ࡱ> 2417 (bjbjUU .07|7|#lJJJJ V E nnnnnnnn  $= ] 6 !nnnnn nnn nnnnnn nn nJn nb ͻz'NJn  0E n nIgor Grbi Tagore and Gandhi: the Way of the Artist and the Way of the Ascetic Back in my student days I went through an intensely ascetic period, brimming with fasts, vows, austerities and all kinds of renunciations. At the same time ( and ever since my late teenage years, as a matter of fact ( I would write poems and stories, walking through woods and by the seaside, taking in my fill of the colours, sounds, smells that engulfed me. If I am beginning on such a personal note, it is because I fancy myself to have walked in the shoes ( or rather the cappals ( of both Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi, at least a part of their ways, to have had a life that enables me to understand both of them, along with the reasons for which they admired one another, as well as those for which they stood in mutual suspicion. I have done it all with myself. And it was precisely Gandhi's Autobiography that, twenty years ago, launched me on the way of ascetic truth, just as Tagore was one of, probably, two poets only to have helped me remember that truth is also beauty. The other was William Blake, the one who wrote Both read the Bible day & night, / But thou read'st black where I read white. Just as both Gandhi and Tagore were profoundly inspired by the word of the Upanishads, with the first, however, taking it to be an ultimate proclamation of saying no to the world (neti, neti, neither this way, nor that), while with the latter ( and it comes from Tagore's Sadhana ( it is rather that "Brahma is not in India a negation of the world, but India aspires to the infinite in all things". So who of the two read it white and who read it black? And is it then valid to identifiy black with wrong and white with right? It is impossible for us to properly understand the complex relationship between the two men without first recognizing the paradigm underlying it: the age-old, archetypal, mythical oppositon between the vita positiva and the vita negativa. On the one hand, the Dionysian eros, here incarnated as poetic imagination that keeps itself constantly vulnerable to anything that might cross its path, repeating an eternal yes to the world. On the other hand, the Apollonian, even Thanatotic logos, here manifested as an exclusive religious mind, constantly withdrawing from the world, with a humming, self-disciplined no. Loving the world, and fearing it, or even hating it. Seeing it as an inexhaustible fountain of inspiration for creating ever new worlds, versus finding it too much in itself. A will to explode towards proliferation, versus a will to annihilate it and implode into nullity. We can call either of the two black and the other white, but when it comes to right and wrong, it is only wrong to consider them as such in themselves. The fact that I myself am no longer ascetic, but still write poems, is only a gradual crystallization of my own personal predisposition, has no general implications and should even not be taken as proof of my valuing one over the other. Actually, I have learnt to appreciate both, understanding also that both have pitfalls of their own, but that the via negativa, being meant for fewer, has more of them (I am here giving looser meanings to the via negativa and positiva, as the way of the ascetic and the way of the artist respectively, rather than just apophatic and cataphatic). If, today, my sympathies go to Tagore rather than Gandhi, it is both because my own path has turned out to be much closer to the former, and because I can see the latter falling prey to too many of the pitfalls on his own path. The via negativa tempts one into simplified rigidity, with clear-cut distinctions and ready-made reactions to ever new situations, since the latter are first classified into one of the already accepted categories. Such an attitude is naturally accompanied by practical self-righteousness, even when (like in Gandhi's case) coexisting with theoretical self-suspicion. To all intents and purposes, one's own brave old world is seen as the enclosure of truth (at least temporary, as, once again, in the case of Gandhi's own experiments), while the others, judged by one's own severe standards, are expected to recognize the promised land. Though otherwise he knew much better, Romain Rolland incredibly writes that "Gandhi never asks men for more than they can give", as if taking at face value Gandhi's words that "the ideals that regulate my life are for mankind in general. Any man or woman can achieve what I have." This is blatantly wrong and Tagore clearly saw that Gandhi is "taking upon himself more than a single man can bear", that his followers, during the non-cooperation campaign, to take only one example, will not be able, in the long run, to distinguish between hating things and hating men. Putting his own artistic insight into human frailty above the proclaimed power of any ideal to govern the lives of men, Tagore would rather "restrict myself to what I consider as my own vocation, never venturing to deal with blind forces which I do not know how to control". Gandhi's retort echoes the ancient strife between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa: "When there's war, let the poet lay down his lyre!" But whenever fresh outbursts of violence give a slap to the realization of his ideal, he sits down to write another mea culpa article, saying God has warned him once again that "there is not yet in India that truthful and non-violent atmosphere which, and which alone, can justify mass disobedience". However, he will take no practical consequences therefrom. His idealistic asceticism will not let him do it. For Tagore, the world is an open field, lilakshetra, in which he is saying yes even to its uncertainties. An artist lives on the apparent contradictions. When asked about his greatest failing, he said it was inconsistency. When asked about his greatest virtue, he said it was inconsistency. An answer impossible for Gandhi, for whom, just as for any typical ascetic, it is all about identifying the one right path and then unswervingly following it. Against Gandhi's dedication in a girl's book that "a vow is fixed and unalterable determination to do a thing", the horrified Tagore quickly adds on the same page "You have dissolved my vow even as the moon dissolves the night's vow of obscurity". But this has always been so and, despite the largely Western oversimplification which reduces India to the land of yoga, there has always been a parallel India of bhoga, of fully embracing the divine play, for, as David Kinsley so nicely puts it, "to deny it is to reject that which is shot through with divine power ( to frown at God's joke". Art is one of the possibilities of appreciating the play, and India, unlike the West, has traditionally acknowledged it as one of the sadhanas leading to moksha. Maybe we can sense a trace of such universalism in the fact that, however different, Gandhi and Tagore remained in profound, life-long respect for one another. It is just that, now in a much happier turn of phrase of Rolland's, Tagore's was intellectual universalism, while Gandhi cherished a universalism of the Middle Ages. Tagore the artist will not renounce the world, but will also not judge the other path by the standards of his own. He does not seem interested in pronouncing general statements on asceticism from his own, artistic, viewpoint. Gandhi's asceticism, on the other hand, feels the need to encompass everything into its enclosure, colouring it with the colourlessness of its own glasses. His belief that true art is inconceivable without the purity of the artist's soul smacks of turning art into another moral discipline, another ascetic exercise. One naturally remembers at this point Hermann Hesse's novel Narziss and Goldmund, where Narziss the monk says to Goldmund the artist: "We thinkers, though often we seem to rule you, cannot live with half your joy and full reality." Or: "We thinkers strive to reach out God by drawing the world away from before His face. You come to Him, loving His creation. Both these are imperfect; yet, of the two, art is the more innocent." I would argue it is precisely this innocence that makes art, now in the unspoken words of Goldmund's musings, "the fusion of two worlds". There is, however, one conspicuous obstacle to simply assigning Tagore and Gandhi to either side of that innocence line: humour. I have never seen a photograph of a smiling Tagore, and his majestic, rishi-like figure only goes to make him the more severe. On the contrary, Gandhi was a great joke-cracker, with an appearance making Sarojini Naidu famously nicknaming him Mickey Mouse. This may complicate things beyond the size allowed to this paper and suggest that the two were not that different after all. Or is it rather that we, too, this time literally, should not take things at their face value? For the time being, instead of an answer I think of Tagore's line to God: I don't know right or wrong, I only know you. And I like to imagine Gandhiji, unable to agree, but giving it at least a mischievous, surreptitious you-naughty-naughty smile. )*.567zb S U d n ] a "$/;  ":= LQ!!E#Y#& &'({(((6OJQJ] j-OJQJ5OJQJ\OJQJK 8 #@%&($dh^`a$(,1h. 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