Tagore expatiated his ideas on cosmopolitan nationalism through his traditional cyclic theory of history; his approach defined national diversity better than enlightenment progressive theories. Central to his historical attitude lie wrought the distinction between superior and inferior values and not such tired contrasting correspondences between issues hailed from the West and from the East. Tagore’s reading of history, then, does not inscribe a triumph based on such exclusive divisions which, thus, does not empower the nation to wring out certain portions from its past, exscind some features of its identity and obliterate some groups of people from its narration. Tagore saw a vigorous connection between tradition and mod-ernity. He saw universalism with individual talent. His understanding of history—the incorporative, inclusive, and accumulative discourse—made him endorse the sway of Britain over India. This brought a sense of ques-tioning and, hence, some regeneration of values in the ways in which Indi-ans thought and acted. With the eclectic spirit of the Renaissance, Tagore, despite his loving commitment to the Upanishads, Sanskrit literary tradi-tion and Buddhism, did not go into a defense of frigid status quoits Hindu-ism incapable of reflexivity and reformation. Contact and contiguity with the west brought “unrest”; it set in motion certain forces which kept work-ing unabated until freedom became an established reality. Essential to the life of the nation, it weighed in the creative momentum, the opportunity to discover the soul crusted over several generations with certain agonizing immovables like caste distinctions. The perceptive intellectual that he was, Tagore knew that India owed her political ideal of freedom to Britain. He urged in his countrymen an “open mind” which would strive to fulfill the purpose of their connection with the British. He realized how the East and the West held each other in debt and, thus, called for a new ethics of communication which vouchsafed for self examination over self glorifica-tion. Making such divisive claims about Europe being all “material” and bereft of all philosophical appeal and the East being the spring of spiritual revival does not engender meaningful progressive dialogue. Europe, though wrapped in materialism, never lacked the currents of deep think-ing. There is not much promise in having any Asian or European consen-sus as to certain claims to cultural uniqueness. But Tagore drove home the point that the dissensus is not in the nature of uncritical rebuttals but is conflictual in that disagreements are generative, interrogative, and not closed to re-examination. Coexistence is not about erasing differences in momentous flights to secure universals that eventually corroborate cultural uniqueness; it has more to do with questioning what a nation and its
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tion have come to accept as “unique.” Approving of each other, Tagore’s cosmopolitan nationalism is not an undifferentiated tread upon a quiescent middle ground but a domain of dialogue inflected with mutual respect and tolerance.
Identity then was not codifiable for Tagore; in his world of differences and sharing, hybridity became as much a reality as multiple identities. In-dians could not have remained staunchly non-British by rejecting whatever came from the West. Tagore claimed that appropriation was not imitation;
acknowledging the good was not submission. Identity is not polarization, for it should allow for revision of commitments and values; it cannot allow immutable primordiality and static essentialism. Tagore favored the “con-flict of values” so that identity formation became dialectical, not violent and antagonistic; it encouraged history and experience to share a constitu-tive relationship. But identity becomes hypostasized when civilizations are divided into territorially determined spaces and lines of separation and geographical caging are clearly drawn into account for the clashes. Tagore relentlessly proposed deterritorialization of cultural systems which such succinct conflictual separation never allowed into being. Clashes are inevi-table, for differences at some junctures can remain irreconcilable but do not become as dangerous as cultural homogeneity which, most often, is externally coerced into imposition.
Having made journeys to twenty-five countries, and having engaged intellectuals of varied stripes and ideologies—Moritz Winternitz, Carlo Formichi, Benedetto Croce, Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein, Romain Rol-land, Paul Richard, Sylvain Levi, John Dewey, Bertrand Russell and oth-ers—Tagore knew the significance of both personal and institutional commitment in the construction of a global community. It was a promise of a community which did not build up by replacing the local with the global but consolidated instead through interconnectedness, through mul-tiple allegiances, through awareness of a set of values based on a belief in diversity. Tagore observed:
What is the truth of the world? Its truth is not the mass of materials, but their universal relatedness. A drop of water is not a particular assortment of elements, it is their mutuality. . . .We see a flower but not matter. Matter in a laboratory has its use but no expression. This expression alone is crea-tion; it is an end in itself. So also does our civilization find its complete-ness when it expresses humanity, not when it displays its power to amass materials (Soares 61).
