Rabindranath tagore,

the indian nation,

and its outcasts

sekhar Bandyopadhyay · victoria university of wellington

Abstract
It is not always remembered that Rabindranath
Tagore, the first Asian to receive a Nobel Prize in literature
in 1913, was also an ardent critic of Western nationalism
and the nation-state. In his view, while Western concepts
of nationalism were associated with conflict and conquest,
harmony was the theme of Indian civilization and the Indian
concept of nationhood. But he often felt uncomfortable
in reconciling this idea of inclusive nationhood with the
persistent problem of untouchability, manifest in the caste
system in Indian society. This essay examines his ideas on
caste and untouchability in the context of his writings on
nationalism and argues that in Tagore’s ideas we might look
for an alternative solution to India’s continuing problem of
social exclusion based on caste.
“Our real problem in India is not political. It is
social,” Rabindranath Tagore writes in a 1916 essay entitled
“Nationalism in India.”1 He chastised nationalist leaders for
clamoring for political freedom before addressing the extant
social issues. This idea had already taken shape in his notion of
atmasakti (self empowerment) delineated in a programmatic
form in his Swadeshi Samaj (indigenous society) address in
1904, in which he transported the concerns of nationalism
away from the state and into the realm of the community, and
preached for working for national liberation through village
reconstruction. Sumit Sarkar has elaborately described this
concept of “constructive swadeshi,” which became one of the
dominant themes in Bengal’s public life during the Swadeshi
movement after the Bengal Partition of 1905.2
Tagore’s first experience of direct involvement in
1
Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (San Fransisco: The Book
Club of California, 1917), 117.
2
Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903-1908
(New Delhi: Peoples Publishing House, 1973), 52-4, passim.

This paper was originally presented at a conference on Rabndranath Tagore held at Murdoch University, Perth, sponsored by
Indian Council for Cultural Relations, in May 2012. The author also thanks all those who commented on the paper.

34 HARVARD ASIA QUARTERLY 15.1 (2013) | Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nation, and Its Outcasts
nationalist politics was during this Swadeshi period. He soon
grew disenchanted with the movement, as he saw in it the
contestation between two forms of nationalism: one that was
exclusive, aggressive, and full of hatred, and another that was
constructive, as based on the notion of self-improvement. At
the one end was an extreme form of nationalism, which rested
on an imagination of desh (country) as the supreme goddess;
at her alter, extreme sacrifices were to be made. Tagore
could see the dangers of this form of nationalism, because
hatred might also turn inward, as it did, resulting in Hindu-
Muslim conflicts. Hence, his preference was for constructive
nationalism, where the welfare of the people acquired
supreme importance. Desh, in this construct, was not just
the land, but rather consisted of its people. The goddess of
this motherland did not tend to supersede the supreme god
who resided in the hearts of all human beings. This humanist
nationalism was not exclusive and did not breed hatred, but
was universalist in its epistemological focus and rested on
the idea of improvement for all people.3 Tagore’s preference
was amply reflected in his famous novel Ghare Baire [The
Home and the World] (1915), wherein he also showed how
both varieties of nationalism had failed during the Swadeshi
era because of a lack of mass support. The post-Permanent
Settlement impoverished peasantry of Bengal – mainly the
Muslim and the untouchables or Namasudra peasants in
the eastern districts – remained untouched by this Swadeshi
nationalism. They were often coerced into submission and
Tagore’s disapproval of such coercive politics permeates the
novel.
Tagore’s disapproval of aggressive nationalism
eventually developed into a forceful critique of the Western
concept of “Nation” by 1915-16 when he visited Japan and
USA. “What is this Nation?” Tagore asked. His answer was:
“A nation, in the sense of the political and economic union
of people, is that aspect which a whole population assumes
when organized for a mechanical purpose.” That purpose, in
his view, was relentless pursuit of self-aggrandizement, and
nation in that sense was “organized self-interest of a whole
people, where it is the least human and the least spiritual.”4
To it, men surrender their conscience and morality. It only
breeds insatiable greed for wealth and power. This nationalism
“teaches … that a country is greater than the ideals of
humanity.”5 And this madness of competition also affects
others: “it goads all its neighboring societies with greed of
3
See Rabindranath Tagore, “Ghare Baire,” in Rabindra Rachanab-
ali, vol. IX, birth centenary edition (Calcutta: Government of
West Bengal, 1368), 419, 424-5, 429, 466-7, 472-4, 477-8.
