Abstract
Published between 1907 and 1910, Rabindranath Tagore’s novel Gora reflects its author’s evolving cultural, political, and ideological views in the first decade of the twentieth century. This period was significant not only for Tagore’s engagement in and disenchantment with the Swadeshi movement, but also in terms of his critical assessment of the viability of a Hindu cultural-national identity for India. Reading the novel in the light of some of his relevant writings in and around the 1900s, this essay puts Tagore’s exploration of Hindu identity into perspective in order to distinguish it from the exclusionary Hindutva ideologies later promoted and popularized in Indian politics. Using a dialogic method in the novel, Tagore pits a limited, divisive, and communalist Hindu ideology against an open, liberal, and alternative Hindu selfhood for India which is compatible with the universal-humanist perspective propounded at the end. Despite endorsing the latter perspective, Tagore nevertheless reveals his concerns and uncertainties about the position of minority communities and outsiders within that holistic paradigm of Indian identity.
Keywords
Conceived in 1904 or 1905 and serially published in the Bengali periodical Prabasi from August 1907 to February 1910 (Paul, 1990b: 215; 1993: 120), the production of the novel Gora partly overlapped with Rabindranath Tagore’s reflection on India’s Hindu heritage and his reaching beyond it for a universal–humanist vision of Indian identity. This was also the time of Tagore’s participation in and disenchantment with the Swadeshi movement. Although set in an earlier period of Indian history, Gora contains the impressions of its author’s evolving cultural, political, and ideological self-fashioning in the first decade of the twentieth century. Historicizing that crucial phase of his life and career, the first section of this essay puts Tagore’s views of Hindu identity into perspective in order to distinguish them from the later exclusionary Hindutva ideologies promoted and popularized by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and others. The second section looks closely at the novel itself to trace its eponymous protagonist’s journey from a limited, divisive, and communalist Hindu identity towards an open, liberal, and all-inclusive Indian selfhood. The novel also presents an alternative sense of being Hindu which is not incompatible with the universal–humanist perspective propounded at the end. This easy congruity, however, is complicated through the novel’s dialogic method. Reading the text in the light of his other writings in and around the decade in question, this essay will demonstrate that Tagore both subscribes to and questions a synonymous conceptualization of the “Hindu” and the “Indian”, revealing his doubts and uncertainties about the position of minority communities and outsiders within that holistic paradigm of Indian civilization.
I
Although he was born into a family that belonged to the reformist Brahmo Samaj, Tagore bore deep respect for Hindu cultural heritage. With reservations about the ritualistic and Puranic aspects of Hinduism, Brahmoism was initiated by Raja Rammohan Roy in 1828, and was later led by Rabindranath’s father Maharshi Debendranath Tagore after his initiation into the movement in 1843 (Kopf, 1979: xxi; Collet, 1962: 239; Sastri, 1911: 90–91). So far as its faith is concerned, Brahmo monotheism is indebted to Vedanta or the Upanishads, 1 Islam, and Unitarian Christianity. 2 Despite its reformist attitudes, the wing of the Brahmo Samaj associated with Debendranath Tagore — which would later come to be called the Adi (original) Brahmo Samaj — did not want to sever its links with Hinduism, but rather wanted to modernize the latter. David Kopf calls the Brahmoism of the Adi Samaj “Hindu Brahmoism” with a view to distinguishing it from the Keshubite and Sadharan wings with their non-Hindu universalism (1979: 288–90). 3 While inheriting the Hindu Brahmoist cultural outlook, Tagore nevertheless extended it to suit his own idiosyncratic views of Indian society and culture. In an essay significantly entitled “Atmaparichaya” (One’s Own Identity) (1912/1913/2011 [1319 Bengali year]), he dwells upon the identity crisis experienced by those Brahmo Samaj members who did not want to consider themselves Hindu. Speaking in favour of Hindu identity, Tagore argues that if the Brahmo Samaj has achieved anything positive in terms of reforming the objectionable practices of the Hindu society, that achievement should be seen not as symptomatic of its severance from the greater Hindu society, but as a fulfilment of whatever is creative, living, and universal in the latter (1912/1913/2011: 593, 597, 600). It is worth noting that unlike the terms “Brahmo”, “Catholic”, “Protestant”, “Vaishnav”, and “Muslim”, for Tagore the term “Hindu” does not refer to any doctrinal, sectarian, or religious identity: “Hindu is not a particular religion”. Instead, it is an all-inclusive concept that denotes the multicultural, multi-ethnical, and multi-credal identity of the people of greater India (Bharatbarsha): “Hindu is the ultimate national or racial [jatigata] outcome of the history of Bharatbarsha” (1912/1913/2011: 594, 599; translation mine). The Bengali word “jati” (in “jatigata” above) is difficult to translate; often translated as “nation”, it also connotes race and a commonly identifiable group of people. Tagore also seems to have in mind the etymological sense of the term “Hindu”, deriving from the river Sindhu (the Indus) and referring to the civilization that developed on its banks (Sen, 1961/2005: 7). Hence its synonymous application with the term “Bharatbarshiya” (the adjectival form of “Bharatbarsha”) in his usage. However, while there is no denying the problematic nature of the identification of “Hindu” with “Bharatbarsha”, we need to distinguish Tagore’s socio-cultural conceptualization of the Hindu identity of India from the political and statist configurations of the same by later ideologues.
In Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (1923), the Hindu nationalist and political activist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar holds the term “Hindu” as meaning more than mere Bharatiya or Hindi, that is to say Indian. An American (Christian) or a Muslim “citizen” of India may be considered “Bharatiya or Hindi”, but in order to be “incorporated into the Hindu fold”, she or he has to have “adopted our culture and our history, inherited our blood and […] come to look upon our land not only as the land of his love but even of his worship” (1923/1969: 83–84). For Savarkar, therefore, Hindutva was not yet applicable to all the citizens of India. Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, a leading ideologue of the Hindu nationalist group the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), drew upon Savarkar’s conception of Hindutva to forge a more exclusive concept which did not have any place for the religiously non-Hindu citizens of India. As he writes in his 1939 We or Our Nationhood Defined, “the non-Hindu peoples in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture” (1939/1947: 55–56). This uncompromising position with regards to the religious minorities is a hallmark of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which has had electoral successes in recent years and is currently the ruling party of India. A founding leader of the party, Lal Krishna Advani, claims Hindutva to be “the BJP’s ideological mascot — the most distinctive feature of its identity and approach” (qtd. in Appaiah, 2003: 41). In the context of this upsurge of Hindu fundamentalism in Indian politics and culture, it is important to recognize the essential difference between that and Tagore’s alternative view of a Hindu samaj (society) which is compatible with his universal–humanist idealism.
In 1901, Tagore published an essay called “Hindutva”, later renaming it “Bharatbarshiya Samaj” meaning Greater Indian Society. Referring to the French philosopher Ernest Renan’s theorization of “nation”, he there argues that the words “nation” and “national” are not applicable to Indian (or Eastern) civilizations, as their meanings have already been limited by the European usages. Using “Hindutva” as an alternative to nationalism in the Indian context, he maintains that while European nationalism has a statist leaning, the driving force of Hindu civilization is its samaj or society which has accommodated people of multiple races and origins with their diverse languages, customs, and faith systems (1901/2011: 622–23; Paul, 1990b: 23). True, he does not mention Islam and Christianity in the essay, and his seeming conflation of “Hindu civilization”, “Hindu society”, and “Hindu community” might be symptomatic of his cultural and ideological uncertainties in the matter (1901/2011: 623, 625; translation mine). It is, however, certain that Tagore deployed the term “Hindutva” in the general sense of Hindu-ness (Hindu-tva). This is because, as we have seen, the term did not gather its problematic ideological senses until the third decade of the twentieth century (Appaiah, 2003: 37). As indicated by the revision of the title and established by the central argument of the essay, in Tagore’s usage the term implied the pluralistic essence of Indian (Hindu) society or Bharatbarshiya samaj.
In a 1904 essay “Swadeshi Samaj” (Nativist Society) he further expands the “unity among diversity” principle of Bharatbarsha to include such culturally distant minority communities as the Muslims and the Christians: “In Bharatbarsha, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Muslim, and the Christian won’t kill each other but find a way to harmonize themselves. That harmony, rather than being non-Hindu, will be especially Hindu” (1904/2011a: 638, 640; translation mine). Coming out of his work towards founding a new socio-political movement called “Swadeshi Samaj”, the essay emphasized the importance of societal self-reliance and was read twice in front of a packed audience in Kolkata in July 1904 (Paul, 1990b: 193–95). It nevertheless attracted some harsh criticism from various fronts. On the one hand, Tagore was upbraided for the impracticability of his poetic idealism, while on the other, he was accused by the Hindu conservatives of strategically proposing to mix up the differences and distinctions within Hindu society (Paul, 1990b: 198–99). Responding to these criticisms in another brief essay which was later appended to the original article, he reinforces his main points regarding self-dependence and social harmony, and asserts that rather than attempting to flatten out the diversity of Hindu or Bharatbarshiya society, he was stressing the latter’s commendable capacity to host plurality and varieties (1904/2011b: 644–45). For all their limitations and idealistic leaps, such arguments offer helpful insights into Tagore’s idiosyncratic vision of social and cultural harmony, as opposed to a politically inspired union, in the context of Swadeshi.
Tagore was of course a central figure of the political movement called Swadeshi (1905–1907) when it flared up in opposition to the Partition of Bengal proclaimed by the then British Viceroy in India Lord Curzon. The poet composed many patriotic songs around that time and conceived a symbolic protest movement by appropriating and secularizing a Hindu custom in which a sister wishes the wellbeing of her brother by tying a sacred thread (rakhi) around the latter’s wrists. 4 On the official Partition day (16 October 1905), Tagore’s song was sung during a procession headed by the poet and held by a huge crowd, whose members, in a peaceful remonstration suggesting fraternal love, tied rakhis around the wrists of each other irrespective of class, caste, and religion (Paul, 1990b: 268–269; Fraser, 2019: 111). Despite his scepticism about politics, Tagore at that time attended some Swadeshi meetings. In a 1907 essay “Byadhi o Pratikar” (Disease and Its Remedy), he recalls one such meeting held by the Muslim community, in which the advantages of Hindu–Muslim unity were being enumerated. Distrustful of this superficial approach to a grave problem of Indian history, he could not help pointing out that the unity between the two communities should not be considered from a utilitarian perspective, but from that of the higher ideals of fraternity, love, and humanity (Paul, 1990b: 273).
