Scroll.in, for some mysterious reason, has chosen to highlight an open letter to the Indian people which Tagore wrote from New York in May 1921, while India was preparing itself for the Non Cooperation Movement.
When freedom is not an inner idea which imparts strength to our activities and breadth to our creations, when it is merely a thing of external circumstance, it is like an open space to one who is blindfolded.
No. Freedom means not having to pay taxes to foreigners nor having to die in wars waged for their benefit. It has nothing to do with 'inner ideas'. A galley slave may have wonderful 'inner ideas'. But he has no economic or political freedom.
In my recent travels in the West I have felt that out there freedom as an idea has become feeble and ineffectual.
Thomas Mann thought Tagore was feeble and ineffectual- 'a fine old English lady'. On the other hand lots of people felt sorry for him and gave him money. I should explain, Tagore only went to the West to beg for money. He wasn't interested in its ideas or its freedoms.
Consequently a spirit of repression and coercion is fast spreading in the politics and social relationships of the people.
In Tagore's native Bengal, zamindars like him could have his tenants whipped. On the other hand, if a zamindar spoke out against the Raj, he might himself be sent to jail.
In the age of monarchy the king lived surrounded by a miasma of intrigue. At court there was an endless whispering of lies and calumny, and much plotting and planning among the conspiring courtiers to manipulate the king as the instrument of their own purposes.
Queen Victoria was the Empress of India. But the British enjoyed increasing freedom during her reign.
In the present age intrigue plays a wider part, and affects the whole country.
No. Intrigue played no part. However the free press could be jingoistic.
The people are drugged with the hashish of false hopes and urged to deeds of frightfulness by the goadings of manufactured panics;
Indians, being unable to produce or afford decent alcohol, tended to consume more hashish. There were plenty of deeds of frightfulness in the villages- some committed by zamindars.
their higher feelings are exploited by devious channels of unctuous hypocrisy, their pockets picked under anaesthetics of flattery, their very psychology affected by a conspiracy of money and unscrupulous diplomacy.
None of this happened. Why? Because most independent countries had universal manhood suffrage and some were giving women the vote. Tagore is describing a wealthy zamindar succumbing to flatterers and perhaps servants who put opium or hashish in his food.
In the old order the king was given to understand that he was the freest individual in the world.
No. He was given to understand that he had a overriding duty.
A greater semblance of external freedom, no doubt, he had than other individuals. But they built for him a gorgeous prison of unreality.
Again, this may be a fitting description of a wealthy zamindar, protected by the British. It does not fit genuine monarchs.
The same thing is happening now with the people of the West. They are flattered into believing that they are free, and they have the sovereign power in their hands.
Nonsense. The people of the West used their political freedom to form Trade Unions and Professional Associations so as to increase their economic freedom.
But this power is robbed by hosts of self-seekers, and the horse is captured and stabled because of his gift of freedom over space.
Once again, Tagore may be speaking of a zamindar who is given a polite hint by the District Collector that he better stay home and keep his mouth shut. The people of the west were not one solitary horse. Indeed, they weren't horses at all. Like Indians, they couldn't gallop off over the horizon.
The mob-mind is allowed the enjoyment of an apparent liberty,
Tagore wasn't even allowed that much. He didn't mind because he was stupider than the mob- probably because he thought he was a horse and should be eating hay.
while its true freedom is curtailed on every side. Its thoughts are fashioned according to the plans of organised interests;
as opposed to Tagore's stupidity
in its choosing of ideas and forming of opinions it is hindered either by some punitive force or by the constant insinuation of untruths; it is made to dwell in an artificial world of hypnotic phrases.
Tagore was a poet. His world was entirely artificial and made up of, if not hypnotic, then soporific, phrases.
In fact, the people have become the storehouse of a power that attracts round it a swarm of adventurers who are secretly investing its walls to exploit it for their own devices.
