Gandhi And Tagore

- Amiya Chakravarty

(Amiya Chakravarty – well known poet, philosopher and currently Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York, Paltz – assesses the impact and legacy of these two illustrious sons of India, drawing on his close association with Tagore, in particular as his literary secretary from 1926 to 1933)

Two of India’s loftiest minds expressed themselves in thoughts and deeds that ran a parallel course.  They often met and supplemented each other by strong affinities and contrasts.  Persons with dissimilar backgrounds of talent and training, they were yet united, as the excerpts will show – and these could be indefinitely prolonged – in faith, in integral service and in the purity of the means used for a creative revolution.  To their passion for social reform and for India’s independence and growth, they brought an unalterable loyalty to the emerging international order.

Man’s humanity demanded an inclusive view of civilization.  No nation or race could usurp the place of the unfolding wholeness, but both Gandhi and Tagore knew the context as well as the transcending values.  They brought their sense of human history to bear upon the daily events and trials that faced them.  Hence we find in a poet, and in a saint-at-work, the same intense concern for the dignity of the individual, for economic and educational justice, for disciplined freedom in the enterprises of personal and social change.

Surprisingly, the artist and the actional sage often reversed their role.  Gandhi wrote with flawless literary skill, and was devoted to silence and prayerful service, while Tagore laboured against malaria and malnutrition and gave all his earnings to start a rural school.  Neither of them could be confined to the separately narrow categories we employ to define great leadership.  They proclaimed a single fellowship in human responsibility.  Enlivened by wit, self-criticism, warmth of personal affection and imagination, these men enhanced their own relationship and influenced a large human community.  Both of them stood up against violence and war, no matter which nation or individual joined the retaliatory cycle, as a betrayal.  India, and the greater world, caught by conflicts and even existential crisis, could ponder upon the witness, in detailed clarity, provided by the two contemporaries. 

The United Vision

The over-arching influence of Gandhiji and Rabindranath almost wholly encompassed our days.  Wonder and surprise entered our lives through new poetry, peace marches, songs and campaigns which these leaders had brought into a dramatic focus.  In them we saw the symbol of a renaissance that spread from Bengal to Gujarat, and from all over India, but while we felt a cultural exhilaration, we were made aware of the deeper historical current which shaped our hidden destiny.  For neither of them allowed us to identify geographical India or its offerings with the whole human outreach.  The fact that Santiniketan or Sabarmati or Sevagram were not frontiers, that no final soothsayer guarded the gates, made us seek leadership from within, and rejoice in the inspiration provided by greatness.

Speaking as one among countless others, I remember how even before we knew Tagore and Gandhi as men of genius, we knew them as men.  They were members of the family who drew us by the power of love and magnanimity.  Their unpredictable “experiments with truth”, their unlimited travel and many errands dazzled and intrigued us.  And yet their gifted personality was there.  So long as no deification was involved, and the motherland was not turned into a geolatrical device, our patriotism as well as our devotion to national or international men of character was safe.  Actually we felt an additional security because pureness of heart and spiritual stature were before us; we did not need the sanction of occult or psychological magnetism.

The commotion that Gandhi created as a lone witness in racist South Africa, and later in India’s non-violent resistance to indigenous as well as foreign brands of tyranny and discrimination, came from a “still-center”.  Tagore opposed nation-states defined in terms of financial and military despotism.  We too spoke from the quite moment and experience of human faith.  They were no war-heroes or felicity-experts, and needed no prestigious cunning or diplomacy to manipulate public opinion. As I look back on those decades when Gandhi and Tagore guided our millions – as they still do, perhaps in the deeper levels of our wisdom and initiative – I am astonished at the blend of humility and towering leadership they represented.  Even the crowds that gathered round them felt the paradox of great events. More momentous than the processions and the urgent throng were the hushed preparations that continued. Banners and shouts were suddenly found to be irrelevant.

Tagore’s greatness was built upon the shattering sorrows of a sensitive life which he had conquered.  His eminence abroad had already been gained by some early poems and songs he had composed in riverine Bengal.  Even the translations could not wholly remove the original meaning and the atmosphere.  So when he stood before audiences, there was a pause.  The important event was not in his speech or his appearance, but in what he had done, unknown to others.  Or in what they knew as his true creation: the evening scene turned into a lyric, the total gift of his wealth to start an interntinal center.  Think of the enormous gathering at a Gandhi prayer meeting of of the sea of humanity joining him on the Salt March, and ocean that no king Canute could turn back.

