“The Universalist Aspirations of Nationalist Dissent: Lessons from the Debates Between Gandhi and Tagore,” in Tamara Caraus and Camil Alexandru Parvu (eds.), Cosmopolitanism and

Part II

Cosmopolitanism and the Legacy of Civil Disobedience

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5 The Universalist Aspirations of Nationalist Dissent Lessons from the Debates between Gandhi and Tagore

Farah Godrej

This essay takes as its point of departure a certain kind of tension between the universal aspirations of Enlightenment thought and the particular aspi-rations to sovereignty embedded in nationalist movements. The Indian political thinker Partha Chatterjee has characterized the dilemma of nation-alist thought as follows: nationalism sets out to assert its freedom from European domination, but in the very conception of its project, remains a prisoner of the prevalent European intellectual fashions. 1 That is, nationalist movements are often motivated by the very same universal presumptions about human nature and political rule—Enlightenment views of rationality and historical progress, liberal conceptions of sovereignty and autonomy—produced within the West, and said to be the product of the very ‘alien’ rule they are attempting to repudiate. Nationalism, Chatterjee claims, denies the alleged inferiority of the colonized people, but in so doing, often produces a discourse which, even as it challenges the colonial claim to political domi-nation, also accepts the very intellectual premises on which this domination was based. 2

This essay uses the historical moment of the Indian struggle for inde-pendence—and more specifi cally, a particular set of debates within that struggle—to shed light on this problem. In particular, I will focus on M.K. Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, two key fi gures of twentieth cen-tury Indian political thought, and leading voices within India’s national-ist struggle. Both are nationalist fi gures who, in different ways, disavow the very political project of nationalism and wish to assert an alternative vision predicated on universal values accessible to all of humanity. Precisely because they recognize the dilemma that Chatterjee explicates, they each provide—in different ways—a far more complex understanding of the rela-tionship between universal values and on the one hand, and the sovereignty of peoples and other particularistic attachments motivating nationalist dis-sent on the other.

However, this point is often neglected or not fully understood: in con-ventional interpretations of their debates, Tagore is often thought to be a strident critic of Gandhi’s form of nationalist dissent, while Gandhi is seen


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as a nationalist thinker who wants to insist on the power of the “indige-nous.” Gandhi and Tagore are often cast as antagonists: Tagore as a uni-versalist or cosmopolitan humanist troubled by the particular attachments undergirding nationalist dissent, Gandhi as the nationalist whose goal is simply to repudiate the universal categories of Western modernity, and replace them with indigenous ones. This starkly dichotomous interpretation would seem particularly persuasive if one were to read only the letters and exchanges between the two, as they appear in the most authoritative edition of these debates. 3 In these exchanges, we see Tagore’s strenuous disagree-ment with Gandhi on the question of the swadeshi movement, the boycott and burning of foreign cloth, which occurred during the fi rst half of the twentieth century. We see Tagore expressing deep concern about what he terms the destructiveness of Gandhi’s nonviolent political strategy, casting it as anti-cosmopolitan and provincial, and insisting that it is tied to a form of nationalism which is itself a Western import. Tagore equates the politics of the swadeshi movement with a nationalism which he calls a “form of idol-atry,” a blind worshipping of one’s own nations and conventions, ignoring the interconnectedness of humanity. For Tagore the recognition of our com-mon humanity requires a renunciation of what he calls the “destruction” of Gandhi’s disruptive politics.

It would therefore be easy to conclude, if one were to read only the text of their letters and public exchanges, that at stake in this disagreement is the narrowly defi ned dichotomy of nationalist patriotism against universal or cosmopolitan values. In the rejoinders he writes to Tagore in the texts of these debates, Gandhi does not provide much to rebut this conception of the disagreement. But my essay will demonstrate that situating this dis-agreement within a wider and more detailed reading of the works of both thinkers will provide us the resources to interpret Gandhi’s thought as sym-pathetic and complementary to Tagore’s universalist, cosmopolitan goals. Meanwhile, it will also show that the precise source of their disagreement does not occur along the spectrum of universalism (or cosmopolitanism) versus nationalism; rather, it pertains to the alternative visions of univer-salism that they each offer as the antidote to the universalizing categories of Western Enlightenment thought and modernity. In so doing, their debate contributes important insights to the question of whether—and how—the dissent expressed in nationalist movements either repudiates or exemplifi es universal philosophical claims.

The essay begins, therefore, with an exploration of Tagore’s critique of nationalism, and his elaboration of a uniquely Indic, universalist alternative. I then move to exegeting Tagore’s critique of the swadeshi movement in his exchanges with Gandhi, demonstrating that there are three main elements to this critique. In each case, I will show how Tagore’s characterization of Gandhi rests on an unfortunate misunderstanding of Gandhi’s position, a misreading which elides the extent to which Gandhi is engaged in the same endeavour as Tagore himself: articulating an alternative universalism


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emerging from Indic rather than Western categories. My treatment of the two thinkers will also demonstrate that the source of their disagreement lies in a very different location from where it is often thought to originate. What distinguishes Gandhi from Tagore is that he offers a conception of univer-salism that is both ethical and political in nature, rather than simply phil-osophical and dialogical. This alternative is not only compatible with the particularities of nationalist dissent, it in fact requires instantiation through such dissent, which serves to articulate its universal ethical and political foundations.

TAGORE’S UNIVERSALISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF NATIONALISM

In Tagore’s essay Nationalism we fi nd a critique centred around a rejection of the “fi erce self-idolatry of nation worship.” 4 Tagore claims here that the very concepts of nation and nationalism are damaging imports of Western modernity, presenting a corrupting, dehumanizing infl uence. Thinking in terms of the Nation was alien to India’s own history, and Tagore is insistent that there is great danger involved in equating the concept of a people or a society with their Nation. 5

To be clear, when Tagore critiques nationalism, he refers not merely to the fi erce love of one’s own nation, but a whole way of thinking that is orga-nized by the modern Western concept of the nation. Rule by the nation, Tag-ore says, is rule by a huge, soulless, monotonous organization that denies all that is spiritual and ethical in man. It becomes preoccupied instead with the effi ciency and compartmentalization of modern life, having no identifi cation with the souls and lives of those it represents. Government by a nation, which is ostensibly the organized self-interest of a whole people, is the “least human and the least spiritual.” 6

[The nation is] an octopus of abstractions, sending out its wriggling arms in all directions . . . punishments are meted out, leaving a trail of miseries across a large bleeding tract of the human heart; but these punishments are dealt by a mere abstract force, in which a whole popu-lation of a distant country has lost its human personality. 7

The more we progress toward modernity and Western civilization, becoming subject to the soulless bureaucracy and effi cient control mechanisms which administer the nation-state, the more we lose our sense of humanity. Indeed, this is especially true because it fosters the selfi sh, egoistic and competitive pursuit of power through confl ict: “The spirit of confl ict and conquest is at the heart of Western nationalism. . . . It is like the pack of predatory creatures . . . this civilization is the civilization of power.” 8 Nationalism, he claims, pits people against one another in the pursuit of power, through


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wars and the “endless bull-fi ght of politics.” 9 Thus, it gradually organizes people into larger and larger commercial and political wholes, as “they become riveted into one organized gregariousness of gluttony, commercial and political.” 10

This same nationalist imperative takes man away from his natural social instincts, dehumanizing him into an unthinking automaton who starts to pursue his own interests at the expense of others.

