Nation Negated: Tagore, Periyar and Their Anti-Nationalism

In the June of 1916, under the Press Act of 1910, the government of British India passed orders against the founders and executive members of the Home Rule League and the Theosophist Society: Annie Besant, B.P. Wadia and George Arundale, and their associate newspaper New India. In order to quell their constant attacks against the British bureaucracy and their calls for Indian self-rule, the Act forbade them from participating in politics, whether in the form of writing or in speeches, and confined their movements to six specified locations that were not under the influence or reach of Madras City; their organization’s primary foothold. In the same week as this, Rabindranath Tagore, recently Nobel laureate and amassing global fame, arrived for the first time in the Japanese capital of Tokyo, where ‘some twenty thousand people turned out to receive him at the city’s central railway station’. Under a $12,000 contract with a speaking bureau in New York, Tagore was to deliver a series of lectures in the United States via a brief detour in Japan. It was these series of lectures that form the content matter of a slightly later publication in 1917 titled Nationalism, an important text for consideration in this essay. Finally, and importantly, in this very year of Nationalism’s publication, E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker makes an entry into the realm of nationalist politics by joining the Madras Presidency Association (MPA), a non-brahman enclave of the Indian National Congress.

Periyar and Ambedkar (Source)

What, one asks, do these three separate historical instances signify? In this essay, I argue that these seemingly disparate incidents, were, in fact, part of an ongoing ideological conjuncture of contending efforts to formulate differing ideas of the nation. By mainly focusing on the thought and activities of Tagore and Periyar, I will compare and show their critical visions and figurations of the idea of the nation. Broadly speaking, while Tagore represented nationalism mainly as a force of capitalist nation-state machinery, Periyar saw it as being congruent to Brahminical Hinduism. By doing so, they present to us highly critical visions of nationalism and, in turn, provide alternate modes of thinking about forms of belonging and resistance.

I will start off by showing that Tagore’s critical formulations of nationalism was part of post-World War I (post-WWI) forces of pan-Asian political cosmopolitanism and were enabled by his own socio-philosophical ideal of spiritualist humanism. Thus, owing to these Tagorean ideals, it is morally untenable to embolden nationalism, and hence it becomes necessary to negate and resist the idea of ‘nation’. In Periyar’s case, however, intersectional identities and intra-national forces of subordination demand that the idea of ‘nation’ be negated. Thus, a vector of subaltern identities of gender, caste, class, region and language, mobilised through the Self-Respect Movement, serve to defy the hegemonic utopia of nationalism. In the first section, I will also briefly discuss Annie Besant’s Home Rule League because its activities were part of the pan-Asian cosmopolitan moment that Tagore engages with, and they also form a prelude to the entry of Periyar’s Self-Respect movement. In the second section, I will discuss in greater detail Periyarite and Tagorean discourses against nationalism and conclude by discussing the alternatives they presented.

The Decade of 1916-26: Besant, Tagore and Periyar

As scholars such as Gauri Viswanathan, Erez Manela, and Mark Frost, among others have shown, during the end years of the WWI, what Frost calls the ‘cosmopolitan moment’ emerged. This roughly refers to the decade from 1916 to 1926, when, across the British territories, ‘elite expressions of nationalism merged with a new type of political cosmopolitanism’. Religious patriots, revivalists, and literary thinkers in Singapore, Ceylon and India — modernizing Buddhists, Confucian progressives and Theosophists, respectively - imagined and expressed ‘new visions of world order’. This order broadly meant a ‘reconstructed’ British empire, forming an imperial federation of countries, that was to bring about international brotherhood and permanent peace. Owing to the lack of space, and for our local purposes, I will only be focusing on the Indian scene at the moment that was predominantly occupied by the Annie Besant’s Home Rule League.

