tagore critique of nationalism essay

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The Patriotic Gurudev: Tagore’s Nationalism

ESSAY by Anurag Advani

The last sun of the century sets amidst the blood-red clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred. The naked passion of the self-love of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the clash of steel and howling verses of vengeance. The hungry self of the Nation shall burst in a violence of fury from its shameless feeding. For it has made the world its food. And licking it, crunching it and swallowing it in big morsels, It swells and swells Till in the midst of its unholy feast descends the sudden shaft of heaven piercing its heart of grossness. -Extract from Rabindranath Tagore’s poem, “The Sunset of the Century” (1899)

This poem was written on the last day of the nineteenth century. Following this first stanza, it goes on to lament the plight of Tagore’s motherland. In it, he notes that human greed, manifest in the “self-love of the Nation”, is responsible for the crimson light on the horizon that indicates a burning pyre instead of a peace-filled dawn. He pleads to his country to be content and embrace humility, non-aggression, and meekness. He views these as the antitheses of nationalism, which symbolizes, pride, power, and aggression for him The poem ends on this note—“… know that what is huge is not great and pride is not everlasting.”

It is intriguing that someone who is considered by many to be among the most accomplished Indians ever, felt so disillusioned by the nationalist struggle as to have penned this tirade against nationalism. What led the first Asian Nobel Laureate and first Indian to be knighted to turn against the “nation”? How did nationalism become anathema to the poet who was his nation’s pride and joy? Why for Tagore did nationalism imply complete annihilation of world peace? Why did Tagore identify pride in one’s motherland with carnage, destruction, and gore? How did this become the rallying point around which the disagreement between Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi centered? These are the questions that this essay attempts to address.

Tagore’s views on nationalism can only be understood by first arriving at a generic definition of the “nation” and then of “nationalism”. It has been admitted by many scholars over the decades that the term “nation” was not, is not and will likely not ever be able to lend itself to a concrete, tangible form. At best, one can agree with Benedict Anderson’s classic phrase, “imagined community”, which posits the idea of a “community” as an intangible, malleable and above all fictional social construct that is the product of a specific stage of human development. Mohammad Quayum, collating from many sources, states, “Nationalism as a political expression, with people sharing a common geographical boundary and some unifying cultural/political signifier is relatively new, although cultural nationalism has prevailed since the beginning of society.” The origins of nationalism are, therefore, fairly modern. While Anderson pins its emergence to the period of 18th century Enlightenment, when rationalist, secular thought came to acquire political shape, Ernest Gellner associates it with the growth of industrial capitalism, and Timothy Brennan attributes it to the literary wave in the 19th century, especially the rise of the novel.

It seems appropriate to begin by analyzing the text for which Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. “ Gitanjali ”, or “Song Offerings” (in English translation), is undoubtedly Tagore’s most famous work. May Sinclair opines that the poems in this volume were reflective of a united emotional appeal made “in a music and a rhythm many degrees finer than Swinburne’s—a music and rhythm almost inconceivable to Western ears—with the metaphysical quality, the peculiar subtlety and intensity of Shelley; and that with a simplicity that makes this miracle appear the most natural thing in the world.” Sinclair surmises that the poems offer a degree of subtlety that can only be achieved in a rich, textured language like Bengali. For her, the spirituality of the songs of divine love in the text cuts across national barriers and unites the world in its appeal for bridging the great “gulf fixed between the common human heart and Transcendent being”. The introduction to this text was written by the renowned Irish poet-playwright, W. B. Yeats, who was also Tagore’s close friend. According to Yeats, in this volume, poetry and religion chorus in unison and the poet, in his attempt to discover the soul, surrenders to its spontaneity. Nature comes to symbolize a child-like innocence that bespeaks the beauty of God’s creation.

Telegram reporting receipt of Nobel Prize in Literature by Rabindranath Tagore (Source: Reuter’s, London, Nov 1913)

The most popular reference to nationalism in “ Gitanjali ” is undoubtedly Tagore’s renowned poem, “Where the Mind is Without Fear”. Though written as a prayer, it is a manifestation of the idealist in Tagore, bringing out his longing for true freedom. He focuses on liberation through education, which introduces reasoning, honesty, and rationality. But most of all, he envisions a truly global society that is not fettered by any petty divisions of parochialism, domesticity, or tradition (“Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls”). Another poem that reflects Tagore’s reaction to nationalism is one that records a conversation between a prisoner and his master (probably a metaphor for humans and God, respectively). The prisoner laments, “I thought my invincible power would hold the world captive leaving me in a freedom undisturbed.” Yet another manifestation of this attitude is Tagore’s statement, “On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.” What comes through is an understanding of the world as one, where nationalism hinders rather than encourages human agency and freedom.

Published in 1918, Tagore’s tract on the subject, laconically titled “Nationalism”, was a testimony to Tagore’s engagement with political affairs, attempting to debunk the criticism that he was only concerned with socio-cultural and economic developments. The gist of the argument comes through in the prophetic statement, “The Nation is ruling India”. He identifies the chief problem in India as being a racial divide and a dehumanizing classification of society that deems some inferior to others. It had dealt with this deterrent compassionately and humanely for fifty centuries, up until the time the West “burst in” and imposed its ideas and institutions on the Indians. Tagore’s perception of nationalism in the West is one of scientific precision and mechanization that results in “neatly compressed bales of humanity which have their use and high market value”. He defines it in terms of an orderly union of politics and commerce in which “a whole population assumes when organized for a mechanical purpose”. For him, commitment to nationalism leads to shunning of moral responsibility that makes men lust for power, and their duties to their family begin to come secondary.

An interesting section in the text that is worth some discussion is a chapter on nationalism in Japan. Tagore lauds Japan for breaking out of the shackles of its old habits and debunking the Western stereotype that Asia lives in the past. He points out that Japan did not merely imitate the West or blindly adopt its mechanized model. Indeed, he believes that Japan is a remarkable amalgamation of the old and the new that has managed to embrace modernity while retaining a firm hold on its ancient traditions. The spiritual and humanistic civilization of the East was perceived as being metaphysical and incapable of progress by the West. This latter notion was proved a fallacy by Japan’s climactic rise to prominence, and Tagore felt it was the beacon of light for Asia. He argues that Japan is more human and soulful that any European nation, but states that it must hold its own against the tide of Western domination. Tagore argues, “True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste.” Japan, according to him, was faltering in aiming to compete with the Western countries on their terms. They admitted “Japan’s equality with themselves, only when they know that Japan also possesses the key to open the floodgate of hell-fire upon the fair earth whenever she chooses, and can dance, in their own measure, the devil dance of pillage, murder and ravishment of innocent women, while the world goes to ruin.” Tagore was warning Japan against excessive European influence.

Tagore wrote that nationalism is “a cruel epidemic of evil . . . sweeping over the human world of the present age and eating into its moral fibre.” This conviction emerged out of his strong belief that the West must envisage a bridge with the East, and that only through a convergence of the two would world peace be able to prevail. This view was sharply criticized by his European contemporaries, Georg Lukacs and D. H. Lawrence, in whose eyes the West was inherently superior to the East, and hence for them the fusion of the two was impossible. But it was precisely this contempt that the West had for the Orient that irked Tagore so much. In his novel “The Home and the World” (1915), Tagore challenged this Western notion of the “nation”. This “forcible parasitism”, according to Tagore, went against all that philosophers through the ages had done for the sake of global peace. The argument came back full circle to what the protagonist in the novel says—“It was Buddha who conquered the world, not Alexander.”

This still does not explain why Tagore did not identify with nationalism as a burgeoning ideology. Some historians have argued that Tagore was a true Romantic who believed in “creation over construction, imagination over reason and the natural over the artificial and the man-made”, according to Mohammad Quayum. For him, worship of the nation above all else leads to a kind of “othering” that incites hatred and even war between countries. He saw a parallel between imperialism and nationalism, perhaps drawing on British colonization that sought to disingenuously justify the dominance of the colonizers over underdeveloped regions not powerful enough to express their resistance. Further, he perceived nationalism as an artificial creation that stifles human emotion. It is a manifestation of the industrial process that sacrifices the moral man for an immoral, greedy one who is entangled in the quagmire of politics and commerce.

However, this does not imply that Tagore did not seem himself as an Indian, or was not proud of his country. Far from it; he wrote numerous odes to his motherland and his nation. One of these, entitled “ Bharat Tirtha ” (“The Indian Pilgrimage”), is a call to all Indians to unite irrespective of barriers like race, class and religion. The plea in the last four lines is worth noting—

Make haste and come to Mother’s coronation, the vessel auspicious Is yet to be filled With sacred water sanctified by the touch of all By the shore of the sea of Bharat’s Great Humanity!

But Tagore saw India’s jumping on the bandwagon of nationalism, a Western construct, as a compromise of all that its rich culture and heritage stood for. As is evident from his own definition of a “nation”, which he saw as a “political and economic union” that brings together people “with mechanical purpose”, Tagore was not willing to attach ethnic, cultural or linguistic attributes to such a community. The choice of lexis indicates his staunch belief that the “mechanical”, manifest in science, commercial and military competition, and the regulatory processes at work would only create an artificial, modern “nation-state” devoid of the most significant facet—the people’s will to unite. He wrote emphatically, “India is no beggar of the West.” Tagore’s alter ego in “The Home and The World”, Nikhil says, “I am willing to serve my country; but my worship I reserve for Right which is far greater than country. To worship my country as a god is to bring curse upon it.” In other words, Tagore was undoubtedly patriotic, but not to the extent where pride in India began to matter more than truth and conscience. This brand of radical hyper-nationalism, according to Tagore, bordered on self-aggrandizement and bred a recipe for disaster.

It is interesting to note the “contrast concepts” that Tagore evolves in order to hint at alternative frameworks to the “nation” within which people’s aspirations can find voice. The first of these concepts is the “society”, which he construes to be an arena for the “self-expression of the social being”. The society, unlike the nation, is a space where the individual naturally identifies with the other members of the community. It has “no ulterior purpose”, and is “an end in itself”. There is nothing forced or artificial about living in such a gathering. The second of these concepts, inherently more evil and malevolent than civil society, is “politics”. This, according to him, encourages greed and selfishness that, in the garb of nationhood, pass off as the moral duty of the people. It is not as though he holds human agency as innocent or devoid of all negativity; but Tagore does view the nation as a catalyst that gives more concrete shape to the selfish and competitive spirit of man.

There is an internal contradiction in Tagore’s theory. While he visualizes self-sacrifice for the sake of the nation as a demoralizing and dehumanizing force since nationalism teaches that “the nation is greater than the people”, on the other hand he also claims that “power of self-sacrifice” and the “moral faculty of sympathy and co-operation” constitute “the guiding spirit of social vitality”. While some scholars have rebuked his theory on the grounds that his own convictions were conflicting, others have pointed out that Tagore always clarified why he saw self-sacrifice as a moral act being different from, and indeed opposed to, sacrifice for the nation. He saw the nobility of sacrifice as being compounded by a moral, universal outlook that is not restricted to the narrow paradigm of the nation. It is his insistent universalism, in a sense, that forms the basis of his critique of modern nationalism.

Intriguingly, Tagore pitted the “inner ideals” of the people against the external forces that the nation superimposes on them. He then synonymized nationalism for professionalism, which he viewed as “the region where men specialize their knowledge and organize their power, where they mercilessly elbow each other in their struggle”. This ruthless competitiveness stood against his belief in universal love. According to Kalyan Sen Gupta, the latter became a core philosophy guiding Tagore’s views on not just nationalism, but on other subjects as well. It might have emanated, Sen Gupta surmises, from Tagore’s understanding of the Upanishads, where the concept of brahman is evoked to represent a universal “world soul” that Tagore interpreted as the “Infinite Personality”. The idea of oneness that accompanies this notion germinates, for him, from experience and not from mere rational deduction. Rather than nationalism, which Tagore saw as being essentially a strategy of antagonism, he insisted on an ontology of love that was inherent in the “personal man”. Implicit in this theory was his understanding of the Manichean opposition between the Real and the Ideal. A progression towards the Ideal, in his terms, was only possible through perfect alienation or absolute detachment from maya , or the world of illusion. On this basis, Michael Collins argues that Tagore’s view of nationalism is “systematically linked to central elements of Tagore’s philosophy that owe nothing of any substance to external or derivative intellectual or philosophical trends.”

