Nationalism by tagore pdf download

Subsequent work published by Tagore in English — mostly published in The Modern Review and in book form by Macmillan — further develops a coherent Tagorean position linking Indian history to a critique of the modern ideology of nationalism. What is perhaps most interesting is that, like Hegel, Tagore saw World History as the steady unfolding of an idea. The marked distinction was that, unlike Hegel, he placed India at the centre of that process. In this regard, Tagore developed an alternative conception of modernity which saw the ideas, politics and technology of the West as only one aspect of a developing historical process, rather than its core movement.

Taneja and Vinod Sena eds. Dasgupta New Delhi: Allied, , pp. Nirad C. They point towards a complicated engagement with the West, its position in the world, its relationship to India and the political and intellectual influences that it had in India.

This is so because there has been a tendency amongst some subalternists and postcolonialists to dismiss Tagore and to place him within categories which are both inappropriate and, ironically, derivative of Western terms of reference. Tagore, in both theory and practice, stands as a counterweight to this trend.

Hence this paper adopts a theoretical framework that allows the agency and intellectual contribution — derived from both textual and biographical sources — of a figure such as Tagore to unsettle some of the overdetermined and unhistorical categories deployed within the field of postcolonial studies.

Tagore was, it should never be forgotten, a poet first. Thompson noted this tendency in his introduction to the edition of Nationalism, and quoted his father, E. It may have been born out of — and still comprise — such phenomena, but for Tagore the nation is distinctively modern and exclusively Western. The nation is a force that is greater than the sum of its parts: it has a purpose, and this purposeful element is reified in the form of the state.

If we think about the exchanges between two of the most significant scholars of nations and nationalism, Ernest Gellner and Anthony D. The characteristics of that particular modernity which gives rise to nations are the regulatory power of the state, combined with science, set within a wider framework of commercial and military competition between individual national units.

The nation-state, for Tagore, is an organising system and a structure of power. Its civilisation is carnivorous and cannibalistic, feeding upon the blood of weaker nations. Its one idea is to thwart all greatness outside its own boundaries. Never before were there such terrible jealousies, such betrayals of trust; all this is called patriotism, whose creed is politics. But the advent of the nation as 23 Tagore, 'The Nation'. Tagore, 'Creative Unity'. Gellner accepted that the modern nation had it roots in pre-modern ethnies, but tried to stress the qualitatively different nature of the modern nation which distinguished it from its antecedents.

It is the nation-state, for Tagore — in dividing humankind — which most aggressively presages this sin.

This kind of formulation was never likely to satisfy anyone interested in a systematic theory of nations and nationalism.

Ultimate reality consists of a supreme power which is both immanent in the universe and also responsible for sustaining and regulating it. It is not a matter of rational argument.

It is based on the ultimately speculative insight that the ontology of love is more central and insistent to the human condition than that of antagonism. In 40 Tagore, Nationalism. Andrews, 'Thoughts from Rabindranath Tagore': Ibid. Andrews, written in , shortly after he returned to Shantiniketan from his tour of the United States, Tagore explained his ideal of love as realised in the social world: We must keep in mind that love of persons and love of ideas can be terribly egoistic and that love can therefore lead to bondage instead of setting us free.

It is constant sacrifice and service, which alone can loosen the shackles. Man as man is far from perfect, and life itself presents myriad obstacles, but the ultimate truth of love and the compulsion towards unity is, for Tagore, a primary force.

Andrews, 10 March C. Yeats Salzburg University of Salzburg, Andrews, 10 March Andrews, 'Letters to a Friend'. Any misapplication of this idea is, needless to say, my responsibility alone. Tagore put it thus: [i]n the night, we stumble over things and become acutely conscious of their individual separateness, but the day reveals the greater unity which embraces them.

And the man whose inner vision is bathed in an illumination of his consciousness … no longer awkwardly stumbles over individual facts of separateness in the human world, accepting them as final; he realises that peace is in the inner harmony which dwells in truth, and not in any outer adjustments. This has significant implications for his approach to the idea of freedom. Freedom is not a negative quality, not concerned with independence, but rather inter- dependence: One may imagine that an individual who succeeds in disassociating himself from his fellows attains real freedom, inasmuch as all ties of relationship implied obligation to others.

But we know that … it is true that in the human world only a perfect arrangement of interdependence gives rise to freedom. The most individualistic of human beings who own no responsibility are the savages who failed to attain their fullness of manifestation … only those maintain freedom … you have the power to cultivate mutual understanding and cooperation. The history of the growth of freedom is the history of the perfection of human relationship. But the important fact is that for Tagore, none of his ideas were in fact derived from these sources.

But Tagorean anti-nationalism was almost exclusively borne out of Indian philosophical and theological traditions, and out of autochthonous historical experience.

The Anglican missionary C. In late , Andrews set sail from Calcutta to Durban where he hoped to learn more about Mr Gandhi — not yet mahatma, for the appellation would be given by Tagore — and make a contribution to his struggle for the rights of Indians in South Africa.

