Sabyasachi Bhattacharya - Antinomies of Nationalism and Rabindranath Tagore
NB: Professor Sabyasachhi Bhattacharya's Rabindranath Tagore: An Interpretation appeared in 2011. His most recent essay on Tagore deals with the much-discussed theme of nationalism - DS
In our endeavour to
understand Rabindranath Tagore’s approach to nationalism we have to recognize three
problems which probably hamper the current discourse on the subject. To begin
with, a good deal of these commentaries on Tagore are often unhistorical in
assuming a homogeneity in Tagore’s thoughts on nationalism; from the 1890s to
1941 they evolved and changed considerably. Unless we follow this evolution and
identify the different stages, his denunciation of self-aggrandising
nationalism of the West European model in his best known work, Nationalism (1917),
is likely to be mistaken for the sum and substance of his thoughts on the
subject. Arguably, a balanced estimation of Tagore’s outlook must include,
inter alia, another aspect: his engagement in the critique of naked
obscurantism, backward- looking and inimical to the inclusiveness of Indian
civilisation—the obscurantism which sometimes dresses itself out of the
wardrobe of nationalist rhetoric in India.
The second problem is
that many commentators, as we shall see later, have cast Tagore’s ideas about
nationalism into a stereotype of “internationalism.” When he wrote his major
work on Nationalism in 1917 (commonly used by scholars since that is the one
easily accessible in English) there were various concepts of internationalism
(for example, President Wilson’s version, the creed of the incipient League of
Nations, internationalism of the British Pacifi sts, and even Japan’s own
version of internationalism which was actually a rationalization of Japanese
imperialism). Tagore has been interpreted in terms of these stereotypes current
in the world of politics. We need to examine whether this stereotype, or that
of “anti-nationalism,” appropriately accommodates the individuality of Tagore’s concept of nationalism. The same caveat applies to the
efforts of r ecent scholars who try to assimilate Tagore’s thoughts into their
own version of “post-coloniality” (Collins 2013) or “anti-modernism” (Nandy
1994).
Third, the textual study of Tagore’s political
writings proves to be insufficient without familiarity with the context in which
he wrote, including obscure journalistic writings in those times. And textual study
is hampered by the fact that not more than about one-tenth of his political writings
are available in English. I will eschew in this essay long quotations from his
political writings in Bengali, but I will be compelled briefly to cite some of those writings when empirical evidence
seems necessary in support of my argument.
Text and Context
“The significance of a piece of writing cannot
be understood if one views it in isolation, de-linked from the context in which
it was written;” Tagore (1929) wrote thus in critical response to a book by
Sachin Sen (1929), a prominent journalist of those times. Tagore (1929) went on
to say,
It is appropriate to view in a historical
way the evolution of the writings of a man who has been writing for a long
time….It needs to be taken into account that a set of political ideas did not
emerge from my mind at a particular time—they developed in response to life
experience and evolved over the years.
It may be useful to bear in mind this caution
from Tagore against generalising too far on the basis of one or two texts like
Nationalism and making a reductionist representation of Tagore. One can
broadly distinguish several distinct stages in the evolution of Tagore’s approach
to nationalism... download PDF: https://tinyurl.com/zl5kevm
see also
Rabindranath Tagore's four-part essay on Nationalism (1917)