However, recognizing the militant gesture of communal rivalry and strong anti-British sentiments in the Swadeshi movement, Tagore soon became disillusioned with it (Paul, 1990b: 279; Dutta and Robinson, 1995: 149) and turned more and more towards social-reconstruction works. His lack of sympathy with the political campaign as well as his continued commitment to alternative Swadeshi activities are expressed in a letter written on 17 November 1905:
Although Debendranath had abandoned the customary Hindu rituals through the Brahmo Movement, he […] insisted that the Brahmo Dharma was an integral part of the Hindu Dharma. […] In Debendranath’s family, there was a synthesis between swadeshi sentiment and modernity. […] Dwijendranath and Ganendranath helped Nabagopal Mitra to establish the Hindu Mela for the display of swadeshi art and craft, swadeshi wrestling, and swadeshi games, also swadeshi songs and swadeshi poetry. […] But the Congress chose to put its faith in the efficacy of petitioning the government for favours to educated Indians. […] As in religion so also in politics, the Adi Brahmo Samaj tried to draw the people’s attention to their country. […] It would not be fair to say that boycott was the mainstay of the movement. (2006: 149–51)
Written just a month after the officialization of the Partition, this letter looks strikingly non-political. The political manifestations of the Swadeshi movement are represented by the self-denigrating “petitioning” policy of the Congress party as well as the boycott movement. These are pitted against his family’s long-standing commitment to the nativist cause. Tagore in this letter also acknowledges the roles of Rammohan Roy, Debendranath Tagore, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, and Iswarchandra Vidyasagar 5 in inculcating respect for their own country in the minds of the culturally alienated English-educated class of Bengal. Referring to his proto-Swadeshi role in “taking education into our own hands”, Tagore further writes that “[m]y goal is to make my school at Santiniketan as indigenous as possible” (2006: 149–51). Established in 1901, this school or “Brahmacharyasram”, as he named it — after the ancient Indian system of imparting an ascetic and close-to-nature teaching — offered basic modern education in a traditional manner. (This would turn into Visva-Bharati in 1918; see Gupta, 1983/2009: 1, 16.) In this spirit, he would also be associated, albeit briefly, with the Jatiya Shiksha Parishad (National Council of Education) when it was formed in 1906 as a reaction against the Partition of Bengal (Paul, 1990b: 186–87; Fraser, 2019: 112). Thus, rather than shunning politics, Tagore, as Semanti Ghosh has argued, was always in “search for an alternative form of politics, removed from its overtly institutional, hence inherently ‘statist’ version”. Nor was he completely against state and modernity as such, but believed, continues Ghosh, that “[a] true regeneration of the villages would necessitate social and economic developmental enterprises, essentially of a ‘modern’ nature” (2017: 121–22). Therefore, so far as the English-educated elite of Kolkata were concerned, Tagore wanted them to value the time-honoured tradition and culture of India. At the same time, he longed for the underprivileged and culturally backward rural people to benefit from a progressive, modern way of life. This desire to blend tradition and modernity as well as the national and the universal is reflected in the character of Gora.
II
By the time his novel Gora started coming out serially in Prabashi in 1907, Tagore had become disillusioned with Hindu nationalist idealism and Swadeshi nationalism. Set in the pre-Swadeshi era of mid-nineteenth century, Gora is in a sense an artistic exploration of the crisis of identity of a generation of educated urban Bengalis raised in the shadow of the Bengal Renaissance. The novel’s dialogic form allows it to accommodate the doubts and dilemmas, questions and quibbles of its characters in a flexible and non-coercive fashion. In the light of the ideological shifts or modifications Tagore underwent in and beyond the first decade of the twentieth century, as traced in the previous section, it might be tempting to read the novel as a documentation of these changes. Such a method might also be rewarding to a certain extent, but this being a multivocal and multivalent text, it is not always easy to pinpoint authorial positions. As Buddhadeb Bose has noted, “the author, rather than expressing himself directly vis-à-vis an authorial voice, articulates his position through gestures and markers” (1955/2015: 217). Similarly, Ananya Dutta Gupta has observed how, “[i]nstead of giving any one point of view pre-eminence, the author opts for a more dialectical approach. Each point of view may be said to contain a convincing slice of truth in it; each contributes to the quest for the whole truth” (2015: 41). It is the quest and not the “whole truth” that seems to matter for Tagore. Even the resolution or synthesis reached at the end of the novel is not fixed or absolute but of a free-flowing tentative nature, true to the pluralist vision of harmony it suggests.
Gora primarily dramatizes the conflict between the Hindus and the Brahmos, seen largely through the perspectives of Gora and Binoy, two English-educated, middle-class Bengali gentlemen. Gouromohan or Gora is the son of a deceased Irish soldier in the 1857 Indian Rebellion, whose wife took refuge at the house of Krishnadayal and Anandamoyi and died soon after giving birth to her son. The Bengali couple adopted the white orphan (“gora” literally means white-skinned) and reared him as a Brahmin (1910/1924: 25–26). 6 Despite embracing Brahmoism at some point, Gora later turned into an orthodox Hindu. This was prompted by a newspaper controversy with an English missionary about Hindu religion and society, which he defended so vehemently that he ended up writing an English book on Hinduism (23–24, 41). Gora thus clings to Hindu orthodoxy by way of resisting colonial rule in India and the educated middle- and upper-class Indians’ mimicry of Western ways of life. The latter is mostly represented through the Brahmo characters. While Paresh Babu epitomizes a liberal philosophical and spiritual wisdom born of his Brahmo faith, his wife Baroda and a leading member of the Samaj Panu Babu bear hostile anti-Hindu sentiments and are slavishly content with the British rule in India. Gora’s best friend Binoy mediates between the extremes of orthodox Hinduism and exclusivist Brahmoism.
