The Pragmatics of Reason : Gandhi and Tagore

7/30/2019 The Pragmatics of Reason : Gandhi and Tagore

1/37

The Pragmatics of Reason: Gandhi and Tagore

Ranajit Guha, in a recent lecture on world-history and historiography makes the

claim that it is by climbing on the back of philosophy that world-history has establishedits moral transcendence over the local and the merely political. In this triangulated

adjudication of the relative valences of politics, world-history, and philosophy,

philosophy could either be celebrated for its sublime ability to create possibilities of

transcendence in the absence of real conditions for such possibilities; or it could besummarily critiqued and condemned for inculcating false consciousness in the name of a

spurious transcendence. So, what exactly does philosophy do, and how is theinterventionary agenda of philosophy preset by its generic determination? What is the

relationship among history, politics, ethics, and philosophy? Is this relationship

hierarchically subsumptive, synchronic, concentric, intersecting and overlapping,contradictory, organic, strategic and opportunistic? It is with these questions in the back

of my mind that I wish to analyze the momentous debates between Mohandas Gandhi,

theMahatma and father of the nation, and Rabindranath Tagore, the Poet, Gurudev, and

visionary concerning the politics ofswaraj, the non-cooperation movement, and finally,the nature of freedom, reason, and the human being. Of particular importance to me is

the manner in which Gandhi and Tagore anchor their arguments and positions in the ideaof reason that each of them conceives differently, and derives from different sourcesand for different ends. But before I get into the debates proper, I would like to offer a

few general comments about the categories that constitute their mutual agreements and

disagreements.

One of Gayatri Spivaks recent books has the following phrase in its title:

postcolonial reason. So, how many reasons are there and in how many worlds? What

is the connection between the worlding of each of these worlds and the evolution of itsattendant reason? In the phrase, postcolonial reason, is reason a practice, an activity, a

perspective, a micrological procedure in search of its proper macrology? How

polemically instrumental is reason in its postcolonial formation, and how does such apolemic invoke and encounter the polemical situatedness of other reasons such as

colonial and imperial reasons? Within the epistemic jurisdiction of reason in the

post-colony, how is theEn Soi of reason articulated with itsPour soi? Is postcolonialreason experienced and cogitated as a break from colonial reason; and if so, where was

the break validated initially: in the pure realm of reason itself, or in those drastically

changed historical conditions that warranted a break in the superstructural realm of

reason? In the break between the colonial and the post-colonial, how is the potential


2/37

universality of reason maintained under erasure? I focus on the historical vicissitudes of

reason in the context of colonialism and postcoloniality for the obvious reason that the

debates between Gandhi and Tagore take place in the context of decolonization: inparticular, the choice of reasonable strategies for Indias decolonization and its

emergence as a free post-colonial nation.

Equally at stake is the status of philosophy as discourse. In his essay, Ranajit

Guha focuses on the ways in which western, and in particular Hegelian philosophy,

creates an illusion called world-history in the name of occidental dominance. It is in therealm of philosophy that the horrors of political realities are laundered and renamed as

the imperatives of world-history. Are all philosophies condemned to behave thus as

accomplices to regimes of dominance, or is this tendency specific to the West poised

towards world domination? The invocation of the world as spirit, whether or not in anexplicitly Hegelian mode, in conjunction with history produces an imperative: the

imperative that there can only be one true history on behalf of one world. It becomes the

burden of philosophy, as a form of higher transcendent truth, to validate and justify this

alignment, achieved via political dominance and economic exploitation, between historyand the world. The worlding of the world through many different flows and in many

different directions is highjacked in the name of dominant historiography towards asingle telos that philosophy anoints as the end point of all humanity. There is then a deep

traditional complicity between the historical empire building and colonizing of the West

and its philosophy. The higher truth of philosophy, rather than question or problematizethe historico-political adventure in the form of a critique, in fact fabricates an allegorical

alibi, or sublates a la Hegel, for the vicious and politically fraught local processes of

dominance, oppression, and exploitation. If the world is to persist as an

epistemological/disciplinary object as well as a worthwhile horizon for all humanthought, then it becomes important to think of the world perspectivally, rather than

concede that the world has already been realized as one within the philosophy

authorized by the dominant discourse, be it western, imperialist, neocolonialist,patriarchal, capitalist etc. As Ashis Nandy points out memorably in his essay on Third

World Utopia, the difference between dominant and subaltern modes of imagining Utopia

is that the latter openly acknowledges and assumes accountability for its perspectivalinvestment in the concept of Utopia. In other words, the philosophical contents of such a

Utopia would be projections from the perspective of a certain historico-political

situatedness in the world, and that even as Utopian projections, they would carry all the

markings of such a situatedness. The Utopian dream, in other words, will not and oughtnot to function as an allegorical or philosophical exorcism of its historico-political

rootedness in a certain context. The reasonable-ness of the Utopian blueprint cannot be

transcendent of the ethico-political authority of the flawed and contingent perspectivethat initiated in the Utopian process in the first place. To put it in the context of my

current endeavor, how is the world that figures in Gandhis political discourse and

Tagores philosophico-poetic discourse different from the world in a Hegelianphenomenology? How is Gandhis world cathected by his ethico-political Reason, and

Tagores by his philosophical Reason? What is the relationship in their thinking between

epistemology and politics, between subject formation and agency formation?


3/37

An easy way to get into the Tagore-Gandhi debates would be by way of the

standard opposition between practical and pure reason, between means and ends, and

between reason as strategic-opportunist and reason as necessary. I do intend to tap intothese canonical forms of opposition later in my essay; but now I would like to introduce,

in broad strokes, the historical context of the debates. First and foremost, there was the

burning question of Indias decolonization and independence from British colonial rule.Swaraj had to be given a specific content, and there was the equally important issue of

elaborating the methodology that would take India towards its goal. Second, there was

the challenge of articulating a persuasive pedagogical relationship between the Indianmasses and the leaders of the independence movement. Thirdly, there was the question

of Indias relationship to the West and the rest of the world: how such a relationship

could be anticipated in the context of the movement towards decolonization. Fourthly,

education emerges as a majormotifin these discussions: should the syllabus bepractical or theoretical, generalist or specialist, indigenous or cosmopolitan, indo-centric

or of the world, anti-western or inclusive of the west with a certain caveat? Fifthly, was

nationalism a good phenomenon or bad? Is Gandhis non-cooperation movement fuelled

entirely by critical anti-colonial negativity, rather than by its own affirmative energy?How should the immediate and urgent political context be thought through with reference

to the long haul? How is the long haul to be recognized in the contours of presentpractices and their pragmatic imperatives? How is Reason to be identified both as a

demystification of extant ignorance and the producer of new knowledges and

affirmations? What is the constitutive connection between Truth as insatyameva

jayathe and its producability by Reason? How is Tagores celebration of Truth as

Cosmic and cosmopolitan different from the Truth that Gandhi was after by way of

askesis, the story of his experiments with Truth? In the context of decolonization, how

should the Indian subject forge a relationship between critical nay-saying and joyful aye-saying? What role does nationalism play in the evolution of the boundless human spirit?

What can India teach the world, and what can it learn from the world? And finally, how

can India be the world and the Indian human being realized as the human in general?

I begin the essay with a statement that Gandhi makes in a letter that he writes to

the Gurudev in April 1919, soliciting a message in the context of the national struggle.The forces arrayed against me are, as you know, enormous. I do not dread them, for I

have an unquenchable belief that they are supporting untruth and that if we have

sufficient faith in truth, it will enable us to overpower the former. But all forces work

through human agency. I am therefore anxious to gather round this mighty struggle theennobling assistance of those who approve it. I begin with this quotation to make the

following points. Gandhi captures the situation both agonistically and antagonistically.

