Analysis on the Sense of Nationalism in Rabindranath Tagore’s Novels Post-Independence

Tagore was a believer in an intuitive, dialogic world, given to a profound feeling of commonality, liberality and sympathy, and in which nations would not be parochial, xenophobic and centripetal, or guided by insignificant selfishness and self-aggrandizement, yet balanced towards an ethically and politically illuminated network of nations through the embrace of a divergent standpoint, multilateral imagination, key of all-inclusiveness and corresponding acknowledgments. In this sense Tagore stands a forerunner to huge numbers of the cutting edge critics and philosophers of post/trans-nationalism and globalism, for example, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Noam Chomsky. Much like Chomsky, Tagore accepted, to place it in Chomsky's words, that "'a different universe is conceivable' [by] trying to make helpful choices of thought, activities and foundations," and by bringing "a proportion of peace and justice and want to the world". Tagore envisioned of a district of nations in which no nation (or race) would deny another "of its legitimate spot on the planet celebration" and each nation would "keep land its own lamp of psyche as its piece of the illumination of the world". The experimental writing of Tagore has an incomparable artistic esteem and consequently, effectively he got the name and fame as a poet, prophet, philosopher, novelist and writer. For an amazing duration he contributed in each field of literature. He has composed a few lyrics which are considered as achievement in English literature. The gathering in Gitanjali is his preeminent show-stopper which center around spiritually and humanism. The vast majority of the ballads in Gitanjali manage Spiritual components (Radhakrishnan, 1961) Right off the bat in January 2015, India saw prestigious Tamil writer Perumal Murugal proclaim the end of his own authorial self-after his constrained accommodation to caste group challenges one of his ongoing books. The organization, both in the state and in the middle independence – the intolerance banter. The homicide of Prof. Kalburgi on August 30 by Hindu activists, the Dadri episode of a Muslim family being assaulted by a Hindu group in late September, trailed by meat activism and hamburger boycott in BJP ruled states like Maharashtra obviously delivered 2015 as what The Indian Express named as 'The year India discovered intolerance'. Notwithstanding, it must be comprehended that the gigantic media inclusion of one case of religious intolerance in Dadri does not make India more narrow minded than it had been previously, in any event in the post independent period. Beginning with tribal human rights issues soon after independence to the administrative arrangements of "devide and please" with Operation Bluestar, the Shah Bano case and the decisions on the Ram Janmabhoomi dispute, India has without a doubt, dependably been a spot for racial and religious Infighting – both certain and express. Tagore, post-1917, rose as the commentator of the advanced thought of nation/nation-state and shared the profound unease that Romain Rolland and Albert Einstein likewise felt. The three books—Gora, Char Adhyay and Ghare Baire—where he unwound the perils of hyper-masculine aggressiveness cum hyper sexuality, mirror his 'dis-ease' with nationalism. Tagore, in his Nationalism (1917), condemned not just the "arranging selfishness of Nationalism" in the West, yet in addition the replication of this outsider idea of nationalism in India by the nationalists. He saw that, "India never had a genuine feeling of nationalism" and that India's adoration for 'God' and the perfect of 'humanity' need not be supplanted by the European idea of a constrained 'national character'. Rabindranath's productive writings register his definitive fondness with non-sectarian innovator/humanist position. Tagore's (post/anti)nationalism appeared to have marginally disturbed Gandhi, however those two shared much philosophical liking. Regardless of some reasonable inconsistencies in the circle of political praxis, both Gandhi and Tagore trusted in freedom as a definitive objective for India. For Tagore, be that as it may, Gandhi's politically grounded thought of 'swaraj' and the 'satyagraha' "would normally bring out savage and dull powers". In his view, such a course to freedom would not in the long run lead to the "freedom of the spirit". Tagore's perusing of nationalism as an energy without empathy, of a pitiless negative security between the self and the other made him the objective of analysis, in India, yet additionally in Russia, Germany, Spain, USA, Yugoslavia, Poland, Turkey, Japan and a substantial segment of the proficient world affected by the West. Tagore himself experienced profound disillusionment with his previous conviction in the freeing intensity of European Enlightenment. Be that as it may, he held his faith in humanity. This faith conferred to a traditions. He in this manner avoided the corrosive impacts of colonization and could imagine 'pedagogy of decolonization' through the foundation of the Visva Bharati. Tagore's vision and discourse of an elective innovation and "freedom" was a counterfoil to a pioneer control that exuded from negligible magnificent/racial/technocratic predominance (The Home and the World, 1915).

