RABINDRANATH TAGOREMY LIFE IN MY WORDS Selected & Edited: Uma Das Gupta Review: Satyendra Nath Dwivedi Part 2 No living creature on this earth is as subservient as man. Man knows the value of freedom but is deprived of it at every stage. This is especially true of women and my mind revolts when I think of it. We men have been policing women for ages and we have no sense of the cruelty it involves. I can only pray God gives you forbearance, that He takes His place within you, that your suffering leads you to radiance and purity… May those who suffer be given the strength to endure. Pain and suffering are unavoidable in life. We human beings must learn to accept them by lighting the flame of sacrifice in us. We can say to almighty: “I am offering myself to you through this suffering, may Your guidance prevail”. “Be it happiness or sorrow, Be it agreeable or disagreeable, Let us accept our destinies, undaunted in mind.” [Mahabharata Shanti Parva 174.39] Nobody can escape the rules of the universe. It is irrational to hope that those rules will be spared the common human experience of suffering. Seen from the point of view of education, should we not admit that poverty is the school in which man has his first lessons and best training? Even a millionaire’s son has to be born hopelessly poor to begin his lesson of life from the beginning. He has to learn to walk like the poorest of children, though he has the means to afford to be without the appendage of legs. Poverty brings us into complete touch with life and the world, for living richly is living mostly by proxy, thus living in a lesser world of reality. This may be good for one’s pleasure and pride, but not for one’s education. 9 Children are in love with life, and it is their first love. All its colour and movement attract their eager attention. Children are not born ascetics, fit to enter at once into monastic discipline of acquiring knowledge. At first they must gather knowledge through their love of life, and then they will renounce their lives to gain knowledge, and then again they will come back to their fuller lives with ripened wisdom. The object of education is to give man the unity of truth. Formerly, when life was simple, all the different elements of man were in complete harmony. But when there came the separation of the intellect from the spiritual and the physical, the school education put entire emphasis on the intellectual and physical side of man. I believe in a spiritual world – not as anything separate from this world – but as its innermost truth. With the breath we draw we must always feel this truth that we are living in God. Born in this great world, full of the mystery of the infinite, we cannot accept our existence as momentary outburst of chance drifting on the current of matter towards an eternal nowhere. We cannot look upon our lives as dreams of a dreamer who has no awakening in all time. We have a personality to which matter and force are unnecessary unless relating to something infinitely personal, whose nature we have discovered, in some measure, in human love, in the greatness of the good, in the martyrdom of heroic souls, in the effable beauty of nature which can never be a mere fact nor anything but an expression of personality. My life has followed various directions. But in all my distractions, inwardly or outwardly, I have been conscious of a continuous companionship with God which expressed itself in gladness. There has been a meeting of my faith with His Poetry. I know the children’s mind. Their subconscious mind is more active than the conscious one, and therefore the important thing is to surround them with all kinds of activities which could stimulate their minds and gradually arouse their interest. My idea is that the mind should find its freedom in every respect, and I am sure that our children have, through early training, freedom from the barriers of country and race, creeds and sects. It is always to get rid of these prejudices after we grow up. The reason for my refusing to advise students to leave their schools is that the anarchy of mere emptiness never tempts me, even when it is resorted to as a temporary measure. I am frightened of an abstraction which is ready to ignore living reality. The students were no mere platforms to me; their life was a great fact to them and to the All. I could not lightly take upon myself the tremendous 10 responsibility of a mere negative program for them which will uproot their life from its soil, however thin and poor that soil may be. In my paper ‘Swadeshi Samaj’, written in 1905, I discussed at length the ways and means by which we could make the country of our birth more fully our own. I laid emphasis on the truth that we must win our country, not from some foreigner, but from our own inertia, our own indifference. We shall have to pay out in soul value for what we purchase as material advantage. The ‘Rishi’ has said, “The son is dear, not because we desire a son, but because we desire to realize our own soul in him”. It is the same with our country. It is dear to us because it is expression of our soul. When we realize this, it will become impossible for us to allow our service of our country to wait on the pleasure of others. When we have the gaining of the object clearly before our minds, we can be restrained, and concentrate our energies to serve it; but when it is a case of venting our anger, our excitement rises and rises till it drowns the object and then we are spendthrift to the point of bankruptcy. The country must be the creation of all its people, not of one section alone. It must be the expression of all their forces of heart, mind and will. This creation can only be the fruit of that ‘Yoga’, which gives outward form to the inner faculties. We, in India, must make up our minds that we cannot borrow other people’s history, and that if we stifle our own, we are committing suicide. When you borrow things that do not belong to your life, they only serve to crush your life. Real freedom is of the mind and spirit; it can never come to us from outside. He only has freedom who ideally loves freedom himself and is glad to extend it to others. When India gave voice to immortal thoughts, in the time of fullest vigor of vitality, her children had the ‘fearless spirit of the seekers of truth’. The great epic of the soul of our people – the Mahabharata – gives us a wonderful vision of the overflowing life, full of the freedom of enquiry and