Day 307: The Tagore–Gandhi Debate on Matters of Truth and Untruth

At one level, the debate between Gandhi and Tagore was about a disparate set of issues. These included Gandhi’s equation of spinning with swaraj/freedom, the non-cooperation movement and the associated boycott of educational institutions, swadeshi and the burning of foreign cloth, and the possibilities of martyrdom in Gandhi’s practice of fasting. However, it is possible that Tagore’s exchanges with Gandhi did not constitute a set of disconnected arguments. These arguments could be interpreted as Tagore’s efforts to articulate his insights about the possibilities of untruth in Gandhi’s conception of the proper means to the truth/satya. One can argue that the debate took place because as a litterateur, Tagore had a deeper understanding of the myriad possibilities of self-deception and sources of untruth that could envelop an individual life and search for truth. He recognized that disguised forms of self-assertion (individual/collective) could obstruct the rigorous purity of Gandhi’s efforts to overcome untruth by moral self-rule/swarajya. On Tagore’s view, self-assertions in the guise of self-mastery would only confirm an individual and society in a life pervaded by all kinds of untruth.

Tagore argued that the various forms of individual self-denial advocated by Gandhi—in the moral life, in the cult of the nation and in asceticism—could in themselves be insidious forms of self-interest. Gandhi’s efforts at overcoming an assertive sense of self in swaraj as moral self-mastery and home rule could in itself be a deceptive form of self-love and thereby become an obstruction to the truth. For Tagore, it was on account of the “egoistic self” that “our friendships become exclusive, our families selfish and inhospitable, and our nations insular and aggressively inimical to other races”. As brought out in Chap. 3 of this book, Gandhi and Tagore thought that truth was both a cognitive and an experiential notion. Tagore (like Gandhi) believed that truth described an individual’s state of being which reflected her progressive awareness of how things really were in the world independently of self-/ego-driven projects. In Tagore’s understanding, deceptions caused by self-assertion could obstruct an individual’s progress to truth and such deceptions would lead an individual into both untruth and a loss of freedom.

In this context it can be philosophically useful to read the Gandhi–Tagore debate, not only in terms of the actual exchanges between them, but also as informed by the plays and novels Tagore wrote at the time he was engaged in writing letters to Gandhi. For it was in his novels and plays that Tagore explored (at his best) the possibilities of untruth (or of insidious sorts of ego-driven self-love) that he saw in Gandhi’s methods to overcome untruth.
This chapter and the next reconstruct the debate between Gandhi and Tagore as being primarily about the difficult nature of untruth and the proper means to become established in a state of truth qua freedom or swaraj. While the present chapter reconstructs Tagore’s arguments about the possibilities of untruth in Gandhian movements and methods, the next puts together Tagore’s alternative understanding of the nature of freedom/swaraj. It is necessary to anticipate in brief the arguments of Chap. 5 here. For Tagore’s understanding of individual freedom as primarily the freedom to reason influenced his conception of the proper means to the truth. This understanding put him at some intellectual distance from Gandhi.

4.1 The Relationship Between Individual Freedom, Reason and Rationality

Tagore thought about individual freedom primarily as a freedom in the mind that is as a freedom to reason. During the debate with Gandhi he argued that an individual’s freedom to think was the chief means of experiencing truth and becoming free of deceptions. Tagore’s objection to the national movement organized under Gandhi was precisely, that the assumption into a homogenized self, denied the individual a right to reason and to differ from others.

Tagore’s understanding of individual freedom can be reconstructed along the lines of Kant’s essay on the Enlightenment. Kant had defined Enlightenment as a human being’s “emergence from his self-incurred minority.” By minority/immaturity Kant meant the individual’s reliance on external variables rather than on his/her own understanding. For Tagore, the “immaturity” from which the agent has to emerge leads to the very same factor that “liberates” the Western rational self, i.e. having reasons for what one believes to be true and for how one acts. The Kantian agent is marked as “distinct” from the “thing” only by the virtue of her rationality. It is this rationality that guarantees the freedom of the will which, in turn, makes possible the agent’s detachment from all sorts of natural desires/inclinations and makes her at home in the world of the truth. It can be argued that Tagore’s conception of individual freedom is philosophically close to Kant and the Enlightenment. However, though Tagore certainly seemed to have been influenced by the Enlightenment he cannot be entirely understood along Kantian lines. An important difference emerges if one tries to unpack what Tagore meant by emphasizing the individual’s freedom to reason. I suggest that the freedom to reason/in the mind, that Tagore argued about, can be philosophically interpreted by taking a clue from Derek Parfit’s conception of the individual’s freedom to respond to reasons in forming her beliefs and in acting in a certain way (Parfit 2013, p. 47). Tagore argued that the primary sense of individual freedom was that individual man qua man must be free to respond to reasons or apparent reasons.