4
Tagore, Nationalism, 26.
5
Tagore, Nationalism, 127.
material prosperity, and consequent mutual jealousy, and by
the fear of each other’s growth into powerfulness.”6 In Tagore’s
view this competition for power and resources invariably
led to conflict, as it would naturally generate a tendency of
a powerful nation to dominate others. “For greed of wealth
and power,” he further writes, “can never have a limit, and
compromise of self-interest can never attain the final spirit
of reconciliation.”7 Western nationalism in Tagore’s view was
thus intrinsically connected to imperialism: “the spirit of
conflict and the conquest,” he wrote, “is at the origin and in
the center of the Western nationalism.”8
By contrast, harmony in Tagore’s view was the main
theme of Indian civilization and the Indian concept of
nationhood. “India has been trying to accomplish her task,”
he wrote, “through social regulation of differences, on the one
hand, and the spiritual recognition of unity, on the other.”9
This idea of a spiritual and harmonious nationalism emanated
from his particular reading of Indian history. In a seminal
essay called “Bharatbarsher Itihas” or “History of India”
written in 1902, Tagore spelled out the inclusive nature of
Indian civilization. He argued that while India was subjected
to a series of foreign invasions by the Greeks, Scythians,
Huns, Arabs, Persians, Afghans, and Mongols, many of these
foreigners later embraced this civilization and in the course
of time were themselves “Indianized,” leaving their mark on
her art and culture. In a poem called “Indian pilgrimage”
(“Bharat teertha”) Tagore described India as a meeting ground
for various races of people rather than simply a country or a
territorial unit: “From the shore of vast humanity none will
turn back or be turned back,” he wrote in this poem. His
motherland was not the bloodthirsty mother goddess who
always demanded human sacrifice (as in his play Bisarjan),
but a loving and nurturing mother. “Her mission,” Tagore
wrote, “has been like that of a hostess to provide proper
accommodation to her numerous guests whose habits and
requirements are different from one another. It is giving rise to
infinite complexities whose solution depends not merely on
tactfulness but sympathy and true realization of the unity of
man.”10 Tagore thus privileged humanism over the rationalist
or “tactful” process of nation building and proffered a concept
of nationhood that reconciled contradictions, yet maintained
diversity or difference.
It was in this assimilative power of Indian civilization,
Tagore thought, that India could claim her difference from
6
Tagore, Nationalism, 19-20.
7
Tagore, Nationalism, 22.
8
Tagore, Nationalism, 33.
9
Tagore, Nationalism, 15.
10
Tagore, Nationalism, 15-6.

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is Professor of Asian History at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His primary research
interest is in nationalism and the caste question in colonial and post-colonial India. Some of his recent books in this area are
Caste, Culture and Hegemony: Social Dominance in Colonial Bengal (Sage, 2004), From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern
India (Orient Longman, 2004), Decolonization in South Asia: Meanings of Freedom in Post-independence West Bengal (Routledge,
2009), and (editor) Nationalist Movement in India: A Reader (OUP, 2009). He has also published on the Indian
Diaspora in New Zealand. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nation, and Its Outcasts | HARVARD ASIA QUARTERLY 15.1 (2013) 35
 Europe, because here the idea of “India” developed more
as an inclusive civilizational community rather than as a
political territorial statist concept.11 The spiritual essence of
Indian unity in Tagore’s view could not even be rationally
defined or described, but like life in a body it needed to be
felt or experienced.12 This felt-community was thus different
from the modern imagined communities.
