Sunday Posts

Unlike the American founders, the Founders of Modern India generally get a bad press. Indeed, many people do not think of them as Founders at all - India was there for thousands of years, they say - and merely see them as political operators who negotiated Independence, a bad one, with the British, only in order to grab power for themselves. That the creation of Modern India was an act of political imagination is overlooked with purpose and intention. That the 'founding' generation had to come up with the idea of timeless India which we now take for granted - and give us the sense of History that we now have - has been completely forgotten. Besides, we are now in a destructive frenzy of an adolescent tearing down the house they built: There was never a worse time to claim the Foundership of what is being considered a great country and a failed experiment at the same time. In this era of 'unfounding', speaking about Tagore's idea of India may only have the effe...

Today is the Birth Anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore.  Tagore was the first global Literary Superstar, the first Nobel Prize Winner from Asia, whose flowing robes and the white beard helped form the public image of an Indian sage on the global stage.  It is somewhat peculiar what Tagore is now known for. Given that many people reading this blog wouldn't know his name, I had to mention his Nobel prize. Yet, Tagore was somewhat resentful - and said so when he was facilitated in Calcutta after receiving the prize - that his countrymen would only recognise him only after the West had given him an award. The alternative way to tell who he was - that he was the man who wrote the National Anthem of India, as well as of Bangladesh - is equally problematic: Not just this brings up an old controversy (see An Exceptional Man ) but, at least in case of India, reminds one of a Cosmopolitan Republican Nationalism that the current Indian government so love to hate. Going by th...

Seventy years on, the Republic of India is now at one of those crossroads when its foundational ideas are being questioned. Its middle classes, in the throes of an existential crisis as the globalisation that made them reverses, have found their demon in the idea of India itself. Nations, usually, consider their origin stories with a special fondness and deep reverence, enshrining the creation ideas as the basis of all new imagination: Despite the passing of the years, the British therefore looks at the Glorious Revolution, the French to French Revolution, the Italians to Risorgimento and the Americans revere their Founding generation. But, in India, as a newly-rich, recently disappointed middle class hunt for the ghosts, they find their Republic flawed, its democracy rickety, its people disunited, and above all, the idea that unites it all misdirected. This makes a re-examination of the idea of India worthwhile. Surely, this is much discussed, but as the optimism turns to pess...

I was asked recently in a NDTV interview: What do you think Tagore would if he was alive today? My answer was that he would remain, first and foremost, a poet. That was indeed the safe answer, but I disappointed the interviewer. She was asking how Tagore would react to today's world - what life of action he might have chosen! Besides, Tagore the poet, however ubiquitous he may be in the life of the Bengalis, is less known: Most of the available translations are quite pedestrian, and his unique evocation of rural Bengal and his lyricism makes him somewhat out of time in our sceptical world. To imagine him as a poet in our day would involve imagining Tagore as a writer of blank verse and pop music, a leap of imagine that may not come very naturally. However, my answer was flawed: Tagore perhaps wanted people to see him as a poet and a mystic, and to remember him as such, but he lived a life of action. His most cogent identity was that of an education reformer and an educator, f...

That Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Bengali Polymath, Nobel Laureate and thinker, is one of the key influencers behind the idea of Modern India, is often a contested topic. Tagore is known for his literature, his Nobel Prize and for his authorship of Indian National Anthem (and, for that matter, the national anthem of Bangladesh, and even the national anthem of Sri Lanka, on which he had a direct influence), but much less for his political activities. In fact, other than the renunciation of Knighthood in the aftermath of Jallianwala Bagh massacre, which would most likely be counted as an empty gesture by an intellectual in Modern India, he was known for his distance from, rather than his support to, the Indian National Movement. While the leading figures of Indian National Movement, particularly Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, were close friends of Tagore, many other equally influential figures, like Subhas Chandra Bose, rejected what he called 'Vacuous Internationalism...

