Tagore and Du Bois as Theorists of Civilization

Rabindranath Tagore

by Nandita Chaturvedi
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Our time is the era of the civilization-state, when India and China, along with other nations such as South Africa, Vietnam, are establishing the independent civilizational paths of their societies towards modernity. Yet, our concept of civilization remains amorphous and ill-defined. There are those who see civilization in older colonial and white-supremacist terms and champion liberal democracy as the only true democracy. On the other hand, many think of civilization in vague cultural, anthropological terms, placing emphasis on clan structures and ‘values’. There are also some who speak of the achievement of Asian and African aristocracy as the basis of dark civilization.

When Asian nations won their political freedom, revolutionary movements that led the people’s struggle for freedom took over the state. In the case of China, the new state saw a strong and accentuated rupture from the old as a ‘people’s republic’ was established. In India, Nehru’s government took over the colonial state, wielding it for the benefit of the Indian people in a way that was in tune with Gandhi’s ideas and the Indian freedom struggle. As Nehru himself said, his government sought not to “destroy their past or uproot them (the people) from their social fabric. We have to balance the forces of continuity with those of change.” Nehru called the period after Indian independence the ‘authentic Gandhian era’. He said in an interview with Russi Karanjia, “Gandhiji always sought to function within the social fabric in which the masses had been living for centuries and tried to bring about gradual but revolutionary changes, instead of destroying the fabric or uprooting the people from their soil. He insisted on continuity with the past and he accepted the existing social system as a base for his political and social strategy.” Thus, the Indian state post-independence was a civilization state, seeking to champion development yet placing non-violence at its center. 

Here we will examine the ideas of Rabindranath Tagore and W.E.B Du Bois on civilization and modernity. Both these thinkers, born 7 years apart in 1861 and 1868 respectively, witnessed the collapse of Europe in the two world wars. They both analysed the root causes of war and tied them to colonial exploitation, materialism and human greed. They studied the West deeply, tracing the revolutionary edge of the renaissance and enlightenment, yet finding it absent in their treatment of colonies and slaves. They were both also witnesses to the human experiment of the Russian revolution, as well as the great democratic upsurge of the anticolonial movements in Asia and Africa. They both studied the emergence of Japan, and the Euro-Asian experiment she undertook in her own society. Both were deeply connected also to China, visiting her several times and studying the trends and changes in her society. 

All of these great events of the 20th century shaped their thinking on civilization. They lived through a time when humanity undertook leaps towards expanding democracy, when nothing was certain, and possibilities for human kind were open. We could argue that we are entering such a time ourselves. The last 70 years, and especially the last 30 have been a period of a US led hegemonic world order. As is apparent to anyone paying attention, this is fast changing. Coming time will bring with it dynamic possibilities, but also grave dangers that humanity will have to grapple with. We look towards two of our greatest thinkers for inspiration.

Democracy

For both Tagore and Du Bois, civilization was tied intrinsically to an emerging democracy. Both saw ordinary people, workers and peasants, as the makers of civilization. They did not trace art and music to imperial courts or ruling class museums and conservatories, but to the uncovering and realization of talent among the mass of men and women. As Du Bois says through his protagonist Mathew Towns in the novel Dark Princess, “And suppose we found that ability and talent and art is not entirely or even mainly among the reigning aristocrats of Asia and Europe, but buried among millions of men down in the great sodden masses of all men and even in Black Africa?" Later in the same section of the novel Mathew goes on to proclaim, “some of the noblest blood God ever made is dumb with chains and poverty,” before he breaks into song, singing “Let My People Go”, a Negro spiritual.

Dark Princess paints a picture of Du Bois’ conceptualization of civilization and democracy. Early in the book, he argues that the experiment in America was showing the world that “ability and capacity for culture is not the hereditary monopoly of a few, but the widespread possibility for the majority of mankind if they only have a decent chance in life.” The Dark Princess was written in 1928 and would be followed by Du Bois’ exploration of this idea in Black Reconstruction in America in 1935. In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois begins with the idea of the ‘Black Worker’, not slave-workers, but an enslaved proletariat. This was a revolutionary breakthrough in theory, and Du Bois faced backlash for daring to argue that the enslaved were workers with agency. Du Bois laid out in Black Reconstruction how the Black proletariat executed a general strike during the civil war. After emancipation these Black men and women went on to establish a dictatorship of the Black proletariat in some southern states.

