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Igor Grbić

Juraj Dobrila University of Pula

Tagore and Gandhi: the Way of the Artist and the Way of the Ascetic

Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi were the most world-famous

Indians of their time. Their relationship was one of great mutual respect, but it was

also troubled by clashes of two very disparate sensitivities and spiritual frames. The

subject has been noticed and explored by authors dealing with either of the two grand

men. The present paper aims, however, at showing that not only were Tagore and

Gandhi as different as they were, but also that the various ways of the spirit came

close to be concentrated in the two of them, making each one of its two poles: Gandhi

stood for the spirit manifesting itself as renunciation, constant negation, the

Apollonian even Thanatotic logos sustained by a strictly religious mind, while

Tagore incarnated the spirit operating as the all-embracing force of eternal

affirmation, the Dionysian eros upheld by an unchecked artistic imagination. The

opposition is mythically paradigmatic: one can sense in it another enactment of the

irreconcilable strife between the will to create and explode towards proliferation, and

the will to annihilate and implode into nullity. It is the via positiva versus via

negativa. At the deepest level, their ends perfectly overlap.

Key words

Tagore, Gandhi, art, asceticism, affirmation, negation.

Back in my student days I went through an intensely ascetic period, brimming

with fasts, vows and all kinds of austerities and renunciations. At the same time and

ever since my late teenage years, as a matter of fact I would write poems and stories,

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walking through woods and by the seaside, taking in my fill of the colours, sounds

and smells that engulfed me.

If I am beginning on such a personal note, it is because I fancy myself to have

walked in the shoes or rather the cappals of both Rabindranath Tagore and

Mahatma Gandhi, at least a part of their ways, to have had a life that enables me to

sympathize with both and to understand the reasons for which they admired one

another, as well as those for which they stood in mutual suspicion. I have done it all

with myself. And it was precisely Gandhi's Autobiography that, twenty years ago,

launched me on the way of ascetic truth, just as Tagore was one of, probably, two

poets only to have helped me remember that truth is also beauty. The other was

William Blake, the one who wrote "Both read the Bible day & night, / But thou read'st

black where I read white" (356). Just as both Gandhi and Tagore were profoundly

inspired by the word of the Upanishads, with the first, however, taking it to be an

ultimate proclamation of saying no to the world (the Upanishadic formula is neti, neti,

neither this way, nor that), while with the latter and it comes from Tagore's Sādhanā

it is rather that "Brahma is not in India a negation of the world, but India aspires to

the infinite in all things" (Tagore 13). So who of the two read it white and who read it

black? And is it then valid to identifiy black with wrong and white with right?

It is impossible for us to properly understand the complex relationship between

the two men without first recognizing the paradigm underlying it: the age-old,

archetypal, mythical oppositon between the via positiva and the via negativa. On the

one hand, the Dionysian eros, here incarnated as poetic imagination that keeps itself

constantly vulnerable to anything that might cross its path, repeating an eternal yes to

the world. On the other hand, the Apollonian, even Thanatotic logos, here manifested

as an exclusive religious mind, constantly withdrawing from the world, with a

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humming, self-disciplined no. Loving the world, and fearing it, or even hating it.

Seeing it as an inexhaustible fountain of inspiration for creating ever new worlds,

versus finding it too much in itself.

We can call either of the two black and the other white, but when it comes to

right and wrong, it is only wrong to consider them as such in themselves. The fact that

I myself am no longer ascetic, but still write poems, is only a gradual crystallization

of my own personal predisposition, has no general implications and should even not

be taken as proof of my valuing one over the other. Actually, I have learnt to

appreciate both, understanding also that both have pitfalls of their own, but that the

via negativa, being meant for fewer, has more of them (I am here giving looser

meanings to the via negativa and positiva, as the way of the ascetic and of the artist

respectively, rather than understanding them strictly as apophatic and cataphatic

theologies, i.e. theologies that describe God in negative and positive terms

respectively).

