He acknowledged the importance of India’s struggle for political and economic decolonization.
Significantly, Tagore was deeply sceptical about the dominant political conception of swaraj as the creation of a politically free nation. According to his biographers, Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, a group of radical Indians even conspired to assassinate him when, in 1916, he visited the USA. In India and in the other countries where he lectured on nationalism, he was regularly subjected to severe criticism by the press. The position he took vis-àvis aggressive nationalism was obviously unacceptable to those who belonged to nationalist circles. To Andrews he wrote: “I love India, but my India is an Idea and not a geographical expression…I shall ever seek my compatriots all over the world.” Through Visva-Bharati, his international university, Tagore tried to initiate a meaningful dialogue between India and the world. In India’s history he discovered an idea of unity in diversity. For him, India was not a geographical or political territory but a culturally pluralistic civilization that had always been capable of accommodating diverse races and religions.
When we borrow this word from other people, it never fits us”. Andrews he wrote: “We have no word for ‘Nation’ in our language. On 2 March 1921 in a letter to his friend C.F. Interestingly, for him, nationalism was a Western idea whose imperatives were fundamentally alien to India’s cultural syncretism. Nations, Tagore believed, consolidated themselves through conflict and exclusion. In that lecture he offered a critique of its politics ~ “The spirit of conflict and conquest is at the origin and in the centre of the Western nationalism”. In “Nationalism in the West”, one of the lectures published in 1917 under the title “Nationalism”, Tagore defined the institution of the nation as “the organized self-interest of a whole people”. In critiquing political nationalism he found himself pitted against the dominant public mood in India and in the West. It was after all the era that experienced the violence unleashed by two World Wars. A fearless social and political commentator, he articulated his radical critique of nationalism during an era that saw the emergence of nationalistic chauvinism as a potent political force. Tagore’s biographer Krishna Kripalani points out that the historic significance of that gesture lies in “the courage with which he voiced his people’s anguish which fear had hushed”.Įven though he was a persistent critic of British rule in India, Tagore rejected the view that the problem of colonialism needed to be solved through the politics of anti-colonial nationalism. It turned out to be a solitary act of protest because at that moment the Indian political leadership was still not ready to react. He was protesting against the brutal massacre that the Government troops had committed at Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh. Tagore’s renunciation of knighthood in May 1919 was an unusual act of defiance against the world’s largest empire. His critiques of the social and political maladies of his milieu spared neither the colonial government nor his own people. The life he lived can help us comprehend the meaning of this song. Composed during the period when the Swadeshi movement was gathering momentum in Bengal, Tagore’s song Jodi tor daak shune keu na ashe tobe ekla cholo re (If they answer not to thy call, walk alone) effectively encapsulates his idea of the courage with which he struggled alone in order to defend his ideals. He tells us that what Rabindranath experienced was an inescapable “intellectual loneliness”. In his memoir On the Edges of Time (1958) Tagore’s son Rathindranath writes that throughout his life his father “felt lonely”.
Because of his refusal to conform, he had few ideological allies.
A highly individualistic thinker, he never lacked the courage to challenge dominant ideas and opinions. Through his writings and through the remarkable life he lived, Rabindranath Tagore defended his idea of intellectual freedom.