In his first visit to Paresh Babu’s house, Gora startles everyone with the “caste-mark of Ganges-clay on his forehead” and his “old-fashioned” outfit, appearing as an “image of revolt against Modernity”. Binoy realizes that this is Gora’s “martial guise” (38). The narrator soon contextualizes Gora’s anti-modern, nativist stance by recounting that, on his way to the sacred Tribeni-bathing festival the previous day, Gora came across the spectacle of two first-class passengers of the steamer, “an Englishman and a modernised Bengali babu”. As they were ridiculing the predicaments of the lower-class natives struggling to board the over-crowded steamer amid rain and confusion, Gora burst out in an angry protest. Although this seemed to work on the Englishman who later apologized to Gora, his Bengali companion seemed almost unperturbed and patronizingly complained about the lack of “creature comforts on this steamer” in order to impress the Englishman (38–39). It is significant that the butt of satire here is not so much the Englishman as the Bengali babu.
Among the Brahmo Samaj members, Haran (Panu Babu) indulges in a similar self-humiliating sycophancy in the episode of Gora’s encounter with the Magistrate Mr Brownlow regarding the police oppression in a Muslim village Ghosepara. Finding the Magistrate unwilling to help, Gora leaves with the declaration that he would inspire the villagers to stand up for themselves. To assuage the Magistrate’s bewilderment at such “insufferable insolence”, Haran remarks that “[t]hese fellows have not been able to assimilate the best of English culture”. To this the Magistrate, whose father-in-law is a missionary, adds that they need to “accept Christ” for the enhancement of their moral sensibilities (141). Baroda for her part is always anxious “to keep pace with advanced society” by dressing in a self-consciously loud fashion and by taking pains to remain in the good books of the ruling-class British people (35, 37, 149). Haran and Baroda in such instances caricature what their author would consider as the detrimental effects of wrong modernity. Speaking about what he regarded as Japan’s mimicry of Western modernity, Tagore would later define “[t]rue moderni[ty]” as “freedom of mind, not slavery of taste” (1917/1924: 75). It is against such superficially “modern” mannerisms and mindless mimicry of the West, at the expense of traditional native culture, that Gora’s orthodox anti-modern “guise” is directed.
During one of their heated altercations, when Haran disdainfully talks about the objectionable customs of Hindu society which need to be reformed, Gora bursts out with “Reform? That can wait a while yet. More important than reforms are love and respect. Reform will come of itself from within, after we are a united people” (51). We remember that, despite its sympathies for societal reforms, the Adi Brahmo Samaj as well as Tagore did not consider Brahmoism as a break from Hinduism. And Gora’s polemic against what he calls Haran’s “separat[ist]” “policy” in favour of the value of “love and respect” (51) reflects Tagore’s similar unitary arguments in and around the 1900s. Tagore, however, would not be in sympathy with Gora’s aggressive Hindu “orthodoxy” which has its source, as Sucharita realizes, not in “real conviction” but in “a spirit of defiance” (47). As for Gora’s anti-imperialist stance in all this, Lalita Pandit has noted that “[t]he Brahmo native […] is an alienated colonial subject whom Gora wishes to reform, subverting the imperialist assumption of moral superiority and redefining it in nationalist terms” (1995: 228). In this respect, Gora resembles such revolutionary contemporaries of Tagore’s as Brahmabandhab Upadhyay and Sister Nivedita.
Drawing upon the work of Ashis Nandy, Pandit thinks that Gora’s radical masculinity, revolutionary asceticism, his use of “Śakta symbolism”, and his “involvement with and disaffection from Brahmo Samaj” inspire quite obvious analogy with Brahmabandhab Upadhyay. The two are also similar in their continuous making and remaking of selfhood, as reflected in their desperate attempts to switch to different socio-cultural and religious identities (Pandit, 1995: 216–18). Born into a Hindu Brahmin family, Upadhyay first became a Brahmo and then converted to Catholicism, attempting to effect a reconciliation of the best aspects of Hinduism and Christianity. Calling himself a “Hindu Catholic”, he maintained that “[b]y birth we are Hindu and shall remain Hindu till death”. While remaining a Catholic Christian, he got himself involved in Hindu nationalist activism and was arrested on a charge of sedition for his radical journalism. Refusing to present himself before the court, he died of illness during his imprisonment in 1907, sealing his image as a heroic rebel. What is more, he had re-embraced Hinduism as a sign of protest against the Partition of Bengal (Pandit, 1995: 218–19; Collins, 2012: 36–37; Lipner, 1999: 209). Tagore met Upadhyay before the militant phase of the latter’s life. Kopf considers the period between 1898 and 1906 as the “Brahmobandhab [sic] period” of Tagore’s career (1979: 294). A great admirer of the poet, Brahmabandhab used a verse from his favourite poetic volume by Tagore (Naibedya, which contains spiritual verses of predominantly Brahmo sympathies) as an epigraph to his essay called “Hindujatir Ekanishthata” (Devotion of the Hindus, 1901) (Paul, 1990b: 25–26). When the school at Santiniketan was opened in 1901, Upadhyay joined as the headmaster at Tagore’s behest, though his career there was very brief (Kopf, 1979: 294; Collins, 2012: 36–37). 7 Significantly, Tagore started writing the novel Gora in 1907, the year of Upadhyay’s death. It is to be noted that if the character Gora was modelled in part on Upadhyay, Tagore chose a separate destiny for his protagonist. Unlike Upadhyay’s re-conversion to traditional Hinduism before the tragic end of his life, we will see that Tagore makes Gora eventually embrace an all-inclusive universalism.
