Political agenda pushers should let Tagore’s quotes be

Rabindranath Tagore’s 162nd birth anniversary was celebrated a few days ago. Hundreds of people posted on social media, paying their respects and quoting from his writings. Op-ed pieces told us what we can learn from the greatest-ever Indian multidimensional genius—poet, novelist, painter, philosopher, educationist.

But the trouble is this. When we quote people who wrote and spoke a lot, we do not keep in mind the context in which they said what they did. Contradictory quotes from them are also easily available. Swami Vivekananda (was he a Hindu fundamentalist?), Mahatma Gandhi (was he against scientific progress?) and Babasaheb Ambedkar (was he anti-Muslim?) are obvious examples, apart from Tagore. To use their words in an ahistorical vacuum is political opportunism and intellectual laziness.

Last week, Tagore’s vision of a harmonious world that rises above narrow nationalistic pride was cited a lot. One columnist, worried about a “majoritarian political and religious dispensation”, went further, quoting something Tagore wrote in 1911: “In order to salvage this inequality (between Hindus and Muslims), the Muslims have started demanding more than the Hindus. We should genuinely be in agreement with their demands. It will be beneficial for Hindus (and) Muslims.”

Those who have a very different view also had enough quotes in their arsenal. For example, Tagore wrote in 1922: “There are two religions in earth, which have a distinct enmity against all other religions. These are Christianity and Islam. They are not just satisfied with observing their own religions but are determined to destroy all other religions.”

A few years later, commenting on the assassination of Arya Samaj leader Swami Shraddhananda by an Islamist radical, he wrote: “We can appeal to our neighbour Muslims, ‘Please don’t be cruel to us. No religion can be based on genocide’—but this kind of appeal is nothing but the weeping of a weak person… Possibly, Hindus and Muslims can forge a fake friendship for a while, but that cannot last for ever.”

One, Tagore’s oft-quoted views on nationalism are from a time when he was horrified by the ongoing First World War—an avoidable carnage of innocents on a scale never before seen in human history, a war driven largely by nationalistic egos.

Two, it is obvious that a man who wrote Jana Gana Mana, with its magnificent sweep across all of India, saw India as a nation. Even a cursory study of his essays reveals that he believed that nations should be proud of their identities, but should not attempt to impose them on other nations. Who can argue against this logic, other than imperialists, whether it’s the West which says it wants to bring ‘democracy’ to countries that never asked for help, or the Soviet Union during the Cold War years?

Three, when he wrote in 1911 supporting extra rights and privileges for Muslims, he was trying, against all odds, to keep Hindus and Muslims together in Bengal back then.

Lord Curzon had partitioned Bengal in 1905 on communal lines, and Tagore was one of the leaders of the movement that fiercely opposed this. But the British knew how to divide and rule. They opened up many new jobs in Muslim-majority East Bengal, abolished the competitive examination for the provincial civil service and began hiring a disproportionately large number of Muslims. In 1901, Muslims held roughly one-eighth of the 1,235 higher appointments. In 1911, they occupied almost one-fifth of the 2,305 gazetted appointments held by Indians. Naturally, Bengal’s Muslims, who were generally poorer than its Hindus, gravitated towards supporting the partition of this state, because they—quite correctly—saw that their economic and political clout could increase.

In many ways, this action plan laid the seeds of for the 1947 Partition. Tagore’s words were a desperate plea for a Bengal not divided by religion.

Four, when a decade later he sharply criticized Islam, he was expressing a deep disillusionment with the Congress’s politics of those times. Mahatma Gandhi had allied his non-cooperation movement with the Khilafat agitation. This was a disaster. The Khilafat movement collapsed after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk took charge of Turkey and made it a secular state. But not before the horrendous Moplah massacre in north Kerala. Thousands of Hindus were killed. Ambedkar, arguably the most rational Indian in public life of the 20th century, condemned it as an act of jihad to “establish the kingdom of Islam”. However, the Mahatma thought that it is “more necessary for a Hindu to love the Moplah and the Muslim more, when the latter is likely to injure him or has already injured him.”

Tagore was aghast. His subsequent writings reflect his disappointment and frustration. He had discovered that his vision of a new world had few takers. But he spoke his mind fearlessly. His views should be judged within this context.

Of course, it is futile to ask political opportunists to not use the words of people like Tagore as random and potentially inflammatory soundbites. When Mamata Banerjee became chief minister of West Bengal, she had a brainwave—blare Tagore songs at traffic lights. I have no words to describe how ridiculous and disrespectful the whole exercise was—crackly speakers emitting music precious to Bengalis while impatient gridlocked drivers honked their horns to get somewhere on time. Thankfully, that auditory horror died a quick and unlamented death. Please let Tagore be.