Gangeya Mukherji has attempted to study Tagore’s understanding of nationalism in the context of the Austrian philosopher Friedrich Waismann’s theory of linguistic open textures, which states that it is possible for any conceptualization to be inadequately defined, and consequently different people may evolve alternative definitions. This does not indicate, however, that the concept is nebulous or ambiguous; varied definitions may apply in distinct circumstances. For Mukherji, nationalism is just such a concept that has been molded and remolded through history. Tagore always maintained that nationalism is a “great menace”, and that he was not “against one nation in particular, but against the general idea of all nations”. But this did not imply that he was devoid of all attachment to his homeland. His opposition to nationalism was really based on it being an concept imported from the West; he himself stated, “our only intimate experience of the nation is the British nation”. For Tagore, nationalism as seen within the narrow contours of political freedom was undesirable and puerile; instead, he believed in the higher, more worthy sense of “dharma”. He rejected India’s cultural isolation, but simultaneously advocated a deeper appreciation of its traditions. In this sense, according to Amartya Sen, he had a dual attitude to nationalism that is evident is Tagore’s own statement, “Neither the colorless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship, is the goal of human history”.

Surveying Tagore’s take on the Indian national movement in a historical perspective helps shed more light on the subject. He was born in 1861, a mere four years after the rebellion that had inflamed the nation and had challenged, for the first time in very definitive terms, British authority in India. He also lived through the birth of the Indian National Congress in 1885. But it was not until the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal twenty years later that he expressed his political inclinations. The movement began as a reactionary protest to the British partitioning of Bengal in 1905. Over the next two years, Tagore gave lectures and composed patriotic songs that are today counted among his finest pieces of literary prose and poetry. Ezra Pound, a contemporary American poet, quipped, “Tagore has sung Bengal into a nation.”

But this ardent support for the movement did not hold out long; Tagore realized that many were protesting due to sectarian reasons, while others opposed it and were in favor of the partition, also for religious causes. Many Bengali Muslims, for instance, irrespective of their participation in the Swadeshi boycott, were already crowding in Dhaka, which they saw as the Muslim capital of Bengal. At the core of Tagore’s ideas was non-violence. In 1906-07, many areas the mobs in Bengal had taken to raiding British stores and engaging in wreckage. Khudiram Bose’s bomb explosion in 1908, that killed many innocent civilians, was the last straw for Tagore. He withdrew support of the movement, despite cries of betrayal from the nationalists, and never again endorsed or encouraged any political struggle that showed the slightest hint of violence.

This brings us to a discussion of the intriguing relationship between two of India’s most devoted sons: Tagore and Gandhi. The link between them was established through a common friend, the erudite missionary and social reformer Charles Freer Andrews. Andrews was a resident of Shantiniketan, and went to Durban in 1913 to meet Gandhi, from where he would mention the latter frequently in his letters to Tagore back in Calcutta. In 1915, among the first tasks that Gandhi, a homecoming lawyer, took on himself was to go to Shantiniketan. The two met in March 1915, barely a month after Gandhi’s return from South Africa. This first meeting set the tone for the many occasions on which they met over the next 25 years. They had great respect for each other, and it was this more than anything else that prevented their political differences from marring their personal relationship. Indeed, it was Tagore who gave the title “Mahatma” (the great soul) to Gandhi, and in return Gandhi dubbed Tagore “Gurudev” (the venerable teacher), hailing him as the “poet of the world.” Romain Rolland once described a meeting between Tagore and Gandhi as one between “a philosopher and an apostle, a St. Paul and a Plato.”

The Mahatma and the Poet (Source: Cover Photograph of Sabyasachi Bhattacharya’s book with the same title)

It is interesting to note that initially, Tagore saw the Rowlatt Satyagraha as Gandhi’s “noble work”. But he refused to support it since he viewed it as essentially an attempt to wrestle some power from the British government, and power for him was inherently immoral and irrational. Gandhi and Tagore’s voices were in unison, however, over the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre the same month (April 1919). Both unequivocally condemned the incident, and Tagore famously gave up his knighthood. But the violence also marked the tacit failure of Gandhi’s satyagraha, as Gandhi himself admitted in his letter dated 19th April 1919: “I at least should have foreseen some of the consequences, specially in view of the gravest warnings that were given to me by friends whose advice I have always sought and valued.” But the end of the Rowlatt agitation did not mean Gandhi’s admission of defeat; on the contrary, he approached the idea of non-cooperation with renewed vigor and the result was the launching of the first national mass movement the next year. Tagore responded to this in his 3 letters to Andrews, published in The Modern Review . Here, he dismissed Gandhi’s idea of swaraj as maya , and questioned the practices of boycott and sabotage on moral grounds.

In the case of both Gandhi’s satyagrahis and the revolutionary firebrands, Tagore refused to lend support, since they resorted to arms and used tools of an incendiary nature to achieve their goals. For them, according to Tagore, it seemed not to matter that ordinary people’s lives were disrupted and, in many instances, uprooted. Ahimsa , one of the two principles that Gandhi stood for, had been embraced by Tagore long before Gandhi appeared on the scene. But Tagore disapproved of non-cooperation and civil disobedience, which Gandhi deployed as tactics in order to mobilize masses and lead national movements. As Tagore wrote in one of his letters to Andrews, “I refuse to waste my manhood in lighting the fire of anger and spreading it from house to house.” It is quite ironic that Tagore did not identify with the ideology of movements guided by the Gandhian notion of non-violence, on grounds of the alleged use of violence.

The difference in their outlooks was especially marked in their disagreement over the road ahead for India. Gandhi, as is well known, espoused political freedom and self-governance as the immediate aim for India. Tagore, however saw the bigger goal as being “steady purposeful education” that would help uplift the Indian masses. Tagore did not sense the need for a “blind revolution” to overthrow colonial rule and gain independence. What he emphasized more was finding solutions to the socio-cultural problems that India was faced with. He believed that the eradication of social evils was only possible through the dissemination of education that would help bring modernization to alleviate the poor, and cultivate freedom of thought and imagination. This was his aim behind the founding of Shantiniketan, a school cum international university where lessons were taught in the open air, harmony with nature was realistically practiced, and education of girls was actively undertaken. The aim of the institution, as Tagore himself expressed in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1913, was to “make it living and representative of the undivided humanity of the world”. An alternative that was a polar opposite to the prevalent system of education was thus offered. Tagore also set up a centre for rural reconstruction in West Bengal.

In terms of the recognition of India’s backwardness, according to Tagore, the most pressing issue was the caste system. He and Gandhi, though both agreed on it being a social evil, differed in their interpretation of it. For Gandhi, there was a marked difference between varna and caste. He saw the first of these as acceptable and even desirable, since it was “the best form of insurance for happiness and for religious pursuit” (Gandhi in his book, “My Varnashrama Dharma”). Caste, according to him, was a corruption of this tradition that helped organize society and helped conserve social virtues. Tagore disagreed strongly, since he felt caste and varna were both responsible for retarding social progress and restricting human freedom. It demeaned human agency and the application of the mind by reducing them to machines and preventing economic mobility. It aided, and was perpetuated by, illiteracy, poverty, and a limited scope of thought.

Tagore particularly criticized Gandhi for popularizing the charkha (or spinning wheel) as the symbol of liberation and autonomy for India. Gandhi had picked on this machine since it was a metaphor for the dignity of labor that stood for technological innovation, employment generation, and a subtle but visible means of identifying with the impoverished masses. But Tagore noted numerous loopholes in this Gandhian strategy. For one, it simplified and indeed denigrated India’s diversity by applying a homogeneous solution to all its problems. By coercing everyone to take to spinning on the charkha , Tagore felt Gandhi was curbing human talent and regimenting in an almost military fashion. Most importantly, Tagore felt the real problem with the charka was that it was in essence an attempt to regulate and stunt the “truth” that stems from unrestricted creative thought. In this sense, Tagore felt the charkha inhibited rather than foregrounded the human capacity for freedom.

One cannot deny that both Gandhi and Tagore agreed on freedom as being the ultimate aim for India. However, for Tagore, Gandhi’s conception of swaraj in a political dimension diminished its worth and reduced its chance of achieving real success as measured in terms of assuring permanent peace. By adopting politicized forms of nationalism as the means by which it would achieve this end, Gandhi was attributing negative connotations to satyagraha , even hatred in some cases. This, according to Tagore, “would naturally bring out violent and dark forces” (Collins). Instead, Tagore believed that freedom lies within the soul. Most of all, he stressed on the unleashing of the “creative impulse” that would be the sole means of expressing human freedom and liberation.

Unlike what the three Gandhian movements, especially the last of these, aimed at achieving, Tagore did not think it necessary or even desirable to drive the British out of India. One of his greatest ambitions was the coalescence of the two peoples in a manner that did not give in to the divisive tactics aiming to keep them apart on nationalist grounds. He believed that India had many valuable lessons to learn from Britain, and vice-versa. Based on this, many critics have insinuated that Tagore was pro-West and was not in favor of Indian independence. Indeed, one biographer has gone so far as to assert, “Tagore loved his country and his people, but made no secret of the fact that he admired the British character more than the Indian. [For] this, his compatriots never forgave him. For this history will honor him.” On the other hand, scholars like Nirad Chaudhari believe that Tagore had a more personal motive in wanting maintenance of cordial relations with the West post-Independence— that he sought from the West the kind of recognition he was never likely to receive in India.

These accusations take us away from the reality behind Tagore’s beliefs. Perhaps among the foremost reasons for stressing on Tagore’s intellectual debts to the West is the extent to which he interacted with Western intellectuals, both in the course of his travels to the West as well as through his regular epistolary correspondences with them. Harish Trivedi points out that his sense of internationalism stemmed from his anglicized upbringing. He was “dazzled” by European literature in particular, and always claimed that he was familiar with not one nation, but two: his own, and England. The receipt of the Nobel Prize only strengthened his ties with people from other countries, many of whom came to visit him in Shantiniketan. In truth, Tagore felt India would make a mistake in dissociating itself from the rest of the world, since a lack of engagement with other countries would make it insular. This would amount to an appropriation of a brand of “provincial nationalism” that would tend to isolate India and make diplomatic foreign relations impossible to achieve.

And yet, we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that Tagore epitomized Indian heritage (he was, after all, the same man who composed what went on to become India’s national anthem). In this sense no one could have been more against cultural westernization than him. As Michael Collins writes, “in contradistinction to those who have accentuated a ‘derivative’ element of Tagore’s thinking, Tagore’s philosophical critique of nationalism was firmly grounded, above all else, in a critical reading of Indian traditions, particularly in evidence in Tagore’s deployment of his Brahmo inheritance and the ideas of the Upanishads .”

Hence, the liberal humanism of Tagore underlined his conceptualization of nationalism. He was an idealist par excellence whose global vision encompassed people of all races. This conviction foregrounded his rejection of the notion of the concept of “nationhood” prevalent in the West. As is evident from his poems in the “ Gitanjali ” and his tract on “Nationalism”, a pervading sense of world unity was more important than the promulgation of parochial interests. India, for Tagore, was a distinct civilization with a society seeped in historical tradition that must not attempt to imitate the parameters set by the West. It must not lose sight of the gargantuan task before it—coming to terms with its diversity and its multi-ethnic character. This, along with spiritual upliftment, socio-economic progress especially through education, and morality, were worthier causes than sacrificing one’s life for one’s homeland. Even Gandhi, whose several divergences from Tagore’s thoughts have been noted above, agreed at a very basic level with his precepts. Both espoused the sagacious philosophy of oneness and harmonious coexistence that, irrespective of national interests, must embrace all forms of humanity.

Therefore, when Gandhi wrote the following in 1940, he was echoing a nation’s sentiment: “In the death of Rabindranath Tagore, we have not only lost the greatest poet of the age, but an ardent nationalist who was also a humanitarian.”

Collins, Michael. “Rabindranath Tagore and Nationalism: An Interpretation” in University of Heidelberg Papers in South Asia and Comparative Politics, 2008

Mukherji, Gangeya. “Open Texture of Nationalism: Tagore as Nationalist” in Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Vol. 2 No. 4, 2010

Sinclair, May. “The Gitanjali: Or Song-Offerings of Rabindra Nath Tagore” in The North American Review, Vol. 197 No. 69, May 1913. pp. 659-676

Tagore, Rabindranath. Nationalism, Macmillan and Co. Limited, St. Martin’s Street, London, 1918

–. “Gitanjali” (Song Offerings), Macmillan and Co. Limited, St. Martin’s Street, London, 1913

Trivedi, Harish. “Nationalism, Internationalism and Imperialism: Tagore on England and the West” in G. R. Taneja and Vinod Sena (eds.), Literature East and West: Essays Presented to R. K. Dasgupta, Allied Publishers, New Delhi, 1995. pp. 163-176

Quayum, Mohammad A. Imagining ‘One World’: Rabindranath Tagore’s Critique of Nationalism, International Islamic University Malaysia, 2004

Yeats, W. B. Introduction to “Gitanjali”, September 1912

Anurag Advani (MAPH ’15) is a 2014 Tata Scholar. He graduated in History from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi in May 2014. His interest is piqued by a range of subjects, among which are world (particularly medieval Indian) history, fiction, rendering theatrical performances, and the study of gender identities. In addition, he likes to read and listen to poetry, and some of his poems have been published.

