“Nationalism Is A Great Menace”

Exploring Tagore on Nationalism

Submitted By : Shahid Afreedi K C

Roll No : 817
Paper Name : Indian Political Thought- II
ABSTRACT

The concept of nationalism is being contested afresh as politics in various

countries throughout the world takes a right-wing bent. From the old
concept of nationalism as defined by ideas like culture and territory, the
conversation must now turn to more nuanced ideas and reflections of
nationalism.
Today, majority membership is reserved for the majority, while minorities
are denied access to this common ground. Tagore was well aware of the
perils of nationalism based on the Western concept of a country. He had
studied European nationalist movements and determined that the West had
become chauvinistic. We will examine Tagore's understanding of
nationalism in this paper.

INTRODUCTION

Today's buzzwords are ''national security'' and ''national interest.'' Any

action is legitimate in the name of the nation, no matter how remote it may
be from truth or justice. How many wars have been waged in the name of
the nation? How much innocent blood has it claimed? Yet people are
worked up into a frenzy when the idea of the nation invokes the same
hollow hysteria that religion aroused in the mediaeval era and still does
among some in the so-called ''third-world'' nations. 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. Metropolitan nationalism, with its robust secular
ideology, is bent on wiping out the pan-religious nationalism that still enjoys
some acceptance in parts of the ''third world,'' considering it an anathema
and anachronism. 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.

NATIONALISM

Indian nationalism grew in the wake of our

struggle for independence against the British Raj. The tone of that sort of
nationalism was naturally emancipatory since it would be the rhetoric upon
which the Republic of India would be founded. Now, the rhetoric of
nationalism has taken a turn in an exclusionary direction. If we look back
into our own history, there have been those who have provided us with
alternative narratives that warn against an egregious understanding of
nationalism. Such caution can be found in the works of Rabindranath
Tagore, whose conceptualisation and understanding of nationalism is worth
revisiting.

Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore was a versatile genius, a true nationalist and above all
an indisputable humanist who has been inspiring generations of intellectual
and empathetic minds irrespective of their religion, race, language and also
the barriers such as state and nation. The literary and artistic genius of
Tagore, which spanned over six decades, is nothing but a reflection of a
sensitive artist, a sympathetic man of letters, a profound thinker and a
strategic experimentalist. It may be considered a false promise if someone
assures to introduce in brief his all-encompassing intellectual engagements;
therefore, the author of this article assures his readers an introduction of
Tagore’s thought-provoking perception on Indian nationalism focusing the
very soul of his intellectual deliberation.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), popularly

known as Gurudev, expressed his views on Indian nationalism on various
occasions. A collection of his speeches on nationalism was published in
1917 with the same title and one of the speeches in it denotes Tagore’s
unconventional, integrated views on Indian nationalism. A substance of his
deliberation is that the true spirit of nationalism lies in its broad humanistic
concern rather constrained political strategy. The spread of fanatic
nationalism during the First World War might have forced him to interpret
and blame it as an evil epidemic. He was trying to subvert the popular idea
of nationalism which was more a political justification that encouraged
grabbing other nations and their resources.

