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22Ân nË¡hZ, 1410

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RABINDRANATH TAGORE AND THE SPIRIT OF FREEDOM

Sudeb Mitra

Ezra Pound once wrote, "Rabindranath Tagore sang Bengal into a nation." That remark was certainly not an exaggeration, since Tagore's songs and poetry had a great impact on the revolutionaries of Bengal who were fighting against British imperialism. There is a story about the Bengali revolutionary Ullashkar Dutta, who was sentenced to death by the British government. It is reported that, "One day when the prisoners were assembled in the court room some time before the judge was due, one of them began to sing a patriotic song - sharthok jawnomo amar jonmechi ei deshey -  `Blessed am I that I am born to this land, And that I had the luck to love her.' It is reported that there was a pin-drop silence when this song was being sung in a melodious tune, with a feeling of pathos natural to one who was perhaps going to close his eyes very soon for serving his motherland. The lawyers, visitors and even the menials who crowded the room, listened with rapt attention, with tears owing from their eyes and nobody thought of stopping the young man, almost a boy, who poured out the inmost thought and desire of his mind in a melodious strain."

James Campbell Ker, I. C. S., wrote in his `Political trouble in India, 1907-1917': The place of honour in the first number is given to a poem entitled Suprobhaat by the celebrated poet Rabindranath Tagore, the leading idea of which is:
   Udoyer pawthe shuni kaar banee bhoy nai
   orey bhoy nai,
   Nihsheshey praan jey koribey daan khhoy nai
   tar khhoy nai
   "Whose voice do we hear coming from the sunrise,
   Saying to us `Fear not! Fear not'!
   There is no death for him who will lay down his life."

Tagore's poems and songs played an important role in the liberation movement of Bangladesh, which began with the historic Language Movement in 1952, when the people of East Pakistan protested against the imposition of Urdu as a national language. Tagore's songs were banned in Pakistan in 1965 during the dictatorship of Ayub Khan and a wave of cultural fundamentalism. Several intellectuals also joined this tirade against Tagore - their fantastic argument was that Tagore was a "Hindu poet" and therefore alien to a predominantly Muslim country. That was actually a great irony, since Tagore had a lifelong interest in Urdu literature. The famous Urdu writer and communist activist Sajjad Zaheer wrote that "the best Urdu writers were very much influenced by his writings and that he was the supreme guru of us all."

In July 1971, at the height of Pakistan's genocide in East Pakistan, a 24-year-old economics student was brought to a torture chamber in Dhaka cantonment. When he was being brutally tortured by the Pakistani soldiers, he sang Amar shonar Bangla, Ami tomay bhalobashi - "I love you dearly, My golden Bengal." His name was Iqbal Ahmed who later became a popular singer in Bangladesh. That famous song is now the national anthem of that country. Tagore is perhaps the only poet to have authored the national anthems of two different countries - Bangladesh and India.

Tagore's impact was certainly not confined to Bengal. He had a direct influence on many revolutionaries from different parts of the world. The famous Polish educational thinker and activist Janusz Korczak produced Tagore's famous play Dakghar, "The Post Office" with the children of the orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto. Two months later, Korczak and the children were taken away and gassed in Treblinka. When asked why he chose to stage "The Post Office," Korczak's response was, "because eventually one had to learn to accept serenely the angel of death."

Susan Owen, mother of the famous British poet Wilfred Owen, wrote the following letter to Tagore (in 1920), 
Dear Sir Rabindranath:
I have been trying to find courage to write to you ever since I heard that you were in London - but the desire to tell you something is finding its way into this letter today. The letter may never reach you, for I do not know how to address it, tho' I feel sure your name upon the envelope will be su
cient. It is nearly two years ago, that my dear eldest son went out to the War for the last time and the day he said Goodbye to me - we were looking together across the sun-glorified sea - looking towards France with breaking hearts - when he, my poet son, said these wonderful words of yours - "jabar diney ei kawthati boley jeno jai - ja dekhechi, ja peyechi tulona tar nai"  - "when I leave, let these be my parting words: what my eyes have seen, what my life received, are unsurpassable." And when his pocket book came back to me - I found these words written in his dear writing - with your name beneath. Would I be asking too much of you, to tell me what book I should find the whole poem in?