Tagore could be describing a wealthy, but stupid zamindar- perhaps one who thinks he is a horse. Obviously, a 'swarm of adventurers' will turn up to try to cheat the fool. However, District Collector sahib will catch them and Section Char Sau Bees them but good.
Thus it has become more and more evident to me that the ideal of freedom has grown tenuous in the atmosphere of the West.
What had not grown evident to Tagore- who was knighted during the War- was that India had paid to send its boys off to Europe and Iraq to be slaughtered without getting anything in return. This was because India did not even have a tenuous type of freedom. That's why Indians were backing Gandhi.
The mentality is that of a slave-owning community, with a mutilated multitude of men tied to its commercial and political treadmill. It is the mentality of mutual distrust and fear.
Zamindars like Tagore certainly had this mentality and plenty of lathi wielding muscle-men to terrorize their tenantry.
The appalling scenes of inhumanity and injustice, which are growing familiar to us, are the outcome of a psychology that deals with terror.
Bengal could show more inhumanity and injustice than anywhere else.
No cruelty can be uglier in its ferocity than the cruelty of the coward.
Tagore's ilk were cowards- that's true enough.
The people who have sacrificed their souls to the passion of profit-
people like Dwarkanath Tagore
making and the drunkenness of power are constantly pursued by phantoms of panic and suspicion, and therefore they are ruthless even where they are least afraid of mischances.
An apt description of the comprador class Tagore sprang from.
They become morally incapable of allowing freedom to others, and in their eagerness to curry favour with the powerful they not only connive at the injustice done by their own partners in political gambling, but participate in it. A perpetual anxiety for the protection of their gains at any cost strikes at the love of freedom and justice, until at length they are ready to forgo liberty for themselves and for others.
Tagore has described himself to a t. To be fair, he understood that if the Brits left the Muslims would grab his estates in East Bengal. Indeed, Ram Mohun Roy and Dwarkanath petitioned Westminster to send more White colonists for the explicit reason that this would hold the Muslims in check.
My experience in the West, where I have realised the immense power of money and of organised propaganda, – working everywhere behind screens of camouflage, creating an atmosphere of distrust, timidity, and antipathy, – has impressed me deeply with the truth that real freedom is of the mind and spirit; it can never come to us from outside.
Tagore's experience of the West was that if you wore a robe and had a long beard and talked spiritual bollocks, you'd get some money. That's why he kept going back there. He couldn't give anybody and real freedom of the mind and spirit. Still, he wanted their money.
He only has freedom who ideally loves freedom himself and is glad to extend it to others.
So, if you are chained up in a prison cell you are actually free provided you love freedom and want everybody to be free. What a wonderful discovery! Why not say 'He only has wealth who loves wealth and is glad for others to be wealthy'? Or how about, 'Only he truly sodomizes Tagore who loves sodomizing Tagore and would gladly permit all and sundry to sodomize Tagore'?
He who cares to have slaves must chain himself to them;
No. He can hire an overseer who will ensure slaves are chained to their work implements or whatever.
he who builds walls to create exclusion for others builds walls across his own freedom;
No. You build a wall to keep others out of your property, but you also build a gate so you can leave your property.
he who distrusts freedom in others loses his moral right to it.
If the 'moral right' to freedom can be lost, then it isn't a universal value and can't be the subject of a categorical imperative.
Sooner or later he is lured into the meshes of physical and moral servility.
Many Indians were plenty servile. But this wasn't something they had been lured into. They were born that way coz their ancestors were shit at fighting.
Therefore I would urge my own countrymen to ask themselves if the freedom to which they aspire is one of external conditions.
Indians did aspire to a freedom based on external conditions- e.g. departure of an alien overlord, political and legal rights, and increasing economic rights and entitlements. If anybody wanted 'Moksha' they could go off and meditate in a cave in the Himalayas.
Is it merely a transferable commodity?
No. It is a legal and political condition.
Have they acquired a true love of freedom?