But it was not until that their correspondence would take the vital and critical form that makes their exchange so valuable as a historical source. By this time, those hoping for a genuine post-war reform programme had been disappointed by the limited imaginings of the Montagu-Chelmsford proposals, and then humiliated by the draconian Rowlatt Act passed in March , which undermined basic civil liberties in the mistaken — though all too widely held — belief that popular movements could be controlled by state repression.

It had also led to various outbreaks of violence, and for Tagore — as for Gandhi — this was a cause of grave concern. Gandhi had asked Tagore, in a letter written on 5 April, for a public declaration of support for the satyagraha. The moral element in it is only represented in the man who drives the horse. He instead placed his emphasis on the subjective orientation of those carrying out the act.

Satyagraha was not an end in itself: its moral value depended on the ends to which it was directed and, crucially, the motivations for its invocation. For both Tagore and Gandhi, the ideal of love — equated with and intimately linked to notions of God and Truth — was central to their ideas of social agency.

Give me the supreme faith of love, this is my prayer — the faith of the life in death, of the victory in defeat, of power hidden in the frailness of beauty, of the dignity of pain that accepts hurt but disdains to return it. In command of some 90 troops, he ordered his men to expend all the ammunition they had into a large crowd gathered at the Jallianwala Bagh, a walled garden in the north of the city.

The firing was reported to have lasted for 10 minutes. The result was the death of unarmed civilians, with a further 1, injured. In the event, the narrow walled lanes that provided the limited entry and exit points from the garden prevented him from doing so.

But his intention was clear. Gandhi, 12 April, Ibid. Unofficial estimates range considerably higher. The non-cooperation movement of was thus more organised and strategic. It sought to utilise swadeshi as an expression of non- cooperation, an approach which involved the boycotting of foreign produced goods, particularly textiles. It involved not only the boycotting of such goods but also their public, symbolic destruction through burning.

The opening gambit appeared as a set of three letters from Tagore to C. Andrews published in The Modern Review in May Gandhi, 12 April, Dutta and Robinson eds. Gandhi to Swami Shraddhanand, 17 April, Ibid. Andrews, 2 March, Bhattacharya ed. Andrews, 2 March, Ibid. Gandhi shared with Tagore the belief that freedom, swaraj, was not to be gained at any price nor by any means; freedom gained by the wrong means was not freedom at all.

But unlike Tagore, Gandhi stressed the dharmic side of non-cooperation. His call to all Indians — including the poet — to take up spinning for 30 minutes a day symbolised solidarity with the poor and the downtrodden.

The call of the spinning wheel is the noblest of all. Because it is the call of love. They cannot be given it. They must earn it. It is worth remembering at this point that, in addition to founding a school and an international university in Shantiniketan, Tagore also founded a centre for rural reconstruction in West Bengal and as a zamindar he encountered rural poverty and was concerned with its amelioration.

Such concern may well 70 Rabindranath Tagore to C. Andrews, 5 March, Dutta and Robinson eds. Andrews, 5 March, Ibid. As we have seen, Tagore repeatedly expressed his belief that love must be active love, expressed within a social context. But if man be stunted by big machines, the danger of his being stunted by small machines must not be lost sight of.

For this task, aspiration and emotion must be there, but no less must study and thought be likewise. Let all the forces of the land be brought into action, for then alone shall the country awake. Freedom is in complete awakening, in full self- expression … but his call came to one narrow field alone.

If you can do nothing else for me, at least you can put these Bengali bhadralok to shame by getting them to do something practical. Gurudev, you can spin. Why not get all your students to sit down around you and spin? Andrews present, in Shantiniketan, early September Means and ends At this point, what can we say about the differences between Tagore and Gandhi?

The stereotypical explanation of their relationship is one that has, in all its dimensions, thrived on binaries: the handsome poet and the bespectacled, khadi clad Mahatma; the aristocrat and the self-styled subaltern; pro-West, anti-West; apolitical, political; modern, non-modern and so on.

In fact, they agreed on many issues at a foundational level. Theirs was a disagreement about means and ends. In a letter to C. Andrews in which Tagore sets down some of his initial reflections on non-cooperation, Tagore referred to his son Rathindranath, a student of philosophy and an ever-present confidant. Therefore he emphasised the fact of dukkha misery which had to be avoided and the Brahma-vidya emphasised the fact of ananda joy to be attained. The latter cult also needs for its fulfilment the discipline of self-abnegation, but it holds before its view the idea of Brahma, not only at the end but all through the process of realisation.

The abnormal type of asceticism to which Buddhism gave rise in India revelled in celibacy … but the forest life of Brahmana was not antagonistic to the social life of man, but harmonious with it. Love is the ultimate truth of the soul. It would naturally bring out violent and dark forces. The argument can easily be made. The realism of Western modernists was admired as a cutting edge by means of which a poet or writer living and working under the colonial modernity of Calcutta could dig into the nitty-gritty of everyday life.

Realism in literature became the twin of social reform in politics, illuminating the social 83 Rabindranath Tagore to C. Although novels such as The Home and the World and Gora sought to deal with the social world of modern Calcutta, the messages were complicated; often ambivalent about aspects of Indian family life, they could also have been said to lack a proper grip upon the pain and hardship of everyday life under colonialism.