If, today, my sympathies go to Tagore rather than Gandhi, it is both because my

own path has turned out to be much closer to the former, and because I can see the

latter falling prey to too many of the pitfalls on the ascetic path. The via negativa

tempts one into simplified rigidity, with clear-cut distinctions and ready-made

reactions to ever new situations, since the latter are first classified into one of the

already accepted categories. Such an attitude is naturally accompanied by practical

self-righteousness, even when (like in Gandhi's case) coexisting with theoretical self-

-suspicion. To all intents and purposes, one's own brave old world is seen as the

enclosure of truth (at least temporary, as, once again, openly suggested by My

Experiments with Truth from the subtitle of Gandhi's autobiography (Gandhi 2013)),

while others, judged by one's own severe standards, are expected to recognize the

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promised land. Though otherwise he knew much better, Romain Rolland incredibly

writes that "Gandhi never asks men for more than they can give" (33), as if taking at

face value Gandhi's words published in The Harijan, in 1936, which, however, merely

reiterate what for Gandhi was obviously a firm conviction (the italics are mine, to

indicate the particularly symptomatic spots):

It is wrong to call me an ascetic. The ideals that regulate my life are presented for

acceptance by mankind in general. I have arrived at them by gradual evolution. Every step was

thought out, well-considered, and taken with the greatest deliberation. Both my continence and

non-violence were derived from personal experience and became necessary in response to the

calls of public duty. The isolated life I had to lead in South Africa whether as a householder,

legal practitioner, social reformer or politician, required, for the due fulfilment of these duties,

the strictest regulation of sexual life and a rigid practice of non-violence and truth in human

relations, whether with my own countrymen or with the Europeans. I claim to be no more than

an average man with less than average ability. Nor can I claim any special merit for such non-

-violence or continence as I have been able to reach with laborious research. I have not the

shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the

same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith. (Bose 215-16)

Much of this is blatantly wrong, at least for the practical, immediate and short-

-term purposes of any here and now, and Tagore clearly saw that Gandhi was "taking

upon himself more than a single man can bear" (Rolland 86; to the relationship

between the two men is dedicated the whole Chapter 6 of Rolland's book). The ascetic

very easily − and naturally − expands his own experience into a general truth and

mistakes the particular stair he is standing on, and the view opened to him therefrom,

for the whole staircase, with the same panorama on every single stair. But people are

not the same, and the caste system, a phenomenon Gandhi mainly understood only in

its socio-historical aberrations from the original idea of the four varṇas, was ideally

conceived to reflect and accomodate their intellectual differences, on their separate

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ways to the − now true enough − singleness of the spirit. The spirit is one, but its

splinters, or rather distorted reflections − that souls are − are many and variegated.

Gandhi's own words notwithstanding, he was an ascetic, and an ascetic does not feel

comfortable with qualifications. Occasionaly, however, he does acknowledge them,

and in his Autobiography (end of Chapter 61), referring to chastity, Gandhi is more

cautios (the italics are again mine): "Where therefore the desire is gone, a vow of

renunciation is the natural and inevitable fruit" (108). Nevertheless, maintaining the

same flexibility of the mind in practice is much more difficult and Gandhi was very

harsh on his ashram inmates who were very sincere and devout seekers, but stained

with the "sin" of having their desire still un-gone. Chapter 9 of his Autobiography

ends on a note that particularly well depicts his attitude to sexuality, the greatest

source of discomfort and anxiety for him. The stressedly moralized tone was certainly

largely due to the circumstances of the episode described. While his dying father was

breathing his last − an event "which demanded wakeful service" − in his own sleeping

room Gandhi was lusting after his wife, pregnant, and woken out of her sleep to

satisfy him. That was "a blot I have never been able to efface or forget". The baby his

wife was carrying, once born, was to live for three or four days only. Now comes the

epilogue that must have stricken Tagore with horror: "Nothing else could be expected.

Let all those who are married be warned by my example" (16). The moral connection

between a newborn's life and its father's libido sounds ghastlier than Gandhi's much

more famous explaining the Bihar earthquake of January 1934 as a divine

chastisement for the sin of abusing the untouchables, which instantly stung Tagore

into replying that physical events have exclusively physical causes.