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Tagore’s ‘nationalism’: much more than a critique of it.

An excerpt from Anuradha Roy’s essay on the seminal text, from the anthology ‘Explorations in Colonial Bengal’, edited by Achintya Kumar Dutta

GN Bureau | December 26, 2023

• #Nationalism
• #Rabindranath Tagore

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On Nationalism, by Tagore

Rabindranath tagore’s essay ‘nationalism in india’ and his poem ‘the sunset of the century’ use prose and verse to reveal insights about ‘nationalism’, ‘freedom’ and indian and world history that are possibly even more relevant today than they were over a century ago., editor's note.

Nationalism – comprising three essays or lectures, and a poem in English by Rabindranath Tagore – was first published in 1917. The book was a product of Tagore’s speaking tours in the United States of America and Japan. We are producing the last essay, titled ‘Nationalism in India’ here for you, as well as Tagore’s own translation of a poem written in Bengali on the last day of the nineteenth century. The poem is self-explanatory. But here is a quick summary and look at the primary themes of the essay.

Tagore’s critique of nationalism, that he sees as a primarily Western construct, is severe, uncompromising and astute. He emphasises “the moral power of love” and “vision of spiritual unity” and says that only those “who have the least feeling of enmity against aliens” and “the sympathetic insight to place themselves in the position of others” will be the “fittest to take their permanent place in the age that is lying before us”. “Nationalism is a great menace,” he writes. “It is the particular thing which for years has been at the bottom of India’s troubles.” Also: “It is my conviction that my countrymen will gain truly their India by fighting against that education which teaches them that a country is greater than the ideals of humanity.”

But besides this key theme, which he develops, as well as other themes discussed below, the essay is also full of observations and insights that are priceless. For instance, his observation about how “all the great nations of Europe have their victims in other parts of the world”. This, according to Tagore, not only deadens their “moral sympathy” but also their “intellectual sympathy” that is so necessary for understanding people different from those you’re familiar with. This is possibly why, he writes, “Englishmen can never truly understand India” whereas Germany or France have produced a greater number of scholars who have studied Indian literature and philosophy with “sympathetic insight and thoroughness”. Also that America has the responsibility of, and the potential for (do note that this was in the 1910s), “a great future because you are untrammeled by the grasping miserliness of a past”. Also how India is “many countries packed in one geographical receptacle”. “It is just the opposite of what Europe truly is, namely one country made into many.”

Tagore’s wisdom about not just India and its place in the world but also other countries came, possibly, not just from his scholarship but from his extensive travel. Between 1878 and 1932, Tagore had been to more than thirty countries on five continents.

Importantly, Tagore delves into the meaning of freedom in this essay. His vision of freedom, coming from the man who has written perhaps one of the best known poems on freedom – ‘Where the mind is without fear’ – is revealing, to say the least. Tagore stresses on the importance of freeing the mind, not just from any external force but from greed and hatred- i.e. from the mind itself. Else we risk living in a “world of abnormality” where “our strength is not health and our liberty is not freedom”. Without this, mere ‘political freedom’ will be as futile to us as an automobile is to a person who isn’t free to use it to go anywhere. “In the so-called free countries,” he writes. “The majority of the people are not free, they are driven by the minority to a goal which is not even known to them.” Yet, still, this majority “create huge eddies with their passions and they feel dizzily inebriated with the mere velocity of their whirling movement, taking that to be freedom”.

Tagore then expands this argument, broadening it from the personal to the social. In a brief but illuminating history of the Indian freedom struggle and Indian National Congress, he attacks the approach of both the moderates as well as the extremists. He chides Indian nationalists for not realizing that India’s “social inadequacy”, not “historical surprises that burst upon us from outside”, is responsible for her political enslavement. “What would we do if, for any reason, England was driven away? We should simply be victims for other nations. The same social weaknesses would prevail.” At the heart of this “social inadequacy”, according to Tagore, is India’s caste system as well as the “blind and lazy habit of relying upon the authority of traditions that are incongruous anachronisms”. To strive for political freedom without addressing India’s social ills, tantamounts to building “a miracle of freedom upon the quicksand of social slavery”.

“In India there is no common birthright,” Tagore writes, summing up in one line the crux of the malaise that continues to ail our country today. Also pertinent to today, is this forceful line: “The social habit of mind which impels us to make the life of our fellow-beings a burden to them where they differ from us even in such a thing as their choice of food is sure to persist in our political organization and result in creating engines of coercion to crush every rational difference which, is the sign of life.”

Tagore compares the social inequality and crime of caste divisions in India to the crimes the West committed by nearly eradicating the native populations of the Americas and Australia, to the curse of racism in the United States, and to the anti-asiatic agitations in Western countries that look to deprive foreigners from earning a living in these lands. “You say this is human nature,” he writes. “And India also thought she knew human nature when she strongly barricaded her race distinctions by the fixed barriers of social gradations. But we have found out to our cost that human nature is not what it seems, but what it is in truth; which is in its infinite possibilities.”

Tellingly, Tagore also signals the blindness of the educated Indian elite with regard to India’s social needs. Likening the Indian society to “a man whose legs have become shrivelled and useless”, he claims the approach of “educated community of India” is like this man “trying to delude himself that these limbs have grown still because they have attained their ultimate salvation, and all that is wrong about him is the shortness of his sticks”.

He presents a chilling and prescient picture of what an India which attains political freedom without conquering its social ills will look like: “ …whatever weakness we cherish in our society will become the source of danger in politics. The same inertia which leads us to our idolatry of dead forms in social institutions will create in our politics prison houses with immovable walls. The narrowness of sympathy which makes it possible for us to impose upon a considerable portion of humanity the galling yoke of inferiority will assert itself in our politics in creating tyranny of injustice.”

A good deal of the essay, especially towards the end, is devoted to warning of the dangers of blindly adopting Western materialism and industry. In this he echoes the spirit of his own works like Raktakarabi, a play which revolves around the pursuit of materialism transforming society into a machine, of which humans make up nameless parts. “In these national carnivals of materialism are not the Western peoples spending most of their vital energy in merely producing things and neglecting the creation of ideals? And can a civilization ignore the law of moral health and go on in its endless process of inflation by gorging upon material things?”

Tagore’s position against commercialization is more nuanced than it seems at the onset, however. Admitting that he is “not an economist” and acknowledging “a law of demand and supply and an infatuation of man for more things than are good for him” he argues that the colonization of India has left her “very little outlet for her industrial originality”. His concerns are premised on this Western commercial civilization – whose “movements are violent”, whose “noise is discordantly loud” – crushing human originality and initiative. And “turning out money at the cost of happiness” stamping down on the greater quest for “Beauty and her twin brother Truth”.

Reading the poet’s essay today, over a hundred years after it was written, one may smile at his early optimism about America (“if one is gifted with the power of clairvoyance, one will be able to love the America that is to be”), which went on to embrace imperialism itself for most of the twentieth century and beyond. One may feel, definitely, that his position on the origin of caste in India is far more benign than history leads us to believe it is. But one cannot help but marvel at the vision of this polymathic genius whose non-fiction as well as fiction and poetry can – even after a century has passed – make us stop and rethink our present as well as our future.

These last few months we have found ourselves in the throes of two serious crises – one after another. The anti-CAA protests and violence to curb them followed closely by the outbreak of the pandemic and the economic and humanitarian crisis caused by the lockdown. This essay carries prescriptions for it all – an idea of an inclusive India that is not hostile to outsiders; an idea of an independent India that builds its economy as per the interests of its own masses and its own imperatives, rather than a one size fits all idea of globalisation; and finally, an idea of a free India that rejects the shackles of social rot and endemic exploitation to give all Indians common birthrights.

A line near the end further reminds us of our present shortcomings – in lockdown because of a disease that has travelled the world – and why, despite what nationalists would have you believe, many an Indian solution has to also be a global solution: “We should actively try to adapt the world powers to guide our history to its own perfect end.”

NATIONALISM IN INDIA

Our real problem in India is not political. It is social. This is a condition not only prevailing in India, but among all nations. I do not believe in an exclusive political interest. Politics in the West have dominated Western ideals, and we in India are trying to imitate you. We have to remember that in Europe, where peoples had their racial unity from the beginning, and where natural resources were insufficient for the inhabitants, the civilisation has naturally taken the character of political and commercial aggressiveness. For on the one hand they had no internal complications, and on the other they had to deal with neighbours who were strong and rapacious. To have perfect combination among themselves and a watchful attitude of animosity against others was taken as the solution of their problems. In former days they organized and plundered, in the present age the same spirit continues – and they organize and exploit the whole world.

But from the earliest beginnings of history, India has had her own problem constantly before her – it is the race problem. Each nation must be conscious of its mission and we, in India, must realize that we cut a poor figure when we are trying to be political, simply because we have not yet been finally able to accomplish what was set before us by our providence.

This problem of race unity which we have been trying to solve for so many years has likewise to be faced by you here in America. Many people in this country ask me what is happening as to the caste distinctions in India. But when this question is asked me, it is usually done with a superior air. And I feel tempted to put the same question to our American critics with a slight modification, ‘What have you done with the Red Indian and the Negro?’ For you have not got over your attitude of caste toward them. You have used violent methods to keep aloof from other races, but until you have solved the question here in America, you have no right to question India.

In spite of our great difficulty, however, India has done something. She has tried to make an adjustment of races, to acknowledge the real differences between them where these exist, and yet seek for some basis of unity. This basis has come through our saints, like Nanak, Kabir, Chaitanya and others, preaching one God to all races of India.

In finding the solution of our problem we shall have helped to solve the world problem as well. What India has been, the whole world is now. The whole world is becoming one country through scientific facility. And the moment is arriving when you also must find a basis of unity which is not political. If India can offer to the world her solution, it will be a contribution to humanity. There is only one history – the history of man. All national histories are merely chapters in the larger one. And we are content in India to suffer for such a great cause.

In finding the solution of our problem we shall have helped to solve the world problem as well. What India has been, the whole world is now. The whole world is becoming one country through scientific facility.

Each individual has his self-love. Therefore his brute instinct leads him to fight with others in the sole pursuit of his self-interest. But man has also his higher instincts of sympathy and mutual help. The people who are lacking in this higher moral power and who therefore cannot combine in fellowship with one another must perish or live in a state of degradation. Only those peoples have survived and achieved civilization who have this spirit of cooperation strong in them. So we find that from the beginning of history men had to choose between fighting with one another and combining, between serving their own interest or the common interest of all.

In our early history when the geographical limits of each country and also the facilities of communication were small, this problem was comparatively small in dimension. It was sufficient for men to develop their sense of unity within their area of segregation. In those days they combined among them-selves and fought against others. But it was this moral spirit of combination which was the true basis of their greatness, and this fostered their art, science and religion. At that-early time the most important fact that man had to take count of was the fact of the members of one particular race of men coming in close contact with one another. Those who truly grasped this fact through their higher nature made their mark in history.

The most important fact of the present age is that all the different races of men have come close together. And again we are confronted with two alternatives. The problem is whether the different groups of peoples shall go on fighting with one another or find out some true basis of reconciliation and mutual help; whether it will be interminable competition or cooperation.

I have no hesitation in saying that those who are gifted with the moral power of love and vision of spiritual unity, who have the least feeling of enmity against aliens, and the sympathetic insight to place themselves in the position of others will be the fittest to take their permanent place in the age that is lying before us, and those who are constantly developing their instinct of fight and intolerance of aliens will be eliminated. For this is the problem before us, and we have to prove our humanity by solving it through the help of our higher nature. The gigantic organizations for hurting others and warding off their blows, for making money by dragging others back, will not help us. On the contrary, by their crushing weight, their enormous cost and their deadening effect upon the living humanity they will seriously impede our freedom in the larger life of a higher civilization.