Truth is, but the historical way to the truth is by way of a struggle: struggle against theforces of untruth. Gandhis conviction is two-directional: convinced that he is in the true

and the forces arrayed against him are captive to untruth. Truth becomes the function of

an uncompromising ethical unilateralism, and in this context, faith takes on a curiousepistemological role. Truth preexists as an a priori, but it needs to be jumpstarted and

motored by our faith, for only then will it work instrumentally on our behalf and

overpower the enemies. The important lesson is that truth as an a priori has to be put

to work perspectivally, i.e., in a force field where conflicting forces are at work


4/37

contending and battling against one another. There is the unmistakable reference to

human agency and its indispensability for the historicizing, the a posteriori unpacking, of

Truth, ones truth as the truth. This postulation raises interesting questions about theepistemology of truth and the ontology of the human condition or perspective that is the

partisan bearer of the truth. Truth will triumph transperspectivally, but such a

transcendence will have to be worked out through a perspectival antagonism, perhapsincommensurability. Unlike a dialectician, Hegelian or Marxist, Mohandas Gandhi will

not allow the the truth of the Truth to implode into the perspectival truth of human

agency. Human agency is the contingent but unavoidable executor of a higher truth.Unlike a dialectical or historical materialist who would be concerned with the recognition

of an emancipatory teleology in the history of the present, or a Foucauldian who would

disallow the uncoupling of the will to truth from the will to power, Gandhi is committed

to Truth as an absolute ontology, but an ontology that requires for itsPour Soi the agencyof the human. The question of course then arises: What makes them hold on to their

untruth as though it were the Truth? How will the one common human Truth emerge

from the many untruths, such as Colonialism, Imperialism, Apartheid etc. that have

somehow found historical human sponsorship and endorsement? How will thetemporality of the one Truth vanquish and demystify the regimes of illusory truths?

Tagores thoughts on the matter, as conveyed in a letter that he writes to the

Mahatma on the eve of the gruesome Jallianwalabagh massacre, run thus: Power in all

its forms is irrational, it is like the horse that drags the carriage blind-folded. The moralelement in it is only represented in the man who drives the horse. Passive resistance is a

force which is not necessarily moral in itself: it can be used against truth as well as for it.

The danger inherent in all force grows stronger when it is likely to gain success, for then

it becomes temptation. We can see where Gandhis and Tagores formulations intersect,in agreement as well as in discord. Tagores invocation of rationality in this passage is

compelling. Refusing to make any opportunistic distinction between those forms of

power that are good and empowering and those that are bad and corrupting, Tagoreoutlaws power as such from the domain of rationality. The irrational is likened to a horse

that drags the carriage blind-folded. What Tagore has in mind is not a Foucauldian notion

of power that is constitutive of truth and knowledge but rather an instrumentalphenomenon hat requires the externality of agency to avoid a fatal blind-foldedness.

Both Tagore and Gandhi concur in their insistence that human agency is crucial to the

correct harnessing of power, but they anchor it differently. Tagore makes an implicit but

all important connection among rationality, morality, and the human subject. Using theall too familiar example of the horse carriage and the human driver (there is the other

famous example of the carriage driven by the 5 indhriyas (sense organs) that would run

amok but for the human mind in control of the carriage: a hierarchical dispensation thatreads the mind as more authentically representative of the human than the sense organs),

Tagore relegates or downgrades power into a necessary evil that nevertheless needs to

be controlled by the human moral sense. So, why is it that the moral sense in and byitself cannot direct and motor the carriage? What is the implication of the direction-

motor split or division of labor? Are power and irrationality coextensive and

consubstantial? If Reason is the opposite of the irrational, and if power and the irrational

are either synonymous or reciprocally entailed, then is Reason powerless, except as an


5/37

ahistorical and perhaps immaculate category? Is the moral sense that categorical

imperative that stands in for Reason, and ergo ex officio directs and unblinds all forces

of power?

Tagore is clearly invested in a necessary as against a contingent or merely

opportunistic or strategic notion of the moral: he is looking for the moral in itselfover and above the determinations of specific historical deployments of force or power.

When Tagore adjudicates that even the Mahatmas passive resistance, whose virtue or

probity is unexceptionable, is not moral in itself, he is also making the symptomaticreading that all practices of power are necessarily equivocal. In other words, passivity in

and of itself does not constitute either a higher moral or epistemological ground. As a

procedural use of force power, passive resistance is not exempt either from a moral or an

epistemological blindness. Gandhi may well have a point in claiming that passiveresistance as modus operandi does not partake substantively, qualitatively, and

ideologically in the semantics of the enemy; but in Tagores reading, passive resistance is

equivocal vis a vis Truth. I will have more to say about this when I discuss the role of

positivity and negativity in Gandhis and Tagores thought. It would appear that Tagoreis seeking an apodictic validation of Truth in the human mind, without the invasiveness

of didacticism and the opportunistic power that such a didacticism has to employ. Astrong corollary to Tagores absolute criticism of Power in all its forms is his negative

attitude to success. He sees success as an immoral seduction that turns force into a

temptation, an irresistible stimulus. The moral here is that if anything is worthy ofhuman valorization, such a valorization should have nothing to do with success. To put it

somewhat cryptically, in Tagores reading, success functions like a currency, like money,

like the logic of monetization that usurps the place of what a moralist would call

intrinsic value. If the logic simply were, and this is what Gandhi calls temptationand habit, that some thing is worth doing precisely and exclusively because it ensures

success, then such a logic is doomed to forever fall short of a Truth that is independent

of winning and losing. As Tagore himself puts it: We must know that moral conquestdoes not consist in success, that failure does not deprive it of its dignity and worth.

With this background I would now like to focus on the themes of non-cooperationandsatyagraha, and the differences between the two thinkers in the context of Indias

opposition to colonial domination. I will begin with Tagores philosophical objections to

Gandhis program of action and then analyze Gandhis sharp polemical rejoinder to

Tagores critique; and here I use the term philosophical to characterize Tagoresdiscourse and polemical in Gandhis context with my own polemical intention: to

understand why, how, and when philosophy becomes polemics, and polemics acquires

the ability to fashion an entire worldview. Now to Tagore: commenting appreciatively onGandhis resolve and ability to galvanize the immense power of the meek to remedy

the insulted humanity of India, Tagore goes on thus.

The destiny of India has chosen for its ally,Narayan, and notNarayansena- the

power of soul and not that of muscle. And she is to raise the history of man, from

the muddy level of physical conflict to the higher moral attitude. What isswaraj!

It is maya, it is like a mist, that will vanish leaving no stain on the radiance of the


6/37

Eternal. However we may delude ourselves with the phrases learnt from the

West, Swaraj is not our objective.

Our fight is a spiritual fight, it is for Man. We are to emancipate Manfrom the meshes that he himself has woven around him,-these organizations of

National Egoism. The butterfly will have to be persuaded that the freedom of

the sky is of higher value than the shelter of the cocoon. If we can defy thestrong, the armed, the wealthy, revealing to the world power of the immortal

spirit, the whole castle of the Giant Flesh will vanish in the void. And then Man

will find hisswaraj. We, the famished, ragamuffins of the East, are to winfreedom for all Humanity. We have no word for Nation in our language. When

we borrow this word from other people, it never fits us. For we are to make our

league withNarayan, and our victory will not give us anything but victory itself;

victory for Gods world. I have seen the West; I covet not the unholy feast, inwhich she revels every moment, growing more and more bloated and red and

dangerously delirious. Not for us, is this mad orgy of midnight, with lighted

torches, but awakenment in the serene light of the morning.

Having agreed with Gandhi on some of the essentials, Tagore carefully differentiates his

chosen teleology from that of the Mahatma. The most startling diagnosis that Tagoremakes is thatswaraj is nothing but a manifestation ofmaya: in other words, a profound

epistemological misnomer. Tagore here is taking recourse to SankarasAdvaita or

monism when he introduces the concept ofmaya into the discussion. In invoking theEternal in opposition to the merely temporal (and his invocation is reminiscent of the

manner in which Shelley eternalizes the memory of Keats in his elegyAdonais),

Tagore is aligning the truly real with epistemological monism and political realities

with historical opportunism that is illusion, maya. If that were all, i.e.. if Tagore weredoing nothing more than instantiating the otherworldly epistemology of Sankara to

discredit the world of circumstantial history, it would be okay precisely because of its

irrelevance to Gandhian thought. But Tagore is doing something more: he is making aconnection between the epistemology of illusion and our dependence on the West, and

between such a dependence and our true nature. Tagore strikes at the heart of the

Gandhian thesis when he asserts that theswa in the conceptswaraj is a meretricious,heteronomous, and parasitic self that is dependent, in its very antagonism, on the

phrases we learnt from the West. To put this in the context of my initial question

concerning the relationship of philosophy to history: is Tagore suggesting that all

historico-political conceptions of the self tout courtunreal when compared to theeternal truths of spirituality; or is he arguing that the self is rendered false when it is

enthralled within a colonizing and alien historiography? Here are two ways of reading

Tagore. First, the ones own as exemplified in the concept ofswaraj is nothing ut areactive paranoid fantasy that is dependent on the reality of colonialism. If this is what

makesswaraj part of the epistemology ofmaya, then such a scenario is politically

corrigible: treatable through a different political alignment that would anchor the selfaffirmatively and proactively in its own historiography and worldview. The second

reading would argue absolutely in favor of a transcendent spirituality that would see no

difference between one kind of historico-political belonging and another. According to

this reading, the spiritual fight on behalf of Man would function as a demystification of


7/37

any other fight that focuses on the merely circumstantial and historical. According to this

logic, the meshes that any historically determinate human subject weaves around himself

could be the enemys or his own.