And it was in these thoughts that there were remarkable
similarities between Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi, who was
also developing the idea of a civilizational nation around the
same time. In Hind Swaraj (1909), in response to the question
“Who is the nation?” Gandhi wrote: “It is only those Indians
… who conscientiously believe that Indian civilization is the
best…” This civilization flourished in a geophysical space that
was linguistically differentiated, he admits. But we learned
each other’s language, Gandhi argued, and visited each other’s
regions as pilgrims. And this civilization was not exclusive,
as he went further: “The introduction of foreigners does not
necessarily destroy the nation, they merge in it. A country is
one nation only when such a condition obtains in it.”13
Tagore’s and Gandhi’s concept of nation was thus
certainly different, as here the demarcation line between “us”
and “them” remains fuzzy. Ashish Nandy has described Tagore
and Gandhi as “counter-modernist critic[s]” of the imperial
West, offering a model of nationalism and nationhood that
could unite India at a social rather than political level.14
But was the civilizational core of their historical nation as
inclusive as they claimed?
In 1936, the Dalit (untouchable) leader Dr. Bhimrao Ramji
Ambedkar in a hard-hitting lecture titled the “Annihilation
of Caste” questioned in no uncertain words the very inclusive
nature of this Indian civilization, standing, as he thought,
on Hinduism and its inimitable shastras (holy scriptures). In
his reading of Indian history the foundational principle of
this civilization was the Chaturvarna system (varnashrama),
which he described as “the most vicious system” that
condemned several million untouchables into the status of
social outsiders in their own land.15 Tagore was certainly
aware of this anomaly and in fact often felt defensive about
the caste system when travelling overseas:
Many people in this country [America] ask me what is happening
11
For a broader discussion of Tagore’s concept of civilizational na-
tion, see Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Talking Back: The Idea of Civi-
lization in the Indian Nationalist Discourse (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2011).
12
Rabindranath Tagore, “Bharatbarsher itihas,” Bhadra 1309
[1902], Chirantan Rabindra Rachanabali, CD-ROM (Kolkata:
Celcius Technologies Pvt. Ltd, nd).
13
M.K. Gandhi, “Hind Swaraj,” in Hind Swaraj and other writings,
ed. Anthony Parel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 52, 115-16.
14
Ashish Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath
Tagore and the Politics of Self (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1994).
15
B.R. Ambedkar, “Annihilation of Caste,” in The Essential Writ-
ings of B.R. Ambedkar, ed. Valerian Rodrigues (New Delhi: Ox-
ford University Press, 2002), 263-305.
36 HARVARD ASIA QUARTERLY 15.1 (2013) | Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nation, and Its Outcasts
as to the caste distinctions in India. But when this question
is asked me, it is usually done with a superior air. And I feel
tempted to put the same question to our American critics with a
slight modification, “What have you done with the Red Indians
and the Negro?” For you have not got over your attitude of caste
toward them.16
But while his idea of Bharat teertha could discursively
grapple with the communal question or Hindu-Muslim
relations by interrogating the idea of Muslims being
“outsiders,” its applicability to the caste question remained
problematic. He recognized that untouchability was a blot on
Indian civilization and needed eradication, but like Gandhi,17
he too believed in caste as a non-competitive system of social
organization, much better than conflict ridden race relations
of the West. It was “from the beginnings of history,” he wrote,
that “India has had her own problem constantly before her
– it is the race problem.” By “race problem” he meant “caste
distinctions,” which he thought were much less violent than
they were in the West.18 “India tolerated difference of races
from the first,” he believed, and the “caste system is the
outcome of this spirit of toleration.”19 By associating specific
occupations to different castes, the system had succeeded in
“allaying for good the interminable jealousy and hatred of
competition,” which was the hallmark of Western societies.20
In this way India was able to “avoid all frictions and yet to
afford to each race freedom within its boundaries.”21 In other
words, he too believed with Gandhi that varnashrama was a
harmonious system of social division of labor – uncolonized
– and therefore, a unique marker of Indian difference and her
civilizational superiority over the West. Ambedkar, however,
differed seriously, as he pointed out: “The caste system is not
merely a division of laborers which is quite different from
division of labor – it is a hierarchy in which the division of
laborers are graded one above the other. … This division of
labor is not spontaneous, it is not based on natural aptitudes
… [but on the] social status of the parents.”22
In Tagore’s view, however, the only problem of this
caste system was that it lacked dynamism and left no space
for internal mobility:
India had felt that diversity of races there must be and should
be … but what she failed to realize was that in human beings
differences are not like the physical barriers of mountains, fixed
forever – 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
16
Tagore, Nationalism, 118.