I have no hesitation in saying that those who are gifted with the moral power of love and vision of spiritual unity, who have the least feeling of enmity against aliens, and the sympathetic insight to place themselves in the position of others will be the fittest to take their permanent place in the age that is lying before us, and those who are constantly developing their instinct of fight and intolerance of aliens will be eliminated.

During the evolution of the Nation the moral culture of brotherhood was limited by geographical boundaries, because at that time those boundaries were true. Now they have become imaginary lines of tradition divested of the qualities of real obstacles. So the time has come when man’s moral nature must deal with this great fact with all seriousness or perish. The first impulse of this change of circumstance has been the churning up of man’s baser passions of greed and cruel hatred. If this persists indefinitely and armaments go on exaggerating themselves to unimaginable absurdities, and machines and store-houses envelop this fair earth with their dirt and smoke and ugliness, then it will end in a conflagration of suicide. Therefore man will have to exert all his power of love and clarity of vision to make another great moral adjustment which will comprehend the whole world of men and not merely the fractional groups of nationality. The call has come to every individual in the present age to prepare himself and his surroundings for this dawn of a new era when man shall discover his soul in the spiritual unity of all human beings.

If it is given at all to the West to struggle out of these tangles of the lower slopes to the spiritual summit of humanity, then I cannot but think that it is the special mission of America to fulfil this hope of God and man. You are the country of expectation, desiring something else than what is. Europe has her subtle habits of mind and her conventions. But America, as yet, has come to no conclusions. I realize how much America is untrammeled by the traditions of the past, and I can appreciate that experimentalism is a sign of America’s youth. The foundation of her glory is in the future, rather than in the past; and if one is gifted with the power of clairvoyance, one will be able to love the America that is to be.

America is destined to justify Western civilization to the East. Europe has lost faith in humanity, and has become distrustful and sickly. America, on the other hand, is not pessimistic or blase. You know, as a people, that there is such a thing as a better and a best; and that knowledge drives you on. There are habits that are not merely passive but aggressively arrogant. They are not like mere walls but are like hedges of stinging nettles. Europe has been cultivating these hedges of habits for long years till they have grown round her dense and strong and high. The pride of her traditions has sent its roots deep into her heart. I do not wish to contend that it is unreasonable. But pride in every form breeds blindness at the end. Like all artificial stimulants its first effect is a heightening of consciousness and then with the increasing dose it muddles it and brings in exultation that is misleading. Europe has gradually grown hardened in her pride of all her outer and inner habits. She not only cannot forget that she is Western, but she takes every opportunity to hurl this fact against others to humiliate them. This is why she is growing incapable of imparting to the East what is best in herself, and of accepting in a right spirit the wisdom that the East has stored for centuries.

In America national habits and traditions have not had time to spread their clutching roots round your hearts. You have constantly felt and complained of its disadvantages when you compared your nomadic restlessness with the settled traditions of Europe – the Europe which can show her picture of greatness to the best advantage because she can fix it against the back- ground of the Past. But in this present age of transition, when a new era of civilization is sending its trumpet call to all peoples of the world across an unlimited future, this very freedom of detachment will enable you to accept its invitation and to achieve the goal for which Europe began her journey but lost herself midway. For she was tempted out of her path by her pride of power and greed of possession.

Therefore man will have to exert all his power of love and clarity of vision to make another great moral adjustment which will comprehend the whole world of men and not merely the fractional groups of nationality. The call has come to every individual in the present age to prepare himself and his surroundings for this dawn of a new era when man shall discover his soul in the spiritual unity of all human beings.

Not merely your freedom from habits of mind in the individuals but also the freedom of your history from all unclean entanglements fits you in your career of holding the banner of civilization of the future. All the great nations of Europe have their victims in other parts of the world. This not only deadens their moral sympathy but also their intellectual sympathy, which is so necessary for the understanding of races which are different from one’s own. Englishmen can never truly understand India because their minds are not disinterested with regard to that country. If you compare England with Germany or France you will find she has produced the smallest number of scholars who have studied Indian literature and philosophy with any amount of sympathetic insight or thoroughness. This attitude of apathy and contempt is natural where the relationship is abnormal and founded upon national selfishness and pride. But your history has been disinterested and that is why you have been able to help Japan in her lessons in Western civilization and that is why China can look upon you with her best confidence in this her darkest period of danger. In fact you are carrying all the responsibility of a great future because you are untrammeled by the grasping miserliness of a past. Therefore of all countries of the earth America has to be fully conscious of this future, her vision must not be obscured and her faith in humanity must be strong with the strength of youth.

A parallelism exists between America and India – the parallelism of welding together into one body various races.

In my country, we have been seeking to find out something common to all races, which will prove their real unity. No nation looking for a mere political or commercial basis of unity will find such a solution sufficient. Men of thought and power will discover the spiritual unity, will realize it, and preach it.

India has never had a real sense of nationalism. Even though from childhood I had been taught that the idolatry of Nation is almost better than reverence for God and humanity, I believe I have outgrown that teaching, and it is my conviction that my countrymen will gain truly their India by fighting against that education which teaches them that a country is greater than the ideals of humanity.

Even though from childhood I had been taught that the idolatry of Nation is almost better than reverence for God and humanity, I believe I have outgrown that teaching, and it is my conviction that my countrymen will gain truly their India by fighting against that education which teaches them that a country is greater than the ideals of humanity.

The educated Indian at present is trying to absorb some lessons from history contrary to the lessons of our ancestors. The East, in fact, is attempting to take unto itself a history which is not the outcome of its own living. Japan, for example, thinks she is getting powerful through adopting Western methods, but, after she has exhausted her inheritance, only the borrowed weapons of civilization will remain to her. She will not have developed herself from within.

Europe has her past. Europe’s strength therefore lies in her history. We, in India, must make up our minds that we cannot borrow other people’s history, and that if we stifle our own, we are committing suicide. When you borrow things that do not belong to your life, they only serve to crush your life.

And therefore I believe that it does India no good to compete with Western civilization in its own field. But we shall be more than compensated if, in spite of the insults heaped upon us, we follow our own destiny.

There are lessons which impart information or train our minds for intellectual pursuits. These are simple and can be acquired and used with advantage. But there are others which affect our deeper nature and change our direction of life. Before we accept them and pay their value by selling our own inheritance, we must pause and think deeply. In man’s history there come ages of fireworks which dazzle us by their force and movement. They laugh not only at our modest household lamps but also at the eternal stars. But let us not for that provocation be precipitate in our desire to dismiss our lamps. Let us patiently bear our present insult and realize that these fireworks have splendour but not permanence, because of the extreme explosiveness which is the cause of their power, and also of their exhaustion. They are spending a fatal quantity of energy and substance compared to their gain and production.

Anyhow our ideals have been evolved through our own history and even if we wished we could only make poor fireworks of them, because their materials are different from yours, as is also their moral purpose. If we cherish the desire of paying our all for buying a political nationality it will be as absurd as if Switzerland had staked her existence in her ambition to build up a navy powerful enough to compete with that of England. The mistake that we make is in thinking that man’s channel of greatness is only one – the one which has made itself painfully evident for the time being by its depth of insolence.

We must know for certain that there is a future before us and that future is waiting for those who are rich in moral ideals and not in mere things. And it is the privilege of man to work for fruits that are beyond his immediate reach, and to adjust his life not in slavish conformity to the examples of some present success or even to his own prudent past, limited in its aspiration, but to an infinite future bearing in its heart the ideals of our highest expectations.

We must, however, know it is providential that the West has come to India. Yet, someone must show the East to the West, and convince the West that the East has her contribution to make in the history of civilization. India is no beggar of the West. And yet even though the West may think she is, I am not for thrusting off Western civilization and becoming segregated in our independence. Let us have a deep association. If Providence wants England to be the channel of that communication, of that deeper association, I am willing to accept it with all humility. I have great faith in human nature, and I think the West will find its true mission. I speak bitterly of Western civilization when I am conscious that it is betraying its trust and thwarting its own purpose.

The West must not make herself a curse to the world by using her power for her own selfish needs, but by teaching the ignorant and helping the weak, by saving herself from the worst danger that the strong is liable to incur by making the feeble to acquire power enough to resist her intrusion. And also she must not make her materialism to be the final thing, but must realize that she is doing a service in freeing the spiritual being from the tyranny of matter.

I am not against one nation in particular, but against the general idea of all nations. What is the Nation?

It is the aspect of a whole people as an organized power. This organization incessantly keeps up the insistence of the population on becoming strong and efficient. But this strenuous effort after strength and efficiency drains man’s energy from his higher nature where he is self-sacrificing and creative.

I am not against one nation in particular, but against the general idea of all nations. What is the Nation?   It is the aspect of a whole people as an organized power. This organization incessantly keeps up the insistence of the population on becoming strong and efficient. But this strenuous effort after strength and efficiency drains man’s energy from his higher nature where he is self-sacrificing and creative.

For thereby man’s power of sacrifice is diverted from his ultimate object, which is moral, to the maintenance of this organization, which is mechanical. Yet in this he feels all the satisfaction of moral exaltation and therefore becomes supremely dangerous to humanity. He feels relieved of the urging of his conscience when he can transfer his responsibility to this machine which is the creation of his intellect and not of his complete moral personality. By this device the people which loves freedom perpetuates slavery in a large portion of the world with the comfortable feeling of pride of having done its duty; men who are naturally just can be cruelly unjust both in their act and their thought, accompanied by a feeling that they are helping the world in receiving its deserts; men who are honest can blindly go on robbing others of their human rights for self-aggrandizement, all the while abusing the deprived for not deserving better treatment. We have seen in our everyday life even small organizations of business and profession produce callousness of feeling in men who are not naturally bad, and we can well imagine what a moral havoc it is causing in a world where whole peoples are furiously organizing themselves for gaining wealth and power.

Nationalism is a great menace. It is the particular thing which for years has been at the bottom of India’s troubles. And inasmuch as we have been ruled and dominated by a nation that is strictly political in its attitude, we have tried to develop within ourselves, despite our inheritance from the past, a belief in our eventual political destiny.

There are different parties in India, with different ideals. Some are struggling for political independence. Others think that the time has not arrived for that, and yet believe that India should have the rights that the English colonies have. They wish to gain autonomy as far as possible.

In the beginning of our history of political agitation in India there was not that conflict between parties which there is to-day. In that time there was a party known as the Indian congress; it had no real programme. They had a few grievances for redress by the authorities. They wanted larger representation in the Council House, and more freedom in the Municipal government. They wanted scraps of things, but they had no constructive ideal. Therefore I was lacking in enthusiasm for their methods. It was my conviction that what India most needed was constructive work coming from within herself. In this work we must take all risks and go on doing our duties which by right are ours, though in the teeth of persecution; winning moral victory at every step, by our failure, and suffering. We must show those who are over us that we have the strength of moral power in ourselves, the power to suffer for truth. Where we have nothing to show, we only have to beg. It would be mischievous if the gifts we wish for were granted to us right now, and I have told my countrymen, time and time again, to combine for the work of creating opportunities to give vent to our spirit of self-sacrifice, and not for the purpose of begging.

The party, however, lost power because the people soon came to realize how futile was the half policy adopted by them. The party split, and there arrived the Extremists, who advocated independence of action, and discarded the begging method, – the easiest method of relieving one’s mind from his responsibility towards his country. Their ideals were based on Western history. They had no sympathy with the special problems of India. They did not recognize the patent fact that there were causes in our social organization which made the Indian incapable of coping with the alien. What would we do if, for any reason, England was driven away? We should simply be victims for other nations. The same social weaknesses would prevail. The thing we, in India, have to think of is this – to remove those social customs and ideals which have generated a want of self-respect and a complete dependence on those above us, – a state of affairs which has been brought about entirely by the domination in India of the caste system, and the blind and lazy habit of relying upon the authority of traditions that are incongruous anachronisms in the present age.

Once again I draw your attention to the difficulties India has had to encounter and her struggle to overcome them. Her problem was the problem of the world in miniature. India is too vast in its area and too diverse in its races. It is many countries packed in one geographical receptacle. It is just the opposite of what Europe truly is, namely one country made into many. Thus Europe in its culture and growth has had the advantage of the strength of the many, as well as the strength of the one. India, on the contrary, being naturally many, yet adventitiously one has all along suffered from the looseness of its diversity and the feebleness of its unity. A true unity is like a round globe, it rolls on, carrying its burden easily; but diversity is a many-cornered thing which has to be dragged and pushed with all force. Be it said to the credit of India that this diversity was not her own creation; she has had to accept it as a fact from the beginning of her history. In America and Australia, Europe has simplified her problem by almost exterminating the original population. Even in the present age this spirit of extermination is making itself manifest, by inhospitably shutting out aliens, through those who themselves were aliens in the lands they now occupy. But India tolerated difference of races from the first, and that spirit of toleration has acted all through her history.