The character of Gora is also said to have been modelled on the strong neo-Hindu nationalist Sister Nivedita (Kripalani, 1980: 214). Born in Northern Ireland as Margaret Noble, Nivedita settled in India in 1898 when she became a disciple of Swami Vivekananda. True to the predominance of Sakta devotion in the Ramakrishna Order founded by her guru, her debut book Kali, the Mother (1900) also contained poignant revolutionary undertones. After Vivekananda’s death in 1902, Nivedita plunged headlong into political activism of a neo-Hinduist fashion. 1905, the year of the Partition of Bengal, saw the publication of her pamphlet Aggressive Hinduism in which she blatantly advocated for anti-colonial political radicalism (Boehmer, 2005: 36–37, 48–49, 59–60, 71; Nag, 2018: 68). What is more, as Elleke Boehmer has noted, Nivedita’s writings represent “the potentially lethal conflation […] of Bengali with Hindu nationalism” by the Bengali middle-class elite of that time (2005: 50). While all this suggests strong parallels with Gora, Nivedita’s Kali worship as well as her aggressive Hindu nationalism set her apart from Tagore. As he surmised, she, on her part, may have had reservations about his reliance on passive resistance. They of course had a respectful relationship. Nivedita had translated Tagore’s stories into English by 1900 and in 1904 he welcomed her to open a Normal School for teacher training in the premises of his Kolkata house, though the project never materialized. Nivedita also visited the Tagore estate in Shelidah, East Bengal (now Bangladesh), staying there from 30 December 1904 to 2 January 1905. During that tour, Tagore told her a version of the story which would later be developed into Gora. Either on this or a later occasion, in response to Nivedita’s objection, Tagore had to slightly alter the plot of the novel, making Gora’s disciple and beloved Sucharita accept him at the end when his European origin is disclosed. After the Sister’s death, Tagore wrote an article in the Prabashi in which, while dwelling upon their disagreements and temperamental differences, he commended her selfless love for India and dubbed her “Lokamata” or “Mother of the People” (Paul, 1990b: 207, 215; 1993: 196–97, 244–45; Nag, 2018: 73–75, 78–81). According to Arnab Nag, Tagore would have liked Nivedita to become the mother not only of the Hindu community but also of all Indians. He must have noticed that potentiality in her personality, a potentiality that is fictionally realized in Gora’s eventual acceptance of an all-Indian identity (2018: 79–80). Whether that was the case or not, love and empathy do indeed occupy a special place in Tagore’s vision of intersectional harmony.
Like Upadhyay and to some extent Nivedita, Gora’s Hindutva was mostly an anticolonial cultural–political gesture. This chink in his Hindutva armour makes Gora stand out from other dogmatic Hindu characters of the novel, his foster father Krishnadayal and Sucharita’s aunt Harimohini. These characters typify such negative aspects of Hindu society as food taboos and untouchability, two offshoots of an abusive caste system. After his purifying bath in the Ganges prior to his daily worship, Krishnadayal shrinks not only from the touch of Gora but also from that of his wife (109, 164). We also note the rigidity of Harimohini’s observance of Hindu religious practices on several occasions. When she stops eating cooked food because she would not use the water brought to her by the low-caste servant at Paresh Babu’s place, Sucharita volunteers to observe orthodoxy so that she be allowed to fetch water for her aunt. But Harimohini still remains scrupulous because “that water has to be offered to my god” (193–94). Although she succumbs to Sucharita’s sincere insistence in this case, later she will not allow her nephew Satish to bring his “untouchable” dog close to her (218).
The novel, however, shows us another variant of being Hindu, set apart from the defensive and observant ones discussed above. When Harimohini accusingly asks Binoy why he does not “become a Brahmo” since he does not “observe any of our Hindu customs”, he replies:
The very day I come to regard Hinduism as consisting of prohibitions with regard to touching, and prohibitions with regard to eating, and a lot of other meaningless rules and regulations, I shall become, if not a Brahmo, then a Christian, a Mussalman, or something of that sort. But I have not yet such a lack of faith in Hinduism. (280)
The stress on “prohibitions” with regards to Hindu religious practices and rituals is a recurrent one in the text. Another word that is crucial in the above excerpt is “faith”. If the actions of Krishnadayal and Harimohini are prompted by their exclusivist orthodox faith, it is his alternative liberal faith in what he believes to be true Hinduism that enhances Binoy’s confidence to flout Hindu society’s “meaningless” practices while still considering himself a Hindu.
