The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore
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The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore (Ashgate World Philosophies Series) (Ashgate World Philosophies Series) by Kalyan Sen Gupta (z-lib.org)
Politics, Gandhi and Nationalism
51 the group, Atin is given the responsibility of executing her. Hence, we move on, in the final chapter, to the tragic meeting between Ela and Atin, whose purpose they both understand. Ela, however, is a willing victim. Atin wants to give her an anaesthetic before executing her, but she refuses it: to die fully aware at the hands of Atin has an erotic significance for her. The last words of Ela to Atin, with which the novel ends, are: ‘Let our last kiss be unending.’ By then, Atin has come to realize that he has been a mere puppet in the hands of a nationalist movement fed on impersonal violence and hatred, that he has fallen from his humanity, from his self, and from his own swadharma (code of conduct). He also realizes that Ela is not similarly victim to the influence of this impersonal, blind violence. On the contrary, hers is a sacrifice that she has chosen out of her love for Atin. Hers is a willing, emotional submission, a glorious act of freedom. Ela’s death symbolizes not only Atin’s fall from selfhood, but the ultimate defeat of Indranath and his terrorist group. Tagore reinforces the ultimate fruitlessness of nationalist revolution by referring to the confession of Brahmabandhab Upadhyaya, an eminent Vedantist as well as a nationalist revolutionary, in the preface of Char Adhyaya (though this reference was subsequently dropped in the later editions). Tagore recounts this confession, at Brahmabandhab Upadhyaya’s last meeting with him, as follows: I thought, having sensed my difference with him on the method of the nationalist movement, he had become hostile and contemptuous towards me … [But] one day when I was sitting alone in a third-floor room at Jorasankho, suddenly in came Upadhyaya. In our conversation we recapitulated some of the issues we had discussed earlier. After the chat he bid me goodbye and got up. He went up to the door, turned towards me and stood. Then said, ‘Rabibabu, I have fallen very low’ … I clearly understood that it was only to say these heart-rending words that he had come in the first place. But by then he had been caught in the web of his actions, there was no means of escape. That was my last meeting and last words with him. 46 What is most significant about this novel is the central focus on Ela. The intention is quite clear. It is only by entering into Ela’s world that Atin can come ‘face to face with his own loss of humanity’, as Upadhyaya did when he paid his last visit to Rabindranath. It is only in the presence of Ela that Atin can realize his fall from his swadharma and svabhavadharma (natural inclination) as a poet. Only then can he realize that he has been a puppet of Indranath’s: The faith in one’s own strength was destroyed so fully that everyone proudly agreed to mould oneself after the official ideal of the robot. When in response to the strings pulled by the leader everyone began to dance the same dance, strangely enough everyone thought it to be a dance of power. The moment the puppeteer loosened his strings, thousands became superfluous. 47 52 The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore Char Adhyaya forcefully expresses Tagore’s view that political violence or violence in the name of nationalism is blind, impersonal and dehumanizing, with no concern for the autonomy and dignity of the individuals: it only makes instrumental use of them as robots for furthering its own cause. Tagore is equally sceptical of the non-violent nationalism represented by Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement, which he describes as a parochial nationalism threatening ‘an isolated view of the country’. But, as already considered, there may be less substantial difference between Rabindranath and Gandhi than appears, even though they used different languages and emphasized the social and political respectively. ‘Indian nationalism is not exclusive,’ insists Gandhi, but ‘humanitarian.’ Elsewhere, he elaborates, ‘Patriotism for me is the same as humanity’: ‘it is the narrowness, selfishness and exclusiveness, which is the bane of modern nations, which is evil’; and it is ‘through the realization of the freedom of India, I hope to realize and carry on the mission of brotherhood of men’. 48 All these observations of Gandhi show his affinity with Tagore as a critic of the dominant, Western paradigm of nationalism. The only difference is that, for Rabindranath, nationalism itself becomes suspect, while for Gandhi, the ideology of nationalism is retained but invested with a new content. Gandhi’s ideology of nationalism is, in effect, an ideology of patriotism, and in this patriotism there was, in the words of Asis Nandy, ‘a built-in critique of nationalism and refusal to recognize the nation-state as the organizing principle of the Indian civilization and as the last word in the country’s political life’. 49 The affinity with Tagore’s position is surely striking. Tagore’s hostility to nationalism arises mainly from his experience of the menace of the imperialistic tendency. In his brief but well-argued book, Download 467.3 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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