When we are fully human, we cannot fl y at one another’s throats; our instincts of social life, our traditions of moral ideals stand in the way . . . take away man from his natural surroundings, from the full-ness of his communal life, with all its living associations of beauty and love and social obligations, and you will be able to turn him into so many fragments of a machine for the production of wealth on a gigantic scale. 11

For this reason, Tagore insists, “The Nation has thriven long upon muti-lated humanity. Men, the fairest creations of God, came out of the National manufactory in huge numbers as war-making and money-making pup-pets.” 12 There is thus something morally corrupting about the Nation on Tagore’s view, for “it will never heed the voice of truth and goodness.” 13 It causes people to close in on themselves, to “cultivate moral blindness as the cult of patriotism” 14 by promoting hatred among races and nations, and “holding up gigantic selfi shness as the one universal religion for all nations of the world.” 15

It should be noted here that Tagore’s critique of nationalism is not to be read as equivalent to a cultural critique of the Western world. 16 It is rather a spiritual critique of the modern way of organizing social and political life. This is a crucial point, as I will later demonstrate. Tagore does not hesitate to point out what he believes are the moral high points of Western civili-zation, and its “spirit.” In fact, the paradox for Tagore is that “while the spirit of the West marches under its banner of freedom, the Nation of the West forges its iron chains of organization which are relentless and unbreak-able.” 17 Nationalism is not meant a lecture about the cultural superiority of non-Western civilizations or the immorality of colonialism; rather, Tagore is holding a mirror up to Western civilization, pointing out what has been lost when the West has turned its back on its own conscience.

As the antidote to the advancement of modern nationalist ideology, Tag-ore articulates a spiritually grounded view of the deeply interconnected nature of humanity. In this, he is clearly infl uenced by ancient Upanishadic and Vedic texts, in which the ultimate reality of a supreme power not only sustains and regulates the universe, but is also manifest within every partic-ular entity. As Kalyan Sen Gupta notes, Tagore thus took as foundational the Upanishadic insight that “each of us is an expression of the Universal Soul . . . the same infi nite is equally present in all of us, [and] we ourselves


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are at bottom identical with each other.” 18 Thus, Sen Gupta claims, Tagore holds the fi rm conviction that “a person is not a discrete, isolated being, and many only realize his or her true nature through identifi cation with the whole universe.” 19 This “insistent universalism,” the Tagore scholar Michael Collins tells us, is the crux of Tagore’s critique of the modern nation. 20 In dividing humankind, the cult of the nation-state and sovereignty, with their “territorialized, bounded divisions” 21 contradicted the truth of the oneness and deep interconnectedness of humanity.

In contrast to this divisiveness and hatred, Tagore “felt . . . the time was right for a new chapter of world history to unfold in which the East and West would meet at the level of culture and ideas.” 22 It was precisely these convictions which led him to travel to the West in 1912, a journey that had as its mission a “meeting of minds” across cultures which would lead away from the blind alley of nationalism. 23 Collins tells us that Tagore felt that empire had brought different cultures and races into intimate contact, but not under benefi cent terms. The trajectory of man was towards greater har-mony, and it was incumbent upon intellectuals and cultural fi gures to carry out this urgent work. Thus, Tagore sets off for London, seeking cultural and intellectual exchange with Britain’s literary elite. Collins calls this a “novel response to colonialism,” which rested upon the possibility of a “new dawn in the relations between man and man,” 24 to be fostered by “engaging in creative dialogue with the cultural elite of the colonial power.” 25

TAGORE’S CRITIQUE—AND MISREADING—OF GANDHI

I turn now to Tagore’s fi erce disagreement with Gandhi on the questions of swadeshi , non-cooperation, and the boycott and burning of British cloth. From about 1914 onwards, the two men began a friendship that lasted almost the course of a half-century, until Tagore’s death in 1941. As is well known, each was responsible for coining the moniker by which the other was later known—“Mahatma” and “Gurudev.” A deep mutual respect and admiration was the basis of the friendship, but despite their shared opposition to the colonial regime, Tagore and Gandhi disagreed publicly and vociferously over the precise shape of the anticolonial movement. In a series of letters, articles and other forms of public exchange, the two fi ercely debated and aired their differences on the non-cooperation and swadeshi movement of 1919–1922. Gandhi led a mass non-cooperation movement based on the boycott of foreign products, particularly textiles, the burning of British cloth, the preferred use of indigenous products, the spinning of one’s own cloth, and the boycott of government schools. On all of these matters, Tagore publicly criticized the nationalist movement, insisting that it exemplifi ed the most troubling characteristics of nationalist ideology. But I want to argue that Tagore fundamentally misreads Gandhi’s leadership of the swadeshi and non-cooperation movement and boycott as antithetical to,


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rather than complementary with, the notion of an alternative universalism he espouses. In his remarks on these movements, he misreads Gandhi as a nationalist thinker in the wrong sense, unable to see the deep universalism that underlies them, just as it does the rest of Gandhi’s thought.

NON-COOPERATION WITH WHAT?

Some of Tagore’s most vocal and public opposition to the non-cooperation movement can be seen in a letter he writes to C.F. Andrews, published in the Calcutta journal Modern Review in May of 1921. In it, he characterizes the non-cooperation movement as motivated by the “joy of annihilation.” 26 “I believe in the true meeting of East and West,” he complains. “The idea of non-cooperation unnecessarily hurts that truth . . . no one people can work out its salvation by detaching itself from the others . . . either we shall be saved together or drawn together in destruction.” 27 “Let India stand for the cooperation of all peoples of the world,” Tagore pleads, clearly convinced that Gandhi’s leadership of the movement leads in an antithetical direction. “Our present struggle to alienate our heart and mind from those of the West is an attempt at spiritual suicide.” 28

In these passages, Tagore indicates that he sees the swadeshi , boycott and non-cooperation elements of the nationalist movement as indicative precisely of the divisiveness of humanity exemplifi ed by the Western under-standing of nationalism. To the extent that Gandhi’s leadership of these movements is centred around encouraging the boycott and burning of Brit-ish cloth, it appears to Tagore to be symptomatic of the “loud ringing cry of rejection” against the West, something which Tagore feels deeply hurt by. 29 In fact, the very term swadeshi further exacerbates Tagore’s frustration, for it stems from the Sanskrit root swa - meaning self, and desh , meaning country. Thus, the term swadeshi , when adopted as part of Congress-led nationalist agitation, came to mean “indigenous,” or “belonging to one’s own country”; the boycott, burning and rejection of British goods along with the concomitant spinning of homespun ( khadi ) advocated by Gandhi came to symbolize the self-reliance on indigenous material and labour, and indeed, the sovereign rule over the collective Indian self. In contrast to this burning and rejection, Tagore suggests we “rejoice at any lamp being lit at any corner of the world, knowing that it is a part of the common illumina-tion of our house.” 30 Using art as his example, he insists,“I always try to understand the Western art and never to hate it . . . I should feel proud of my humanity when I can acknowledge the poets and artists of other countries as mine own.” 31 To deny the value and fertility of such cross-cultural intel-lectual exchange, Tagore charges, is the “worst form of provincialism.” 32 Later, Tagore shores up his critique when he complains in a long rejoinder to Gandhi in the Modern Review in mid-1921:“Your main motive is hatred of the foreigner, not love of country.” 33



These passages indicate, as Collins tells us, that Tagore’s resistance to colonial rule was “not to take the form of noncooperation but of active engagement.” 34 In contrast to the boycott and non-cooperation of the nationalist movement, Tagore insisted the effort of Indians should be to “communicate a set of intellectual and cultural positions emanating from India’s religious and philosophical traditions,” 35 thus fostering a “two-way fl ow of intellectual and cultural infl uence.” 36 Tagore was insistent that freedom was not to be understood as a “negative quality,” for it was con-cerned with interdependence rather than independence. 37 Attaining freedom requires the “perfection of human relationships” based on the recognition of “implied obligation to others,” rather than “dissociat[ing] oneself from others” through individualism. 38 It is this freedom, based on perfect inter-dependence, which allows us to “cultivate mutual understanding and coop-eration.” 39 Despite his deep personal respect for Gandhi’s towering moral leadership, Tagore saw Gandhi’s non-cooperation, boycott and swadeshi movements as inimical to this central insight about the mutual connected-ness, interdependence and cooperation of humanity.