It is clear that in invoking spirituality, Tagore is also gesturing passionately

towards a cosmic universality that is thwarted and derailed by what Tagore termsNational Egoism. The reference to all Humanity is both omniscient and perspectival:

omniscient since all Humanity is posited as a necessary a priori, but at the same time

this all Humanity becomes the perspectival responsibility of the ragamuffins of theEast. We, the so-called orientals, have the responsibility of not succumbing to illusion

and of producing a spiritual and all encompassing Humanity grounded in its own

spirituality. At this juncture, when his rationale would seem to leave behind the world of

determinate names and histories towards the horizon of a pure and untrammeledspirituality, Tagore loops his thesis back into the world of history and politics when he

makes the confident claim that we have no word for Nation in our language. Here, just

as in the earlier context, two discourses get interbraided: that of political autonomy and

self-reliance, and that of spiritual or ontological freedom. As Sekyi-Otu contends in thecontext of Frantz Fanon, here too, the absolute perversion or occlusion of Spirituality (or

what I choose to translate as Ontology in a Heideggerian vein), cannot be identified assuch. It has to be recognized in a specific political betrayal or misapplication. The

symptom is the fact that even though we have no word for Nation in our language, we

are being forced to use the word; and the diagnosis is not so much the preemption of ourown political sovereignty, but more crucially, alienation from our true and ones own

Spirituality. Whether we take Tagores words, Gods world literally or not, it is clear

that to Tagore the spiritual securing of the Self in its own sovereign context is pure act of

unconditional affirmation, whereas acts of self declaration in the manner ofswaraj aremired in the immediate moment and its particular mode of conditional entrapment, and as

such cannot be anything but negative. Awakening to the serene light of the morning

and its spiritual call will have to be on the basis of a resolute transcendence of the orgy ofthe West and its nocturnal revelries of the Flesh.

Though Gandhi and Tagore are at one when it comes to rejecting anything alien:we have Tagore saying, When we borrow this word (Nation) from other people, it never

fits us, and Gandhi proclaiming, I refuse to live in other peoples houses as an

interloper, a beggar or a slave, they ground and nurture their ontology differently. To

Gandhi, politics, always constituted, governed and directed by ethics, is ontology; andontology political. Whereas to Tagore, with his strong epistemic faith in Spirituality,

Ontology is separate from, even though it partakes in, Politics. To locate Gandhi and

Tagore within the famous Hindu tripartite division of reality-seeking intoKarma yoga,Bhakthi Yoga, and Gnana Yoga, Gandhi is exclusively aKarma Yogi who does not

acknowledge a beyond that lies beyond the karma-kshetra, whereas Tagore privileges

the temporality ofGnana yoga and its commitment to the beyond. As a symptom ofthe same difference, Gandhis action is centered in a collective notion of the human

subject and subjectivity whereas the poetic-philosophic Tagore is attuned to the music of

the individual. Is this merely a matter of temperament, or is it a genuine disagreement

about the worlding of the world? Let us hear Tagore directly on this issue. Beginning


8/37

with a charming confession that of late he has been playing with inventing new metres

based on the conviction that God himself is an eternal waster of Time, Tagore offers us

the following thesis of his own interpellation.

But where am I among the crowd, pushed from behind, pressed from all

sides? And what is this noise about me? If it is a song, then my ownsitarcancatch the tune and I join in the chorus, for I am a singer. But if it is a shout, then

my voice is wrecked and I am lost in bewilderment. I have been trying all these

days to find in it a melody, straining my ear, but the idea of non-cooperation withits mighty volume of sound does not sing to me, its congregated menace of

negations shouts. And I say to myself, If you cannot keep step with your

countrymen at this great crisis of their history, never say that you are right and the

rest of them wrong; only give up your role as a soldier, go back to your corner asa poet, be ready to accept popular derision and disgrace.

A couple of significant asides before I comment on the passage. Like the visionary

intellectual Tridib in Amitav Ghoshs The Shadow Lines, Tagore too takes intellectualpride in eternally wasting Time, rather than succumb to the seduction of an

anthropocentric, be it nationalist or otherwise, architectonics of Time. Secondly, there isa remarkable resemblance between Tagores appeal to thesitarand its mode of aesthetic

being and that remarkable poetic utterance of Subramanya Bharati, the famous Tamil

poet-freedom fighter-visionary contemporary of Tagore, that goes something like this:Why would anyone craft a good veena/veenai and let it gather dust? In this passage,

Tagore is unabashedly identifying and staking his subject-position and asserting

unequivocally that he can assume a political role on the basis of, and not in abeyance of,

theswadharma of that subject-position. He is a singer, and even if such a confessionmay sound inane, precious, and irrelevant in the context of the great crisis of the people

and their history (and here one is reminded of the predicament of the poet Yury Zhivago

in Boris PasternaksDr. Zhivago), he has to keep singing and keep faith with hissitar.What is also interesting in this passage is the way in which Tagore, subtly but surely,

employs his subject-positional and specific-intellectual (and of course here I am thinking

of Michel Foucault) expertise not just to register the political passively or receptively, butrather to constitute politics proactively. In the very heat of the critical historical

moment, Tagore fearlessly poses the question of alignment and attuenement. He reserves

for himself and his poetic-singerlyswadharma the right to expect and find a melody in

the immanent political manifesto and its rhythms. What he hears, in the place of apossible melody and its affirmative joy, is the congregated menace of negations shouts.

And this dissonance precipitates a crisis: the poet has to make a drastic choice and a

decision about what role to play. The poet accepts, at his own peril and the possibility ofaccusations of infamy and treason to the political cause, to be a poet since it has become

untenable to combine within the same performance the role of the poet and that of the

soldier. The question to pose here is this: Is this merely an elitist-individualist-intellectualist withdrawal from politics in the name of temperament and sensibility; or

is it a kind of position taking, with an implicit politics of its own, that can function as a

radical critique of the political as such? To put it concretely, what is the cognitive as well

as epistemological status of Tagores symptomatic reading that theswaraj movement,


9/37

fuelled exclusively by negativity and nay-saying, is a flawed and erroneous manifestation

of the political? In other words, does and can the Poet have something meaningful to say

to the political agitator, i.e., can the truth claim of this message be entertained on its ownterms, and not merely as the truth of a special pleading of a special interest group? And

Tagore helps us out here with the following statement: a statement that has all the zing

and the oomph of a manifesto even though it emanates from a poet-singer.

The idea of non-cooperation is political asceticism. Our students are

bringing their offering of sacrifices to what? Not to a fuller education but tonon-education. It has at its back a fierce joy of annihilation which at best is

asceticism, and at its worst is that orgy of frightfulness in which the human

nature, losing faith in the basic reality of normal life, finds a disinterested

delight in an unmeaning devastation as has been shown in the late war and orother occasions which came nearer to us. No, in its passive moral form is

asceticism and its active moral form is violence. The desert is as much a

form ofhimsa (malignance) as is the raging sea in storms, they are both

against life.

In a manner reminiscent of Nietzsches campaign on behalf of Life in the arena ofphilosophic thought, Tagore targets asceticism and negativity as enemies of Life. If

Nietzsches thesis was that a compulsive preoccupation with history causes a chronic

inability to forget which in turn encourages an ascetic denial of lifes vitalism, and whatFoucault would later term the history of the present, Tagores objective is to uncover

the life-denying violence that is implicit even within putative non-violence of asceticism.