Also worth recalling, is the story of the Indonesian communist Njoto. After the 1965 military coup in Indonesia that brought to power the brutal dictator Suharto, Njoto was given the death sentence by a military court. His last words in the court room were two lines of a famous Tagore song:
   amar jeerno pata jabar belay barey barey 
   daak diye jaay notun patar d(b)arey d(b)arey
   "Withered leaves of mine
   call upon the new
   as they depart"

In 1970, during the `Afro-Asian Writers Conference' held in India, a representative from Vietnam condemned the US aggression by reciting the following words from a poem of Tagore (titled "Africa"):
   Others came with iron manacles,
   With clutches sharper than the claws of your own wild wolves:
   Slavers came,
   With an arrogance more benighted than your own dark jungles.
   Civilization's barbarous greed
   Flaunted its naked inhumanity.

Rabindranath opposed all forms of colonial rule and imperial domination. He strongly opposed the British proposal in 1905 to divide Bengal into two provinces and wrote several memorable songs on that occasion. After the 1919 Amritsar massacre (when the British army opened fire on a peaceful crowd, and more than 350 unarmed people were killed and thousands were wounded), he returned his knighthood as a form of protest. He wrote to the Viceroy of India, "I for my part want to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen who for their so-called insignificance are liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings." In 1931, when two political prisoners were killed and several others were wounded in the Hijli prison (in India), Tagore strongly protested and gave a stirring speech at a gathering in Calcutta, condemning the police brutality. He was consistently critical of British imperialism. However, he also warned against any national one-sidedness. He wrote, "Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamond, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live."

Tagore's lectures on "Nationalism" influenced many Western thinkers and activists. He said "Neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship is the goal of human history." A young British soldier Max Plowman joined the War in 1914, but after reading Rabindranath's "Nationalism" his life radically changed - he became an anti-war activist. In 1921, Lenin requested the famous Indian revolutionary Abdur Peshawari to suggest him a list of books related to India's freedom movement. Peshawari gave Lenin a list of 37 books that included some books of Tagore. It is said that Lenin read Tagore's lectures on "Nationalism" in German translation. Tagore's anti-imperialist ideas were much admired by Lenin, Krupskaya, Maxim Gorky, Lunarcharsky, the famous French communist writer Henri Barbausse, Pablo Neruda (who also translated some of his poems in Spanish), and Bertolt Brecht. While visiting Vienna in 1926, Tagore met the famous communist Angelica Balabano. They had an interesting conversation on Mussolini and Fascism; this is recorded in Balabano's autobiography "My life as a rebel."

In December 1939, Rabindranath wrote to his friend Leonard Elmhirst, "It does not need a defeatist to feel deeply anxious about the future of millions who with all their innate culture and their peaceful traditions are being simultaneously subjected to hunger,disease, exploitations foreign and indigeneous, and the seething discontents of communalism." Tagore did not live to see the ultimate outburst of communal frenzy during the 1946 Hindu-Muslim riots, and the subsequent partition of India, based on religious separatism. However, his words to Elmhirst prophetically captured some of the burning problems that the entire Indian subcontinent is facing today. Poverty, illiteracy, the destructive results of capitalist globalization, and a wave of religious fundamentalism are now devastating the social fabric of South Asia. He would have strongly opposed the idea of seeing India exclusively along "Hindu" lines. Towards the end of one of his classic novels, the central character, Gora, remarks, "within me there is no conflict between communities, whether Hindu or Muslim or Christian" and he yearns to learn "the mantra of that deity who belongs to all - Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Brahmo - the doors of whose temple are never closed to any person of any caste or race - the deity not only of Hindus but of Bharatvarsha." Tagore steadfastly opposed all forms of exclusivism, narrow sectarianism, and cultural separatism. His emphasis on the lack of education as a main cause of many of India's social problems, remains extremely relevant today (throughout South Asia). According to him, "the imposing tower of misery which today rests on the heart of India has its sole foundation in the absence of education. Caste divisions, religious conflicts, aversion to work, precarious economic conditions - all centre on this single factor."

