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 141: Book Excerpt: From The Ruins Of Empire

For many Chinese in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, India was the prototypical ‘lost’ country, one whose internal weakness, exploited by foreign invaders, had forced it into a state of subjugation that was morally and psychologically shameful, as well as politically and economically catastrophic. For ordinary Chinese, there were visible symbols of this Indian self-subjection in their own midst: Parsi businessmen from Bombay who acted as middlemen in the British opium trade with China; Indian soldiers who helped the British quell the Boxer Rising; and Sikh policemen in treaty ports like Shanghai, whom their British masters periodically unleashed on Chinese crowds. In 1904, a popular Tokyo-based Chinese journal Jiangsu published a short story describing a dreamlike journey into the future by a feckless Chinese literatus named Huang Shibiao (literally, ‘Representative of Yellow Elites’) and a mythical old man. Walking down the streets of Shanghai, they see a group of marching people led by a white man.

Shibiao looked closely at these people, and they all had faces black as coal. They were wearing a piece of red cloth around their heads like a tall hat; around their waists, they wore a belt holding wood clubs. Shibiao asked the old man: are these Indians? The old man said, yes, the English use them as police … Shibiao asked, why do they not use an Indian as the chief of police? The old man answered: who ever heard of that! Indians are people of a lost country; they are no more than slaves.

Later in this dreamlike sequence, Shibiao sees a yellow-skinned man in a red Sikh-style turban; he turns out to be Chinese. The dream then quickly turns into a nightmare as Shibiao notices that everyone on the streets is wearing red turbans and that English is being taught in schools from textbooks designed by Christian missionaries. The story ends with Shibiao feeling profoundly disturbed by this vision of China subjected to India’s fate.
India, conquered and then mentally colonized, was also a cautionary tale for al-Afghani. But from the perspective of China, where despite its weaknesses a political-moral order based on Confucianism had endured, India seemed dangerously out of touch with its own cultural heritage. Indian philosophy and literature – which only Brahmans in possession of Sanskrit could read – had been a closed book to a majority of Indians; it was the European discovery, and translation into English and German, of Indian texts that introduced a new Western-educated generation of Indian intellectuals to their cultural heritage.
As the Chinese saw it, foreigners had ruled the country continuously since the Mughals established their empire in the sixteenth century; there was no native ruling class capable of unifying the country. The most progressive elements seemed to be members of the Hindu castes that had faithfully served the imperial Muslim court and then turned into officials of the British as the latter expanded their administrative structures across the subcontinent.
Rabindranath Tagore’s family, connected to the British East India Company right from the settling of Calcutta in 1690, was a prominent beneficiary of the British economic and cultural reshaping of India. His grandfather was the first big local businessman of British India, and socialized with Queen Victoria and other notables on his trips to Europe; his elder brother was the first Indian to be admitted by the British into the Indian Civil Service (ICS).
Born in 1861, four years after the Indian Mutiny and the establishment of new Western-style universities in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, Tagore was part of a new Indian intelligentsia – one that was exposed to a range of Western thought and was also influenced by the ‘social reform’ movements initiated by such men as Ram Mohun Roy (1774 – 1833), often called the ‘father of modern India’. Roy founded the Brahmo Sabha, a reformist society aimed at purging Hinduism of such evils as widow-burning and bringing it closer to a monotheistic religion like Christianity. Tagore’s father, Debendranath, adopted and then elaborated Roy’s syncretism in the organization Brahmo Samaj.
Just as many of China’s modern thinkers emerged from the regions near Canton and Shanghai, the parts of the country most exposed to the West, so the Bengalis of India’s eastern coast came to be natural leaders of what was later called the ‘Indian Renaissance’. Tagore himself grew up in a culturally confident and creative family, and was exposed early to European society and culture. This meant that he never partook of the strident anti-Westernism that began to overwhelm many of his Bengali compatriots in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Writing as late as 1921, when the tide of Indian nationalism was rising fast, he protested that ‘if, in the spirit of national vainglory, we shout from our house-tops that the West has produced nothing that has an infinite value for man, then we only create a serious cause of doubt about the worth of any product in the Eastern mind.’ He would later develop serious differences with Gandhi over what he saw as the xenophobic aspect of the anti-colonial movement. At the same time, Tagore could never be part of ‘Young Bengal’, a group of Western-educated Bengalis who sought to escape Asia and join Europe just as fervently as the Ottoman Tanzimatists and the Meiji intellectuals in Japan had. Committed to a larger vision of the divine in man, and the essential unity of mankind, Tagore became in fact one of the clearest observers and strongest critics of India’s Europeanization.

~~From The Ruins Of Empire -by- Pankaj Mishra

Day 118: Book Excerpt: The Longest August

The performance of the Congress ministries provided examples of insensitivity toward Muslims’ beliefs and feelings. Congregational singing of “Vande Mataram” (Sanskrit: I bow to Mother) as part of the official protocol in schools, colleges, and elsewhere was one. According to Rabindranath Tagore, a nationalist poet and philosopher, the core of “Vande Mataram” was a hymn to the goddess Durga. In Islam, deifying or worshiping anyone or anything other than the One and Only (unseen) God constitutes idolatry and is forbidden.

