Transnationalist Spirituality of Rabindranath Tago
Transnationalist Spirituality of Rabindranath Tago
Transnationalist Spirituality of Rabindranath Tago
Transnationalist
Spirituality of
Rabindranath Tagore
Ashim DUTTA, University of
Dhaka/ University of York
Abstract:
Focusing on a selection of Rabindranath Tagore’s essays, lectures, and a
few of his creative works, this essay draws attention to the spiritual orienta-
tion of Tagore’s transnationalism. In his vast and multifaceted writings,
Tagore offers an alternative vision of transnational union of humanity,
different from and often resistant to nationalist distributions of human
relationship. Through close readings of Tagore’s works, this essay compli-
cates Orientalist notions of the East-West polarities. While strongly oppos-
ing Western imperialist ideology, Tagore was always frank about his trust in
and indebtedness to the liberal humanist values of the West. On the other
hand, despite upholding Indian or Eastern spirituality, he was critically
aware of the social and political crises of the contemporary East. A large
volume of his works betrays his scepticism about any political solution to
national and international problems. What he promotes is a spiritual con-
cord of the best in Western and Eastern cultures, connecting the liberal
humanist conscience of the West with the harmonizing, all-inclusive spir-
itual wisdom of the East. Neither completely secular nor thoroughly reli-
gious in an institutional sense, the transnationalist spirituality of Tagore
bridges the gap between the secular humanism of Western modernity and
the mystic–religious spirituality of Eastern antiquity, offering nuanced
perspectives on both.
1 The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, ed. by Sisir Kumar Das, 3 vols
(New Delhi: Sahitya Academi, 1994–96), III (1996), 711.
2 Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded
Man (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), p. 203.
3 Ibid., p. 251.
4 Ibid., p. 207.
5 Ibid., p. 204.
17 Michael J. Franklin, Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and
Linguist, 1746–1794 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 209.
18 ‘Hermeneutics versus History’, Journal of Asian Studies, 39.9 (May 1980), 495–
506 (p. 496).
19 Ibid., pp. 497, 501.
20 Gitanjali (Song Offerings): A Collection of Prose Translations Made by the Author
from the Original Bengali (London: Macmillan, 1913), pp. 27–28.
one’s self. Given the use of the phrase ‘my country’ in the last line, the
poem might very well be read as representative of the nationalist sentiment
of the Swadeshi Movement (1905–07), in which Tagore had become actively
involved.21 (Tagore, however, soon became disillusioned about the scope of
the Movement as it triggered communal rivalries and violence.) But the
third line of the poem counters this tone of national(ist) attachment by a
seemingly transnational, cosmopolitan vision that does away with the stat-
ist–nationalist ‘walls’: ‘Where the world has not been broken up into frag-
ments by narrow domestic walls […]’.22 Such a claim, too, is problematic,
considering the fact that Tagore’s attitude towards cosmopolitanism was
not unmixed. Using the term ‘cosmopolitan’ interchangeably with ‘interna-
tional’, he writes in 1924: ‘The international endeavour of a people must
carry the movement of the people’s own personality round the great spirit
of man. […] Otherwise, mere cosmopolitanism but drifts on the waves,
buffeted by winds from all quarters, in an imbecility of movement which
has no progress’.23 In this powerful observation, we note the juxtaposition
of ‘people’s own personality’ and ‘the great spirit of man’; in other words,
the cultural particularity of a group of people and the spiritual oneness of
universal humanity.