It is important to reconstruct Tagore’s understanding of the relationship between an individual’s free response to reasons and her rationality as a human being qua human being. Tagore accorded priority to the individual’s freedom to understand and respond to reasons rather than to an a priori conception of rationality as a differentiating feature of a human being qua human being. It may be recalled that for Kant both the authority and the content of the categorical imperative are to be understood with reference to the requirements of rational agency rather than to some independent conception of the reasons that people have for what they believe in and do. In Tagore claims about the individual’s freedom to respond to reasons (what he calls freedom in the mind) is not grounded on any commitment to a prior claim about rational agency. Therefore, there is no commitment to any Kantian conception of universal reason. Individual freedom to respond to reasons is more fundamental than any claims of human rationality and universal reason.

It is important to raise the point about Tagore’s understanding of the relationship between individual reasons and rationality here. Section 4.4.2 examines the debate between Nussbaum and her critics on patriotism and cosmopolitanism. In that debate Nussbaum draws on (what she understands to be) Tagore’s commitment to a cosmopolitanism based on the idea of universal reason. In terms of my argument, Tagore insisted on the individual’s freedom to respond to reason without being committed to any prior understanding of the claims of individual rational agency or of universal reason. Understood in this way, judgements about reasons are independent of judgements about universal reason. In Tagore’s view we are rational when we do not believe blindly/obey passionately but respond to reason or apparent reason. Our acts are rational when, if our beliefs are true, we would be doing what we had good reasons to do.

This discussion on the priority of reasons in Tagore should not be taken to mean that he could be unreflectively called a modern. Though he was powerfully influenced by central ideas of the Enlightenment, Tagore cannot be easily called a product of the Enlightenment. His insistence that nature was alive and essentially independent of man and even of God kept him at some distance from the anthropocentricism of modernity . As he had declared in essays called “Sādhanā” he shared India’s ancient rejection of the essentially modern “anthropomorphic hallucination” of seeing man as the centre of the universe. To some extent this brought him closer to Gandhi. In their respect for the integrity of nature both Gandhi and Tagore shared the cosmological commitments of the ancients as they negotiated with Western modernity.

~~ The Tagore–Gandhi Debate on Matters of Truth and Untruth -ed- Bindu Puri

Day 169: Book Excerpt: Patriots and Partisans

Let me begin with two epiphanies.

A few years ago, I visited a book fair held on the seafront in Kochi. The local publishers were represented, as were Indian and foreign firms. In between the stall of Oxford University Press and a shop stocking the works in Malayalam translation of Marx, Engels and Lenin, I came across a man selling, of all things, pickles from Bikaner. He had placed his wares in large open buckets, one containing aam ka murabba, another shalgam ka achar. I asked the young man how he had come from a northern desert to participate in a book fair in this southern port. ‘Maine suna ki Keral mein mela lag raha tha,’ he answered, ‘aur maine socha ki wahan ek dukan khol doon.’ (I heard that there was some kind of fair on in Kerala, so I thought, why don’t I bid for a stall there?) Thus spoke a pickle man in a salad-bowl nation, adding his charmingly naïve logic to an apparently illogical country.

Some months after this encounter, I was travelling by car from Patiala to Amritsar. It was a hot day, and the countryside was monotonous. I fell asleep, and woke when the car slowed down. We were now in the market town of Khanna. I scanned the buildings and their signs.

One, particularly, caught my attention: it read, ‘Indian Bank, Khanna Branch, Head Office, Rajaji Salai, Chennai’. I was charmed and uplifted, sentiments that (especially for the young) perhaps need explaining. For, ‘Rajaji’ was C. Rajagopalachari, the scholar–statesman who had been governor-general of India, chief minister of Madras State, founder of the free-market Swatantra Party, and author of bestselling versions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. In his person he embodied all Punjabi stereotypes about the Madrasi; he was slight, wore thick glasses, had never played a single sport or consumed an alcoholic beverage, and was vegetarian. Yet here was evidence of his enduring legacy in the Punjab, where—as that sign informed me—there were many whisky-guzzling, chicken-eating Sikh farmers banking their savings in an institution headquartered in Chennai on a road named after a dhoti-wearing, rasam-drinking, austere Tamil scholar.

