This article was downloaded by: [University of Edinburgh]On: 31 July 2012, At: 05:33Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

South Asia: Journal of South AsianStudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csas20

Caste Matters: Rabindranath Tagore'sEngagement with India's Ancient SocialHierarchiesTapan Basu aa Department of English, University of Delhi

Version of record first published: 06 Mar 2012

To cite this article: Tapan Basu (2012): Caste Matters: Rabindranath Tagore's Engagement withIndia's Ancient Social Hierarchies, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 35:1, 162-171

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2011.648910

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representationthat the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of anyinstructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primarysources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings,demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Caste Matters: Rabindranath Tagore’s

Engagement with India’s Ancient Social

Hierarchies

Tapan Basu

Department of English, University of Delhi

In an article entitled ‘A Vision of India’s History’ written in 1912, RabindranathTagore theorised India’s social evolution in terms of alternating processesof contestation and collaboration between its two dominant caste formations,the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas. According to Tagore, the Kshatriyas andBrahmins were not, contrary to popular belief, engaged in a long-standing war ofattrition with each other. Indeed there was no fundamental difference of worldoutlook between them. Rather, in Tagore’s opinion, they

. . .merely represented two different natural functions of the body-politic, which, though from the outside presenting the appearanceof antagonism, have as a matter of fact cooperated in the evolutionof Indian history. Sowing seed in one’s own land and reapingharvest for different markets are apparently contradictory. Theseed-sowers naturally cling to the soil which they cultivate, whilethe distributors of the harvest develop a different mentality beingalways on the move. The Brahmins were the guardians of the seedof culture in ancient India and the Kshatriyas strove for puttinginto wide use the harvest of wisdom. . .. Life moves in the cadenceof constant adjustment of opposites, it is a perpetual process ofreconciliation of contradictions.1

Like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, better known as the Mahatma, withwhom he had a relationship of mutual admiration often tempered by mutual

1 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘A Vision of India’s History’, in S. Jayaseela Stephen (ed.), The Sky of Indian

History: Themes and Thought of Rabindranath Tagore (New Delhi: UBS Publishers Distributors Pvt. Ltd.,

2010), pp.73–102.

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies,n.s., Vol.XXXV, no.1, March 2012

ISSN 0085-6401 print; 1479-0270 online/12/010162-10 � 2012 South Asian Studies Association of Australia

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2011.648910

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f E

dinb

urgh

] at

05:

33 3

1 Ju

ly 2

012

admonitions, Tagore subscribed to the idea of caste as the basic principle whichinformed the harmonious co-existence of the diverse constituencies thatcomprised Hindu society in India:

[India’s] caste system is the outcome of [a] spirit of toleration. ForIndia has all along been trying experiments in evolving a social unitywithin which all the different peoples could be held together, whilefully enjoying the freedom of maintaining their own differences. Thetie has been as loose as possible, yet as close as the circumstancespermitted. This has produced something like an United States, asocial federation whose common name is Hinduism.2

Made in 1916, his statement anticipated a more dedicated defence of the castesystem by Gandhi in an article published in Young India in the early 1920swhich included the provocative suggestion that caste might be

. . .offered to the world as a leaven and as the best remedy againstheartless competition and social disintegration born of avarice andgreed.3

Indeed Gandhi appeared to concede only one defect in the functioning castesystem of his day and that was untouchability. As to the charge that the castesystem might be seen as stunting individual enterprise and inhibiting socialmobility, he responded:

If the members of the [human] body had the power of expressionand each of them were to say that it was higher and better than therest, the body would go to pieces. . .. It is this canker that is at theroot of the various ills of our time, especially class and civil strife.It should not be difficult for even the meanest understanding to seethat these wars and strifes could not be ended except by theobservance of the law of varna. For it ordains that everyone shallfulfill the law of one’s being by doing in a spirit of duty and servicethat to which one is born.4

2 Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (New Delhi: Macmillan India Limited, 1950; and Macmillan Pocket

Tagore Edition, 1976, 1985, 1995), p.69.3 M.K. Gandhi, Young India (5 Jan. 1921), in N.K. Bose (ed.) Selections from Gandhi (Ahmedabad:

Navajivan Publishing House, 1948), p.233.4 M.K. Gandhi, cited in ‘The Gandhian View of Caste, and Caste after Gandhi’, in P. Mason (ed.), India and

Ceylon: Unity and Diversity (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p.175.