Tagore on Nationalism

Tagore opined that the term nationalism was derived from the term nation-
state which was nothing but the embodiment of Western ideas of capitalism
and mechanisation. He believed that these ideals were intrinsically against
the Indian tradition of self-autonomy, pluralism and religious tolerance
which one would find in what he termed as the samaj.
Tagore’s understanding of nationalism, that is, its genuine
European version that took its final shape in the 19th century as an
inseparable adjunct of the modern nation state and the idea of nationality is
explicit in a number of essays and letters. In effect argues that the idea of
nationalism is intrinsically non-Indian or anti-Indian, an offence against
Indian civilisation and its principles of religious and cultural plurality.
Ghare Baire is a story of how nationalism dismantles community life and
releases the demon of ethno religious violence. Similarly, Char Adhyay is
an early, perhaps the first exploration of the roots of industrialised, assembly
line violence as a specialisation of the modern times.
Tagore’s critique of modern civilisation
finds clearest expression in his reflections on the concepts of nation and
nationalism. Tagore defines nation as the political and economic union of a
people and this union is the one that a whole population assumes when
organised for a mechanical purpose. Commerce and science are used by
nationalisms instrumentally to attain their ever-expanding power goals.
Tagore traced all the deep flaws of modern Western ‘political civilisation’
back to the nexus of the political and the commercial in the apparatus of the
modern state. In contrast, the defining feature of the Indian, as also of the
Chinese, was for him the communities’ self regulation of their own affairs.
In fact, if his essays on nationalism and on the theme of samaj (community)
are read together, a clear distinction emerges in his works between the
nature of politics in the case of the nation state and the pre-national political
formations.
Indian nationalism grew in the wake of our struggle for independence
against the British Raj. The tone of that sort of nationalism was naturally
emancipatory since it would be the rhetoric upon which the Republic of
India would be founded. Now, the rhetoric of nationalism has taken a turn
in an exclusionary direction. If we look back into our own history, there
have been those who have provided us with alternative narratives that warn
against an egregious understanding of nationalism. Such caution can be
found in the works of Rabindranath Tagore, whose conceptualisation and
understanding of nationalism is worth revisiting.
Tagore's critique of nationalism emerges most explicitly in his essays
and lectures: ''Nationalism in the West,'' ''Nationalism in Japan,''
''Nationalism in India,'' ''Construction versus Creation'' and
''International Relations.'' It is also foregrounded in his novels, The
Home and the World and Four Chapters, as well as in several poems of
Gitanjali and ''The Sunset of the Century.'' In these works, he roundly
criticizes nationalism as ''an epidemic of evil'' or a ''terrible absurdity,''
posing a recurrent threat to mankind's ''higher humanity,'' through the
canonization of ''banditry'' or the ''brotherhood of hooliganism''
(Tagore's phrases).
Tagore was born in 1861, 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 1857, only four years before the poet
was born. In 1905, the swadeshi movement broke out on his doorstep,
as a response to the British policy of partitioning Bengal. Initially,
propelled by the injustice and irrationality of the act, Tagore got
actively involved in the movement, writing patriotic songs with such
explosive fervour that Ezra Pound quipped, ''Tagore has sung Bengal
into a nation." But soon after, the movement took a violent turn and he
made an about-face, never having anything to do with nationalism
again, except to launch a systematic indictment to ''destroy the bondage
of nationalism.'' Even Gandhi's urgings to join the satyagraha
movement, which eventually brought about Indian independence, after
the protracted period of colonial rule, in 1947, could not alter Tagore's
position on nation and nationalism. In a letter to Gandhi, he questioned
the latter's wisdom, when he asked dismissively, after explaining how
in the West many ''higher minds'' were trying to rise above the
superficiality of nationalism, ''And are we alone to be content with
proceeding with the erection of Swaraj on a foundation of telling the
beads of negation, harping on others' faults and quarrelsomeness?''
Tagore's foremost objection to nationalism lies in its very nature and
purpose as an institution. The fact that it is a social construction, a
mechanical organisation, modelled with certain utilitarian objectives in
mind, makes it unpalatable to Tagore, who was a champion of creation
over construction, imagination over reason and the natural over the
artificial and the man-made: ''Construction is for a purpose, it expresses
our wants; but creation is for itself, it expresses our very beings''. As a
formation, based on needs and wants rather than truth and love, it could
not, Tagore suggests, contribute much to the moral/spiritual fulfilment
of mankind. To him, race was a more natural, and therefore acceptable,
social unit than the nation, and he envisioned a ''rainbow'' world in
which races would live together in amity, keeping their ''distinct
characteristics but all attached to the stem of humanity by the bond of
love."
He took the view that since nationalism
emerged in the post-religious laboratory of industrial-capitalism, it was
only an ''organisation of politics and commerce'' that brings ''harvests
of wealth,'' or ''a carnival of materialism,'' by spreading tentacles of
greed, selfishness, power and prosperity, or churning up the baser
instincts of mankind, and sacrificing in the process ''the moral man, the
complete man… to make room for the political and the commercial
man, the man of limited purpose.''
Nationalism, according to Tagore, is not expressive of
the living bonds in society; it is not a voluntary self-expression of
individuals as social beings, where human relationships are naturally
regulated, ''so that men can develop ideals of life in cooperation with
one another,'' but a political and commercial union of a group of people,
in which they come together to maximize their profit, progress and
power; it is ''the organised self-interest of a people, where it is least
human and least spiritual.'' Tagore deemed nationalism a recurrent
threat to humanity, because with its propensity for the material and the
rational, it trampled over the human spirit and human emotion; it upset
man's moral balance by subjugating his inherent goodness and divinity
to a soul-less organisation.
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. Thus every nation becomes
inward-looking and considers another a threat to its existence, while
war is hailed a legitimate, or even ''holy,'' action for national self-
aggrandisement or self-fulfilment. Both its existence and success, as an
institution or a discourse, is grounded in the binary of self/other,
us/them; every nation operates for itself, and the presence of the other
is but a recurrent and looming peril to this self.
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. They were never sincere in developing colonised
countries/nations, as to convert their ''hunting grounds'' into ''cultivated
fields'' would have been contrary to their national interest. 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. The logic is simple but cruel, and is sustained by a
privileging norm, that in order to have rich and powerful nations, some
nations ought to be left poor and pregnable: ''Because this civilization
is the civilization of power, therefore it is exclusive, it is naturally
unwilling to open its sources of power to those whom it has selected
for its purposes of exploitation.'' By its very nature as an organisation,
nationalism could ill afford any altruism in this regard.
One might think that Tagore's critique of nationalism is lofty and far-
fetched, or ''too pious,'' as Pound might have said; his arguments are
layered in atavistic spiritualism and romantic idealism. But he was a
practical-idealist, an inclusivist and a multilateral thinker. ''I am not in
favour of rejecting anything,'' he wrote, ''for I am only complete with
the inclusion of everything.'' He believed in the symbiosis of body and
soul, physical and spiritual, wealth and conscience. 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.

