View of THE ETERNAL HUMAN VALUES GLORIFIED IN THE WRITINGS OF RABINDRANATH TAGORE

(1)

ACCENT JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS ECOLOGY & ENGINEERING

Peer Reviewed and Refereed Journal, IMPACT FACTOR: 2.104, (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL) ISSN No. 2456-1037

Vol. 02, Issue 01,January2017 Available Online: www.ajeee.co.in/index.php/AJEEE

1

THE ETERNAL HUMAN VALUES GLORIFIED IN THE WRITINGS OF RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Dr. Subhalaxmi Tripathi

Associate Professor of English, G.G.D.C., D.L.W., Varanasi Tagore was deeply influenced by the

Vedas, the Upanishads, Lord Buddha, the devotional poets and also the Baul folk singers. The spiritual humanism of the Upanishads touched him profoundly and formulated his philosophical outlook. His Religion of Man enshrines the idea of the humanity of God or the divinity of man.

Rabindranath was a votary of ahimsa or non-violence. He believed that friendship, fraternity and love were the only means of human welfare. His writings are resplendent with the elements of sacrifice, forgiveness, kindness, compassion, love, unity, equality and peace which are universal humanistic values. The concept of non- injury to the entire creation permeates his thoughts, his being, his actions, his speech, his writings and his artistic creations.

Tagore was against violence of any kind, whether it was practiced by the colonial rulers or their opponents. In the early 1900s, he was involved in the Swadeshi campaign against the British, but withdrew when the movement turned violent. Out of deep anguish and unbearable grief he renounced the knighthood bestowed upon him by the British government in protest against the atrocities in Jallianwala Bagh in 1919.

Although he was deeply religious and spiritual and firmly believed in the innate divinity of man, he was dead against communalism and religious orthodoxies. In his plays, Sati and A Sojourn in Hell, he focuses on the cruel barbarities which are committed in the name of religion. The Story of a Muslim Woman is the last short story composed by Tagore in 1941, in which he ruthlessly attacks social evils and communal conflict. At a time when India was witnessing the worst communal riots, Tagore pleaded for religious harmony by marrying off a Hindu girl Kamala to a Muslim boy whose father had saved her from bandits.

A close and careful study of Tagore's writings shows that they contain all the basic values of humanism. Tagore

believed in the equality of all human beings and protested against all distinctions of race, sex, caste, class, language or religion. He strongly protests against the inhuman practice of untouchability in many of his short stories and in his play Chandalika. In Muktadhara and Red Oleanders, he dramatises the liberation of human spirit from the stranglehold of machines and colonial powers. He bitterly condemns the exploitation of the weaker races by colonial rulers. He believed that lust, greed and love of comfort have produced ugly sores in the body of civilization in the form of hovels and brothels, vindictive penal codes, cruel prison system and the exploitation of foreign races (Tagore : 1993 : 90).

Tagore gives expression to his deep hatred of tyranny and social injustice in plays like Muktadhara, King and Queen and Red Oleanders. According to Tagore, the problems of bonded labour, child labour, slum life, prostitution, physical torture and political exploitation can be solved only when 'we know man as a spirit and we know him as our own' (Tagore : 1993 : 91).

Tagore like all other humanists believed that the object of education is the freedom of mind. According to him, the highest education is that which does not merely give information, but makes our life in harmony with all existence. He asserts that the purpose of education should be nothing short of the highest purpose of man, the fullest growth and freedom of the soul. He had established the Vishwabharati, an international university at Shantiniketan, where education aimed at the comprehensive development of the character and personality of students.

Tagore worked hard for the upliftment and development of the common man; with his limited resources and with the money he received from the Nobel prize, he had set up rural hospitals, roads, ponds, rural banks which lent money to farmers at nominal rates of interest and agricultural development

(2)

2

centres. At Shriniketan near Shantiniketan, he had set up a centre for rural industries and handicrafts. He believed that the poet hailing from the working class could realistically voice the emotions and experiences of the workers.

In his poem, The Poet of Man he hails the poet who is close to the soil; shares the peasant's life and becomes his kin through work and action (Tagore: 1995:

240).

A study of Tagore's poems reveals that they are permeated with his intense love for mankind and deep concern for human welfare, freedom and dignity. They bitterly denounce the European colonialist pillage of Africa, the Japanese invasion of China, Nazi brutalities in Europe and the bloody savagery of the second world-war.

In his poems Akla Chalore and Awakening of the Waterfall Tagore sang the glory of the indomitable human spirit.

In many of them, Tagore has glorified the dignity of women and championed their empowerment and emancipation.

In his play, Nature's Revenge he expresses the typical humanistic aversion to renunciation and asceticism and glorifies the earthly life of man. In Malini and Natir Puja, the eternal human values of mercy, compassion, tolerance and sacrifice have been upheld. Through his plays, Tagore spreads his humanistic message that evil may be won by goodness, enmity by friendship, hatred by love and cruelty by compassion.

The Cycle of Spring and Autumn Festival highlight the harmonious interrelationship between man and nature. Man can learn the secret of rejuvenescence by an identification with the dynamism of the eternal life of Nature.

The plays also invite man to join the festivity and celebration of nature.

Colonization, militant nationalism, war, mechanization of human beings, communalism, untouchability, ill- treatment of women and children and sati-system are the running motifs of his plays. In them the struggling humanity always emerges victorious and death or defeat cannot crush the immortal spirit of man.

Tagore's short stories project the silent agonies of the underdogs, the exploited peasants, the suffering women and helpless children. His stories are

notable for their deep humanism, warmth of human relationships, down-to-earth realism and profound psychological insight.