In early 1914, in the league’s other newspaper Commonweal, Besant wrote that ‘the term Empire has broadened to signify a unification of peoples under a single scheme of government which should allow its co-ordinated parts the widest possible freedom of autonomy’. Under this scheme of Home Rule League, the imperial federation, as presented in Besant’s Commonwealth of India Bill, involved the creation of a system of government that extended from village councils in rural areas and ward councils in municipal towns, to provincial parliaments and a national parliament that elects representatives to an imperial parliament. According to this plan, India’s national parliament would control its own army, navy and communications, though, as Frost notes, Besant later argued that India required the ‘continuance of the ‘imperial connection’ to preserve her from the threat of Russia’. Although, Besant’s ideas predate Wilson’s Fourteen Principles, Viswanathan and Frost, suggest that these ideas were formed under the influence of empire-builders like Joseph Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes on the one hand, and Asian millenarians and reformist thinkers such as Anand Coomaraswamy, Dr. Lim Boon Keng, and Ponnambalam Arunachalam, on the other. Although, for the most part Besant received political support in Madras presidency and through adherents such as the “trinity” of Indian leaders Lal, Bal and Pal; her reputation was heavily compromised in 1919 when she took a stance that was interpreted as favouring General Dyers’ role in the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre and in her opposition to Gandhi’s Satyagraha. Unlike Besant, however, Tagore never invested the British Empire with his cosmopolitan hopes nor entertained the nationalist politics as the way to achieve his ideal of humanist universalism.

In Nationalism, he considers the idea of ‘nation’ as an extraneous category imposed upon Indian history due to its colonial encounter. He distinguishes between nation and society, what he calls samaj, and poses them almost as dialectical forces. The former serving a mechanical purpose, working through forces of commerce and military, deploying power (although, the political side of society does have this aspect, it is only for the sake of self-preservation, unlike the nation, which uses this to attain supremacy and so on). The samaj, however, is through which the attainment of human ideals is made possible and is an end in itself. The samaj, owing to the incursions of the West is under threat of being submitted to the forces of nationalism. The working principle of the former is competition between mechanically organized nations for the purposes of power, whereas the latter works through ideals of social cooperation and harmony, with those principles being an end in themselves.

In the former, self-interest reigns, and thereby breeds perpetually greed and jealousy for wealth and power limitlessly, while in the latter, it is the notion of ‘mutual self-surrender’ which sustains and enables a spirit of reconciliation. In the crucial sentence, he defines the colonial encounter as the ‘moral man, the complete man’ giving way, almost unknowingly, to the ‘political and the commercial man, to the man of limited purpose’. Significantly, Tagore understands 'nation' not as an identarian term, but as a transposable method of mechanical organization of power, an extraneous field of abstraction, that is always imposed (he even calls it an ‘applied science’) and thus as an anti-idealist force.

Thus, when we construe the Tagore’s impulse, the problem of nationalism cannot simply be posited within the field of political sociology because the ‘political’ is not the primary site of contestation in his emancipatory discourse. For Tagore, the ideal of freedom and universalist conviviality was, first and foremost, a preterpolitical task. It was to be attained and articulated through spiritualist humanism, the communal space of samaj, the aesthetic idealism of creative unity, and the ethics of heterological comity, among others. It is owing to this philosophical orientation that Tagore was able to pose the question that was new and, perhaps also, rather baffling or irksome to his contemporaries: what, his writings seem to ask, should the ideal of Indian freedom constitute of when it does not merely mean being untethered to the colonial yoke and establishing a modern nation? Thus, the further question is: what else is required of the ethical task of imagination and of living, when neither anti- colonial nationalism nor internationalist cosmopolitanism can bring upon the transcendent fellowship of humanity?

In this very decade, alongside Tagore, political developments in the Madras Presidency, form the preconditions for the emergence of Periyar. As Barnett and Irschick show, in the early-twentieth century, a nexus between Home Rule League, the Congress and the Brahmin community was felt very strongly by the rural, land-owning non-brahmin jatis. Along with the fact that major players in the League and Congress were mostly Brahmins, their predominance in administrative jobs and university-level education was observed and protested. Thus, in response to the belief that Home Rule merely meant Brahmin rule, Justice Party was established in order to advocate against Home Rule and prioritize social reform and non-Brahmin demands over the Congress-League politics. It was in this context that Periyar joined MPA, and in later stages, even radicalized further, as I will show in the next section.