The writer Wallace Stegner once remarked that ‘the tracing of ideas is a guessing game. We can’t tell who first had an idea—we can only tell who first had it influentially, who formulated it in some form, poem or equation or picture, that others could stumble upon with the shock of recognition.’ So it is with ‘the idea of India’. Rabindranath Tagore used the phrase in a letter to a friend in 1921, writing that ‘the idea of India is against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one’s own people from others, which inevitably leads to ceaseless conflicts’. There may have been others who used the phrase before him. But it was only in 1997, when Sunil Khilnani used it as the title of his wonderful book, that his fellow citizens stumbled with a shock of recognition at what the idea of India represented.

As citizens, we ubiquitously use a humdrum manifestation of the miracle of India—namely, our currency notes, which have a portrait of Gandhi on one side and the national Parliament on the other, and its denomination written in seventeen languages, indeed seventeen different scripts, each encoding a distinct, sophisticated, ancient and proud literary culture. Since rupee notes are an artefact of everyday life, we do not see or sense their significance. However, in its own way our paper currency is as marvellous and strange as the Bikaneri achar-vendor in Kochi or the signboard of the southern bank in the Punjab.

The plural, inclusive, idea of India has three enemies. The best known is the notion of a Hindu Rashtra, as represented in an erratic fashion by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and in a more resolute (not to say more bigoted) manner by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, and other associated organizations. When Khilnani published his book in 1997, Hindutva appeared to be the major challenge to the idea of India. To the ‘theoretically untidy, improvising, pluralist approach’ of Gandhi and Nehru, he wrote, the Sangh Parivar offered the alternative of ‘a culturally and ethnically cleaned-up homogeneous community with a singular Indian citizenship, defended by a state that had both God and nuclear warheads on its side’.

Living in north India between 1988 and 1994, I experienced this challenge at first-and second hand—by seeing my Muslim friends board trains under assumed Hindu names, by visiting Bhagalpur after the riots provoked by Lal Krishna Advani’s rath yatra, by witnessing a more general polarizing of public opinion on religious lines. The poisonous residues of those years carried on well into the next decade, as illustrated by the pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.

Shortly after the Gujarat riots, I was driving to the Mumbai airport from the south of the city, when I noticed the tricolour hanging out of every home on Muhammad Ali Road. As I proceeded northwards, beyond Parel into Dadar and Shivaji Park, the flags were not visible any more. The contrast puzzled me, till I reached the airport and saw a live telecast of an India-Pakistan cricket match. It remains one of the saddest memories of my life—the memory of how, intimidated by decades of harassment and violence at the hands of Hindutva bigots, so many of my fellow citizens had to shame themselves into a public display of patriotism solely on account of their faith.

One reason that Hindutva has been so successful is that it speaks in different voices. Arun Jaitley can be trotted out to calm the liberals; Narendra Modi to appeal to the hardliners. The BJP can distance itself from the RSS when it suits, but at other times can claim to be tied by an umbilical cord to it. The RSS in turn can opportunistically own or disown the trishul-waving goondas of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal.

~~Patriots and Partisans -by- Ramachandra Guha

Day 79 : Book Excerpt : Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry

Prasad found Gandhi’s appearance and behavior bizarre in the extreme. “In those days he was living practically on groundnuts and dates,” Prasad remembered later. “Milk of the cow or buffalo was tabooed [sic] and even goat’s milk,” while Gandhi had also vowed not to eat more than five types of food in a single day and to eat no meal after sunset. Although he dressed in homespun peasant clothes, Gandhi spoke not a word of Bihari. He barely understood Hindi. Yet there was something compelling about the strange little man, with his odd habits, his persuasive but pointed banter, and his rapid scuttling walk that made it hard for men two decades his junior to keep up with him.

That compulsion would make Rajendra Prasad go with Gandhi to the poorest and most remote villages in Champaran. He became Gandhi’s first intimate disciple outside his home turf. Three decades later Prasad would become India’s first president.