Faced with the ambivalence inherent in Tagore’s vision of transnational
or transcultural relationship, critics often take recourse to compound
terms. In order to define Tagore’s ‘counter nationalist national attachment’,
Poulomi Saha finds the phrase ‘locally rooted globalism’ useful. 24 In a simi-
lar attempt to theorize Tagore’s and Yeats’s ambivalence about both na-
tionalism and cosmopolitan universalism, Louise Blakeney Williams coins
the term ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’.25 Taking her stance against the ‘skep-
tics about Tagore’s nationalism’ like Ashis Nandy, Gauri Viswanathan, and
Martha Nussbaum, Williams considers Tagore and Yeats as nationalists of
a kind that is less typical and ‘resembles the “new” cosmopolitanism’ that
has started to gain critical currency since the last decade of the twentieth
century.26 The ‘new cosmopolitanism’, to sum up her argument, is respect-
ful of national differences, but poses a fundamental challenge to imperialist
dichotomization of some form or other. 27 Attempting to view Tagore in the
light of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s notion of ‘rooted cosmopolitan’, Fakrul
Alam qualifies Appiah’s observation by pointing out that, unlike ‘the con-
Tagore was born in the heyday of the ‘modern’ colonial education in India—
the first Indian universities having been established in 1857, some four
years before his birth—with its stress on ‘a general humanistic education’
39 Nationalism, p. 56.
40 Creative Unity, pp. 109–10.
41 Sādhanā: The Realisation of Life (London: Macmillan, 1913), p. 112.
42 Nationalism, p. 56.
rous and cannibalistic in its tendencies’. He adds that ‘[t]his political civili-
zation is scientific, not human’.43 By ‘scientific’, he seems to mean what is
merely technical and mechanical. We have already seen his redemptive
view of Western science. His ambivalence between such an optimistic view
of science and a highly reductive one is also reflected in his observation
that ‘science is not man’s nature. […] By knowing the laws of the material
universe you do not change your deeper humanity’. 44 This ‘deeper humani-
ty’ is the spiritual nature of man, involving his emotional and moral values.
In ‘East and West’, he similarly maintains that ‘the dominant collective idea
in the Western countries is not creative’ but is rather ‘wholly wanting in
spiritual power to blend and harmonize; it lacks the sense of the great
personality of man’.45 As we will see, against such materialistic–scientific
values and exclusively competitive political ideology of the West, he as-
cribes to the East the historical role of spiritual unity, assimilation, and
harmony of the human races.
Another essay that nicely represents the dialectical relationship be-
tween East and West, Asia and Europe is ‘The Religion of the Forest’
(1922). Tagore there dwells upon two distinctive ways in which men relate
to the world (‘the universe’): ‘either by conquest or by union’. The ‘principle
of dualism’ and the ‘principle of unity’ are seen, via what seems to be a
geographical or environmental essentialism, to be the instinctive character-
istics of ‘the Northmen of Europe’ and the men of ‘Northern India’ respec-
tively. For the former, the geographical closeness of the Sea represented
man’s encounter with a hostile and cruel nature: ‘the challenge of untamed
nature to the indomitable human soul’. Although ‘man did not flinch’ but
‘fought and won’, such an antagonistic relationship with nature left its
mark in the mould of the personality of the people of northern Europe, to
whom ‘truth’ takes on the ‘aspect of dualism, the perpetual conflict of good
and evil, which has no reconciliation, which can only end in victory or
defeat’.46 Tagore specifically focuses on northern Europe and northern
India in this essay seemingly as a prelude to contrasting William Shake-
speare with Kalidasa, a north Indian Sanskrit poet and playwright. But a
similar dichotomy of dualism versus unity or conflict versus harmony is
evoked in many other essays and lectures to be attributed to a largely gen-
eralized East–West polarization.
Significantly foreshadowing the postcolonial critique of The Tempest as
well as going beyond it by his conflation of Ariel and Caliban, Tagore argues
that, ‘through Prospero’s treatment of Ariel and Caliban we realise man’s
struggle with Nature and his longing to sever connections with her’. He
dwells at length on man’s control and subjugation of nature. Analysing
43 Ibid., p. 60.
44 Ibid., p. 54.
45 Creative Unity, p. 103.
46 Ibid., pp. 45–47.
Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale, Tagore at-
tempts to show ‘the gulf between Nature and human nature’ in Shake-
speare, which, he considers, is caused by ‘the tradition of his race and
time’. Not disregarding Shakespeare’s depiction of the beauty of nature in
his works, Tagore notes there a failure ‘to recognise […] the truth of the
interpenetration of human life with the cosmic life of the world’. The same
is also true of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Despite its beautiful descrip-
tions of the heavenly garden, Tagore discerns in the text a lack of ‘kinship’
between man and animals. The latter ‘were created for man’s enjoyment;
man was their lord and master’, as suggested by the impenetrability of the
‘seclusion of the bower’ of Adam and Eve in Paradise. 47 What Tagore wants
to stress here is clearly the materialist anthropocentrism of the West,
which he connects with its imperialist ethnocentrism.