Crucial in this entire discussion is the valence given to the term, interest. What is the

difference between the interest that underlies acts of cooperation and the interest thatinforms practices of non-cooperation? Furthermore, in the act of creating positive or

affirmative value, does it matter what one is cooperating with, or non-cooperating

against? Can cooperation turn into an act of nay-saying under certain conditions, and cannon-cooperation, under certain circumstances, transform itself into a form of aye

saying? What could Tagore mean by the basic reality of normal life when such a life

has been invaded and contaminated by Occidental Colonialism? Is Tagore suggestingthat despite such an invasion the basic reality of normal life goes on its own terms, in

its own sphere, untouched by the epistemic violence of Colonialism, inviting the Yes of

cooperation from the Indian/human subject? Whereas Fanon would argue poignantly that

the very wells of a human ontology have been poisoned by the Manichean illogic of theColonizer-Colonized divide, Tagore seems to be suggesting that it is up to the subject to

give credence or not to the regime of colonialism. His argument is that precisely because

the non-cooperation movement is interpellated, albeit in dire antagonism, by the realityof Colonialism, that it is not and cannot ever be a free movement. It is up to the spiritual,

human subject of the East to show up Colonialism for what it is, i.e., maya, an effect of

illusion that has no command or purchase over our creativity. On the one hand, Tagoreseems to acquiesce in SankarasAdvaitic theory ofmaya as afait-accompli, but on the

other hand he forwards a strong theory of agency on behalf of the eastern spiritual

subject: it is indeed up to the volition of this subject to nihilate colonial reality into

maya. Once such a demystification has been achieved, a process that demonstrates that


10/37

what is seemingly real is in fact an illusion, the real aye-saying of cooperating with ones

own nature and affirming life can begin. When nay-saying is actively pursued as an

instrument of socio-political change, its asceticism becomes a force of violence; and whatis violated is a deep-seated human nature that is constituted by its capacity for

cooperation. In psychoanalytic terms, Tagores argument could be interpreted as an

endeavor to re-cathect the human subject in opposition to the ascetic imperative. Tagorehimself perhaps not like the language of cathexis since it has to do with desire, a drive not

all that compatible with the discourse of spirituality and spiritual ontology; and yet, it will

have to be maintained that Tagore is insisting on a volitional change of direction. Non-cooperation will just do, andswaraj has to be conceptualized and tracked differently.

Tagore could also be seen, and this might seem like an ungainly stretch, as an ally of an

Althusser to come in so far as both Tagore and Althusser privilege epistemology or

theoretical thinking over the immediate and self-evident imperatives of political need.Tagores persistent diagnosis that a certain kind of political praxis is itself a manifestation

ofmaya that warrants demystification by intellectual thought is very similar to

Althussers altogether theoretical exorcism of those humanist obstacles that come in the

way of our understanding of what is man.

It is interesting that in all the exchanges between the two great thinkers, eventhough the West is referred to continually, all the sources of erudition mobilized by both

Tagore and Gandhi are resolutely Indian: Hindu and Buddhist to be precise, but within a

continuum that can only be called Hindu. Here for example is Tagore, legitimating hispreference for cooperation over non-cooperation. Brahma-vidya (the cult of Brahma, the

Infinite Being) in India has for its object, mukti, emancipation, while Buddhism has

nirvana, extinction. It may be argued that both have the same idea in different names.

But names represent attitudes of mind, emphasize particular aspects of truth. Muktidraws our attention to the positive, and nirvana to the negative side of truth.

Contrasting the Hindu brahmana worldview with that of an ascetic Buddhism, Tagore

goes on thus.

The abnormal type of asceticism to which Buddhism gave rise in India

revelled in celibacy and mutilation of life in all different forms. But theforest life of theBrahmana was not antagonistic to the social life of man,

but harmonious with it. It was like our musical instrument tambura whose

duty is to supply the fundamental notes to the music to save it from straying into

discordance. It believed in anandam, the music of the soul, and its ownsimplicity was not to kill it but to guide it.

Is this the kind of philosophy that allows history a piggy back ride and thereby sublimatesthe guilty, fractious, worldly, and accountable contradictions of history into a mono-

phonic symphony; or, is it an organic philosophy that acknowledges its ideology of

worldliness without the ruse of sublimation? To put it bluntly and to put the onus ofproof and credibility entirely on Tagore: what do terms like anandam, mukti,brahmana

have to do with the historicity of political struggle, decolonization, and the achievement

of political freedom? How is harmony, troped by way of music, even germane in the

context of historical dialectical struggle and antagonistic confrontation between a


11/37

colonizing collective human subject and a colonized collective human subject? Isnt this

the philosophy of quietism, of thestatus quo masquerading in the guise of

phenomenological and/or spiritual transcendence? Isnt this the good old philosophy thatis happy to pontificate post-historically from a position of virtual transcendence even as

history is taking shape historically? What is not clear is whether Tagore is initiating a

meta-historical interrogation of history, historiography, and historicity, or simply optingout of history into a spiritual mode of engagement with the world.

At this point, before I get into Gandhis rejoinder to Tagore, I would like todigress a bit to discuss the status of truth in general: and in particular, the coming into

its own of truth by way of process. To the Poet, it would seem that Truth preexists, if not

as an essence, at least as a promised horizon reachable through aesthetic and spiritual

troping. The anandam that Tagore is ecstatic about is an integral part of theSachitanandam constellation of concepts: a constellation that effects the mutual

apotheosis of Truth and Beauty. In opposition to such a luxuriant and indulgent theory of

Truth and Bliss, there indeed is an askesis theory of Truth that is close to Mohandas

Gandhis Story of Experiments with Truth. In this story of historical and empiricalexperiments with Truth, the self, both individual and collective, functions (much like the

practice of ethical self styling and taking care of the self in the later Foucault) as theacted upon: as the object of epistemological askesis. In this scenario, the actualization

of Truth is the function of a disciplinary regime: a regime that is an expression to the

extent that it is also an analytic of imposition. The body politic does not ipso factoproduce the truth, i.e., not until it is conditioned through a series of prescriptions and

proscriptions so that it can yield the truth. Truth is a rigorous funding that is not

necessarily a celebration of the flow of life: it could well be a distillation, a meaningful

desiccation, an annealment, a restricted distillation of Life by way of as much nay-sayingas aye-saying. Also, significantly such a truth is very much in the making in a world

replete with antagonism, exploitation, and domination. Let us now hear Gandhi

responding to Tagores misgivings and anxieties about non-cooperation. Beginning witha stern repudiation that Tagores letter has been written in anger and in ignorance of

facts, Gandhi gets to the heart of the matter. He(The Poet) has a horror of everything

negative. His whole soul seems to rebel against the negative commandments ofreligion. He then engages directly with Tagores position. (Propositional negation: state

of being and instrumentality)

In my humble opinion, rejection is as much an ideal as the acceptance of athing. It is as necessary to reject untruth as it is to accept truth. All religions

teach that two opposite forces act upon us and that the human endeavor

consists in a series of eternal rejections and acceptances. Non-cooperationwith evil is as much a duty as co-operation with good. I venture to suggest

that the Poet has done an unconscious injustice to Buddhism in describing

nirvana as merely a negative state. I make bold to say that mukti (emancipation)is as much a negative state as nirvana. Emancipation from or extinction of the

bondage of flesh leads to ananda (eternal bliss). Let me close this part of my

argument by drawing attention to the fact that the final word of the Upanishads

(Brahma-vidya) isNot. Neti was the best description the authors of the


12/37

Upanishads were able to find forBrahma.

I, therefore, think that the Poet has been unnecessarily alarmed at the

negative aspect of Non-cooperation. We had lost the power of saying no. Ithad become disloyal , almost sacrilegious to say no to the Government. This

deliberate refusal to cooperate is like the necessary weeding process that a

cultivator has to resort before he sows. Weeding is as necessary to agricultureas sowing. Indeed, even whilst the crops are growing, the weeding fork, as every

husbandman knows, is an instrument almost of daily use. The nations Non-

cooperation is an invitation to the Government to co-operate with it on its ownterms as is every nations right and every good governments duty. Non-

cooperation is the nations notice that it is no longer satisfied to be in tutelage.

The nation had taken to the harmless (for it), natural and religious doctrine of

Non-cooperation in the place of the unnatural and irreligious doctrine ofviolence. And if India is ever to attain theswaraj of the Poets dream, she will

do so only by Non-violent Non-cooperation.

