CRISIS IN CIVILISATION : RABINDRANATH TAGORE'S

INTRODUCTION

Rabindranath Tagore born on 7 May 1861 – died on 7 August 1941 was (Short Summary) 

a Bengali polymath (is an individual whose knowledge spans many different subjects) who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful" poetry of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. Referred to as "the Bard of Bengal", Tagore was known by sobriquets: Gurudev, Kobiguru, (Poet Laureate) Biswakobi.  (World Poet)

A Bengali Brahmin from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Burdwan district and Jessore, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old.  At the age of sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha ("Sun Lion"), which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics. By 1877 he graduated to his first short stories and dramas, published under his real name. As a humanist, universalist, internationalist, and ardent critic of nationalism, he denounced the British Raj and advocated independence from Britain. As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs; his legacy also endures in his founding of Visva-Bharati University.

What is Civilization?

An advanced state of human society, in which a high level of culture, science, industry, and government has been reached. those people or nations that have reached such a state. any type of culture, society, etc., of a specific place, time, or group: Greek civilization.

What is Crisis?

A situation that is extremely difficult or dangerous, when there are many problems: a major/serious/global crisis. An economic/financial/political crisis.

a time of great danger or difficulty; the moment when things change and either improve or get worse

What is Civilization Crisis?

The Crisis Civilization is a documentary feature film investigating how global crises like ecological disaster, financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages are c... Read all. Proving that 'another world' is not 

THEME

This essay “Crisis in Civilization”, written in the final year of his life, Tagore seriously denounced Europe for its aggressive nationalism, imperialism, and racial chauvinism, and apprehended a cataclysm for the human civilization.

The Crisis of Civilization is a documentary feature film investigating how global crises like ecological disaster, financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, and terrorism and food shortages are converging symptoms of a single, failed global system.

SUMMARY THE CRISIS IN CIVILISATION BY RABINDRANATH TAGORE

In May, 1941 Rabindranath Tagore was in such poor health that nobody knew for sure if he would be able to take part in his birthday celebrations that year. In the end he did, though he was still too weak to read out himself his birthday message to his well-wishers, as he did every year in Santiniketan. The poet’s last message to the world, then, was not delivered in his own voice, and this adds to the poignancy (painfully affecting the feelings) that permeates his message. Crisis in Civilisation can truly be called his last testament (something that shows that something exists or is true). One of the greatest men to have ever lived was bidding goodbye to the world, and was doing so at a time when everything around him seemed to be falling apart. He looked back on his own life, and tried to come to terms with the ‘profound tragedy’ that had overtaken the sunny hopefulness of his early years.

 “As I look around, I see the crumbling ruins (To fall into small fragments or pieces) of a proud civilisation strewn like a vast heap of futility (pointlessness)”, cried Rabindranath in anguish (great mental pain or suffering). He was thinking primarily of his own country, though not about his alone. Two hundred years of predatory colonial rule had completely denuded India of his dignity, his spirit, his very life. “The wheels of fate will one day oblige (make (someone) legally) Englishmen to give up their Indian empire. But what kind of a country will they leave behind them? What stark, wretched misery? (bare in appearance or outline) …. What wasteland of filth and hopelessness?” The poet agonized (to worry or think for a long time about a difficult problem or situation) over how his generation of educated Indians had once put their unquestioning faith in the magnanimity of the Englishman, in his sense of fair play and enlightened liberalism. As that faith, cruelly belied, mocked at him now, Rabindranath’s heart poured out in sadness and disbelief.

But this was also when the Second World War, the greatest conflagration (a large fire which burns a lot of buildings, land, forests) in human history, raged furiously in Europe and elsewhere, and the poet’s heart knew no solace. The 1930s had been an unbroken chain of catastrophes (a sudden disaster that causes great suffering or damage), betrayals (the act of not being loyal when other people believe you are loyal) and disasters. Japan, a country Rabindranath once greatly admired for his spirit of independence and cultured refinement, ravaged hapless China in a series of invasions (the action of entering another country with an army in order to take control of it), prompting the poet to denounce his in the strongest terms conceivable. Italy’s assault on and occupation of Ethiopia (then Abyssinia), the European great powers’ cynical betrayal of Czechoslovakia and the defeat by Falangist Franco of the heroic Spanish Republic all weighed heavily on Rabindranath’s mind and, even as he repeatedly spoke out against every fresh outrage on civilisational values, his spirits sank  further and further.

Then the War broke over Europe, and the Nazi hordes overran Belgium, Holland and France at staggering speed. Broken in health, his hearing and even his ability to hold the pen sadly weakened the poet’s sense of the irretrievable loss of all that he had believed in all his life deepened immeasurably. The Apocalypse was here, and the bard of hope and faith found his voice very nearly choked with pain and bewilderment. It was at that juncture that Rabindranath’s last birthday arrived. The great message of Crisis in Civilisation was fashioned out of his pain, his sense of loss and betrayal.

