'TIS TIME TO BE MANLY
It is dangerous if an entire race takes too much to soft music, art and poetry. Such hyper-emotionalism en masse usually spells the doom of the race and it is enslaved by more robust races with lesser propensity to cultural refinements. Such a state we have in Bengal today and it does not augur well for the race. There must be an immediate change in attitude and it calls for virile action forthwith. Else, bondage awaits Bengal with its music, poetry et al. The martial spirit needs to be awakened in Bengal. That is the cure for the effeminacy of the Bengalis today. But will Bengal heed ? Will the Bengalis switch from Tagore to Vivekananda and save themselves from impending ruin ?
Tagore for all his literary greatness has injected and induced a debilitating cultural trend in Bengal which has resonated to the psychology of the Bengalis. Hence, Tagore has taken root in Bengal to its utter loss of manhood. The type of effeminate that abounds in Bengal and breeds its type further by the hour has paralysed the sinews of the race, polluted its mind and converted it into a weak sensual race capable of a general weeping and submitting to imposed force which is historically evident in it having undergone mass conversion to Islam -- note that two out of every three Bengalis are converted Muslims from Hindus -- and quite a bulk of the remainder to sensual atheists and godless communists. Here Tagore has led the charge in providing food to the Bengalis to subsist on mere cultural debilities.
This is no indictment of Tagore, the cultural icon, as such but is a critique in a sense as to his debilitating effect on Bengal. And by Tagore is meant not just the poet premier but the entire bandwagon that accompanied and succeeded him in paralysing Bengal. Tagore in that sense has thwarted Vivekananda who has lost the game till now in a general sense to the poet, for Bengal is still not ready to receive him.
Vivekananda's strength Bengal fears. So, it either avoids him or like the coarse commoner criticises him but cannot as yet yield to his directions or dictates. This is a great departure, though, from the revolutionary Bengal which followed Vivekananda during the freedom struggle to liberate India. Bengal then had pledged its loyalty and service at the altar of the motherland to free her from colonial consequence, being fired by the volcanic words of the cyclonic monk. But post-independence the scene changed as Bengal flung itself into its age-old Vamachar (left-handed practice) albeit along its modern derivatives and lost purity and manhood.
The infiltration of sensual ideas through art, literature, poetry, drama, music and invasive alien political thought has reduced Bengal into a land of irreverence where the inhabitants take especial delight in 'citing the scripture to suit' their perverse purposes among which is no less the relishing in spurning spirituality and insulting great men, a deed to which this author is right now being culpable to may quickly be pointed out at him to defeat the general purpose of the essay. Tagore himself has in his celebrated autobiographical study 'Atmaparichay' stated that we, Bengalis, do not know how to pay reverence to the greats.
A self-clarification is due here in that this author is in no way being dismissive of Tagore's prodigious talent and even genius and that he holds in high regard his literary output and other contributions in the field of education, culture and rural development but that he finds some aspects of Tagore's cultural influence baneful for Bengal, a fact which Swamiji had himself warned Nivedita about in no uncertain terms repeatedly. To that effect this essay is a pointer but no one is blaming Tagore entirely for corrupting Bengal. It is the genetic material intrinsic to the Bengali race that, as pointed out before, has resonated to Tagore's works and derived debilitation out of its distortion for which Tagore may be held only partially responsible for having furnished in the first place such sensual thought or even spiritual thought couched in weak language which would inevitably bring about decadent effect on its reader. The rest Bengal will have to manfully bear responsibility for. The hosts of other writers and artists and musicians and cultural icons who were Tagore's contemporaries or successors have, barring a few notable exceptions, all played their due roles in debilitating Bengal but the preeminent among them was Tagore. Vivekananda with his seer's foresight knew it all coming and had, thus, forewarned his Irish disciple thus : "That (Tagore's) family has poured a flood of erotic venom over Bengal."
Bengal listened to Vivekananda early on, then turned away from him and suffered. It is time to change status and be once again on the vigorous path of an upward spiritual rise.
Bengal, renounce sensuality and follow the sage of the Age, your own leading light, Swami Vivekananda. Bengal, save thyself.
Written by Sugata Bose
No comments:
Post a Comment