CASTE MATTERS 163

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f E

dinb

urgh

] at

05:

33 3

1 Ju

ly 2

012

Social harmony was a reachable goal. It required only that society’s memberskept to their assigned places. Tagore focused on the divisive and destructivepotential of the caste hierarchy (especially in the context of the growingnationalist aspirations among his fellow Indians). This perspective was rootedin Tagore’s perception of the degeneration of Indian society from its originalVedic conception. Vedic caste, he felt, had promoted social integration, butover time caste had mutated into a structure of rigid, immutable gradationssegregating entire categories of the population from one another:

In India, the real cause of the weakness that cripples our spirit offreedom arises from the impregnable social walls we raise betweenthe different castes. These check the natural flow of fellow-feelingamong the people who live in our country. The law of love andmutual respect has been ignored for the sake of retaining anartificial order. This only serves to promote a sense of degeneracyand of defeat. The people of India in this way have built their owncage. But by trying to secure their freedom from one another, theyonly succeeded in keeping themselves eternally captive.5

Tagore’s critical perspective of the caste system led him, as early as 1918, tosupport proposed legislation in favour of Hindu inter-caste marriages:

It is humiliating to find that some of our countrymen are opposingthis Bill [to lend legal sanction to inter-caste marriages] under thenotion that it will injure Hindu society if it is passed. They do notseem to consider that those who are already willing to accept thesocial martyrdom should not have any further coercion, passive oractive, from any governing power, to oblige them to observeagainst their will such conventions as are not based upon thefoundations of moral laws. . .. Such an implication is a libel againstthe spirit of Hinduism which, all through its history, has beenaccommodating differences of creeds and customs, allowingmixture of castes and making new social adjustments from thetime of the Mahabharat until now. . ..6

5 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Freedom’, in The Viswa-Bharati Quarterly (Autumn 1957), rpt. in Nityapriya

Ghosh (ed.), The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore: A Miscellany, Vol. 4 (New Delhi: Sahitya

Akademi, 2007), pp.627–8.6 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Hindu Inter-caste Marriage’, in The Modern Review (February 1919), rpt. in Sisir

Kumar Das (ed.), The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore: A Miscellany, Vol. 3 (New Delhi: Sahitya

Akademi, 1996), pp.741–2.

164 SOUTH ASIA

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f E

dinb

urgh

] at

05:

33 3

1 Ju

ly 2

012

It was a radical stand. The injunction against exogamy (marriage across castes)was central to the orthodox Hindu project of demarcating a boundary betweenritualised purity and pollution, between low caste and high. But arguablyTagore’s most potent critique of what he called the ‘shadow lines’ of caste wasembedded in his fiction, especially in his much acclaimed novel, Gora (1910).

Widely decoded as a satire against ‘authentic’ Hinduism of the kind celebratedby Hindu revivalist organisations such as the Dharma Sabha (founded in 1830),the Arya Samaj (1875) and the Ramakrishna Mission (1898)—organisationspartly inspired, ironically, by Western Orentalist interpretations of Hinduscriptures—Gora is the story of a foundling-child of European descent (a SepoyMutiny orphan) named Gora who has been brought up by Hindu foster-parents.7 Quite unaware of his own alien roots, and against the grain of hisadoptive mother’s temperament of tolerance, Gora grows up to be a strongadvocate of Hindu orthodoxy at a time when it faced increasing challengesfrom Christian missionary propaganda and from Hindu reformist movementssuch as the Brahmo Samaj. As Meenakshi Mukherjee has explained, Gora’sstrident defence of his faith represents ‘what may be called ‘‘a colonial anxietyof influence’’, an anxiety that makes one aggressively deny the values that mighthave once conditioned one’s perception and thinking’.8 Gora is of the firmopinion that criticism of Hinduism, native or foreign, can best be countered bysteadfastly upholding the ‘pristine’ precepts and practices of the religion.‘Whether we are good or bad, civilised people or barbarians, we don’t have tojustify ourselves to anyone. All that we want is to feel in every inch that we areourselves’,9 declares Gora, adding:

