Tagore:Discussion on an excerpt from Gitanjali

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

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      

Let us discuss Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s affiliations to Western intellectual movements like European Enlightenment, Orientalism and American Transcendentalism. These are more familiarly reflected as two disparate Indian movements namely, swadesi and Brahmo samaj. Though the Enlightenment emphasis on reason and science supports it, Tagore does not relinquish the solace or sanctuary offered by faith. Similarly, Tagore is unconfined by Swadesi or Brahmo Samaj and shows the critical acumen to stay free from absolute subscription to anyone line of thought.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was living in vibrant times. India was realizing the value of freedom it had lost. Tagore in his early career took active role in Swadeshi campaign that emphasized pride in Indian traditions. In fact, he participated in an agitation against the Sedition Bill of 1898 and read an article ‘kantha- rodh’ in protest against the arrest of Bal Gangadhar Tilak whose clarion-call was ‘swaraj’ or self-rule (Radice:1995.17-39). He also spearheaded the agitation against partition of Bengal in 1905 which was seen as a ploy of the British to create and aggravate the religious divide between the Bengalis of Hindu and Muslim communities. But gradually he drifted to a more inclusive position, especially when the movement tended to become violent. This was also natural since Tagore would have always sensed an opposite pull in the Brahmo Samaj founded in 1828 by Raja Rammohan Roy that leaned towards Western education and emulation of Western thinking. Tagore was born in 1861 in a prominent Bengali family. His father Debendranath Tagore was the doyen of Brahmo Samaj, a reform movement inspired by Enlightenment and belief in reason. The British Crown had taken over the government of India in 1858 following the mutiny of 1857 and the native intellectuals were keen on building a constructive relationship with the foreign imperialist now. This alienated the Brahmo Samaj from the more orthodox Hindu society that clung rigidly to its many crushing and dehumanizing traditions. However, after the Jallianwallah massacre Tagore returned the knighthood bestowed to him by the Briitish government in 1915. He was identified as the conscience-keeper of India and hailed as the ‘Great Sentinel’ by Mahatama Gandhi as also lovingly called ‘Gurudeb’ or spiritual master by the general public. It is said that in 1914, after he won the Nobel Prize, Tagore visited the St Stephen’s College at Delhi and spoke on 'Nationality and Western Development of Social Existence'. In his exposition he may have suggested a solution to the problem of the unity of India. In 1920 Tagore visited England and America. In 1921 Visva-Bharati, his university at Shantiniketan was inaugurated.

Rabindranath Tagore’s father Debendranath Tagore headed the Brahmo Samaj and as a result the movement influenced his outlook to the utmost. Tagore, in fact, is considered the ideological heir to Raja Rammohan Roy (1772-1833) who founded the Brahmo samaj, a reform movement that emerged among the elite Hindus of nineteenth century propogating resistance to superstitions and social evils in the Hindu society and recommending modern Western thought.

Raja Rammohan Roy is associated with the ‘orientalist’ education policy. Radice observes, ‘Rammohan believed that India needed Western science and learning- he wrote a famous letter to the Governor General Lord Amherst in 1823, condemning a Government proposal to establish a Sanskrit College in Calcutta. In his universalism, his belief that India must learn from the West as well as from her own heritage, we see his real debt to Enlightenment, and the real nature of his influence on Tagore, who saw likewise’ (Radice, 23).

Enlightenment, in fact, had spread throughout the world. Enlightenment was associated with reason and progress. It became influential in nineteenth century since it offered hope that more orthodox Christian positions withheld from the people: ‘Enlightenment rationalism increasingly stressed humankind’s inherent goodness rather than depravity, and it encouraged a belief in social progress and the promise of individual perfectibility’ (Tindall and Shi, 537).

Tagore vouchsafed for a world where ‘the world has not been broken up into fragments by/ narrow domestic walls’ as domesticity may inculcate a kind of ‘selfishness’. A family may come to be regarded as a self-contained system. However no system can really be self-sustaining. The same is true for a country.

Exclusionary practices prove to be the most lamentable aspect of Indian life. This may also point to Tagore’s idea of the Visva-Bharati or a national university- an intellectual haven in India with a global character. Tagore elaborates in the essay “The Relation of the Individual to the Universe” : ‘Man must realize the wholeness of his existence, his place in the infinite; he must know that hard as he may strive he can never create his honey within the cells of his hive, for the perennial supply of his life food is outside their walls’ (Tagore Omnibus IV.2005.80).

He prays that the hearts of his country men may be freed from penury. Tagore did not take ‘freedom’ to be equivalent to ‘freedom’ from British rule. He went beyond and talked in terms of universal phenomenon. He asserts in “The Realization in Love” that ‘when we talk about the relative values of freedom and non- freedom, it becomes a mere play of words. It is not that we desire freedom alone, we want thraldom as well. It is the high function of love to welcome all limitations and to transcend them. For nothing is more independent than love, and where else, again, shall we find so much of dependence? In Love, thralldom is as glorious as freedom’ (Tagore Omnibus IV.2005.148-149).

Swadesi, Swaraj and beyond: Symbolism and the meaning of freedom in Gitanjali

To understand how the idea of enlightenment blended with swadesi and Brahmo and then escalated to a transcendental realm one may draw on Gitanjali. The Bengali gitanjali, an anthology of religious verses was published in 1910. In 1912 Tagore visited England where WB Yeats praised the English translation of those lyrics. Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for Gitanjali which was then published by Mc Milan and when speaking of Tagore where better to start a discussion on Tagore’s idea of freedom and liberty than from ‘where the mind is without fear’. Tagore’s verse is to be read in the framework of the colonial ignominy that evoked the National pride and the consequent Swadesi movement and National struggle for freedom. Here is an excerpt from the aforementioned anthology:

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of 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.

Possibly, the prayer is rendered to Brahma as 'my Father' in these verses may refer to Brahma, the creator in the Hindu scriptures. The poem indicates the moral and intellectual impoverishment that had seeped into the Indian society during the colonial rule. It is an effect of subjugation of the natives by a foreign race. This state of mind materializes as a ‘dreary desert of dead habit’. The alliterative phrase evokes an image of a vast arid desert where wanderers are prone to losing their way. The ‘desert’ here, however, is emphatically not a landscape but a mindset and the metaphor refers to unquestioning submission to habit and tradition. It highlights the irrationality of following the conventions blindly.

The ‘clear stream of reason’ offers a contrast to the dreary desert through which it goes and which can engulf it, if habit is allowed to supersede inquisitiveness natural in man. ‘Reason’ is implicitly compared to a stream. The metaphor of ‘stream’ that connotes movement, progress and fecundity highlights the possibility of life in a ‘dead’ zone. The epithet ‘dead’ for habit seems to be a transferred epithet. This is because it deadens the senses of those it afflicts. People who are trapped in routine are callous and insensitive- almost dead. It is the vivacity in the people that dies and not the habit.

An overarching humanist spirit informs Tagore’s texts and philosophy that dwarfs any absolute claims to intellectual and cultural superiority. Tagore was anything but an intellectual snob and this humility lends his texts a grandeur and sanctity that truly commends him as a colossal figure within the world canon of literature.

References

Radice, William, Trans. and Introduction (17-39.1984) to Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Poems. Penguin Books. New Delhi: Penguin Books India. 1995

Cuddon, JA Ed. (revised by CE Preston) 1998.Penguin Books:.4 th edition. Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Litearary Theory

Tagore, Rabindranath. 2002. Gora. Rupa & Co.: New Delhi.

Tagore, Rabindranath. 2005. Omnibus IV. . Sadhana. New Delhi: Rupa &Co. (71-181).