Rabindranath Tagore: I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity

In the late 1920s, during his penultimate visit to the US, Rabindranath Tagore was harassed by immigration officials in Seattle. The poet, having spent a “delightful” time in Canada, had been to the US on three previous occasions and planned to, just as he had before, deliver lectures at universities. 

Once in the country, Tagore was asked to present his documents and made to wait while the immigration official chatted and laughed with another individual. When he finally came to the door, he saw Tagore and another man waiting; the official talked to the man and ignored the poet. 

He then summoned Tagore to his office, pointed to a chair for him to sit, and began asking a series of questions to do with his visit. “His insulting questions and attitude were deeply humiliating,” Tagore recalled. He began to rethink his trip but ultimately decided to go ahead with his plans. 

Tagore lectured in Los Angeles but was, all along, troubled by anti-Asian xenophobia, particularly rampant along the West Coast of the US. “[A]s a representative of all Asiatic peoples” he could not stay any longer and decided to depart from the country. 

It was neither personal grievance nor bitterness towards the American people that led Tagore to cut short his trip. In fact, he was glad the official did not accord him any special treatment but behaved towards him as he likely would towards any Asian. At the same time, Tagore deeply admired much about the US and its “truly great people”. He could not however remain in a country in which Asians and other “coloured peoples” were treated with such indignity.

Why Tagore looks at nations as mechanical constructs

Today, as we witness nationalist hubris sweeping the world alongside the aggressive policing of borders, Tagore’s experience is worth calling to mind. Such attitudes flowed then, as they do now, from a tendency to exceptionalise a people and their homeland with all nations reeling from this presumption of distinctiveness. 

However, Tagore believed that nationalism followed a standard template and was the consequence of a people being shaped into a nation. “A nation…is that aspect which a whole population assumes when organised for a mechanical purpose,” Tagore submitted. Nations therefore did not arise organically and, once they did, ended up mechanising human relations.

As an Indian, indeed an “Asiatic”, what troubled Tagore was not simply the imposition of the nation by the West but its, seemingly uncritical, acceptance by the world outside Europe. Amid the First World War, Tagore reproached his Japanese audience for undertaking this imitative project. The Japanese had nationalised themselves in so violent a manner that it alarmed the poet. There was also disappointment because Japan, Tagore believed, had once stood out as a beacon of hope in a largely colonised continent. 

Tagore’s critique of Japan’s nationalist turn

He denounced the West, too, for encouraging Japan to tread this bloody path: it was only the Japanese victory over Russia in the war fought between the two sides in 1904-05 that led to Europe thinking of Japan as an ‘equal’. To be fair, Tagore himself had taken his students in Santiniketan on a victory march to mark the occasion. It was the excesses of the Swadeshi Movement following the partition of his home province of Bengal in 1905 that turned him away from nationalism once and for all.

Tagore, like Leo Tolstoy, eventually came to believe that the Japanese victory was, oddly, a triumph of the West. Japan had abandoned its ideals by seeking “tutelage under European schoolmasters” and made Western materialism its own. 

The ultimate betrayal would come decades later when Japan invaded Manchuria in China and established a puppet state. It was not as if this was completely unanticipated as these belligerent tendencies lay at the very heart of nationalism. Manchuria followed the Japanese takeovers of Taiwan and Korea, both of which occurred before Tagore’s first visit to Japan. Japan therefore became the very force it was once expected to resist: an imperial aggressor in Asia.

How nationalism affected identity in anticolonial struggle

Rabindranath Tagore spent considerable time reflecting on Empire, in general, and the British presence in the Indian subcontinent, in particular. For Tagore, India necessarily needed to encounter Europe. What upset him was that this engagement came via the instrument of colonialism. 

The poet became increasingly interested in how the colonial project disrupted ties between communities in India. So much so that, at times, he would deemphasise the British and highlight instead the pitfalls of responding to the coloniser by duplicating its ways. This meant that, much like the British, Indians would come to have identities that were more fossilised than fluid and become increasingly defined by the same militarism and hierarchical thinking he had hoped they would oppose. 

All of this, most worryingly for Tagore, stemmed directly from the very idea of nationalism. In his remarkable work Ghare Baire, or The Home and the World, Tagore expressed apprehension over the anticolonial response to the British leading to Hindus and Muslims rigidly defining their identities. This was because the anticolonial project was rooted in nationalism which had an inherent propensity to divide. 

In Char Adhyay, or Four Chapters, Tagore illustrated the damaging psychological consequences often suffered by revolutionaries as they ended up reproducing, in some measure, the violence of the colonial state.

Tagore and Gandhi: Allies in spirit, opponents in method

It was an unease with this violence that Rabindranath Tagore shared with Mahatma Gandhi. The relationship between Tagore and Gandhi was one of the most important and, for the Indian Freedom Movement, consequential intellectual associations of the last century. 

The two men held each other in the highest regard and their ties were marked by both alignment and contention. While Gandhi advocated the boycott of foreign goods, Tagore was wary of such approaches dominating the anticolonial struggle. Tagore also famously objected to Gandhi’s characterisation of the 1934 Bihar earthquake as a “just retribution” for untouchability, deploring the superstition entrenched in such a view.

On the other hand, Gandhi, like Tagore, wished for India to remain true to its spirit and refrain from “imitating the West”. A militant response to colonialism, the two also agreed, would adversely affect those in whose name it was being carried out. Victory under such circumstances meant little. Once violence became the accepted means through which a society addressed its problems, the logic underpinning it risked becoming embedded in common sense, sustaining itself well into the post-colonial future. 

When patriotism overshadows humanity

Tagore and Gandhi recognised the inadequacies of achieving freedom without a social and moral reckoning. A disproportionate focus on the coloniser, without a sincere engagement with the deep-rooted injustices within our own societies, impeded the realisation of a transformative present and future.

Nationalism bred fears and anxieties which manifested themselves by way of exclusionary impulses, as Rabindranath Tagore himself experienced in Seattle. In his writings, he conveyed that these instincts also revealed themselves in liberation movements that followed the schema of nationalism. 

In a letter to Aurobindo Mohan Bose, nephew of scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose, Tagore once wrote: “Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live.”

On the occasion of Tagore’s birth anniversary, we would do well to remember his prescient warning that nations invariably produce the very borders — physical and affective — that he wanted humankind to transcend. It is by prioritising our shared humanity that we might begin the difficult but necessary task of realising the world Tagore envisioned.

Post Read Questions

“Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity,” said Rabindranath Tagore. Evaluate. 

In what ways did Tagore and Gandhi agree and differ in their approach to India’s anticolonial movements?

What was the core of Rabindranath Tagore’s critique of the anticolonial movements that mirrored colonial structures? How does his novel Ghare Baire reflect his concerns about nationalism dividing communities?

What was Rabindranath Tagore’s concern with Japan’s embrace of nationalism in the early 20th century? Why did he see the adoption of Western-style nationalism as a threat to Asian ideals and culture? 

How does the current global wave of nationalism echo the tendencies Rabindranath Tagore warned about?

(Arko Dasgupta is a PhD candidate in history at Carnegie Mellon University and a doctoral fellow at Duke University.)

Share your thoughts and ideas on UPSC Special articles with ashiya.parveen@indianexpress.com.

Subscribe to our UPSC newsletter and stay updated with the news cues from the past week.

Stay updated with the latest UPSC articles by joining our Telegram channel – IndianExpress UPSC Hub, and follow us on Instagram and X.