I am a Hindu. If I can’t understand the deeper meaning of Hindudharma today, I may do so tomorrow. And even if I neverunderstand it, I have to follow this path. It must be because I couldnot sever my ties with the Hindu community in my previous birththat I have been born into a Brahman family. In this way, through

7 ‘It is significant that Tagore got the idea for the novel from his meeting with Sister Nivedita, formerly

Margaret Noble, who was a fervent disciple of Swami Vivekananda, the founder of the Ramakrishna

Mission. In this connection, Krishna Kripalani writes: ‘Those who have read her [Sister Nivedita’s] books

know what a passionate advocate she was of everything Hindu. Tagore who liked and admired her for her

sincerity and courage must often have smiled when she preached Hinduism to him—more Hindu than the

Hindu. Once when she was staying as his guest at his Shelidah estate, she would insist, as they sat out on the

deck of the house boat in the evening, that he tell her a story. So he began telling the story of Gora and later

wrote it down’. G.V. Raj, Tagore the Novelist (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Limited, 1983), p.42.8 Meenakshi Mukherjee, ‘Introduction’ to Rabindranath Tagore, Gora (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1997),

p.xiv.9 Rabindranath Tagore, Gora (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1997), p.28.

CASTE MATTERS 165

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f E

dinb

urgh

] at

05:

33 3

1 Ju

ly 2

012

repeated rebirths, and within the ambit of the Hindu dharma andthe Hindu community, I shall reach the supreme goal of existence.If by mistake I were to swerve from this path, I shall have to returnto it only at the cost of re-doubled effort.10

The thrust of Tagore’s plot is Gora’s gradual disenchantment with his vision ofHinduism and particularly its tenets on caste, on which subject he has tocontend with criticism within the home itself from his foster-mother,Anandamoyi. In response to Gora’s demand that she relieve herself of theservices of the non-Hindu maidservant, Lachmiya, Anandamoyi tells him:

. . .it was only when you landed on my lap that I gave up allcustoms. Only when you take an infant into your arms do yourealise that nobody is born on earth with a caste. The moment Irealised this, from that moment I have been sure that if I were tolook down upon somebody else because he was of low caste and aChristian, then Ishwar would take you away from me. May youalways fill my arms and light up my home, I prayed, and I woulddrink water from the hands of every caste in the world.11

Troubled by his friend Binoy’s attraction towards Brahmo Samaj ideology—inhis opinion a renegade faith—and by his own feelings of ambivalence towardBrahmo Samaj ideologue Paresh Babu, Gora takes a trip to the countryside,hoping to quell his sense of disquiet. Yet as Mukherjee points out, theexcursion, which is reminiscent of the revivalist Swami Vivekananda’s travels asa wandering monk in different parts of India,12 turns out, in the words of G.V.Raj, to be ‘a journey into his innermost self’.13 Instead of finding reassurance,Gora discovers doubt. For the first time in his life he begins to observe howrural people live, closeted in their villages. He sees how Hinduism, his belovedreligion, serves to keep its followers divided and ignorant:

In each household, every ordinary action was performed under theunblinking eyes of society. People had a simple faith in socialcustom, nobody ever challenged even its smallest part. But none ofthe bondage of society, this adherence to custom, was giving themstrength to perform their tasks in the realm of work. There was nocreature more scared, more helpless, more unable to judge what

10 Ibid, p.29.11 Ibid., p.15.12 Mukherjee, ‘Introduction’, p.xiv.13 G.V. Raj, Tagore the Novelist (New Delhi: Starling Publishers Private Limited, 1983), p.44.

