Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father let my country awake

This highly acclaimed poem forms part of one of Rabindranath Tagore’s best known works, Gitanjali, which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Tagore thus became the first non-western to win the coveted award. Gitanjali is an abstract dissertation with a vast ray of Infinite meanings and interpretations.

This prize-winning publication is a manifesto for all politicians, who wish to emerge as statesmen, to really read and reread it and unfold its universal message in their quest for leadership to create a new world of concord, harmony, universality and understanding. As it stands, despite the networks of international multi-lateral agencies, and the United Nations, our world is far, very far from its practice of any precepts of peace and goodwill and understanding.

 
A look at the newscasts on all the media makes one doubly sure that our world is no closer to that paradigm now or ever.  There are political, social, economic and moral convulsions across the board, with no hope of returning to any semblance of a world rooted in any one of these precepts.

Rabindranath Tagore is not only one of India’s stellar leaders, his philosophy as a universal man reflects his nationalism, patriotism, belief in peace and faith in God. Tagore’s name is set in the same template as Mahatma Gandhi, S. Radhakrishnan, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Swami Vivekenanda – all highly respected frontline leaders of India.

As the world marks his 160th birth anniversary on May 7, 2021, it would be apt to reflect on his universal work as a philosopher, thinker, Nobel Laureate, and visionary of all times.

Dr Eric Williams, then premier of Trinidad and Tobago,  while delivering the Tagore Address at the Queen’s Hall marking his centenary in May, 1961, said: “Tagore was an intellectual nationalist, not a nationalist politician. “As such, he ran afoul several times of the non-cooperation (movement led by Mahatma Gandhi against the British). He regarded non-violence as a moral principle which must spring from the depth of the mind and must not be forced upon man from some outside appeal or urgent need. He thought it, therefore, impossible of attainment where millions were concerned in a prolonged and complex struggle, and he would not agree that an independence won by a six-months of turning the spinning wheel was worth having-- for him it was too mechanical and simple”.

And in an address, marking Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary, on May 7, 2011, Trinidad and Tobago’s then foreign minister Winston Dookeran, called Tagore the philosopher who set the basis of the values of Indian independence; Mahatma Gandhi was the political strategist who charted the road forward and Jawaharlal Nehru became the practitioner of that independence.

Dookeran continued: “It is an important distinction to see the coming together of these three men and these three sets of ideas that culminated in what turned out to be the beginning of the de-colonization period in the world. It is that strategy without philosophy will not be successful, and that practice without strategy will also not be successful as a nation shapes its own future. And as we assess our own political situation, we must find the right equilibrium in getting the philosophy correct, getting the strategy right and getting the practice correct”.

Tagore the universal man had conceived of a world where man would be integral to nature and where cosmogony would find moorings in the full soul force, a world where cultures would talk, integrate and assimilate and where the creative impulse of man would unfold and seek fulfillment in merging with infinite consciousness.

In 1901.Tagore founded the school for children, Santiniketan, which meant Abode of Peace, that eventually blossomed into the Visva Bharati University. It was meant to be a confluence of the East and the West, and Tagore rightly coined the motto  “Yatra Ishwam Bhavati Eka Needam” (Where the whole world meets in a single nest).

Dookeran, in the final paragraph of his address, pointed out: “Tagore was a deep revolutionary thinker of our time, not in the way we have defined revolution in the history books of our country and elsewhere, we do not define it as an inner revolution. We define it as an outward expression of discontent or protest. Tagore sought to inject the concept of an “inner revolution” in the minds of all men everywhere”.

(The writer is an Indian-origin journalist based in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Views are personal. He can be contacted at paras_ramoutar@yahoo.com)