CHAPTER VI

RABINDRANATH TAGORE'S CONCEPT OF SOCIAL INTEGRATION

SHYAMAL SARKAR

Civil society was one of Tagore's chief concerns. He repeatedly wrote and spoke of it, and in his own way tried to foster it by experimenting with institutions which would serve as the foundation of civil society. E.P. Thompson, in his introduction to Tagore's Nationalism observes, "For Tagore, more than any other thinker of his time, had a clear conception of civil society, as something distinct from, and of stronger and more personal texture than, political and economic structures." The Visva-Bharati he proposed (a far cry from the central university of today) was the growing concrete shape of the foundation imagined for the superstructure of civil society. We have to give the Visva-Bharati he proposed a close look; a few other things also deserve our consideration.

Tagore, says E.P. Thompson, `was a founder of anti-politics'. This means that even during the phase of the most widespread political activities in India's struggle for independence Tagore continued to maintain that village reconstruction was a more fruitful activity for the purpose of the real deliverance of the Indian people. Not only Indians, but India survived in India's villages. The uninterrupted continuity of Indianness in the Indian villages was possible not because they could offer any effective resistance to the successive hordes of invaders and colonizers, but because these invaders and colonizers thought they could afford not to take their existence into serious account. Down the ages and stages of foreign rules, the Indian (but not exclusively Hindu) civil society survived the political upheavals and economic transitions without an impact of fundamental character. The trickle of benefits that accrued to the village society as a result of changing economic forces did not inspire the crossing of any technological border which could have exercised a decisive influence. Macaulay's ideas about westernization of Indians were true only about a fringe of Indian urban society. Outside the urban fraction, the plural civil society went on in Indian villages much in the manner of a hundred years ago. The British Indian army and the British Indian lower bureaucracy performed for British Imperialism whatever British imperialism desired to squeeze out of this sub-continent. Distance and discontinuity amongst villages were not annihilated, and the civil society in rural India remained more or less beyond the pale of impregnation of Western social, political and economic ideas and the consequent changes in structures which could have been induced by radically new ideas,

Tagore recognized this and was, in fact, pleased with this. But he did not idealize all aspects of living in this society. He was put out by the feudalistic limitedness -- economic, social and moral -- and repeatedly pointed out the need for reforms, and, in his own way, carried out some reforms on his own means in estates he managed on behalf of his father. He found in this plural civil society the seat of Indian creativity, the fountainhead of multifarious cultural manifestations which together constituted the unity of Indian culture. To respect the vitality and legitimacy of civil society is at one and the same time to discountenance the totalization, monopolization, mechanization, abstraction which are features of aggressive, neo-colonial societies. Neo-colonialism is the new economic mask of the belligerent nationalism of the recent past.

Tagore wanted to posit the civil society he experienced in Indian societies against the covert neo-colonial aggression making its appearances in his own day. He proposed another antidote in the form of a new university that he conceived, his Visva-Bharati. The motto with which the university was founded included:

This is Visva-Bharati where the world

makes a home in a single nest . . .

We are of the faith that Truth is one and

undivided, though diverse may be the ways

which lead us to it. Through separate

paths pilgrims from different lands arrive

at the same shrine of truth. . . .

. . .

So unto this Visva-Bharati we render our

homage by weaving garlands with flowers

of learning gathered from all quarters

of the earth. To all devotees of Truth, both

from the West and from the East, we extend our hand with love,

Compared with the objectives of any institution of higher learning at any time anywhere, the motto of Visva-Bharati must be considered unique. Pursuit of learning is not acknowledged as an end in itself. It is set against the perspective of the achievable unity and solidarity of all civil societies, along with their distinct heritages of value and the perpetually active cultural and spiritual exercises. Tagore conceived of his institution as `The Center of Indian Culture', but we need to know of the proposed activities in slightly greater detail than will be revealed by the mere name of the Center. In Tagore's own words, "On each race is the duty laid, to keep alight its own lamp of mind, as its part in the illumination of the world. To break the lamps of any people, is to deprive it of its rightful place in the world festival," The noblest experience is that of the ever brightening world festival of light, every ray of which is the effulgence of one national mind or another. The effulgence starts at the moment of origin of any particular society, and every contribution of undeniable value will be progressively added through the perpetually evolving life process of that society -- of every society. The attraction of the world festival of light is spontaneous and unquenchable in every human heart unless this be irredeemably brutalized. The love of this light is the urge for answers for all the problems of existence which agonize every human heart. The social mind, in a combined single and collective effort, thinks, feels and gropes. Education energizes this groping and helps find slices of truth. Society makes this slice of truth its own wherever it may have originated. What is of crucial importance is the perception of truth and not the source from which it arrives. Yet, the significance of the sources of the arrival of truth cannot be detached from the truths themselves, and hence education is a concourse of truth and the sources and processes of its arrival.

