Nationalism and Home and The World (Students' Edition)

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A SPECIAL EDITION OF TWO CLASSIC TEXTS BY ONE OF INDIA'S LEADING VISIONARIES

On his visits to Japan and the US during the First World War, Tagore urged his audiences to see nationalism from an ethical, humanistic lens rather than as political conquest. And India's national self-consciousness, he believed, should be founded in its rich cultural sensibilities. A collection of his lectures on the subject, Nationalism is Tagore's powerful and prophetic exhortation for a capacious patriotism.

Set against the backdrop of the Swadeshi movement, Home and the World is a riveting love triangle and a thinly concealed allegory. Bimala, the perceptive wife of a wealthy, liberal zamindar, Nikhilesh, is drawn to the charismatic Sandip who advocates the boycott of foreign goods. Her dilemma brings to light the question of women's emancipation and has generated endless debate about the Indian nationalist movement.

Professor Sugata Bose's erudite introduction provides the details and context for students about these two landmark works. It insightfully elucidates how they are linked by Tagore's wider humanism and why his compassionate vision makes them a guiding light in contemporary times.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE (1861-1941) was one of the key figures of the Bengal Renaissance. He started writing at an early age, and by the turn of the century had become a household name in Bengal as a poet, a songwriter, a playwright, an essayist, a short story writer and a novelist. In 1913 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his verse collection Gitanjali, Around the same time, he founded Visva-Bharati, a university located in Santiniketan near Kolkata. Called the 'Great Sentinel' of modern India by Mahatma Gandhi, Tagore steered clear of active politics, but is famous for returning the knighthood conferred on him as a gesture of protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919.

Tagore was a pioneering literary figure, renowned for his ceaseless innovations in poetry, prose, drama, music and painting, which he took up late in life. His works include some sixty collections of verse, novels like Gora, Chokher Bali and Ghare Baire, plays like Raktakarabı and Dakgbar, dance dramas like Shyama, Chandalika and Chitrangada, over a hundred short stories, essays on religious, social and literary topics, and over 2500 songs, including the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.

SUGATA BOSE is the Gardiner Professor of history at Harvard University. He was educated at Presidency College, Kolkata, and the University of Cambridge where he obtained his PhD and was later a fellow of St Catharine's College. Before taking up the Gardiner Chair at Harvard in 2001, he was professor of history and diplomacy at Tufts University. Bose was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997 and gave the G.M. Trevelyan Lecture at the University of Cambridge.

Bose's many books include The Nation as Mother and Other Visions of Nationhood, the much-acclaimed A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire and His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle against Empire. He has also made documentary films on South Asian history and politics and published recordings of his translations of Tagore.

Even though from childhood I had been taught that idolatry of the Nation is almost better than reverence for God and humanity, Rabindranath Tagore writes in 'Nationalism in India', 'I believe I have outgrown that teaching, and it is my conviction that my countrymen will truly gain their India by fighting against the education which teaches them that a country is greater than the ideals of humanity. (p. 66 of this volume) It is this ethical stance that provides the connecting thread between Tagore's lectures on nationalism and his novel Home and the World. Entranced by Sandip's wizardry with words, Bimala's cardinal error of placing adoration of the nation above solicitude for humanity could only end in tragedy. This students' edition bringing together fiction with non-fiction should serve as an invitation to continue the fight against a false education that Tagore began more than a hundred years ago.

The Bengali novel Ghare Baire was serialized in the journal Sabuj Patra from April 1915 until February 1916. In the spring of 1916, Tagore edited out what he thought were superfluous passages before sending it for publication as a book. By the time the novel appeared in book form, Tagore had already embarked on his voyage to Japan. During his summer sojourn in Japan Tagore drafted his lectures on nationalism that he would deliver in the United States of America. The novel had none of the hallmarks of instruction with which the essays were infused. A female reader had inquired of Tagore his uddeshya, or intent, behind writing Ghare Baire. Tagore had responded with an analogy. A deer's spots were designed as camouflage in its forest habitat, but the deer was unaware of that intent. Much the same could be said about an author. The temporal environment casts its influence on the author in ways conscious as well as unconscious and perhaps expresses its own intent through the medium of the writer. The subtlety of the novel should not be violated by efforts to draw lessons from it.

Tagore was quite sensitive about the complexity of the key characters he had created in Home and the World and resisted their easy categorization in terms of traditional or modern. The easier accessibility of Satyajit Ray's film version of the novel makes it even more imperative for students to read it in the original or in translation. The privileging of the visual over the textual has led to superficial commentaries on the novel's take on the nation. Ray's Sandip is so one-dimensional in his villainy that it is hard for the viewer to figure out why Bimala should feel in the least bit attracted to him. The unnecessary diminution of one of the two principal male characters results in doing some injustice to the female protagonist in the triangle. Even though Nikhilesh embodied some of Tagore's own deeply held values and sensibilities, Tagore had drawn the character of Sandip with a deft touch. Sandip's manipulative guile did not mean he was entirely devoid of the charisma that buttressed the seductive power of nationalism.