Another character who epitomizes a similarly free attitude to Hinduism is Gora’s foster mother Anandamoyi. Despite being born a high-caste Brahmin, she has shunned orthodoxy since the day she adopted the Christian-born orphan Gora, whom she considers as a boon from God. She thinks it would be hypocritical if she were to practise untouchability after accepting Gora as her son (175). As early as Chapter 6, the reader is introduced to Anandamoyi’s syncretic and compassionate attitude to human relationships. For her unorthodox behaviours, she is antipathetically viewed as a Christian by many in the Hindu society. But such social ostracism cannot subdue her confidence as she contents herself “with the reply: Aren’t Christians human beings? If you alone are the elect of God, why has He made you grovel in the dust first before the Pathans, then before the Moghuls, and now before the Christians?” (26–27). Although she does not subscribe to any religious or racial chauvinism, nor does Anandamoyi forego her claim to her roots. As she tells Sucharita, in spite of feeling unwelcome within her own house as well as in the Hindu society, she refuses to accept “that the house is not my home, and that their Hindu society is not my society” (256). This remark is consonant with Binoy’s liberal stance on his Hindu heritage noted above. This alternative — and supposedly truer — Hindu-ness stands for freedom of mind and choice, respect for all human beings (irrespective of caste, class, race, and religion), and a culturally rooted universalism. If the above characteristics chime in with what Kopf calls the “Hindu Brahmoism” of the Adi Brahmo Samaj, it is significant that they are represented here by two Hindu characters.
Of the Brahmo characters, Paresh Babu is the only person who lives up to higher ideals of religion, society, and interpersonal relationships. Being a Brahmo, he is against such customs and practices of the Hindu society as the caste system and idol worship. He allows free mixing of the sexes in his household and gives his daughters freedom of choice and expression. His living room contains pictures of Christ and Keshub Chandra Sen, 8 as well as a full set of Theodore Parker’s writings (32). Among the books Paresh Babu reads to Sucharita are the Bhagavadgita, the Mahabharata, and some volume by Emerson (75, 213). 9 (Sucharita is also seen reading Imitation of Christ [117].) The first two of these books are considered Hindu texts and are thus shunned by westernized Bengalis, as well as the staunch Brahmos like Haran who finds it exasperating “that Paresh Babu drew no line between Brahmo and non-Brahmo in such things as the study of scriptures” (75). However, like Anandamoyi, Paresh has an inexhaustible fund of self-possession and his “equanimity” remains unruffled by the “the censure of sectarian enthusiasts”. Deeply spiritual in a non-dogmatic and non-sectarian manner, he is imbued with “freedom” of spirit and a “natural reliance upon goodness” (208).
We have seen how Tagore envisioned a trans-sectarian Hindu or greater Indian (Bharatbarshiya) society around the time when Gora was conceived and produced. The novel nevertheless expresses his scepticism about the Hindu–Bharatbarshiya equation, which may have been the result of his disillusionment with Swadeshi politics and its communal turn. When Gora preaches to Sucharita the value of unity and non-sectarianism, she asks him whether he too did not “belong to a particular party”. To this he replies with a statement that upholds a Hindu nationalist idealism: “I am a Hindu! A Hindu belongs to no party. The Hindus are a nation [jati], and such a vast nation that their nationality cannot be limited within the scope of any single definition” (294). When Binoy wants Paresh Babu’s consent about marrying his daughter Lolita while remaining a Hindu, Paresh wonders whether the Hindu society would accept that. Echoing Tagore’s idealistic views about an inclusive Hindu society discussed in the previous section, Binoy holds that “Hindu society has always given shelter to new sects” and that it has the potential to be “the society of all religious communities”. Tagore, however, undercuts such idealism by making Paresh Babu reply that ideas like these might be easy to verbalize but are difficult to put into practice (308). Further, he later tells Sucharita that unlike in Muslim and Christian societies, “there is no way of obtaining entrance into the Hindu Society [… which] is not one for all mankind — it is only for those whose destiny it is to be born Hindus” (355). In one of his moments of lucidity during his second trip to the rural areas, Gora sees clearly the “cruel and evil results” of the “traditional customs” of Hindu society which he so forcefully defends while amongst the English-educated elite in Kolkata. Plagued by the plethora of dehumanizing “prohibitions” and “penalties” of a divisive society, the village folk are unaware of their own “welfare”. Encountering this stark reality, Gora finds it impossible to “delude himself” with any vague idealism (367–68). Tagore thus dialogizes opposing views of Hindu identity in the novel, revealing his own ambivalence and conflicting positions on that score.
However, as the Marxist critic Serajul Islam Chowdhury has observed, due to its commitment to social realism, the novel does not truly accommodate the farmers and the Muslims. For all his sympathy for the village farmers, Gora remains an outsider to them. Drawing upon Pratap Narayan Biswas’s argument, Chowdhury further opines that Paresh Babu and Sucharita would not accept Gora so easily if he had been born of Muslim, rather than ruling-class Christian, parents (1989: 69, 73–74). Following on from that, Mohammad Azam maintains that “Gora’s being Muslim is out of the question”, because the middle- and upper-class Bengalis of that time did not consider Hindu–Muslim unity as a major issue. They were rather invested in the question of union with the West. Gora’s proposal for unity, Azam concludes, is not revolutionary (2011: 488; translation mine). Of course, Tagore does not propose any socialist revolution. Both Chowdhury and Azam rightly recognize that the unity Tagore envisions in Gora is of a spiritual (and hence probably impracticable or non-utilitarian) nature. That said, they do not take into consideration the fact that the novel significantly pushes the frontiers of its (and its author’s) class, caste, and religious affiliations, although perhaps without fully crossing them.
