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Ireland, India, and the Poetics of Internationalism
Gauri Viswanathan
Columbia University
| By the time of home rule agitation in both Ireland and India, anti-Bcolonial movements blended into a more internationalist vision then beginning to emerge in the years following the First World War. To extreme nationalists, internationalism was a complete anathema, a more refined term to prolong the evils of colonialism indefinitely under the guise of a universal humanism. However, to those who still considered themselves nationalists but believed they had a responsibility that extended far beyond the immediate goal of liberation from colonial rule, internationalism was the only solution to a world totally sundered by ethnic fratricide. The frightening reality of states at war with each other threatened to engulf with equal devastation those states aspiring to newfound independence. Therefore, when the Indian poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore raised his voice in India on behalf of the "expanding soul of humanity," the language of universalism that underlined his appeal for "some spiritual design of life" earned him brickbats from his compatriots, who mocked his views as hopelessly romantic and beguiled.1 |
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Incidentally, Tagore was a puzzle not only to his own countrymen. He equally intrigued those in other countries who looked to Indian anticolonialism as a potential model for combating racism in their societies. For instance, a short but cryptic letter by Tagore to The Crisis, a periodical devoted to African American issues that was at the time edited by W. E. B. DuBois, raised eyebrows among African American readers. They were rightly stunned that Tagore, "a colored man," should so strike a universalist note even while experiencing the most humiliating forms of racism.2 Tagore's call to Indians and other oppressed subjects to break out of the "forced seclusion of our racial tradition" astounded those who were trying to recover all that had been suppressed by centuries of white oppression. Tagore's declaration that "we must show, each in our own civilization, that which is universal in the heart of the unique" appeared to reintroduce the colonial logic of universal humanism, just as his appeal to fellow subjects to harmonize their growth with "world tendencies" seemed to place the center of their cultural development outside themselves. Yet as DuBois admitted, in a moment of total agreement with Tagore, the struggle against racism in the African American community was falling victim to the same provincialism that had given the defining strokes to European colonialism and American white supremacy. |
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Tagore's isolation, especially in India, was all the more pronounced because his stance on internationalism as the political philosophy of the future appeared to converge with that of Europeans then residing in India. Indeed, internationalism appeared to many to have become the cultural priority of European émigrés in India who, neither sympathetic to the continuance of British colonial rule nor keen on seeing a violent takeover by extremist nationalists, favored a more spiritual successor to the inevitable demise of empire. Movements with a global reach, such as theosophy, gained strength during the same period, advocating a "brotherhood of man" as a metaphysical counterpart to a British commonwealth destined to supersede empire. From our own perspective as critics of the discourses of both nationalism and colonialism, the real challenge lies in evaluating the motives and intentions of those advocating internationalism. Were they simply continuing colonial rule in a different form? Or were they genuinely crafting a worldview that sought an ideal meeting point as much between philosophy and politics as between a narrow, provincial nationalism and rank colonialism? |
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