Her caste system is the outcome of this spirit of toleration. For India has all along been trying experiments in evolving a social unity within which all the different peoples could be held together, yet fully enjoying the freedom of maintaining their own differences. The tie has been as loose as possible, yet as close as the circumstances permitted. This has produced something like a United States of a social federation, whose common name is Hinduism.

What would we do if, for any reason, England was driven away? We should simply be victims for other nations. The same social weaknesses would prevail. The thing we, in India, have to think of is this – to remove those social customs and ideals which have generated a want of self-respect and a complete dependence on those above us, – a state of affairs which has been brought about entirely by the domination in India of the caste system, and the blind and lazy habit of relying upon the authority of traditions that are incongruous anachronisms in the present age.

India had felt that diversity of races there must be and should be whatever may be its drawback, and you can never coerce nature into your narrow limits of convenience without paying one day very dearly for it. In this India was right; but what she failed to realize was that in human beings differences are not like the physical barriers of mountains, fixed forever – they are fluid with life’s flow, they are changing their courses and their shapes and volume.

Therefore in her caste regulations India recognized differences, but not the mutability which is the law of life. In trying to avoid collisions she set up boundaries of immovable walls, thus giving to her numerous races the negative benefit of peace and order but not the positive opportunity of expansion and movement. She accepted nature where it produces diversity, but ignored it where it uses that diversity for its world-game of infinite permutations and combinations. She treated life in all truth where it is manifold, but insulted it where it is ever moving. Therefore life departed from her social system and in its place she is worshipping with all ceremony the magnificent cage of countless compartments that she has manufactured.

The same thing happened where she tried to ward off the collisions of trade interests. She associated different trades and professions with different castes. It had the effect of allaying for good the interminable jealousy and hatred of competition – the competition which breeds cruelty and makes the atmosphere thick with lies and deception. In this also India laid all her emphasis upon the law of heredity, ignoring the law of mutation, and thus gradually reduced arts into crafts and genius into skill.

Therefore in her caste regulations India recognized differences, but not the mutability which is the law of life. In trying to avoid collisions she set up boundaries of immovable walls, thus giving to her numerous races the negative benefit of peace and order but not the positive opportunity of expansion and movement… Therefore life departed from her social system and in its place she is worshipping with all ceremony the magnificent cage of countless compartments that she has manufactured… India laid all her emphasis upon the law of heredity, ignoring the law of mutation, and thus gradually reduced arts into crafts and genius into skill.  

However, what Western observers fail to discern is that in her caste system India in all seriousness accepted her responsibility to solve the race problem in such a manner as to avoid all friction, and yet to afford each race freedom within its boundaries. Let us admit in this India has not achieved a full measure of success. But this you must also concede, that the West, being more favourably situated as to homogeneity of races, has never given her attention to this problem, and whenever confronted with it she has tried to make it easy by ignoring it altogether. And this is the source of her anti-Asiatic agitations for depriving the aliens of their right to earn their honest living on these shores. In most of your colonies you only admit them on condition of their accepting the menial position of hewers of wood and drawers of water. Either you shut your doors against the aliens or reduce them into slavery. And this is your solution of the problem of race-conflict. Whatever may be its merits you will have to admit that it does not spring from the higher impulses of civilization, but from the lower passions of greed and hatred. You say this is human nature – and India also thought she knew human nature when she strongly barricaded her race distinctions by the fixed barriers of social gradations. But we have found out to our cost that human nature is not what it seems, but what it is in truth; which is in its infinite possibilities. And when we in our blindness insult humanity for its ragged appearance it sheds its disguise to disclose to us that we have insulted our God. The degradation which we cast upon others in our pride or self-interest degrades our own humanity – and this is the punishment which is most terrible because we do not detect it till it is too late.

Not only in your relation with aliens but also with the different sections of your own society you have not brought harmony of reconciliation. The spirit of conflict and competition is allowed the full freedom of its reckless career. And because its genesis is the greed of wealth and power it can never come to any other end but a violent death. In India the production of commodities was brought under the law of social adjustments. Its basis was cooperation having for its object the perfect satisfaction of social needs. But in the West it is guided by the impulse of competition whose end is the gain of wealth for individuals. But the individual is like the geometrical line; it is length without breadth. It has not got the depth to be able to hold anything permanently. Therefore its greed or gain can never come to finality. In its lengthening process of growth it can cross other lines and cause entanglements, but will ever go on missing the ideal of completeness in its thinness of isolation.

In all our physical appetites we recognize a limit. We know that to exceed that limit is to exceed the limit of health. But has this lust for wealth and power no bounds beyond which is death’s dominion? In these national carnivals of materialism are not the Western peoples spending most of their vital energy in merely producing things and neglecting the creation of ideals? And can a civilization ignore the law of moral health and go on in its endless process of inflation by gorging upon material things? Man in his social ideals naturally tries to regulate his appetites, subordinating them to the higher purpose of his nature. But in the economic world our appetites follow no other restrictions but those of supply and demand which can be artificially fostered, affording individuals opportunities for indulgence in an endless feast of grossness. In India our social instincts imposed restrictions upon our appetites, – maybe it went to the extreme of repression, – but in the West, the spirit of the economic organization having no moral purpose goads the people into the perpetual pursuit of wealth; – but has this no wholesome limit?

In these national carnivals of materialism are not the Western peoples spending most of their vital energy in merely producing things and neglecting the creation of ideals? And can a civilization ignore the law of moral health and go on in its endless process of inflation by gorging upon material things?… In India our social instincts imposed restrictions upon our appetites, – maybe it went to the extreme of repression, – but in the West, the spirit of the economic organization having no moral purpose goads the people into the perpetual pursuit of wealth; – but has this no wholesome limit?

The ideals that strive to take form in social institutions have two objects. One is to regulate our passions and appetites for harmonious development of man, and the other is to help him in cultivating disinterested love for his fellow-creatures. Therefore society is the expression of moral and spiritual aspirations of man which belong to his higher nature.

Our food is creative, it builds our body; but not so wine, which stimulates. Our social ideals create the human world, but when our mind is diverted from them to greed of power then in that state of intoxication we live in a world of abnormality where our strength is not health and our liberty is not freedom. Therefore political freedom does not give us freedom when our mind is not free. An automobile does not create freedom of movement, because it is a mere machine. When I myself am free I can use the automobile for the purpose of my freedom.

We must never forget in the present day that those people who have got their political freedom are not necessarily free, they are merely powerful. The passions which are unbridled in them are creating huge organizations of slavery in the disguise of freedom. Those who have made the gain of money their highest end are unconsciously selling their life and soul to rich persons or to the combinations that represent money. Those who are enamoured of their political power and gloat over their extension of dominion over foreign races gradually surrender their own freedom and humanity to the organizations necessary for holding other peoples in slavery. In the so-called free countries the majority of the people are not free, they are driven by the minority to a goal which is not even known to them. This becomes possible only because people do not acknowledge moral and spiritual freedom as their object. They create huge eddies with their passions and they feel dizzily inebriated with the mere velocity of their whirling movement, taking that to be freedom. But the doom which is waiting to overtake them is as certain as death – for man’s truth is moral truth and his emancipation is in the spiritual life.

In the so-called free countries the majority of the people are not free, they are driven by the minority to a goal which is not even known to them. This becomes possible only because people do not acknowledge moral and spiritual freedom as their object.

The general opinion of the majority of the present day nationalists in India is that we have come to a final completeness in our social and spiritual ideals, the task of the constructive work of society having been done several thousand years before we were born, and that now we are free to employ all our activities in the political direction. We never dream of blaming our social inadequacy as the origin of our present helplessness, for we have accepted as the creed of our nationalism that this social system has been perfected for all time to come by our ancestors who had the superhuman vision of all eternity, and supernatural power for making infinite provision for future ages. Therefore for all our miseries and shortcomings we hold responsible the historical surprises that burst upon us from outside. This is the reason why we think that our one task is to build a political miracle of freedom upon the quicksand of social slavery. In fact we want to dam up the true course of our own historical stream and only borrow power from the sources of other peoples’ history.

Those of us in India who have come under the delusion that mere political freedom will make us free have accepted their lessons from the West as the gospel truth and lost their faith in humanity. We must remember whatever weakness we cherish in our society will become the source of danger in politics. The same inertia which leads us to our idolatry of dead forms in social institutions will create in our politics prison houses with immovable walls. The narrowness of sympathy which makes it possible for us to impose upon a considerable portion of humanity the galling yoke of inferiority will assert itself in our politics in creating tyranny of injustice.

When our nationalists talk about ideals, they forget that the basis of nationalism is wanting. The very people who are upholding these ideals are themselves the most conservative in their social practice. Nationalists say, for example, look at Switzerland, where, in spite of race differences, the peoples have solidified into a nation. Yet, remember that in Switzerland the races can mingle, they can intermarry, because they are of the same blood. In India there is no common birthright. And when we talk of Western Nationality we forget that the nations there do not have that physical repulsion, one for the other, that we have between different castes. Have we an instance in the whole world where a people who are not allowed to mingle their blood shed their blood for one another except by coercion or for mercenary purposes? And can we ever hope that these moral barriers against our race amalgamation will not stand in the way of our political unity?

We must remember whatever weakness we cherish in our society will become the source of danger in politics. The same inertia which leads us to our idolatry of dead forms in social institutions will create in our politics prison houses with immovable walls. The narrowness of sympathy which makes it possible for us to impose upon a considerable portion of humanity the galling yoke of inferiority will assert itself in our politics in creating tyranny of injustice.

Then again we must give full recognition to this fact that our social restrictions are still tyrannical, so much so as to make men cowards. If a man tells me he has heterodox ideas, but that he cannot follow them because he would be socially ostracized, I excuse him for having to live a life of untruth, in order to live at all. The social habit of mind which impels us to make the life of our fellow-beings a burden to them where they differ from us even in such a thing as their choice of food is sure to persist in our political organization and result in creating engines of coercion to crush every rational difference which, is the sign of life. And tyranny will only add to the inevitable lies and hypocrisy in our political life. Is the mere name of freedom so valuable that we should be willing to sacrifice for its sake our moral freedom?

The intemperance of our habits does not immediately show its effects when we are in the vigour of our youth. But it gradually consumes that vigour, and when the period of decline sets in then we have to settle accounts and pay off our debts, which leads us to insolvency. In the West you are still able to carry your head high though your humanity is suffering every moment from its dipsomania of organizing power. India also in the heyday of her youth could carry in her vital organs the dead weight of her social organizations stiffened to rigid perfection, but it has been fatal to her, and has produced a gradual paralysis of her living nature. And this is the reason why the educated community of India has become insensible of her social needs. They are taking the very immobility of our social structures as the sign of their perfection, – and because the healthy feeling of pain is dead in the limbs of our social organism they delude themselves into thinking that it needs no ministration. Therefore they think that all their energies need their only scope in the political field. It is like a man whose legs have become shrivelled and useless, trying to delude himself that these limbs have grown still because they have attained their ultimate salvation, and all that is wrong about him is the shortness of his sticks.

India also in the heyday of her youth could carry in her vital organs the dead weight of her social organizations stiffened to rigid perfection, but it has been fatal to her, and has produced a gradual paralysis of her living nature. And this is the reason why the educated community of India has become insensible of her social needs.  

So much for the social and the political regeneration of India. Now we come to her industries, and I am very often asked whether there is in India any industrial regeneration since the advent of the British Government. It must be remembered that at the beginning of the British rule in India our industries were suppressed and since then we have not met with any real help or encouragement to enable us to make a stand against the monster commercial organizations of the world. The nations have decreed that we must remain purely an agricultural people, even forgetting the use of arms for all time to come. Thus India is being turned into so many predigested morsels of food ready to be swallowed at any moment by any nation which has even the most rudimentary set of teeth in its head.

India, therefore has very little outlet for her industrial originality. I personally do not believe in the unwieldy organizations of the present day. The very fact that they are ugly shows that they are in discordance with the whole creation. The vast powers of nature do not reveal their truth in hideousness, but in beauty. Beauty is the signature which the Creator stamps upon his works when he is satisfied with them. All our products that insolently ignore the laws of perfection and are unashamed in their display of ungainliness bear the perpetual weight of God’s displeasure. So far as your commerce lacks the dignity of grace it is untrue. Beauty and her twin brother Truth require leisure, and self-control for their growth. But the greed of gain has no time or limit to its capaciousness. Its one object is to produce and consume.