But in a rejoinder to Tagore, we see Gandhi insist: “Our Non-cooperation is neither with the English nor with the West. It is with the system the English have established, the material civilization and its attendant greed and exploitation of the weak.” 40 There is something quite striking about the above statement. It reminds us that Gandhi has hit upon something that Tagore appears to have missed entirely: the systemic, global nature of certain forms of injustice. Gandhi is reminding Tagore here that it is not the specifi c regime of colonial power in place within India that is the target of the dissent of the nationalist movement. That is, it is not simply cosmo-politan or universal values about the equality of all human beings which can have global currency; forms of injustice such as empire, industry, mod-ern technologies and global commerce, and other attendant pieces of what Gandhi calls “Western civilization” had already gained a global, systemic ability to oppress unjustly and degrade the human condition.

This is a terribly prescient point, and one that contemporary advocates of cosmopolitan thinking might do well to recognize. Unjust systems and forms of life can have a global, perhaps even cosmopolitan character, in that they care not for the particularities of the specifi c peoples or nations which serve as the target of their hegemony, for they transcend place and nation. Of course, this sounds rather self-evident to us now, but Gandhi was par-ticularly prophetic to have suggested this in his seminal 1909 treatise, Hind Swaraj . As is well known, in this treatise, Gandhi had fi ercely criticized modern civilization for a variety of reasons: the elevation of the pursuit of bodily welfare and material wealth over moral and spiritual concerns; the increase in indulgences available to mankind; the proliferation of machin-ery, modern technology and mass production, all of which restricted the human capacity for manual labour, artifi cially increased human needs and enslaved human beings to one another and to the control of the producer;


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the destruction of the simplicity and self-suffi ciency of human life. 41 As I have argued elsewhere, for Gandhi, modern industrial civilization

enables and re-inscribes forms of social and economic organization in which we are lazy, physically atrophied, overly dependent on others for the sustenance of our proliferating needs and desires, and thus vulnera-ble to exploitation by those who control our material well-being. 42

But what is worth noting is that as he describes the ills of modern civili-zation, Gandhi clearly asserts: “It should never be forgotten that the English people are affl icted by [the disease of modern civilisation] . . . I believe that they will cast off the evil . . . their mode of thought is not inherently immoral.” 43 Thus, while the “condition of England at present is piti-able” 44 . . . . “It is not due to any peculiar fault of the English people, but the condition is due to modern civilization. . . . Under it the nations of Europe are becoming degraded and ruined day by day.” 45 In his authoritative trans-lation of Hind Swaraj , the Gandhi scholar Anthony Parel reminds us of the text’s intellectual debt to nineteenth-century European critiques of the new industrial civilization such as Tolstoy, Ruskin, Thoreau, and Carpenter. He insists crucially, therefore, that we correct the view that “the Mahatma was opposed to Western civilisation as such,” realizing instead that he “joins forces with many concerned Western thinkers in the defence of true civilisational values everywhere, East and West.” 46 Like Tagore, who was deeply infl uenced by the British romantic poets such as Yeats and Pound, and is sometimes said to have read the Orientalizing values of the romantics back into putatively Indian traditions, Gandhi’s retrieval of Indian spiritual insights owed much to his connections to internal (that is, Western) critics of the emerging industrial civilization: theosophists, vegetarians, naturopaths, advocates of simple living and a return to manual labour, and many other thinkers and movements ostensibly concerned with the rationalizing, alien-ating effects of the new materialist, utilitarian and mechanistic mode of life.

In any event, Gandhi therefore wants to insist that it is not simply British rule of India, or even the overall colonial project, which should be seen as the target of the movement he leads. Rather, it is a global and systemic form of injustice represented by the various constitutive pieces of modern civili-zation which oppress everyone, including the English colonizers themselves. That this civilization appears to have originated in the West is, for Gandhi, almost irrelevant. The English and other Western peoples are equally oppressed by the systems of empire, modern industry and global commerce that seek to spread their hegemony. But in so fi ercely criticizing the swadeshi and non-cooperation movements—and in seeing their aspiration as political freedom alone—Tagore misunderstands fundamentally what Gandhi is up to. He misses the extent to which Gandhi wants to target not only the Brit-ish, but rather to insist on a complete restructuring of human life and forms of social organization, not simply for Indians, but for all human beings and



societies everywhere. It is this misunderstanding that we see expressed so clearly when Tagore complains in a rejoinder to Gandhi: “Our unfortunate minds keep revolving round and round the British Government . . . our affi r-mations and denials alike are concerned with the foreigners.” 47

Tagore, like many others, understands swadeshi in the traditional terms of nationalism and political freedom for an independent people from the yoke of colonial rule. For Gandhi, these goals are almost beside the point, for as Anthony Parel reminds us, “colonialism was the fruit of modern civil-isation, and only when this truth was grasped could the colonial problem fi nd its ‘fi nal’ solution.” 48 The point rather was rather to awaken within Indians the self-discipline and self-mastery required to overcome and fi ght such injustice, and to ensure that such injustice is combated systemically not merely within India but everywhere. I will have more to say about the role of self-discipline and self-mastery in the following section, but I wish at this point to emphasize that one of Gandhi’s goals for the indepen-dence movement was that the British themselves realize how thoroughly their minds and worlds have been colonized by the pervasive categories of modernity. In other words, there is no one person, set of people, offi cials, or holders of power to whom Gandhi’s “truths” are addressed. Rather, they are addressed to all human beings everywhere, and the urgency of the plea is for everyone—including, and especially, those who appear to “do” the colonizing—to realize the extent to which modern forms of empire, indus-try, and technology oppress us all. Long before critiques of neo-liberal polit-ical economy became as intuitive as they now are, Gandhi was desperately trying to warn all of us—Indian and British, Hindu and Muslim, Western and non-Western—about the universal, global and dangerously hegemonic nature of the political, economic and cultural components of the modern project. Tagore, like many others who have characterized the swadeshi and non-cooperation movements solely as nationalist attempts at reinstating the political economic and political autonomy of a people, fundamentally mis-understands this.

