What I Owe to Tagore and Gandhi

When a people come into their own after centuries of alien domination, many complexes develop. One of the most common is the urge to run down everything associated with foreign rule so as to boost one’s own morale. In our country there are many who believe patriotically that all our faults and shortcomings are due largely, if not wholly, to foreign education.

Unlike these patriotic countrymen, I take no pride in disowning whatever good I derived from my education, whether in India or abroad, through my own or through the English language (which is what is generally meant by foreign education in India). Whether I would have been better off or worse off for not receiving such education. I have no means of knowing. All I can say is that but for it I wouldn’t have been what I am, and that I could not spurn this legacy without spurning a good bit of myself.

All the same, as the years passed and I looked , I found the yard of my mind choked with weeds. The seeds and seedlings brought from abroad, though good in themselves, were obviously not well suited to the soil in which they were transplanted, nor to the climate and atmosphere in which they were nurtured. Why else would the fruit, sweet and wholesome in England, turn sour and hard-to-digest in India, and why would the flowers that smelt so good there begin to lose their colour and perfume here?

Turning away from myself I looked at another type deemed very authentic because very indigenous. I met learned men and holy men stuffed choke-full with ancient Indian lore and totally oblivious of the world outside and around them. I found the fruit of their learning and wisdom hard to bite, and the flowers seemed to have lost their bloom ages ago. These worthies were loaded with the heirlooms and curios of the past and were so pleased with themselves that they had no mind to look around or ahead. I turned away from their sight with even more distaste than I had turned away from the wasteland of my own mind.

What then is true education, I asked myself. How can knowledge or culture, whether borrowed from one’s own past or from outside, be made one’s own and made to live and grow and yield a harvest that will taste sweet and be wholesome?

The answer came by watching at work Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. Here were two Indians who had taken freely from their country’s past as well as from the West, and whose minds, though otherwise as unlike as two minds can be, had borne rich flower and fruit, sweet-smelling and nourishing, and at once truly Indian and universal. How was it that the same seeds and seedlings that had borne such a rich harvest in them had turned into little better than weeds in the jungle of my mind and the minds of thousands of my countrymen, though many of them were hardly aware of the wasteland within them? What was there in the spirit of Gandhi and Tagore that transformed whatever they took from outside, whether from the heritage of their own land or from other lands, into something rich and living and made it their own?

Then for the first time I dimly understood the meaning of the much ill-used word, creative. These two men, however unlike otherwise, were truly creative–not as individual freaks but as representative Indians, bringing to the surface and making evident, in a new incarnation as it were, the submerged collective genius of their people. Watching them and brooding on their many affinities and contrasts, it seemed to me that here were the two authentic faces of that ageless spirit of India which has now and again shone through the many masks that India has worn in the turbulent course of her three-thousand-year-old recorded history.

Tagore passed away in early August of 1941. Jawaharlal Nehru was then in Dehradun jail. A few days after the poet’s death I received a letter from him, duly censored and passed by the jailer, in the course of which Nehru wrote: “Both Gurudev (honoured teacher, as Tagore was known to the boys of his school at Santiniketan) and Gandhiji took much from the West and from other countries, specially Gurudev. Neither was narrowly national. Their message was for the world. And yet both were 100 per cent India’s children and inheritors, representatives and expositors of her age long culture. How intensely Indian both have been, in spite of all their wide knowledge and culture! The surprising thing is that both of these men with so much in common and drawing inspiration from the same wells of wisdom and thought and culture should differ from each other so greatly! No two persons could probably differ as much as Gandhi and Tagore.”

The differences, often so sharp as to seem contrasts, were indeed very marked–in almost everything, from birth, upbringing and way of living, to temperament, talent and taste. Almost everything that can keep two human beings apart was there to alienate them from one another. Had one of them been less great and wise, and had either of them failed to understand intuitively that the other was different because he represented the other face of India, they would have misjudged one another and misjudged harshly, as indeed did many of their admirers. But they knew that the Indian sadhanaor the way of realising the truth of life was two-fold, through tapasyaor penance and sacrifice, and through ananda, a joyous acceptance of the fullness of life as partaking of the divine. In a letter of January 1929 addressed to Gandhiji’s English disciple Miss Slade (Mira Bhen), after she had paid a visit to Santiniketan, Tagore wrote: “Human life has its two aspects–one is the discipline of truth and the other is the fullness of expression. Sabarmati represents that discipline of truth, for Mahatmaji is born with the pure life of truth, his nature is one with it. Being a poet my mission is to inspire life’s fullness of expression, and I hope Santiniketan carries that ideal in all its activeness….According to the Upanishads, the reconciliation of the contradiction between tapasyaand anandais at the root of creation, and Mahatmaji is the prophet of tapasyaand I am the poet of ananda.”

It was this inmate awareness that they complemented rather than contradicted one another that kept them close in spirit, across the chasm of many differences that seemed to separate them. They shared in common a great love of their country as well as of humanity, and believed passionately that the good of India was in harmony with the good of humanity, that the merely patriotic man was an incomplete man. But even when they were united by a common love and faith, their temperamental reactions and their ways of approach to life and nature diverged so much that their love and faith assumed very different shapes. A study of the bewildering varieties of shapes thus assumed would help one to understand the two faces of the most creative phase of modern India. To have known them and watched them in action was the greatest privilege of my life.