17
For discussion on Gandhi’s ideas on caste and untouchablity, see
Bhikhu Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of
Gandhi’s Political Discourse (New Delhi: Sage, 1989).
18
Tagore, Nationalism, 118.
19
Tagore, Nationalism, 137.
20
Tagore, Nationalism, 138.
21
Tagore, Nationalism, 139.
22
Ambedkar, “Annihilation,” 263.
 opportunity of expansion and movement.23
This rigidity raised “fixed barriers of social gradation,”24
which “impose[d] upon a considerable portion of humanity
the galling yoke of inferiority.”25 This needed rectification
and he criticized the nationalist leaders for trying to
achieve political freedom without first addressing this social
injustice. Here we see remarkable agreement between Tagore
and Ambedkar, who also believed that time had come to
“recognize that there is nothing fixed, nothing eternal,
nothing sanatan; that everything is changing, that change is
the law of life for individuals as well as for society.”26 But
the two differed seriously on how to change this apparently
unchanging tradition.
Tagore was full of sympathy for the untouchable poor
peasants who remained excluded from the nation’s social
space. But unlike Ambedkar, he was confident that Indian
nationalism was capable of resolving this anomaly of her
civilization through righteous self-consciousness, just as
Gora, the main character of his famous novel of the same
name, realized it. Gora’s orthodoxy, his unquestioning faith
in Hinduism and caste system are shaken when he steps out
of his comfort zone and moves around in the villages and sees
the day to day degradation of humanity. That faith is finally
unsettled when he discovers his own hybrid origin, being a
mutiny orphan of Irish descent, having been raised by Hindu
Brahman foster parents. He then discovers the real face of
Indian civilization by looking at the liberalism of his own
loving mother, whom he describes in this way: “You have no
caste, you make no distinctions, and have no hatred – you
are only the image of our welfare! It is you who are India.”27
If this was rather an emotive image of a loving, nurturing
inclusive Indian civilization, in his novel Ghare Baire Tagore
formulates a more practical vision of emancipation. In this text,
the untouchable peasants of eastern Bengal are represented by
the pitiable character of Ponchu, who suffers incessantly at
the hands of the overzealous Swadeshi volunteers and their
overbearing zamindar (landlord) patron, Harish Kundu.28
Ponchu remains almost voiceless; he is a passive and placid
character, weak and vulnerable – “emaciated by hunger,
blind in ignorance.”29 His own understanding of nationhood
remains untold in the narratives of elite nationalism because
he cannot speak. So Ponchu’s liberation would come not
through his rebellion, but through noble zamindar Nikhiles’s
patronage and the reformist Chandrakantababu’s protection
and moral training – in other words, through the good will of
the civilized, socially conscious individuals who could make
a lasting change.
23
Tagore, Nationalism, 137-38.
24
Tagore, Nationalism, 140.
25
Tagore, Nationalism, 146.
26
Ambedkar, “Annihilation,” 304.
27
Quoted in Rini Bhattacharya Mehta, “In the shadow of the Na-
tions: Dissent as Discourse in Rabindranath Tagore’s Political
Writings, 1914-1941,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
35.1 (2012): 188.
28
See Tagore, Ghare Baire, 479.
29
Ibid., 483; translation added.
Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nation, and Its Outcasts | HARVARD ASIA QUARTERLY 15.1 (2013)
In real life, however, the Ponchus of rural east Bengal
did not only suffer in silence; they also spoke, resisted, and in
some cases triumphed. It was since 1872 that the Namasudras
of eastern Bengal had started organizing themselves and
voicing their protest against social discrimination. During the
Swadeshi era they actively resisted the nationalist volunteers
and their boycott movement. This alienation from nationalism
continued into the period of Gandhian mass movements.30
But Tagore does not allow that rebellion any space in the
narrative structure of his novel, because like Gandhi, he also
believed that elimination of untouchability should come
through social reform, not through social upheaval. Rebellion
was neither necessary nor desirable.