A central aspect of Tagore's thinking was "freedom of mind". The eminent economist and philosopher Amartya Sen notes, "For Tagore it was of the highest importance that people be able to live, and reason, in freedom." This captures the essence of Tagore's approach to education, politics, and culture. He would have definitely agreed with the Enlightenment idea that "education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water but, rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way," so eloquently expressed by Noam Chomsky. He worked tirelessly to put in practice his humanistic ideas on education in his school at Santiniketan. He thought much and wrote extensively on education. In this context, it is important to recall his views on the Soviet Union. He was greatly impressed by the Soviet government's commitment to spread basic education to all people. He wrote, "In stepping on the soil of Russia, the first thing that caught my eye was that in education, at any rate, the peasant and the working classes have made such enormous progress in these few years that nothing comparable has happened even to our highest classes in the course of the last hundred and fifty years." However, Tagore did not fail to see the authoritarian aspects in Soviet society and he was sharply critical of them. Again, the emphasis was on "freedom of thought". He said, "I must ask you: are you doing your ideal a service by arousing in the minds of those under your training anger, class-hatred, and revengefulness against those whom you consider to be your enemies? Freedom of mind is needed for the reception of truth; terror hopelessly kills it . . . For the sake of humanity I hope you may never create a vicious force of violence, which will go on weaving an interminable chain of violence and cruelty. . . You have tried to destroy many of the other evils of the czarist period. Why not try to destroy this one also?" As we all know, his comradely warnings turned out to be quite accurate. His emphasis on "freedom of mind" reminds us of the very sympathetic criticism of the Bolsheviks by the outstanding libertarian Marxist intellectual and activist Rosa Luxemburg. She warned (very early) that freedom only for the supporters of a Party, however numerous they may be, is no freedom at all, and added, "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently."

I should add that Tagore was widely read in the Soviet Union and his great humanist ideas were very much respected. The outstanding Soviet scholar, P. S. Kogan summarized it well: "It must have seemed that Tagore, avoiding all political struggle, absorbed in his deep meditation, must be foreign to us and far away from our life, which is spent in an atmosphere of stormy political discussions and feverish reconstructions. But it is an error. A thinker, reflecting on the Eternal, and a Revolution full of today's interest and immediate problems, are not enemies. There is no rupture between them, and somewhere high up on the last summit they will hold a friendly meeting. Our Revolution does not reject the hope of `a golden age', of a future brotherhood of humanity, the idea which during many thousand years animated all religions and also the best representatives of humanity . . . That is why the songs of Tagore are resounding in our hearts as a beautiful call for liberation."

Rabindranath Tagore never belonged to any particular school of political thought. He was a great humanist in the loftiest sense of that word. Nothing, perhaps, expresses his humanist ideals as clearly as this poem in Gitanjali:
   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 best way to remember Tagore, is not to treat him as an icon, or a "gurudev," or a "mystic from the East," but to be inspired by his great creative genius, and to strive to inherit from him the best in him - his moral passion, his tenacity, his amazing ability to constantly surpass himself, his steadfast belief in the importance of freedom of thinking, and his unwavering faith in humanity. His voice can be heard in his own words:
   Mor naam ei boley khhyato hok,
   Ami tomaderi lok
   "Let my name be known to you
   As one of your own people."

References:
Nationalism, by Rabindranath Tagore.
Democracy and Education, by Noam Chomsky (article).
The Russian Revolution, by Rosa Luxemburg.
The Golden Book of Tagore, edited by Ramananda Chatterjee.
A Tagore Reader, edited by Amiya Chakravarty.
Tagore and His India, by Amartya Sen (article).
Rabindranath Tagore - Selected Poems, translated by William Radice.
Rabindranath Tagore - final poems, selected and translated by Wendy Barker and Saranindranath Tagore.
Robindronath O Biplobishawmaj, by Chinmohan Sehanavis.

Acknowledgement. I want to thank Anandamayee Majumdar for her valuable comments and suggestions, and also for several translations. 

3u pwMÉ¡, 2003