In The Pedlar from Kabul, Little Master's Return and The Postmaster, Tagore upholds the dignity of labour. He portrays the working class with deep sympathy and understanding. He affirms that all human beings are equal and the serving class is often morally much superior to their masters. He voices his strong protest against the dowry system, child-marriage, gender injustice and the ill-treatment of women and children. In The Inscrutable Woman, The Wife's Letter, The Laboratory and Fury Appeased, he portrays the emancipated New Woman, who is brave, determined, independent, progressive and open- minded.

In stories like Holiday and Housewife, Tagore voices his strong protest against the physical and mental torture of children. His child heroes are innocent, intelligent, carefree and freedom loving. Tagore champions the rights of little children and emphasizes that they have an independent personality and they ought to be respected and sympathetically treated.

As Rabindranath had utmost faith in the inherent divinity of the human spirit, he felt that death was powerless against the free spirit of man. Death could destroy only the external body of flesh and bones, but the invincible spirit of man could never be conquered by death.

In poem No. 7 in Sesh Lekha, he asserts that death is only a shadow and has no power to swallow life's immortality.

Death recurs frequently in Tagore's plays always resulting in liberation, transformation, transcendence or self-realization in the other characters.

In Muktadhara, the death of prince Abhijit leads to the liberation of the waterfall which had been dammed to create an artificial famine in Shivtarai due to scarcity of water. In Red Oleanders, the death of Ranjan awakens the conscience of the king who joins Nandini and the rebellious workers fighting the governors and the royal army. In The Sacrifice, the self sacrifice of Jaya Singha at the feet of the image of goddess Kali is an eye-opener to hard-hearted Raghupati who throws the idol into the river and walks out of the

(3)

3

temple with the beggar-girl Aparna who launches a crusade against animal sacrifice. In The King and the Queen, the self sacrifice of prince Kumarsen and queen Sumitra utterly transforms the blood-thirsty King Vikram who realizes his folly. In his essay entitled My Religion Tagore writes: 'To know life truly, one must see life introduced through death' (Tagore : 1953 : 61).

The lust for material, national and military powers has transformed human beings into heartless machines. Man has reduced himself to his minimum in pursuit of wealth and power. When the callous rudeness of power, he observes, runs amuck in the broadway of humanity, it scares away by its grossness the precious human ideals which men have cherished with their martyrdom of centuries.

Tagore boldly opposes fascism and militarism in all their forms and manifestations. During and after the First World War, Tagore's Gitanjali resounded like a passionate appeal for universal peace, love and harmony. When the ominous storm of a new world war began to brew again in 1934, together with the progressive writers of many others countries, he appealed to the World Peace Conference in Brussels to fulful the dream he had long cherished, the dream of the liberation of the eternally fettered human mind (Tagore : 1995 : 39).

The entire Tagore canon is suffused with the message of undying hope for human freedom. Tagore's concept of freedom is not merely restricted to political freedom. He aspires for total freedom of human body, mind and soul. In his poem No. 35 in the Gitangali, he dreams of a heaven of freedom in this world where the human mind and conscience would be liberated from fear, hatred, narrowness, ignorance and irrationality. He aspires for a world that is united by the bonds of love where the narrow domestic walls are non- existent. He prays that knowledge be free and the mind should be led forward by the forces of goodness to 'ever widening thought and action'.

Tagore sought to spread the message of human unity, and brotherhood. In his novel Gora, he presents an epic of modern Indian history. No other book gives so masterly

an analysis of the complex Indian social life with its teeming contradictions and deep inherent unity.

The protagonist of the novel, Gour Mohan or Gora is intensely patriotic and also a staunch orthodox Hindu. He was born of English parents but adopted and brought up by a pious Brahmin family.

The revelation of the parentage is like a blinding flash of light. In an instant, he becomes altogether rootless. The revelation of the truth brings about his release from his orthodox ideas. In the sudden access of freedom from the inner stranglehold of his self-imposed obligations ready to rewrite his destiny, he breaks into the voice of a rhapsody:

Today I am just an Indian. There is no struggle within me between Hindu and Muslim and Christian. They all belong to me and I belong to them all.

(Tagore: 1998: 241).

CONCLUSION

According to Tagore, the entire creation springs forth from infinite joy. In his essay My Religion, he writes that 'it is joy from which beings are born, it is joy towards which they proceed and it is joy into which they enter' (Tagore: 1992: 61).

The blissful aspect of this joy does not renounce evil, but transcends it. This one whole, non-dualistic aspect of joy is achieved only by bringing all divisions, all contradictions to the their perfected form, and not by denying them.

Rabindranath advocates the ideal of unity and harmony and not uniformity and identity. Nations should preserve their identity, for each nation has a right to its expression as a part of the whole.

Each culture must bring its own contribution to the world.

REFERENCES

1. Tagore, Rabindranath, Red Oleanders. New Delhi: Macmillan, 1992.

2. Tagore, Rabindranth, The Religion of Man London: Allen and Unwin, 1961

3. Tagore, Rabindranth, Three Plays, Tr. Lal, Ananda, New Delhi: OUP, 2004.

4. Tagore, Rabindranth, Three Plays, Tr. Marjorie Sykes. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995.

5. Ayyub, Abu Sayeed. Tagore's Quet Calcutta:

Papyri's, 1980.

6. Chakravarti, Aniya (ed). A Tagore Reeta London:

Macmillan an 1961.

7. Thempson, Edward: Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist. New Delhi: OUP, 1995

(4)

4

8. Tagore, Rabindranat, Collected Poems and Plays. New Delhi: Macmillan, 1966.

9. Tagore, Rabindranath Hungry Stones and Other Stories. Calcutta: Macmillan, 1995.