LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Imagining a Borderless World: A Comparative Study of
Rabindranath Tagore and Swami Vivekananda

Sandip Sarkar, Ph.D. Candidate

Abstract

In the wake of globalised market economy we often talk of global village without taking into account the praxis of 'shadow lines' indicating the political sovereignty of a particular country. The birth of a nation is a historical phenomenon. Some scholars may consider it as a 'commodity' imported from the West to suit the changing outlook of "indust-reality." However, through this paper, the researcher tries to present a cohesive view of nation, analyzing the work of Rabindranath Tagore and Swami Vivekananda who were firm believer in the notion that "There's only one history - the history of man. All national histories are merely chapters in the larger one" (Das, Sisir Kr. ed. "The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore", Vol.-2)

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do…
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
(John Lenon : "Imagine There's no Country")

Nations in Narrations

Nations survive in narration, "…and lose their origin in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizon in the mind's eye" (Bhabha, Homi. K. ed. "Nation and Narration")

Very often the contours of narration shape the history of a nation. For posterity comes to know about their nation only through textualized version of history. Nation is an artificial construct drawn on a piece of paper and enforced through material agencies like immigration office, military, passport and visas. (Nair, Pramod Kr. "Postcolonial Literature: an introduction)

Nation as an Imagined Political Community

Much before the appearance of Anderson's famous book Imagined Community which paved the way to the portrayal of nation as imagined political community, Tagore viewed nation in the same way. Nation and nationalism depend sometimes on the way we look at them. In 1911, while deliberating on the occasion of Sister Nivedita's death (an Irish born woman who took the discipleship of Swami Vivekananda), Tagore recounts the incident which impelled Nivedita to serve an alien country most of whose people were illiterate and ignorant. This was because she had been able to love the country and moreover she "could pierce the veil" of that which was objectively real: "we hear about Europeans who came to India with the feelings of devotion toward her, having been attracted by our scriptures or by the character or the words of some of our holy men…but they returned empty-handed,…their sense of devotion waning over time and discarded in the end. They could not pierce the veil of poverty and incompleteness in the country as a whole to see what they had read about the scriptures or what they had seen in the characters of holy men"(Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe, Post Colonial Thought and Historical Difference)

Tagore's Portrayal of the Indian Nation: Laxmi or Durga

Tagore's nationalist poetry written during the Swadeshi movement employs this same mode of viewing "the act of seeing that transcended the objective and historical vision" (Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe, Post Colonial Thought and Historical Difference)Through the poems composed during these times one come across Tagore's portrayal of the country as an all powerful deity, sometime as Goddess Laxmi, sometime as Durga.

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