Actually, unlike Gandhi's former comment, with its problematic moralization of

sex, the latter is likely to suppress Tagore's for many of those embracing the reality of

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a divine providence, was acceptable as such in both Western and Eastern traditions,

and tellingly delineates another aspect of the chasm between the two men: Tagore the

artist was less traditional and more modern, scientific, than Gandhi the ascetic. An

overmodernization of Tagore's has indeed occasionally been criticized in the West by

those trusting not the current times, or the various social and mental encrustations

enslaving people all around the globe, but an authentic, single ur-tradition, only

partially preserved in the many subsequent ones (a number of these critics do belong

to the movement that is, indeed, known as traditionalism). God was central in both

Tagore and Gandhi's worldview, but against Tagore's God as a humanized and

poeticized presence there is in Gandhi a God much "rawer", primordial in its

uncompromisingness. Both men were open to the discoveries of science, but Gandhi's

greater reserves towards them stemmed from a more troubled intuition that every

factory was potentially another Satanic mill (to say it again with Blake), and that

things used do tend to overpower the user.

However, when it comes to politics, this intuition fails him. Once again, it must

bend before a rigid, and generalized, principle of the ascetic. Gandhi could well afford

to self-confidently claim that he would withdraw from the non-cooperation campaign

the moment he felt hatred for the English, since one must love one's enemy, and hate

only the enemy's foul deeds. But, once again, it was asking too much from his

followers to be able, in the long run, to distinguish between hating things and hating

men. As Rolland observes, the campaigners rather thought things first, men next (95)!

The same goes for Gandhi's fine distinction (of which he talked to Tagore himself)

concerning swadeshi: for Gandhi it was a message to the world as a whole, and non-

-cooperation was directed not against the West, but against the materialistic

civilization and its attendant greed, which made the movement beneficial to the West,

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too (Rolland 93). Putting his own artistic insight into human frailty above the

proclaimed power of any ideal to govern the lives of men, Tagore would rather

"restrict myself to what I consider as my own vocation, never venturing to deal with

blind forces which I do not know how to control" (Rolland 86). Whenever fresh

outbursts of violence gave a slap to the realization of his ideal, he would sit down to

write another mea culpa article, saying God had warned him once again that "there is

not yet in India that truthful and non-violent atmosphere which, and which alone, can

justify mass disobedience" (Rolland 103-4). He would next lie down, to fast until

peace returned, which in fact was a subtle form of blackmail and functioned because

his followers wanted to save him, the beloved Bapu, not his ideals. However, he

would take no practical consequences therefrom. His idealistic asceticism would not

let him be tempered by material contingencies.

The non-cooperation campaign was a particularly sore spot for Tagore and if

there can be found an immediate reason for whatever degree of break eventually

ensued between him and Gandhi, it was this. Its beginning ironically coincided with

Tagore's Western tour, during which he preached about the need for the East and the

West to go forth arm in arm. His first impressions on returning to India produced the

"Appeal to Truth", published in the Modern Review (1 October 1921). Their wording

is soaked with genuine disgust he must have felt for such a vision of freedom:

An outside influence seemed to be bearing down on them, grinding them and making one

and all speak in the same tone, following the same groove. Everywhere I was told that culture

and reasoning power should abdicate, and blind obedience only reign. So simple it is to crush, in

the name of some outward liberty, the real freedom of the soul! (qtd. in Rolland 85)

Tagore always needs the whole world for man's true home on earth, with

everything mankind has ever and anywhere produced, and no political circumstances

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should drive him out of that home. In November of the same year, always in the

Modern Review, he writes:

All humanity's greatest is mine. The infinite personality of man (as the Upanishads say)

can only come from the magnificent harmony of all human races. My prayer is that I may

represent the co-operation of all the peoples of the world. For India, unity is truth, and division

evil. Unity is that which embraces and understands everythjing; consequently, it cannot be

attained through negation. The present attempt to seprate our spirit from that of the Occident is a

tentative of spiritual sucide... The present age has been dominated by the Occident, because the

Occident had a mission to fulfil. We of the Orient should learn from the Occident. It is

regrettable, of course, that we had lost the power of appreciating our own culture, and therefore

did not know how to assign Western culture to its right place. But to say that it is wrong to co-

