Yogendra Yadav circulates his thoughtful and occasionally insightful articles to a number of people for opinion.I am on the mailing list.Since the latest article is likely to elicit from me a longish response I thought I should use this platform for an elaborate response for whatever it is worth.
Sri Yadav looks back on the pre-independence period to draw our attention to the rich and varied spectrum of original creative thought during it,ranging from Sri Aurobindo to M.N.Roy.He then goes on to lament the singular lack of such thinking in the decades after independence.
One reason might be that this period had been devoted to trying out the ideas of those pioneers.Since almost all of them have fallen short,we are jolted back to the urgency of such want.
Further, we are barred from access to possibly serious enquiries and thoughts expressed in various vernaculars like Bengali, Maharashtra and Malayalam by language difficulties.
Besides,it seems that such thinking during years before independence worked largely within the magnetic field of Western political heritage,even when in outright rebellion against it.The focus was on the state as the regulator of public affairs and the repository of the liberties of the people.Or there was a counter to the state-centred secular orientation with civilisational and idealistic(‘spiritual’) emphasis.
I would like to counterpose to this general trend someone like Tagore,who put himself outside that dialectic with a positive affirmation of an altogether different kind.Tagore’s highly original and questioning position on such political obsessions are little known as they are largely in Bengali.What surprises one is its distance from the airy-fairy mysticism people are accustomed to associate with him.He turns out to have had an eminently practical and this-worldly outlook.He forces us to turn our gaze away from the state to society,particularly the rural society with all its accumulated decadence but still pulsating with a life far less alienated from people as such than the state.Colonial servitude might have revealed to him in blatant form that alienation.But the point is that he based his political thought on this vital perception.
Nationalism entered Indian thought through the English language and political ideas.It had basically a bourgeois origin.And the English bourgeoisie has found in colonialism a mode of exploitation relatively light in cost. Jose Marti,the great visionary who had and propagated a view of Hispanic America’s culture as rooted more in indigenous American history and culture than in colonial Spain shared some of Tagore’s ideas though both were strangers to each other.
One is surprised by Tagore’s shrewd practical sense and keen observation of Indian folk life, i.e. rural life.Literary critics imprisoned by purely literary concerns have been unaware of the part his life on a boat on the Padma wherefrom he discharged his zemidari duties and gathered the fund of rich experience of Bengali rural life,played in his life.
He could share the simple but profound feelings of Bengali rural folks without patronage,unlike his father the noble Vedantic sage Debendranath who enjoyed the mystic bliss of communion with the Divine while his troops of lathi-wielding strong-arm men kept the discontented tenant peasants in line.
Unlike someone like say Sri Aurobindo,who drew his poltical speculations from scriptures, Tagore based his views on close observation of rural social life and self-government.He conjectured that the colonial administration’s penetration into the rural public life had asphyxiated it and disempowered rural society.Its decayed relics could be seen in surviving control over customary social rules. Even such elementary public matters as keeping pond water clear and reasonably fresh and roads in a passable condition had been taken over by the government,which thanks to its exploitative colonial nature left village life barely alive and merely a source of land revenue.
Tagore thought that traditional Indian politics,or the biggest part of it is to be found in rural society.And it is basically bottom up not top down.Hence the state was a remote entity concerned with wars, conquests , treaties,grants to temples and mosques or seminaries and so on.Of course it also fixed rates of land revenue which were tough though flexible.If the village found the rates exorbitant and the state unresponsive to their pleas the entire village voted against it by ‘voting with their feet’,to use Lenin’s witty phrase,by decamping to a more benign kingdom.
The Western state as we know it had Roman trappings added later to it.But it was the creation largely of the rising bourgeois class,and its growth was organically linked to their history.When they hankered after freedom from feudal plurality of governing power and multiplicity of rules,customs and taxes or dues,they theorized the state as a Leviathan where all power including that of laying down laws, levying taxes and extracting dues was uniformly vested.When they became more confident they seized that power from the king by deposing him or severely limiting his own power.Having arisen in towns(bourgeois is etymologically related to burghs and boroughs,i.e.towns and townsmen).The foundations of the state were in towns where new capitalist industry and commerce were concentrated. First they successfully wrestled from the king their charters of freedom,and then after seizing power extended it to towns.Personal liberty became a cornerstone of that freedom. Villages remained for long a marginal concern and in time a serious problem until Napoleon during the radical phase of his career gave villagers property-rights in land and built out of radicalized peasantry a victorious army fired by the idea of spreading liberty and welcomed with open arms by oppressed villagers of feudal kingdoms initially.
The challenge of rejuvenating Indan rural life was that shorn of its central political power and role village society sank into the morass of a reactionary caste tyranny and social stagnation.It is an exaggeration to think that Indian villages had always been impervious to change. Kshitimohan Sen,Tagore’s close friend and associate knew that well enough,as his studies in medieval spiritual thought down to the eighteenth century indicates.
Tagore!’s idea of a universal spirit took the form of exceptionally broad sympathy for the widest cross-sections of the people.Those were fragments of a divine whole.He was also a forceful advocate of international understanding and intercourse. His ViisvaBharati was his own contribution to the promotion of this cause.
This end was to be achieved through peaceful resolution of conflicts on the basis of justice and equality.At the same time he was a passionate patriot and outstanding critic of the abomination that is colonialism.
In his scheme of things both colonialism and fascism were offshoots of nationalism.He was one of the earliest sustained and consistent critics of nationalism.He thought the very idea of aggrandizing one’s own nation at the expense of others was an evil as such.It was a characteristically Westen ideal inimical to world peace and harmony.
Is such thinking utopian?Perhaps not.Mao-tse Tung has thought that by empowering the peasantry with progressive ideas and a co-operative mode of production and distribution he could by a giant leap forward arrive at a desirable goal for humanity.The Communes in China—-some of them— had functioned well and delivered results.But regrettably his impatience outleapt his good sense and by ramming the idea down the throat of unprepared and unwilling peasants in countless villages the seminal idea leapt to a resounding crash.If instead he had allowed progressive villages to co-exist with stagnant villages ,and helped promote the enterprise of progressive ones he could have arguably fulfilled his dreams.
Yogendra Yadav had himself seen and led a massive peasant movement outgrowing rotten feudal ideas and gaining more enlightenment,confidence and power with time.I think he could have gained a lesson there
Hiren Gohain is a political commentator
