Tagore: On the Hindutva Horizon
SASC Horizon Lecture #1 by Shri Sreejit Datta
Savarkar-Ambedkar Study Circle (SASC) is a digital initiative dedicated to developing a deeper, more empathetic understanding of Savarkar’s and Ambedkar’s thought together, to uncover and build on the truly transformative potential in their work.
The Horizon Lecture Series is being organized by SASC to generate new conversations and push fresh ideas to the frontier of Indian civilizational thought. The philosophy of these conversations is inspired by German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer’s idea of ‘Fusion of Horizons’. In this idea, ‘Horizon’ is that which expands, that which we can see beyond with a little effort, that which points toward something more. Horizons might function as a limit at a particular time, but they are always also gateways to something beyond.
The first Horizon Lecture was delivered by Shri Sreejit Datta on the theme ‘Tagore: On the Hindutva Horizon’. Shri Sreejit Datta is an educator, researcher, and social commentator, who writes/speaks on subjects critical to rekindling the Indic consciousness in a postmodern, neoliberal world. This post contains a transcript of the lecture followed by a summary of the SASC comments presented on the material.
Transcript
When I begin to contemplate Rabindranath Tagore’s ideas on the Hindutva horizon, which began visible quite early in his life and continued to develop in one form or another until its very conclusion on the physical plane, I am immediately reminded of two works. One of these is Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Dharmatattva (1888), and the other is an anthology of Bengali essays, titled Atmashakti (1905), written by none other than Rabindranath. The first of these two works, Bankim’s Dharmatattva, is a brilliant dialogic exposition of the Bhagavata dharma in the Bengali language, presented with a cosmopolitan approach under the new name ‘Anushilan Tattva’. It is often characterised as a religious or theological work from the late Bankim era, when Bankim was supposed to have taken an ultra-conservative or orthodox turn in his sphere of ideas. But anyone who cares to read the Dharmatattva would scarcely fail to observe its dizzyingly wide scope, in terms of both the Indian and western sources it draws upon as well as its in-depth treatment of the human individual and the human society. Indeed, it can be described, borrowing the words of H.T. Hansen, as a treatise in anthropology in the sense of a complete knowledge of man in body, soul, and spirit. But what is most remarkable about Dharmatattva is its deployment of the term ‘Hindutva’ and its detailed elucidation of the idea that this term signifies. In fact, this was the second time when Bankim had used this term, after he coined it in his much more well-known work, the novel Anandamath (1882).
The other work that comes to my mind in this connection, namely, Rabindranath’s Atmashakti, is remarkable for multiple reasons, not least because its publication coincided with the commencement of the Swadeshi Movement in 1905. In this anthology of essays, Rabindranath included an essay which he had originally written in the year 1901 for the Bangadarshan, nava-paryāya. This was the second life of an immensely popular Bengali journal, which was started in its first spell in 1872 by none other than Bankim as its founding editor. The journal had left a great impact on Rabindranath and his contemporaries. In his autobiographical work Jibansmriti, Rabindranath reminisces that “Bangadarshan came and straightaway stole the hearts of Bengalis”. In an essay titled “Bankimchandra”, Rabindranath remarks: “Like the first spell of monsoons in the month of Ashadha, Bangadarshan was, as it were, “samāgato rājavadunnatadhvaniḥ”. And due to an incessant downpour of bhāva-varṣaṇa [rains of literary or aesthetic feelings and themes], now all the rivers and waterfalls of Bengali literature, whether they flowed eastward or westward previously, got filled to their brink and started rushing with a joy of the approaching youth.” It was in Bangadarshan’s first spell that Bankim’s Anandamath was serialised. This first spell of Bangadarshan came to an end in the year 1884. Nearly a decade after, Bankim passed away untimely. Almost seven years after his passing, it was revived in 1901 with Rabindranath as the editor. Rabindranath edited the nava-paryāya or second spell of Bangadarshan for five years and, in this journal, his popular novel Chokher Bali came out as a serialised publication.
