Why I cringed when I heard PM Modi invoke Tagore at Visva Bharati
In 1951, when the Visva Bharati Act declared that the acharya or chancellor of the university would be the prime minister of India, the members of the committee, who drafted the proposal, probably had no idea about how things will shape up more than five decades later and who actually might occupy that chair.
I will always cherish the affection of the students of the Visva-Bharati Univeristy. pic.twitter.com/GXAGOkiLez
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) May 25, 2018
It is cringe worthy and embarrassing to see a person in an environment absolutely alien to him, fumbling and reaching to make bizarre connects to find common ground with the people he is addressing. Perhaps more so when it is the prime minister of the largest democracy of the world, fully conscious that the sea of faces looking at him are far more qualified than he is, and that he is expected to impart words of wisdom to them.
Falling back therefore on his familiar fail safe strategy, the current acharya of Visva Bharati Vishwavidyalaya, Narendra Modi, announced in his inimitable style, "Gurudev's elder brother Satyendranath Tagore, who was the first Indian civil servant, was posted in Ahmedabad for quite some time and this was where Gurudev learnt the basics of English."
LISTEN IN: PM Modi speaks at Visva Bharati University, says ‘I am here as a Chancellor, not a guest’ pic.twitter.com/ixQGeTiKeQ
— TIMES NOW (@TimesNow) May 25, 2018
The contribution of Gujarat thus firmly established on the red soil of Birbhum, and the ice broken, the rest of the speech passed like a breeze. The term "Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam" was trotted out like an obliging pony that had served well several times in speeches in India and abroad and fulsome praise heaped on Rabindranath Tagore, and his all-encompassing vision of a world without borders. Presumably not the ones we have with Pakistan and Bangladesh, which pay enormous dividends by way of votes to the BJP.
One wonders whether the acharya who described Tagore as a "true global citizen", who wanted to make Shantiniketan a "nest of the whole world" was inspired by the poem, "Where the Mind is without Fear" (Chitto Jetha Bhayshunyo).
One would be tempted to believe that he was, if only one could convince oneself to believe that he could actually understand this magnificent poem. Tagore's ideas on nationalism are completely antithetic to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Sangh Parivar's and the acharya's hordes of devotees and followers. Certainly so, going by the fresh horrors that stare at us every day from the newspapers and television screens, which one need not enumerate.
What were Tagore's views on nationalism?
After the arrest of Jawaharlal Nehru University student's union leader Kanhaiya Kumar on charges of sedition, professor Ranabir Chakravarti had said, "If Tagore was alive, he would have been in jail."
In a poem titled, "The Sunset of the Century", written on the last day of the nineteenth century, India's messianic poet and Asia's first Nobel laureate, Tagore, launched a fierce denunciation of nationalism. It is a poem full of disenchantment and outrage over extreme nationalism.
- "The last sun of the century sets amidst the blood-red clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred.
- The naked passion of the self-love of nations, in its drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the clash of steel and howling verses of vengeance.
- The hungry self of the nation shall burst in a violence of fury from its shameless feeding.
- For it has made the world its food.
- And licking it, crunching it and swallowing it in big morsels, It swells and swells
- Till in the midst of its unholy feast descends the sudden shaft of heaven piercing its heart of grossness."
Tagore believed ardently in a reciprocal world view that was based on sympathy, generosity and reciprocity, and in which nations would not be parochial, xenophobic and centripetal, or guided only by realpolitik of commercial greed, but inclined towards a morally and politically enlightened community of nations with humanism as their guiding light.
In this sense, Tagore stands as a predecessor to many of the modern critics and philosophers of post-globalism such as Edward Said, Noam Chomsky and Frantz Fanon.
How are the aims of JNU or Aligarh Muslim University that are labelled today as "anti-national", their seats of learning infiltrated by RSS moles in administrative capacities, any different from Visva Bharati? How are their students dubbed "traitors", slandered, persecuted and beaten up at protest marches, any different from their contemporaries in Visva Bharati?
Ironically, only a couple of days before this convocation, a storm of controversy had been raised by the BJP and it's IT cell trolls over Archbishop Couto's letter to the priests in his parish and religious institutions under the Delhi Archdiocese to "pray for the nation" every Friday, given the dark times the country was passing through. This was seen as treasonous by the hyper nationalists since it smacked of criticism of the incumbent government and as we all know, that is unforgivable and comes with the "go to Pakistan" penalty.
But criticising Archbishop Couto's is challenging Tagore's thoughts reflected beautifully in his poem:
- "Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
- Where knowledge is free
- Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
- By narrow domestic walls
- Where words come out from the depth of truth
- Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
- Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
- Where the mind is led forward by thee
- Into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."
Tagore was of the opinion that since nationalism emerged in the crucible of industrial-capitalism, it is only an "organisation of politics and commerce" that brings "harvests of wealth" or "carnivals of materialism "by spreading tentacles of greed, selfishness, power and prosperity, or churning up the baser instincts of mankind, and sacrificing in the process "the moral man, the complete man... to make room for the political and commercial man, the man of limited purpose"
Tagore wrote, "The nation, with all its paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its flags and pious hymns, its blasphemous prayers in the churches, and the literary mock thunders of its patriotic bragging, cannot hide the fact that the nation is the greatest evil for the nation, that all its precautions are against it, and any new birth of its fellow in the world is always followed in its mind by the dread of a new peril."
If Tagore, who gave up his knighthood after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, saw what happened in 2018 in Tuticorin in Tamil Nadu, how would he react?
The police department is well on its way to becoming a private army and enforcers of mega corporations. From the forests of Jharkhand, where tribals are hunted down and killed as Naxals, to the farmers of drought-ridden Maharashtra, to Tuticorin agitators fighting against Sterlite, everyone in anti-national and fit to be eliminated.
What kind of government murders its own citizens protesting peacefully for their lands and livelihoods, for the right to breathe clean air and drink pure water, with long range sniper rifles, and still calls itself "nationalist"?
If only the present chancellor of Visva Bharati could read and comprehend the following address of Tagore during the opening ceremony of Visva Bharati Cheena Bhavan on April 14, 1937:
"We had, for over a century, been so successfully hypnotised and dragged by the prosperous West behind its chariot that, though choked by the dust, deafened by the noise, humbled by our helplessness, overwhelmed by speed, we yet agreed to acknowledge that this chariot-drive was progress, and that progress was civilisation. If we ever ventured to ask, however humbly: Progress towards what, and progress for whom? It was considered to be peculiarly and ridiculously oriental to entertain such doubts about the absoluteness of progress.
It is only of late that a voice has been heeded by us, bidding us take account not only of the scientific perfection of the chariot, but of the depth of ditches lying across its path. Today we are emboldened to ask: what is the value of progress if it makes a desert of this beautiful world of man? And though we speak as members of a nation that is humiliated and oppressed and lies bleeding in the dust, we must never acknowledge the defeat, the last insult, the utter ruin of our spirit being conquered, of our faith being sold. We need to hear again and again, and never more than in this modern world of bead-hunting and cannibalism in disguise that: By the help of unrighteousness men do prosper, men do gain victories over their enemies, men do attain what they desire, but they perish at the root."