This misunderstanding is all the more unfortunate given that Gandhi elsewhere underscores the very critiques about the modern nation-state that are evident in Tagore’s Nationalism : the dangers of allowing the state as understood by modern categories to overtake human life, its mechanistic soullessness and abstraction away from moral/spiritual matters, and so on. 49 But because Tagore misunderstands the target of Gandhi’s critiques, he is left mistakenly believing that Gandhi has capitulated to those very categories. That is, rather than “erecting barricades of fi erce separateness” as Tagore charges, 50 Gandhi’s boycott and non-cooperation movements seek to draw attention to precisely that aspect of universal humanity that is being elided by the forces of empire and global capital: the universal vulnerability of all human beings to the insidious ways in which power operates and oppresses universally within such a system. Michael Collins asserts that Tagore wishes to “appeal to Europe to rediscover aspects of its own self, thereby breaking


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free from the chains of nationalism and colonialism that enslaved Europe as much as they had enslaved the rest of the world.” 51 But I want to point out that if that is true, Tagore appears to miss the sense in which Gandhi is after the very same thing via the swadeshi movement, for he misreads the movement in seeing it as a repudiation—rather than a confi rmation—of that very insight.

DISRUPTION, DISSENT, AND DIALOGUE

A second striking point of disagreement between Gandhi and Tagore is the extent to which Tagore characterizes the boycott and burning of Brit-ish cloth, along with other aspects of the non-cooperation movement, as destructive and negative, characterized by anger, rejection and exclusion. “The idea of noncooperation with its mighty volume of sound does not sing to me, its congregated menace of negations shouts,” 52 Tagore com-plains. He characterizes the destructiveness of cloth burning as a form of “aggressive racial egoism” 53 and disharmony. Our chief business, Tagore complains, is the “compilations of others’ short-comings . . . [the] recital of others’ sins . . . harping on others’ faults . . . [are we to be content] pro-ceeding with the erosion of swaraj on a foundation of quarrelsomeness?” 54 Thus, “the West has misunderstood the East which is at the root of the disharmony that prevails . . . will it mend the matter if the East in her turn tries to misunderstand the West?” 55 At the height of the non-cooperation movement, Tagore still insisted that Gandhi’s “pugnacious spirit of resent-ment” was a “mere emptiness of negation.” 56 Gandhi’s form of nationalism seemed to Tagore to display precisely the antithesis of the dialogical mode of cross-cultural engagement and mutual understanding that Tagore him-self wished to cultivate: a dualistic, hate-based, unharmonious, narrow and exclusivist patriotism.

Yet Gandhi himself rejects this conclusion, noting with some frustration that Tagore has “come to the conclusion that Non-cooperation is . . . a doc-trine of negation and despair . . . of separation, exclusiveness, narrowness, and negation.” 57 It is worth examining why this impression of negativity and destruction is yet another misreading of Gandhi’s intent by Tagore. Indeed, a core component of the swadeshi movement rested on the insight that the hegemonic and insidious nature of global system of economic injustice could only be brought to light when its specifi c components were disrupted, that is, brought to a halt. It is well-known that the burning of British cloth was thus a symbolic action intended to highlight injustice while putting a halt to the mechanism that produced it. But Gandhi is clear that putting a halt to this mechanism requires that Indians recognize their own complicity in such injustice:

[We] have cooperated with [the big houses of Europe, America and Japan] in the bleeding process that has gone on for the past two hundred


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years. . . . I am living on the spoliation of my countrymen. . . . In burn-ing my foreign clothes I burn my shame. 58

Thus, the symbolism underlying the act was twofold: in burning foreign cloth and spinning their own, Indians were both expressing solidarity with the material disadvantage of the poor, while extricating themselves from the global web of injustice in which they had long participated. There was no better way to express this dual symbolism than the disruption and defi ance of the cloth-burning and boycotting strategy.

But what is crucial to note here is that the defi ance and disruption of the cloth-burning strategy are more than simply symbolic for Gandhi; they are an integral part of the moral commitment underlying the dissent against an unjust system, and they are meant to serve a discursive and dialogical purpose in engaging one’s adversaries on the question of these injustices. Let me examine both parts of this claim by revisiting an argument I have made elsewhere about the crucial connection between truth-seeking, discourse and warrior-like defi ance for Gandhi. First, disruption and defi ance, Gandhi insists, are crucial components of any morally centred dissent against injus-tice. The most fundamental human task for Gandhi is truth seeking, and the ethical commitment to ahimsa or non-violence—understood not simply as non-injury, but as complete absence of ill will toward all life—instantiates this commitment, through the continual search for truth in every aspect of daily life. 59 Crucially, however, Gandhi believed that truth seeking through non-violence was not meant to be passive or submissive, but rather activ-ist and warrior-like in its confrontations with injustice. Hence the political strategies of satyagraha , or nonviolent civil disobedience, resistance, and active non-cooperation in the form of strikes, fasts, sit-ins, and deliber-ate law-breaking, were all meant to express its literal meaning: “fi rmness in adherence to the truth.” It is for this reason that Gandhi claims that satyagraha in its ideal form is to be assertive, requiring “fi erce defi ance,” “bold action,” “disruptive challenge,” and “open protest.” 60 In fact, the very language of civil “disobedience” suggests that it “relies on disrupting the legal and conventional structures that uphold an existing social or polit-ical order.” 61 Such defi ance is “a weapon of the courageous truth-seeker,” precisely because it combats the injustices represented by this order. 62

Thus, disruption and defi ance serve as the declaration of a truth claim regarding the injustice of a particular political order. “In the very moment of defi ance, the satyagrahi declares her intention to subvert the truth claims that underlie her adversaries’ actions.” 63 But crucially, I have also argued that for Gandhi, such defi ant and disruptive behaviour must be accompanied by rigorous ascetic discipline indicating ethical self-mastery. An aggressive and warrior-like disposition toward political injustice, I show, rests on the foundations of austerity and self-sacrifi ce; for Gandhi, only those who have completed the requirements of disciplined austerity can fully engage in the sac-rifi ces and self-suffering required for satyagraha . Thus, all disruptive, defi ant political action must emerge from the ethical foundation of truth-seeking. 64


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Why precisely might this be so? One answer I provide in my own work is that satyagraha is not simply meant to be an act of political defi ance for Gandhi, it is also a discursive, dialogical one. Satyagraha , I argue, serves as a persuasive form of discourse about the strength of one’s beliefs; it demon-strates that one is willing to suffer physical pain in order to persuade others of one’s ethical position, indicates respect for the adversary as a truth-seeker, and also signifi es that the satyagrahi is willing to be persuaded. 65 Disruptive acts of disobedience must remain nonviolent so that in case our truth claim was mistaken, no one has suffered other than ourselves. In all of these ways, Gandhi wished for disruptive and defi ant political acts to serve as discur-sive messages, and thus to launch a dialogue involving moral persuasion—and hopefully conversion. But such confrontational persuasion, Gandhi believed, would only be made possible if Indian satyagrahis had undertaken the self-discipline required in order to arrive at these truth claims through a rigorously process of truth-seeking. 66 This is one reason why the disciplined process of self-mastery serves as the indispensable ethical foundation for any disruptive and defi ant political acts.