Coming back to Rabindranath’s essay anthology Atmashakti, I have already mentioned that the poet included in it an essay that he originally published in the second spell of Bangadarshan, under the title “Hindutva”. When Rabindranath included this essay in the anthology Atmashakti, its title was changed to Bharatavarshiya Samaj. Notably, during the years 1901 to 1905, when Rabindranath was editor of the revived Bangadarshan, he also wrote certain other essays which got published in other essay anthologies, or as forewords to notable publications by his contemporary scholars. In all these essays, Rabindranath returns repeatedly to the theme of Hindutva – sometimes using the term, and sometimes without using it. Around the same time, he almost single-handedly started the project of running a gurukul in Bolpur, where his father Maharshi Devendranath had previously acquired some land and built a house named Santiniketan, with the intention of undertaking his Sadhana in the quietness of a scarcely inhabited hamlet. Rabindranath called this gurukul the Brahmacharya Ashram. Here, he gathered some young children, including his own, and began to teach them following the ideal of the ashramas of yore. When he began this project, he received direct help and participation from only one individual – Brahmabandhav Upadhyay. Brahmabandhav was a childhood friend of Narendranath Datta or Vivekananda, and as editor of the journal Sandhya, he acted as one of the main propagators of the idea of revolutionary nationalism on the eve of the Swadeshi Movement.
Anyway, in those years when Rabindranath was editing the second spell of Bangadarshan and also simultaneously running his fledgling gurukul at Bolpur, far away from the metropolis of Calcutta, we find Rabindranath as a champion of the idea of Hindutva as given by Bankim and his friend, Chandranath Basu. After Bankim coined the term Hindutva and expounded on the ideas he meant by it in Dharmatattva using the analytic mode and in the three novels Anandamath, Devi Chaudhurani, and Sitaram using the narrative-aesthetic mode, his friend Chandranath gave it a socio-historical foundation in Hindutva: Hindu-r Prokrito Itihas (1892). Immediately after them, we find Rabindranath taking up the idea and interpreting its social, political, historical and theological contours following the ideals laid more or less by his two predecessors, who were also his close acquaintances. Rabindranath knew both Bankim and Chandranath well, he frequently met and corresponded with them by mail, and often concurred with them, while equally often disagreed with them, in private and sometimes in public, in the then raging debate over the limits and nature of reform that Hinduism and the Hindu Samaj should be allowed to undergo. At this juncture, it should be mentioned, unless it has already become apparent, that none of these three personalities understood by the term ‘Hindutva’ a solely political idea or ideology. In fact, the very ground of their agreement regarding the term and its signification was that Hindutva was an integration of Hindu sociology, politics, history, economy, theology and morality. In short, for Bankim, Chandranath, and Rabindranath, Hindutva was Hinduness and Hindu weltanshauung.
Now, coming to Rabindranath’s exposition of Hindutva in particular, I see three specific and interrelated strands in his interpretation of the idea and the ideal. The first of these is Rabindranath’s emphasis on knowing and preserving the national distinction of the Hindu nation. Again, by nation, both Bankim and Rabindranath understood and meant the Hindu samaj, rather than a nation-state. Though both agreed that the nation-state or rājya was an important institution, they both saw its only value lying in furthering the cohesiveness of the samaj. The rājya, in other words, is subordinate to the samaj in this view. Therefore, the first strand in Rabindranath’s exposition of Hindutva, so far as my reading of Rabindranath is concerned, is a strong insistence on the knowledge of the distinct national character of the Hindus and the preservation or continuation of that knowledge in religious, moral, cultural, economic, and political expressions. This distinct character, according to Rabindranath, can be found in various European nations in their predilection for political formations and political unity as the supreme end or parama-purushartha of their respective nations. Rabindranath gives a clear expression of this idea in his essay “Hindutva” or “Bharatavarshiya Samaj”, when he asserts that the Hindu civilisation has devoted its best efforts at building a samaj out of diverse ethnicities by assimilating and arranging them in a system that offered those ethnicities a path for social and moral upliftment.
The second strand that I find in Rabindranath’s exposition of Hindutva is based on his radically new approach to historiography. Please note that I use the term ‘radical’ here keeping in mind the specific era in which Rabindranath thought, experimented, and wrote on Hindutva. This is at least twenty-two years before Savarkar gave us his Essentials of Hindutva (1922). In this radically new approach to historiography, Rabindranath prioritised art, handicrafts, traditional and popular performative modes such as songs, dances, and theatre, along with the storytelling traditions associated with the tellings and retellings of India’s two great Mahakavyas, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, as not merely sources but as living history. He encouraged, in an essay titled “Bharatavarsher Itihas”, again written in the same period between 1901 and 1905, an almost phenomenological approach to read and understand history using these sources, to quote his words from this essay:
From time to time even the educated people of our country ask, like bewildered fools: who do you call the country, what is the distinctive spirit of our country, where does it reside, where has it been all along? Answers to these cannot be obtained by simply asking questions. Because the matter is so subtle, so vast, that it cannot be apprehended by reason alone. Be it the English, or the French, no one from any country can express in one word what his national spirit is, where the core essence of his country resides – it is as directly perceivable a truth as the life that resides in the body, yet as elusive to definition and conception as life itself. It enters into our knowledge, into our love, into our imagination, through various invisible paths in various forms, right from our childhood. In inscrutable ways it shapes us through its wonderful power; it does not allow a rift to occur between our past and our present; and it is by its grace that we become great, that we are not isolated. How can we explain this wonderfully invigorated, mysterious, and ancient energy to the sceptical questioner by means of a definition in just a few words?