E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker (1879-1973), known to his followers as Thanthai Periyar; the Great Man — a self-conscious dig at his nemesis Gandhi, the Great Soul - was born in the trading town of Erode in Tamil Nadu. His father, Venkatappa Naicker, worked as a stone mason and coolie, and he lived in great poverty for the first half of his life until he earned his way upward through trading. It was in this now-wealthy household, infused by Brahminical religiosity, that Periyar was born into. Periyar recalls the donative thrust of his wealthy mid-caste family where charities to temples, cow-gifting to Brahmins and patronaging of wandering Hindu monks who debated religion in his house was a common feature in his early life. Periyar himself, at the age of twenty-five, left home as an itinerant monk, along with two other Brahmins, travelling to North India. He travelled to Puri, Calcutta, and Benares where he worked in a Hindu ashram, translating religious sermons of his Brahmin compatriots and collecting leaves and materials for conducting the daily puja. After two years of this sadhu lifestyle — during which, he later said, he witnessed firsthand the corrupt practices of the Brahminical fold - he was taken back to Erode by his father.

The Next Decade, 1926-36: Tagore and Self-Respect Movement

The very Periyar, who wandered the stretches of the Indian subcontinent as a wandering sadhu, translating religious sermons; around three decades later would set sail on the French ship, Amboise, from Madras that would take him touring the Soviet Union and other European countries. In this Soviet tour of 1931, however, he was translating into Tamil the Communist Manifesto and was attending the May Day Parade at the Lenin Mausoleum at the Red Square, meeting with atheist-rationalist societies such as League of the Militant Godless and German International Freethinkers’ Association. He was so inspired by the Soviet power —the hydroelectric stations of Dneprostroi and Zaporizhia, Avtomobilnoe Moskovskoe Obshchestvo, the efforts of Profintern offices (Red International of Labor Unions), and its resilience during the era of Great Depression and so on - that he even named the children of a leading Dravidian intellectual ‘Russia’ and ‘Moscow’. Similarly, Tagore, who travelled to the Soviet in the same ship the previous year, also spoke highly of the Soviet spirit for having ‘raised the seat of power for the dispossessed’. He was particularly admiring of the Soviet education system, which he discusses in his fifth and seventh letter that he wrote from Berlin. He was particularly struck by the active participation and visiting of the working-class members and craftsmen in art exhibitions that were previously only the reserve of the upper-class aristocrats and art connoisseurs. In the seventh letter, he even discusses the Soviet use of the museum as a pedagogic site. Although he identifies the repressive dimension of Soviet’s propogandist education, Tagore, however, hoped that this spread of education and the consequent banishment of illiteracy, could serve to further democratize the state in the future. The Soviet experiment was important for Tagore because it served as a model for the Indian nation that was poor, agricultural and mostly illiterate, just like Russia before the Revolution of 1917.

Tagore, however, had his reservations against many Soviet characteristics, one of which is chiefly pertinent for our purposes, namely his stressing of the links between nationalism and violence. In an interview he gave to the newspaper Izvestia, he advised the Soviet government to ‘never create a force of violence which will go on weaving an interminablechain of violence and cruelty’. He mentioned that the ‘[F]reedom of mind is needed for the reception of truth; and terror hopelessly kills it’. However, as it was later made evident in Moscow show trials and the Stalinist purges, this warning seems prescient. The powers and needs of nationalism, by the suppression of the individual and by the coercive hegemonizing of cultures, necessitates the use of violence. According to Tagore, this was an interminable and originary link between nationalism and violence.