-operate with the West is to encourage the worst form of provincialism and can produce nothing

but intellectual indigence. The problem is a world problem. No nation can find its own salvation

by breaking away from others. We must all be saved or we must all perish together. (qtd. in

Rolland 82)

This is in exact contrast to the Gospel of Swadeshi, a manifesto of the swadeshi

movement penned by D. B. Kalelkar, a Gandhian professor, in which we read that

God is presently incarnated in the movement, that every nation must be self-sufficient,

seeking emancipation through its own religion and culture only, that exporting one's

own goods and importing others' is a crime, that Indians should stay away from

people of customs or ideals other than their own. True, this was not written by

Gandhi, but he did write an approving preface to it (Rolland 90-92). Rolland

comments that it is easy for a following to turn the discipline chosen to attain an ideal

into the ideal itself, but it is precisely one of the ascetic pitfalls to mistake the means

for the end and find fulfilment in (or even gloat over) unswervingly keeping to the

path. Gandhi may be certain of his imagined end, but Tagore once more understands

that it is not for the multitude in his footsteps: they will interpret Bapu's call as an

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incentive to deepen the chasm between the East and the West. Once this happens, the

road to hindutva is smoothened and, paradoxically, Gandhi can be seen indirectly

allied with the forces he so much abhorred. In contrast, Tagore's humanism,

unconditioned by any "higher causes", could never put him in such danger and he

rather suffered being abandoned by some of his students instead of advising them to

boycott school, as part of the campaign (this tension between a supposed rising to the

expectations of a new India and staying true to "the religon of man" is finely analyzed

by Tagore himself in his novel The Wreck).

The attainment of swaraj was for Tagore a much more complex matter,

requiring also some knowledge of economy, politics, statesmanship, education and so

on. However, Gandhi saw himself as no stranger to any of these fields and on the

pages of his collected works one will find opinions on everything, from bowel

movements and the right way to build a toilet to the true meaning of the Bhagavadgita

and the nature of God. Tagore might well have held such authoritative

comprehensiveness as yet another instance of self-assumed competences. He found

very troubling Gandhi's idea that "spin and weave, spin and weave", as expressed by

the charkha and the khaddar movement, could be the solution to the Indian problem.

Though he once did concede that "in the products of the handloom the magic of man's

living fingers finds its expression, and its hum harmonizes with the music of life", he

feared that, taken again as a general prescription, it meant simply condemning people

to mechanical, repetitive work deadening the spirit, which "is no less valuable than

cotton thread" (see Sengupta 45-49).

Essentially the same kind of discrepancy is, unsurprisingly, found in the two

men's views on Gandhi's central concept: ahimsa, non-violence. While his own (and

by no means traditional Indian, as he wanted it to be believed!) position on the matter

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is known well enough, Tagore's criticism of some aspects of this tenet deserve to be

fully quoted, as containing so much that is vital to understanding how the two kinds of

the mind work, and why the twain shall never meet. It comes from his printed

statement on his position regarding non-cooperation, addressed to Gandhi in 1922:

I believe in the efficacy of ahimsa as the means of overcoming the congregated might of

physical force on which the pol. powers in all countries mainly rest. But like every other moral

principle ahimsa has to spring from the depth of mind and it must not be forced upon man from

some outside appeal of urgent need. The great personalities of the world have preached love,

forgiveness and non-violence, primarily for the sake of spiritual perfection and not for the

attainment of some immediate success in politics or similar departments of life. They were

aware of the difficulty of their teaching being realzed within a fixed period of time in a sudden

and wholesale manner by men whose previous course of life had chiefly pursued the path of

self. No doubt, through a strong compulsion of desire for some external result, men are capable

of repressing their habitual inclinations for a limited time; but when it concerns an immense

multitude of men of different traditions and stages of culture, and when the object for which

such repression is exercised needs a prolonged period of struggle, complex in character, I cannot

think it possible of attainment. The conditions to which you refer as prevailing in South Africa

and those in India are not nearly the same... (qtd. in Thompson 262-3)

Though one should always be beware of too neat compartmentalizations,

Gandhi's retort basically echoes the ancient strife between the vita activa and the vita

contemplativa, which is why it, too, deserves to be quoted extensively:

When there's war, let the poet lay down his lyre! When a house is on fire all must go out

and take up a bucket to quench the fire. . . . When all about me are dying for want of food, the

only occupation permissible for me is to feed the hungry. . . . To a people famishing and idle the

only acceptable form in which God can dare appear is work and promise of food as wages. . . .