Tagore was against the possibility of the nation; he was significantly more furiously restricted to India joining the bandwagon of nationalism. This would bargain India's history and way of life as a culture and bring it under the shadow of the West. He cautioned:

Tagore was conceived in 1861, a period amid which the nationalist movement in India against the British guideline was taking shape and picking up momentum. In 1857, just four years before the poet was conceived, the main military uprising for self-preclude broke in India. In 1905, the Swadeshi movement began Tagore's doorstep, as a reaction to the British policy of partitioning Bengal. Albeit apolitical by disposition, Tagore at first was attracted to the movement and began giving addresses and composing patriotic songs with such intensity that Ezra Pound joked, "Tagore has sung Bengal into a nation". Yet, before long, Tagore saw the movement turning violent with the nationalists unsettling against innocent civilians who were not interested in their motivation, and particularly the Muslims who were supportive of the partition for down to earth just as political reasons (the partition gave the Muslims of East Bengal another capital in Dhaka). A hero of peacefulness or Ahimsa, Tagore thought that it was hard to acknowledge the craziness of the nationalists in their consuming of every single foreign great as a sign of non-cooperation, in spite of the fact that it was harming the poor in Bengal who found homemade items more costly than foreign goods (Gora). He was additionally disheartened to see that a significant number of the energetic young people swung to the clique of the bomb, wanting to free their motherland from the burden of foreign oppression by violence and dread. In this manner, at long last, Tagore pulled back from the movement, when a youthful Bengali radical, Khudiram Bose (broadly respected a legend in the archives of Bengal), heaved a bomb, slaughtering two innocent British

Tagore was viewed as a demonstration of betrayal by numerous individuals of the nationalists, yet nothing could change his choice. He would not have anything to do with a movement that was seized by the Bengali Bhadroloks (elites) for their personal stake, and that saw the person through the crystal of a monster Cause. Tagore's reaction to his critics was anecdotally enunciated in both The Home and the World and Four Chapters (both seen as Tagore's significant demonstration of peacefulness). In both the novels, Tagore performs how misuse, violence and killing become ceremonial acts when the individual forfeits his/her self to a deliberation, and nationalism is put on a platform, giving up righteousness and soul; how the nationalist movements in Bengal and later, amid Gandhi's Satyagraha movement, in India, frequently veered into psychological militant movements as a result of the intemperance of the nationalist heads, and once in a while their propensity to manhandle the movement for individual political addition, as, do both Sandip and Indranath, separately in The Home and the World and Four Chapters. Both Sandip and Indranath, start as alluring nationalist figures, however slowly turned out to be self-fixated and vainglorious in their motivation, dismissing their dharma of dispassionate, disinterested activity (as prompted by Krishna to Arjuna in The Bhagavad Gita), and use violence as an interest for individual increase; in this manner their initial positive thinking is supplanted later by a feeling of nothing (Nationalism, 1995). Tagore and Gandhi were on amicable terms, and from various perspectives Tagore was an antecedent of Gandhi; it was Tagore who gave the title "Mahatma" (the incredible soul) to Gandhi, and consequently Gandhi named Tagore "Gurudev" (the respected instructor) and welcomed him as "poet of the world." Romain Rolland once depicted a gathering among Tagore and Gandhi as one between "a philosopher and an apostle, a St. Paul and a Plato". However Tagore and Gandhi never observed eye to eye in transit towards India's future, as Tagore adamantly would not bolster Gandhi's nationalist movement against the British standard. In contrast to Gandhi, Tagore trusted that political freedom and achievement of a nationalist identity by driving the British out was not the correct answer for India's issues; "I am not for pushing off Western civilization and getting to be isolated in our independence. Give us a chance to have a profound affiliation", he said in his trademark confidence. In a letter to an American lawyer Myron H. Phelps, he logically stated, "Must we not have that more noteworthy vision of humanity which will prompt us to shake off the chains that shackle our individual life before we start to dream of national freedom?" Tagore took the view that what India required was not a "visually impaired transformation" or the "miracle of [political] freedom [built] upon the quicksand of social slavery", "however enduring intentional training", or a development from inside; "what India most required was useful work originating from inside herself," he "thought force" like the one encountered by Europe amid the Renaissance that separated "the medieval framework and the oppressive traditionalism of the Latin Church" was the correct solution for a nation grieving on the "dry sand-bed of dead traditions". Tagore kept up that India's prompt issues were social and social and not political. India is the world in smaller than usual, this is the place the races and the religions have met; subsequently she should always endeavor to determine her "burden of heterogeneity," by advancing out of "these warring logical inconsistencies an incredible synthesis". As a matter of first importance, India must address the caste issue. The caste framework has turned out to be excessively inflexible and taken an entrancing hang on the psyche of the general population; what was once intended to present social request by pleasing the different racial groups in India, has now turned into an enormous arrangement of cold-blooded repression. India should leave this social stagnation by teaching the general population out of their stupor; just when the relentless dividers of society were evacuated, or made adaptable, will India recapture her vitality and dynamism as a general public and discover genuine freedom (Gandhi, 1998)