It is against such exclusive Western sense of ‘superiority of man’ that
Tagore places ancient Indian syncretism, which does not deny man’s supe-
riority but rather sees it reflected in ‘the comprehensiveness of sympathy,
not in the aloofness of absolute distinction’.48 Tagore thus envisions an
aesthetic of spiritually comprehensive harmony and union which, he seems
to claim, is essentially Eastern. Although he notes a trace of this in the
English Romantic poets and mentions Wordsworth and Shelley in particu-
lar, he sees the Romantic phenomenon as symptomatic of the ‘great mental
change in Europe’, caused by its interest in Indian philosophy. 49 On this
note, let us move on to consider Tagore’s vision of the East.
As with his view of the West, Tagore’s view of the East is also a site of am-
bivalence and contradiction, which is all too natural given his complex
cultural–historical background. There are moments in his works when he
believes, like his Japanese friend, Okakura Kakuzo, that ‘Asia is one’. 50 At
other moments, Japan’s rise as a materialist and imperial power shatters
his idealism about the singleness of the Orient. Although India remains at
the centre of Tagore’s notion of the East, the constant shift between ancient
and contemporary India in his writings poses an intellectual challenge for
us in trying to place his preference. However, for the sake of clarity, it is
possible to note two dominant modes in his thoughts on India. On the one
hand, he idealizes ancient India as a land of harmony, peace, and unity,
and also sees in its spiritually syncretic model the ideal future of the hu-
man world. On the other, he dwells upon the problems of contemporary
India, most alarming of which is its loss of a sense of its own greatness. For
reviving its self-respect or ātmaśakti, Tagore stressed the importance of
reforming India’s social institutions, particularly religious and educational
ones.
In ‘Nationalism in Japan’, delivered originally as lectures in Japan in
1916, Tagore writes that ‘in Asia great kingdoms were founded, philosophy,
science, arts and literatures flourished, and all the great religions of the
world had their cradles. […] For centuries we did hold torches of civilization
in the East when the West slumbered in darkness’. 51 As is obvious from his
self-conscious tone and diction here, Tagore is responding to Eurocentric
notions of the East. Although he does not mention any particular writer of
the West, the notions he seems to be revising or writing back to remind us
of G. W. F. Hegel’s chauvinistic contention in The Philosophy of History
(1837) that ‘[t]he History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe
is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning’ or ‘[the East] is the
childhood of History’.52 Hegel contests that, in its obsession with the One
supreme power, India or the Orient ignores the individual existence and
lacks ‘subjective freedom’. What is more troubling is his notion that ‘outside
the One Power […] there is only revolting caprice, which […] roves at will
without purpose or result’.53 Tagore, too, maintains that, after its initial
glory, there ‘fell the darkness of night upon all the lands of the East. The
current of time seemed to stop at once, and Asia ceased to take any new
food, feeding upon its own past, which is really feeding upon itself’.54 While
more of this type of self-criticism on behalf of the East will be seen in his
reflection on India’s contemporary social decadence, it suffices for now to
say that Tagore did not believe this state of stagnancy to be an essential or
natural condition of the East. Moreover, far from seeing the West as the
end of history, he strongly believed in the potentiality of the spiritual East
for saving humanity from the degeneracy of the materialist ideologies of
international politics dominated by the West.
