REFLECTIONS ON VIVEKANANDA AND TAGORE ... 1

REFLECTIONS ON VIVEKANANDA AND TAGORE ... 1

No poem was ever penned by Tagore honouring the memory of the revolutionaries of Bengal or of greater India in direct terms, not a line composed by him on Khudiram, Bagha Jatin, Rash Behari, Surjya Sen and countless others where their sacrifice and suffering was praised and raised aloft in glowing terms, not merely by way of safer, camouflaged, indirect reference replete with literary compulsions. He was rather a bitter critic of revolutionary violence.

Swamiji, on the other hand, had praised profusely the Chapekar brothers and had said that statues of gold should be raised to honour their martyrdom. To Tilak, while strolling with him on the Belur Math grounds, he had emphatically said, "What India now needs is a bomb." Earlier he had befriended Sir Hiram Maxim, inventer of the light machine gun, learnt its operation from the inventor himself and had contemplated its purchase and secret passage to India should he be fortunate enough to see his motherland ripen into revolution before his earthly days were done. During Swamiji's wanderjahre through the princely states of India he had exhorted the Indian princes to rise up in arms against the British but, alas, had found them compromised to comfort in colonised conditions. Swamiji lamented to Sister Christine that India had rotted to her marrow and it needed a generation of education of the masses for her to be ripe for revolution which it was the case as it turned out.

Tagore's poem on Aurobindo in jail was a solitary exception in his airy fairy compositions on freedom from the British where he named the revolutionary as such but here as well no indictment of British rule was explicit, no call given to the evil repressors to quit the land. Much is made of his rejection of the knighthood, and in sooth it was of seminal significance in the freedom struggle then,  but his acceptance of the knighthood in the first place from an evil empire confirms his unwitting condoning of the colonial occupation of India by the British, an error in first principle which he somewhat erased by renouncing the title post the Amritsar massacre. Why in the first place had he accepted the title and become the knight of a dastardly imperial order? Was it that Tagore was cut off from the existent political reality of the day? Was it his unwitting submission to the Empire by way of civility shown to an order which to his reckoning was well-intentioned in awarding him the title? But a knight of the very imperial order which had destroyed India and had not yet seen through to the end of its depredation? These are issues that need critical examination in a fair and impartial way.

Written by Sugata Bose