166 SOUTH ASIA

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f E

dinb

urgh

] at

05:

33 3

1 Ju

ly 2

012

was good for himself. Other than obeying custom they had noother goal in their lives, and they did not understand anything everwhich was explained to them. Under the threat of penalties, andthrough sectarian quarrels, they regarded prohibitions as thehighest truths. What must not be done—this was the concern thatshaped their nature and, by various rules forbidding something orother at every step, they had tied themselves head to foot. . . . Therewas no unity in this bondage that would make them stand shoulderto shoulder at times of adversity or of prosperity.14

But that was not all. Even as Gora recoils at evidence of the countless factionsand frictions within the Hindu fold, he finds unity among the Muslim villagershe encounters. The Muslims are not in discord amongst themselves. Theirreligious edicts, he concludes, do not tear them asunder:

During his visits to the villages Gora had also observed that therewas something among the Muslims which enabled them to standtogether. He noticed that whenever there was any trouble ordanger, the Muslims showed a solidarity that the Hindus lacked.He often asked himself why should there be this difference betweenthese two communities which lived so close to one another. Theanswer which occurred to him was not one he was prepared toaccept. It pained him greatly to concede that the Muslims wereunited in their religious faith and not merely in social practices.Custom did not tie up their lives needlessly, while the bonds ofreligion brought them close to each other. They came together notto say ‘no’ but to make a positive assertion of a principle to whichmen could respond at one call and lay down their lives ifnecessary.15

Still, though shaken, Gora clings to his faith and attempts to justify it byreference to an abstract notion of nationalism. Unable to prevent Binoy frommarrying Lolita, an adherent of the Brahmo Samaj, or to persuade his motheragainst aiding Binoy, Gora proclaims his continued commitment to his ownHindu theology which (in prophetic intimation of latter-day Hindutvathinking) conflates the destiny of his religion with that of his nation. ‘I wantto share the seat of dishonour which Bharatvarsha occupies at present,forsaken by the rest of the world, humiliated’, he proclaims defiantly. ‘This is

14 Tagore, Gora, pp.432–3.15 Ibid., p.434.

CASTE MATTERS 167

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f E

dinb

urgh

] at

05:

33 3

1 Ju

ly 2

012

my Bharatvarsha (land) of caste discrimination, of blind superstition, of idolworship’.16 The tone of defensiveness in these lines makes it obvious thatGora’s intransigence is based upon uncertain conviction.

Gora’s final enlightenment, of course, comes in the shape of his sensationaldiscovery of his own hybrid identity. This both overwhelms his sense of hisimmaculate heritage and prompts a recantation of his previous world view.Addressing Anandamoyi, he gushes:

Ma, you are my only mother. The mother for whom I have lookedeverywhere––all this time she was sitting in my house. You have nocaste, you do not discriminate against people, you do not hate––you are the image of benediction. You are my own Bharatvarsha.17

Many critics have passed harsh judgement on this fabricated denouement.18

Yet as G.V. Raj has argued, the ending (trite or not) is prepared for from thebeginning, through Gora’s encounters with conflict situations pertaining toHinduism both outside and inside himself.19

Rabindranath Tagore’s rhetorical assaults on the caste system in Gora andsome other writings can be seen as consistent with—and can in part beexplained by—his own Brahmo Samaj inheritance. In Tagore’s reckoning, thefounder of the Samaj, Raja Ram Mohun Roy, was quite simply the greatestIndian of the modern age.20 Moreover Tagore practised what he preached,refusing, in his own life, to be bound by the tenets of social exclusivenessexpected of a bhadralok (gentleman) and a Brahmin. For instance, in the mid1920s he courted the wrath of his peers by attending a conference ofNamasudras—erstwhile Chandals or untouchables—virtually the lowest of thelow in Bengali society.21 A.K. Biswas wonders ‘Why? What prompted him to

16 Ibid., p.324.17 Ibid., p.477.18 Among the critics who have expressed dissatisfaction with the ending of Gora are Nirad C. Chaudhuri,

‘Tagore and the Nobel Prize’, in Illustrated Weekly of India (11 March 1973), p.15; B.C. Chakravorty,

Rabindranath Tagore: His Mind and Art (New Delhi: Young India Publications, 1971), p.108; Sujit