It is true that most of the taboo-breaking, subversive actions of the novel’s middle-class characters are made possible by dint of their class privilege. Yet we are also shown a picture of transgression in the family of a lower-class/caste farmer in a crucial episode that brings together the issues of class, caste, religion, and colonialism. In his first tour around rural Bengal, Gora and his companion Ramapati come to the Muslim village Ghosepara where they face the challenge of taking food at the house of a low-caste Hindu barber, the only Hindu household in the village. What exacerbates the case for the orthodox Brahmins Gora and Ramapati is the fact that the wife of the barber has temporarily sheltered the son of the rebellious Muslim farmer Faru Sardar who stood for his fellow farmers against the indigo planters’ oppression. This left Faru incarcerated and subjected his family to extreme poverty. In these circumstances, the Hindu barber’s wife felt compelled to take home Faru’s starving son Tamiz (133–34). Even after hearing this, Ramapati remains adamant about not taking food at the house of this Hindu “transgressor” and prefers the hospitality of Madhav Chatterjee, the Brahmin rent collector of the Indigo Factory. Gora, on the other hand, cannot bring himself to refuse the hospitality of the good-souled barber in order to “preserve his caste”. Torn between the binding demand of Hindu customs and the dictates of his superior moral sense, Gora, in another lucid moment, realizes the “terrible wrong” of “making purity an external thing” (135–36). He also braves imprisonment by defending the case of these villagers and, moreover, refuses to pay his bail by utilizing his class privilege. Pressed by his lawyer friend, he says that he wants, like any common villager, to suffer the full brunt of a corrupt legal policy (144–45). Such actions of empathy across divisive social lines of class, caste, and religion are central to Tagore’s vision of unity.
In a slightly different but relevant context in “Atmaparichaya”, Tagore broaches the question of Hindu–Muslim unity with reference to some members of the Brahmo Samaj who think that identifying themselves as Hindus would mean a denial of their connection with Muslims. He argues on the contrary that by denying one’s Hindu identity, one does not resolve the Hindu–Muslim problem but merely evades it. Instead of doing so, he seems to suggest, it is wiser to acknowledge one’s socio-cultural identity and reach out to one’s communal others with gestures of empathy and genuine kindness. In order to clarify his argument, Tagore then compares the Hindu–Muslim animosity to the rivalry between the English and the Irish, arguing in favour of a compassionate relationship between these adversarial groups (1912/1913/2011: 593–94). Although somewhat odd, the above analogy reveals Tagore’s awareness of the problematics of self-positioning in the complex cultural politics of the colonial condition. The fact that he identifies, on behalf of the educated middle-class Hindus or Hindu–Brahmos, with the English in the English–Irish conflict expresses his class/communal guilt apropos of discrimination against the Muslim community. The comparison also implies the relativity of power and dominance. In an imperial context, the Indian parallel the Irish because of their shared colonized status. By making Gora Irish by birth, Tagore underscores that parallelism. He was nonetheless aware that in the context of the internal conflict between the Hindus and the Muslims in India, it is the Hindus that get the privileged upper hand, thereby inviting analogy with the English.
Written in 1915, though significantly set in the time of the Swadeshi, Tagore’s novel The Home and the World deals with the Hindu–Muslim question in a more straightforward fashion than does Gora or “Atmaparichaya”. A landlord by inheritance, the protagonist of the 1915 novel Nikhil seems to voice Tagore’s ideas and attitudes, particularly in his views against the militant, elitist, and proto-Hinduist Swadeshi nationalism promoted by his college friend Sandip. When such nationalism dangerously exacerbates the relationship between the Hindus and the Muslims on his estate, Nikhil counsels the leading members of Hindu society against providing any further incentive to a seemingly impending riot. Told by an English-educated Hindu tenant that the Muslim farmers are being agitated by some external militant group, Nikhil retorts by asking: “Why is it possible […] to use the Mussulmans [sic] thus, as tools against us? Is it not because we have fashioned them into such with our own intolerance? […] Our accumulated sins are being visited on our own heads” (1915/2005: 162). This poignant sense of shared guilt on behalf of the privileged Hindu community seems to be that of Tagore as well. In “The Dishonoured” (1910), a poem he wrote around the same time as Gora, the speaker similarly accuses his “unhappy land” of having dishonoured man and god alike, by its discriminatory social principles: “A hundred centuries’ shame upon your head, | The God of Man you never reverenced yet”. The poem ends on a note of grim warning that India is sowing the seed of her own death by casting such insults upon her people. The “dishonoured” in this poem might refer to both the lower-class Muslims and the lower-class/caste Hindus who were often deemed untouchable: “When you staved off the touch of man each day | The god of human life you turned away” (1910/2004: 203–04). It is significant that the land of the speaker is “unhappy” not because of any external force, but because of internal tyranny and disunity.