Relationships between societies demanded being underwritten by self-determination, the freedom to acknowledge the complexities of
inter-communal existence. In trying to engineer some kind of mechanical race adjustment, India failed to produce a “living political organism,” more so because of a caste consciousness that did not allow unbarred flow of hu-man sympathy (Dutta & Robinson 303). Tagore as an artist expected communion, an appreciative oneness, in response to creations. He could not envisage an existence away from a deeply networked plexus founded on self-interest and sympathy where sympathy is predominantly under-stood as the power to “listen.” For Tagore the history of the growth of freedom was the history of the perfection of relationships, the dialectically alert terrain of the insider and the outsider. S. Radhakrishnan makes a per-tinent point:
As morality, in individual relations, means the subordination of the indi-vidual inclinations to the law of duty, so international morality means the subordination of the selfish advantages of nations to the claims of human-ity and the world at large. It is immoral to think that moral principles have no place in politics. They are for international use as much as for home consumption. The state represents the general will of the community. Truth and honour are as sacred to it as to individuals. The state is not an end in it-self. It is not higher than the moral law. When this reversal of values takes place then the better minds of nations will repudiate war as the failure of reason and the abdication of spirit. From this holocaust real spiritual de-mocracy may be born. The belligerent peoples are in a mood of self-examination. The note of interrogation meets us everywhere (175).
These urgings to interrogate lead to several ways of expressing humanity which are means of understanding a variety of levels of relationships.
Modern culture cannot be limited within the reifying boundary lines of grammar and the laboratory. The artist urged humans not to ignore their aesthetic life; he insisted that this particular premise never be left unculti-vated. Indians, he noted, made experiments, and the solutions they arrived at were different from those of Europeans. These differences from the Eu-ropeans were not markers of seclusion but agencies of mobility, vindica-tors of the ability of Indians to join the “procession of man’s discoveries.”
True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independ-ence of thought and action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters. It is science but not its wrong application to life. Tagore argued that freedom is not estrangement from life or killing of faculty, but the enlargement of self, the expansion of personality, and the utmost possible extension of faculty and desire. Modern culture called Indians into line, to move to the
“drumbeat of life.”
So as a public intellectual, Tagore looked into the prospects of growing a democratic citizenship where one was obligated to question “tradition”
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and allowed to engage with “examined life” (in the Socratic sense of the term). It is space, as Martha Nussbaum argues, where citizens “can think for themselves without simply deferring to authority, who can reason to-gether about their choices rather than just trading claims and counter-claims”. Tagore’s call was to make democracy perform in a more reflec-tive and reasonable way. There was the need to see human beings bound to all other human beings by ties of “recognition and concern.” These modes of recognition for Tagore were ways to find the “human heritage.”
Cultivating humanity in a complex interlocking world involved under-standing the ways in which common needs and “isms” were realized dif-ferently in different circumstances. This realization speaks for “narrative imagination” at different levels and contexts, an ethical imagination which makes a person “think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have” (Nussbaum). It is sympathy for the “other,” something that Tagore ascribed as “the sympathetic insight to place themselves in the position of others”; this, for me, is Tagore’s way of describing dharma which in its encompassing sweep becomes his version of globalization also. Dharma discourages anarchy by upholding norms of order and well being; by acknowledging “sympathy” and “otherity” it acknowledges the uniqueness of individuality too. It becomes an integral planetary Hindu vision of upholding differences amidst a cohering mechanism of together-ness. It points to a pluralism which is not merely based on tolerance, at least not a tolerance that is content with merely putting up with the “other”
out of political expediency. Outlining a solidarity based on genuine par-ticipation in the life of the “other,” Tagore advocated deterritorialization of cultural systems as means to bring down conflicts and secessions at every important level of human existence.