 Hello and welcome to everybody, Zindabad. Welcome to Paiga Me Azadi, a lecture series which we started on the eve of 74th Independence Day. This was to revisit the legacies, visions, and dreams of the freedom fighters of the Indian National Movement. So far, we've had lectures on Maulana Azad, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Bhagat Singh, and Aruna Safali, and plan to do more in the future. Today, we have with us Professor Rudrangshu Mukherjee, who is an internationally acclaimed historian and is presently the chancellor of Ashoka University. He was the founding vice chancellor of the university as well. He's completed his education in Presidency College, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and then went on to Oxford. And he has authored several books over the years, and he's also written about many of the freedom fighters who we are speaking about in this series. He is a loved and admired storyteller, and everybody at Ashoka loves him for that, and I personally have been a student of his, and have loved him for the same reasons. Today, we'll hear from him on Rabindranath Tagore. I'm sure the love that students at Ashoka have for you, Professor. I'm sure the audience will love to hear from you on Tagore, and really relive his vision, his legacy as you speak. Professor, over to you. Thank you, Nawaz. Good afternoon, good evening. So I crave your indulgence for the next 35, 40 minutes or so when I try to talk about Tagore. It is a difficult task because Tagore was a personality with many, many facets of creativity, and so it is difficult to slot him in, as it were in 35, 40 minutes, but it'll necessarily be selective what I say. I'm not trying to provide you with a complete picture of all of Tagore's achievements. I want to start with one clarification that the name Tagore, by which he is known outside Bengal and internationally, he's not actually his name. His family name was Thakur. Rabindranath Thakur was his name. The British were very prone to anglicized Indian names. Thus Mukhopadhyay became Mukherjee. In the same manner, Thakur became Tagore, and that's how he is known beyond the frontiers of Bengal and Bengalese, and that's how he has become famous internationally as Tagore. But in Bengal, we still refer to him as Rabindranath Thakur, often a little more familiarly as just Rabindranath. So I might be switching between Rabindranath and Tagore, so please hold your patience. I'm talking about the same person. So he was born in 1861, in May 1861, into a very, very affluent and privileged family. The family fortune had been made by his grandfather, Darokanath Tagore, who had been an entrepreneur of a very unique and pioneering kind and had made enormous amounts of wealth, part of which he actually invested in buying landed estates. So the Tagore family from the time of Darokanath was involved in business as well as in rentier income from the landed estates. Darokanath's son, Tagore Rabindranath's father, Demendrana, was a person with a very strong spiritual bent of mind, particularly he was a scholar of the Upanishads. He had many children, Rabindranath being the 14th sibling in a long line of sons and daughters. In spite of being born, the Tagore's also from the time of Rabindranath, the family house, from the time of Devendranath, the family house where the Tagore's lived in Jorashankul, it is now the site of a university named after Rabindranath, Rabindranath Bharati University School, that's where originally the Devendranath family lived, was a great hub of cultural activity because the Tagore's Devendranath's children were all very talented, particularly musically, they were very talented, they all sang very well, some of them wrote songs, et cetera, and wrote very good prose as well, Bengali prose. Tagore had this very unusual background and he was also from a very young age, he displayed a prodigious creative talent, but he never had a formal education. He, as he himself was to recall later on in his life, he always played truant from school. So he had to be moved around from one school to the other because he wouldn't pay attention in his class, he would bunk classes and so on and so forth. And also because he was among the last of the children of Devendranath, he was also very lonely, in a large house full of servants and various kinds of activities, his childhood was very lonely. At the age of 12, Devendranath perceiving that young Rabindranath was not getting any kind of attention and education, took him away to the hill station called Dalhousie, where he provided Rabindranath with a rather remarkable education himself. And Rabindranath Tagore wrote about this, they would get up early in the morning, after the morning prayers, they would learn Sanskrit, read the Upanishads, learn a little bit of English, do some music, and then Tagore would be left on his own to walk with his father, sometimes on his own, sometimes with his father, to walk in the woods of Dalhousie. And Devendranath would teach him elementary botany, teach him how to identify trees and flowers. And at night they would sit on the terrace and Devendranath would give him lessons in astronomy by pointing out to the stars. So Rabindranath had this education and also this exposure to nature while he was very, very young. At the age of 16, 17, he was sent off to England in the hope that in England, he would pursue a more formal education. He was sent off to England with his elder brother, Shruthendranath Tagore, who was the first Indian to become a member of the Indian civil service. But this also was a hope that was belied. He lived one year in England, part of the time in Oxford, part of the time in London, but he got no formal education there as well. But there he was exposed to Western music, to Western literature, to Western culture, to Western modes of living. And this had an impact on Rabindranath. And we can trace these influences, in