The intellectual historian Ananya Vajpeyi provides yet another reason for the indispensable foundation of ethical self-mastery in Gandhi’s thought. Recall that ahimsa , or non-violence, for Gandhi was to be understood not simply as non-injury, but as a total ethical system of virtue demonstrating complete absence of ill-will toward all life. Vajpeyi, in exegeting Gandhi’s interpretation of the Bhagavad-Gita , calls Gandhi’s ahimsa a“peaceable and empathic orientations of the self toward others.” 67 For Gandhi, she notes, “ ahimsa is the relationship between self and other that the Indian must master in order to be able to do battle against colonial rule.” 68 Whatever the confl ict at hand, what is crucial for Gandhi is that our will remain pure and untainted by the desire to do harm, and this pure will qualify our dealings with our adversaries. 69 Thus, the central message that Gandhi took from the Gita , Vajpeyi contends, is that even—or perhaps especially—while engaging in confl ict, one must work hard to free oneself of ill-will toward others. 70 To fearlessly “pick up arms in a courageous and conscientious manner” requires the cultivation of the “right mind”devoid of the desire to harm others. 71 It is the cultivation of this right mind toward which Gandhi himself strove endlessly, and called upon his compatriots to do so likewise. And it is precisely for this reason that the rigorous discipline of self-mastery is so cru-cial as the foundation of all political confl ict and exchange: “The training of the will such that a person—Everyman—is able to behave conscientiously, consciously and correctly in any challenging life situation: this is the Gita according to Gandhi.” 72

Thus, Gandhi’s claim is that swaraj —understood not simply as the self-rule of independence, but rather as self-discipline and training of the will—is the prerequisite for any political victory, including that of independence from colonial rule. It is well known that Gandhi reinterpreted swaraj to refer to both the collective political self-rule of a people, but also self-rule in the


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sense of mastery and purifi cation of the individual self. Thus, it is only when one achieves the individual ethical/spiritual self-discipline and self-mastery predicated on ahimsa that we can have anything resembling political self-rule for peoples. Moreover, if Vajpeyi’s interpretation, along with my own, are right, then the disruptiveness of boycotting and burning British cloth is not meant to express the negativity, destructiveness, narrow-mindedness or exclusivism that Tagore associates with “nation-worship.” Rather, it is meant to symbolize that Indians are working hard to achieve this spiritual self-mastery, but in crucial conjunction with the most universal assumptions embedded within ahimsa ; namely, the love for all beings, and the insistence on operating from this love, free of all ill-will and negativity and desire to harm. We burn British cloth, Gandhi suggests, not to demonstrate our anger, ill-will and negativity toward the British, but rather to insist on a dis-ruptive and warrior-like expression of our dissent against untruth. However, Gandhi insists that we must do so while demonstrating our self-mastery; hence, the insistence on the concomitant spinning of our own cloth, along with other ascetic forms of self-discipline embedded in satyagraha . These symbolically demonstrate our adherence to ahimsa , in its most universal form. That is, we must have as the basis of our disruptive action the same ethical self-mastery that requires us to be free of anger and ill-will toward other humans, while concomitantly fi ghting whatever injustice needs to be fought. Disruptiveness must be preceded and continually accompanied by ethical self-mastery, in order for its ethical claims to have any meaning or moral force.

That Gandhi wants Indians to burn cloth symbolizes precisely the fact that the target of dissent is a global, hegemonic system of unjust politics and commerce, rather than particular human beings. That he concomitantly wants them to spin and wear only the simple khadi they have spun them-selves symbolizes more than simply their commitment to indigenous produc-tion. It indicates their commitment to ethical self-mastery by demonstrating the rigorous, ascetic discipline that accompanies their acts of disruption. Thus, disruptive defi ance and practiced self-mastery must accompany each other in these acts of dissent, precisely so that dissenters can demonstrate their lack of ill-will and desire to harm. Gandhi demonstrates that there is an entirely new category of political action that can exemplify ethical self- mastery: confrontation free of ill-will, provocation free of anger, disruption free of the desire to harm. The state of mind that exemplifi es ahimsa and allows the satyagrahi to act from the pure place of moral commitment is one in which we battle the anger, ill-will and hatred that underlies all forms of unjust power, and which all of us must struggle to destroy within ourselves.

In interpreting the boycott and burning of cloth simply as the aggressive moves of a nationalist project intent on gaining formal political indepen-dence and establishing indigenous forms of political economy, Tagore once again misunderstands entirely the point and purpose of Gandhi’s attempt at re-situating the nationalist struggle. By casting it as simply as an expression


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of anger, negativity, and exclusivist rejection, Tagore appears to miss the moral core inherent within defi ance or disruption as a political strategy, as well as the fundamentally dialogical nature of those acts. The struggles of Gandhi, and of all other Indians to spin their own cloth while rejecting the cloth that symbolized the injustice of empire, were meant to exemplify the struggle of all peoples everywhere to fi ght injustice while doing so from a place of pure ethical motivation, rather than of ill-will, anger or hatred. In this sense, it is the most universal ethical struggle of all.

The irony here, once again, is that Gandhi would fully agree with Tagore about the dangers of capitulating to and casting the nationalist struggle in terms of the exclusively political categories of modern Western thought, such as sovereignty, autonomy, and independence of the nation. In this, Gandhi was much closer to Tagore than to his other contemporaries such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Vallabhbhai Patel, all of whom were mainly interested in the goal of Indian independence, as understood precisely through such categories. Gandhi explicitly decoupled patriotism from the forms of nationalism that were popular in the Indian freedom struggle. 73 In contrast to other nationalist contemporaries, Gandhi, like Tag-ore, realized that the focus on such categories would imbue the nationalist struggle with a purely political content devoid of ethical foundation, and wanted to restore the ethical struggle which he believed to be at the core of the human condition to its central place within the nationalist political project. That is to say, he wanted to remind Indians who and what the true adversaries were: not simply British rule, but the larger forms of injus-tice that it symbolized, as well as their own propensity to fi ght these forms of injustice through the same ill-will and anger that underlie these forms of injustice, rather than through the purity of ethical being. The focus on rejecting British cloth while spinning one’s own was meant, ultimately, to ensure that the nationalist movement would exemplify the universality of this ethical struggle to be undertaken by all human beings. It is for this rea-son that Gandhi insists in his rejoinder to Tagore: “Indian nationalism is not exclusive, nor aggressive, nor destructive. It is health giving, religious and therefore humanitarian.” 74

MATERIALITY

The third and most fundamental divide between Gandhi and Tagore emerges from their radically differing ontological positions regarding the ideal versus the material as the foundation for human life. This key philosophical differ-ence between the two thinkers has attracted barely any analytical attention. Yet, it forms a crucial component of their disagreement about the national-ist movement. Tagore fi nds Gandhi’s emphasis on the spinning of cloth to be utterly irrelevant to the independence struggle: “The mind of the country is being distracted from swaraj . . . heaps of thread and piles of cloth do



not constitute the subject of a great picture of welfare.” 75 Tagore, Collins tells us, is “unwilling to see the colonial situation as framed solely by the material or political confl icts of interest.” 76 In fact, as we recall, Tagore is particularly concerned that the nationalist movement is moving toward a replication of the Western preoccupation with materiality, and much of his critique of Gandhi’s call to spinning is directed toward this. “That the mea-sure of man’s greatness is in his material resources is a gigantic illusion . . . it is an insult to man.” 77 “The all-embracing poverty which has overwhelmed our country cannot be removed by working with our hands.” 78