Tagore Is More Relevant than Ever Before

Tagore’s encompassing definition of patriotism is a solution to distortions

of the term which was primarily the work of Hindu nationalists of the time.
His definition is embedded with values of cooperation and coexistence that
transcends boundaries and is meant for humanity at large. This is
comprehensively reflected in his work entitled Gora which Tanika Sarkar in
her article brings out:

The novel was written 100 years ago. Many of the critical questions that it
had asked at that time remain unresolved and contentious even today; caste,
faith, freedom of country and of individual self-determination, socially
forbidden love and patriotic love. It reproduces and then thoroughly
problematizes certain arguments of Hindu nationalism: first elaborated by
late 19th century revivalists and then, in a different way, powerfully
developed in Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya’s novel Anandamath, written
three decades before Gora. In a contrapuntal mode, Gora then offers a
radically new way of being an Indian patriot.

Tagore was aware of the dangers of a nationalism that was rooted in the
Western concept of a nation state. He had observed European forms of
nationalism and concluded that the West had turned chauvinistic. In
Europe, nationalism was a sentiment that was being promoted in order for a
nation to become more powerful, especially commercially. Tagore’s brand
of nationalism sought to caution against this. His thoughts on nationalism
developed from his inquiry on what it meant to be human. It was rooted not
in the power that commerce could bring to Western political civilisations
but in human agency and its traditions that emphasised tolerance that Indian
civilisations used to be characterised by. As Rudolph C Heredia, pointed
out in his article:
Tagore’s idea of India was distinctly syncretic. He imagined a civilisation
‘embedded in the tolerance encoded in various traditional ways of life in a
highly diverse plural society’, welcoming all peoples and cultures.