particularly in his music and his songwriting, traces of Western music often appear in the songs and the musical compositions that he wrote. By the time he is 21, 22, he is well-established as one of Bengal's, if not the most leading literary figure, particularly as a poet. Everybody is praising his genius, but at the same time he's also writing prose, he's also writing dance dramas on various different themes. And the other thing that is growing within Rabindranath is an awareness of India's cultural heritage. And this is linked to his growing sense of love for his country, patriotism. And this is what takes him to, or makes him, join some of the sessions of the Indian National Congress, where he actually sings some very patriotic songs, including Bande Mataram, which he sets to music. It was originally written as a poem by Bonkin Chandra Chatterjee for the novel Anandumar. Tagore set it to music in the, I think, in the Raad Desh, and he was the first to sing it in one of the Congress sessions. So there is this incipient and growing sense of patriotism in the young Rabindranath Tagore. He is already about 25, 30 years old when he is doing all this, a little more than 30, in fact. But there is another very formative experience without which we cannot understand what happens to Tagore and the vision that he was to articulate later on in his life. In the 1890s, his father sent him out to look after the family-landed estates in eastern Bengal. What is today Bangladesh? And Tagore went on to do this family duty. And for much of the time, for many months at an end, he actually lived on a boat, a houseboat. Sometimes on the river, sometimes it would be moored on the bank of the river, or he would go on to the bank of the river, stay in somebody's house. This enabled Tagore to see the daily lives of the common people of India, the poorest peasants of East Bengal, their daily lives, how they lived, their grinding poverty in which they lived, the many fairs, festivals, carnivals that acted as pillars of their sustenance. And also Tagore came to realize how helpless they were, how they had no means in any way to elevate their conditions of their life. They're completely dependent on state initiative and state health that he realized that helplessness. So from this, he came to the realization that if India needed to be revived, if a new India was to be built, and that is what Indian nationalism, the Indian National Congress was trying to do, if a new India had to be built, then it had to be built on the basis of reconstructing the lives of these simple people. Without them, there could be no new India. So Tagore felt a growing commitment to this poor people of India. And he was to write about this poor people very evocatively in a series of short stories that he wrote during this 1890s, which were later collected and published in two volumes. So this is one side. And also he's staying on a houseboat on the river Padma for most of the time, also enhanced his appreciation of nature, the changing seasons and so on and so forth. So, and a third development following from what he had learned from his father in Dalhousie was Tagore's immersion in the Upanishads. He became more and more learned, read in the Upanishads and began to believe in the philosophy that had been expressed in the Upanishads. And, but it was not just the other worldliness or the spirituality of the Upanishads that attracted him or which was part of his mental makeup. Side by side, as I wanted to emphasize, there was this realization of poverty, of humiliation of the poor, their helplessness. So in a volume of poems written very early in the 20th century, 19, two or 19, three, which was called Noibeddo, Noibeddo means offering, offering particularly to God. Most of the poems are of a spiritual nature. They have a spiritual bent, but there is one particular point which shows that Tagore was actually thinking also about other aspects of human life and human existence. That this poem is written in the form of a prayer and appeal to the almighty God, whatever you want to call him. And one line or two lines towards the end of the poem goes like this, give me the strength never to disown the poor, give me the strength never to disown the poor or bend my knees before the insolent might. Give me the strength never to disown the poor or bend my knees before the insolent might. So he is praying that he has the strength to stand up against oppression and exploitation and he has the strength also to stand beside the poor, the poverty-stricken. This is a prayer that he articulates as a poet. All this, what I have been talking about, takes a back seat. It would come back again in the front row, but for the moment it took a back seat because of a governmental decision around 1904-05 when the then Vice-Troy of India, Lord Curzon, decided to partition Bengal. The ostensible reason for the partition of Bengal was that Bengal had become too big and too populated to be administered as one province. So the official argument was administrative expediency required the division or the partition of Bengal. But the intelligence of Bengal was very quick to catch on, and that included Romindranath, very quick to catch on to this bluff that the government was putting out as the justification of their policy. They actually read it as an attempt to drive a wedge between Hindus and Muslims because the Muslims were the dominant population, the majority population in Eastern Bengal and Western Bengal had the Hindu population. And at this time 1905 Bengal was becoming the cradle of growing nationalist feelings and sentiments. So Curzon decided that the best way to nip Indian nationalism in the bud was to divide and rule. Now, as I said, the Bengali intelligentsia and the intelligentsia elsewhere, particularly in Western India, were quick to catch on to this bluff. And now we know many years after this event, when the official