In the last few weeks we are talking a lot about nationalism. Many articles are being circulated on social media, debates are aired on national TV channels. Everybody has their own opinion on the subject. I don’t have enough knowledge to take a side. I lived in three different countries - twelve different cities over the course of last twenty years. Also got the opportunity to travel to at least one country in the each continent (except Australasia and Antarctica) and thus became briefly acquainted with cultures of different parts of the world. Having lived in so many different places, I don’t feel a strong sense of belonging to any particular place - yet at the core of my heart I consider myself a Bengali, an Indian and a global citizen. I owe my intellectual identity mainly to Bengali writers and philosophers and we are indeed lucky to have some great Bengali leaders who brought a renaissance of thought in 18th-20th century. My Indian identity was induced upon me by my parents who from my early childhood took me to different parts of India - esp. to “not so touristy” places. We spent months in villages of Jharkhand (Bihar at that time) during summer and puja vacation. We travelled without reservation in economy class train, without arranging any lodging at the destined location. When I look back I feel grateful to my parents because that still remains my closest encounter with rural India. I set my foot outside India for the first time at the age of twenty-two. In all places I visited, I was accepted with a lot of warmth and that can not just be sheer luck. This earth, indeed is beautiful. I love to be a part of it. I enjoy the rich diversity it offers. That’s how I developed my identity as a global citizen. Yet at the wake of a sudden nationalism in my country, I feel the need for understanding the essential idea of our nation. As always, I took refuge in the writing of my ultimate teacher - Rabindranath Tagore. I was reading his book titled “Nationalism” published in 1917 - ninety-nine years ago. This book is a compilation of three essays - “Nationalism in the West”, “Nationalism in Japan”, “Nationalism in India” and a poem - “The sunset of the century”. I would like to quote a few paragraphs from “Nationalism in India” which has added great value to my understanding of India. If you are equally confused like me about nationalism, I hope reading the quoted text would shed some light. And at the end, I guess you will also feel hopeless like me, as you will realize that not much has changed over the last century.
“India is too vast in its area and too diverse in its races. It is many countries packed in one geographical receptacle. It is just the opposite of what Europe truly is, namely one country made into many. Thus Europe in its culture and growth has had the advantage of the strength of the many, as well as the strength of the one. India, on the contrary, being naturally many, yet adventitiously one, has all along suffered from the looseness of its diversity and the feebleness of its unity. A true unity is like a round globe, it rolls on, carrying its burden easily ; but diversity is a many-cornered thing which has to be dragged and pushed with all force. Be it said to the credit of India that this diversity was not her own creation ; she has had to accept it as a fact from the beginning of her history. In America and Australia, Europe has simplified her problem by almost exterminating the original population. Even in the present age this spirit of extermination is making itself manifest, by inhospitably shutting out aliens, through those who themselves were aliens in the lands they now occupy. But India tolerated difference of races from the first, and that spirit of toleration has acted all through her history.
Her caste system is the outcome of this spirit of toleration. For India has all along been trying experiments in evolving a social unity within which all the different peoples could be held together, yet fully enjoying the freedom of maintaining their own differences. The tie has been as loose as possible, yet as close as the circumstances permitted. This has produced something like a United States of a social federation, whose common name is Hinduism.
India had felt that diversity of races there must be and should be, whatever may be its drawback, and you can never coerce nature into your narrow limits of convenience without paying one day very dearly for it. In this India was right ; but what she failed to realize was that in human beings differences are not like the physical barriers of mountains, fixed forever - they are fluid with life's flow, they are changing their courses and their shapes and volume.
Therefore in her caste regulations India recognized differences, but not the mutability which is the law of life. In trying to avoid collisions she set up boundaries of immovable walls, thus giving to her numerous races the negative benefit of peace and order but not the positive opportunity of expansion and movement. She accepted nature where it produces diversity, but ignored it where it uses that diversity for its world-game of infinite permutations and combinations. She treated life in all truth where it is manifold, but insulted it where it is ever moving. Therefore Life departed from her social system and in its place she is worshiping with all ceremony the magnificent cage of countless compartments that she has manufactured.
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The general opinion of the majority of the present day nationalists in India is that we have come to a final completeness in our social and spiritual ideals, the task of the constructive work of society having been done several thousand years before we were born, and that now we are free to employ all our activities in the political direction. We never dream of blaming our social inadequacy as the origin of our present helplessness, for we have accepted as the creed of our nationalism that this social system has been perfected for all time to come by our ancestors who had the superhuman vision of all eternity, and supernatural power for making infinite provision for future ages. Therefore for all our miseries and shortcomings we hold responsible the historical surprises that burst upon us from outside. This is the reason why we think that our one task is to build a political miracle of freedom upon the quicksand of social slavery. In fact we want to dam up the true course of our own historical stream and only borrow power from the sources of other peoples' history.
Those of us in India who have come under the delusion that mere political freedom will make us free have accepted their lessons from the West as the gospel truth and lost their faith in humanity. We must remember whatever weakness we cherish in our society will become the source of danger in politics. The same inertia which leads us to our idolatry of dead forms in social institutions will create in our politics prison houses with immovable walls. The narrowness of sympathy which makes it possible for us to impose upon a considerable portion of humanity the galling yoke of inferiority will assert itself in our politics in creating tyranny of injustice.
When our nationalists talk about ideals, they forget that the basis of nationalism is wanting. The very people who are upholding these ideals are themselves the most conservative in their social practice. Nationalists say, for example, look at Switzerland, where, in spite of race differences, the peoples have solidified into a nation. Yet, remember that in Switzerland the races can mingle, they can intermarry, because they are of the same blood. In India there is no common birthrights And when we talk of Western Nationality we forget that the nations there do not have that physical repulsion, one for the other, that we have between different castes. Have we an instance in the whole world where a people who are not allowed to mingle their blood shed their blood for one another except by coercion or for mercenary purposes ? And can we ever hope that these moral barriers against our race amalgamation will not stand in the way of our political unity ?”
The full essay can be found here: https://archive.org/details/nationalism00tagorich
