Building a nation thro’ political activism

O jaane-vaale! Don’t go, leaving your home behind
Your mother is calling you back, with folded palms
These towns are yours, these streets and settlements are all yours
Where are you going, leaving all of these behind?
- Radha in Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957)

It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must do so in the knowledge—which gives rise to profound uncertainties—that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.

- Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands” (1982)

In this week’s column, we examine how Tagore and his work contributed to the construction of nation. Although it seems cynical to assume that Rabindranath Tagore’s enduring literary and artistic legacy alone contributed to the robust Indian culture in the postcolonial state, it is worthwhile to examine how much contemporary Indian culture owes to Tagore for its sustenance at the dawn of independence after centuries of colonial rule.

One of the major theses explaining the nation state is ‘Imagined Communities’ by Benedict Anderson. According to Anderson, nation states are imagined and a constructed concept. In an introduction to ‘Imagined Community’, Anderson explains his thesis as “My point of departure is that nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word’s multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind. To understand them properly we need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy.”

Anderson defines nation as, “In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.

It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”

Indian nation

The birth of the Indian nation has been perceived differently by different writers as depicted in the above quotations. For Rushdie, it is ‘an extra festival on the calendar …a new myth to celebrate ...a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will except in a dream we all agree to dream ….India, a new myth –a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantacies-money and God.”

Writing on post colonial literature and the construction of nation, Pramod K. Nayar, citing Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, points out, “In Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, the old grandmother asks if she would be able to see the ‘border between India and East Pakistan from a plane’, at least, trenches…or soldiers, or guns pointing at each other’. She wonders how if there are no trenches, one can possibly distinguish between nations and peoples. And if there is no marker of separation or distinction, why was there any need for the violent partitioning of the land. The father then clarifies in ‘abstract’ notions of boundaries and nationality: the border is concretised in ‘all those disembarkation cards and things’. Lines, invisible except on paper, divide people.

Someone else insisted that passengers be told where the ‘inexistent’ border used to be –inexistent, because Somali never admitted it…Non-Somalis, because they were total strangers or knew no better, looked at maps, where they found a curvy line, drawn to cut Somali people from another. ( Farah)

A nation is drawn constructed on paper, and enforced through material ‘forces’ like Immigration Offices, the military, passports, and Visas. A nation exists within these forms. It exists in the icons people adopted and believed in.”

Tagore’s vision

Tagore’s vision and his literary and artistic legacy should be analysed against the backdrop of British colonialism in India. Apart from a writer, playwright and novelist, Tagore was also a political activist on his own right and shared a vision for an independent India with Mahatma Gandhi. Tagore opposed British imperialism and supported the Indian nationalism. His political vision was manifested in Manast which was mostly composed in his twenties. Tagore’s ideology and political vision were affirmed in evidence produced during the Hindu-German Conspiracy trial. The evidence also revealed his knowledge of the Ghadarites. Tagore wanted the masses to keep away from being victims and to seek self-help and education. He perceived British imperialism in India as a ‘political symptom of our social disease’. He maintained the idea that even for the extremely poor ‘there can be no question of blind revolution’ instead he advocated ‘steady and purposeful education’. Tagore said “So I repeat we never can have a true view of man unless we have a love for him. Civilisation must be judged and prized, not by the amount of power it has developed, but by how much it has evolved and given expression to, by its laws and institutions, the love of humanity. ”

” S?dhan?: The realisation of life, 1916

It is obvious Tagore was far ahead of his time and his views were fiercely opposed by many politically-charged masses. As a result of this, an Indian expatriate attempted on his life while he was staying in a hotel in San Francisco in late 1916; it was stated that the plot failed as the would-be assassin got into an argument with Tagore. Tagore’s compositions for the campaign of independence such as “Chitto Jetha Bhayshunyo” (“Where the Mind is Without Fear”) and “Ekla Chalo Re” (“If They Answer Not to Thy Call, Walk Alone”), virtually mobilised masses in favour of the Indian independent movement. It was a well-known fact that Gandhi liked Ekla Chalo Re which symbolised the defining moment of Indian independence. One of the highly symbolic acts against the British Raj was Tagore relinquishing knighthood following the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919. In repudiating the Knighthood, Tagore wrote; “The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in the incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part, wish to stand, shorn, of all special distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen who, for their so called insignificance, are liable to suffer degradation not fit for human beings” It was not only through the production of ‘cultural artifacts’ as argued by Benedict Anderson in his ‘Imagined Communities’ that Tagore contributed to the construction of nation but through his political activism and his vision to alleviate poverty through ‘purposeful education and self-help’.