But from the perspective of intellectual history — if recovering past thought for its own sake is one of its objectives — then far more is lost than gained by deploying such politicised categories against Tagore. I have already referred at some length to the importance Tagore placed on social endeavour.

In light of this it is hard to sustain the charge of a callous indifference to the poor. Moreover, on the specific issue of caste and social reform, both Gandhi and Tagore adopted ambivalent positions.

In spite of his well-known opposition to untouchability, Gandhi in fact wrote and spoke frequently in support of Varna and of caste, though he drew a distinction between the two. Varna was a simpler fourfold division of society into a priesthood Brahmin , a warrior cadre Kshatriya , a commercial or business group Vaishya and manual labourers Shudra.

The beauty of the caste system is that it does not base itself upon distinctions of wealth [or] possessions … caste is but an extension of the principle of the family. He saw it as highly inefficient for people to be allocated to occupation by virtue of birth and felt that the persistence of hereditary occupations was destructive of an innovative quality of mind. The idea of Varna, Tagore claimed, where some were assigned lowly, and others high, occupations according to a hereditary principle, restricted human freedom.

At present, the ideals, education, 88 Harijan, 28 September, Mohandas K. But it also reached down to his attitude to society, custom and religion: the ultimate good for Tagore was the freedom to realise the inner truth of man, and anything that prevented this — including the thoughtless and unquestioning repetition of dead custom — was to be resisted. As I have suggested, Tagore felt that the pursuit of swaraj that made Western political forms its objective, and which was motivated by negative forces contempt for the British, the destruction of cloth and so on was unacceptable.

To this end he deplored the compulsions of instrumental rationality. Humans also expressed themselves in the world of work and labour. Tagore did not ask humans to abandon their social identity, for the truth of love was, as he repeatedly states, expressed through cooperation and unity. But the sphere of inner self must also be defended if we are to retain our humanity, if we are to avoid alienation from our true nature.

In a letter sent to C. But he was devoted to Gandhi and Tagore in equal measure and desperately wanted the two to see eye to eye. The original letter is preserved in the Shantiniketan archives, and it is to this letter I refer here. But in my worship of ideas I am not a worshipper of Kali. So the only course left open to me when my fellow-workers fall in love with form and fail to have complete faith in idea, is to go and give my idea new birth and create new possibilities for it.

This may not be a practical method, but possibly it is the ideal one. It is the regimentation of individual behaviour in the process of the nationalist struggle, not simply the oppressive power inherent in the end goal of the nation state, that Tagore sees as inimical to freedom.

Andrews, 7 July C. However, relying on Andrews has meant that the Gandhi reference has not yet come to light. A short summary of this paper. Tagore and Nationalism. How many wars have been waged in the name of the nation? How much innocent blood has it claimed? Nation is the most desirable political institution of our time; a fictive concept, without any scientific grounding, it is still inviolable and enshrined in the modern imagination.

Competing visions of the nation are now pushing the world to the brink of destruction. This monocular, exclusivist approach, an attempt by the forces of secularism to appropriate the centre of civilization, has resulted in a cycle of retribution and retaliation, a horrific dance of destruction, opening the doors to a new pandemonium. Tagore was born in , a period during which the nationalist movement in India was crystallizing and gaining momentum.

The first organized military uprising by Indian soldiers against the British Raj occurred in , only four years before the poet was born. In , the swadeshi movement broke out on his doorstep, as a response to the British policy of partitioning Bengal.

Tagore found the fetish of nationalism a source of war and mutual hatred between nations. The very deification of nation, where it is privileged over soul, god and conscience, cultivates absolutism, fanaticism, provincialism and paranoia.

Tagore maintained that British colonialism found its justification in the ideology of nationalism, as the colonisers came to India and other rich pastures of the world to plunder and so further the prosperity of their own nation. Like predators and nationalism inherently cultivates a rapacious logic , they thrived by victimising and violating other nations, and never felt deterred in their heinous actions by the principles of love, sympathy or fellowship.

But he was a practical-idealist, an inclusivist and a multilateral thinker. The lord of poetry was also an effective and efficient landlord; he was ascetic and yet worldly; he cherished seclusion at moments of creativity but still remained very much a public figure, both at home and abroad a chirapathik, he went from place to place and country to country, ever acting as an unofficial ambassador of united India. His critique of nationalism was that of a wholesome and holistic thinker arguing against discourses couched in essentialism and one-sidedness that champion power and wealth but not soul and conscience, greed but not goodness, possessing but not giving, self-aggrandisement but not self-sacrifice, becoming but not being.

Much of what Tagore said is no doubt intellectually valid and some of it is borne out by contemporary post-colonial criticism. Critics concur that nation is a necessity, it has laboured on behalf of modernity, and it helps to bolster the present civilization; as a political organization it befits the social and intellectual milieu of present-day society.

However, they hardly claim its moral authority, or its beneficial role in the reinforcement of human virtue. Critics also view the constructed aspect of nationalism as a weakness in the ideology. It is always vulnerable to regressing into more natural social units of clan, tribe and race, or language and religious groups. Its very formative process introduces a self-deconstructing logic in it.