Meanwhile local British authorities knew about Gandhi’s arrival almost the moment he got off the train. They were deeply alarmed. “His mere presence in Champaran is most undesirable,” the district inspector general’s special assistant wrote to the provincial police superintendent. Even in remotest Bihar, Raj officials knew of Gandhi’s reputation as an agitator, especially on the issue of Indian indentured labor. District Commissioner Morshead had a short interview with Gandhi and concluded that he was keener on stirring up trouble rather than on a serious inquiry. Morshead decided he had to forestall any violence.

On Sunday, April 15, Gandhi and another lawyer named Prasad (not Rajendra but the man he had met at the Lucknow Congress) set off by elephant for the first village in the district, called Chandrahia. Just as they arrived in the dusty, deserted street, a police officer rode up on a bicycle. It was a scene worthy of E. M. Forster, or Paul Scott, with the turbaned khaki-clad officer on his flimsy bicycle standing in the path of the great creaking animal, with its weary and bemused passengers.

They were to stop at once, the policeman said. The district magistrate, W. B. Haycock, had an expulsion order waiting for Gandhi, under the Defense of India Rules. Gandhi returned to Motihari and quietly read the letter. He then informed Haycock that he would disobey the expulsion order and sent a similar letter to the viceroy’s private secretary.

Gandhi waited all day Monday to be arrested, even as the news of what was happening spread with torrential speed through neighboring villages. Finally Haycock ordered him to appear on Tuesday at the district court to explain why he should not be put in jail. Gandhi’s whole plan, of course, was to be put in jail, and he had prepared a statement to that effect.

On Tuesday morning more than two thousand peasants pressed to get into the courtroom. The glass panels of the door broke under the strain, and Haycock had to ask Gandhi to control his followers, which Gandhi gladly did. Gandhi then read his statement, concluding, “I have disregarded the order served upon me not for want of respect for lawful authority, but in obedience to the higher law of our being, the voice of conscience.”

Haycock was in a quandary. As Gandhi said later, “He seemed to be a good man, anxious to do justice.” Like any British judge in India, he saw his job as defending law and order in his district. Willful disobedience of the law (specifically Section 144 of the Crown Penal Code) called for punishment. But the unexpected and unprecedented outpouring of peasant support for the strange little man standing before his bench unnerved him. Haycock convinced himself more violence would result if he arrested Gandhi than if he left him at liberty. Therefore he announced he would suspend any judgment and adjourned the court. He privately asked Gandhi to put off his village visits (surprisingly, Gandhi agreed), and that night Haycock sent a long telegram to the lieutenant-governor asking, in effect, what he should do.

It was a watershed moment in Gandhi’s dealings with British officialdom. In fact, it set the classic pattern of the Raj’s response to Gandhi’s satyagraha tactics, then and later: first the insistence that the law be obeyed; then surprise at the Mahatma’s calm defiance; then confusion at the show of sympathy and support from ordinary Indians; and finally hesitation and inaction and a sheepish letter to superiors asking for further instructions.

So Haycock became the first, but by no means the last, British official in India to be reduced to bumbling helplessness by Gandhi’s unorthodox approach. The response to his letter revealed the pressures from the other side. The lieutenant-governor sharply disapproved of the commissioner’s action and ordered Haycock to withdraw the expulsion order. Gandhi would be allowed to continue his inquiry, making visits to villages in Champaran. “Mr. Gandhi is doubtless eager to adopt the role of martyr which as you know he has already played in South Africa,” the official wrote, and nothing “would suit him better than to undergo a term of imprisonment.” The Indian media were already noticing the events in Champaran and were hailing Gandhi as a hero. Better to back down, the lieutenant-governor suggested, than to give Gandhi the publicity he wanted—and possibly set off an even more widespread reaction. Relieved at not having to enforce the law, Haycock dropped the case.

Gandhi had won. Even more important, Champaran’s peasantry felt they had won, too. As Gandhi resumed his village visits and continued them for the rest of April and May, men, women, and children poured out of their homes. They followed him everywhere, chanting his name, throwing flowers in his path, and—the most striking part of darshan, or sighting of a holy man—gathering the dust from his feet on their fingers. When he finally reached Bettiah and Raj Shukla’s home village, the people unhitched the horses from Gandhi’s carriage and pulled it through the streets. A local British official watched. The English might think Gandhi a fanatic or even a revolutionary, he noted, but to the peasants “he is their liberator, and they credit him with extraordinary powers.”

~~Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age -by- Arthur Herman