This disagreement between the Mahatma and the Poet works on two registerssimultaneously: the political and the philosophical. To the Poet, by and large,

cooperation and anandam are ontological states of being that enjoy a categorical/spirituala priori status. In other words, cooperation as a fundamental ontological orientation and

anandam as a primordial spiritual possibility/goal/horizon do not require the travails, the

contradictions, the contingent and unpredictable vicissitudes of history for theirlegitimacy. Tagores distrust of history and the outcome of historical processes as

struggles, contestations, and antagonisms is so intense and deep-rooted that he prefers to

protect and quarantine whatever is worthwhile and precious in Existence from betrayal by

History. The ultimate epiphanic affirmation of statements such asAham Brahmasmi andTat tvam asi is true by virtue of itself, and not as the function of an ongoing critical

negotiations with negativity and nay-saying. Tagores objective is to instantiate in

every instance of living the principle of ontological cooperation with spirituality and theprinciple ofanandam; and the rationale of unmediated instantiation is only too willing to

consider history as such, colonialist or otherwise, as the maya that warrants

demystification. The epistemological critique of history as such as maya is informed bythe understanding that all productions of Truth in History are unavoidably reactive in

nature (and never proactive or anchored in their own ontology or worldview: and this is a

truly postcolonial concern regarding derivativeness, (Partha Chatterjee) and ontological

pre-emption by the vicious binary logic of winners and losers), and therefore never trueby virtue of themselves. To put it in basic philosophical discourse, Tagores thinking

takes the form of an abiding solicitude on behalf of theEn Soi of Truth, and an eternal

vigilance against the improper high-jacking of theEn-Soi by the meretricious andinauthentic practices of historical representation that are motivated exclusively by a

polemical opportunism that desires and wishes on behalf of the loser nothing more than

the triumphalism of ritual winning. The Poet is keen to establish the truth ofphilosophical thinking over and above the mutable and deceptive truths of political

history.


13/37

Gandhis rejoinder to Tagore is two-pronged: he responds both programmatically

by clarifying his objectives against Tagores misrecognitions, and he also has something

to say about Tagores philosophical rendition of the truths of history and politics.Humbly but firmly, Gandhi corrects Tagores understanding of the valences of the terms

mukti and nirvana. Gandhi suggests that there indeed does obtain, between the two terms

a relationship of semantic fungibility: mukti as emancipation from could be a negativepractice in the name of freedom, and that nirvana could well be an affirmation. This

interchangability is as much propositional-formal as it is historical-contextual. In

reminding Tagore of the Upanishadic Neti protocol of finding the Truth, Gandhi is alsoproving the point that there can be no Truth without instrumentalization. Neti is as much

the name of the Truth as much as it is the designation of an instrumentality or

methodology. First of all, whether any statement is positive or negative in intent is to be

understood as a matter of process or signification, i.e., not as a state of being, but assomething being produced agentially from soothing other. In a world structured in

dominance, negations and affirmations have to be understood with dialectical reference to

each other. Propositionally speaking, the statement, I will NOT obey your law ought to

be construed as an affirmation of positive sovereignty when the law being non-cooperated against is Jim Crow or Colonialist legality. Gandhi reminds Tagore that in a

context where the country had lost its power to say No, the wresting of this power canonly be read as a positive and affirmative practice; Gandhi also makes it crystal clear that

any self proclamation as free can happen only after the NO has been uttered in thunder.

The nay-saying and the aye-saying, that comes about after the soil has been prepared andweed-disinfested by the nay-saying, constitute a necessary continuum of emancipation.

With the ringing insight that an India prostrate at the feet of Europe can give no hope to

humanity, Gandhi reminds Tagore that gesturing towards a spiritual, ontological

humanity in an absolute and transcendent context that voids the reality of historicalexperience is utterly inane and otherworldly.

Along with the tension of the historically particular with the transcendental-universal, there is another controversial conjuncture that lies at the heart of the Gandhi-

Tagore debates: India and the World, the Indian subject and humanity at large, Indian

polity and cosmopolitanism. It is well known that Tagore named Shantiniketan also asViswabharathi, i.e., WorldIndia, and as for Gandhi, there is his well known and oft-

quoted example of India as a house with open windows that will let the breezes blow

from wherever but only on condition that the winds dont blow the house away. But the

great leader is also known to have averred that India has nothing to learn from the world.So, who is learning from who, and who is the teacher and who the student? Is it a winner

take all zero-sum game between India and the World, or is it a reciprocal unilateralism?

What happens to the rest of the world in the evolving relationship between India and theworld? Is this relationship micro-macro, metonymic, or synecdochic? And furthermore,

how is the relationship between India and the World given shape and direction by the

immediate colonial relationship between India and the West, to be more specific,England? I would like to start with that last colonial complication. Here is Tagore

reading his own role in the articulation of a relationship between India and the West.

I say again and again that I am a poet, that I am not a fighter by nature.


14/37

I would give everything to be one with my surroundings. I love my fellow beings

and prize their love. Yet I have been chosen by destiny to ply my boat there

where the current is against me. What irony of fate is this that I should bepreaching cooperation of cultures between East and West on this side of the sea

just at the moment when the doctrine of non-cooperation is preached on the other

side? You know that I do not believe in the material civilization of the West

just as I do not believe in the physical body to be the highest truth in man. But

I still less believe in the destruction of the physical body, and the ignoring of thematerial necessities of life. What is needed is establishment of harmony between

the physical and spiritual nature of man, maintaining of balance between the

foundation and superstructure. I believe in the true meeting of the East and the

West. Love is the ultimate truth of soul. We should do all we can, not to outragethat truth, to carry its banner against all opposition. The idea of non-cooperation

unnecessarily hurts that truth. It is not our heart fire but the fire that burns out our

hearth and home.

Tagore feels strongly that true India is an idea and not a mere geographical fact, an idea

that he has come into touch with in far away places of Europe, with his loyalty drawnto it in persons who belonged to different countries from mine. He exhorts himself and

his readers to be rid of all false pride and rejoice at any lamp being lit at any corner of

the world, knowing that it is a part of the common illumination of our house. To put itanachronistically, Tagore is playing here with the politics of location, destabilizing

merely geographic notions of location, of proximity and distance, creating instead a

diasporized concept of solidarity and a cosmopolitical sense of home. And quite

predictably in the case of Tagore, such a nameless, or shall we say ineffable,cosmopolitanism is legitimated in the scriptural name of brahmanic Hinduism.

India will be victorious when this idea wins victory, - the idea of Purushammahantam aditya-varnam tamash parastat, the Infinite Personality whose light

reveals itself through the obstruction of darkness. Our fight is against this

darkness, our object is the revealment of the light of this Infinite Personality inourselves. This Infinite Personality of man is not to be achieved in single

individuals, but in one grand harmony of all human races. The darkness of

egoism which will have to be destroyed is the egoism of the People. The idea of

India is against the intense consciousness of the separateness of ones own peoplefrom others, and which inevitably leads to ceaseless conflicts. Therefore my one

prayer is: let India stand for the cooperation of all peoples in the world. The

spirit of rejection finds it support in the consciousness of separateness, the spiritof acceptance in the consciousness of unity.

What is of importance here is Tagores avowal of his subject position as a poet and aperson of culture; for it is on that basis that her perceives the irony of his situation. So,

on the basis of what criteria does India and the leaders of India decide which of the two

options is superior: cultural cooperation or political non-cooperation? Within the broader

realm of what one could call reality, what is the relationship between politics and


15/37

culture? In Tagores usage, culture acts as the placeholder for Utopia in blind abeyance

of the historical situation on the ground. What does it mean for Tagore to invoke cultural

cooperation between the East and the West during the heyday of Colonialist andOrientalist practice? Wouldnt such a cooperation tantamount to an abject acquiesecence

in being colonized? The only way open to Tagore is the strategy of ontological de-

realization by which he demotes historical reality to the status ofmaya. When he meansthe West he is not denoting the West; nor is he denoting India when he means India. It is

the state of mind that liberates the body from its physical finitude and determination; and

it is in this sense that India is an idea that cannot be merely a geographic fact. It isthis deterritorialized attitude towards Truth that sets him apart from Gandhis idea of

truth emerging conflictually in a specific place. To Tagore, Truth and Spirituality are

topoi in themselves: locations of ideality whose dependence on history and politics is

mere maya. I am truly ambivalent in my evaluation of this aspect of Tagores thought.On the one hand I feel like dismissing Tagores position as elitist-idealist-and escapist.