To many, dictatorship and democracy may seem at odds. Yet for Du Bois they did not pose a contradiction. As he says, 

“The current theory of democracy is that dictatorship is a stopgap pending the work of universal education, equitable income, and strong character. (..) But always the temptation is to use the stopgap for narrower ends, because intelligence, thrift and goodness seem so impossibly distant for most men. We know perfectly well that most human beings have never had a decent chance to be full men. Most of us may be convinced that even with opportunity the number of utter human failures would be vast; and yet remember that this assumption kept the ancestors of present white America long in slavery and degradation.

It is then one’s moral duty to see that every human being, to the extent of his capacity, escapes ignorance, poverty and crime. With this high ideal held unswervingly in view, monarchy, oligarchy, dictatorships may rule; but the end will be the rule of All, if mayhap All or Most qualify. (...) The opportunity to study a great human experiment was present in Reconstruction, and its careful scientific investigation would have thrown a world of light on human development and democratic government.”

Reconstruction was accompanied with the responsibility of universal education being taken up by the state, innovations in the education system, setting up of hospitals, etc. This period where the black masses in the South, recently emancipated from slavery, expanded democracy for all Americans marks an important period of modern history that should be studied more by people all over the world. For Du Bois, this history, when studied scientifically and free from color prejudice, showed the potential of men and women everywhere. For here was a people brutally severed from old world civilization, with no record of the inheritance of blood, caste or even nation, who “enfranchised labor led by educated men and groups of their own blood sought so to guide the state as to raise the worker to comfort and safety.”

This was the human experiment that Du Bois was speaking of in Dark Princess, and he saw 
the implications of this history for all of the colored world. African Americans were and are a unique people, who have shown the world that ordinary men and women can create civilization, science and culture even without an unbroken social inheritance. Their experience showed that the mass of men “could rule as well as be ruled” and “can work as well as be worked, can live as well as be kept alive”. In fact, the lack of caste and tribal bonds and divisions of the old world may have allowed Black people to leap forward into a new modernity. Strikingly, it is a dictatorship of the lowest and most exploited, according to Du Bois, which is in the interests of democracy.

Du Bois’ journal The Crisis, of which he acted as editor between 1910 and 1934 acted as a medium for the dialogue of the civilizations of the world, unmediated by the assumptions of white supremacy. The journal would regularly feature articles on the situation of the colonial world, and the anticolonial struggles. It was read all over the world, and Du Bois would become one of the most well known figures among the Darker World. The journal would also carry messages from leaders and thinkers of the anticolonial movements across the world, including Tagore. 

Similarly, for Tagore, creation was undertaken in all its aspects by ordinary people. As he says in Geetanjali,
“Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!
He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put of thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!
Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found? Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation; he is bound with us all for ever.
Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense! What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained? Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.”

Universal man was at the center of the process of knowledge and civilization. Tagore said in his letters from Russia, “In knowledge, love and activity, my development will reveal the infinite: in this is my fulfillment. The veil of imperfection will fall away from our minds, will and action so that we shall ever prove our kinship with the infinite: this is the religion of man. (...) Man’s evolution consists in the self attained truth, not in the Nature regulated mode of life. Hence it is his difficult prayer that he may reveal the infinite in every respect. Hence he says --bhumaiba sukham --happiness is in greatness: nalpe sukham asti -- in nothing small is there happiness. (...) The manifestation of greatness is another synonym for what we call civilization. The implicit meaning in man, his deepest truth, is being unravelled in civilization.”

Tagore saw universal man in the peasantry of India. He devoted his life to two parallel endeavors: a world civilization school for art, literature and music in Shantiniketan, and an experiment in rural reconstruction in Sriniketan. Shantiniketan saw the emergence of great artists such as Ramkinkar Baij, who was the son of a barber with little to no formal education. With Tagore’s ideas and the creative impulse of Shantiniketan he went on to create some of the most profound sculptures and paintings of modern India. It is said that he would sing Tagore’s songs while he painted. Shantiniketan is also home to Cheena Bhavan, one of the great efforts to bridge civilizations in Asia. On the other hand, Sriniketan was an effort to prove that the Indian peasantry could work as well as be worked and rule, as well as be ruled. It was an experiment to realize, in Du Bois’ words, “thinking workers and working thinkers.” In Sriniketan and Shantiniketan the work done was to bridge the gap between folk traditions and modern art forms on the one hand, and to bridge the civilizational traditions of the world unmediated by Europe on the other.

