Tagore, Gandhi and the National Question (original) (raw)

""Tagore’s anti-nationalism was born out of the violence that engulfed the anti-partition movement in Bengal between 1905 and 1908. Lord Curzon sought to divide the Hindu and Muslim communities of the large and politically active Bengal Presidency, and in response the swadeshi (self-sufficiency) movement in Bengal anticipated Gandhi with its boycott of British goods. Tagore had initially supported the movement but soon turned away in disgust after it spiralled into violence. This was a seminal moment in Tagore’s life. He was less interested in the conditions under which it becomes conceivable for people to act violently than any socialist might have been. Tagore’s belief was rather that freedom cannot solely be attained through the instrumental rationality of politics, of which violence is a subset. The desire to shape or seize control of structures of power – state, army, police, even the economy – is insufficient unless we are willing to also look within at values, beliefs and culture. ‘The way of bloody revolution’, Tagore added, ‘is not the true way’: ‘a political revolution is like taking a short cut to nothing’. This could be seen as Tagore’s answer to the ‘two vital questions about the search for liberation in our times’ that Ashis Nandy has pointed to: ‘namely, why dictatorships of the proletariat never end and why revolutions always devour their children’. Both Tagore and Gandhi agreed that there was to be nothing passive about resistance, but Tagore could not tolerate the negativity of book burning or education boycotts, which he saw as an offence against a higher ideal of cooperation. The differences between Tagore and Gandhi have been over-stated at times, but differences there were and their debates through the 1920s and 1930s about the nature of freedom deserve much more scholarly attention. Amartya Sen has written that Tagore ‘never criticized Gandhi personally’. This isn’t quite true. In a letter sent to his English missionary friend C. F. Andrews in July 1915, Tagore made the following and striking claim: ‘only a moral tyrant like Gandhi can think that he has the dreadful power to make his ideas prevail through the means of slavery’. When Andrews came to publish Tagore’s letter in his 1928 book Letters to a Friend he deleted Gandhi’s name and left only the generic ‘tyrant’. It suggests to us that in spite of Tagore’s obvious admiration for Gandhi; in spite of the fact that it was Tagore himself who first gave Gandhi the name mahatma – the ‘great soul’ – he held deep reservations about Gandhi’s methods. ‘It is absurd’, Tagore wrote ‘to think that you must create slaves to make your ideas free’. Tagore sometimes saw Gandhi’s willingness to enforce his beliefs as a form of violence. Tagore’s advocacy of the ‘worlding’ or opening out of a creative, expressive Indian self often clashed with Gandhi’s effort to negate external influence.""

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