Yes. Truth is linked to rationality. Indians were rational to want freedom. They would be better off in every way- though no doubt some zamindars and other compradors might lose out. Consider the Spanish flu. The US, with a population of about 100 million lost about 600,000 people. India with three times the population lost 14 million. A recent study shows that Districts administered by natives did better than those administered by Europeans.
Have they faith in it? Are they ready to make space in their society for the minds of their children to grow up in the ideal of human dignity, unhindered by restrictions that are unjust and irrational?
No. So what? They would still be better off.
Have we not made elaborately permanent the walls of our social compartments?
No. Don't be silly.
We are tenaciously proud of their exclusiveness. We boast that, in this world, no other society but our own has come to finality in the classifying of its living members.
Fuck off! Nobody was boasting that India was ruled by foreigners.
Yet in our political agitations we conveniently forget that any unnaturalness in the relationship of governors and governed which humiliates us, becomes an outrage when it is artificially fixed under the threat of military persecution.
Who the fuck was forgetting that? All India hated Brigadier Dyer.
When India gave voice to immortal thoughts, in the time of fullest vigour of vitality, her children had the fearless spirit of the seekers of truth.
Sadly, it turned out that conversion to Islam turned 'immortal thoughts' into some jahil nonsense nobody bothered with.
The great epic of the soul of our people – the Mahabharata – gives us a wonderful vision of an overflowing life, full of the freedom of inquiry and experiment.
Once our people turned Muslim, they didn't bother with it.
When the age of the Buddha came, humanity was stirred in our country to its uttermost depth.
But Buddhism disappeared from India the way it had disappeared from Afghanistan and Sogdia because...urm... members of a certain faith turned out to be better at fighting- probably because they weren't interested in Nirvana or other such shite.
The freedom of mind which it produced expressed itself in a wealth of creation, spreading everywhere in its richness over the continent of Asia.
Till Turks showed up and India discovered that ahimsa may get you Spiritual Liberation but it meant slavery here and now. Then people started converting and found life was better without Brahmins or Shramans turning up to talk bollocks.
But with the ebb of life in India the spirit of creation died away. It hardened into an age of inert construction. The organic unity of a varied and elastic society gave way to a conventional order which proved its artificial character by its inexorable law of exclusion.
Tagore is being silly. The Hindus may indeed have sunk into somnolence, but the Ashraf Muslims were having a whale of a time. Then the Brits turned up and they too made a go of things though, no doubt, the climate did not appeal.
Life has its inequalities, I admit, but they are natural and are in harmony with our vital functions.
No. Inequality is the result of cumulative human achievement or the lack of any such thing.
The head keeps its place apart from the feet,
because of the skeleton- i.e. lots of bones and muscles and so forth
not through some external arrangement or any conspiracy of coercion.
Clearly Tagore's chums were constantly complaining of the conspiracy which caused their heads to be at such a distance from their feet that they found it difficult to suck their own toes the way they had done as babies.
If the body is compelled to turn somersaults for an indefinite period, the head never exchanges its relative function for that of the feet.
There speaks the bitter voice of experience.
But have our social divisions the same inevitableness of organic law?
No. Don't be silly.
If we have the hardihood to say “yes” to that question, then how can we blame an alien people for subjecting us to a political order which they are tempted to believe eternal?
Who cares whether slaves blame themselves or someone else for their plight? They are simply slaves.
By squeezing human beings in the grip of an inelastic system and forcibly holding them fixed, we have ignored the laws of life and growth.
Tagore, as a zamindar, certainly did 'squeeze' human beings. But he did it for money.
We have forced living souls into a permanent passivity, making them incapable of moulding circumstance to their own intrinsic design, and of mastering their own destiny.
Tagore also talked and wrote bollocks- for money.
Borrowing our ideal of life from a dark period of our degeneracy, we have covered up our sensitiveness of soul under the immovable weight of a remote past. We have set up an elaborate ceremonial of cage-worship, and plucked all the feathers from the wings of the living spirit of our people.
