Towards One World: A Journey Through the English Essays of Rabindranath Tagore Submitted by Christine Elizabeth Marsh, to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in April 2013 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. 1 Towards One World: A Journey Through the English Essays of Rabindranath Tagore Abstract Tagore is viewed through the medium of five books of essays which he wrote in English. Most of the essays are the texts of lectures Tagore delivered to audiences in England and America. They are important because they constitute what Tagore actually communicated to audiences and readers in the West during his tours outside India. The five books are taken chronologically in the chapters of this thesis, each one being a stage on Tagore’s journey. They are read in conjunction with information about his activities in India prior to each particular tour, his encounters during the trip, and any relevant correspondence, in order better to understand the ideas he expresses. A key finding from close study of the essays is the extent to which Tagore draws on his understanding of the evolution and special capabilities of the human species. This philosophical anthropology, or ‘deep anthropology’, is used to describe what mankind ought to be, as well as what we are. Tagore was critical of what he considered the dehumanising economic systems of the West, which were supported by educational methods that focussed narrowly on training people to participate in such systems. The ideal behind the design of Tagore’s own practical projects was a modernised and less restrictive form of traditional society, comprising networks of self sustaining villages or small communities, where children and young people are encouraged to develop their natural curiosity and creativity, and to express themselves freely with body and mind. Tagore’s approach to education and rural reconstruction, if implemented widely as he intended, could lead to a radical redesign of society, a turning of the world upside down. The aim of my dissertation is to help encourage a wider appreciation of Tagore’s pioneering work in this field. 2 Towards One World A Journey Through the English Essays of Rabindranath Tagore Contents Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 4 1. Introduction 5 The Books of English Essays: 2. Sadhana (1913) 22 3. Personality (1917) 49 4. Nationalism (1917) 85 5. Creative Unity (1922) 117 6. The Religion of Man (1931) 148 7. Conclusion 170 Appendices: 178 1. Tagore’s Letter to the Viceroy, 1930 178 2. ‘The Village and the World: A Political Reading of 179 Rabindranath Tagore’s Prose Fiction’ 3. Article for Contemporarising Tagore and the World: 184 ‘The Once and Future Village: From Tagore’s Rural Reconstruction to Transition Towns’ 4. Marjorie Hessell Tiltman on Dartington Hall 196 Bibliography 199 3 Acknowledgements It has taken me over twenty years to reach this point in my journey of discovery with Rabindranath Tagore, and I have many people to acknowledge and thank. First of all I must honour and remember Marjorie Sykes, who first introduced me to Rabindranath. My next debt is to my dear friend Jean Hardy, through whom I encountered Tagore again at the Dartington Archive. I am grateful to Angie St. John Palmer, John Sanford and Yvonne Widger who worked on the Archive in the High Cross House days, and who were very generous with their interest and support for my research in the Leonard Elmhirst papers. I owe a huge debt to my Open University tutor Barbara Morden, who taught me so much about how to be a literature scholar when I was working on my MA dissertation on Tagore. I also thank Kalyan Kundu and Amalendu Biswas at the Tagore Centre in London for insights into the enduring Tagore legacy for Bengalis worldwide, and for many stimulating discussions. This thesis would not have been possible without the help I have received from three people in particular. First of all I owe everything to my husband, David Gearing, who has shared in all the ups and downs of this research, supporting me by learning about Tagore with me, being the best critic and sounding board anyone could wish for, and always showing his faith that I can do this. Secondly, I owe a different kind of everything to my supervisor, Regenia Gagnier, for her intuition that I have something to offer the world of scholarship, if only it can be got out, for her exacting criticism, for her appetite for new ideas and opportunities from wherever they may come. Thirdly, I owe a special debt of gratitude to my dear friend and mentor, Uma Das Gupta, upon whose work on ‘the relatively lesser known aspects of Rabindranath’s life’ my research is built, and who has helped guide me towards what I need to know about Tagore from the Indian point of view. I must also thank my daughters: Felicity Fay for being a perceptive reader of draft chapters, and Eleanor Marsh for the gift of her portrait of Tagore in pastels, a special presence in our house, looking wise and encouraging and so very much alive. 