These examples demonstrate Tagore’s sincere consideration of the question of Hindu–Muslim unity and the possibility of some empathic connection across class or caste strata. In fact, in “Atmaparichaya”, he finds it “not only not difficult, but rather easy to imagine a Hindu family where a Christian, a Muslim, and a Vaishnav brother live together sharing the affection of their common parents” (1912/1913/2011: 599; translation mine). This model “Hindu family” acts as a microcosm for an ideal Hindu society, jati, or civilization. The idealistic harmony here is notably reliant on the power of parental love which, in Gora, is represented by Anandamoyi’s love for Gora and Binoy as well as that of Ramapati’s wife for Tamiz. It is the inner spiritual or affective quality of the host parents, not the religious or racial identities of the adoptee and the guest, that carries the thrust of Tagore’s unitary cultural vision. One might nevertheless maintain (along the lines of Paresh Babu’s argument in the novel discussed earlier) that what is “easy to imagine” idealistically in an essay is not so easy to realize in life or, for that matter, in a novel of the social–realist mode. Perhaps that is why in Gora the more sensitive Hindu–Muslim unity materializes in a Hindu barber family, which sits very low in the class/caste ladder. Although the novel does not depict any substantial disruption of the social status quo, it imaginatively pushes the divisive boundaries by making some transgressive gestures.
The themes of freedom and bondage, of being both inside and outside of a geographical, socio-cultural, or imaginative space, are suggested in the beginning of the novel by the song of an itinerant “Bāul mendicant”:
Into the cage flies the unknown bird, It comes I know not whence. Powerless [is] my mind to chain its feet, It goes I know not where. (1)
The lyric employs the contrast between “the cage” and the freely moving “unknown bird” which foreshadows the novel’s meditation on the problem of societal fixity versus individual freedom. Moreover, the song, like many others in the Baul tradition, symbolically alludes to the mysterious ways of the Self that at once inhabits and transcends the body. Suggesting a dual identity that is both local and universal, this might further indicate the flexibility or fluidity of the concept of “jati” or “nation” in the context of Bharatbarsha or greater India. Not only his song, but the Baul himself would be symbolically resonant for Tagore. The Baul community consists mostly of people from the lower levels of Hindu and Muslim societies and follows “the sahaj [simple] cult” of a “living religious experience” (Sen, 1931/2000: 117–18, 122). Occupying a liminal space, Bauls were important to Tagore, among other things, for their mobility across religious, caste, and sectarian divisions. In a 1928 introductory essay he wrote for a collection of Baul songs, Tagore argues that, belonging to both the Hindus and the Muslims, Baul literature epitomizes an ideal union of these communities. Not motivated by any external necessity, he points out, such a union is realized in the profound truth of people’s hearts: “The civilization of India finds its true meaning in this union, not in the savagery of enmity and strife” (1928/2004: 313; translation mine). Although written at a later date, this notion of affective harmony of people of diverse backgrounds captures the essence of Tagore’s view of Indian civilization in the first decade of the twentieth century.
It is on such an imaginative and spiritually liberating vision of unity that the resolution of Gora rests. In order to stop Gora from going ahead with his “penance ceremony” which is meant for making him more purely Hindu than he already is, Krishnadayal discloses the real identity of his adopted son (389, 402). After the initial shock of that revelation is over, Gora feels himself free and exclaims with a terrible joy: “Today I am really an Indian! In me there is no longer any opposition between Hindu, Mussulman [sic], and Christian”. Begging to be a disciple of Paresh Babu, who “has no place in any society”, and hence is not bound by their strictures, Gora asks the wise man to “give [him] the mantram of that Deity […] who is not merely the God of the Hindus, but who is the God of India herself!” (407). In the epilogue, Gora returns home to Anandamoyi and equates her with Bharatabarsha: “You have no caste, you make no [discriminations], and have no hatred — you are only the image of our welfare! It is you who are India!” (407). In all these cases, Tagore uses the word “Bharatbarsha” for “India” in the original. We have seen how in his essays around that time (written between 1901 and 1912/13), Tagore employs the term “Hindu” not in its narrow sense of a religion or faith system, but in its bigger sense of the ultimate outcome of Bharatbarsha’s evolution as a jati. Hindu or Bharatbarshiya Samaj provided him with an accommodative platform on which the differences among the many religious, sectarian, or racial identities could be transcended. Therefore, at the end of the novel, Gora does not simply grow “out of Hindutva into Bharatbarshiyatva [a greater Indian identity]”, as Prashanta Kumar Paul has maintained (1993: 91; translation mine). Rather, by finally escaping the clutches of sectarian Hindutva as well as those of a communalist Hindu nationalism, Gora becomes Hindu in a truer sense — in the sense of being “really an Indian” or “Bharatbarshiya”. What is more, rather than being restrictive, this Hindu or Bharatbarshiya identity is a liminal identity between or belonging to the national and the universal. As Tagore writes in a 1911 letter, “the abiding purpose, the undying truth in [India …] is national, as well as universal” (qtd. in Paul, 1993: 287). Like the word “national”, he would have meant the word “universal” in a non-Western, non-coercive, or non-imperialist sense. As Pandit argues, unlike “[t]he imperialistic notion of universalism [… which] is nonempathic, fixed, and hegemonic”, “Tagore’s universalism refers to a moral/intellectual/emotional discipline based on the principle of empathy” (1995: 207). Against all odds, it is an empathic and non-hegemonic national–universal identity that Tagore imaginatively wills into existence for India in Gora.