This link between nationalism and violence gets articulated in Periyar through his emphasis on the centrality of Brahminism. It was also during the early- to mid-20s that Periyar rejected Gandhian Congress, as he became increasingly convinced that Gandhi’s politics of negotiation and accommodation with Brahmins was not radical and just enough to realize his ideals. Periyar believed that Gandhi sought to “attack” Brahminism while upholding varnashrama dharma — a self-contradictory move - as became clear in Gandhi’s responses to Vaikkom Satyagraha and temple-entry protests. Thereafter, according to Periyar, the ideology and function of the ‘nation’ as a concept was homologous to Brahminical Hinduism both in terms of its networks and ideals. Here, most significantly, we need to note that ‘Brahminical Hinduism’, in Periyar’s usage, was an all-encompassing term that included and referred to Aryan and North Indian subordination, Hindi-Sanskrit hegemony, patriarchal systems of power, upper class domination and even the institute of Congress. Thus, his Self-Respect Movement, which sought to eradicate and oppose Brahminical Hinduism/Nationalism, involved issues that cut across all the inferiorized, subaltern identities of caste, gender, class, language and region. There are two main things to note here about this Periyarite conceptualization of Brahminical Hinduism/Nationalism.

Firstly, by making ‘nationalism’ and ‘Brahminism’ continuous, homological and transitive entities; Periyar was able to emphasize and attack the very core upon which these power structures are predicated. Namely, their irrational, constructive and classificatory function. The most astounding and “scandalous” aspect of Periyar’s radicalism springs from this very recognition of its core function. To further substantialize this point, we can consider his 1955 declaration, when he advocated for the public burning of the Indian National Flag. Here, he invokes Thiruppur Kumaran, a Gandhian nationalist, who died in January 1932 because of brutal police attacks when he refused to let go of the British-banned Indian National Flag. Periyar said:

“Why shouldn’t we burn [the Indian National] flag? Is it because Thiruppur Kumaran saved it? Is the cloth so soiled that it will not burn? All that is needed is little more kerosene and it will burn. Or is it made of some fire-proof cloth? A lump of clay becomes Vinayaga. Isn’t it the same story when a cubit length of cloth becomes the flag? We have proved that Vinayaga had the same worth as a lump of clay. Similarly, we will prove that your flag has the same value as a cubit length of rag.”

Here, we can observe a series of remarkable reinterpretations being undertaken, all made possible owing to the Periyarite recognition mentioned above. The first thing to note is that Kumaran, in Periyar’s reading, cannot simply be glorified and subsumed within the nationalist discourse as a martyr. In fact, upholding Kumaran as a martyr would amount to condoning the very evil of nationalism. According to Periyarite discourse, Kumaran is more a ‘victim’ of nationalism than he is a heroic martyr. This is because Kumaran, an exemplar of the nationalist public, fails to see the constructive nature of nationalism and its deep linkages with the Brahminic discourse. The passionate euphoria, the sense of belonging, the sacrificial compulsion, and the ethics of self-annihilating reverence inspired by the nationalist symbology all serve to dehumanise and deify the nationalist subject. It is this dehumanisation that Periyar finds to be irrational. This ‘irrationality’ can only be produced and sustained because of the constructive character of these symbols, affects and ideologies. Moreover, Periyar even identifies a congruence between the Brahminic Vinayaka and the National Flag, thus highlighting their homology. In many ways, he is also hinting at the theological foundations predicated in both cases where the ideals of devotion and deification, surrender and sacrifice, reverence and repression are all active. Given these forms and formulations, Periyar’s response is to aver the pragmatic materiality of things. The flag and the idol are merely objects that are instrumentalised and propagated as more worthy than a human life. Thus, if this ‘objective’ element is recognised and the schism between the symbol and substance, the material and the immaterial, the real and the reinforced is identified, one can see things more clearly. Thus, for Periyar, emancipation and democracy can only be achieved through an undertaking of rationalist inquiry. Rationalist public inquiry lays bare things and events providing clarity and truth. More importantly, it emancipates the nationalist-subject from the shackles of Nationalism/Brahminism by way of humanism. Similarly, it is owing to this disenchanted, rationalist framing that he was able to describe the idol in Vaikkom temple in 1924 as ‘a mere piece of stone fit only to wash dirty linen with’. On the same note, he criticized the Hindu public saying that ‘[H]ad it not been for the rationalist urge of the modern days, the milestones on the highways would have been converted into gods. It does not take much time for a Hindu to stand a mortar stone in the house and convert it into a great god by smearing red and yellow powders on it’. Therefore, we see that the religiosity of nationalism and Brahminism was opposed to the virtues of rationality. As M.S.S. Pandian summarily notes, ‘self-willed reason alone could restore the real worth of those enslaved by religion’ and the Self-Respect Movement strived to do the same.