In the past, Tagore believed, the bhakti movement under
the leadership of saints like Nanak, Kabir, and Chaitanya
had shown the way “by preaching one God to all races of
India.”31 This tradition of a spiritual universalist solution
could be tried again in the present, and so like Gandhi he
made a fervent appeal to Brahmins to come out with purified
hearts and to hold the hands of everyone (“Eso Brahman
shuchi kori mon dharo haat sabakar”). In this way India
could achieve social unity without losing social diversity or
jeopardizing social harmony.32 In his poem “Bharat Teertha,”
he advocated for the sacred pitcher (mangalaghat) of Indian
unity to be filled with water touched by everyone. This was
radical, no doubt, as Rini Bhattacharya Mehta has recently
argued.33 But for Tagore it was not unprecedented, as this
ideal of spiritual unity had already been established by a
host of medieval bhakti saints who had created a social space
where discriminatory boundaries of caste could be effectively
interrogated, even dismantled. But did their dissent not also
invite hostility, resistance, and conflict? Was a harmonious
resolution of the caste question at all possible?
One may argue here that, like Gandhi, Tagore was
possibly misreading inequality as diversity in the nation’s
history and ignoring the power aspects of caste relations –
understating both the power of domination and the power of
rebellion. Dalit leaders like Amdedkar therefore rejected such
reformist positions, in addition to religious solutions like
temple entry, and suggested instead a political solution that
would empower the Dalit by securing them political rights
of citizenship. Ambedkar preferred a reform that would be
“purely secular in character.” This did not mean he was against
religion, but rather that he preferred a religion that would
be “in consonance with Liberty, Equality and Fraternity,
in short, with Democracy.”34 Such modern movements for
social justice had started in Bengal long before Ambedkar
came to the forefront of Dalit politics in the 1930s. It is
not that Tagore was unaware of such movements; in 1925
he actually attended a conference of the Namasudras in
30
See for details, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity
in Colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal, 1872-1947, second
edition (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011).
31
Tagore, Nationalism, 119.
32
Tagore, Nationalism, 137-8.
33
Mehta, “In the shadow of the Nations,” 189.
34
Ambedkar, “Annihilation,” 290-1, 300-1.
37
 Dhaka.35 We do not know anything else about this meeting,
including who invited him, why he accepted the invitation,
what was told to him, and more importantly, what he said at
the meeting. But this information does tell us that Tagore was
certainly aware of the political importance of Dalit groups
like the Namasudras. Still, he never approved of this politics
of empowerment, which he probably thought was politically
divisive. Tagore supported Gandhi when he opposed the
separate electorates for the Scheduled Castes provided in the
Communal Award and finally had it overturned through the
Poona Pact of September 1932.
But this did not mean that Tagore opposed the
untouchables’ demand for self-determination as Tapan Basu
has claimed in a recent article. Basu wonders why Tagore had
to agree with Gandhi on this point when he differed from
him on so many other issues.36 But it was not opposition in a
pure and simple sense. When Gandhi was fasting unto death
at Yeravda jail in protesting against separate electorates, in a
speech to the students of Santiniketan Tagore explained his
message in the following words:
No civilized society can thrive upon victims whose humanity has
been permanently mutilated, whose minds have been compelled
to dwell in the dark. Those whom we keep down inevitably drag
us down and obstruct our movement in the path of progress. The
indignity with which we burden them grows into an intolerable
burden to the whole country; we insult our own humanity by
insulting Man where he is helpless or where he is not our own
kin.37
On September 22, 1932 when a settlement to the crisis
was still not in site and the nation held its breath in anxiety
about Mahatma’s health, Tagore issued a public “Appeal to
Countrymen”:
I appeal to my countrymen that they must not delay a moment
effectively to prove that they are in earnest to eradicate from
their neighborhood untouchability in all its ramifications. The
movement should be universal and immediate, its expressions
clear and indubitable. All manners of humiliation and disabilities
from which any class in India suffers should be removed by
heroic efforts and self-sacrifice. Whoever of us fails in this time
of grave crisis to try his utmost to avert the calamity facing India
would be held responsible for one of the saddest tragedies that
could happen to us and to the world.38
In other words, Tagore preferred a social, individualistic
solution to the problem of untouchability, rather than a
political solution of separate electorates, which would result
35
A.K. Biswas, “Two Events in Tagore’s Life,” Mainstream, May 8,
2012.