The two-year-plus rule of the Congress gave Muslims a foretaste of what to expect in an independent India. Support for the Muslim League grew rapidly. In the 1945–1946 elections, it garnered all 30 Muslim places in the Central Legislative Assembly, securing 87 percent of the Muslim vote. In the provincial legislatures its size quadrupled to 425 out of 485 Muslim seats.

By then the League’s resolution asserting that Muslims were “a nation by any definition,” and that the Muslim-majority areas in the northwestern and eastern zones of India, “should be grouped to constitute Independent States in which the constituent units will be autonomous and sovereign,” was six years old.

More significantly, the term “Pakistan” had become irresistibly attractive to Muslims of all classes and persuasions. Orthodox Muslims envisaged a Muslim state run according to the Sharia. Muslim landlords felt assured of the continuation of the zamindari (landlord) system, which the Congress had vowed to abolish. Muslim businessmen savored the prospect of fresh markets in Pakistan free from Hindu competition. Civil servants foresaw rapid promotion in the fledgling state. These perceptions among Muslims grew in an environment in which Hindus were much better off economically than Muslims.

Astonishingly, there was a singular lack of perception among Congress leaders of the economic factors bolstering the League’s appeal. Jawaharlal Nehru made passing remarks about peasants, whether Muslim or Hindu, suffering at the hands of landlords. Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi failed to grasp that it was that section of the Muslim population that felt it could not compete with Hindus in getting government jobs and in commerce and industry that backed the League.

On the political front, what made partition inevitable was Nehru’s boastful declaration on July 8, 1947, about Britain’s Constitutional Award of May 16. It envisaged united India with a constituent assembly, elected by existing provincial legislatures, convening briefly in Delhi, and then dividing into Sections A (Hindu majority), B (Muslim-majority, northwestern region), and C (Muslim-majority, Bengal-Assam) to frame a constitution for three subfederations into which federal, independent India was to be divided. Nehru announced that the Congress had agreed to participate in the Constituent Assembly and, once convened, the Assembly would have the power to change the Constitutional Award’s provisions, if it so wished, and that the grouping scheme would most likely not survive. This led Jinnah to withdraw the League’s acceptance of the Constitutional Award.

The savage butchery that Muslims and non-Muslims—Hindus and Sikhs—perpetrated on one another in Punjab left five hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand people dead and caused the largest mass exodus in history. When communal frenzy gripped Delhi, with Muslims bearing the brunt, Nehru stuck firmly to his secular beliefs, while Patel and Rajendra Prasad disapproved of the Indian army protecting Muslim citizens.

Moreover Patel and his cohorts in Nehru’s government were hell-bent on strangling Pakistan at birth. Jinnah complained about this to British prime minister Clement Attlee and vowed that the Dominion of Pakistan would “never surrender.” Despite his failing health, he helped the incipient Pakistan, composed of two wings separated by a thousand miles, to find its infant feet.

JINNAH FAILS TO WOO THE MAHARAJA

While acting as the chief executive of Pakistan, Jinnah dealt directly with the tribal areas adjoining Afghanistan and the princely states. He realized that failure to persuade the Hindu Maharaja Sir Hari Singh of the predominantly Muslim Jammu and Kashmir to accede to Pakistan would be a severe blow to his two-nation theory. An opponent of Jinnah’s thesis, the maharaja rebuffed his friendly approaches.

Jinnah then assigned the Kashmir portfolio to Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan. He complemented his strategy of taking charge of the Azad Army formed independently by Kashmiri Muslims with a plan to secure Srinagar by deploying armed irregulars from the tribal areas. He informed Jinnah of the first track but not the second.

When the invasion of the tribal irregulars led to the airlifting of Indian troops to Srinagar in October 1947, following the maharaja’s accession to India, Jinnah was distraught. His unease increased when Pakistan’s commander in chief General Sir Frank Messervy refused to obey his order to deploy Pakistani troops. Sir Frank argued that implementing Governor-General Jinnah’s order would result in British officers commanding their respective Indian and Pakistani contingents in a fight against each other.

Jinnah’s dream of incorporating all of Jammu and Kashmir into Pakistan withered, accelerating his physical decline. He died in harness only a year after the birth of Pakistan.

The outbreak of war with India in Kashmir within months of Pakistan’s inception gave its military a primacy it has maintained since then, monopolizing the drafting and implementation of national security policies after the assassination of Ali Khan in October 1951. With his death the nation lost the remaining cofounder of Pakistan. The Muslim League started to unravel, while differences between the eastern and western wings sharpened on the status of Bengali, the mother tongue of the majority of Pakistani citizens. Urdu remained the sole official language. The ongoing squabbling between politicians led to the seizure of power by General Muhammad Ayub Khan in 1958.

~~The Longest August: The Unflinching Rivalry Between India and Pakistan -by- Dilip Hiro