The poet lives for the morrow, and would have us do likewise. He presents to our admiring gaze

the beautiful picture of the birds in the early morning singing hymns of praise as they soar into

the sky. Those birds had their day's food and soared with rested wings in whose veins new blood

had flown the previous night. But I have had the pain fo watching birds who for want of strength

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could not be coaxed even into a flutter of their wings. The human bird under the Indian sky gets

up weaker than when he pretended to retire. (qtd. in Rolland 88-89)

Trace every penny in your possession, ends Gandhi, and you will find its source

is exploitation. So let Tagore spin just like anybody else!

For Tagore, the world is lilakshetra, an open field on − or through − which the

divine is performing its endless play. In this field the artist is saying yes even to its

uncertainties (it is Keats' negative capability). An artist − and Tagore called his

religion precisely "a poet's religion, or "the religion of an artist" (Sengupta ix) − lives

on the world's apparent contradictions, that the ascetic can well find frustrating.

Tagore's biographer Krishna Kripalani reports that, when asked about his greatest

failing, the poet answered it was inconsistency. When asked about his greatest quality,

he said it was inconsistency (qtd. in Arzeni 114). An answer impossible for Gandhi,

for whom, just as for any typical ascetic, it is all about identifying the one right path

and then unconditionally following it. Against Gandhi's dedication in a girl's book that

"a vow is a fixed and unalterable determination to do a thing", the horrified Tagore

quickly adds on the same page: "You have dissolved my vow even as the moon

dissolves the night's vow of obscurity" (Sen 520).

This has always been so and, despite the largely Western oversimplification

which reduces India to the land of yoga, there has always been a parallel India of

bhoga, of fully embracing the divine play. As David Kinsley, writing about lila, the

divine power of disinterested play, so nicely puts it: "To play the game one must

affirm, not deny, this world, for to deny it is to reject that which is shot through with

divine power to frown, as it were, at God's joke" (15). Not by withdrawing from the

world, continues Kinsley, is the veil of maya overcome, but by ripping it apart and

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then fondly wrapping it around the self. "[T]he puppet in the case of the withdrawn

ascetic has had the audacity to cut his own strings" (18).

The artist is always the one delighting in the cosmic performance, one way or

another, at least in a minimalist Joycean way. Art is one of the possibilities of

appreciating the play, and India, unlike the West, has traditionally acknowledged it as

one of the sadhanas, spiritual disciplines leading to moksha. Maybe we can sense a

trace of such universalism in the fact that, however different, Gandhi and Tagore

remained in profound, life-long respect for one another (they first met quite early, in

March 1915, in Shantiniketan; see Sengupta 3). It is just that, now in a much happier

turn of phrase of Rolland's (94, n.1), Tagore's was intellectual universalism, while

Gandhi cherished a universalism of the Middle Ages, articulated through religious

feeling and renunciation, imposing the same "truth" on everyone.

Tagore the artist will not renounce the world, but will also not judge the other

path by the standards of his own. He does not seem interested in pronouncing general

statements on asceticism from his own, artistic, viewpoint. Gandhi's asceticism, on the

other hand, feels the need to encompass everything into its enclosure, colouring it

with the colourlessness of its own glasses. Ascetics have no use for art and Gandhi is

perfectly honest when he writes that "I can do entirely without external forms" (qtd. in

Bose 273). Which does not mean, however, that he did not appreciate it. He did, as a

means for the soul's journey towards self-realization. So when he says that true art is

inconceivable without the purity of the artist's soul (Bose 274), this does nowadays

smack of turning art into another moralistic discipline, yet another ascetic exercise,

but is sanctioned by all major traditional theories of art, Indian included (see for

example the Śukranītisāra).