During April and May 2013, I travelled across India, covering about 10 cities over a few weeks, with two colleagues. My primary goal was to connect with educational institutions, who I wanted to partner with to deliver the courses we were developing then, mainly pathway qualifications that allowed an Indian student to study for the first couple of years of a Bachelors degree in India and enter an UK institution in the final year.  It was a trip full of stories, to be told over a lifetime, as we battled May heatwaves, managed erratic Indian transport and met a wide variety of people, businessmen, educators, students and parents. For my colleagues, exposed first time to India in all its intensity, it was exhausting and exasperating. For me, it was a rare opportunity to see India, and interior India and not just the posh parts of Mumbai or Delhi, with two vantage points all at once - from my own deeply Indian perspective, from the vantage point of my colleagues with whom I enjoyed a...

The Governor of the Indian state of Rajasthan has a new issue. He thinks the Indian national anthem is somewhat not right, as it praises the then English king, George the Vth. He has a specific, poetic suggestion to make - he wants to replace the word Adhinayak (meaning Leader, though he thinks it stands for Ruler) with Mangal (Good) in the lyric ( see the latest here ). Governorship is political retirement, but some people refuses to fade away. The governor in question, Kalyan Singh, presided over the demolition of Babri Masjid, the coming-out party of political Hiduvta which now triumphant in India, when he was the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. That was the crowning contribution in his career, one that he would be long remembered. He seems to be trying best it now, by dismembering the National Anthem - and by implication, its writer, Rabindranath Tagore, a bête noire for nationalists for good reason. Though the poetic suggestion is a new thing, the accusation is not. Th...

Rabindranath Tagore got a Nobel for Literature in 1913 and became institutionalised as a poet and a mystic. His ideas about education remain largely unknown, outside the scholarly work that appears from time to time. True, his educational practise gets some prominence because of Viswabharati, the university he created, but the fact that this has since become a Central University subsumed in the bureaucracies like any other university obscures most of its foundational principles. Instead of being an expression of the creative and integrative spirit that Tagore wanted his institution to represent, the university today is little different from any other than the curiosities such as its open classrooms and its annual rituals. The education in India, however, has come to a full circle. The doctrine of Higher Education in independent India did not draw much from Tagore's thinking, but rather depended on the technocratic ideals of the West and aimed at creating an elite who could as...

I have chosen to live outside India for more than a decade. This was my attempt to become Indian. I did not leave India because I felt constrained. Rather, I was comfortable. And, it is that comfort that I wanted to overcome. My persistent requests for transfers abroad, even to remote locations in Asia and Africa, were often met with puzzlement by my bosses, who could never figure out why I would want to go away, leaving what seemed to be a promising and safe career.  Eventually I went away, but I never really left. Most of my conversations always centred around India. All that I learnt along my way added to my perspectives and changed me. I lived in Bangladesh first, which made me cross the first boundary, that of religious stereotypes that afflicted so many conversations when I lived inside the cocoon in India. Travelling in South-East Asia opened up my mind to the value of working by hand, and challenged the deep-seated caste-based presumptions that I grew up with. And...

As India's democracy reaches a critical juncture, with a very real danger of a authoritarian take-over, Rabindranath Tagore's birth anniversary is a perfect occasion to revisit the founding idea of India once again. There are many things in his politics that we may need to dust up and reconsider: Tagore's political ideas, because of his inherent aversion of popular nationalism and enthusiasm about Pan-Asianism and universalism, were outside the mainstream of the Indian National Movement, seen as impractical and effectively shunned. He was seen mostly as the Poet and the mystic, someone whose politics remains in the domain of the ideas rather than action. Tagore himself, after a brief passionate involvement in politics during the division of Bengal by Lord Curzon in 1905, withdrew from political action: He never belonged to the political class, despite his iconic status and itinerant interventions, such as returning the Knighthood after the massacre of Amritsar in 1919. ...

