'My refuge is humanity': Reimagining Rabindranath Tagore

From the serpentine lanes of North Kolkata that resound with Rabindra Sangeet on public holidays to the television screen where Rabindranath Tagore’s plays and novels are routinely adapted, Kabiguru’s literary genius has seeped into the fabric of Indian, and especially, Bengali culture as naturally as water seeping into a sponge.

And yet, in assimilating the creative contours of Tagore’s work, we have come to neglect many of the discursive elements of his oeuvre, not least those concerned with the political domain.

Amidst the identity crisis of nationhood unravelling in India today, it is appropriate, even urgent, to revive the political in Tagore, to reimagine Tagore as a messenger of an eclectic notion of nationalism.

Reviving the political in Tagore

“I am willing to serve my country; but...to worship my country as a god is to bring a curse upon it”, argues Nikhil, the contentious protagonist of Tagore’s novel Ghare Baire (The Home and The World).

For Tagore, many of whose views are reflected directly in the character of Nikhil, nationalism cannot be reduced to the narrow confines of identity politics. As someone who had described his own Bengali family as a “confluence of three cultures: Hindu, Mohammedan, and British”, syncretic thought was central to the nationalistic ethos of Tagore. He was not a henchman for a parochial Hindutva subsuming India, but a proponent of the capaciousness of Hinduism and its intermingling with other religious affiliations.

(Mis)understanding Tagore

“Patriotism (often used interchangeably with nationalism by Tagore) cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity.” This was the fervent faith of Tagore, who lived during an era when nationalism, much like today, was morphed into a vehicle of mobilisation for authoritarian regimes across the world.

Tagore never saw the concept of a nation as defined by geographical boundaries or linguistic legions or governmental allegiance, but as a continuum of associations, imaginations, and identities.

When political parties like the BJP try to invoke Tagore for political capital, they forget that the sheer breadth of Tagore’s thought makes him impossible to appropriate. In order to sincerely pay homage to Tagore’s ideas, one must know how to keep an open mind, how to keep asking questions, and how to locate Hinduism as a way of life, not as a philosophy that can be distorted into a politically convenient ideology for polarising the electorate.

Tagore versus fascism

True political freedom, Tagore insisted, was to be found not in a romantic attachment to bygone glories but in the capacity to self-actualise through an unfettered exercise of the intellect and a refusal to surrender to the “unalterable will of the Master”.

Tagore was not only a vehement critic of the tenuous taxonomy of nationalism that pigeon-holes people based on majoritarianism, but also a staunch opponent of fascist politics that (as he observed in the Manchester Guardian in 1926) “ruthlessly suppresses freedom of expression...and walks through a path of violence and stealthy crime”.

Unlike the cohorts of fascism, Tagore avoided the trap of extrapolating the malfeasance of the few into a stereotype of the many that generally paves the way for a framing of the “other” in fascist discourse, a grievous error that much of India is still prone to committing, as evident during the communalisation of Covid-19 last year.

Cultural chauvinism, which forms an integral component of fascist regimes, had no place in the realm of Tagore, whose translations of Kabir and foregrounding of folk culture provide two of the many fascinating vistas to his variegated vision, one that could harness the sophistication of the Upanishads as seamlessly as it integrated the mysticism of the Bauls.

Remembering Tagore

Following his death in 1941, Tagore has been caricatured in the West as a sagely figure of Oriental exoticism. While the fierce republicanism of John Milton, the undercurrents of loyalism (towards the British crown) in William Shakespeare, and the streak of anarcho-syndicalism distinguishing Albert Camus have been debated endlessly, no commensurate place of scholarship has emerged to accommodate the political thinking of Tagore.

As direct inheritors of Tagore’s legacy, we must not make the same mistake of limiting Tagore’s brilliance to the solitary domain of art. Remembering Tagore as an artist par excellence is vital, but in the deeply divided nation that confronts us, reimagining Tagore as a political voice of reason, harmony, and diversity is more vital still, lest we relegate into an India where the mind can no longer be without fear and the head no longer held high.

(Priyam Marik is a freelance journalist writing on politics, culture and sport)