It has neither pity for beautiful nature, nor for living human beings. It is ruthlessly ready without a moment’s hesitation to crush beauty and life out of them, moulding them into money. It is this ugly vulgarity of commerce which brought upon it the censure of contempt in our earlier days when men had leisure to have an unclouded vision of perfection in humanity. Men in those times were rightly ashamed of the instinct of mere money-making. But in this scientific age money, by its very abnormal bulk, has won its throne. And when from its eminence of piled-up things it insults the higher instincts of man, banishing beauty and noble sentiments from its surroundings, we submit. For we in our meanness have accepted bribes from its hands and our imagination has grovelled in the dust before its immensity of flesh.

But its unwieldiness itself and its endless complexities are its true signs of failure. The swimmer who is an expert does not exhibit his muscular force by violent movements, but exhibits some power which is invisible and which shows itself in perfect grace and reposefulness. The true distinction of man from animals is in his power and worth which are inner and invisible. But the present-day commercial civilization of man is not only taking too much time and space but killing time and space. Its movements are violent, its noise is discordantly loud. It is carrying its own damnation because it is trampling into distortion the humanity upon which it stands. It is strenuously turning out money at the cost of happiness. Man is reducing himself to his minimum, in order to be able to make amplest room for his organizations. He is deriding his human sentiments into shame because they are apt to stand in the way of his machines.

The nations have decreed that we must remain purely an agricultural people, even forgetting the use of arms for all time to come. Thus India is being turned into so many predigested morsels of food ready to be swallowed at any moment by any nation which has even the most rudimentary set of teeth in its head. India, therefore has very little outlet for her industrial originality.

In our mythology we have the legend that the man who performs penances for attaining immortality has to meet with temptations sent by Indra, the Lord of the immortals. If he is lured by them he is lost. The West has been striving for centuries after its goal of immortality. Indra has sent her the temptation to try her. It is the gorgeous temptation of wealth. She has accepted it and her civilization of humanity has lost its path in the wilderness of machinery.

This commercialism with its barbarity of ugly decorations is a terrible menace to all humanity. Because it is setting up the ideal of power over that of perfection. It is making the cult of self-seeking exult in its naked shamelessness. Our nerves are more delicate than our muscles. Things that are the most precious in us are helpless as babes when we take away from them the careful protection which they claim from us for their very preciousness. Therefore when the callous rudeness of power runs amuck in the broad-way of humanity it scares away by its grossness the ideals which we have cherished with the martyrdom of centuries.

The temptation which is fatal for the strong is still more so for the weak. And I do not welcome it in our Indian life even though it be sent by the lord of the Immortals. Let our life be simple in its outer aspect and rich in its inner gain. Let our civilization take its firm stand upon its basis of social cooperation and not upon that of economic exploitation and conflict. How to do it in the teeth of the drainage of our life-blood by the economic dragons is the task set before the thinkers of all oriental nations who have faith in the human soul. It is a sign of laziness and impotency to accept conditions imposed upon us by others who have other ideals than ours. We should actively try to adapt the world powers to guide our history to its own perfect end.

This commercialism with its barbarity of ugly decorations is a terrible menace to all humanity. Because it is setting up the ideal of power over that of perfection. It is making the cult of self-seeking exult in its naked shamelessness.

From the above you will know that I am not an economist. I am willing to acknowledge that there is a law of demand and supply and an infatuation of man for more things than are good for him. And yet I will persist in believing that there is such a thing as the harmony of completeness in humanity, where poverty does not take away his riches, where defeat may lead him to victory, death to immortality, and in the compensation of Eternal Justice those who are the last may yet have their insult transmuted into a golden triumph.

THE SUNSET OF THE CENTURY

( Written in Bengali on the last day of last century )

The last sun of the century sets amidst the blood-red clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred.

The naked passion of self-love of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the clash of steel and the howling verses of vengeance.

The hungry self of the Nation shall burst in a violence of fury from its own shameless feeding.

For it has made the world its food,

And licking it, crunching it and swallowing it in big morsels,

It swells and swells

Till in the midst of its unholy feast descends the sudden shaft of heaven piercing its heart of grossness.

The crimson glow of light on the horizon is not the light of thy dawn of peace, my Motherland.

It is the glimmer of the funeral pyre burning to ashes the vast flesh,—the self-love of the Nation—dead under its own excess.

Thy morning waits behind the patient dark of the East,

Meek and silent.

Keep watch, India.

Bring your offerings of worship for that sacred sunrise.

Let the first hymn of its welcome sound in your voice and sing

“Come, Peace, thou daughter of God’s own great suffering.

Come with thy treasure of contentment, the sword of fortitude,

And meekness crowning thy forehead.”

Be not ashamed, my brothers, to stand before the proud and the powerful

With your white robe of simpleness.

Let your crown be of humility, your freedom the freedom of the soul.

Build God’s throne daily upon the ample bareness of your poverty

And know that what is huge is not great and pride is not everlasting.

About the Author:

Rabindranath Tagore was a polymath who reshaped Indian literature, music and art with contextual modernism in the late 19th and 20th centuries. He was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, but he was much more than that. He was an alternative face of modernity that arrived on the horizon just in time: when India and the world had begun to grow weary of modernity’s older face. You can  read more about his life and work here .

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Relevance of Tagore's Nationalism in the Contemporary World

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Farah Godrej

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The debate on constituting India as a nation has been a deeply contentious issue in the decades both preceding and following Indian independence in 1947. Tagore, a multifaceted genius and a versatile figure, is one of the most reverential names in the literary-cultural world in India as well as abroad. Tagore was a great visionary. He observed and critiqued the idea of nation at a time when most of the Indian people were steeped deeply in the intoxicated wave of patriotism. His foresightedness was greatly misunderstood and critiqued by then nationalists. This paper revisits Rabindranath's essay Nationalism to analyze how the writer's views contribute to the creation of a nation in Indian context and offers an alternative framework to the idea of a nation. The paper further attempts to locate Tagore's idea of nation in the present context and concludes by establishing the fact that Rabindranath Tagore's vision has become more appropriate and relevant than ever in today's violent world of intolerance, vengeance and fanaticism.

Swapnajeet Das

Rabindranath Tagore, the multifaceted Indian poet, philosopher and artist, critically investigated the origin and evolution of [Western] nationalism and surmised the dangers of its adoption in the Indian anti-colonial struggle. Thus, he developed a unique perspective on nationalism that challenged the prevalent nationalist ideas of the prominent political thinkers and provided with a nuanced understanding of the intricacies of India's struggle for Independence and the subsequent nation-building processes. His concept of nationalism immediately became a matter of great controversy and many people even started regarding him as 'anti-nationalist.' This paper aims to investigate and tackle the controversy regarding the relevance of Tagore's nationalism both in the colonial period and the post-colonial period. It will try to emphasize how his concept of nationalism contrasts with that of Mahatma Gandhi regarding its role as an anticolonial force, and also with that of Benedict Anderson regarding its importance in shaping national and cultural identities, and international relations in the post-colonial era. By focusing on his essay on 'Nationalism' and his three renowned political novels, such as, Gora, The Home and the World, and Four Chapters, the paper intends to analyze the value of Tagore's ideas in the context of the anti-colonial struggles and their validity in the context of the contemporary socio-political and cultural movements, and give an insight of his philosophical conception on the discourse of nationalism.

South Asian History and Culture

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Man’s history is being shaped according to the difficulties it encounters. These have offered us problems and claimed their solutions from us, the penalty of non-fulfillment being death or degradation. Rabindranath Tagore’s politics exhibited a marked ambivalence- on the one hand, he turned down the notions of Imperialism, as set by the centre (Europe) and on the other, he also shunned the Swadeshi Movement. Tagore viewed the British control as a political symptom of our social disease, urging Indians to accept that there can be no question of blind revolution, but of steady and purposeful education. Rabindranath Tagore saw World History as the steady unfolding of an idea. The dissertation paper aims to show what is Nationalism, in a way explaining Tagore’s take on Nationalism in his poetry. Nationalism, according to Tagore, is not a “spontaneous self expression of man as social being”, where human relationships are naturally regulated, “so that men can develop ideals of life in co-operation with one another”, but rather a political and commercial union of a group of people, in which they congregate to maximize their profit, progress and power; it is “the organized self-interest of a people, where it is least human and least spiritual.” Tagore deemed Nationalism a recurrent threat to humanity because, with the prosperity for the material and the rational, it trampled over the human spirit and emotion; it upsets man’s moral balance, obscuring his human side under the shadow of soul-less organization. The definition of Nationalism, as given by Rabindranath Tagore, calls for a re-working on the definition itself, as it makes a sharp contrast with the idea of Nationalism, as it rose in the nineteenth century India. The paper also focuses to show this marked contrast; and in showing this, I would mainly concentrate on the nationalist poems of Tagore, such as The Last Sun of the century; Africa and Bharat-tirtha.

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2 Rabindranath Tagore, “Nationalism in India” (1917)

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This chapter presents an excerpt from Rabindranath Tagore's 1917 essay “Nationalism in India,” in which he considers the specific challenges faced by India in developing a national self-consciousness as well as the need for that consciousness to be grounded in Indian cultural sensibilities. Tagore was a prolific and accomplished poet, novelist, and playwright and is perhaps best known for his literary output, a massive corpus comprising remarkable writing in both Bengali and English. Tagore is less well known as a philosopher but made significant contributions to the development of Indian philosophy in the early twentieth century. In his essay, Tagore argues that the real problem in India is not political but social, a condition that he says prevails not only in India but among all nations. He also notes a parallelism between America and India—the parallelism of welding together various races into one body. In the end, he claims that India has never had a real sense of nationalism, and that nationalism has for years been at the bottom of India's troubles.

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Tagore and Nationalism pp 53–65 Cite as

Language, Nationalism and Tagore

• Tilottoma Misra 3  
• First Online: 16 March 2017

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This chapter argues that notwithstanding his vital critique of nationalism, Tagore was accountable for invoking the Indian traditions which, according to him, would represent the well-founded moral base of the Indian civilization that could never be sullied by any form of aggressive Western nationalism. Although Tagore has spiritedly rejected aggressive nationalism that is detrimental to the human civilization, he could never detach himself completely from the emotional dimensions of the national sentiment, more so in his writings on language and a sustainable print-community which, consequently, allows him to be affiliated among those who sang for the nation.

• Linguistic nationalism
• ‘Bhasha-Bicched’
• Lakshminath Bezbaroa
• Print-community
• Multiculturalism

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Tagore’s views on assimilation of races into one mighty ocean of humanity, that is Bharat, fall in line with the idea of consolidating national solidarity through the ‘natural process’ of integration and merger. The idea articulated so passionately through those memorable lines in his ‘Bharat-Tirtha’ (1909), where he makes a fervent appeal to all the races which have made India their home, to merge into the mainstream and become a part of the great Indian tradition (‘ dibe ar nibe, milabe milibe, jabena phire ’) seems like an echo of the concept of ‘God’s crucible’ put forward in the American playwright Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play ‘Melting Pot’. In the last lines of the poem, the image of the mangal - ghat sets up for the abhishek of the mother goddess, even hints at the assimilation of races into a great Hindu tradition.

The articles appeared in Punya, Prabasi, Mrinmoyee and Banhi, among others. For a detailed discussion on this debate, see Misra ( 2011 , pp. 180–188).

Padmanath ‘Bidyabinod’ of Sylhet, in his presidential address at the ‘Uttarbanga Sahitya Sammilan’ held at Gauripur on 22 January 1910, built up a case in favour of merger of Asamiya and Bangla. He argued that Asamiya literature would gain by being included in the historiography of Bangla literature. His arguments were almost an echo of Tagore’s ‘Bhasha-Bicched’. For details, see Prashanta Chakrabarty, ‘Lakshminath Bezbaroa o Padmanath Bidyabinod: patabhumi o nepathyer katha’, in the Bangla journal Eka Ebong Koekjan , 35.2, Guwahati, 2014.

Bezbaroa mentions that he was a member of one such group of the Tagore family called ‘Suhrid Samaj’, see Bezbaroa Granthavali , vol. 1, p. 67.

The translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Bhasha-Bicched’ is mine.

Translated from the original Bangla by me.

For a detailed discussion on this, see Cohn ( 1994 ), p. 326).