papers and the letters of Curzon, etc, became publicly available, we know as a fact that this was the intention of Lord Curzon and the British government. They actually wanted to divide the Bengali population. This is now clear from Curzon's correspondence with the Secretary of State in sitting in London. And Bengalis decided that they would not accept partition and they launched a mass movement. At the forefront of this movement was Robin Ranath Tagore. He, for the only time in his life, he was part of demonstrations. He was part of protest marches. He spoke in public meetings against the partition and also very importantly, he gave this anti-partition movement a cultural angle. He wrote a spate of songs and poems that were in praise of the Indian nation, the Bengali people, to raise the pride, to raise the morale of the people that they were actually fighting for something noble, something worth fighting for. Later on, just before his Nobel Prize in 1913, Ezra Pound was to say that Tagore had sung Bengal into a nation because of this cultural achievement, the cultural dimension that he brought to the anti-partition movement in 1905. There were two other dimensions to this movement, both of which in different ways influenced Tagore. One was Swadeshi. Indians should only use what Indians themselves are manufacturing and producing. They should completely forgo the use of foreign commodities. Tagore campaigned for Swadeshi and this strand of Swadeshi was so strong in the movement that nowadays historians do not call it the anti-partition movement. The term that is used is the Swadeshi movement in Bengal. That's how the movement is identified. And Tagore was a participant in this Swadeshi movement. As a part, it was a spin-off of the Swadeshi movement and this has a very long lasting impact on Tagore. There was the imposition of boycott. Those who did not forgo the use, the selling of foreign goods, they were boycotted. Often they were not just boycotted. Their commodities were burnt, their shops set on fire, their houses attacked and so on and so forth. Now, Tagore saw this as a form of coercion. He said instead of raising the consciousness of these poor people, these poor traders who are selling foreign commodities, buying foreign commodities because it's cheaper. It's a livelihood for them. Instead of raising their consciousness, we are forcing them through violence and this led Tagore to withdraw from the Swadeshi movement. And in fact, he never again actively participated in any public political activity. This is not to say that he had no political views, but he never publicly articulated or participated. He never publicly participated in any political agitation. Henceforward, he withdrew and withdrew into his creative shell, if you like. And his experience of the Swadeshi movement, his participation is expressed in one of his more famous novels written in 1915 called Ghoribayre, The Home and the World, which also was made later on into a film by Satyajitre with the name Ghoribayre, Home and the World, where Tagore actually sets himself up with a different name, of course, sets himself up as one of the principal characters. There are three principal characters in the book and one of them called Nikilesh is actually modeled on himself. So much of what Nikilesh says and what Nikilesh does is actually an expression of Tagore's own views. And these are the views that were expressed that we cannot achieve anything through force and violence. We have to work to educate the people to raise their awareness. That is one strand that is becoming very prominent in Tagore's views and also his complete abhorrence for any kind of coercion and any kind of violence. The other is his growing and this is a strand that is taking forward from the 1890s of his growing horror at the poverty of the people of Bengal and of India. And he is arguing increasingly in this first 15 years of the 20th century that we have to build the strength of these people. He calls his Atma Shakti, Atma Shakti. People cannot remain forever under the shackles of the state. They must be in control of their own lives. They must try and build their own lives, regulate their own lives and become autonomous individuals instead of being helpless victims of state action or lack, in the case of the British, the lack of state action. So Tagore calls this the attainment of Swaraj. Swaraj for him, much like Gandhi, Swaraj for him is not just political independence. Swaraj, the ability to govern your own self. Swar is yourself, the ability to govern and regulate your own self. Tagore writes in a song which tells us what he was thinking. He said there is no king in the kingdom of our king. We are all kings. Let me put it, I was quoting it wrong. We are all kings in the kingdom of our king. So if everybody is a king, if everybody is a sovereign self-regulating, then there is no need of a king. There is no need of royal power. Everybody is a king. So this is what he was trying to achieve and this is where from very different parts, different routes, Gandhi's views and Tagore's views converged. Gandhi was explicating similar views in the Hind Swaraj written in 1909, 1910 and Tagore was also around the same time without knowing what Gandhi was writing. They hadn't met before till then. They met, meet only in 1915. Tagore is also articulating the same kinds of views. So there is a withdrawal from active politics, a kind of a nationalism that is based on coercion and force and also a commitment towards the poor and how their lives can be refashioned and remade and how they can become independent by themselves and that Tagore believed would lead to the independence of India, not just freedom from British rule, but the independence of every single individual in India. While these views are germinating in Tagore and they are also being expressed in some of his essays, some of his writings in poetry, there occurs