But on the other hand, I feel compelled to listen carefully to Tagores reminder to us all

that there indeed is a dire need to secure truth in its own ethical and spiritual ethos,

rather than conceptualize it exclusively as the end product of determinate historicalstruggles. Tagore is reminding Gandhi and his readers that although the geneology of

truth, i.e., the history of where it comes from, is an important aspect of the truth oftruth, there is great harm in surrendering Truth to the vagaries of history. Tagore could

be seen as endeavoring to construct a space for the category of the a priori over and

above the clamor of historicity. For example, ifahimsa is a moral good, the validation ofthis goodness should have nothing to do with the historical progress report ofahimsa:

whether it has succeeded or not, it is good in itself. It is only by deterritorializing the

sovereignty ofahimsa from its empirical fixity that the human subject can truly honor the

principle ofahimsa.

It is time to look a little more closely at terms like materialism, idea, and

spirituality, and observe how they circulate both in Tagores and Gandhis rhetoric.I want to begin this analysis with the simple statement that bodies and matter occupy

space, and they die; whereas ideas and spirituality are not bounded territorially or

temporally. Once we accept this modal differentiation, it is easy to understand whyTagore would value the spirit and the idea as infinitely more worthwhile than the domain

of the bounded and finite. The idea of India, scattered-disseminateddiasporized all over

the world, is infinitely more precious than a geographically determinate truth of India.

To extend this line of thinking, the vast and cosmic idea of humanity as spirit is vastlymore compelling than the limited and limiting instantiation of humanity in ideological

regimes such as Nationalism. The epistemological problem is this: how to understand the

relationship between these two descriptions of the same worldly reality: as Spinozawould have it, how to describe the world both on the registers of immanence and

transcendence at the same time? Is there then a body of the world that is necessary as

raw material for the production of the meaning of the world? Is the body the nothing butthe raw material that qua material contributes to the phenomenological unfolding of the

meaning of the world as Spirit? Is the epistemological/spiritual haunting of the body by

the spirit itself a corporeal practice, or does the haunting emanate from a pure

elsewhere? Is Tagore attempting to dissolve a pseudo-dualism by affirming the


16/37

sovereignty of the Noumenal over the Phenomenal, of true Gnana over the materiality of

maya?

In the passage quoted above, Tagore is equivocal in his understanding of the

relationship of matter to spirit. Like Gandhi, he neither believes in the material

civilization of the west nor in the supremacy of physical truth; but unlike Gandhi, he isnot dismissive of the body or of the reality of material needs. He is not calling for an

askesis or a desiccation of the physical and the material as a prolegomenon tinitiation into

the realm of spirituality. He is in fact saying yes both to the physical and the spiritual,and looking forward to the establishment of harmony between the physical and the

spiritual. If the body is, to introduce Michel Foucault to this discussion, the history of

the present, and the spirit is the ideal or Utopian truth, Tagore has no intention of

mortifying or impoverishing the former by way of empowering the latter. The balance orthe harmony that he celebrates is the triumph of the indivisible One over the divisive

many. His is not a dialectical project, Hegelian or Marxian, that either sublates

contradiction or mobilizes contradictions as active social antagonisms that are intended to

play themselves out towards a final historical materialist resolution, from necessity tofreedom as Marx would have it. It is a poetic vision of harmony where harmony is an in

itself that is desirable as a human goal. Such a harmony, in Tagores vision, is not somuch the result of a political production as it is the representation of an attitude of love or

empathy that not even the dire antagonistic needs of the political can/should violate.

When Tagore declares that the truth of non-cooperation hurts the higher truth of universallove and empathy, he is in effect expressing an abiding solicitude for the indivisible One

that is vulnerable to the fractious world of political partisanship and strategic

opportunism. The soul that makes its appearance repeatedly is both the sign-bearer of

spirituality, and the place-holder for the temporality of the Ideal One.

The ontological problem confronting Tagore is the qualification of the One. The

question is the following: the One of What? To say the One of the One does not takethe discussion any further. Such a statement is either a tautology or the numinous silence

of theEn Soi. On the other hand, if Tagore were to say, the One of the many, his

discourse wouldnt be all that different from the factitious discourse of nationalism, adiscourse that Tagore thoroughly disapproves of, one that seeks to create the One from

the many, by way of political production and manufacturing. It is in this context that

Tagore makes a curious distinction between divisive egoism of the People that he

deplores, and the anthropological grand harmony of all human races. What is to bedestroyed is the dark egoism of the People. On the other side is enlightenment and

illumination in the name of the multiracial harmony of the family of Man. So, what are

the races, and who are the peoples of the world? What is the taxonomic relationshipbetween races and peoples? In the context of anthropological races and national

peoples, what status do names have, names such as, Mongolian, Teutonic, Aryan,

Dravidian, Indian, English, French, and German? When and under what conditions doesthe identification of oneself with one name militate against cooperation and harmony

with other names? The Infinite Personality in ourselves that Tagore invokes is neither

a collectivity nor an individual identity, but an ideal potentiality that makes all self-

centered or identitarian entrenchment mean and paltry. Tagore will acknowledge India


17/37

not as a national identity, but rather as an allegorical point of entry towards for the

cooperation of all peoples in the world. Hence Tagores double-take on materiality and

the physical: the material and the physical are to be fetishized as ends in themselves, butas the means towards a greater harmony. Unlike Gandhi, who comes across in Tagores

eyes as an ascetic who punishes the flesh and the materiality of the present, Tagore is not

in favor of a rationale, teleological or eschatological, that endorses present mortificationor nay-saying in the name of a good to come.

Much of the discussion that takes place between Tagore and Gandhi brings tomind the questions and concerns that Nehru voices in hisDiscovery of India: where is

India, whom does it belong to, how is India to be made ones own by its people, does

India preexist as an ideal entity, or is to be signified into being through the exercise of

free populist will? Tagores views on the matter, as expressed in the following passage,are clear and definitive.

Alien government in India is a veritable chameleon. Today it comes in the

guise of the Englishman; tomorrow perhaps as some other foreigner; the next day,without abating a jot of its virulence, it may take the shape of our own

countrymen. However determinedly we may try to hunt this monster of foreigndependence with outside lethal weapons, it will always elude our pursuit by

changing its skin, or its colour. But if we can gain within us the truth called our

country, all outward maya will vanish of itself. The declaration of faith that mycountry is there, to be realized, has to be attained by each one of us. The idea that

our country is ours, merely because we have been born in it, can only be held by

those who are fastened, in a parasitic existence, upon the outside world. But the

true nature of man is his inner nature, with its inherent powers. Therefore, thatonly can be a mans true country, which he can help to create by his wisdom and

will, his love and his actions.

And Tagore goes on to say that we must win our country, not from some foreigner, but

from our own inertia, our own indifference. In a manner that anticipates the

deconstructive auto-critical vigilance of Jacques Derrida, Tagores diagnosis works at thesystemic or structural level than at the level of ostensible contents. That we can be or

turn into our own colonizer, and that the self can be its own alien are profound

insights that transcend the pettiness of immediate and reductive political recognitions and

identifications. Like Derrida and Jacques Lacan, each of whom makes criticaldifferentiations between the other and the Other, Tagore too, despite the urgency of

immediate political decolonization, has the ethico-epistemological integrity to declare

that alien government in India is a veritable chameleon. In other words, aliengovernment has to be detected in all its floating, deterritorialized manifestations, and not

read symptomatically as an instance of identity theft to be rectified through recourse to

natal or native formulae of belonging. Critical vigilance against a shape-shiftingchameleon cannot be based on the truth of some true external form for the simple

reason that it is externality as such that is the deceiver. Tagores answer is to find an

inner truth that is invulnerable to seduction by externality and its chameleon like self

instantiations and exemplifications. My question however is the following: Is this inner


18/37

self in Tagore a form of essentialist belief or fiction, or is it a historical/secular

production? This issue becomes even more complicated in the context of Tagores

constant negative reference, a la, Sankara, to the category ofmaya. Is Tagore merelyrecuperating classicalAdvaita philosophy and suggesting that history and politics pertain

to the register ofmaya whereas true spiritual knowledge asBrahma gnana/vidya is on

the other side ofmaya, ie., absolutely heterogeneous with the world of the political andthe historical? Or, is he re-signifying the concept ofmaya as nescience or illusive

knowledge to enact a different relationship between the realms of contingency and

necessity? If the cleansing and the demystification of politics and history is to take, frowhat position will such a critical endeavor be undertaken? Whence will such

enlightenment emanate? Does the realm ofmaya partake in the production of true

knowledge; or is it merely a form of the fake that is to be demystified and discarded on

the way to true knowledge? To put it differently, are the truths of politics and history tobe valorized as historical and political, or are they to be trans-substantiated into the Truth

of Spirituality?