Banikanta Kakati says: ‘The comparative obscurity of Assamese and the spread of a powerful Bengali literature almost all over the globe gives an impression to foreigners that Assamese is a patois of Bengali’ (p. 6). Kakati establishes with meticulous care that the Assamese language does not show any characteristics of being a dialect of Bengali. Rather, both the languages developed on parallel lines, each ‘with peculiar dialectical predispositions’ of its own. He discusses at length the difference between the two languages in the vocabulary system, in the systems of accentuation, in the case affixes, in the completely different negative conjugations in the Assamese language, in the use of plural suffixes and in other linguistic features.

Linguistic Survey of India , vol. 1, Part 1, cited in Kakati ( 1941 ), p. 6.

Bezbaroa mentions in his autobiographical notes that after the initial years of his association with Rabindranath, he never took part in any acrimonious debates with him regarding the independent status of the Asamiya language and both he and Rabindranath maintained a polite silence on the matter. Bezbaroa says, “Ever since then, till I have reached this ripe old age, the elder Tagore (“Rabikaka”) has never passed a comment on the subject and never took part on any debate with me on the topic. Only once when I met him in Shillong, he remarked rather sadly: ‘People like you are responsible for restricting the spread of the Bangla language by separating Assam from Bengal. Bengali writers today are disheartened and they are not sure whether there is any point in publishing books under such conditions.’ ” [This translation is mine] ( Bezbaroa Granthavali , vol. 1, pp. 67–68.)

The earliest Bengali grammar was by a Portuguese scholar (1743), followed by those of Nathaniel Halhead’s (1778) and Ram Mohan Roy’s (1832).

According to David Washbrook, ‘the notion of language (other than the classical ones) as something that must have an exact standard form with territorial boundaries was unknown to the South Asian intellectual world’. The British colonial rulers, confronted by the bewildering linguistic diversity they found in India, conceded that there might be various dialects in the country but armed by their ‘science’ of comparative philology, and they sought to discover what they considered as the natural form of each language, its standard form (Washbrook 1991 179–203).

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), Hugh Seton-Watson’s Nations and State (1977 ) or Bernard Cohn’s ‘The Command of Language and the Language of Command’ ( Subaltern Studies IV, 1985) discuss the close relationship between language and the rise of national consciousness in Europe and other Western countries in the nineteenth century.

Tom Nairn, The Break - up of Britain , 1977, cited in Anderson, p. 80.

Kandali ( 2013 ) ‘Kishkindhyakanda’, in Saptakanda Ramayana , 26: 72–78.

Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism . Verso.

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Bezbaroa, L. 1968. “Mor Jivan Sonwaran”, Bezbaroa Granthavali , vol. 1. Guwahati: Sahitya Prakash.

Bose, Buddhadeva. 2010. Rabindranath Tagore and Bengali Prose. In Rabindranath Tagore: A Centenary Volume, 1861–1961 . Sahitya Akademi.

Chatterji, Suniti Kumar. 1970–1972. The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language . 3 vols. London, Allen and Unwin.

Chatterji, Suniti Kumar. 1973. The Nineteenth Century Renaissance in India and Lakshminath Bezbaruwa of Assam (1864–1938). In Lakshminath Bezbaroa, the Sahityarathi of Assam , ed. Maheswar Neog. Guwahati.

Chatterji, S.K. 2010. Visva-Manah Vak-Pati. In Rabindranath Tagore: A Centenary Volume, 1861–1961 . Sahitya Akademi.

Cohn, Bernard. 1994. The Command of Language and the Language of Command. In Subaltern Studies IV , ed. Ranajit Guha. OUP: Delhi.

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Misra, T. (2017). Language, Nationalism and Tagore. In: Tuteja, K., Chakraborty, K. (eds) Tagore and Nationalism. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3696-2_4

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Nationalism by Rabindranath Tagore

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Manish is a 3rd year undergraduate student of Political Science at Presidency University, Kolkata. He is particularly interested in international migration, democracy, globalization, citizenship, gender politics, peace and conflict studies. The discourse of the intersection of caste, class and gender in understanding the Indian society and politics has deeply intrigued him. He currently looks forward to a career in academia and research in International Relations.

Nationalism , the book is a series of lectures by Rabindranath Tagore that was first published in 1917 amid the First World War. He was influenced by the Nationalist Movement in India, World War-I and the industrial revolution of the late 19 th century and the early 20 th century. All these influences culminated in his lectures on Nationalism.

For Tagore, Nationalism was “ the political and economic union of a people, is that aspect which a whole population assumes when organised for a mechanical purpose ” (Tagore, 1917, p. 4). From the first chapter itself, Tagore was highly critical about the concept of Nation, which was not only an ideology for him brought by the West but also an institution of greed, maximisation of profit and an inhuman application of science whose ultimate goal is the mechanisation of life devoid of the human spirit and nature. He called Nationalism the source of belligerent foreign policy, making a country feel threatened if another Nation comes into being. It is the source of all death, destruction of the human mind and divisiveness practised by modern countries. This ideology of destruction, Tagore said, is the work of the West. At the same time, he reminded us to not confuse him with the rest of the followers of Nationalism in India who, out of detestation against the British Government, practised nothing short of xenophobia (like burning foreign clothes). He talked of the West’s contribution in Arts and Literature and the ideas of liberty of the mind, thought, and action to be cherished. This, he termed as the inner core of the West for which he feels proud. However, he reminds us that the Nation of the West clads its inner core and, for its selfish needs, creates havoc against non-Nations of the East. For him, the Nation was the political side and the scientific, logical side of profit maximisation, but he never wanted it to be the end and the highest purpose of humanity. He vehemently supported the ideal of the human who is loving, compassionate and, above all, is a universal human devoid of hatred against the human race.

Tagore’s biggest fear was that humans were succumbing to the force of Nationalism unknowingly through the mere mimicry of the West. He writes, “ The history has come to a stage when the moral man, the complete man, is more and more giving way, almost without knowing it, to make room for the political and the commercial man, the man of the limited purpose. ” (Tagore, 1917, p. 8)

Tagore, when he gave his speech, kept Japan and the USA in his highest ideals. He took cognisance that both the countries have kept themselves apart from participating in the First World War. He thought that Japan and America could break away from the warmongering nature of the Nations of the West. In his speech, addressed to Japan, he said, “ And Japan, the child of the Ancient East, has also fearlessly claimed all the gifts of the modern age for herself. ” (Tagore, 1917, p. 25) He meant that Japan has indeed proved the West wrong (the West was full of contempt for the East) and is a beacon for the entire Asia. However, he warned Japan not to lose itself and mimic the soulless idea of Nationalism from the West while modernising. He reminds, “ True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought of action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters. It is science, but not its wrong application in life, – a mere imitation of our science teachers who reduce it into a superstition, absurdly invoking its aid for all impossible purposes ” (Tagore, 1917, p. 36). At last, he wanted Japan to cherish its uniqueness and beauty and not fall into the trap of the “ ugly ” Nationalism. “ Beauty is the signature which the Creator stamps upon his works when he is satisfied with them. “

He was highly critical of the Nationalist movement in India and asserted that India’s immediate problems were social and cultural and not political. (Quayum, 2006, p. 45) Tagore talked about the practice of the caste system in India, which had taken control of the people’s mind and such traditions he called is the source of all oppression within. For him, political freedom was distant since the powerful in the society was busy exploiting the oppressed. His answer to such a problem was education and not India joining the bandwagon of mimicry of the Nation of the West.

Even though many authors have interpreted the core of Tagore’s critique as “the anti-nationalitarian sentiment” (Quayum, 2006, p. 33), I believe that the philosophical basis of this core is Tagore’s belief that human nature is innately good, loving, empathetic. This is what he meant by saying, “ so long as nations are rampant in this world, we have not the option freely to develop our higher humanity. ” (Tagore, 1917, p. 13) This higher humanity is the universal good human, which brings the readers to another theme of Tagore’s thought – Internationalism. If humans are innately good and are only competing among themselves because of the mindless abstractions of everyday life through the application of modern science, logic, and rationality, then the idea of Nation, divisiveness, difference, and contempt against fellow humans is pointless. For humans, reaching the higher moral ground means getting together in a loving and empathetic manner. Because of this, Tagore, unlike his contemporary participants of the Nationalist movement, was never against the British as a civilisation. He accepted and held the British Literature, Arts and thought in his highest ideals except for the ideology of the Nation.

The description of humans in a trance where they are disciplined to follow the path of the Western industrial society and always be hungry for power and profits reminds me of the concept of Alienation by Karl Marx (Singer, 2000, p. 46). Like Marx, Tagore did not want the forces of industrial capitalism controlling human emotions and alienating them from their higher and true ideals. He wanted humans to take control back from the force of Nationalism. Tagore also reminds me of Ambedkar. Like Ambedkar, Tagore prioritised freedom of the society, especially critiquing the caste system before freedom of the country from British rule (Ambedkar, 2014, p. 172, 2.2).

Tagore was a philosopher, poet and a true worshipper of freedom and liberty (unlike the Nation), and Nation as an institution was incapable of realising it and therefore, he rejected it.

Ambedkar, B. R. (2014). Annihilation of Caste. In B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste The Annoted Critical Edition (p. 172). Verso.

Quayum, M. A. (2006). Imagining “One World”: Rabindranath Tagore’s Critique of Nationalism. Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, 7 (2), 33-52. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/41209941

Singer, P. (2000). Marx A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tagore, R. (1917). Nationalism. Edinburgh: R. & R. Clark, Limited.

Image Credits: DNA India

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Patriotism Versus Nationalism: Tagore’s Critique of Nationalism

• Category Politics
• Subcategory Political Systems
• Topic Nationalism , Patriotism

Indian Political Thought Assignment

Why did Tagore criticized nationalism? And in the context of Tagore’s Critique of Nationalism would there be any difference in Patriotism and Nationalism.

The multifaceted genius of Tagore ended the last day of the 19th century by writing down the poem The Sunset of the Century – The notion of nationalism was boldly criticized in the poem. Naturally introduced to a time of expanding pressure among the superpower of Europe, and the consistently developing nationalist movement in India, Tagore trying to straightforwardly assault the institution of the nation sate ―

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The last sun of the century sets amidst the blood red clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred.

The naked passion of selflove of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed is dancing to the clash of steel and the howling verses of vengeance.

The hungry self of the Nation shall burst in a violence of fury from its own shameless feeding.

For it has made the world its food,

And licking it, crunching it, and swallowing it in big morsels, it swells and swells

Till in the midst of its unholy feast descends the sudden heaven piercing its heart of grossness(1). ‖

An antinationalization tendency is extremely clear from these words. The notion of nationalism being the main foundation explanation for war aggression and death stays at the centre of Tagore’s teachings(2). Yet, he is referred to as the greatest nationalist figure of the Bengali renaissance. For sure, Tagore’s most prominent legacy lies within the undeniable fact that three nation states of the planet today to be specific, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, owe their national anthems to this antinationalitarian genius. This represents a genuine problem in the investigation of Tagore’s thoughts on nation and nationalism. In an offer to successfully comprehend and explain this problem, it must be remembered that Tagore was hostile towards the concept of nationalism in its military or aggressive sense. What could be genuinely be brought up as hyper-nationalism. He was a passionate devotee of an interactive world, a universe of dialogue among development and social orders. The standard of all-inclusiveness would be the base of such a word where countries would not be guided exclusively by selflove and self-gratification, yet be a piece of a higher illuminated network of social order. Tagore likewise imagined an inter civilizational collusion-a blend of the east and west and an advantageous interaction of all world civilisation in the bigger setting.