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A literary, artistic, expression of the archetypal difference between Tagore and

Gandhi is given by Hermann Hesse's novel Narziss and Goldmund. Narziss the monk

can more often than not be taken as Gandhi's counterpart, Goldmund the artist as

Tagore's. Here a poignant remark of the former to the latter:

We thinkers, though often we seem to rule you, cannot live with half your joy and full

reality. Ours is a thin and arid life, but the fullness of beins is yours; yours the sap of the fruit,

the garden of lovers, the joyous pleasaunces of beauty. Your home is the earth, ours the idea of

it. Your danger is to be drowned in the world of sense, ours to gasp for breath in airless space.

You are a poet, I a thinker. You sleep on your mother's breast, I watch in the wilderness. (46)

Or, in the light of the cosmic lila: "We thinkers strive to reach out God by

drawing the world away from before His face. You come to Him, loving His creation.

Both these are imperfect; yet, of the two, art is the more innocent" (280). I would

argue it is precisely this innocence that makes art, allowing "the fusion of two worlds"

(164) and being "the assurance of reconciling [Goldmund's] deepest contradictions"

(165). When art is not enough of a vision, when, in Gandhi's words, it has "no trace of

the soul's upward urge" (qtd. in Bose 273), it is diluted into wit. When asceticism is

not mysticism enough, itself missing sufficient transcendent credentials, it withers up

into self-created, ready-made, hence rigid formalism.

There is, however, one conspicuous obstacle to simply assigning Tagore and

Gandhi to either side of the above-hinted innocence line: humour. When, at the

Edinburgh conference dedicated to Tagore in 2012, I presented the shorter version of

this paper, I said I had never seen a photograph of a smiling Tagore. One of the

participants remarked that there were a few of his stories, hardly available to non-

-Bengali readers, that revealed a humourous Tagore. But neither do a few stories

really make much of a difference in an opus as large as Tagore's, nor was I at all

referring to Tagore the writer. And what if the possible grin I only glimpsed on his

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face in a documentary shown later during the conference really was a smile? These

are nothing but ripples on his majestic, severe rishi-like figure. On the contrary,

Gandhi was a great joke-cracker, with an appearance making Sarojini Naidu famously

nicknaming him Mickey Mouse.

This is one last thing warning us against a simplified, bipolar classification of

the two men. Their underlying cores, however, represent the archetypal dichotomy.

There will always be a Gandhi, the yogi shouting of the need "to recover [the] power

of saying 'No'" (qtd. in Rolland 80), and there will always be a Tagore, the bhogi

singing: "Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a

thousand bonds of delight" (Collected Poems and Plays 34). And I like to imagine

Gandhiji, unable to agree, but giving it at least a mischievous, surreptitious you-

-naughty-naughty smile.

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Works Cited

Arzeni, Flavia. An Education in Happiness: The Lessons of Hesse and Tagore.

Trans. Howard Curtis. London: Pushkin Press, 2009.

Blake, William. Poems and Prophecies. 1927. Ed. Max Plowman. London: J.

M. Dent & Sons, 1984.

Bose, Nirmal K. Selections from Gandhi. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing

House, 1948.

Gandhi, Mohandas K. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with

Truth. 1940. Trans. Mahadev Desai. 22 Dec. 2013

<http://www.holybooks.lichtenbergpress>.

Hesse, Hermann. Narziss and Goldmund. Trans. Geoffrey Dunlop.

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971.

Kinsley, David R. The Divine Player (A Study of Kṛṣṇa Līlā). New Delhi:

Motilal Banarsidass, 1979.

Rolland, Romain. Mahatma Gandhi: the Man Who Became One with the

Universal Being. Trans. Catherine D. Groth. New Delhi: Publications Division, 1969.

Sen, N. B., ed. Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore. New Delhi: New

Book Society of India, 1968.

Sengupta, Kalyan. The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore. Aldershot: Ashgate

Publishing, 2005.

Tagore, Rabindranath. Collected Poems and Plays. 1936. Chennai: Macmillan

India Limited, 1991.

- - -. Sādhanā − The Realisation of Life. 1915. The Spiritual Bee. 22 Dec. 2013

<http://www.spiritualbee.com>.

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Thompson, Edward. Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist. 2nd ed.,

revised and reset. London: Oxford University Press, 1948.