Tagore’s Critique of 20th Century Nationalism

Tagore saw Japan as a symbol of hope as well as caution. Japan being an

Asian nation had reinvented itself to become a force to reckon with. It
became an example for other Asian nations and broke the myth that only
Western nations were capable of modernisation. However, Tagore also
expressed a note of caution saying that the method by which Japan achieved
this transformation was similar to that of other Western nations that
followed a form of aggressive nationalism which he believed was corrosive
and characteristic of nationalism in the 20th century. Amartya Sen in his
article wrote:

Unlike many others in his and our times, Tagore believes that the canonical
texts of India – the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita might be at the centre
of India’s classical culture but they do not constitute the heart of Indian unity
or provide the basis of it. Here he differs radically from the likes of Ram
Mohan Roy, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, and an array of eminent
19th century thinkers who believed that the canonical texts of Hinduism
defined the basis of Indianness. Indian unity, Tagore insists, is built on the
thoughts and the practices of the medieval mystics, poets and religious and
spiritual figures. In such a country, importing the Western concept of
nationalism was like Switzerland trying to build a navy.

Tagore lived and worked during a period of crucial social and political
transformation in India. He responded to its intense moments in memorable
words. A product of the nineteenth century, he was profoundly influenced
by its liberal humanistic thought and its hope and optimism. He contributed
substantially to the making of a modern India. By his own admission his
formative influences were from a confluence of three movements which
were active in the India of his time: the protestant religious movement of
Rammohan Roy (1772-1833), the literary movement of Bankim Chandra
Chatterjee (1838-94), and the national movement. ‘It [the national
movement] was not fully political but it began to give voice to the mind of
our people trying to assert their own personality’, he wrote. The ‘national
movement’ revived the Indian pride in its past achievement in philosophy
and religion, art and architecture, music and poetry. Pride in his own cultural
traditions did not however blind Tagore to the moral and social degradation
of his country which he directly experienced. Even in his eulogies of India
he was remarkably free from the rhetoric of patriotism. He responded to
European literature with a keen mind and great enthusiasm. The first forty
years of his life was conspicuous by his fond attraction for the Romantic and
the Victorian poets, and Shakespeare, matched equally by his passionate
love for Sanskrit literature in general and for the classical Sanskrit writer
Kalidasa in particular. This catholicity of taste slowly evolved into his deep
and pervasive sense of the ‘universal’ in thought and culture.

Like all the leading intellectuals of his time, Swami Vivekananda (1863-
1902) and Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) in particular, Tagore also was
obliged to address the question of the relation between India and the West.
Like his compatriots he began by believing in an essential dichotomy
between the two cultures and, for a certain period of time, he talked of a
spiritual East and the materialistic West. But there was an evolution in his
understanding when he discovered for himself a spirituality in Western
civilisation too. He located this spirituality in the West’s dynamism and
experimentation and its continuous pursuit of truth. Equally, he observed
and critiqued the West’s arrogant display of power but believed that it
clashed with her ‘inner ideal’. This criticism led to his controversial lectures
on Nationalism in 1916 where he argued that the West’s tremendous success
in science and technology had led to dehumanization and an increasing
greed for power.

Tagore's alternative construct to the NationState:

Tagore's extensive discourse on nationalism and his critique of the nation
state underlines an attempt to propose a societal fabric that is best suited to
the Indian scenario. While he criticises the NationState as ―an economic
or political union of a people...which a whole population assumes when
organised for a mechanical purpose‖, he sees the notion of samaj [ society]
as having ―no ulterior purpose‖. ―It [the institution of society] is a
spontaneous self expression of man as a social being. It is a natural
regulation of human relationships, so that men can develop ideals of life in
cooperation with one another. It also has a political side, but this is only for
a special purpose. It is for selfpreservation.‖ Tagore Rabindranath,
Nationalism in the West, Macmillan, 1917 Tagore, hence, clearly advocates
a natural form of society for India, devoid of the Western institution of
nation state and the notion of political nationalism. The absence of the
psychological feeling of nationalism would ensure the absence of extremist
identity based nationalism. Indian society would fare better if it remained
merely an Indian society, with all its indegenous traditions, value systems
and way of life ,as it had been for hundreds of years before the British
imported within India the notion of a nation state.