Self-Respect Movement (Source)

Secondly, Periyarite notion of ‘Brahminical Hinduism/Nationalism’ was useful as a political strategy for public mobilization and the ease of ideological communication. By pointing out to the inextricable link between the two conceptual entities, Self-Respect Movement was able to consistently mobilize and address the large subaltern non-brahmin public. Thus, a critique of Nationalism as Brahminical Hinduism enabled Periyar to consider and address issues emerging across a vector of identities, such as gender, caste, class and language. We can start by looking at the language question in Periyarite discourse, and specifically, how it was developed during the Anti-Hindi agitations of the 1930s. The agitations mainly erupted as a response to the C. Rajagopalachari - led Tamil Nadu Congress government’s decision tointroduce Hindi in schools. The anti-Hindi agitations, as commonly misconceived, were not merely a product of jingoistic Tamil chauvinism or a romanticized idea of Tamil purity and its ancientness. In fact, Periyar’s comments on the issue are instructive in this regard. He outlined his position as follows:

“I do not have any attachment to the Tamil language for the reason that it is my mother tongue or the tongue of the nation. I am not attached to it for the reason that it is a separate language, ancient language, language spoken by Shiva or language created by Agastya. I do not have attachment for anything in itself. That will be foolish attachment, foolish adulation. I may have attachment for something for its qualities and the gains such qualities will result in. I do not praise something because it is my language, my nation, my religion . . . If I think my nation is unhelpful for my ideal and could not [also] be made helpful, I will abandon it immediately. Likewise, if I think my language will not benefit my ideals or [will not help] my people to progress [and] live in honour, I will abandon it.”

It was through this logic that the Self-Respect Movement evaluated English, Tamil and Sanskrit. Sanskrit, with its strong links to the Pundits and their cultural superiority, was always rejected by the movement as a language that denied equality and dignity to the subaltern classes that it forcefully excluded. English, on the other hand, as Pandian notes, was regarded ‘as a language of modernity rather than as a language of colonial governance’. Although, the movement recognised that English was central to the Brahminical acquisition of cultural capital and in their usurpation of bureaucratic power, it reinterpreted the role of English. It was understood that English could be used as an alternative space to carry out the critique of the extant power relations, and through it access the global ideas of freedom and liberation. Therefore, Periyar says that ‘it is no exaggeration to say that it is the knowledge of English which has kindled the spirit of freedom in our people who have been cherishing enslaved lives. It is English which gave us the wisdom to reject monarchy and to desire a republic; to reject Sanathana Dharma and desire socialism. It gave us the knowledge that men and women are equal’. In fact, this attitude is highly consonant with Tagore’s reservations against Gandhi’s actions during the Non-Cooperation movement. Gandhi, in a long essay called ‘Evil Wrought by English Medium’ censured figures such as Rammohun Roy and Tilak for using English as their primary means of expression and ideation. He also argued against the ‘superstition’ that English was necessary for ‘imbibing the ideas of liberty and developing accuracy of thought’. Just as Periyar, Tagore also considered this Gandhian attitude to be flawed and dangerous. While Gandhi identifies the imposition of a foreign language as damaging, Tagore and Periyar argue that it was precisely an interaction with these other languages that gave rise to wider comprehensiveness and increased cultural exposure. Thus, Tagore writes that Rammohun Roy, due to his knowledge of other languages, was, in fact, able to have ‘the comprehensiveness of mind to be able to realize the fundamental unity of spirit in the Hindu, Muhammadan and Christian cultures. Therefore, he represented India in the fulness of truth, and this truth is based, not upon rejection, but on perfect comprehension. Rammohun Roy could be perfectly natural in his acceptance of the West, not only because his education had been perfectly Eastern, — he had the full inheritance of the Indian wisdom. He was never a schoolboy of the West, and therefore he had the dignity to be the friend of the West’. This position regarding English highlights a very important and common feature between Tagore and Periyar. Unlike Gandhi and their other contemporaries, Tagore and Periyar did not automatically accept the intrinsic validity of the national space which was required in order to sustain the binaries of Foreign/Domestic, Colonial/Colonised and English/Indian and so on. This was not because they were turning a blind eye to the brutal reality of colonialism. Instead, they identified that these binaried categories cannot be fully essentialised and that each category was internally differentiated. Moreover, they were interested in establishing and enabling the interface between these categories and emphasising their interrelation. Thus, it would be a mistake to read their efforts to collapse this dichotomous view as a form of ambivalent support for the British colonialism.

