Tagore does not perceive India as merely the motherland of the nationalist. For him, she represents the great principle - the fundamental human unity of the diverse people who, whether as original inhabitants, immigrants or conquerors, have made their home on her soil. |
“Awake, my heart, in the holy land
On India's mighty human sea.....
No one knows at whose call the many streams of men
Came rushing from afar to mingle in that sea." (Gitanjali)
"The history of India, he said, was not the separate history of a sect, caste, race or religion, and the Aryans who had conquered the land from non-Aryans were not its only makers. The country's culture was born of their combined efforts. The Turks and the Moghuls, who entered India as conquerors, lived and died on Indian soil and merged into the Indian body, they too had a place of their own in the history of India."
“But a river belonging to a country is not fed by its own waters alone. Contributions have similarly found their way to India's original culture.”
"The Muhammadan, for example, has repeatedly come into India from outside, laden with his own stores of knowledge and feeling and his wonderful religious democracy.......In our music, our architecture, our pictorial art, our literature, the Muhammadans have made their permanent and precious contribution."
"And there has descended upon us the later flood of Western culture. …………."
(Series of Lectures by Tagore, 1919) |