In his trip to the Soviet Union, he would compare the experiment of Sriniketan with land collectivization and the education of the peasantry that he saw there. Tagore would be deeply moved by conversations with the peasants of the Soviet Union, and would say, “The dumb have found their voice, the ignorant have cast the veil from their minds, the helpless have become conscious of their own power and those who were in the depths of degradation have come out of society’s ‘black hole’. This is Soviet Russia’s achievement in eight years. They are busy here with three things: education, agriculture and machinery.” He saw the development of the human being as the center of it all, since “ the machine alone is of little use until the machinist himself becomes a man.” Tagore and Du Bois both greatly admired the Soviet experiment and sought to study it for application among their own people. Du Bois would declare, “If this is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik.” Tagore would say in his letters from Russia, “I came to Russia at a time when my mind was dark with despair. (...) There I saw mighty efforts being made to provide universally everything of which India is deprived. Needless to say, I have seen it all with my own long hungering eyes.”

Like Du Bois’ vision in Dark Princess, Tagore envisioned a great world democracy where each civilization would make a contribution towards the building of a human civilization. In 1929, he would send a message to Du Bois’ journal the Crisis, “What is the great fact of this age? Is it that the messenger has knocked at our gate and all bars have given way. Our doors have burst open. The human races have come out of their enclosures. They have gathered together.
We have been engaged in cultivating each his own individual life, and within the forced seclusion of our racial tradition. We had neither the wisdom nor the opportunity to harmonize our growth with world tendencies. But there are no longer walls to hide us. We have at length to prove our worth to the whole world, not merely to admiring groups of our own people. We must justify our own existence. We must show, each in our own civilizations, that which is universal in the heart of the unique.”

Thus for Tagore each civilization was not to be self-serving but in service to the expansive project of human knowledge and culture. He saw and appreciated the different strengths of different peoples. In his Talks in China, he would say, “Civilisation cannot merely be a growing totality of happenings that by chance have assumed a particular shape and tendency which we consider to be excellent. It must be the expression of some guiding moral force which we have evolved in our society for the object of attaining perfection. The word ‘perfection’ has a simple and definite meaning when applied to an inanimate thing, or even to a creature whose life has principally a biological significance. But man being complex and always on the path of transcending himself, the meaning of the word ‘perfection’ as applied to him, cannot be crystallised into an inflexible idea. This has made it possible for different races to have different shades of definition for this term.”

Indeed, Tagore was an emissary of India to the world, seeking to build bonds of friendship and brotherhood wherever he went. His trip to China opened up a great historic relationship disrupted by colonialism, as he would say, “The world has for long been in its grip,--the exclusive winter that keeps the human races within closed doors. But the doors are going to open. Spring has come.” He would visit America, Europe, Java, Japan, Iran and Russia with the same sentiment. He would create an atmosphere in Shantiniketan where the whole world could feel at home. It was a futuristic endeavour, seeking to rekindle intercivilizational dialogue and friendship in a time when white supremacy mediated all interactions. 

Modernity and Western Civilization

Tagore would declare himself a revolutionary in his talks in China, declaring his opposition to the greed and materialism of Western modernity. He would say, “The impertinence of material things is extremely old. The revelation of spirit in man is truly modern: I am on its side, for I am modern. I have explained how I was born into a family which rebelled, which had faith in its loyalty to an inner ideal. If you want to reject me, you are free to do so. But I have my right as a revolutionary to carry the flag of freedom of spirit into the shrine of your idols,---material power and accumulation.” Modernity, as Tagore saw it then, was related to ideas and man’s spirit, not technology and scientific prowess for material wealth.

Even as a young man, Tagore despaired at the condition of the Indian people brought about by colonialism. Throughout his life he studied the roots of this, as well as the British response to it. Criticising the comments of John Simon blaming the condition of India on her people, he would criticise the hypocrisy of white supremacy, “These words are meant to be contemptuous. The ideals by which he has judged India’s needs is not his own. The advantages of unlimited education, opportunities and freedom, which his own people enjoy for producing abundance of wealth, have enriched from many sides their ideal of life in education, action and enjoyment. India in rags, emaciated of body, exhausted by disease and starved of education must not even dream of this ideal. We must carry on as best we can by preventing the increase of our population and limiting our expenses. Beyond this there is nothing more to think; and therefore the entire responsibility of the remedy lies on us: those who make the remedy difficult have little to do.” 

In his trip to China, he warned the young Chinese revolutionaries of the May 4th movement who protested his visit and upheld Western progress and development, “My warning is, that those who would have you rely on material force to make a strong nation, do not know history, or understand civilization either. Reliance on power is the characteristic of barbarism; nations that trusted to it have already been destroyed or have remained barbarous.” 