What is difficult to determine in Tagores discourse is whether he is prescribingas a remedy, otherworldliness, or an other way of imagining reality in all its multi-

valent complexity. What is common both to Gandhi and Tagore, despite the differencesin the way they go about performing their tasks, is the simultaneous practice as well as

the purification of politics, and the question is purification by and in the name of what

principle? To put this differently, how does each thinker deal with the relativeautonomies of politics, history, etc., and at the same time envision Totality in critical

transcendence of the logic of the parts? The question is: how does reality become one,

and how the subject becomes free in such a realization? There is an interesting

moment in the passage quoted above from Tagore where the Poet makes a tellingreference to the figure of the parasite. Let us hear Tagore again. The idea that our

country is ours, merely because we have been born in it, can only be held by those who

are fastened, in a parasitic existence, upon the outside world. Tagores brilliantpolemical formulation of parasitism does not reiterate the clichd opposition between

parasitic dependence and ones own natal/native/autochthonous/indigenous/filial

independence, but instead radicalizes the very meaning of parasitic existence. Tagoreproposes a non-filiative re-negotiation of what it means to be Indian. Tagore is recoding,

literally re-semanticizing the meaning of what it means to be Indian: rather than celebrate

and sacralize being born in India as a vital principle of authentic identity, Tagore

relegates being born in India/in any place for that matter to the secondary and non-essential condition of mere external circumstantiality. As a result, the formulation, India

is mine simply because I was born in India becomes symptomatic of the most abject

parasitism: citizenship not in the inner India of infinite spirituality, but in the finite,contingent geographic accident called India. Within Tagores philosophical

hermeneutics, the allegorical repudiation of parasitism takes precedence over the

historical critique of parasitic existence. In other words, Tagores primary objective is toliberate the human subject from its bondage to the world of external fact and

circumstance (the tenor of the allegory), and as historical instantiation of the allegory, to

liberate the Indian subject from its bondage to inauthentic and erroneous notions of India.


19/37

What is problematic, however, in Tagores vision is the magisterial as well aspedagogical authority that characterizes his anonymous appeal to what after all are

specifically Hindu-Indian texts: Purusham mahantam aditya-varnam tamasah parastat,

the Infinite Personality whose light reveals itself through the obstruction of darkness. Inhis attempt to demystify the Indian people and wean them away from seduction by India-

as-maya, Tagore has no problem ex-nominating his canonical Hindu-Indian references.

In Tagores philosophical scheme of things, the world of Ideas and Spirituality is

transcendent of the provincial pettiness and finitude of bodies, geographic entities, andtheir divisive names. Tagores hope is that when the Indian people realize their country

within their heart and spirit, conflicts among nations will cease; and more significantly,

parochial ego identifications with ones exclusive and exclusionary nation will give

place to a cosmic recognition of the human everywhere. It is to be expected that Tagore,unlike Gandhi who does not think of himself as a poet-thinker-philosopher, should pose

the entire problem at the level of thought, gnosis, and epistemology. There is a rightunderstanding, and there are misunderstandings. The misunderstanding, from Tagores

perspective, is a misunderstanding of the human by the human. The misunderstanding is

profoundly intra-human, i.e., if one were to think of humanity as an indivisible One. Butalas, we only know all too clearly that the Human as One is divided up into multiple

collective, and in particular, national human subjects. Consequently, the intra-Human

understanding is in effect an inter-human misunderstanding, i.e., a relational

misunderstanding, between the East and the West, and among the many nations thatconstitute our world. So, where and how should the rectification/remediation of the

misunderstanding be applied? To point up a contrast here, since I have used the term

remediation along with rectification: whereas an allopathic system of medicinewould cure the symptom at the site of the symptom itself, ayurveda oryoga would

attempt a holistic remedy that would focus on the root cause of which the symptom is all

after the symptom. It is in the nature of the symptom to stimulate a local diagnosis,whereas holistic medicine would first of all deterritorialize the finite location of the

symptom and look for an inclusive and deep structure cure. The misunderstanding may

well be in the arm, symptomatically speaking, but in reality, it may be a

misunderstanding between the arm and the heart, or between the arm that is somatic andsome psychic pressure or tension that the organism is going through. To put it in terms of

my discussion of Tagores cosmo-spiritual-politics, the intra-human misunderstanding as

such has to diagnosed through the symptom of a determinate inter-humanmisunderstanding such as between the East and the West. And here I quote at length

from Tagore, before I turn my focus back to Gandhi.

Therefore, it hurts me deeply when the cry of rejection rings loud against

the West in my country with the clamour that the Western education can only

injure us. It cannot be true. What has caused the mischief is the fact that for a

long time we have been out of touch with our own culture and therefore the


20/37

Western culture has not found its prospective in our life very often found a

wrong prospective giving our mental eye a squint. When we have the

intellectual capital of our own, the commerce of thought with the outer worldbecomes natural and fully profitable. But to say that such commerce is

inherently wrong, is to encourage the worst form of provincialism, productive

of nothing but intellectual indigence. The West has misunderstood the Eastwhich is at the root of the disharmony that prevails between them, but will it

mend the matter if the East in her turn tries to misunderstand the West? The

present age has been powerfully possessed by the West; it has only becomepossible because to her is given some great mission for man. We from the

East have to come to her to learn whatever she has to teach us; for by doing

so we hasten the fulfillment of this age. We know that the East also has her

lessons to give and she has her own responsibility of not allowing her lightto be extinguished, and the time will come when the West will find leisure

to realize that she has a home of hers in the East where her food is and her

rest.

My response to this passage is agonizingly ambivalent: on the one hand, I am moved and

inspired by Tagores Utopian-deconstructive vision on behalf of all humanity, but at thesame time I am appalled by the ease with which Tagore exonerates the West and places

the historical as well as ontological onus of introspection and moral spiritual information

on the East. Equally troubling, despite his call for East West cooperation and hisperspectival endorsement of the potential and necessary contributions of the East, is

Tagores reliance on the mystique of theZeitgeistand the privileged relationship of the

West to the actualization of theZeitgeist. Tagores vision is plagued by the flaw that

bedevils all trans-historical and trans-ideological humanisms: they create an absoluteseparation between the temporality of Ontology and historicity. If Stalinist Marxism, in

the name of the time to come perpetrates the nightmare of dystopia, Tagore, at the

other extreme, excuses all in the name of the time to come and foists on the colonizedsubject the untenable burden of achieving a world without borders:sans struggle,sans

antagonism,sans contradiction. It is one thing to assume responsibility for ones own

culture and ones own failures and shortcomings; and quite another to assume a positionof ethical martyrdom whereby the colonized subject is criminalized for having been

colonized. To reduce the outrage of Colonialism, or for that matter the epistemological

violence of Orientalism, to a mere matter of misunderstanding and to euphemize

colonialist dominance as mere disharmony is to be guilty of nothing short of absoluteinnocence. Tagores insistence that all human possibilities, Ontology if you will, should

not be corrupted, perverted and pre-empted by the passing maya of Colonialism is all

well and good; but the question is how will the truth of Colonialism as illusion bedefeated in history, historically? Clearly, Gandhis position of nay-saying to

Colonialism makes perfect sense whereas Tagores call for spiritual-allegorical

transformation is literally fantastic.

What then do we make of Tagores concern, that motivated by the urge to

retaliate, that the East should not misunderstand the West? Is the West not what the West

has done to the East? Is there another latent West that is not complicit in the perpetration


21/37

of Colonialism? The Wests intentions have been clear and colonialist: surely Tagore is

not contending that the colonial effect is itself the result of an Oriental

misunderstanding of the Occident. Whereas Gandhi, while making that all importantdistinction between the person of the Englishman and the Colonialism that he stands

for, would argue (and this is a line of thought brilliantly theorized in the work of Ashis

Nandy), would contend that the Colonizer is as much damaged, if not more, byColonialism as the Colonized, Tagore with his horror of the negation and binary

antagonism does not even look in that direction. Tagore will just not name Colonialism

as Colonialism, for he has a horror of names that divide and perpetuate conflicts andhatreds among humans. To bring back to this discussion a theme I had barely touched

upon earlier in the essay: the three paths to reality, i.e., bhakti, karma,gnana. If reality

is One, but there are three equally viable modes to that One reality with each mode with

its own temporality, how will the three temporalities will come together in synchronicity,or will they, in their relative endorsement of the One reality? A bhakthaa la Job or

Abraham and a whole pantheon of suffering bhakthas in the Hindu tradition make peace

with suffering in a quietist mode all in the name of Gods will; a gnana yogi seeks to

comprehend the same situation intellectually/epistemologically, whereas the karma yogiacts and understands reality. My point is simply that it is in the temporality of a

particular mode of understanding that the world worlds. Literally, Gandhi and Tagoreare so apart modally that they could be seen as living in the same world of problems,

but in altogether different worlds of resolutions.

