INTRODUCTION
Rabindranath Tagore born on 7
May 1861 – died on 7 August 1941 was (Short Summary) a Bengali polymath 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, Biswakobi.
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 of this
‘moral law’ that Rabindranath recognised as the reason why mankind found itself
at the edge of the precipice in 1941. Prophetically in 1916, he had said that
“(Y)ou cannot violate these (moral) laws in the name of your nation, yet enjoy
their advantages as individuals”. And this recognition posits the question of
nationalism squarely at the centre of the civilisational discourse everywhere
today. As the world increasingly turns – to use a worn cliché – into a ‘global
village’ through the nearly completely unhindered trans-border movements of
technology, finance capital and industrial inputs, and as markets merge into a
giant, single, world-wide market as never before, the apotheosis of the
nation, 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 from that path – new contradictions began to assail human
society from all possible sides. Crass isolationism is being deified
unabashedly in many parts of the ‘developed’ world today, and ‘national
interest’ is trumping even such basic human responses as the sheltering of
refugees desperately fleeing from chaos and mayhem. In India, where we never
tire of singing paeans of praise to our ‘Gurudev’, we stand passively by as the
“public sapping of ethical ideals slowly reacts upon each member of society,
breeding weakness where it is not seen, and causing that cynical distrust of
all things sacred in human nature, which is the true symptom of senility”, as
Rabindranath said so eloquently.
In Crisis in Civilisation, the
poet unhesitatingly points to the flawed civilisational model that the dominant
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
geographical area…. That is how a pharisaic formalism gradually got the upper
hand of free thought and the ideal of ‘proper conduct’ …steadily degenerated
into socialised tyranny”.
In Nationalism, on the other
hand, Rabindranath cites a social evil which persists among us even today, an
evil which, indeed, seems to have gained in its macabre insanity of late: “The
social habit of mind which impels 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 to crush every
rational 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 that man has invented”,
exerts a most pernicious influence on the whole people that “can carry out its
systematic programme of the most virulent self-seeking without being in the
least aware of its moral perversion – in fact, feeling most dangerously
resentful if it is pointed out”. Prescient 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 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 sin to lose faith in Man”
Here’s hoping that, “after the
cataclysm is over and the air rendered clean with the spirit of service and
sacrifice”, India will retrace her path to “winning back her lost human
heritage”.
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