In more concrete terms he says:

My suggestion is that we should generate somewhere a centripetal force which will attract and group together from different parts of our land and different ages all our materials of learning and thus create a complete and moving orb of Indian culture.

At one and the same time he cautions:

We have come to understand in modern times that any special truth, or special culture which is wholly dissociated from the universal, is not true at all.

Indeed his understanding of the Indian past was that:

Our forefathers did spread a single pure white carpet, whereon all the world was cordially invited to take its seat in amity and good fellowship.

The basic impulse for Tagore's conceptions of `The Center of Indian Culture' as a seat where all the distinct cultures of the world should meet and creatively negotiate at the level of equality and complete acceptance of one another was supplied by his vision of India's history. In ancient India, as perhaps in all ancient societies, social, personal life was lived at a safe distance from the political and revolved around features of civil society. Thoughts were directed mainly to the evolution of diverse aspects of the civil society, Hence, successive periods of the Indian history proved receptive to various groups of settlers or even invaders and assimilated all the novel and noble features of these peoples. Indian culture remained a developing synthesis, seeking harmonization with alien but welcome, distinct but absorbable elements.

In his interpretation of India's history, he undertakes to show how the history of India constitutes a process of assimilation through different epochs of history, through periods of trials and struggles with aggressive antagonistic forces. The specific historical situations which served as the objective basis for the two primary epics of India, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, give us an insight into the emergence of a new age, with a new outlook upon the life of societies, races and ideas which were initially hostile to each other, This remains the abiding spirit of the history of India. At that stage the achievement consisted in the reconciliation of two opposite principles, that of self-preservation, represented by the Brahmin, and that of self-expression, represented by the Kshatriya. When the first overtures towards social union were being made, it became necessary for the Aryans to come to an understanding with the non-Aryan strata of the population. At a succeeding phase, the Sakas and the Huns poured into India in repeated hordes, and this threatened that the very racial and cultural identity of Indians being would be swept away.

But an act of self-preserving resistance and sheer cultural vitality enabled India to assimilate the invaders. The retention of racial identity to the extent it is a reflex of a distinct cultural identity is a sine qua non for the synthesizing attitude and act. The urge for protection of cultural identity manifested itself through new compilations and collections of the extant cultural materials which served to define and preserve the synthesizing cultural identity. Visualizing the whole as complete made for a new, inspiring self-awareness. The surviving, as well as renewing self-awareness, is a condition of an ever-enriching culture which generates its own principle of creative continuity and its vigor for enfranchising others. Race-mingling and value-absorbing became a unified and unhindered process. Harmony of component differences came to be organically effected through a long history which confronted India with complex problems of meaningful adjustment. In a climatic passage in his A Vision of India's History (Visva-Bharati, 1962, p. 42) Tagore observes:

. . . The India of to-day has roused herself once more to search out her truth, her harmony, her oneness, not only among her own constituent elements, but with the great world. The current of her life, which had been dammed up in stagnation has found some breach in the wall and can feel the pulse of the tidal waves of humanity outside. We shall learn that we can reach the great world of man, not through the effacement, but through the expansion of our own individuality. We shall know for certain that, just as it is futile mendicancy to covet the wealth of others in place of our own, so also to keep ourselves segregated and starved by refusing the gift which is the common heritage of man because it is brought to us by a foreign messenger, only makes for utter destitution.

Thus, vision of Indian history, as it has progressed through centuries of conflict and resolution in integration in a higher synthesis, is the broad perspective that has lent meaning and intelligibility to Tagore's conception of an international university which expresses the spiritual craving of an ancient civilization. This spirit seeks fulfillment in a complete freedom of creativity which alone assures individual as well as collective self-realization.