It is in the context of moving from problems to resolutions that the theme of

education and its relevance figure prominently in the Gandhi-Tagore conversations: in

particular, the role of the West in the curriculum. As is to be expected, the learning of

English acts as the lightning rod for the entire effect of the West and westernization. Letus hear Gandhi on this fraught issue.

The Poet does not know perhaps that English is today studied because ofits commercial and so-called political value. Our boys think, and rightly in the

present circumstances, that without English they cannot get Government service.

Girls are taught English as a passport to marriage. I know several instances ofwomen wanting to learn English so that they may be able to talk to Englishmen

in English. I know families in which English is being made the mother tongue.

Hundreds of youths believe that without a knowledge of English freedom for

India is practically impossible. The canker has so eaten into the society that, inmany cases, the only meaning of Education is a knowledge of English.

All these are for me signs of our slavery and degradation. It is unbearable

to me that the vernaculars should be crushed and starved as they have been. Icannot tolerate the idea of parents writing to their children, or husbands writing

to their wives, not in their own vernaculars, but in English. I hope I am as great

a believer in free air as the great Poet. I do not want my house to be walled in onall sides and my windows to be stuffed.

The big difference between Tagore and Gandhi is that the latter actually builds a case

circumstantially whereas the Poet generalizes acontextually. Gandhi rightly identifies


22/37

specific interventions that English makes in the vernacular body politic of India. Most

significantly, unlike the Poet, Gandhi immediately identifies the power dynamic between

English and the vernaculars: an oppressively uneven dynamic imposed by Colonialism.Not for the political resister the luxury of the ideal world where English and the

vernaculars are in a blissfully reciprocal relationship. Gandhi shrewdly identifies the

ways in which English becomes a stand in for Education, and deracinates India from itsvernacular being. Not for Gandhi the privilege of language as literature and language as

aesthetic contemplation of the spiritual ideal: to him language is instrumentality,

language is the site of and is power play. He refuses to consider the politics of English inisolation: it has to be in relationship to the fate of the vernaculars. The impoverishment

of the vernaculars is the direct result of the flourishing of English.

The Poets concern is largely about the students. He is of the opinion thatthey should not have been called upon to give up Government schools before they

had other schools to go to. Here I must differ from him. I have never been able

to make a fetish of literary training. My experience has proved to my satisfaction

that literary training by itself adds not an inch to ones moral height and thatcharacter building is independent of literary training. I am firmly of opinion that

the Government schools have unmanned us; rendered us helpless and Godless.They have filled us with discontent, and providing no remedy for the discontent,

have made us despondent. They have made us what we were intended to become-

clerks and interpreters. A Government builds its prestige upon the voluntaryassociation of the governed. And if it was wrong to cooperate with the

Government in keeping us slaves, we were bound to begin with those institutions

in which our association appeared to be the most voluntary. The youth of a nation

are its hope. I hold that, as soon as we discovered that the system of Governmentwas wholly, or mainly evil, it became sinful for us to associate our children with

it.

The issues are: pedagogy, the syllabus for and on behalf of the nation, the formation of

political and cultural subjectivity, and the cultivation of a relevant youth towards a future

that India can call its own. The sphere of education is crucial for the obvious reason thatit is through the educational apparatus that subject formation takes place; and it is

Gandhis legitimate concern that the subject being formed should be relevant in the

Indian context. A subject interpellated by English would be at odds with Indian realities,

and moreover, any political agency achieved on the basis of such a subject would be atodds with Indias needs and imperatives. Even though Gandhi does not phrase it thus, his

fear is that for lack of proper subject formation and the consequent subject-agency

misalignment, some form of neo-colonialism will persist even after the realization ofindependence. The only way to guard against such a possibility is to prepare the right

pedagogical-educational track through non cooperation. Tagores sense of relevance

works the other way around: from cosmic or boundless India to the named and nameableIndia. Gandhis position is that bharath can fulfill its commitment to the vishva only

after it has lived up to itself. The other ongoing contestation between the two has to do

with critical negativity and offering a positive option. Gandhi, and here I would agree

with him, points out that weaning the youth away from a pernicious pattern of education


23/37

is in itself a valuable plan of action. But the difference between the two thinkers about

the literary and the useful deserves special attention.

Gandhi categorically rejects the claim that a literary education is a good in itself.

He makes two value judgments regarding literary pedagogy: 1) that the literary does not

automatically become ethical, and 2) that indeed it is possible to fetishize literature andin the process lose sight of the total and overall pragmatic objective of education. The

other issues that come up here are: basic education and specialized education, education

as means and education as end, concept and precept in pedagogy, the intellectual-peoplerelationship, education and community building. By way of anticipating the next

segment of this essay, I would like to focus on literature by asking the two following

questions. When is literature enlightening and when is literature itself a source of

mystification? Is literature a general category of human learning and understanding, or isit a specific genre that comes under specialized knowledges? What is or should be the

relationship between education and ideology? Who are the experts and who the lay

practitioners of knowledge, and who should be in charge in the task of elaborating

education as a matter of public policy? Finally, in the context of democratic education,who are the people and how are they be both represented and produced into existence?

What is the nature of leadership, and how should the authority of the leaders be producedand applied to the populist will?

Is Gandhi a generalist and Tagore a specialist? Is Gandhis critique of the literarymodel a function of his populist-instrumental way of thinking, and does Tagore have a

vested interest in Literature for the simple reason that he is a Poet, and that is how he

declares his subject position? The basic issue here is staggeringly complex. What is the

best education policy for a whole nation that is seeking to decolonize and emancipateitself, and who should be in charge of drawing up this blueprint? What is the role of the

intellectual in all this? Are we looking for an organic intellectual, a la Gramsci, or the

talented tenth of the Du Boisian kind, or the Foucauldian specific intellectual whorefuses to take on the burden of macropolitical representation? And the complexity of

these problems is compounded further in the context of a colonized people who are

engaged in the task of overthrowing the oppressor: a people who are not yet their ownpolitically speaking even though they have been an ancient people prior to the horrors of

colonialism. Both Tagore and Gandhi are deeply aware of the ontological damage done

to the natives by colonialism. The ontological thesis is that a free people give the gift of

themselves to themselves; and it is precisely this possibility of ontological self-addressthat is taken away from the colonized by colonialist domination and oppression. Whereas

Tagore would rather dwell as a Poet in the pure and untrammelled realm of Ontology and

through an intellectual sleight of hand dismiss Colonialism as maya, Gandhi chooses themuch more difficult path of producing a free ontology by way of political struggle: a

struggle that has to produce its own terms of relevance in antagonism and in critical

negation of the given colonized reality. Gandhi understands that behind the literaryEnglish education provided by the colonial government schools lies a different mandate:

the infamous Babington Macaulayan imperial desire to create obedient clerks and

interpreters of Pax Britannica. He understands the danger of what Ngugi wa ThiongO

would call decades later the culture bomb that kills a people psychically by


24/37

deracinating them from their ethos. Gandhis diagnosis is at its most acute when he

maintains that English education creates a discontent that it cannot remedy: what is

created instead is a chronic despondency. What Gandhi is describing symptomatically isthe condition of the midnights children that Rushdie has immortalized. Midnights

children are nothing but chronic symptoms who have accepted the symptom itself as the

cure. The only way to prevent the malaise of endless post-colonial double-ness is toidentify the source of the disease during the process of decolonization, and eradicate it

rightaway.

Whether Gandhi really believes that India has to learn anything from western

modernity, i.e., given Gandhis tout courtdismissal of modernity and its epistemology, is

another issue. In my reading, his dismissal of modernity is more definitive and binding

than the metaphor of the house with open windows. But what Gandhi is astutely awareof, an awareness lacking in Tagores idealized and utopianized vision, is that cultures and

civilizations and histories are brought into contact with one another under specific

conditions of power and privilege, and that the nature of the contact is definitively

constituted by these historic conditions and circumstances. In other words, there is nodenyi

The Pragmatics of Reason : Gandhi and Tagore

Documents

Transcript of The Pragmatics of Reason : Gandhi and Tagore