36
Tapan Basu, “Caste Matters: Rabindranath Tagore’s Engagement
with India’s Ancient Social Hierarchies,” South Asia: Journal of
South Asian Studies 35.1 (2012): 171.
37
Rabindranath Tagore, “‘20th September,’ Address to the Staff and
Students of Santiniketan and Sriniketan,” in The English Writings
of Rabindranath Tagore, ed. Sisir Das, vol. III (New Delhi: Sah-
itya Akademi, 1996), 326.
38
Rabindranath Tagore, “Rabindranath’s Appeal to Countrymen,”
in The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, ed. Sisir Das, vol.
III (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996), 328.
38 HARVARD ASIA QUARTERLY 15.1 (2013) | Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nation, and Its Outcasts
in the “dismemberment of a large portion of Hindu society”
and be “certainly fatal to its wholeness.”39 Michael Collins
has recently drawn our attention to the liberal in Tagore
who sincerely believed in civilized individuals being effective
agents of social and cultural change. In his view, effective social
change could only take place through the proliferation of
such individuals.40 Equally important was Tagore’s insistence
on social harmony as a goal of human history, as individual
freedom could only be achieved within the harmony of the
whole.41 Within this context, constructive social reform rather
than politics of empowerment seemed preferable to him, as
the latter would inevitably lead to conflict. When the Poona
Pact was finally signed, he rejoiced at the “reconciliation
with the depressed classes of India” and regretted that such
an agreement could not be reached with “our Muhammadan
brethren which is so absolutely necessary for the fulfillment
of our national life.”42 He was thus looking for a harmonious
nation based on a spirit of reconciliation.
One needs to remember that the question of caste
remained Indian nationalism’s most significant unresolved
contradiction, at the levels of both theory and practice. And
there were always two parallel streams of thought to grapple
with this issue. Tagore and Gandhi’s reformism seeking the
abolition of untouchability was eventually enshrined in
the Indian constitution – through the instrumentality of
Ambedkar himself, as the Chair of the constitution drafting
committee. It declared untouchability illegal and provided
for the reservation of seats for the Scheduled Castes in the
legislatures. Possibly, it was a victory for Ambedkar’s chosen
path of legal-political solutions to the problem of the nation’s
outcasts. But as historian Eleanor Zelliot has argued, this
possibly also signified a convergence of two parallel streams
of thought, both seeking the elimination of India’s age-old
problem of untouchability.43 That this political-constitutional
solution has not been able to resolve the problem of social
exclusion in Indian society is now well known to social
observers. But we may point out here that there was possibly
another terrain where Tagore and Ambedkar were coming
closer to discovering an alternative solution to the problem. I
will conclude by making a brief observation on that.
In 1933, when in the wake of the Poona Pact Mahatma
Gandhi launched his Harijan campaign to eradicate
untouchability and faced stiff resistance from orthodox Hindu
39
Tagore, “20th September,” 328.
40
Michael Collins, “Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of
Friendship,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 35.1
(2012): 123.
41
Kalyan Sen Gupta has argued that “Tagore’s notion of harmony
was central to his whole thinking.” See Kalyan Sen Gupta, The
Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005),
13.
42
Rabindranath Tagore, “Message on Mahatmaji’s Birthday,” in
The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, ed. Sisir Das, vol.
III (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996), 334.
