Remembering Rabindranath Tagore Volume - High Commission of ...

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Remembering Rabindranath Tagore
the rational judgment is the judgment of man. Man must judge between high and
low, good and evil, creed and human nature… the case of our wretched condition
is to be found in our peculiar religion and nowhere else. 16
Thus he voices that nationalism should not be Hindu superiority among non-Hindus. The
Freedom for him is seeing humanity in the Supreme Being. The Muslim participation
in Svadeśi became a great concern to Tagore. At the Bengal provincial, conference 1908,
Tagore called for Hindus to support special concessions to Muslims in order to bring about
a healthy relationship between the communities. What was demanded after the idea of
unification of both groups is a breaking down of walls, a rejection of sectarian barriers and
building of Mahājāti on the basis of broad humanism. Tagore states.
People whose religion teaches them to despise others, whose heaven is supposed
to be ruined by drinking water touched by a neighbour, who have to protect
their sanctity by insulting others – such people deserves no better fate than
humiliation. 18
To Rabindranath Tagore, the vision of united India on the basis of transcending all
barriers of caste, religion and race were the ultimate goal of a nation. His daily contact
with the simple share cropping peasants may have led him to value Indian traditions. In his
writings on ‘What is Nationalism’ 19 Tagore exemplifies nation as a mental construct and
he differentiates between the idea of a nation in the West and the idea of society in Indian
History. He further states that:
What we have to understand is that society or community reigns supreme in India.
In other countries, nations have protected themselves from various revolutions
for survival. In our country society has survived countless convulsions from time
immemorial… 20
Many of his short stories deal with the life of the villagers and his poems showed a deepening
love for his natural surroundings. The beauty, simplicity and harmony with the nature of
rural life grew so congenial for him that he idealized his life as the true Indian culture. 21 In
his famous Svadeśi Samāj address (1904), he had pleaded that all around efforts have to be
made to promote self help in the countryside through the revival of the traditional village
community, or Samāj through which he seems to have had a romanticized conception. 22
There a committee of five would be chosen by the inhabitants of each village to promote
Svadeśi art and crafts, setting up schools, dispensaries and irrigation constructions to uplift
the life of the rural community.
Unlike the other Svadeśi members, Rabindranath did not reject the influence of western
thoughts in Indian renaissance. He stated that India must recognize that it is providential
that the west has come to India and yet one must show the east to the west and convince the