THE GANDHI-TAGORE CONTROVERSY

IT is with no little hesitation that we venture to express our opinion regarding the controversy that has taken place between two men who, besides being among the first minds in contemporary India, are among the best known and most outstanding figures at the present time all the world over. In noticing the controversy, the first thing that strikes one is that while each writer is frank and outspoken, and does not hesitate to call a spade a spade whenever necessary, both write with a complete freedom from bitterness. After summing up the achievements of the past generations of public workers in India as “vapourings in the English language, in which flitted about thin shades of Burke and Gladstone, Mazzini and Garibaldi, and in which nothing resembling self-sacrifice or true feeling for their countrymen was visible,” Dr. Tagore writes--“At this juncture, Mahatma Gandhi came and stood at the door of the destitute millions, clad as one of themselves, and talking to them in their language. Here was the truth at last, not a mere quotation out of a book. So the name of Mahatma which was given to him is his true name. Who else has felt so many men of India to be his own flesh and blood? At the touch of truth, the pent-up forces of the soul are set free.” We do not endorse Dr. Tagore’s summing of the past. One misses in it the true note of criticism. To say of a generation of political workers which included not only a Gokhale but a Tilak that the country meant for it “only that bookish aspect of it which is to be found in the pages of the Englishman’s history” is wrong. Gandhi will be the first person to acknowledge that he found the ground admirably prepared for his work. We are concerned only with Tagore’s appreciation of Gandhi and not with his failure to appreciate others, and from this point of view the picture we have quoted, leaves nothing to be desired.

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