Let us examine, then, the source of Tagore’s stringent opposition to the spinning of cloth as a key component of the swadeshi movement. In two essays published in 1925, we fi nd Tagore adhering uncritically to a Carte-sian version of Enlightenment rationality that privileges the ideal over the material, placing consciousness and reason in a hierarchy over the material-ity and physicality of the body. In certain passages from a long rejoinder to Gandhi entitled “Call of Truth,” Tagore demonstrates his clear insistence on the priority of the human over the natural, the material or the animal, and his ontological commitment to human mastery over nature as defi nitive of human being. “I do not believe the physical body to be the highest truth in man,” he asserts bluntly. Intellect is “the master,” he insists, while muscles are “slaves.” 79

The truest wealth of man is his mind. . . . Matter is the true shudra ; while with his dual existence in body and mind, Man is a dwija . . . . Whatever functions he cannot perform by material means are left as an additional burden on himself, bringing him down to the level of matter, and making him a shudra . 80

For Tagore, as for many thinkers of the early modern and Enlightenment eras, what distinguishes humans is their clear transcendence over the spheres of nature, animality, materiality and necessity. 81 Indeed, it is only in tran-scending nature and materiality, and rising above being imprisoned by these necessities, that we express our humanness. 82

It is this Cartesian privileging of reason and mind over matter that appears to be at the heart of Tagore’s opposition to spinning: “It is not enough to say: Let them spin . . . . It is an inherent defect of all routine toil . . . that it dulls the mind by disuse,” he insists. This kind of manual labour “runs along a fi xed track . . . To ask the cultivator to spin, is to derail his mind.” In other words, it is a “waste of energy.” 83 Thus, Tagore’s greatest objection is that the call to spinning is a call to undignifi ed and mindless labour, destructive of the transcendent human capacities of creativity, reason and intellectual development. 84 “By turning its wheel man merely becomes an appendage of the charkha . . . he but does himself what a machine might have done: he converts his living energy into a dead turning movement . . . he becomes a machine, isolated, companionless.” 85 It is for this reason that he confesses:


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“I have been unable to display enthusiasm in the turning of the charkha .” 86 The labour it privileges “is drudgery; it kills the mind of a man who is a doer, whose work is creation.” 87 It seeks to turn the variety and diversity of reasoning, creative individuals into “a lump of uniformity,” 88 “reduced to a machinelike existence.” 89

Tagore’s critique of Gandhi’s call to spinning thus appears rooted in a version of Cartesian dualism which privileges the reasoning and intellectual capacities of humans over the spheres of material and bodily necessity. 90 Although Gandhi does not respond directly to this aspect of Tagore’s cri-tique in his public rejoinders on the charkha controversy, we can see that his thought provides a direct rejection of this dualism. Elsewhere, I have argued Gandhi’s thought and practice centred the importance of material, bodily needs, desires and behaviours within the public, political realm, rejecting the claim that they were somehow subordinate to reason, speech, discourse and intellect. Rather, Gandhi saw the materiality and physicality of the body as holistically interwoven with—rather than dualistically contrasted to—the non-material aspects of human existence. His understanding of both human existence and of politics required therefore that “the body, through various modes of lived experience—desire, need, speech, discourse, self- presentation, psychic self-examination, self-suffering, and self-discipline—[remains] holistically engaged in ethical and political action at all times.” 91

The fact that Gandhi chooses to centre the dissent of the nationalist movement around something as seemingly quotidian and mundane as cloth is, I submit, no coincidence. It reveals precisely Gandhi’s commitment to engaging both aspects of human existence within ethically oriented politi-cal action: the material, physical and bodily, along with the rational, intel-lectual and psychic. Moreover, the precise emphasis on spinning cloth is also not as irrelevant as Tagore would have us believe. Rather, the logic of Gandhi’s call for boycotting and burning British cloth is symbolic of his depth of understanding of the relationship between everyday materiality and the political power of systems such as empire and global commerce. It is not simply that empire and commerce are deeply interlinked in their mutual creation of oppression; rather, Gandhi insists that Indians refuse to internalize the claims that these linkages make on the most intimate habits and conditions of daily, material life—among other things, how one clothes the body. Such resistance occurs therefore within the realm of everyday material practice.

Gandhi’s insistence on charkha and spinning reinstates the material con-ditions of the production and reproduction of human life at the centre of principled discussions about ideals in political life. The nationalist resistance to empire, Gandhi suggests, must occur on both the material and ideal lev-els, for unjust systems like empire and global commerce operate not sim-ply through the realm of ideas and subjective consciousness, but through their overwhelming control over the material conditions of everyday human life. Tagore appears to miss this entirely in his critique of spinning, which



represents the Cartesian assumption that “idealities” such as language, sub-jectivity, consciousness and intellect trump the baser inertia of materiality and physical “stuff.” But Gandhi gestures here toward a more farsighted understanding of human existence which highlights its ineluctable depen-dence on the socioeconomic structures that produce and reproduce the material conditions of our everyday lives. In other words, Gandhi’s call to charkha served to remind Indians that everyday material practice matters for both politics and ethics.

In a world where our every mundane material practice has implications for the collective resource base, we now take this insight to be self- evident. What we eat, what we wear, what we use to clean ourselves, how we dis-pose of our waste: all of these material aspects of human existence are increasingly invested with collective political signifi cance because they bear on collective stock of resources and thus on common life. New materialist thinkers—including political theorists such as Jane Bennett, William Con-nolly, Giorgio Agamben and Pheng Cheah—remind us that the complexities of twenty-fi rst-century biopolitics and political economy raise fundamental questions about the ways in which we produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment. But through his emphasis on the everydayness of the bodily practice of spinning, Gandhi was prescient in insisting that the deleterious effects of empire, governmentality, technology and industry on human life could only be resisted by reasserting the importance of mun-dane, everyday material practice, and not simply the abstraction of moral knowledge.

In other words, by shedding public, political light on that which often gets relegated to the “private”—among other things, the mundane, material matter of how we clothe ourselves—Gandhi wished to convince Indians that the materiality of everyday bodily practices had important implications for political life. 92 Foreshadowing those contemporary theorists who now warn us to attend to the “growing inclusion of man’s natural life in the mecha-nisms and calculations of power,” 93 as well as to the “material aspects of power that justifi es incursions into the most intimate habits of daily exis-tence . . . [and] into the everyday minutiae of our material lives,” 94 Gandhi insisted that the economic, industrial, and technological developments of the time demanded a recognition of their increasing encroachment into the embodied lives of humans in a material world. In other words, the power of empire and global commerce stemmed from the fact that these forces could dictate to Indians the conditions of the most mundane of their every-day material consumptive practice, the clothing of the body. For Gandhi, resistance to such developments demanded a reassertion of control over pre-cisely those everyday aspects of material life which were thus threatened by the forces of injustice. In this, Gandhi presages all of those who now argue that contemporary economic, environmental, geopolitical, and technologi-cal developments demand new accounts of human agency that recognize the place of embodied humans in a material world.