To understand why did Tagore criticized nationalism we have to look how he looked at nationalism. Tagore’s portrait of nationalism consequently spills out of his portrayal of the establishment of nation-state. Tagore was of the sentiment that patriotism is just an organization of governmental issues and business, that brings harvests of wealth by spreading arms of covetousness, childishness, force and flourishing. nationalism, as indicated by Tagore, isn’t a unconstrained self-expression of man as social being, the place human connections are normally regulated, so that men can create standards of life in participation with each other, but instead a political and business association of a gathering of individuals, in which they assemble to amplify their benefit, progress and force. It is the composed self-interest of a people, where it is least human and least profound. Tagore considered nationalism to be a repetitive risk to mankind, in light of the fact that with its penchant for the material and the balanced, it stomped on over the human soul, human ethical quality and human feeling, obscuring his human side under the shadow of heartless association(3). Tagore saw his greatest case of the distorted Nation in the British colonialism in India. The British expansionism discovered its ethical defense on the grounds of nationalism. The colonizers advocated their provincial experiences and adventures as the white man’s weight to spread human advancement to the remainder of the world. Anyway, the creating nations were just transformed into ‘chasing justification’s for simple self-interests of the colonizing country. Tagore opines that all the issues in frontier India as established in one basic certainty that is the dynamic being, the Nation [the English nation] is administering India(4). His first stark criticism and rejection of the radical Swadeshi nationalist that lectured „boycott of remote goods‟ and thus was otherwise called the Boycott Movement turned out in the article called “Sadupay” (‘The Right Means’-1908). He criticized there in clear terms the fixation of the leaders who would not consider the ground real factors of the country destitute individuals both Hindu and Muslim and never winced from receiving any vicious intends to compel ‘swadeshi’ down their throats. Such was the position taken by Tagore, the follower of Indian history and culture(8). Tagore’s involvement in the nationalism can be said to have two distinct phases of development. The primary stage was overwhelmed by a nationalist feeling, a phase that continuously finished in what is referred to in history as the period of Swadeshi movement. The second stage can be defined as the post Swadeshi one when he became basic and revisionary of what had occurred for the sake of his increasing interest in the issues of the nation. It can be further elaborated as in 1905, the Swadeshi development began against the British approach of apportioning Bengal, Tagore was strongly engaged with the dissent against the Raj- began giving talks and composing patriotic songs. In any case, before long, Tagore saw the development turning savage with the nationalist fomenting against honest laborers, who were not interested in their motivation, and particularly the Muslims who were supportive of the segment for partition for practical as well as political reasons (the segment gave the Muslims of East Bengal another capital in Dhaka). Tagore thought that it was hard to acknowledge the madness of the nationalist in their consuming of every single remote great as a characteristic of noncooperation, in spite of the fact that it was harming the poor in Bengal who discovered custom made items more costly than foreign goods(7)..

Tagore was against the idea of the nation; he was considerably more furiously restricted to India joining the drive of nationalism, as he accepted this would bargain India’s history and way of life as a culture and bring it under the shadow of the West. He cautioned: ‘We, in India, must make up our mind that we can’t obtain others’ history and that on the off chance that we smother our own we are ending it all. At the point when you obtain things that don’t have a place with your life, they just serve to squash your life. I accept that it does India a whole lot of nothing to contend with Western human advancement in its own field. India is no hobo of the West.'(5)Tagore accepted that extreme nationalism makes one nonsensical and obsessive, oblivious in regards to the faculties of truth and equity, make individuals willing to both slaughter and pass on for it, sustain a rationale of ‘lunacy’ and war, rather than a pattern of opportunity and harmony. He spurned it as ‘ a cruel epidemic of evil sweeping over the human world of the present age and eating into its moral fiber”(6). As Arunita Samaddar has properly said nationalism, as indicated by Tagore, isn’t ‘an unconstrained self-articulation of man as social being,’ the place human connections are normally controlled, ‘so men can create thoughts of life in cooperation with each other the composed personal responsibility of a people, where it is least human and least otherworldly’. Tagore considered nationalism a repetitive risk to mankind, in light of the fact that, with its fondness for the material and the reasonable, it stomped on over the human soul and human feeling; it upset man’s ethical parity, ‘darkening his human side under the shadow of soul-less association.’ Quayum expresses ‘Tagore raised doubt about both the developed part of patriotism, which smothered the natural and instinctual characteristics of the human individual and its over emphasis on the business and political perspectives, to the detriment of man’s good and profound characteristics. Both of these impediments diminished patriotism to a fragmented, solid and unipolar belief system – basically lacking for people given to a characteristic variety and appearing contraries, that should have been brought together and integrated, through a procedure of heartfelt arrangement and striking of a hub line between contrary energies, to make the entire and healthy individual.

Although in the context of Tagore’s criticism towards nationalism the difference between nationalism and patriotism and not clear but there are certain differences like In his ‘Home and the World’, Nikhil, Tagore’s alter ego in the novel, who is patriotic however wouldn’t put the country above truth and still, concise says: ‘I am willing to serve my country, but my worship I reserve for Right which is far greater than country. To worship my country as a god is to bring curse upon it.’ However, Nikhil’s companion, Sandip, a charming yet nationalist, to whom any activity for the sake of the country is correct: ‘country’s needs must be made into a god, and one must set aside conscience by putting the country in its place’. With the unfurling of the story, we see Sandip getting upset with common laborers who neglected to join the battle, particularly the Muslim traders who saw little benefit in selling sweeping swadeshi things. Sandip, truth be told, brought forth a ploy to consume the exchanging stocks and genuinely assaulted them. Quayam wonderfully figures, ‘Bimala has to acknowledge the connection between Sandip’s rousing nationalistic sentiments and his sectarian – and ultimately violent actions. Nikhil endeavors to support the people in question, taking a chance with his life incorporate the finish of Bimala’s political sentiment with Nikhil’s demise(9).Discussions of both patriotism and nationalism are often marred by lack of clarity due to the failure to distinguish the two. Many authors use the two terms interchangeably but they are different as in the 19th century, Lord Acton contrasted “nationality” and patriotism as affection and instinct vs. a moral relation. Nationality is “our connection with the race” that is “merely natural or physical,” while patriotism is the awareness of our moral duties to the political community(10). The differences laid by George Orwell contrasted the two in terms of aggressive vs. defensive attitudes. Nationalism is about power: its adherent wants to acquire as much power and prestige as possible for his nation, in which he submerges his individuality. While nationalism is accordingly aggressive, patriotism is defensive: it is a devotion to a particular place and a way of life one thinks best, but has no wish to impose on others(11). his way of distinguishing the two attitudes comes close to an approach popular among politicians and widespread in everyday discourse that indicates a double standard of the form “us vs. them.” Country and nation are first run together, and then patriotism and nationalism are distinguished in terms of the strength of the love and special concern one feels for it, the degree of one’s identification with it. When these are exhibited in a reasonable degree and without ill thoughts about others and hostile actions towards them, that is patriotism; when they become unbridled and cause one to think ill of others and act badly towards them, that is nationalism. Conveniently enough, it usually turns out that we are patriots, while they are nationalists(11).

Tagore, the visionary that he was, understood the flipside of making god of the country when feelings and assumptions for the nation were running wild. He watched and scrutinized the components of Hindu nationalism inside the nationalist development when it was making its head route in Bengal. Or maybe forward and increasingly far-seeing for his age, he turned into a controversial and a misunderstood figure. Today, however, a considerable lot of the prior misguided judgments about him have cleared to reestablish his picture as an advanced and brave scholar. Indeed, it is just since the complexities and significance of his thoughts have been completely seen. Tagore, as well, for an incredible duration effectively scrutinized colonization. He has composed endless songs for the nation and had surrendered his knighthood in protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Be that as it may, he did this in his own specific manner and violence was something which he could not support. Nonetheless, the last piece of his life was spent in extraordinary difficulty, for neither might he be able to overlook the procedure of decolonization nor would he be able to acknowledge it completely. What hurt him more was the way that his own countrymen followed the West in teaching forcefulness and magnification rather assimilate India’s own social qualities.

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Last Chance

In Raymond Saunders’s Paintings, an Education on How to Rebel

“Post No Bills,” a four-decade overview of the artist’s work, is a sprawling map of his searching mind and hard-to-categorize work.

By Zoë Hopkins

As much as they are works of art, the assemblage-like paintings of Raymond Saunders are works of archaeology.

In “Post No Bills,” a four-decade overview of his work at two galleries — David Zwirner in Chelsea and Andrew Kreps in TriBeCa — one gets the sense that the artist is excavating his own paintings, literally digging beneath their surfaces to expose hidden layers.

In “Saturdays of Black Color and Habitual Gestures” (1987), for example, Saunders mounts scraps of discarded posters, newspapers and street signage on canvas and then tears at them, yielding a distressed texture of buried paint and paper. In “Pittsburgh ’07-11” (2007), a thick layer of white paint has dried and cracked like a desert floor, its fissured topography revealing black gesso (a primer that makes canvasses smoother and less absorbent). There is life beneath the surface, and it is not content to stay there.

“Post No Bills” is a sprawling map of Saunders’s searching mind and hard-to-categorize work. The artist, now 89, draws from the improvisatory impulses of jazz, the power of Abstract Expressionism, the eclectic excessiveness of assemblage and the academic classicism of Renaissance painting.

His cartwheeling and singular aesthetic strategy teases the eye in “Places Near and Far” (1986), a work in which the precision of minimalism rubs up against the bombast of painterly marks whose wild coils and curves evoke Abstract Expressionism. Found materials, including street signage rulers, ornithology illustrations and children’s drawings, festoon the canvas, mingling with hurried chalk annotations and prays of gestural brushwork resembling graffiti.

Paintings like “Drawing a Still Life” (1987) and “A, B, See” (1996) reveal Saunders’s penchant for seemingly out-of-place art historical motifs, like elegant chalk drawings of Baroque still-life-esque pears and flowers. There is no easy way for the viewer to make sense of this motley group of elements, and it is this difficulty that makes the paintings so powerful.

The exhibition, curated by Ebony L. Haynes, the director of David Zwirner’s outpost 52 Walker, also illuminates Saunders’s way of speaking to the broader social and visual world. The exhibition’s title, borrowed from a 1968 work on display, is a familiar part of the urban landscape, evoking the city walls worn down by cycles of illicit yet obdurate flyposting, removal and reposting.

Here, such urban surfaces are analogized to the rough and variegated texture of Saunders’s canvases; both are teeming with layers of articulation and erasure, both are archives of their own histories.

In several paintings, signs reading “Post No Bills” share the canvas with abundant brushwork and exuberant collages that disobey these directives of orderliness. Amplifying this renegade sensibility, Haynes has plastered some of the gallery walls with vinyl sheets featuring blown-up details of Saunders’s canvases, mucking up the usual austerity of the rooms.

Saunders rebels beneath the surface of his paintings, too. Throughout his career, he has asked where a painting starts — what exactly is a blank canvas? Rather than accepting white as the neutral starting point for painting, Saunders often builds dizzying assemblages up from a base of black gesso.

While some viewers may think such gestures are political, Saunders has long pushed back against a reductive linking of an artist’s work to their racial identity. In “Black Is a Color ,” a 1967 essay, he rebuffed the ambitions of the Black Arts Movement — the cultural cousin of Black nationalism — as an unacceptable restriction on artistic freedom. Suggesting that Black identity solely defined one’s work was a gross error, he wrote, and by separating the two, “we get clear of these degrading limitations, and recognize the wider reality of art, where color is the means, not the end.”

This insistence that black is, indeed, a color reverberates from the paintings in “Post No Bills.” In them, we witness a lifelong exploration of the pleasure, variety and depth of black. At times it glistens with sleek sheen, at others it wrinkles like skin, and at still others it is matter-of-fact matte.

The black background also suggests another site of investigative inquiry: the blackboard. Saunders has taught at universities including the California College of Arts and California State University, Hayward (now California State University, East Bay), and his painting career is unthinkable without the inquisitive buzz of the classroom. In “Flowers From a Black Garden, no. 51” (1993) , a miniature blackboard is affixed to the canvas. Coming from an educator’s mind and soul, Saunders’s work teaches our eyes how to ask questions, how to dig deep.

Raymond Saunders: Post No Bills

Through April 6 at David Zwirner, 519 & 525 West 19th Street; davidzwirner.com; and Andrew Kreps Gallery, 22 Cortlandt Alley, Manhattan; 212-741-8849; andrewkreps.com.

This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds.

Art and Museums in New York City

A guide to the shows, exhibitions and artists shaping the city’s cultural landscape..

A bounteous and playful survey of Joan Jonas ’s, career on the vanguard highway fills the museum and the Drawing Center with the 87-year-old artist’s work..

Francesca Woodman’s crowning achievement, “Blueprint for a Temple (II),” is accorded pride of place in a show  that includes more than 50 lifetime prints.

Kiyan Williams, for their Whitney Biennial commission, recreated the column-lined facade of the White House from soil. Viewers can watch as it crumbles , sprouts plants and births insects.

A new installation at the New-York Historical Society acknowledges a notorious purchase 400 years ago  — and lets the Lenape tell their side.

The Whitney Biennial, New York’s most prominent showcase of new American (or American-ish) art, is currently underway. Will this year’s edition go down as a notable one ?

Looking for more art in the city? Here are the gallery shows not to miss in March .