the trauma that we know as Jolly on Alla Park and Tagore is one of the earliest to react to that act of barbarism where the British opened fire on an unarmed crowd that was celebrating by Saki. This is 13th April of 1919 and Tagore does so in two ways. One is he writes to the left-hand governor of Bengal to say that I am here by returning my knighthood. He had been knighted. He had been made, Sir Robin Ranathakor. He returned his knighthood saying that he did not want to be honored by a regime of power which was nothing more than the most terrifyingly efficient organization for the destruction of human lives. This is a phrase that Tagore used. He said that British rule had only one aim in India. That was to degrade and humiliate Indians and Jolly on Alla Park was only a terrifying symbol of that regime and he didn't want to be honored by such a regime. So he returned his knighthood. That was one thing that he did. The second thing that he did, he wasn't very successful at this point of time. Punjab was then under martial law. Tagore wrote to or didn't write to Gandhi. He sent Dinobandhu Andrews, Charlie Andrews, a Christian missionary who had made India his home and he was a common friend of both Gandhi and Tagore. He actually worked in Tagore's University, Shantini Ketan. He sent Charlie Andrews as his personal emissary to Gandhi with the request that Gandhi and Tagore should walk into Punjab which was under martial law and break the curfew and break the martial law. No outsider was being allowed into Punjab and Gandhi, Tagore told Gandhi, let us meet in Delhi and then let us walk into Punjab. If they arrest us, let them arrest us. That will be the best protest that we can put forward at this point of time. Gandhi for reasons of his own because he was planning the first non-cooperation movement at this point of time. He said, let's not do something so precipitated at this point of time. We can take on this little later. Gandhi very politely but rejected this proposal that Charlie Andrews had bought. A little dissolution by this, not a little, very dissolution by this rejection that came from one of his closest friends. He also appealed to the most important congress leader in Bengal, Chitranjandas, Deshbandhu Chitranjandas, who also wasn't very enthusiastic about launching a public protest against what had happened in Jalayanarabad. So this added to Tagore's dissolutionment and exasperation about nationalist politics. He didn't quite understand which direction nationalism was going. And at the same time, around this time was growing in his mind the idea that he should build a center of learning in Shantini Ketan which would bring the best of the East and the West in the world of scholarship, in the world of culture. This university would bring the best of the East and the West together and he was touring the world and touring India to raise funds and to talent search for this university, which came to be known, which was established and came to be known as Bishro Bharati. So Tagore's thinking was also acquiring an international dimension. He increasingly began to feel that nationalism was too restrictive. One could not just think of one's own country. Humanity was one whole and it was necessary to speak to that larger unity, to that larger humanity. So on the one hand is Tagore's growing awareness and commitment and also I might say work at the village level, among the very poor of India. And at another level there is this attempt to build a community of international understanding because Tagore believed that in essence all human beings were one. Differences of race, nation, color were actually destroying a harmonious unity and they should be abhorred and abjured. So these are two distinct strands that are running through Tagore's works at this point of time in the 1920s. Village work and international cooperation and the building up of harmony. Because of his commitment to village work, Tagore also develops a particular view of Indian history which is worth emphasizing. And that view was India's history has nothing to do with kings and princes. India's history is to be found in the daily quotidian lives of ordinary people. That's the history of India because that is what has endured despite suffering, despite oppression, despite exploitation. This has what has endured for so many centuries. And to repeat myself, to build a new India, one had to build it from the village level and bring that village level to the harmony that the whole of humanity, irrespective of country, caste, class, creed, color, to which humanity actually belonged. And this is what Tagore tried to do in his university, which he very significantly called Vishwa Bharati, where the world met India and India met the world. And for him, for him, India was not the Congress. For him, India was not the Indian national movement. India was not the kings and the princes of the past. India was the common people, the humble people, for whom he had prayed in Naivedu. Give me the strength not to disown them and Tagore never disowned these people. He worked despite being a creative genius. And a creative genius like one the world has seldom known because he was a poet, a dramatist, a novelist, a short story writer, a musician and so on. He had that master's touch, whatever creative field he touched, he blossomed. So despite being a creative genius, he believed that it was possible to bring to the common people that creativity, to imbibe in the common people, that creativity, to fashion their own lives in which they themselves would be independent. And therefore that would lead to a substantive independence of India, which would also be in a way the liberation of the whole of humanity. Tagore's views were to, unknown to him, Tagore's views were to take a severe passion in the twilight years of his life. He died in 1941 and very long life, 1861 to 1941. And in the last two years of his life, he