Mukherjee, Passage to America (Calcutta: Bookland Private Limited, 1964), p.181; and S.C. Sen Gupta, The

Great Sentinal: A Study of Rabindranath Tagore (Calcutta: A. Mukherjee, 1948), p.219.19 Raj, Tagore the Novelist, pp.45–7.20 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Raja Ram Mohun Roy’, in The Visva-Bharati Bulletin (October, 1928 ), rpt. in

Nityapriya Ghosh (ed.), The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore: A Miscellany, Vol. 4 (New Delhi:

Sahitya Akademi, 2007), pp.575–8.21 The Bengali Namasudras (officially denominated Chandals until the Government of India Census of 1911)

were untouchables numbering 2,006,259 in the 1921 census. They were Bengal’s second largest caste after the

168 SOUTH ASIA

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f E

dinb

urgh

] at

05:

33 3

1 Ju

ly 2

012

do so?’22 Presumably he was bent on making a very public point by showing hissolidarity with the downtrodden.

Yet strangely this liberated man—who deliberately and cavalierly defied thetaboos of caste in his own life—demurred at attributing transgressivesubjectivity of the same order to caste-tormented people within his ownnarratives. To borrow a phrase from Sisir Kumar Das, Tagore’s stories aboutoutcastes in general and untouchables in particular were inevitably ‘narrativesof suffering’.23 His subalterns do not rebel. A prime example is the character ofPanchu in Ghare Baire (1915/1916). Described in the text as a ‘tired-out beast ofburden’,24 Panchu is among the poorest of the poor in post-PermanentSettlement Bengal,25 a landless peasant forced to toil on an estate owned by anabsentee landlord, and his life is extremely hard.

He is up before dawn every day, and with a basket of paan leaves,twists of tobacco, coloured cotton yarn, little combs, looking-glasses and other trinkets beloved to the village women, he wadesthrough the knee-deep water of the marsh and goes over to theNamasudra quarters. There he barters his goods for rice, whichfetches him a little more than their price in money. If he can getback soon enough he goes out again, after a hurried meal, to thesweetmeat sellers, where he assists in beating sugar for wafers. Assoon as he comes home, he sits at his shell-bangle making,plodding on often till midnight. All this cruel toil does not earn, forhimself and his family, a bare two meals a day during much morethan half the year. His method of eating is to begin with a goodfilling draught of water and his staple food is the cheapest kind ofseedy banana. And yet the family has to go with only one meal aday for the rest of the year.26

Mahishyas. Tagore’s participation in the Namasudra Conference has been discussed in some detail by A.K.

Biswas in his article ‘Two Events in Tagore’s Life’, in Mainstream, Vol.XLVIII, no.20 (8 May 2010).22 Ibid.23 Sisir Kumar Das, A History of Indian Literature 1911–1956 (New Delhi: Shitya Akademi, 1995), pp.301–

22.24 Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World (trans. Surendranath Tagore) (Delhi: Doaba Publications,

2002), p.73.25 For an insightful analysis of Panchu as a representative peasant figure of late nineteenth-century and early

twentieth-century Bengal, see Sumanta Bannerjee, ‘The Peasant in Ghare Baire’, in Saswati Sengupta,

Shampa Roy and Sharmila Purakayastha, Towards Freedom: Critical Essays on Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare

Baire (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007), pp.137–62.26 Tagore, The Home and the World, p.64.

CASTE MATTERS 169

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f E

dinb

urgh

] at

05:

33 3

1 Ju

ly 2

012

Panchu’s miseries are compounded by the fact that he is perenniallyaccountable to the dictates of a repressive Brahminical regime. On his wife’sdeath from consumption, for instance, the Brahmin priesthood makes himundergo ‘a purification ceremony to cleanse himself of sin and to propitiate hiscommunity’,27 an exercise which costs him ‘one hundred and twenty-threerupees’,28 a huge sum for a poor peasant to pay in those days. He pays, becausethe price of non-compliance would be social ex-communication. As Panchulaments to the protagonist Nikhilesh: ‘there is no escape from the offerings Ihave to make to the Brahmins’.29 Panchu does not rebel because he cannot.Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is right. Panchu is basically a ‘passive and placidcharacter, weak and vulnerable’.30