experiment. When the age of the Buddha came, humanity was stirred in our country to its uppermost depth. The freedom of mind which it produced expressed itself in a wealth of creation, spreading everywhere in its richness over the continent of Asia. But with the ebb of life in India, the spirit of creation died away. It hardened into an age of inert construction. The organic unity of a varied and elastic society gave way to a conventional order which has proved its artificial character by its inescapable law of exclusion. It is through literature and art that countries come to know one another. I feel He must be happy with my writings and wants others to share that happiness. It is something like our taking delight in the lotus we offer Him because He delights in 11 it. I feel He has brought me from East to West to demonstrate His pleasure in my work. I should learn to receive this honour with humility and gratitude. What my soul offered to my master in the solitude of an obscure corner of the world must be brought before the altar of man where hearts come together and tongues mingle like the right and the left palms of hands joined in the act of adoration. Honour is a heavy enough burden even when it is real but intolerable when meaningless and devoid of sincerity. I am still suffering from Nobel Prize notoriety and I do not know what nursing home there is where I can go and get rid of this my latest and greatest trouble. To deprive me of my seclusion is like shelling my oyster – the rude touch of curious world is all over me. I am pining for the shade of obscurity. A thing which is valuable, which has worth, must be allowed a sufficient amount of space around it. Emptiness of space is most necessary for fullness of perception. A crowd of material is most inimical to the unfolding of life. The worst form of bondage is the bondage of dejection which keeps men hopelessly chained in loss of faith in themselves. We have been repeatedly told, with some justification, that Asia lives in the past – it is like a rich mausoleum which displays all its magnificence in trying to immortalize the dead. In India, I know, a large section of our educated community, grown tired of feeling the humiliation of this charge against us, is trying with all its resources of selfdeception to turn it into a matter of boasting. But boasting is only a masked shame, it does not truly believe in itself. I can see that Japan has all the advantages of the smallness of her area, security of her sea and homogeneity of her inhabitants. She is like a skillful gardener having a small piece of land, compelled to take recourse to intensive culture, namely every inch of the ground yield its best. It is wonderful to see how the mind of a whole people has been trained to love beauty in nature and bring it out in art. It has been their conscious endeavor to make their everyday life in all details perfect in rhythm of beauty. There is no sign of oversight or vulgar display in their houses or their manners. The reticence in their taste shows their natural sensibility for the beautiful. Because their enjoyment is true, for them the enough is better than the more and right proportion better than profuseness. They have acquired a perfect sense of form at some cost to the sense of spirit. Their nature is solely aesthetic and not spiritual. Those of us in India who have come under the delusion that mere political freedom will make us free have accepted their lessons from the West as the 12 gospel of truth and lost their faith in humanity. We must remember that whatever weakness we cherish in our society will become the source of danger in politics. The same inertia that leads us to our idolatry of dead forms in social institutions will create in our politics prison-houses with immovable walls. The narrowness of sympathy which makes it possible for us to impose a considerable portion of humanity the galling yoke of inferiority will assert itself in politics in creating the tyranny of justice. Power in all its forms is irrational; it is like the horse that drags the carriage blindfolded. The moral element in it is only represented in the man who drives the horse. The danger inherent in all force grows stronger when it is likely to gain success, for then it becomes temptation. Those who believe in spiritual life know that to stand against wrong which has overwhelming material power behind it is victory for the active faith in the ideal in the teeth of evident defeat. The great gift of freedom can never come to a people through charity. We must win it before we can own it. And India’s opportunity for winning it will come to her when she can prove that she is morally superior to the people who rule her by their right of conquest. The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their 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 a degradation not fit for human beings. It is in the fitness of things that Mahatma Gandhi, frail in body and devoid of all material resources, should call up the immense power of the meek that has been lying in the heart of the destitute and insulted humanity of India. The destiny of India has chosen for its ally the power of soul, and not of muscle. And she is to raise the history of man from the muddy level of physical conflict to the higher moral attitude. I feel that India is an idea and not a mere geographical fact. India will be victorious when this idea wins victory – the idea of: “The Infinite Personality whose light reveals itself through the obstruction of darkness”. [Shvetashvatara Upanishad 3.8] Our fight is against this darkness. Our object is the revealment of the Light of the Infinite Personality within ourselves. This Infinite Personality of man is not to be achieved in single individuals, but in one grand harmony of all human race. 13 Power, whether in patriotic or any other form, is no lover of freedom. It talks of unity, but forgets that true unity is that of freedom. Uniformity is unity of bondage. The world of learning must be illuminated by a festival of lights, a festival to which every race brings its own light. The whole world suffers if even a single race is left out of it. Education can flourish in an environment where scholarship can grow and spread its wings. That is the purpose of a University. To fulfill this purpose it is essential to invite intellectuals and scholars who are contributing to the world of learning and creativity. A meeting of minds makes a University