When Tagore crossed India to visit Gandhi in prison, we saw them meet with hardly a word.  Gandhi was fasting, if necessary to death, to prevent a complete betrayal of democracy by a power-driven government; and there were a few trees, a grassy yard in front of the prisoner.  Outside, the empire had prepared its squadrons and battalions as forceful rulers still do in the name of civilization.  But this other epic of greatness, of moral power pitted against mere power, of two friends meeting, not for strategy but for profound sharing, was written differently.

Thus the supreme events happened simply because the utter sacrifice, the revelatory experience, were cadenced and almost concealed in  modest action, even when the action appeared majestic.  The undramatic arrival of Gandhiji back from Africa to India, and to Tagore’s ashram – where he, his family and friends found their immediate home – their first conversation which followed, their discovery of an identity, as well as their decision, each to follow his own creative path; these “preparatory events” led to vast and spectacular sequences which became a part of their own and India’s history.  The discerning mind understands their revolutionary meaning.

Startling movements emerged out of deeply apprehended truths.  Their mutual agreements carried the seal of life-long commitment.  Three of these factors can be mentioned here: they believed in divine guidance in the pursuit and fulfillment of human service; both of them denounced violence and discrimination, and such definitions of religion as supported those evils – with this was related the urgency to revolutionize existing institutions so that economic justice could support truth; they committed themselves to spreading education and enlightenment, particularly in view of the needful understanding and interdependence in an emerging world order.

Such decisions, made from different backgrounds, but with full concurrence by the two leaders, became more significant as nations were plunged into cycles of massive fratricide, and India itself, at the moment of freedom, was torn into bleeding frontiers.  Evidently the nation-state concepts of freedom and progress had failed, a dynamic international change that could reshape and substantiate perennial human values.  A practical, far-reaching adjustive revolution alone could save mankind from itself.

The greater arrival of human awareness and opportunities could not be accepted as man’s ultimate disaster.  It was a new beginning.  We could make it so; the resources of a global humanity were available at this crucial hour.  There the applicational morality of Tagore and Gandhi, their vision of history and their unwavering service are a continued challenge to civilization.

These two men gave birth to India as she is today……Both of them, though vastly different, spring from the soil and culture of India and are rooted in the ten thousand year old Indian tradition.  They represented the ideal of young India. 

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU

Two Gifts

In perspective, Tagore’s Visva-Bharati and Gandhi’s satyagraha can be singled out as their supreme gifts.  Research and discovery, the blend of indigenous traditions and of insights provided by the larger historical process had formed the center of studies and initiated a new movement.  Both were evidences of the universal and the contextual mind that characterized the two leaders.  Visva (the World) and Bharati (India) had to meet anew in a creative community; Satya (Truth) and Agraha (the Urge, the Cohesive Force) belonged together in a technique – a way of living which would replace the ruinous and ineffective methods of violence in a world that seeks radical changes.

Tagore’s and Gandhi’s efforts are now seen as correlated and supplemental: seldom in history have two contemporaries, singular in their genius and mutually involved in their life work, done so much for their people and humanity. A major institution and a movement made India conscious of its new image, and of its relation to the modern age.

Not only to blueprint but to build an international study center – now a university – in an India which demanded a hundred proprieties of food and freedom, self-rule and economic change was itself a daring priority. Tagore chose education as the basic instrument of recovery and growth.  He gave India a new home where the new world could be invited; other initiatives would come out of this responsive hospitality.  Santiniketan (The Abode of Peace) was a reaffirmation of the Upanishadic ashramas (literally, work centers) which greeted men from far and near and recognized them as a community.

Many kinds of ashramas were known before.  Spiritual living, shared labour, intellectual pursuits were emphasized in different groups, and sometimes these groups coalesced.  A few of them were meditational retreats.  But each of them, no matter what specialized studies brought the group together, accepted the disciplines of equality, of pure living, of wide-ranging rational thought and service.  Nature and humanity were not held to be separate but accepted as a bountiful harmony maintained in a simple but adequate setting.  Neither an alienation from a “supernatural” reality nor an anthropomorphic mastery of creation was intended.

Not all was felicity, of course, in India’s religious and cultural progress; atavism or glorification of the past, instead of a true spirit of continuity and growth, had often retarded the ashrama ideal, but the sense of human and cosmic truth that was nurtured in the Indian tradition had not disappeared.  Tagore sought a new form to establish this concept of wholeness.  His educational center stressed an adventurous faith, a search for adequacy that allowed us to explore the unfolding richness of humanity and nature.

