Ignorant Criticism

A MADRAS journal has discovered in Dr. Rabindranath Tagore’s recent lectures at Madras “the undoubted growth in one of the most picturesque and intellectual personalities of modern India of an attitude towards human life as it exists to-day both impatient and bitter”. “Indeed, from what he said”, writes the journal, “one might be excused for coming away with the impression that his intention was to prove that all that the West was good for was war and destruction and that if the world was to find an antidote to her suffering, she must look for it in the Brahminical doctrines and traditions, surely a very one-sided attitude for any sincere idealist to adopt.” Dr. Tagore cannot be rightly held responsible for the impression which a particular hearer of his lectures came away with. That would depend far more, in most cases, upon the intellectual and other equipment of the individual concerned than upon what the lecturer actually said. In the present case, it is safe to assert that so far from trying to extol Brahminical doctrines and traditions unduly or at the expense of the good things of the West, Dr. Tagore was in fact as hard upon certain aspects of those doctrines and traditions as upon some of the leading tendencies of European civilisation, culture and life. This has, indeed, been the drift of all Dr. Tagore’s recent utterances. No writer of our time, none in this country at any rate, has had so much to say against fanatical nationalism, whether of the East or the West, whether Indian or English. So far from regarding India as the exclusive home of all that is good, it was against this supposed tendency in certain phases of the non-co-operation movement that he made his earnest protest in a famous series of lectures in Calcutta which for a time made him unpopular with a section of the people.

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