Benedict Anderson characterized nation as a ―imagined community. Most social researchers keep up that the thought of nation is ―notoriously hard to characterize, let alone to dissect. In any case, regardless of such multifaceted nature in characterizing the establishment of nation in the literature of political examinations, Tagore was expressly and exorbitantly clear about his concept of nation. Regardless of being a poet and intensely turning to likenesses and symbolisms in the vast majority of his content on nation and nationalism, Tagore is fairly straight and incredibly striking with regards to address of the nation. A nation, Tagore accentuated, is 'a political and monetary union of basically current and western. The 'mechanical reason' of the nation state infers an instrumental judiciousness in its political structure. This nation has a reason – the motivation behind self-determination and implementation in the human civilization and satisfaction of its political and financial interests – and this is guaranteed by the foundation of the State. Tagore's nation is, in this manner, basically a nation state. Tagore's conceptualization of nationalism is fundamentally the same as that of Earnest Gellner, who underlines on an ideology of nationalism which makes nations instead of prior nations creating nationalism (Tagore and Nationalism, 2008). Tagore further proceeds to stress that when ―this association of politics and commerce, who‘s other name is the Nation, turns into all powerful at the expense of the higher social life, at that point it is a malicious day for humanity. Tagore differentiates the dehumanized and mechanical Western civilization and the nation that created out of it to the indigenous societal groups in India. His is a clarion call toward the East, a notice, to not be hypnotized by the bait of this sparkling organization of the Nation. He calls upon the world ―not just the subject races, however you who live under the dream that you are free, are ordinary giving up your freedom and humanity to this interest of nationalism, living in the thick noxious environment of worldwide doubt and greed and frenzy... Partha Chaterjee in his article Rabindrik Nation Ki, which can be interpreted as "What is Tagore's nation?' brings up that Tagore had anticipated the fleetingness of nations and the development of a union of nations and that, as manifestations of history nations would go back and forth. From his writings and expressions on nationalism we see an antinational Tagore, one who disengages himself from power structures and power struggles and one whose distaste for the 'nation 'emerges from the conviction that it would pulverize singular freedom. Tagore rejects the political thought of business and forceful nationalism pursued my militarily more grounded social orders of the West completely. He rather anticipates a notational widespread world request where social orders would not be isolated up or positioned in a request of chain of command by such nationalism that brought into life Thucydides' old adage of ―large nations do what they wish, while little nations acknowledge what they should [8]. Tagore's representation of nationalism consequently spills out of his depiction of the establishment of nation-state. Tagore was of the conclusion that nationalism is just a ―organization of politics and commerce that brings ―harvests of wealth by ―spreading limbs of power, selfishness, greed and success. Nationalism, as per Tagore, isn't ―a unconstrained self-expression of man as social being, the place human connections are normally controlled, ―so that men can create goals of life in cooperation ―the sorted out self-interest of a people, where it is least human and least spiritual. Tagore considered nationalism to be an intermittent risk to humanity, on the grounds that with its affinity for the material and the reasonable, it trampled over the human soul, human morality and human emotion, ―obscuring his human side under the shadow of cruel association. Nationalism, hence, as Tagore notes, ―is an extraordinary hazard, it is the specific thing which for a considerable length of time had been at the base of India's troubles. England was sent ―the beautiful allurement of wealth [by God].She has acknowledged it and her civilization of humanity has lost its way in the wild of machinery...This corporate greed with all its barbarity of revolting beautifications is a horrible danger to all humanity (Tagore‘s, 2004)