I have now finished reading Pankaj Mishra's From The Ruins of the Empire, a fascinating tale of the idea of Asia in the time of European conquests. This is a colonial history in the reverse, a sensitive, balanced tale of interactions, tensions and ideas around the lives of men who made it. The story is structured around the lives of two central figures, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838 - 97) and Liang Qichao (1873 - 1929), and their many contemporaries who debated and developed the idea of the new Asia in the face of the advances and adventures of the newly industrialised Europe. Other prominent Asians, men like Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi, Rashid Rida, Sun Yet Sen, Lu Xun, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, leading men of Japan leading the Meiji restoration and imperial Japan, the young Ottomans and European Socialists all make an appearance, all in stark contrast with the old world colonialists such Lord Elgin, the Czar, David Lloyd George etc alongside a rhetoric-obsessed, duplicitous Woodr...

This is a bad time for globalism. The recession has renewed the fear of the others, and various politicians, from Japan to Italy to United States, are inventing foreign bogeymen to obscure their own failures. Companies, while desperate for ideas and for growth, are receding to respective homelands for safety: The only international bit they would still like to do is to keep their cashes stashed in tax havens. In fact, by doing so, they have given global business more bad press - Starbucks dodging taxes, Wal-Mart paying bribes and various banks, almost all of them, defrauding customers and governments alike. Critics can say that this was bound to happen and globalisation is a sham: But when it comes to climate change, nuclear disarmament, human rights, the issues that the same critics love, they concede that there is no alternative to concerted global action. I shall contend that global connections (or disconnections) are a function of technology and due to progress in transportati...

I remember that afternoon. The rain seemed to be tiring off intermittently; the wild wind was waking it up yet again. It was all darkness: I did not want to work. I took the instrument, And the tune of the rains flew out of it. She came to the door, and went again. Then, came out to the balcony. Then, slowly, came to the room and sat down in silence. Kept knitting. Then, stopped knitting and looked out of the window to the faded trees. The rain stopped, my music stopped. She went to do her hair. Nothing else: An afternoon of rains, music, darkness and silence. History is full of stories of kings and wars, dime a dozen. But, this afternoon, this frozen moment, would remain hidden in Time's chest like a rare treasure; Just two people will ever know of it. (Translated from Bengali, a poem by Rabindranath Tagore)

We sing glory to You, The Captain of the Indian mind, You, the maker of our destiny! The lands of Punjab, Sind , Gujarat and Maratha , The Dravidian Plains, Those of Utkal and Bengal, The mountains of Vindhya and Himalaya, The waters of the Jamuna and the Ganges, The dancing waves of the ocean, Rise up to chant your name, Pray for your blessings, And sing your greatness. You, gracious Lord, our Captain, The maker of India's destiny, Victory, victory, victory to thee. You invite everyone, with open arms, Hindus, Buddhists , Sikhs, Jains , Persians, Muslims and Christians; East and West come together And script a new unity Under your throne. The unifier of all, The maker of India's destiny, Glory, glory, glory to thee. Our endless journey, Through decline, fall, ascendance, and difficulties, Led by you, the Charioteer! Your clarion call Steer us through the revolution, You reliever of all. You, the great guide, The maker of India's...

Today, in parts of India and Bangladesh, celebrations will mark the 150 th Birth Anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore, largely known as a poet to the rest of world, but a polymath who shaped the language, education, music and art of his countrymen. Being a Bengali, I grew up in the shadow of his intellectual presence. I am no connoisseur of music, I shamefully must admit, but the renditions of Rabindrasangeet , the music and lyrics created by Tagore, were an inescapable part of my identity. His books filled our shelves and school curricula. We learnt to look at nature, god and love through his poetry. And, finally, growing up, we learnt to look at our country and its politics through the lens of his ideas. While I can keep going about Tagore's all-encompassing impact on our lives, it is his politics that I would want to talk about today. Indeed, he was not a political figure for the rest of the country, largely forgotten in the nationalist struggle and even branded an anglo...