Latin patria, as also ‘its derivative “patriotism”, although originally associated narrowly with a town or a locality, was now stretched to designate an ideal loyalty to the whole national state of France’ (Boehm, 1963, p. 242).

This aroused hopes in people without nationalities, particularly in the German states, and eventually led to opposition, at great personal risk, to Napoleon’s rule. Men like Fichte, Gorres, Handenberg, Schleirmacher and Benzenberg ‘stood at first wholly under the spell of the revolutionary ideas emanating from France’ (Rocker, 1937, p. 205). But the French Revolution also contained the seeds of major-itarianism. Its efforts at bringing about uniformity of language, culture and education through state schooling, and the dissemination through pamphlets and periodicals of concepts like the nation, patriotism, patriotic duty, the spirit of a ‘nation in arms’ and conscription as a sacred duty, naturally did not appeal to European monarchs. The ensuing conflict provoked France into committing war excesses. Napoleon, ‘less plagued by false prejudices than many representatives of legitimate royalty’, consummately manipulated nationalist principles in order to further his own secret plans (ibid., p. 204).

The defeat of Napoleon by the Holy Alliance brought in Germany, not liberty, but the Carlsbad Decrees. Intellectuals were imprisoned and universities put under police supervision, but this constituted arguably ‘only a small minority who had placed great hopes’ in liberation (Rocker, 1937, pp. 211–12). On the other hand, the ‘great masses were, as always, forced into the so called “wars of liberation” and simply followed their hereditary princes with dutiful obedience’ (ibid.). Auerbach finds Germany at this time generally ‘passive, defensive, and irresponsive’, and ‘the youthful German intellectual movement’ hostile towards the French Revolution (Auerbach, 2003, p. 446). Locating Goethe’s antipathy towards the ‘dawning tendencies of the nineteenth century’ in his ‘solid bourgeois background’ and the elite German attitude, Auerbach is ‘yet tempted to imagine’ Goethe’s effect on German literature and society had he, ‘with his vigorous sensuality, his mastery of life, his far-reaching and untrammeled vision, . . . devoted more interest and constructive effort to the emerging modern structure of life’ (ibid., p. 452). However, Goethe’s prescience regarding the interrelationship of political consciousness and liberation is striking:

You speak of the awakening and arising of the German people and are of the opinion that this people will not again allow itself to be deprived of what it has achieved and so dearly paid for with its blood and treasure, namely freedom. But is the people really awake? Does it know what it wants and what it can achieve? And is every movement an uprising? Does he arise who is forcibly stirred up? We are not speaking here of the thousands of educated youth and men. We are speaking here of the mass, of the millions. And what is it that has been achieved or won? You say Freedom. Perhaps it would be better if you were to call it liberation, that is not from the yoke of the stranger, but from a strange yoke (Rocker, 1937, p. 212).

Germany’s ‘inner confusion’, continuing well into the 20th century, was not dispelled by its travails of foreign and domestic tyranny. Militarism inhabited its national consciousness, the ‘product of a victorious war’ (Kohn, 1963, p. 235). The minority of Germans ‘who in 1866 and 1877 rejected Bismarck’s ethos, doubted his wisdom’, remained ineffective before the majority which ‘welcomed the proud edifice without scrutinizing its foundation’ (ibid.).

The ‘antagonistic other’ developed into a constituent of the national identity and became almost universal in Europe. The liberals could not have stemmed the ‘blood-dimmed tide’ even if they had wanted to, and by the end of the 19th century the new states of Eastern Europe, the Serbians, Rumanians and Bulgarians, were trying to subdue their neighbours militarily, displaying the ‘theatrical nature of the first apings of western civilisation by spirited races just emerging from slavery’ (G. B. Shaw, 1938, p. 734).

The First World War was caused by, and in turn reinforced, chauvinistic nationalism. Some European empires disintegrated, new nations like Finland and Estonia took birth, and some, like Poland, were enlarged. Soviet Russia’s embryonic sympathy for racial minorities asphyxiated in the socialist empire, ‘prison-house of nationalities’, founded on neo–pan-Slavism. European rule of Asia and Africa withstood the growing demands for freedom. The anti-colonial and postcolonial sensibilities will be discussed subsequently.

Language, Region and Nation

Language is not merely an intellectual construct with ideological underpinnings, but an attempt to express the experience of a people within a particular geographical location. Language is like a mirror reflecting the self-image of a people and the many shades of its life:

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1. The National, the Regional and the Universal
• 2. Tagore in the Context of Postcolonialism
• 3. Vivekananda: Man-Making and Universal Toleration
• 4. In Conclusion
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Index