The inability to imagine outcastes having agency explains why Tagore, likeGandhi, failed to appreciate the importance of separate electorates awarded tothe so-called Depressed Classes via the Communal Award of the BritishGovernment in 1932.31 Gandhi, in fact, went on a fast intended to kill theaward, notwithstanding the support for it registered by the Depressed Classfollowers of B.R. Ambedkar, who had argued long and hard in its favour at theRound Table Conference held in London earlier that year.32 Never a fan ofgovernment intervention, Gandhi did not believe that toleration towardsHarijans, as he called untouchables, could be enforced by legislation. For him,untouchability was a sin demanding ‘repentance and reparation on the part ofthe suppressors. I am certain’, he declared, ‘that the moment is ripe for thechange of heart among them’.33 What is more, he feared that the concession ofseparate electorates would drive a permanent wedge through Hindu society:‘The possible consequences of separate electorates for Harijans fill me withhorror. . .separate electorates will create division among Hindus so much that it

27 Ibid., pp.72–3.28 Ibid., p.73.29 Ibid.30 Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, ‘Understanding Panchu: Swadeshi, Ghare Baire, and the Lower-Caste Peasants of

Eastern Bengal’, in Saswati Sengupta, Shampa Roy and Sharmila Purakayastha, Towards Freedom: Critical

Essays on Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare Baire (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007), pp.163–81.31 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Speech delivered on 20 September 1932 to Students and Faculty of Sriniketan and

Santiniketan’, in Sisir Kumar Das (ed.), The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore: A Miscellany, Vol. 3

(New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996), pp.326–8.32 Ambedkar had argued that the establishment of separate electorates, in which the Depressed Classes would

vote exclusively, apart from other social groups, to elect their own legislators, would be an enabling step

towards achieving political autonomy for the Depressed Classes.33 M.K. Gandhi cited in Eleanor Zelliot, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar and the Untouchable Movement (New

Delhi: Blue Moon Books, 2004), p.130.

170 SOUTH ASIA

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f E

dinb

urgh

] at

05:

33 3

1 Ju

ly 2

012

will lead to bloodshed’.34 Ambedkar dubbed Gandhi’s position wrong and‘coercive’.35

Interestingly however, Tagore—whose disagreements with Gandhi on crucialissues were legion—concurred absolutely with the Mahatma in disapproving ofseparate electorates.36 In a speech to the students and faculty of SantiniketanUniversity, he claimed that the ‘dismemberment of a large portion of Hindusociety’ would be ‘fatal to its wholeness’.

I ask them (the British Government) to imagine what would havehappened, given that the Roman Catholic community of Englandsuffered from a forcible deprivation of its common rights, if someforeign power [had] come and with efficient benevolence alienate[d]them from the rest of the nation? Very likely the [Roman Catholic]people would [have] resort[ed] to. . .violence. In our case. . .Mahatmaji has made use of an expression (a proverb) which ishis own.37

This uncharacteristic affirmation, on Tagore’s part, of the sanctity of the nationas an object of allegiance over the opposing claims of its constituent fragmentstragically underscores his failure, like that of Gandhi, to acknowledge theoutcastes’ aspirations for self-determination.

34 Ibid., p.140.35 B.R. Ambedkar, ‘States and Minorities: What are their Rights and How to Secure them in the Constitution

of Free India’, in Vasant Moon (ed.), Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches Vol. 1 (Mumbai:

Government of Maharashtra, 1979).36 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Letter to Madan Mohan Malviya’, 18 August 1934, in Sisir Kumar Das (ed.), The

English Writings of Rabindrath Tagore : A Miscellany, Vol. 3 (New Delhi : Sahitya Akademi, 1996), pp.806–7.37 Tagore, ‘Speech delivered on 20 September 1932 to Students and Faculty of Sriniketan and Santiniketan’,

pp.326–8.

CASTE MATTERS 171

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f E

dinb

urgh

] at

05:

33 3

1 Ju

ly 2

012