true. Life has its risks and freedom its responsibility – and yet they are preferable for their immense value and not for any ulterior results. It is not enough to remove wants; you can never remove them completely from the outside; the far greater thing is to rouse the will of the people to remove their own wants. It is food which nourishes, not money; it is fullness of life which makes one happy, not fullness of purse. Multiplying materials intensifies the inequality between those who have and those who have not, and this yields a fatal blow to the social system, through which the whole body is eventually bled to death. The object of ‘Sriniketan’ is to bring back life in its completeness into the villages, making them self-reliant and self-respectful, acquainted with the cultural tradition of their own country, and competent to make an efficient use of the modern resources for the improvement of their physical, intellectual and economic condition. Real peace comes from a wealth which is living, which has the blessings of nature’s direct touch, which is not machine-made – let us seek humbly, coming down to the soil, dealing with forces of life which are beautiful and bounteous. Know that happiness is the growth of the power of the soul. Know that it is absolutely worthless to sacrifice all spiritual beauty to obtain the so-called material civilization of the West. Ideas, to be fruitful, must have the collaboration of hearer and speaker. All real union consists of a binding of two hearts. A child’s claim upon its mother has a sublime origin – it is not a claim of an individual, it is that of humanity. Those who come on some special errand of God are like that child, if they ever attract love and service it should be for a higher end than their own enjoyment. Not only love, but hurts and insults, neglect and 14 rejection come not to grind them into dust but to kindle their life into a brighter flame. The great ones of the world who have made stupendous sacrifices for the land of their birth or for their fellowmen in general, have all had a supreme vision of the welfare of country and humanity before their mind’s eye. I think it to be primarily necessary that in different places over the country, small centres should be given to the responsibility of the country for achieving its own ‘Swaraj’ – that is to say, its own welfare as a whole and not only in regard to its homespun thread. The welfare of the people is a synthesis comprised of many elements, all intimately interrelated. To take in isolation can lead to no real result. Health and work, reason, wisdom and joy, must all be thrown into the crucible in order that the result may be fullness of welfare. That which we would achieve for the whole of India must be made actually true even in some small corner of it – then only will a wonderful striving for it be born in our hearts. Then only shall we know the real value of self-determination, “not by reasoning, not by listening to lectures”, but by the exercise of their own powers make their village their very own, then there will begin the work of realizing our own country as our own. Man creates his own motherland. In the work of its creation as well as of its preservation, the people of the country come into intimate relations with one another, and a country so created by them, they can love better than life itself. In our country, we must reawaken the faculty of gaining the motherland by creating it. The various processes of creation need all the various powers of man. In the exercise of these multifarious powers, along many and diverse roads, in order to reach one and the same goal, we may realize ourselves in our own country. To be powerful, such exercise of our powers must begin near home and gradually spread further and further outwards. If we are tempted to look down upon the initial stage of such activity as too small, let us remember the teaching of Bhagavad-Gita: “By the least bit of ‘Dharma’ (truth) are we saved from immense fear”. Truth is powerful, not in dimension, but in itself. When acquaintance with, practice of, and pride in cooperative selfdetermination shall have spread in our land, then on such broad abiding foundation alone may ‘Swaraj’ become true. The village of which the people come together to earn for themselves their food, their health, their education, to gain for themselves the joy of so doing, shall have lighted a lamp on the way to ‘Swaraj’. It will not be difficult therefore to light others, one after another, and thus illuminate more and more of the path along 15 which ‘Swaraj’ will advance, not propelled by the mechanical revolution of the ‘Charkha’, but taken by the organic process of its own living growth. “He who is one, and who dispenses the inherent needs of all people and at all times, who is in the beginning and the end of all things, may He unite us with the bond of Truth, of common fellowship, of righteousness.” [Shvetashvatara Upanishad 4.1] Gandhiji, great as he is as a politician, as an organizer, as a leader of men, as a moral reformer, he is greater than all these as a man, because none of these aspects and activities limits his humanity. They are rather inspired and sustained by it. His emphasis on the truth and purity of the means, from which he has evolved his creed of non-violence, is but another aspect of his deep and insistent humanity; for it insists that men in their fight for their claims must only so assert their rights, whether as individuals or as groups, as never to violate their fundamental obligation to humanity, which is to respect life. Whatever may be the case, the all humanity, and it is absurd to ruthlessly suppresses freedom against individual conscience, violence and stealthy crime. methods and the principles of Fascism concern imagine that I could support a movement which of expression, enforces observances that are and walks through a blood-stained path of In bygone days in India, the state was only a part of the people. The mass of the population had its own self-government in the village community. Dynasties changed but the people who always retained the power to mange all that was vital to them. This saved them from sinking into barbarism; this has given our culture a community through centuries of political vicissitude. Our western rulers have destroyed this fundamental structure of our civilization, the civilization based on obligations of intimate human relationships. Review: Satyendra Nath Dwivedi 16