Tagore would criticise the machine civilization and materialism of the West, echoing Du Bois’ sentiment that “Science is a great and worthy mistress, but there is one greater and that is Humanity which science serves; one thing there is greater than knowledge, and that [is] the Man who knows.” 

In the same address in China, Tagore would say, “It is co-operation and love, mutual trust and mutual aid which make for strength and real progress in civilization. New spiritual and moral power must continually be developed to enable men to assimilate their scientific gains, to control their new weapons and machines or these will dominate, enslave, and slay them. 
Men have been losing their freedom, their humanity and their lives, to fit themselves for vast mechanical organizations, scientific, political, economic, and military. We see today civilizations of vast power and great intellect veiling in a decent way mere cannibalism. It is the nemesis of Science dominant over, rather than subservient to, the spirit of man ; for the world of mere science is not a world of reality, but an abstract impersonal world of force.”

On his 80th birthday Tagore would deliver his address “Crisis in Civilization” in which he expressed his loss of faith in the ability Western civilization to take humanity forward, “I had at one time believed that the springs of civilization would issue out of the heart of Europe. But today when I am about to quit the world that faith has gone  bankrupt altogether. As I look around I see the crumbling ruins of a proud civilization strewn like a vast  heap of futility. And yet I shall not commit the grievous sin of losing faith in Man. I would rather look forward to the opening of a new chapter in his history after the cataclysm is over and the atmosphere rendered clean with the spirit of service and sacrifice. Perhaps that dawn will come from this horizon, from the East where the sun rises. A day will come when unvanquished Man will retrace his path of conquest, despite all barriers, to win back his lost human heritage.”

Tagore was not an idealist or a sentimental figure, he knew well the challenges of poverty before the colonized nations and had studied them among his own people. He spoke of a righteous path to a new civilization well aware of the suffering of these nations, “I speak to you as a member of a nation that has gone under in the race for progress, and I tell you that I am ready to accept weakness and insult and oppression of the body, but I will never acknowledge the defeat, the last insult, the utter ruin, of my spirit being conquered, so that I am made to lose my faith and purpose. My enemies may dominate and slay my body, but they cannot make me adopt their methods, or hate them. The devil helps in the sphere in which he is master, but we must reject such aid if we want to save our life from utter destruction. Seek righteousness even though success be lost.”

Tagore based his critique of the West on the ideas of the Vedas and the Upanishads, which he reinterpreted for his times. He would repeat the same couplet from the Upanishad in several of his talks, 

“By the help of unrighteousness men do prosper, 
men do gain victories over their enemies, men do 
attain what they desire; but they perish at the root.”

It is based on this philosophy that he defined civilization as dharma, “The Sanskrit word dharma is the nearest synonym in our own language, that occurs to me, for the word civilisation. In fact, we have no other word except perhaps some newly-coined one, lifeless and devoid of atmosphere. The specific meaning of 'dharma’ is that principle which holds us firm together and leads us to our best welfare. The general meaning of this word is the essential quality of a thing. 
Dharma for man is the best expression of what he is in truth. He may reject Dharma and may 
choose to be an animal or a machine and there-by may not injure himself, may even gain strength and wealth from an external and material point of view; yet this will be worse than death for him as a man.”

Du Bois early in his career, in the Souls of Black folk, would declare himself “bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the veil.” Thus, he spoke from within the West, yet with an epistemology based in the Black poor. He would write of White Folk in Darkwater, “ Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them, I view them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their language. Mine is not the knowledge of the traveler or the colonial composite of dear memories, words and wonder. Nor yet is my knowledge which servants have of their masters, or mass of class or capitalist of artisan. Rather, I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know what I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed now furious. They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth! My word is to them mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism. And yet, as they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of fact and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped -- ugly, human.”

Thus, for Du Bois, the white and Western world were not externalities that could just be rejected, but their true human assessment was essential to the project of freedom. It is difficult for those outside of the west to truly appreciate what Du Bois’ vantage point was, and a deeper study of the African American situation is needed to see the white world.

In his work the World and Africa, he titled the first chapter ‘The Collapse of Europe’, referring to the second World War. He says in the first paragraph, “The collapse of Europe is to us the more astounding because of the boundless faith we have had in European civilization.” Du Bois would go on to describe in the book how the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism and, eventually the bending and contorting of Western knowledge for their justification led to the crisis. In his words, “The result of the African slave trade and slavery in the European mind and culture was to degrade the position of labor and the respect of humanity as such.” European civilization would develop a system “first conscious and then unconscious of lying about history and distorting it to the disadvantage of the Negroids” such that the history of Africa ceased to be taught and then in the European mind, to exist. Every field, including “archaeology, history, and biography, psychology and sociology” was used to prove the scientific basis of the color line.