saw the world and human beings being engulfed by violence, the Second World War. And he was completely broken and shattered by what he's the reality that he saw around him. And he was also perceptive enough to understand that this conflict that had engulfed the world had in its very heart, it was embedded in violence that had become an integral part of Western civilization. He had been an admirer of Japan, and he also saw Japan as being a part of this regime or regimes of violence, if you like. And in the last year of his life, he died in August 1941. In the month of April, even though he was, this is a very strange tradition in Shantiniketan, even though he was born on the 7th of May, the university actually used to shut at the beginning of May, 1st of May, because it became too hot in Shantiniketan. So Tagore's birthday was actually celebrated in April. In the university, it was celebrated in April to coincide with the new Bengali New Year around the 14th or the 15th of April. That year in 1941, as a part of his birthday celebrations and the part of the New Year celebrations, Tagore wrote out an address. It was called in Bengali Shubhutar Shankar, Crisis of Civilization, where he actually articulated how it's a very, very moving and a very powerful address. And he articulated in this how these regimes of violence had driven the world to ruin devastation and destruction. And how British rule had done the same thing to India. He again reiterated what he had said when he had renounced his knighthood in 1919, that British rule was barbaric. It was a regime of vengeance and violence. And he writes at the end of that speech. It's a cry from his soul. He said, at one time in my youth, he writes, I had seen the West, its literature, its poetry, as being the high water marks of culture and civilization. That belief inside me has now gone completely bankrupt. I only see ruin and devastation. But he said, I have been taught since I was a young boy that one cannot lose one's faith in humanity. He said, losing one's faith in humanity was a sin. He actually used that word, path, manushar opor vishchash haranopav, to lose faith in humanity is a sin. So he could not end. He could not end that address in a note of despair. So this is what he wrote at the very end of that address. As I look around, I see the crumbling ruins of a proud civilization, strong like a vast heap of futility. And yet I shall not commit the grievous sin of losing faith in humanity. I would rather look forward to the opening of a new chapter in his history after the cataclysm is over and the atmosphere rendered clean with the spirit of service and sacrifice. Perhaps the dawn will come from this horizon, from the east where the sun rises, a day will come when unvanquished man will retrace his path of conquest, despite all barriers to win back his lost human heritage. Today we witness the perils which attend on the insolence of might. One day shall be borne out the full truth of what the sages have proclaimed by unrighteousness, man prospers, gains what appears desirable, conquers enemies, but perishes at the root. Tagore could not abandon hope. Yes, I have no hesitation in admitting that this was a utopian vision, an idealistic vision. But without idealism, can one stand next to shoulder to shoulder with the poor and the wretched of the earth? Without idealism, can one stand against the insolent might of the powerful? I think we cannot. And this is the most lasting legacy of Rabindranath Tagore. Thank you. Thank you from the School for Democracy to Dhritaranshu. As an old friend and comrade and who's been on many journeys with me, it is wonderful to listen to the story of Tagore. And as your students say, you're a great storyteller and your classes are very interesting because history becomes a story in your classes. Today for those who listen to you, this is the story of Tagore, one of the greatest people that this country has produced and lived with. A person personally to me, who has lived since my childhood, since my father in the 1920s, went from Chennai to Bolport to study in Shantaniketan, in Shantaniketan with Tagore at the age of 10. So I have lived with stories of Tagore and Shantaniketan since my very young years. To me, he has been a beacon light, not only in terms of his great poetry and his great cultural contribution to this country, but as a person who has been one of the most thought provoking and philosophical persons in our history in the last 100 years. You said that losing faith in humanity is a sin is what he said. I would say that today to listen to Tagore is critically important because we tend nowadays to lose faith in a humanity which is rapidly going from good to bad, from rapidly descending into the lowest depths of human consciousness. So for those of us who want to have faith and hope, Tagore has always been wonderful. I won't repeat anything that you've said because you've made it such a beautiful story and I want all the listeners to hear it, but I'd like to end with just one thing. A recent great writer and poet and philosopher born in Uruguay has written to say that somebody asked him, what is utopia? And he said, you will never reach utopia, but what is important is the walking to it. So long as you believe in utopia, you'll walk to it. And that's what I think Rabindranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore, Gurudev, as we may remember him, said to all of us and said to the world that you can't lose hope, there is a utopia and that's a utopia you must dream of and you have to keep walking. Today, Rudrakshu, I want to thank you very much from the School for Democracy, which has organized these lectures. I want to thank the School for Democracy as well for organizing this pegame azadi lectures, which has made it possible for me and for many thousands who will hear you talk about Rabindranath Tagore. Thank you very much indeed to all of us.