Did you also sodomize the living spirit of your people? No? Good for you.
And for us, – with our centuries of degradation and insult, with the amorphous- ness of our national unity, with our helplessness before the attack of disasters from without and our unreasoning self-obstructions from within, – the punishment has been terrible.
Oh dear. Tagore was sodomized after the feathers were plucked from his arse. Sad.
Our stupefaction has become so absolute that we do not even realise that this persistent misfortune, dogging our steps for ages, cannot be a mere accident of history, removable only by another accident from outside.
Yes, yes. Being sodomized after all your tail feathers have been plucked can do that to you.
Unless we have true faith in freedom, knowing it to be creative, manfully taking all its risks, not only do we lose the right to claim freedom in politics, but we also lack the power to maintain it with all our strength.
Oddly, the various peoples who conquered Bengal one after another, had no 'true faith in freedom'. But they were good at fighting.
For that would be like assigning the service of God to a confirmed atheist. And men, who contemptuously treat their own brothers and sisters as eternal babies, never to be trusted in the most trivial details of their personal life, – coercing them at every step by the cruel threat of persecution into following a blind lane leading to nowhere, driving a number of them into hypocrisy and into moral inertia, – will fail over and over again to rise to the height of their true and severe responsibility. They will be incapable of holding a just freedom in politics, and of fighting in freedom’s cause.
So, fuck fighting for freedom. Just fight to get the Brits out. Choose limited aims. Pluck the tail feathers of any gaseous bore who turns up to talk bollocks. That's it. That's all that is required.
The civilisation of the West has in it the spirit of the machine which must move;
Only in the sense that the civilization of the East has in it the spirit of the sodomized bird whose tail feathers have been plucked.
and to that blind movement human lives are offered as fuel, keeping up the steam-power.
Electric trains had been around since the 1880s. The London Underground, which Tagore knew about, was electric. Mumbai got its first electric trains in 1925.
It represents the active aspect of inertia which has the appearance of freedom, but not its truth, and therefore gives rise to slavery both within its boundaries and outside.
More sadly, it causes Tagore's tail feathers to be plucked and his arse to be fucked. It is 100 years since Tagore wrote these lines. We must rise up as a nation to demand the true freedom to posit a Tagore whose tail feathers have grown back and whose arse is guarded against anal intrusion. If we fail in this challenge, slavery and tail feather plucking will burgeon both within our borders and outside.
The present civilisation of India has the constraining power of the mould.
India had a British civilization at that time. No doubt, the natives had some sort of culture, but its tail feathers kept getting plucked and its arse kept getting fucked, so least said about it the better.
It squeezes living man in the grip of rigid regulations,
and plucks his tail feathers
and its repression of individual freedom makes it only too easy for men to be forced into submission
to anal intrusion
of all kinds and degrees. In both of these traditions life is offered up to something which is not life;
but which makes your arse really sore
it is a sacrifice, which has no god for its worship, and is therefore utterly in vain.
People sacrifice themselves for their families or their nations all the time. The thing isn't vain at all. By contrast, you can worship god well enough without sacrificing anything. It isn't the case that God really needs the blood of a chicken or a goat or whatever.
The West; continually producing mechanical power in excess of its spiritual control,
The alternative to 'mechanical power' is sweated labor. As the working class gained political freedom, sweat was replaced by electricity. Fuck spiritual control. Tagore's tenants didn't think it was anything to write home about. The departure of the Brits gave those tenants the power to chase away Tagore's ilk.
an India has produced a system of mechanical control in excess of its vitality.
India wasn't producing control of any sort, because it was controlled by foreigners. At best, it grew some cotton and coffee and jute and so forth. Gaining political freedom, India could have attained economic security. Under the guidance of Tagore level vacuous mathematical economists it chose not to. That plucked out our spirit's tail feathers right enough.
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