By Dr Satish C Aikant
It is often maintained that British colonialism helped forge nationalism in India. However, during colonial domination nationalism was consolidated in the third-world countries, not just on account of the acceptance of western liberal tradition in these countries, but mainly because of a fiercely anti-imperial stand.
Cultural nationalism in one form or the other has prevailed in different societies since the beginning of history. Yet cultural nationalism remains perhaps the most vexed, the most problematic and therefore the most vigorously debated of all the forms of nationalism, precisely because it represents the most intangible and yet the most hegemonic constituent of the nation-state. It is also true that in many colonies in Asia and Africa, cultural nationalism substantially reinforced political movements for freedom and provided a major impulse for them.
Rabindranath Tagore contended that nationalism was one of Europe’s ‘most pernicious exports’, for ‘it is not a child of reason or liberty, but of their opposite: of fervent romanticism, of political messianism, whose consequence, inevitably, is the annihilation of freedom.’ For Tagore, humanity is indivisible and societies such as India’s could redeem themselves by adopting the principles of sarvadharma sambhava (deference to all religions) or the Upanishadic dictum of vasudhev kutumbakam (the world as one family) which can be extended to political domain for a state of peaceful coexistence among all nations, and also within the national boundaries. It is in this spirit that he envisions a world ‘which has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls’.
Tagore firmly held the view that India has never had a real sense of nationalism. He said: ‘Even though from childhood I had been taught that idolatry of the Nation is almost better than reverence for God and humanity, I believe I have outgrown that teaching, and it is my conviction that my countrymen will truly gain their India by fighting against the education which teaches them that a country is greater than the ideals of humanity.’
The dangers of nationalism had become evident to Tagore in the wake of the First World War. He believed that the horrors of war should have opened people’s minds to explore the possibility of a universal movement that would promise a better future to mankind. He was particularly concerned that India must resist the rising tide of nationalism that was sweeping through Europe, which, he feared, would compromise India’s history and identity as a culture and bring it under the shadow of the West.
In Tagore’s critique, the nation is always the nation-state, which has largely been instrumental in dividing humankind. Expressing his concern over the subjecthood of India under the British rule he felt at the time that before standing up to the colonial power, one needed to set one’s own house in order and get rid of the internal divisions and hierarchies. His attention focused not only on the evils of European nationalism and colonialism but also on the fault lines in India’s traditional social structure. He concurred with Gandhi’s view that freedom would have no meaning if one oppressive power was replaced by another, replicating the structures of hierarchy. The issues of caste and gender discrimination had to be tackled first to promote social and religious harmony among the various sections of Indian society. Therefore, Tagore firmly took an anti-communal and anti-casteist position.
Though Tagore rejected the idea of nationalism, he practised anti-imperialist politics all his life. His work elucidates that distinction, in particular, in his involvement and disengagement with the swadeshi movement in Bengal which broke out in 1905, 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.’ It was well before Gandhi embarked on his satyagraha movement, with non-violent non-cooperation as the main strategy to withstand the imperial might. But soon after, when the movement took a violent turn, he withdrew from it, never having anything to do with it again.
Both Gandhi and Tagore agreed that freedom was the ultimate aim, but in Tagore’s eyes, Gandhi’s swaraj placed too much emphasis on politicised forms of nationalism as the means by which it would achieve this end. Tagore maintained that the central problematic of Gandhi’s movement was the instrumentalization of the ideas of ahimsa and satyagraha which found their ill-advised way into the boycott of education and the burning of cloth. Tagore’s break with the swadeshi was only a reawakening of his earlier muted protest against nationalism. In his novel Gora (1910), for example, he joins issue with the idea of ‘pure’ national identity. Even though the sudden withdrawal of Tagore from the swadeshi movement was seen as an act of betrayal by many of the nationalists, nothing could alter his conviction. He would not have anything to do with a movement that was hijacked by the Bengali bhadrolok elites for their vested interest, and that saw the individual through the instrumentality of an uncertain Cause. His critics overlooked Tagore’s patriotism in his renunciation of his knighthood after General O’Dwyer’s massacre of innocent civilians at Jallianwalla Bagh in 1919.
Tagore’s novel Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) published in 1915 points to the danger of iconography. Throughout the narrative Tagore tracks the symbols, phrases and icons employed towards nationalist ends, and the harm they can do. The novel identifies several of those emblems of nationalism: bonfires; the image of Bengal or India as a woman and a goddess; and most frequently of all, the phrase ‘Bande Mataram’. Tagore vehemently opposes the idea of turning the nation into a goddess for it was a superfluous deification of nation.
Indeed, by 1910 Tagore had moved away from nationalism in order to promote a ‘world humanism’ which would ultimately transcend all ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic distinctions, influenced by Rammohan Roy and the reformist tenets of the Brahmo Samaj. He replaces the ideology of nation with the idea of swadeshi samaj, of social relations that are not mechanical and impersonal but based on love and cooperation. He later espoused an internationalism which was inherent in the culture of diversity and co-existence in which the Indian civilisation had evolved through the ages.
It was Tagore’s belief that to be truly modern, we need to liberate ourselves from the constraints of nationalist ideology so that we can express ourselves freely in the process of becoming full spiritual beings. A nationalist chauvinist tends to declare himself as transcending humanity.
If Tagore was opposed to the idea of the nation; he was even more fiercely opposed to India appropriating the idea, which, he believed, would compromise India’s history and culture. The overarching ideology of nationalism often places the dominant group at the centre, pushing the minority population to the periphery. Thus, instead of a fraternity, it creates a new hierarchy and hegemony within its structure, and exposes the fracture between its rhetoric and reality. The appropriation of nationalist ideology has erased the sense of India’s difference as a society capable of standing on its own.
Today as we are into the 79th year of our independence I find myself, like any other proud Indian, in a celebratory mode; yet as one recalls Tagore’s vision for India it is difficult to brush aside the uneasy times we are living in. Nehru embraced much of Tagore’s cosmopolitan and secular ethic and advanced his Idea of India. Tagore was of the view that men ought to be free, their imagination open and inclusive and the fellowship of men could not be constrained by territorial boundaries. Unfortunately, the New Idea of India is not premised on an extension of Nehruvian vision but on its repudiation, where individual freedom has become hostage to the relentless market forces, where sacred symbols and chants are used to threaten and demand submission to authority, and a virulent form of nationalism is promoted to undermine cultural pluralism. The buzzwords today are ‘national security’ and ‘national interest’ taken to paranoid extent. As ethnic nationalism raises its head, patriotism threatens to degenerate into jingoism. Tagore’s alternative vision of peace, harmony and the spiritual unity of humankind seems more relevant now than ever before.
(The author is former Professor and Head of the Department of English, H.N.B.Garhwal University and former Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla.)