Tagore gave the original ashramic concept electric light and simple but modern residential units; the open-air classes and quiet study rooms of Visva-Bharati soon had East-West scholars and artists with a range of languages, creativity and humanistic research that no earlier epoch could have provided.  Visva-Bharati had been called Tagore’s greatest poem composed with materials and a meter drawn from living earth and humanity.  It was shaped with rhythms from old and new world hopes; it held an atmosphere of beauty.

The excitement of international living drew us to Santiniketan (The Abode of Peace) which was both rural and modern.  Modest and young scholars like us were caught in a totally unexpected neighbourliness.  Caste, race or color terminology was absent, religious and intolerance unknown.  We shared classical and modern music, literature and culture from many lands and epochs.  Science and agriculture, crafts and sociology were studied.  All of us were exposed to the spirit of the humanities.  To this inheritance we came in a tree-sheltered, immensely active Santiniketan – where Visva-Bharati is located – surrounded by an open, almost limitless horizon.

Tagore himself, both a creative artist and an educationist, was a continuous inspiration.  But often he was away, and that too was a freedom for us, to look beyond a personality, and also t o find ourselves in countries and among people to whom he introduced us.  We gained fine friends from all over India and from abroad, whom he had met and invited.  Already in my youth I was able to travel with him, and this to say the least was a wonder: the earth was a home, largely unknown to us and yet the map had become real.

In distant lands I now think of the early initiation.  Apart from such travel, the Visva-Bharati center in its own context gave us a view of humanity.  To this day such a view, and the conditions that allow it to be shared, are the gift of Santiniketan.  Inevitable changes have not produced a basic change; Visva-Bharati continues to be served by able, innovative men and women.  It is guided by philosophers, artists and scientists with a strong social and international concern.

The Road

Mahatma Gandhi who often visited Santiniketan and his friend, also came when the poet was no more.  The generous material help and sustained moral support given by Gandhi is part of the sacred history of Santiniketan.  Some day this history will be fully written.  Jawaharlal Nehru, then the Chancellor of Visva-Bharati, gave it a University Charter.  His greatness made our responsibility greater, Visva-Bharati was brought closer to modern reality.

The major achievement of these men, so different in temperament but so united in their purpose, was to release nationalism from chauvinistic limitations.

INDIRA GANDHI

A friend of all three, C.F. Andrews, brought Tagore and Gandhi, and to   their different ashrama centers, the spiritual wealth of the West.  His witness is an Englishman and as a citizen with a home on many shores, will remain.  Such memories and others are a part of the pilgrimage that Santiniketan carries on. 

They belong to the great priesthood……..who lift humanity from the cave and the jungle to a cleaner and clearer air……where the great verities are seen undimmed by self and sophistry.  Man’s ordinary existence then becomes a life, a passion, a power.

S. RADHAKRISHNAN 

What shall we say of Gandhi’s spirit, which claims us in India and has steadily become a light for mankind?  The friendship of Tagore ad Gandhi is our theme, but that too is a wide arc of living truth, of converging differences and years of deepest accord that we cannot yet measure, or discuss, objectively.  Many of us younger contemporaries moved, however falteringly, along the avenues they opened for us.  We saw an illuminated but difficult road, and we had glimpses of a destination.  What could be emphasized here is the fact that we knew them separately and together, not as “men of destiny”, but as men of faith who were inwardly guided.  They became a truth in our lives.  Personal devotion for them was transformed into a still greater loyalty to the humanity they served.  We were freed to follow our highest prerogative.

As an example, I would refer to a visit to Sevagram ashram in 1942 when the “Quit India” program was being launched (Gandhi’s own phrase included an invitation for fuller Western partnership).  What could I, as a young educationist, contribute to a movement which would soon reach a new and perhaps a grave tragic climax?  He was surprised.  No special mandates, no specifics that could be applied to all contingent circumstances were needed or proclaimed.  He was no law-giver, he merely tried to follow the law.  Each person, whatever his vocation, talent or temperament, could acquire “a plus”, he said.  This plus was an added concern for truth, a sacrificial and entire dedication to the fullness of truth as one saw it.

Prayer, and vigilance would help, but divine law as realized in life’s circumstances must be a revelation and a revelatory light – it could not be given from outside.  Gandhi’s gift was not that of a dictator.  The gift of satyagraha could not be forced upon others or be merely received; it had to be acquired.  As he talked I could see a farmer at the plough in the land outside, a few trees……His face was quiet, but there was a merry twinkle in his eyes as I took his leave.