4 Chapter 1: Introduction Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was the great Bengali poet who travelled the world in the first half of the last century, preaching his faith in human unity. A charismatic presence, with a beautiful voice, he delighted audiences in the more than thirty countries on five continents which he visited. When his words were reported in the press, and when the texts of his lectures were published, it was seen that he was critical of the modern world and the direction it was taking. At home in Bengal he was not just a poet and preacher. He actively pursued an alternative course for his country, which he believed would ‘bring back life in its completeness’. Indian society had been severely disrupted by the British Raj. Where for centuries there had been mutually beneficial interaction between village and town, now the new urban middleclass of administrators and professionals looked down upon the village people, who were unable to help themselves. The villages were ‘drained of joy’, as Tagore expressed it. Tagore’s alternative was a modernised, less restrictive form of traditional society, comprising networks of self sustaining villages or small communities. In one of his lectures on this work, Tagore explains that ‘to resuscitate our moribund villages, we have to supply to them their basic need of food for the body and the mind’, bring back the old festivals and the ‘simple joys of social contact’, ‘enriching the folk mind with entertainment and education’.1 Tagore had a modern approach to village revival. He encouraged the adoption cooperatively of new farming methods and machinery to make life easier for the cultivators, and the best tools and technologies for craft industries. These methods would be used primarily to meet local needs, and for goods to exchange at the fairs which had always been the way villages conducted festivities and met the wider world. Tagore had advocated his direction for India as a political programme during the ‘Swadeshi Movement’ of 1903-1908 against the plan by the British Government to partition Bengal, and had taken a leading role in the protests. He withdrew when he 1 Rabindranath Tagore, Appendix II, in Leonard Elmhirst, Poet and Plowman (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1975), pp. 168-73 (p. 172). [Later references in footnotes to ‘Rabindranath Tagore’ as author are abbreviated to ‘Tagore’] 5 failed to persuade other leaders of the urban middle class in Calcutta of the viability of ‘constructive swadeshi’ (local social enterprise), and when the protests turned violent.2 He continued with his rural reconstruction work, but on a small scale as part of the programme of education at the school and university he had established at Santiniketan in the Bengal countryside. In his essay ‘City and Village’, his aims appear very modest. He explains that rather than think of the whole country, it is best to start in a small way: ‘If we could free even one village from the shackles of helplessness and ignorance, an ideal for the whole of India would be established’.3 Tagore was an important pioneer and advocate for the principle of self-help. He believed that people should be given the freedom to work cooperatively towards self- reliance at the local community level. To some extent this was the aspiration of a Romantic poet, deriving from his own sense of the unity of the individual self with the universe. But Tagore was also ‘an indefatigable man of action’,4 and had some success at identifying practical people with the skills to work with him to put his principles into practice. What he was unable to do was put this forward persuasively as the right and proper direction for India, at a time when an urban middle class had set its sights on India becoming an independent nation. In this thesis I argue that Tagore envisaged an ideal for the whole world, and that his vision can be understood through his ‘English Essays’, the five books he wrote originally in English: Sadhana in 1913, Personality and Nationalism in 1917, Creative Unity in 1922, and The Religion of Man in 1931.5 These books provide an opportunity to seek out Tagore’s ideal of ‘the One, the Infinite, the harmony of the many’ which is ‘the object alike of our individual life and our society’.6 It is not enough to study the forty two essays ‘in cold print’.7 We have to try to bring Tagore alive by going on a 2 Sumit Sarkar, ‘The Gospel of Atmasakti—Constructive Swadeshi’, in ‘Trends in Bengal’s Swadeshi Movement’, in The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903-1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973), pp.