For taking up the new historical role as preserver of humanity, the
East, of course, has to synchronise the old and the new, the ancient and
the modern. That is why Tagore ostensibly praises ‘Japan, the child of the
Ancient East’, for accepting ‘all the gifts of the modern age’ and for
‘com[ing] in contact with the living time’. By combining in herself ‘old and
new’, the ‘immemorial East’ and the modern West, Japan ‘has given heart
to the rest of Asia’.55 Such optimism, however, cannot have been unmixed.
Two years before coming to Japan, Tagore expressed his grim apprehen-
51 Nationalism, p. 50.
52 Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. by J. Sibree (London: George Bell
and Sons, 1894), pp. 109, 111.
53 Ibid., pp. 111–12.
54 Nationalism, p. 50.
55 Ibid., pp. 52–53.
sion, in the context of Japan’s rise as a military power in 1915, that ‘Japan
has her eyes on India. She is hungry—she is munching Korea, she has
fastened her teeth upon China and it will be an evil day for India when
Japan will have her opportunity’.56 We note again Tagore’s use of food met-
aphors to suggest the carnivorous consumerism that Japan imported from
the West in the name of modernization. The whole lecture on ‘Nationalism
in Japan’ oscillates between his optimism and apprehension so far as Ja-
pan’s tilt towards modernity was concerned. Seemingly keeping Japan’s
aggression towards its neighbouring countries in mind, he wants to remind
Japan of ‘those days when the whole of Eastern Asia from Burma to Japan
was united with India in the closest tie of friendship, the only natural tie
which can exist between nations’.57 Here he tries to forge a pan-Asiatic or
an ideal Eastern identity. Many years later in 1937, he would similarly
think of a China–India spiritual coalition, distinctly nonpolitical, and
founded upon the ‘intercourse of culture and friendship’ that dates back
‘eighteen hundred years’. 58 In the same year, he would also inaugurate the
Department of Chinese Studies at Visva-Bharati University.
However, returning to ‘Nationalism in Japan’, Tagore cautions Japan
against the fatal contagion of the ‘political civilization’ of Europe, arguing
that the civilizations of Greece and Rome have become ‘extinct’, whereas
‘the civilization, whose basis is society and the spiritual ideal of man, is still
a living thing in China and in India’. 59 Here he clearly connects the social
and the spiritual, pitting them against the political and the materialist.
Japan should not be dazzled by the lustre of materialist modernization into
ignoring her ‘inherited ideals’, because, modernity, as Tagore defines it, is
‘freedom of mind, not slavery of taste’. Therefore, the East should welcome
‘the true modern spirit’ of the time from the West without taking recourse
to mimicry of its culturally specific external details. 60 The ‘true modern
spirit’ of the West, like its liberal-humanist values, seems to be essentially
compatible with the spiritual values of the East, and is not to be confused
with the ‘false’ or superficial modernity.
We have already seen how, in ‘The Religion of the Forest’, Tagore offers
a critique of the self-centred, isolationist, or anthropocentric ideologies of
the West encapsulated in Shakespeare’s plays. On the contrary, Kalidasa’s
plays uphold ‘the true Indian view’, according to which, human ‘conscious-
ness of the world […] is perfect when [it] realises all things as spiritually
one with it’. 61 Diverging from Hegel’s argument (quoted above) that Indian
philosophy ignores the world in its obsession with the One, Tagore’s analy-
In his novel Home and the World (1915), set in the context of the Swadeshi
(svadeśī) movement of 1905, Tagore addresses some key factors behind
Hindu–Muslim rivalry. One of his major concerns, revealed in this novel,
seems to be that Indian nationalist movement is not dealing with this cru-
cial internal antagonism sensitively enough.