Tagore's broad discourse on nationalism and his evaluate of the nation-state underlines an endeavor to propose a societal texture that is most appropriate to the Indian situation. While he condemns the Nation-state as ―an financial or political union of a people...which an entire populace accept when sorted out for a mechanical purpose, he sees the thought of samaj [society] as having ―no ulterior reason.

Tagore, subsequently, plainly advocates a characteristic type of society for India, without the Western organization of nation-state and the thought of political nationalism. The nonappearance of the mental sentiment of nationalism would guarantee the nonattendance of radical identity based nationalism. The Indian culture would admission better on the off chance that it remained simply an Indian culture, with all its indigenous traditions, value frameworks and lifestyle, as it had been for the several years prior to the British imported inside India the thought of a nation-state [10].

The leaders like Mahatma Gandi, Sardar Patel, Pandit Nehru, Sarojini Naidu had endeavored to lit the candle of nationalism in each Indian's psyche. While characterizing literature it is dependably said

it can best be experienced through the artistic work of Rabindranath Tagore. The experimental writing of Tagore is influenced by the components of nationalism, imperialism, spirituality and so on. Tagore's Gora, the Home and the World, Chaturanga and Four Chapters manages each significant occasion of pioneer India. A few parts of nationalism and spirituality can be effectively noted in Tagore's novels. His novel Gora is with brimming with national pride. Gora is the hero of the novel who is brought up in customary Hindu family. His pride for nation and his pride for religion are extremely splendid. Tagore's vision may appear to be optimistic yet it isn't unattainable. It requires a humanitarian mediation into present self-chasing and antagonistic nationalism, through the presentation of a moral and spiritual measurement in the establishment. It additionally expects us to venture out of history to reexamine another future for ourselves that regards human poise and sees each person and nation as equivalents, in a genuine popularity based soul. The dangers for us not to take up Tagore's direction are excessively high. The present type of nationalism that works sanely inside an "insane person" doctrinal system is compromising our very survival. Violence is spreading far and wide like infection. Our huge killing power is duplicating regularly with the presentation of yet progressively refined ammo in our arms stockpile. Maybe it isn't past the point of no return for us to wake up from our terrible moral sleep and acknowledge the way of international solidarity, peace, concordance and justice cleared by the Indian edified humanitarian poet, Rabindranath Tagore; by testing the ruling ideological arrangement of self-chasing nationalism and jingoism, we could in any case turn away the all-devouring bad dream before us and adjust the dooming course of history.

1. Radhakrishnan, S. (1961). The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore. Baroda: Good Companions, 1961 2. Nationalism, Tagore Rabindranath (1917). Macmillan, New York. 3. The Home and the World (1915). Trans. Surendranath Tagore. London: Penguin, 1985. 4. Gora, Tagore Rabindranath, Viswabharati, Calcutta 5. Nationalism (1995). Internationalism and Imperialism: Tagore on England and the West, in G. R. Taneja and Vinod Sena, Literature East and West: Essays Presented to R. K. Dasgupta, Allied, New Delhi, 1995. Critical Introduction. New South Wales: Allen and Unwin, 1998. 7. Rabindranath Tagore and Nationalism (2008). An Interpretation, Collins Michael, Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics, Heidelberg. 8. Rabindranath Tagore and the Problem of Self Esteem in Colonial India‖, Mind, Body and Society: Life and Mentality in Colonial Bengal, Subramaniam Lakshmi, Oxford University Press, Calcutta 1995) 9. Tagore‘s Gora (2004). A study in the Nationalist Perspective, Studies on Tagore, Singh Kh. Kunjo, Atlantic Publishers, New Delhi, 2004). 10. Imagining One World: Rabindranath Tagore's Critique of Nationalism, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Quayam A Mohammad.

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