Tagore was opposed to the idea of the nation; he was even more fiercely
opposed to India appropriating the idea. He believed it would compromise
India's history and culture, and make it a ''beggar of the West." His
predictions have come true, because although India is now politically free,
its joining the bandwagon of nationalism has cast the shadow of western
civilisation over it. The appropriation of nationalist ideology has erased the
sense of India's difference as a society capable of standing on its own; and
the forging of links with the West has allowed neo-colonialist controls to
operate over the country both explicitly and implicitly, spelling political and
cultural doom for its people. Perhaps it is time for India and the rest of
humanity to rise from their horrific moral slumber and take note of the path
that Tagore sought to pave for the world the path of love, justice, honesty,
equality and the spiritual unity of all mankind. Though not anti-modern or
anti-progressive, throughout his life Tagore aspired to redeem modern man
from the tyranny of money, matter and machine. His vision of a free world,
free from the fetters of materialism and nationalism, is most passionately
expressed in the following poem, written in the form of a supplication for
India but meant, by extension, for all mankind: Where the mind is without
fear and the head is held high,Where knowledge is free,Where the world has
not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls,Where words
come out from the depth of truth, Where tireless striving stretches its arms
towards perfection,Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into
the dreary desert sand of dead habit,Where the mind is led forward by thee
into ever widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my
Father, let my country awake. The world that the poet envisions in the above
poem stands superior to the violent, war-ravaged world of ''getting and
spending'' (Wordsworth's phrase), of jealousy, suspicion and mutual fear
that we currently live in. It is a world of love, truth, harmony, creativity and
conscience, with no artificial walls to separate its people or to keep their
souls, or personal humanity, in bondage; in which, as Tagore puts it
elsewhere, every country would ''keep alight its own lamp of mind as its part
of the illumination of the world'' and no country would deprive another ''of
its rightful place in the world festival.

CONCLUSION
Long before the League of Nations and the United Nations, Tagore was an
internationalist who critiqued the narrowly defined concepts of nationalism
and patriotism. He wanted all human beings to be treated equally regardless
of the country or nation to which they belonged. He also did not want
barriers between people even within the same nation—the barriers of caste,
race, and religion.Tagore had raised a fundamental question: Does world
humanity need "Nationalism or Humanism"? While there has been no
concept of "Nationalism" in civilisational history as such, humanity has
crossed various stages of life from barbarism to cultural living values, from
no ownership to common natural property of our entire humanity, to the
highly corporatised one per cent property. holders against 99 per cent who
are deprived of minimum property at the global stage.Tagore's book is a
bold, rational and humane critique of the idea of "nationalism", which has
caused so much misery in the world and continues to do so.

Presently, the United States under Donald Trump, Turkey under Recep
Erdogan and India under Narendra Modi are making ordinary citizens suffer
immensely in the name of the "evil epidemic" that Tagore's words warned
us of! . In the present Indian state, this aptly applies to the conduct of the
cow vigilantes and "Bharat Mata ki Jai" brigades. Tagore could see it
hundred years before

Bibliography

1. Tagore Rabindranath, “Nationalism”,The Macmillan Company, New

York,(1917)

2. Tagor Rabindranath, “The Religion of Man”,The Macmillan Company, New

york (1930)

3. Ravesh Durgande,”Perception on Nationalism”,. The Bridge Chronicle,(15

aug-2021) https://www.thebridgechronicle.com/opinion/rabindranath-
tagore%E2%80%99s-perception-indian-nationalism-54228

4. Economic and Political Weekly- https://www.epw.in/engage/article/what-

kind-nationalism-do-we-need-today-exploring

(24-4-2022)

5. https://youtu.be/x5a4AkQ-1Mk