This very approach brings us to the third and final strand in Rabindranath’s exposition of Hindutva as I see it. I like to call this third strand the metaphysical basis of Hindutva. It is there in Bankim in a big way, when Bankim gives us the ideas of universal love and love of one’s country. Perhaps due to Bankim’s influence of Rabindranath, we get to see a continuity of this idea in his essays included in anthologies like Atmashakti and Bharatavarsha. Let me mention that, in these and other publications, Rabindranath uses the term ‘Hindutva’ at least 22 times in seven different pieces of his writings. The metaphysical strand can be best glimpsed from Rabindranath’s utterance in the essay “Hindutva” or “Bharatavarshiya Samaj”, when he says:
If we establish the spirit of mangala or welfare inherited from our forefathers vividly in our hearts and apply it everywhere in the society, only then will we regain the vast Hindu civilization. Teaching the samaj, offering it food, wealth, and means to attain good health – this is our own work; herein lies our happiness – not looking at it as an exchange, expecting nothing but punya and kalyana in return, this is yajna, this is Yoga or union with Brahman through karma, and never allowing ourselves to forget it, this is Hindutva. Not placing the ideology of self-interest at the centre of the human society, but observing the human society in Brahman, this is Hindutva. In this, beneficence pervades everyone, from animals to humans, and avoiding self-interest becomes as easy as breathing. To bind all in unity, from the bottom of the society to the very top, in one great unselfish bond of kalyana or universal welfare, is the greatest endeavour of all our endeavours. It is in this unity that the Hindu community has to unite the past with the present and the present with the past. This is the only way to gain our humanity. It is not that there is no utility in political efforts; But how far that effort can help us in advancing our social cohesion, therein lies its main glory.
Horizon Commentary
Reviving the Renaissance Landscape: The most important aspect of studying Tagore’s engagement with the idea and vocabulary of Hindutva is in its potential to revisit India’s original renaissance landscape. This is more than a historical perspective, since our objective is to make something strikingly contemporary out of this dialogue with the past, to see how our greatest national luminaries perceived Hinduism, its civilization, and the trajectory of its cultural evolution. In so far as the greatest question before Hindutva is the question of the future, Tagore’s contemplation sheds light on the logic and the objective of India’s ongoing transformation. If we are committed in trying to understand Hindutva in all its diversity and complexity, we must explore its life-giving origins wherever they took root, including in Tagore. Hindutva is thought of today as a political praxis; its social and cultural thought is not absent but the most concrete manifestation is definitely in politics, i.e. it comes closest to be a paradigm in the field of politics. These new explorations help us understand its latent possibilities and work towards visualizing Hindutva as a complete paradigm - political, social, cultural.
Networked Approach: The phenomenon of nationalism and Hindutva cannot be understood in isolation; rather, it necessitates an exploration of the interconnected web of ideas and influences that shaped their evolution. Tagore's engagement with Hindutva, alongside stalwarts like Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Chandranath Basu, underscores the collaborative nature of intellectual discourse in India's history. Each figure contributed distinct perspectives, building upon and refining the concepts that would come to define the cultural and ideological landscape of the nation. This networked approach, in which we understand individuals not in silos but as nodes of relationality, through their associations with other individuals as well as with institutions, gives us a a deeper appreciation for the multifaceted nature of nationalism and Hindutva. On a macro level, this idea gives us epochal thinking - that groups of people carry the fears, hopes, and aspirations of a whole age together.
Savarkar’s Great Intuitions: At SASC, we have focused on generating new readings of Savarkar and Ambedkar that do not reduce them to their historicities but raise them to a monumentalism of ideas. In this sense, Savarkar’s identification with the ideology of Hindu nationalism even if not exactly absolute (Hindu nationalism has been evolutionary), occupies the centermost space. Even as we explore the prehistory of contemporary Hindutva, the idea is never to reduce ourselves to textualist tourism around the origins of this concept. Rather we believe that Savarkar's idea of Hindutva already represents a watershed moment in the evolution of Hindu nationalism. In considering the already accomplished history of Hindutva to be firmly established, we mean that our concern with the present exploration is not to look for new histories of Hindutva but to look for new futures and new potential.
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