10/2/2023 0 Comments Rabindranath tagre![]() But from time to time, we glimpse people of other faiths such as Islam that has spread in the subcontinent, but that seemed to have been shut out of any consideration in the tussle between the supposedly orthodox and the professedly reformist versions of Hinduism professed by the Hindus and the Brahmos of the novel respectively. On the other hand, reformist Bengali Brahmo zealots would like to see a faith without some of the Hindu ritual practices that they claim would make it similar to the religion that existed in their land in its original form. ![]() On the one hand are people in it like the protagonist, idealistically representing those who would like to see Hinduism flourish throughout the land in its pristine form, unlike the other Hindu zealots of the novel who espouse the Hindu cause but without his humanity. Gora illustrates all these issues in the course of its 500 or so pages. Instead of such things that lead to divisiveness he would like to see "social cooperation" as the basis for both the east and west to move forward internally and externally. Tagore feels that the 'caste system' and burdensome traditions have been imperiling India in his own times. But he is convinced by now that nationalism has also become a "great menace," for in India too he feels "it is the particular thing which for years has been at the bottom of India's troubles". The positive thing he has noted about the subject, he tells his American audience while delivering the lecture there, is that he found "a parallelism exists between America and India-the parallelism of welding together into one body various races". To illustrate these points, one may cite a few passages from his third lecture of his 1917 lecture tour to Japan and the United States, "Nationalism in India". ![]() Read more Tagore’s 'Shesher Kobita': A timeless exploration of love and freedom He would write against such nationalism-whether in India, or Japan or the West-in outspoken and even hectoring fashion in later years after he had seen the manifestations of its ugly side not only during the later years of the swadeshi movement but also just before, during and after the First World War. He had rued its excesses subsequently and underscored it as the kind of nationalism to avoid. The short-lived division of Bengal had immediately led to the Swadeshi movement that Rabindranath had championed creatively and energetically for a few years, only to be quickly disillusioned by what he perceived to be its excesses, and by the divisiveness he felt it was creating in his country. Read more Rabindranath’s song-lyrics in translation by Professor Fakrul AlamĪlthough the setting of Gora is mostly in and around colonial Calcutta in the seventh decade of the 19th century, it is important to note that it is a novel that could only have been written after Bongobhongo or the 1905 partition of Bengal, which was clearly part of Britain's colonial policy to "divide and rule" the resurgent province. He is, of course, ironically oblivious of his origins till he learns about it at the end of the novel, and had overlooked till then the many streams that had poured into the river of Indian civilisation but is visible to orthodox Hindus of his time as only one mighty body of water flowing through the course of subcontinental history. All three words are relevant to Tagore's Gora and the narrative that Rabindranath creates, for he presents not only an apparently fully Indian Bengali protagonist who paradoxically turns out to be a European white person by birth, but who had become a fanatic about Hinduism and intent on establishing it in its purest form in 1870s India. But a third similar sounding word, albeit inflicted by a nasal sound in Bengali, tells us that it can also be someone who is a blind follower of his faith and even fanatic about it. Named Gora since he is fair-skinned, the protagonist is nonetheless in a quest to go back to the roots of Indianness and preserve and perpetuate the founding values and unity of his "Bharatvarsha". The deftly chosen word is thus especially apt for the novel since its titular protagonist is revealed to be an Irish orphan abandoned and then rescued during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Primarily, and the way the word is spelt in the Bengali original, to be "gora" is to be fair-complexioned or even a white man or woman, and a European to boot however, the word is also related to a homonym implying "root", or "foundation" or "origin'. ![]() A good way to think about Tagore's novel from these viewpoints is to consider the title of his novel, for it evokes three Bengali words simultaneously.
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