But when the poet talks about how “..all over Europe, barbarism has bared its bloody fangs, striking terror in every human heart ….(even as) an epidemic of repression rears its ugly head from inside the very core of western civilisation”, his reader is inevitably reminded of  Rabindranath’s words from 25 years ago. As early as in 1916-17, when such ideas had very little currency around the world except among radical European socialists who were seldom heard, Rabindranath had dwelt at length in his Nationalism lectures on the monster that then clutched at mankind’s throat. “When this organisation of politics and commerce, whose other name is the Nation, becomes all-powerful at the cost of the harmony of the higher social life, then it is an evil day for humanity…… When it allows itself to be turned into a perfect organisation of power, then there are few crimes it is unable to perpetrate”, he had said then. This “abstract being, the Nation”, reduces “the personal man”, as also communities of men, to “phantoms” and executes policy, or state-craft, “with no twinge of pity or moral responsibility”. The nation-state, “which is the organised self-interest of a whole people”, is so far removed  from a truly human community as to be treated with scepticism and distrust. “….(I)t enshrines gigantic idols of greed in its temples, taking great pride in the costly ceremonials of its worship, calling it patriotism. And it can be safely prophesied that this cannot go on, for there is a moral law in this world which has its application both to individuals and to organised bodies of men.”

It was the mindless trampling (doing something without conscious awareness or thought) of this ‘moral law’ that Rabindranath recognised as the reason why mankind found itself at the edge of the precipice in 1941. (dangerous situation) Prophetically in 1916, (correctly tells what will happen in the future) he had said that “(Y)ou cannot violate (break or fail, act against something, especially a law ) these (moral) laws in the name of your nation, yet enjoy their advantages as individuals”. And this recognition posits (to suggest something as a basic fact or principle from which a further idea is formed or developed) the question of nationalism squarely (directly) at the centre of the civilisational discourse (written, spoken) everywhere today. As the world increasingly turns – to use a worn cliché (A cliché is an expression, phrase, or idea that has been overused to the point of seeming worn out) – into a ‘global village’ through the nearly completely unhindered trans (free from obstacles or restrictions) -border movements of technology, finance capital and industrial inputs, and as markets merge into a giant, (very great size ) single, world-wide market as never before, the apotheosis of the nation, (the highest point in the development of something;) of national pride, is puzzlingly becoming respectable once again.

Even as some champions of neo-liberalism triumphantly proclaimed the ‘end of history’ – thereby suggesting that human history had found its ‘true’ course and could now be expected not to waver (become weaker) from that path – new contradictions (combination ideas) began to assail (voilet attack) human society from all possible sides. Crass isolationism( being alone) is being deified unabashedly (without apology) in many parts of the ‘developed’ world today, and ‘national interest’ is trumping (tramping) even such basic human responses as the sheltering of refugees desperately fleeing from chaos (confusion) and mayhem.(violent) In India, where we never tire of singing paeans of praise to our ‘Gurudev’, we stand passively by as the “public sapping of ethical(moral principles) ideals slowly reacts upon each member of society, breeding (good manares) weakness where it is not seen, and causing that cynical believing) distrust (feeling) of all things sacred in human nature, which is the true symptom of senility”, as Rabindranath said so eloquently.(fluent) 

In Crisis in Civilisation, the poet unhesitatingly points to the flawed civilisational model that the dominant (having power) discourse in India had come to repose its trust in by the 19th century. “That phase of civilisation with which we were familiar in this country has been called by Manu ‘Sadachar’(or, ‘proper conduct’), that is, the conduct prescribed by the traditions of the race. Narrow in themselves, these time-honoured social conventions originated and held good in a circumscribed (ristric) geographical area…. That is how a pharisaic formalism (practice) gradually got the upper hand of free thought and the ideal of ‘proper conduct’ …steadily degenerated into socialised tyranny”. (Cruel) 

In Nationalism, on the other hand, Rabindranath cites a social evil which persists (continue) among us even today, an evil which, indeed, seems to have gained in its macabre (disturbing) insanity of late: “The social habit of mind which impels(fource)  us to make the life of our fellow beings a burden to them where they differ from us even in such a thing as their choice of food, is sure to …. result in creating engines of coercion (the act of process) to crush every rational (having reason) difference which is the very sign of life”. Even as this ‘social habit of mind’ plays out cynically here and there, every now and then, “the idea of the Nation”, “one of the most powerful anaesthetics (study, practice) that man has invented”, exerts(apply) a most pernicious (harmful effects) influence on the whole people that “can carry out its systematic programme of the most virulent (harmfull) self-seeking without being in the least aware of its moral perversion (corruption – in fact, feeling most dangerously resentful if it is pointed out”. Prescient (having knowledge) words, these, and the best tribute we can pay to our greatest poet on his birthday is by acknowledging the crisis that we find ourselves in today and resolving that we will not let India transmogrify(magical) into a vast “wasteland of filth and hopelessness”. Is this road open to us still? Rabindranath himself tells us that it must be, that in even the darkest hour, “it is a grievous serious) sin to lose faith in Man”

Here’s hoping that, “after the cataclysm is over and the air rendered (civered) clean with the spirit of service and sacrifice”, India will retrace her path to “winning back her lost human heritage”.(inheritance)