Tagore and non-co-operation

http://www.hindu. com/mag/2008/ 09/14/stories/ 2008091450090300 .htm

PAST & PRESENT

Tagore and non-co-operation

RAMACHANDRA GUHA

Tagore's letters from 1920-21 reveal the mixed feelings he had about
Gandhi's non-co-operation movement.


Photo: The Hindu Photo Library

An inclusive stance: Tagore during his tour of the West in 1921.

In the summer of 1920, Rabindranath Tagore went on a long trip
overseas to collect funds for an international university he was
founding in Santiniketan. He sailed to England, crossed the Channel
to the Continent, came back to England and then, in the autumn,
sailed across the Atlantic. He spent several months in North America,
visiting cities and towns, giving speeches and meeting friends. In
the spring of 1921, he crossed the Atlantic in the other direction.
He spent time in England and in Germany, before returning to India in
July.

During this extended absence from his homeland, Tagore wrote
regularly to his close friend, the English priest and sympathiser of
Indian nationalist aspirations, Charles Freer Andrews. These
communications were brought out by the Madras publisher S. Ganesan in
1924 under the title Letters from Abroad. I recently ordered a copy
on the Internet from that superb site, abebooks.com. When the book
arrived, I noted the name of the previous owner on the flyleaf: "John
Haynes Holmes".

Delightful coincidence

J.H. Holmes was a pacifist pastor in New York who was a great admirer
of Mahatma Gandhi's. He did much to make the Mahatma's message better
known in the United States. (Those seeking more information on this
subject should visit Abebooks and purchase a copy of the pastor's I
Meet Gandhi). I was delighted to own a book that Holmes had once
possessed, not least because the book contained materials crucial to
the development of Gandhi's thought.

In the last weeks of 1920, Mahatma Gandhi had launched a countrywide
movement of "non-co-operation" . This involved the boycott of British-
run schools, colleges, and law courts, and the burning of foreign
cloth. This movement took shape while Rabindranath Tagore was
travelling in the West. Reading the reports of burnings and boycotts,
and reading also the exhortative words of the leader which
accompanied them, brought back for Tagore memories of the Swadeshi
movement, when a popular upsurge had likewise steered this
dangerously unstable course between patriotism and xenophobia.

The Swadeshi movement had provoked very ambivalent feelings in
Tagore. These are expressed in his novel Ghaire Baire (The Home and
the World), later made into a film by Satyajit Ray. Now, 15 years
later, Gandhi's struggle also produced mixed emotions in the poet.
These are expressed in letters written to their mutual friend, C.F.
Andrews, from various stops on his Euro-American tour. A letter
dispatched from Paris on September 18, 1920 noted the fact that "our
countrymen are furiously excited about Non-co-operation" . Tagore
wished the emotion to be channelised along constructive channels, and
hoped that Gandhi would take the lead in starting independent
organisations across India. If that happened, said the poet, "I shall
be willing to sit at his [Gandhi's] feet and do his bidding, if he
commands me to co-operate with my countrymen in service of love. I
refuse to waste my manhood in lighting the fire of anger and
spreading it from house to house".

Against blind passion

Lest he be accused of lack of patriotism, Tagore added: "It is not
that I do not feel anger in my heart for injustice and insult heaped
upon my motherland. But this anger of mine should be turned into the
fire of love for lighting the lamp of worship to be dedicated through
my country to my God. It would be an insult to humanity, if I use the
sacred energy of my moral indignation for the purpose of spreading a
blind passion all over my country."

The next month Tagore sailed for the United States. He read about
Gandhi's continuing movement in the American papers, and, presumably
in more detail, in letters coming to him from India. On January 14,
1921, he wrote to Andrews that to him, humanity was "rich and large
and many-sided. Therefore, I feel deeply hurt when I find that, for
some material gain, man's personality is mutilated in the western
world and he is reduced to a machine. The same process of repression
and curtailment of humanity is often advocated in our country under
the name of patriotism". Three weeks later he wrote from New York
that he was "afraid I shall be rejected by my own people when I go
back to India. My solitary cell is awaiting me in my Motherland. In
their present state of mind, my countrymen will have no patience with
me, who believe God to be higher than my own country." Then he added,
defiantly: "I know such spiritual faith may not lead us to political
success; but I say to myself, as India has ever said, Even then —
what?"

In a letter posted from Chicago on March 5, 1921, Tagore
observed: "What irony of fate is this that I should be preaching co-
operation of cultures between East and West on this side of the sea
just at the moment when the doctrine of non-co-operation is preached
on the other side?"

Tagore had reservations about non-co-operation from the start. Soon,
he began having reservations about its leader. I shall deal with
these in my next column.

ramguha@vsnl. com