The spectre of nationalism
Terrifying Vision:
M S Golwalkar, the RSS and India
by Jyotirmaya Sharma
Penguin, 2007
Nationalism
by Rabindranath Tagore,
introduction by Ramachandra Guha
Penguin, 2009
Rabindranath Tagore is the best· known Southasian litterateur, and that is not only because he was the first Asian to receive a Nobel Prize in any discipline. A prolific writer, he wrote novels, plays, short stories and essays, besides his better·known poems and songs. He travelled widely and lectured extensively, and had friends in different parts of the globe. Closer to home, M K Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were his admirers. Late in his life, he took up painting and exhibited in London, Moscow, Paris and New York. To call Tagore a mere polymath, however, would be an injustice to his versatility. A person of great and varied learning certainly he was. But more than that, Tagore possessed that rare attribute found in abundance only in poets and artistes- deep insight and an ability to peep into the souls of fellow beings.
Bangalore-based writer Ramachandra Guha ranks Tagore as one of the 'four founders' of modern India, along with Gandhi, Nehru and B R Ambed kar. That, however, is a debatable list at best, as it leaves out Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel, Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan, among a host of other personalities that helpedto form and nurture the idea of 'India'. But Guhapresents hiscase convincingly ina 60-page introduction to this collection of Tagore's ruminations on national isms in the East and West. Indeed, his is a beautifully crafted essay that not only sets the stage for the great poet's reflections but also contextualises the volume.
Sometimes, though, the introducer gets carried away by his enthusi asm. In a clear leap of faith, Guha claims that it was through Tagore's "provocation" that Gandhi and Nehru "developed a theory of nationalism that sought not just political freedom for the Nation but equal rights for all its citizens." While it is true that Gandhi was often effusive in his praise for Gurudev (as Tagore was dubbed), the Mahatma probably arrived at his own conclusions about the necessity of an inclusive definition of Indian nationalism as he travelled through the length and breadth of his country.
Meanwhile, Nehru was discovering his own vision of India, where Ashoka and Akbar amazed him with the expanse, accommodation and grandeur of their empires. Gandhi and Nehru were certainly informed by Tagore's writing and impressed by his erudition, but their formulations were rooted in politics rather than in the realm of ideas. Theoretically, it would have been impossible to imagine a community as heterogeneous as India. The existence of a united India is a fact stranger than fiction, but it owes its success to politics rather than to poetry or philosophy.
The second half of the book contains three of Tagore's speeches, dealing with nationalism in Japan, the West and in India itself. With a prescient foreboding, Tagore diagnoses the disease that had begun to eat at the vitals of Japanese society. "I can see her motto," he says of Japan, taken from science, 'survival of the fittest' writ large at the entrance of her present day history – the motto of whose meaning is, 'Help yourself, and never heed what it costs to others', the motto of a blind man who only believes what he can touch, because he cannot see. But those who can see know that men are so closely knit that when you strike others the blow comes back to yourself.
There are better-organised and deeper thoughts in the lecture, but this quote shows how little the New Delhi establishment has learned from one of its most celebrated thinkers. Tagore admits that he risked being hit with "the epithet of `unpractical"' and that it would stick to his "coat-tail never to be washed away", effectively excluding him "from the consideration of all respectable persons". But Japan had to endure World War 11; and even though the Japanese have not quite discarded the Darwinian principle, Tagore's name commands more admiration among 'respectable persons' in Nippon.
In discussing nationalism in the West, Tagore defines the modern concept of the nation as "the organised self-interest of a whole people, where it is least human and least spiritual," and admonishes progenitors of this idea: "You, the people of the West, can you imagine the desolating despair of this haunted world of suffering man possessed by the ghastly abstraction of the organising man?" The last chapter, about nationalism in India, comes from a talk delivered in the US. Here again the poet stresses perils inherent in the very idea of the nation."It is the aspect of a whole people as an organised power," he says. This organisation incessantly keeps up the insistence of the population on becoming strong and efficient. But this strenuous effort after strength and efficiency drains man's energy from his higher nature where he is self-sacrificing and creative. For thereby man's power of sacrifice is diverted from his ultimate object, which is moral, to the maintenance of this organisation, which is mechanical. Yet in this he feels all the satisfaction of moral excitation and therefore becomes supremely dangerous to humanity.
Guruji and Gurudev
No better analysis of kamikaze fighters or suicide bombers has been offered by psychoanalysts studying the minds of men and women who embrace death with the sole purpose of destroying their objects of desire, than what is offered in these words of Tagore's. Nathuram Godse is supposed to have told the court, in his last statement, that it was his admiration for the success of Gandhi that prompted him to kill the Mahatma. Now, Jyotirmaya Sharma, a political philosopher, has taken it upon himself to study the life of the 'nationalist' that Tagore feared so much and that inspired Godse.
In terrifying vision: M S Golwalkar, the RSS and India, Sharma culls 12 volumes of collected works of his subject to come up with the thesis that the Guruji of the Hindu right inhabits the "eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mental universe that attempted to transform Hinduism into a rigid, codified, mono chromatic and aggressively masculine entity". Further, in the introductory chapter, the author suggests that it is necessary to understand the idea of European romantic nationalism (which created grounds for the emergence of Fascism) in order to appreciate the potency of Golwalkar's Hinduism.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, known as the RSS in the English press and simply as the Sangh in other languages of the Subcontinent, was founded in 1925 by K B Hedgewar (1889-1940 ), a Marathi Brahman trained in Bengal. The original intention was to use the organisation to promote the idea of a Hindu nation. But it was
Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar (1906- 73), the second and most influential sarsanghchalak – the RSS's supreme authority – who gave the organisation the direction it has since followed. The key word here is organisation- with all of the connotations of creed, structure, hierarchy, discipline and devotion – which Tagore feared would transform human beings into automatons. It is the aggressive nationalism of Golwalkar that has given birth of a host of RSS off shoots – collectively the Sangh Parivar, including the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bharatiya Janata Party. The shape and direction this has given to Hindu chauvinism and militancy is most visible in Narendra Modi's Gujarat, the state where Gandhi was born and where the Sabarmati Ashram still reminds visitors of the idea of India as propagated by the Mahatma. No wonder that Tagore finds so little resonance in India that is Bharat – not the Hindostan about which Allama Iqbal sang.
It is an irony of history that two of Tagore's songs have become markers of aggressive nationalism, as the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. Along with the flag, a national anthem is one of the two most powerful symbols of the kind of nationalism that Tagore so despised. All over Southasia, Guruji's version of nationalism appears to have triumphed over the humanism of Gurudev. But then again, Golwalkar had merely modified Fascism, whereas Tagore's thoughts are universal and aimed at eternity. A century is too short a period by which to judge the strength of an idea as original as that of Gurudev's