Tagore and hindutva

Cultivating Humanity and World Citizenship


http://ucl.academia.edu/CollinsMichael/Papers/948542/Rabindranath_Tagore_at_150_Representations_and_Misrepresentations


I am scandalized. This is what I came across today

Rabindranath Tagore and sickularism

An extract from the above

Rabindranath Tagore as an intellectual of high order was deeply derisive of sickular thinking. 

Today, Tagore's Gitanjali wont pass the sickular test, let alone win the Nobel Prize. In Gitanjali, Tagore envisaged an India “.Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit”.

Tagore envisaged an India where native Dharma (clear stream of reason, river metaphor) trumps desert dogmas - islam, christianity (dreary desert sand of dead habits); very reverse of sickularism.

Tagore did not leave anyone in doubt where he stood on the issue of Hindutva. In his remarkable work, Sandip’s story, one can see how derisive, Tagore was on sicko thinking, completely demolishing it.

Clicking on Sandip's story leads to this extract from Ghare Baire

Our work proceeds apace. But though we have shouted ourselves hoarse, proclaiming the Mussulmans to be our brethren, we have come to realize that we shall never be able to bring them wholly round to our side. So they must be suppressed altogether and made to understand that we are the masters. They are now showing their teeth, but one day they shall dance like tame bears to the tune we play.

"If the idea of a United India is a true one," objects Nikhil, "Mussulmans are a necessary part of it."

"Quite so," said I, "but we must know their place and keep them there, otherwise they will constantly be giving trouble."

Someone completely unfamiliar with Tagore or Ghare Baire is likely to think Sandip represents Tagore's views. I think that Ghare Baire explores the flip side of mass movements. It is Nikhil who voices Tagore's views 

"So you want to make trouble to prevent trouble?"

"What, then, is your plan?"

"There is only one well-known way of avoiding quarrels," said Nikhil meaningly.

I know that, like tales written by good people, Nikhil's discourse always ends in a moral. The strange part of it is that with all his familiarity with moral precepts, he still believes in them! He is an incorrigible schoolboy. His only merit is his sincerity. The mischief with people like him is that they will not admit the finality even of death, but keep their eyes always fixed on a hereafter.

I have long been nursing a plan which, if only I could carry it out, would set fire to the whole country. True patriotism will never be roused in our countrymen unless they can visualize the motherland. We must make a goddess of her. My colleagues saw the point at once. "Let us devise an appropriate image!" they exclaimed. "It will not do if you devise-- it," I admonished them. "We must get one of the current images accepted as representing the country--the worship of the people must flow towards it along the deep-cut grooves of custom."

But Nikhil's needs must argue even about this. "We must not seek the help of illusions," he said to me some time ago, "for what we believe to be the true cause."

"Illusions are necessary for lesser minds," I said, "and to this class the greater portion of the world belongs. That is why divinities are set up in every country to keep up the illusions of the people, for men are only too well aware of their weakness."

"No," he replied. "God is necessary to clear away our illusions. The divinities which keep them alive are false gods."

Here is the link to the full book in this Writings of Tagore Here is Amartya Sen on Tagore

Now another gem based on work by Arun Shourie and his team http://zoomindianmedia.wordpress.com/2009/12/08/decode-sickular-lies-on-indian-history/

From a review of Shourie's book

The largely Marxist membership of the Indian Council of Historical Research appointed by the socialistic Congress party, which was in power for nearly all of the fifty years since independence, was reconstituted in July 1998 by the Bharatiya Janata Party, currently ruling at the center. Unfortunately, it will take a long time for undoing the harm done by the Marxist historians to the Indian psyche: "they have used these institutions to sow in the minds of our people [the Hindus] the seeds of self-hatred."

 K,N.Panikkar's oft quoted response to Shourie

Arun Shourie is not a historian. He is a mythologist of Hindu communalism. He is a political pornographer.

Here is another extract  http://www.indowindow.com/akhbar/article.php?article=135&category=6&issue=19

Ten year old article written in 2002.