Tagore’s view of India remains incomplete without taking into account his
idealism about India’s role in the realization of his universal-humanist
vision of unity. In his novel Gora (1910), Tagore represents this dream as
well as the multifarious impediments on the way to its realization, such as
the internal, caste-based segregations among the Hindus, the division
between the Hindus and the Muslims, the Hindu–Brahmo antagonism,
and, of course, the friction between the colonizers and the colonized. Gora,
the son of a deceased Irish soldier and raised as a Hindu by Anondomoyi
and Krishnadayal, holds on to Hindu orthodoxy, including the caste system
and idol worship, as part of his nationalist resistance to the British colonial
rule in India as well as to the attempted Westernization of the educated
middle- and upper-class Indians. The family of Paresh Babu is the epitome
of the Brahmo Samaj. While Paresh Babu represents the philosophical and
spiritual wisdom born of his Brahmo faith, his wife and Panu Babu, a fami-
ly friend and a leading member of the Samaj, are remarkable for their ex-
tremist anti-Hindu ideology and their slavish contentment about British
rule in India. Tagore’s Brahmo inheritance notwithstanding, the novel be-
trays his scepticism about the possibility of the Brahmo Samaj’s being the
epicentre of the true Indian unity. (It is significant that, by that time, the
Brahmo movement had become rife with clashes, conflicts, and schisms,
and Tagore’s efforts to unite its different branches as well as to see it as
inseparable from Hinduism had resulted in failure and invited severe criti-
cism.)70 Nor could he trust Hindu orthodoxy with such a historical role. The
novel zooms in, among other things, on Gora’s journey towards self-
realization (in more than one sense), which could also be read as the self-
realization of bhāratbarsha or the Great India. What is more, as Syed
Akram Hossain suggests, Gora’s voyage from Hindu nationalism to univer-
sal humanism also reflects his author’s similar ideological evolution. 71
Having remained engrossed in the Kolkata-centric Hindu–Brahmo con-
troversy so far, it is during his tour of the rural Bengal that Gora comes
face to face with the Hindu–Muslim divide as well as the caste system and
its worst offshoot—untouchability. In a Muslim village, Gora and his com-
panion, Ramapati, are faced with a dilemma with regard to accepting the
hospitality at the house of a low-caste and untouchable Hindu barber, the
only Hindu family in the village. What exacerbates the case for Gora and
Ramapati is the fact that the wife of the barber has temporarily adopted the
son of a Muslim farmer, Faru Sardar. Faru was the leader of the rebellious
tenants of the village, and, for standing against the indigo planters’ oppres-
sion, suffered persecution. Finding Faru’s son Tamiz starving for days, the
Hindu barber’s wife felt compelled to take him home.72 When Ramapati,
after hearing this story, becomes adamant about refusing the hospitality of
this Hindu transgressor and accepting, instead, that of Madhav Chatterjee,
the Brahmin rent collector of the indigo factory, Gora chooses to accept the
hospitality of the barber. 73 He cannot make himself refuse the food of the
good-souled barber merely in order to ‘preserve his caste’. 74 Torn between
his long-cherished prejudice and his superior moral sense, Gora self-
critically questions the ‘terrible wrong’ of ‘making purity an external
thing’.75 Here Gora takes his first significant move towards the spiritual
humanism that finds most eloquent expression in Tagore’s 1930 collection
of Oxford Hibbert Lectures, The Religion of Man. Far from expressing alle-
giance to any institutionalized religion, Tagore there distinguishes between
man’s biological and transcendental selves, and maintains that man’s
‘religion’ lies in his spiritual journey from the former towards the latter:
‘Man […] is truly represented in something which exceeds himself. He […] is
not imperfect, but incomplete. He knows that in himself some meaning has
yet to be realized’. 76 This ‘meaning’ is the spiritual self-realization, namely
the realization of the universal humanity in oneself: ‘in our life we must
touch all men and all times through the manifestation of a truth which is
eternal and universal’.77 The eternal/universal truth or the spiritual experi-
ence he pursued all his life was to be sought for and realized in this life
through actions that ‘touch all men’.