For Du Bois, it was not just the European ruling elites, but the whole of European society and civilization, including the European worker that began to want “not comfort for all men, but power over those men for himself.” European civilization gave up its agency to the fetish and lie of whiteness, and “even the evidence of the eyes and senses was denied by mere weight of reiteration.” Their art became cynical and decadent, a far cry from the European renaissance and enlightenment.

Like Tagore, Du Bois condemned the machine civilization of Europe where “moral judgement of the industrial process” was made difficult by “the stretch in time between the deed and the result, the work and the product.” He would declare ignorance of the European people to be a colossal crime in itself. He would say, “When a culture consents to any economic result, no matter how monstrous its cause, rather than demand the facts concerning work, wages, and the conditions of life whose results make the life of the consumer comfortable, pleasant and even luxurious, it is an indication of a collapsing civilization.”

In a time when European civilization and modernity were just about the only standard for civilization in the world, Du Bois was not afraid to state that he believed “that the trade in human beings between Africa and America, which flourished between the Renaissance and the American Civil War, is the prime and effective cause of the contradictions in European civilization and the illogic in modern thought and the collapse in human culture.” Hence, European modernity was contradictory and hypocritical because of its embracing of slavery and colonialism. In Darkwater, Du Bois would declare of King Leopold's regime cruel and murderous regime in the Congo, “As we saw the dead dimly through the rifts of battlesmoke and heard faintly the cursings and accusations of blood brothers, we darker men said: this is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the soul of white culture--back of all culture-- stripped and visible today. This is where the world has arrived, -- these dark and awful depths and not the shining and ineffable heights of which it boasted.”

Further, Du Bois analysed the triumph of the industrial revolution, mechanization and modern European production not as proof of the superiority of Western civilization, but as results of the inordinate and unprecedented profit amassed by the cheap labor of slavery and colonialism. 

Like Tagore, Du Bois saw the future of human civilization in the East. In his unpublished manuscript Russia and America, he would say of a new system of human organization, 

“It must, of course, be Marxian in its abolition of industrial profit, toward which family and state communism in Asia already tends, but which has been frustrated by European influence. It must be Marxian in its division of income according to need; but it may be distinctly Asiatic in its use of the vertical clan division and family tie, instead of reaction toward a new bourgeoisie along horizontal class layers which must be the temptation of Europe.

It would take a new way of thinking on Asiatic lines to work this out; but there would be a chance that out of India, out of Buddhism and Shintoism, out of the age-old virtues of Japan and China itself, to provide for this different kind of Communism, a thing which so far all attempts at a socialistic state in Europe have failed to produce; that is a communism with its Asiatic stress on character, on goodness, on spirit, through family loyalty and affection might ward off Thermidor; might stop the tendency of the Western socialistic state to freeze into bureaucracy. 

It might through the philosophy of Gandhi and Tagore, of Japan and China, really create a vast democracy into which the ruling dictatorship of the proletariat would fuse and deliquesce; and thus instead of socialism becoming a stark negation of the freedom of thought and a tyranny of action and propaganda of science and art, it would expand to a great democracy of the spirit.”

Today we are in a new period where Europe and America face an unprecedented social and political crisis. We in the darker world must ask ourselves what the future of human civilization will look like. Will we continue to chase after the contorted vision of civilization of the West, or will we take Tagore and Du Bois seriously, to work out the basis of a new civilization?

Conclusion

This article attempts to put together the ideas of two great thinkers. Yet its scope is too small to fully investigate the worldview of Tagore and Du Bois, which deserves further work in the future. It is illustrative and beautiful to examine the two together, one born of the Indian people’s striving for freedom, and the other of the African American struggle for human emancipation. Both were world-citizens, belonging to all humanity. There are other questions that deserve attention for future thought. This includes the common emphasis of Tagore and Du Bois upon children. While Tagore surrounded himself in Shantiniketan with children and concerned himself deeply with education, Du Bois conceptualized the problem of the modern world as the treatment of the Immortal Child. Further, the most examined subject in Tagore’s Letters from Russia is the reform and innovation in education. Du Bois also was a lifelong teacher, and his essay ‘The Meaning of Progress’ paints a moving picture of the Black poor in Josie, and her striving for knowledge. We hope that this article can form the basis for further exploration of these ideas. Through the discovery of our common inheritance of the movement for human emancipation and the struggle to achieve it we can build a new human civilization.



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Nandita Chaturvedi is an editor of Vishwabandhu Journal.