Truth-force was Gandhi’s “matchless weapon”.  No metaphor could be brighter or more apposite.  Driven apart by forces of hatred and war, in a world of glittering nearness, we have almost arrived at a contradiction that might annihilate us.  Nations armed with the untruth-force of lethal weapons, and of total violence, threaten each other and man’s very existence.  At this point satyagraha (as used by Gandhi) told us, as all timeless truths have told us, that evil cannot be cancelled by evil, not violence and lies by violence and lies.

Other means are there.  Indeed, the methods of war have leapt beyond the categories of right and wrong into sheer irrelevance.  We cannot practice them in a world community which is here, even though we may choose to ignore its reality.  It is strange, but true, that one man’s integrity can help us, even though such a man merely claimed the right, along with others, to “experiment with truth”.

An analysis of new world techniques tried against overt or semantically hidden brutism lies outside this discussion.  We can merely not that many forms of individual and organized resistance can be seen in far-flung situations today where nation-states or smaller power groups, with or without “religious” and “democratic” sanction, seek to crush human conscience.  The idealism of youth and a mature morality in many countries is ranged against unmoral administrative units and systems.

Through partial success and new insights, truth-workers are moving forward.  Also they will guard themselves as a result of experience and self-scrutiny, against the parallelism of hatred and intolerance that may show up in moments of frustration.  Such an infection may often be deliberately spread by the opposed authorities.  Repeatedly Gandhi knew that those in obsessive power seek nothing better than the evidence of anger and desperation in their moral adversary.  Mass distortion media can then take up the theme of “the angry man” or “the angry generation” – Gandhi, by the same token, was described as an agitator, or worse as an acting saint.  But he knew the alchemy of turning anger into love, heat into light.  He sought the peace that comes form added service.  And this research was satyagraha.

Wherever Gandhi went on this path, hearts opened, new opportunities seemed to rise.  We joined him.  His road led through riots to be calmed by persistent work for both sides, through burning villages and prayer meetings, through stillness achieved in a sense of destination.   Flaming flower banks, green stretches of tress and new grown rice were a successive contrast as we marched further in stricken Noakhali (then East Bengal) not long before Gandhi’s death.  A darkening fury seemed to close the view.  Two communities and also a distant, retreating empire, had created an impasse.

Gandhi, I remembered, referred to an impenetrable darkness; he could but take one step ahead.  Then he also referred to his mathematical formula: the greater the light, the less the darkness.  Gandhi, his trained satyagrahi friends like Pyarelal and others, proved to us how the “matchless weapon” could be used.

The entire scene changed, though slowly.  Other areas caught the evil and smouldered.  But success is not success, it is the road towards perfection.  Even Gandhi’s death – at the hand of an assassin – was therefore no failure; it was a symbol of a life which no death can destroy.  His suffering brought about a mutation in the entire Indian situation.  Nothing was the same again.  Already he had brought freedom for India.   The finest elements in the British tradition were on his side as he changed a hurtful relationship into partnership.

As we think of Gandhi and Tagore we think of two personalities, but we think also of the power they used in their lives.  And this power of love had brought them together, as it had brought each of them nearer to humanity.  So Tagore the poet could write a poem “Gandhi Maharahar Shishya” (“Disciples of Gandhi Maharaja, we….”) and Gandhi called Tagore, Gurudeva (“The Revered Master”): their many tributes are on record.  Across the distance between Gujarat and Bengal they met, and crossed their own territories of art and service which defined their deeply-rooted genius – to offer their best to India and to the divine humanity which is mankind.

We conclude by remembering that other great men in India sustained the vision. We refer in particular to Jawaharlal Nehru who became India’s first prime minister with the blessings of Gandhi and Tagore.  He had an equally innovative power, to revitalize India’s rural and urban areas, and to refashion the entire cultural and educational outlook of new India.  Fortunately his daughter, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, is carrying the torch of progress, not only for India, but for the greater humanity of man.

We had philosophers like Sri Aurobindo and Raman Maharshi who brought energy and light to the entire sub-continent.  The legacy seems to get stronger as in the case of the two ashramas that are being guided and renovated by Mataji Gayatri Devi: She makes countless pilgrimages back home to the orphanages in especially need and dispossessed areas like the urban centers near Calcutta.

This is the new constellation which has been described as India’s dynamism, not only in her own country but also in the West and East, where a new momentum of cultural renaissance is daily offering strength and faith to the new millions of our ancient land.