Once again I draw your attention to the difficulties India
has had to encounter and her struggle to overcome them. Her problem was the
problem of the world in miniature. India is too vast in its area and too
diverse in its races. It is many countries packed in one geographical
receptacle. It is just the opposite of what Europe truly is, namely, one
country made into many. Thus Europe in its culture and growth has had the
advantage of the strength of the many as well as the strength of the one.
India, on the contrary, being naturally many, yet adventitiously one, has all
along suffered from the looseness of its diversity and the feebleness of its
unity. A true unity is like a round globe, it rolls on, carrying its burden easily;
but diversity is a many-cornered thing which has to be dragged and pushed
with all force. Be it said to the credit of India that this diversity was not
her own creation; she has had to accept it as a fact from the beginning of her
history. In America and Australia, Europe has simplified her problem by almost
exterminating the original population. Even in the present age this spirit of
extermination is making itself manifest, in the inhospitable shutting out of
aliens, by those who themselves were aliens in the lands they now occupy. But
India tolerated difference of races from the first, and that spirit of
toleration has acted all through her history.
Her caste system is the outcome of this spirit of
toleration. For India has all along been trying experiments in evolving a
social unity within which all the different peoples could be held together,
while fully enjoying the freedom of maintaining their own differences. The tie
has been as loose as possible, yet as close as the circumstances permitted.
This has produced something like a United States of a social federation, whose
common name is Hinduism.
India had felt that diversity of races there must be and
should be, whatever may be its drawback, and you can never coerce nature into
your narrow limits of convenience without paying one day very dearly for
it. In this India was right; but what she failed to realize was that in human
beings differences are not like the physical barriers of mountains, fixed for
ever—they are fluid with life's flow, they are changing their courses and their
shapes and volume.
Therefore in her caste regulations India recognized
differences, but not the mutability which is the law of life. In trying to
avoid collisions she set up boundaries of immovable walls, thus giving to her
numerous races the negative benefit of peace and order but not the positive
opportunity of expansion and movement. She accepted nature where it produces
diversity, but ignored it where it uses that diversity for its world-game of
infinite permutations and combinations. She treated life in all truth where it
is manifold, but insulted it where it is ever moving. Therefore Life departed
from her social system and in its place she is worshipping with all ceremony
the magnificent cage of countless compartments that she has manufactured….
However, what Western observers fail to discern is that in her caste system India in all seriousness accepted her responsibility to solve the race problem in such a manner as to avoid all friction, and yet to afford each race freedom within its boundaries. Let us admit India has not in this achieved a full measure of success. But this you must also concede, that the West, being more favourably situated as to homogeneity of races, has never given her attention to this problem, and whenever confronted with it she has tried to make it easy by ignoring it altogether. And this is the source of her anti-Asiatic agitations for depriving aliens of their right to earn their honest living on these shores. In most of your colonies you only admit them on condition of their accepting the menial position of hewers of wood and drawers of water. Either you shut your doors against the aliens or reduce them into slavery. And this is your solution of the problem of race-conflict. Whatever may be its merits you will have to admit that it does not spring from the higher impulses of civilization, but from the lower passions of greed and hatred.
You say this is human nature—and India also thought she knew human
nature when she strongly barricaded her race distinctions by the fixed barriers
of social gradations. But we have found out to our cost that human nature is
not what it seems, but what it is in truth; which is in its infinite
possibilities. And when we in our blindness insult humanity for its ragged appearance
it sheds its disguise to disclose to us that we have insulted our God. The
degradation which we cast upon others in our pride or self-interest degrades
our own humanity—and this is the punishment which is most terrible, because we
do not detect it till it is too late.[1]
Tagore, Nationalism (1917)
[1] Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (New York: MacMillan, 1918),
pp. 114-119. First published in 1917. Available
as a Project Gutenberg eBook from which the above text is excerpted. Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. He was the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize.
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