Anjan Basu: The Crisis in Civilisation that Rabindranath Tagore red-flagged Is back upon us
NB: A very well written and timely reminder. My two caveats are 1) with the word back; and 2) with the positioning of the word crisis. It is not 'back', because after the Napoleonic wars it never went away; and a more appropriate title description of our time (with due respect to Gurudev), would be the civilisation of crisis. DS
In May, 1941 Rabindranath Tagore was in such poor health that nobody knew for sure if he would be able to take part in his birthday celebrations that year. In the end he did, though he was still too weak to read out himself his birthday message to his well-wishers, as he did every year in Santiniketan. The poet’s last message to the world, then, was not delivered in his own voice, and this adds to the poignancy that permeates his message. For Crisis in Civilisation can truly be called his last testament. One of the greatest men to have ever lived was bidding goodbye to the world, and was doing so at a time when everything around him seemed to be falling apart. He looked back on his own life, and tried to come to terms with the ‘profound tragedy’ that had overtaken the sunny hopefulness of his early years.
“As I look around, I
see the crumbling ruins of a proud civilisation strewn like a vast heap of
futility”, cried Rabindranath in anguish. He was thinking primarily of
his own country, though not about her alone. Two hundred years of predatory
colonial rule had completely denuded India of her dignity, her spirit, her very
life. “The wheels of fate will one day oblige Englishmen to give up their
Indian empire. But what kind of a country will they leave behind them? What
stark, wretched misery? …. What wasteland of filth and hopelessness?” The poet
agonised over how his generation of educated Indians had once put their
unquestioning faith in the magnanimity of the Englishman, in his sense of fair
play and enlightened liberalism. As that faith, cruelly belied, mocked at him
now, Rabindranath’s heart poured out in sadness and disbelief.
But this was also when
the Second World War, the greatest conflagration in human history, raged
furiously in Europe and elsewhere, and the poet’s heart knew no solace. The
1930s had been an unbroken chain of catastrophes, betrayals and disasters.
Japan, a country Rabindranath once greatly admired for her spirit of
independence and cultured refinement, ravaged hapless China in a series of
invasions, prompting the poet to denounce her in the strongest terms
conceivable. Italy’s assault on and occupation of Ethiopia (then Abyssinia),
the European great powers’ cynical betrayal of Czechoslovakia and the defeat by
Falangist Franco of the heroic Spanish Republic all weighed heavily on
Rabindranath’s mind and, even as he repeatedly spoke out against every fresh
outrage on civilisational values, his spirits sank further and further….
Rabindranath
Tagore's essay on the cult of the nation
The Almond Trees by Albert Camus
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya - Antinomies of
Nationalism and Rabindranath Tagore
Albert Camus's “The Human Crisis” (March
28, 1946) - 'No cause justifies the murder of innocents'
Sam Dresser: How Camus and Sartre split up
over the question of how to be free
Anu Kumar - The stories behind the story of
Albert Camus’s ‘The Stranger’
Book review: Albert Camus‘ 'Algerian
Chronicles’ // PDF of 'Reflections on the Guillotine'
Book Review: Albert Camus, the Guillotine’s
Relentless Foe
Why is Albert Camus Still a Stranger in His
Native Algeria?
Book review: Resistance, Rebellion, &
Writing - Albert Camus's dispatches on the Algerian crisis
Susan
Neiman - Evil in Modern Thought // Lecture: 'Hannah Arendt's Disruptive Truth
Telling'
Kwame
Appiah's review of Moral Clarity
