Remembering Rabindranath Tagore Volume - High Commission of ...

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Remembering Rabindranath Tagore
struggle for independence. Nikhil had done his best to encourage indigenous manufacture
in his estates; as a Zamindar he could afford the luxury of imported goods but preferred
native ones, his wife Bimola recounts when the boycott of foreign goods had become a
fashionable slogan. The eruption of the Svadeśi movement broke down the barriers of the
home and the world for Bimola, because its impact was felt on everyone in Bengal. At an
instance Bimola says,
One day there came the new era of Svadeśi in Bengal; but as to how it happened,
we have no distinct vision. There was no gradual slope connecting past with the
present. For the reason, I imagine, the new epoch came in like a flood breaking
down the dikes and sweeping all our prudence and fear before it. We had no time
even to think about, or understand, what had happened, or what was to happen.
My sight and my mind, my hopes and my desires, became red with the passion
of this new age. Though, up to this time, the walls of the home which was the
ultimate world to my mind – remained unbroken, yet I stood looking over into
the distance, and I heard a voice from the far horizon, whose meaning was not
perfectly clear to me, but whose call went straight to my heart. 11
Eager to do some personal sacrifice, she wants to get rid of her English teacher Miss. Gilby
and also burns her foreign clothes and she becomes displeased with her husband who tells
her,
N: 'Why burn them?"… ' you need not wear them as long as you please?'
B: as long as I please! not in my life…'
N: 'very well do not wear them for the rest of your life, then. But 'why this bonfire
business? 12
Bimola feels very unhappy that though her husband supports Svadeśi he has not
wholeheartedly adopted the spirit of bande mātaram and she consequently thinks of her
husband as,
My husband still sharpens Indian made pencils with his Indian made knife, does
his writings with reed pens, drinks his water out of bell-metal vessel, and works at
night in the light of an old fashioned castor-oil lamp. But this dull milk and watery
Svadeśi of his never appealed to us. 13
As opposed to Nikhils patriotism, even though Nikhil's friend, Sandip is opportunistic and
looks for the means for achieving personal power representing a prototype of a populist.
Sandip goes about inflaming people in the cult of bande mātaram and the concept of freedom
by force rather than inculcating the Svadeśi spirit among the people. Sandip therefore
portrays a revolutionary or an arrogant type of a nationalist, implying the nationalist ideals
that Tagore was reluctant to admire. Nikhil observes Sandip as,