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CONCLUSION

What are the implications of this debate for our understanding of the dichot-omy between the ostensible universalism of cosmopolitan values on the one hand, and the particularistic attachments of nationalism or patriotism or the other? First, Gandhi’s leadership of the swadeshi movement, understood in this way, transcends the dichotomy of universal values versus particular attachments. The dissent he seeks to foster is the (necessarily local) expres-sion of an important universal human claim. Indeed, the argument is often made that nationalist movements are inherently the local expression of uni-versal liberal claims about human rights, equality, or self-determination for all peoples. But, in the case of Gandhi and India’s nationalist movement, the universality of the claim pertains to the totality of a social, economic, political and cultural system, and the universal truths inherent within the critique of such a system. Thus, it is a fundamental misunderstanding to see Gandhi’s swadeshi and non-cooperation movements as representing the nar-rowly exclusive forces of nationalism, with Tagore representing a cosmopol-itanism of universal values and transnational cooperation. Rather, Gandhi insists that the moral “truths” inherent in India’s nationalist project were of some universal nature, accessible to all, transcending merely the Western imposition of certain ideals. But in reading Gandhi simply as a nationalist, Tagore misunderstands the fundamental point that it was precisely through the particularities of the nationalist movement that Gandhi wanted such universalism to be exemplifi ed. We contemporary interpreters of Gandhi are also likely to make the same mistake if we read him as simply the “father of the nation.” Not only are we likely to forget how critical Gandhi was of the categories upon which nationalism rests, we are prone then to missing the ways in which the nationalist project, for Gandhi, was in fact the expression of universal ethical imperatives.

Second, the moral truths and ethical imperatives embedded within the universal claims could for Gandhi be instantiated through a very specifi c kind of politics: one that combined the requirements of disruptive dissent and ethical self-mastery. The deep ethical universalism of Gandhi’s thought restores the universal ethical struggle at the core of the human condition to a central role within political dissent. Dissent against unjust systems requires a struggle to rid the self of the same ill-will which lies at the root of all injus-tice. In this way, the swadeshi movement was meant to stand as a symbol of the universality of the ethical struggle to be undertaken by all human beings. It is for precisely this reason that Gandhi’s use of the term swaraj or self-rule was addressing both Indians, as well as potentially any human being any-where. 95 It is also this understanding that lies at the root of Gandhi repeated insistence to Tagore that he wants to redefi ne terms such as nationalism and patriotism in terms that are universal to all of humanity. 96 Gandhi shows us that patriotism rightly understood requires disruptive dissent, and that such dissent must be grounded in our struggle with the universal ethical challenge


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of self-mastery. This challenge, for Gandhi, goes beyond the particularities of merely nationalistic interests such as gaining independence, for it pertains to the very condition of relational selfhood, and the very ground for all of our interactions with and orientations toward a variety of others, near and far.

Finally, the ethical universalism Gandhi wished to exemplify through the swadeshi movement is a materialist one. For Gandhi, our ethical commit-ment to dissent against injustice cannot remain solely at the level of ideas and consciousness; it must be exemplifi ed through the everyday practicality of lived material experience. Tagore, having accepted Cartesian dualism, privileges the ideal over the material, prioritizes subjective consciousness over the passivity of brute matter, and thus criticizes Gandhi’s focus on the materiality of spinning, equating it with unreason, mental dullness, lack of creativity and intellect. Hence, for Tagore, the true ground of univer-salism was discursive exchange and cross-cultural communication, which relied on the faculties of reason, mind and intellect. Gandhi, however, refuses to privilege consciousness and subjectivity, and insists that manual labour and other embodied activities are crucial steps in the realization of any transcendent, universal ideal. Gandhi’s contention is that only through attending mindfully to the humblest and most mundane of everyday mate-rial activities—the making of one’s own basic clothing—can the universal ethical struggle for self-mastery be achieved, or the universal ideals embed-ded in the nationalist movement be expressed. Gandhi’s universalism thus insists on all of humanity fi nding solidarity with one another in the common condition of material embodiment, and sees the material or corporeal as the means to the transcendental, thus reasserting the importance of the material with respect to the ideal.

In reading the swadeshi movements, the boycott of cloth, and the non- cooperation movement as symptomatic of the damaging and derivative effects of nationalism, Tagore misses some of the most fundamental points of convergence between his own views and Gandhi’s, preventing himself from seeing the sense in which he and Gandhi are up to the very same thing, in some ways. In so doing, he contributes to a popular mischaracterization of the disagreement between himself and Gandhi as being rooted in the dichotomy between a belief in the universal value of oneness of all humanity on the one hand, and the nationalism of a people seeking sovereignty on the other. What I have attempted to demonstrate here is not that there is no disagreement between them; rather, the disagreement is of a fundamentally different nature. It is far more accurate, instead, to characterize both Tagore and Gandhi as reacting to the universalism of modern Western categories, its vision of life, and the hegemony of its categories, while attempting to provide an “alternative universalism” based upon some categories inherent within Indian civilization. In reacting to the hegemonic universalism of West-ern modernity, each of them expresses a desire to rehabilitate some of the categories of Western modernity, to preserve what they see as best within it, while providing an alternative emerging from the indigenous philosophical,


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ethical, or political categories of the Indic civilization. In fact, Tagore sees himself casting his vision in universal terms that encompass humanity, and that resist the exclusivism of narrowness, particular attachments, or enth-nocentrism that often characterize nationalist ideology and nationalist proj-ects. What Tagore’s misreading obscures for us is that Gandhi, to some extent, does the same, but the crucial difference between him and Gandhi lies within the specifi cs of the alternative universalism that they each offer.

While Tagore’s alternative universalism rests on communicating the potential of a Vedically grounded oneness of humanity to the West in phil-osophical terms, Gandhi’s vision rests on exemplifying the universal ethical struggle against equally universal forms of injustice through the specifi c polit-ical context of the Indian nationalist movement. Unlike Tagore, who sees the project of Indian independence as motivated by particularistic thinking and antithetical to universal values, Gandhi is convinced that India’s inde-pendence struggle can transcend the dichotomies of the universal versus the particular, serving as an exemplar of universal ethical imperatives. It does so, according to Gandhi, through restoring the ethical struggle which he believed to be at the core of the human condition to its central place within the nationalist political project. In so doing, Gandhi also wished to restore the specifi cally political nature of the struggle against injustice to its central place within the ethical project of truth-seeking: truth was to be sought always through a disruptive and dissenting form of politics. Tagore in turn is unable to recognize that such disruptive dissent is morally and dialogi-cally grounded, insisting on seeing it as symptomatic of anger, narrowness, cultural exclusivity, and rejection of the West. Finally, Tagore insists that a universal vision of humanity is communicated and instantiated through the “higher” capacities of reason, intellect and creativity of mind, while Gandhi suggests, with great foresight, that it is the universal condition of material embodiment, along with one’s universal vulnerability to having one’s mate-rial life subject to the incursions of empire and commerce, that characterizes our common humanity. Resisting such injustice through engaging with the materiality of everyday, practical lived reality becomes the ground upon which our universal ethical struggles can, for Gandhi, be instantiated.

NOTES

1. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986), 10.

2. Ibid., 30. 3. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates

between Gandhi and Tagore, 1915–1941 (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1997).

4. Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 15. 5. Ibid., 16, 17, 19. 6. Ibid., 26.



7. Ibid., 25–26. 8. Ibid., 33. 9. Ibid., 44. 10. Ibid., 45. 11. Ibid., 50. 12. Ibid., 58. 13. Ibid., 55. 14. Ibid., 97. 15. Ibid., 98. 16. Tagore insists: “I have a deep love and a great respect for the British race as

human beings” ( Nationalism , 28). 17. Ibid., 36–37. 18. Kalyan Sen Gupta, The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore (Burlington, VT:

Ashgate, 2005), 9. For more extensive treatment of Tagore’s spiritual univer-salism, see also Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man: Being the Hibbert Lectures for 1930 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 193); and Michael Col-lins , Empire, Nationalism and the Postcolonial World: Rabindranath Tagore’s Writings on History, Politics and Society (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).