Gora, of course, is yet to realize the full implication of this universal
unity. For all his sympathy for the poor and the lowly, he is kept from feel-
ing a sense of true equality by ‘an unseen gulf of separation’. 78 It is only at
the end of the novel, when Gora’s birth-secret is revealed to him, that he
feels himself free and exclaims with a terrible joy: ‘Today I am really an
Indian! In me there is no longer any opposition between Hindu, Mussul-
man, and Christian. To-day every caste in India is my caste’.79 In his own
self, Gora also unifies Europe and India. Despite the fact that Gora has
been subjected to authorial irony throughout the novel, and that Tagore in
this novel splits himself into different characters (for example, Binoy,
Paresh Babu, Anondomoyi, and Gora), Gora’s above syncretic epiphany
about a pluralist India seems to be Tagore’s, too.
In a poem, written in the same year as Gora, a similar vision of India or
the Great India finds eloquent expression. The poem, ‘Pilgrimage to India’
reads much like the ending of Gora:
Aryan and non-Aryan come,
Hindu and Musulman:
Come, O Christian; and today
Come, O you Englishman.
Come, brahman, with a heart made pure
Hold hands with one and all:
Come, you outcaste: let your load
Of insult from you fall.80
the East and from the West mingle their murmur in some profound har-
mony of meaning it delights my soul’. 85 Clearly, it is the transnational har-
mony of an extrapolitical nature that he is proclaiming here, inspired by
the belief that ‘the best in the world have their fundamental agreement’.86
Tagore’s transnational–humanist vision was also reflected in the edu-
cational institution he founded in Santiniketan, India, which he significant-
ly named ‘Visva-Bharati’, meaning wisdom of the world or universal
knowledge. In Tagore’s vision, ‘Visva-Bharati acknowledges India’s obliga-
tion to offer to others the hospitality of her best culture and India’s right to
accept from others their best’. 87 The founding of the university testifies to
Tagore’s serious commitment to a meaningful and respectful union of the
East and the West. Such union, needless to say, is Tagore’s alternative to a
merely politically motivated coming together of nations. The latter, however,
continued to frustrate his hope till the end of his life. In Crisis in Civilization
(1941), he reveals his scepticism about European civilization and his fearful
apprehension of the ‘stark misery’ the British would ‘leave behind’ in India.
Nevertheless, he is reluctant to commit ‘the grievous sin of losing faith in
Man’ and ‘look[s] forward to the opening of a new chapter in [Man’s] history’
to be dawned, probably, in ‘the East where the sun rises’. The dawning he
looks up to is the dawning of spiritual humanity, when the ‘unvanquished
Man’ (cf. the ‘transcendental Man’ of The Religion of Man) will reclaim ‘his
lost human heritage’. 88
To sum up, Tagore’s views of East and West are not rigid but fluid,
and, for that very reason, rife with contradictions. Despite always identify-
ing himself with India or the East in the hemispheric polarization, which he
found impossible to completely transcend, he was not blind to the problems
of his country or the East in general. Although he strongly opposed West-
ern imperialist politics and often wrote back to Western misconceptions
about the Orient, he distinguished, if not always very neatly, the humanist
West from the imperialist West, and never completely denied his admiration
for the former. Tagore’s criticism of the West was corrective and sympathet-
ic, not racially subversive. ‘I speak bitterly of Western civilization’, he writes
in Nationalism, ‘[only] when I am conscious that it is betraying its trust and
thwarting its own purpose’.89 Given his belief in the spiritual essence of
man, he took care not to harbour any ‘distrust of the individuals of [any]
nation’.90 His transnationalism thus relies heavily on the spiritual nature or
the superior moral sense of human beings. This sense of morality, inherent
in his transnational world-vision, coheres with the mystical spirituality of
the vast majority of his works, connecting the public and the private, the
political and the poetic, and the national and the transnational in his oeu-
vre. Tagore ends The Religion of Man with the following excerpt from the
Upanishads in his own translation: ‘He who is one, and who dispenses the
inherent needs of all peoples and all times […] may he unite us with the
bond of truth, of common fellowship, of righteousness’.91 This threefold
unity needs to be taken into consideration in order to understand Tagore’s
transnationalist spirituality.
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