Given this, the role of Tamil has to be further explored in anti-Hindi agitations within the Self-Respect Movement. Unlike the orthodox Tamil Smarthas, Vaishnavites and Shaivites, Self-Respect Movement discourse did not posit an easy, taken-for-granted opposition between Tamil and Sanskrit. Instead, it was understood that, although it was better than Sanskrit, Tamil also had ingrained many forms of disempowerment and exclusionary vocabulary that had to be refashioned in order to deem it progressive and democratic. The main cultural forms that inhibited Tamil were seen as religion and gender. Therefore, leaders such as Kuthoosi Guruswamy and Periyar criticized the canonisation of ancient Tamil texts such as Thirukurral and Silapathikaram because they were seen as promoting gender inequality and upholding patriarchal structures. On a similar note, they criticized the promotion of Tamil through Puranic and epic Kavya literature alone and thereby sought to ‘de-sacralise’ the language. This was done by campaigning against singing Saivite hymns inconferences, teaching religious texts as part of Tamil language courses, and including invocations of gods in school textbooks. Thus, this auto-critique of Tamil enabled the Self- Respect movement to mobilise and garner support of women and lower-caste groups as well.

In this connection, the question of the relationship between gender and Brahminical nationalism within the Self-Respect Movement has also to be emphasised.

The most important way in which Periyar opposed the patriarchal foundations of Brahminical nationalism was by attacking the institutions of marriage and family. By insisting that marriage was merely a way of enslaving women and turning her into private property, he initially campaigned for complete abolition of marriage itself. However, during the Self-Respect Movement, he advocated a form of marriage that ‘transcended the traditional and socially-accepted norms for women’. In this new form of marriage, all rituals associated with traditional marriage had to be abandoned, including the tying of thali which he regarded as a symbol of male subjugation. These marriages were conducted without the presence of Brahmin priests and were scheduled during times that were traditionally considered as inauspicious, such as during Rahu Kalam or midnight. Apart from these, he opposed arranged marriages and advocated men and women to choose their own partners. And as aforementioned, he also sought to reform the patriarchal heritage of Tamil language itself. For this reason, he introduced such neologisms into Tamil such as vidavan (widower) and vyabicharan (male prostitute), which had not existed before. Along with these measures, the Self-Respect Movement also ensured that a substantial women presence be maintained in public conferences, by creating a separate women’s conference and by ensuring women preside over and fairly participate in general conferences. It was therefore that feminist figures such as R. Annapurani, T.S. Kunchidam and S. Neelavathi, among others were prominent during the movement.

Thus, we see that representatives of identical categories encompassing gender, caste and language were able to articulate and refashion their political will and reason within the Periyarite discourse. The realist and rationalist thrust of Periyarite politics deemed impossible the hegemonic and all-encompassing utopia of nationalism by stressing the existence of factional divisions, and intra-categorical differences. Therefore, nationalism was understood not as an antidote to these various vexing problems, but as an ideological and socio-cultural system that actively sought to erase or underplay these issues. Tagore, on the other hand, criticized the extraneity and violence of nationalist machinery, as that which diminishes humanity’s ability and proclivity to commingle, and establish peace and internationalist fellowship. In doing so, and owing to their critical prescience, courageous eloquence, and unwavering efforts for collective betterment; the antinomies and anxieties of the contemporary moment can be better addressed.

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