19. Gupta, The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore , 11. 20. Collins, Empire, Nationalism and the Postcolonial World , 74. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 19. 23. Ibid., 26. 24. Ibid., 47. 25. Ibid., 21. 26. Rabindranath Tagore, “Letter to C.F. Andrews,” Modern Review (May 1921),

in Bhattacharya, The Mahatma and the Poet , 57. 27. Ibid., 59. 28. Ibid., 61. 29. Ibid., 62. 30. Ibid., 61. 31. Ibid., 62. 32. Ibid. 33. Rabindranath Tagore, “The Call of Truth,” Modern Review (August 1921), in

Bhattacharya, The Mahatma and the Poet , 70. 34. Collins, Empire, Nationalism and the Postcolonial World , 20. 35. Ibid., 20. 36. Ibid., 21. 37. Ibid., 77. 38. Tagore, The Religion of Man , 53. 39. Ibid., 53. 40. Gandhi, “The Great Sentinel,” Young India (13 October 1921) in Bhattacha-

rya, The Mahatma and the Poet , 91. 41. Farah Godrej, “Ascetics, Warriors and a Gandhian Ecological Citizenship,”

Political Theory , 40: 4, (2012), 443–444. 42. Ibid., 444. See also Anthony Parel, ed., M.K. Gandhi: Hind Swaraj and

Other Writings (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), [here-after HS].

43. Gandhi, HS, 38. 44. Ibid., 30. 45. Ibid., 33. 46. Parel, “Editor’s Introduction,” HS, xlvii.


132 Farah Godrej

47. Tagore, “The Call of Truth,” 73. 48. Parel, “Editor’s Introduction,” HS, xxxii. 49. See Thomas Pantham, “Thinking with Mahatma Gandhi: Beyond Liberal

Democracy,” Political Theory , 11: 2 (1983), 175–178, and “Indian Sec-ularism and Its Critics: Some Refl ections,” in Border Crossings: Toward a Comparative Political Theory , Fred Dallmayr, ed. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999), 183. See also Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 112.

50. Tagore, “Letter to C.F. Andrews,” in Bhattacharya, The Mahatma and the Poet , 60.

51. Collins, Empire, Nationalism and the Postcolonial World , 20. 52. Tagore, “Letter to C.F. Andrews,” in Bhattacharya, The Mahatma and the

Poet , 56. 53. Ibid., 60. 54. Tagore, “The Call of Truth,” 86. 55. Tagore, “Letter to C.F. Andrews,” in Bhattacharya, The Mahatma and the

Poet 62. 56. Tagore, “Letter to C.F. Andrews,” (7 Sept 1920), in Selected Letters of Rabin-

dranath Tagore , Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, eds. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 236.

57. Gandhi, “The Poet’s Anxiety,” Young India (1 June 1921) in Bhattacharya, The Mahatma and the Poet , 65.

58. Gandhi, “The Great Sentinel,” Young India (13 October 1921) in Bhattacha-rya, The Mahatma and the Poet , 88–90.

59. Godrej, “Ascetics, Warriors and a Gandhian Ecological Citizenship,” 441. 60. For a detailed treatment of these matters in Gandhi’s writings, see Godrej,

“Ascetics, Warriors and a Gandhian Ecological Citizenship,” 445–449. 61. Ibid., 447. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 448. 64. Ibid., 449. 65. Ibid., 448. 66. Ibid., 449. 67. Ananya Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic: Political Foundations of Modern India

(Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2012), 68. 68. Ibid., 67. 69. Ibid., 67–68. 70. Ibid., 77. 71. Ibid., 77. 72. Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic , 78. See also Gandhi, “Satyagraha—Not Passive

Resistance,” in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi ( Delhi: Publication Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1958–1994) 13: 523.

73. Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic , 59–60. 74. Gandhi, “The Great Sentinel,” in Bhattacharya, The Mahatma and the Poet ,

91. 75. Tagore, “Striving for Swaraj,” Modern Review (September 1925), in Bhat-

tacharya, The Mahatma and the Poet , 118. 76. Collins, Empire, Nationalism and the Postcolonial World , 66. 77. Tagore, “Letter to C.F. Andrews,” in Bhattacharya, The Mahatma and the

Poet , 60. 78. Tagore, “The Cult of Charkha,” Modern Review (September 1925), in Bhat-

tacharya, The Mahatma and the Poet , 104.



79. Ibid., 103. 80. Ibid., 104. 81. It is, of course, hardly accurate to characterize all of modern, post-

Enlightenment thought in this way, for the anti-materiality of Cartesian think-ing had already produced critics within Descartes’ own lifetime itself. Marx’s historical materialism is only the most prominent version of later critiques of purely ideational thinking, and contemporary Marxists, along with femi-nists, post-structuralists, theorists of biopolitics, new materialists, and many other more recent modes of thought have done much to re-center political thinking along the lines of materiality, suggesting that contemporary devel-opments demand a re-examination of the place of embodied humans in a material world. See, for instance, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

82. For instance, Tagore asserts:

All the lower animals are parasites . . . carried along by their environ-ment . . . [they] progress or retrogress as nature may dictate . . . But Prov-idence displayed a sudden accession of creative courage when it came to man . . . [he has] refused to submit to the rule of things as they always have been. (Tagore, “The Call of Truth,” 68–69)

“Man’s true function to make the impossible into the possible by dint of his own powers . . . lives mainly by his inner nature” (Ibid., 70). “If the cultiva-tion of science by Europe has any moral signifi cance it is in its rescue of man from outrage by nature . . . to harness the forces of nature in man’s service” (Tagore, “The Cult of the Charkha,” in Bhattacharya, The Mahatma and the Poet , 104).

83. Tagore, “Striving for Swaraj,” 115. 84. See Tagore, “The Cult of the Charkha,” 103; see also the “inherent inglorious-

ness of labour divorced from the mind” (Ibid., 104). 85. Tagore, “Striving for Swaraj,” 121. 86. Tagore, “The Cult of the Charkha,” 99. 87. Ibid., 100. 88. Ibid., 99. 89. Ibid., 103. 90. See, for instance, Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (New

York: Routledge, 1993). It is not clear that Tagore takes this view directly from the Enlightenment thinkers, but at the very least, he appears to have internalized and been infl uenced by the view as an imperial subject.

91. Godrej, “Ascetics, Warriors and a Gandhian Ecological Citizenship,” 455. 92. Godrej, “Ascetics, Warriors and a Gandhian Ecological Citizenship,” 443. 93. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto:

Stanford University Press, 1998), 89. 94. Coole and Frost, New Materialisms , 23. 95. Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic , 50. 96. “Patriotism for me is the same as humanity,” “patriotism includes the service

of humanity,” “it is the narrowness, selfi shness and exclusiveness which is the bane of modern nations, which is evil,” “through the realization of freedom of India, I hope to realize and carry on the mission of brotherhood of men.”(See Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, “Introduction,” The Mahatma and the Poet , 30).


“The Universalist Aspirations of Nationalist Dissent: Lessons from the Debates Between Gandhi and Tagore,” in Tamara Caraus and Camil Alexandru Parvu (eds.), Cosmopolitanism and

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