43
Eleanor Zelliot, “Congress and the Untouchables, 1917-1950,”
in Congress and Indian Nationalism, ed. Richard Sisson and Stan-
ley Wolpert (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 182-97.
society,44 and when Bengal witnessed a particularly nasty of society and the welfare of the individual.”48 Although
high-caste Hindu backlash, Tagore wrote his musical dance Ambedkar organized the mass conversion as a collective
drama Chandalika on the story of a Chandala or untouchable celebration of protest, conversion ultimately is an individual
woman’s personal journey to self-discovery. The drama is “act of spiritual faith.”49
not just about untouchability. There are two distinct parts It was possibly on this spiritual terrain that Tagore,
in its narrative structure; while the second part deals with Gandhi, and Ambedkar truly converged in discovering an
the complex theme of interconnectivity of love, physicality, historic emancipatory path for the nation’s outcasts. This was
and spiritualism, the first part is clearly focused on the issue closest to the Tagorean ideal of social regulation of differences
of untouchability, where Prakriti – the young untouchable and spiritual recognition of unity. In today’s context, this
woman – is subjected to various forms of discrimination might appear utopian and too distant from India’s preferred
and disability, leading to her rebellion. “There are so many modernist path of social justice and political empowerment.
Chandalas in Brahman lineages, I am not a Chandali,” she But while that path has not led to any satisfactory resolution of
defiantly tells her mother, who is mentally more conditioned the problem of social exclusion, many Dalits in Western and
to accept her inferior social status. But Prakriti’s anger is Central India feel liberated by embracing Buddhism. Tagore –
calmed when Ananda, a Buddhist monk, approaches her as well as Ambedkar – have reminded us of the public role that
and asks for drinking water. When she hesitates, the monk religion can play in resolving the caste question. Historically,
conveys to her the message of universal humanism: “you are they tell us, there always existed a socio-spiritual space in
the same human being as I am.” Prakriti is enlivened to a new India, carved out by myriad religious traditions from ancient
truth of human dignity through self-discovery.45 Buddhism to medieval bhakti, where caste discrimination
What is important about this dance drama is that and exclusion were continually interrogated and subverted.
Tagore does not convey here any overt political message Ultimately, it is in this tradition that the Indian nation might
of reforming the orthodox Hindu society, but situates the trace the cultural roots of its unity.
emancipatory drama of individual spiritual self-discovery
of a Chandala woman within a Nepalese Buddhist story.46
Through Buddhism he invokes a tradition from the
cultural repertoire of Indian civilization, which signified
transcendence from the restrictive strictures of caste and thus
confirmed his idea of an inclusive historic nation. There was
no need for a modernist political solution to resolve the caste
question; there was precedent in India’s own ancient history
that showed how spirituality could be harnessed to ensure
social inclusion.
We cannot know Tagore’s exact thoughts, and it is
hazardous to make any authoritative statement on authorial
intentions. But what we do know is that Ambedkar too
found in Buddhism a true solution to the social problems
of the nation’s outcasts.47 That his more modernist political-
constitutional solution would not solve this social problem
became clear to him when he faced stiff opposition to the
Hindu Code Bill in 1950. Consequently, a few months before
his death a disillusioned Ambedkar converted to Buddhism
with thousands of his followers, thus ultimately choosing a
non-modern path for their liberation as individuals rather
than as political collectives. “Political gain has no connection
with conversion,” he asserted, nor was it for “economic gain.”
Conversion could solve the problems of the untouchables
because religion, he thought, was “for the preservation
44
See Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability:
Fighting the Indian Caste System (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 2005), 67-70.
45
Rabindranath Tagore, “Chandalika,” in Rabindra Rachanabali, 48
B.R. Ambedkar, “Conversion,” in The Essential Writings of B.R.
vol. IV, birth centenary edition (Calcutta: Government of West Ambedkar, ed. Valerian Rodrigues (New Delhi: Oxford Univer-
Bengal, 1368). sity Press, 2002), 221, 229-30, 238.
46
Tagore, “Chandalika,” 557. 49
For a nuanced discussion of Ambedkar’s reading of Buddhism,
47
See B.R. Ambedkar, “The Buddha and His Dhamma,” in Dr. Ba- see Debjani Ganguly, Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity:
basaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. XI (Bombay: The Notes on a Postcolonial Hermeneutics of Caste (London: Rout-
Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1992). ledge, 2005), 155-75.

Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nation, and Its Outcasts | HARVARD ASIA QUARTERLY 15.1 (2013) 39