Brāḥmaṇa by Rabindranath Tagore (Part IV)
[Translator’s note: This is the final part of the English translation of Tagore’s essay “Brāḥmaṇa” from the anthology Bhāratavarṣa. The previous parts can be read here: Part I, Part II, and Part III.]
The whole of our society is primarily Dvija[i]; and if it does not remain so, if it ends up being primarily a Shudra society, then, with only a handful of Brahmins living in it, this society will fall short of both the European ideal as well as the Indian ideal.
Every highly developed society demands vitality from its people. A society which leniently allows most of its people to believe that they are so debased that they can easily indulge in sluggish material comforts, dies; and if not, it is better for such a society to die.
Europe is ever ready to proffer her life to the thrill of action and to the excitement of instincts. If we, on the other hand, are not ready to give our life for the sake of dharma, then it ill behoves us to keep sulking when that life continues to be humiliated.
European soldiers give up their life for the sake of the thrill of war, greed for wages, and the assurance of glory; but Kshatriyas remain prepared to lay down their lives in battle even if the excitement and wages are lacking. This is because war is an essential task for the functioning of society. If one community accepts that difficult duty as its very own dharma, then the protection of dharma is ensured along with the performance of the task. If everyone in the country starts preparing themselves for battle, then the excesses of militarism bring serious harm to the country.
Commerce is essential work for the protection of society. If a community accepts that social necessity as its communitarian duty, as its ancestral glory, then commerce does not engulf the other forces of the society through a pervasive intrusion into everything. Moreover, the ideal of dharma remains ever awake in that work.
Acquisition of dharma and knowledge, the waging of wars and the running of a government, carrying out commerce and the fine arts – these are the three vital activities of a society. None of these can be abandoned. If each of these activities is endowed with the glory of dharma as well as the glory of a lineage, and then handed over to a particular community, then not only are these activities kept under control, but they are also given the opportunity to strive for excellence.
The thrill of action might itself become the overlord and thus overwhelm our souls – India has always been apprehensive of this possibility. Therefore, in India, the social being fights, trades; but the eternal being, the whole human being does not remain a mere soldier, it does not remain a mere merchant. If a certain kind of work is sanctified in order to make it a sacred vow to be kept by a particular lineage, if that work is sacralised to become a community’s religion, then not only the work is accomplished, but moreover work does not get to occupy the very throne of the human spirit by transgressing its own boundaries, by damaging the equilibrium of society, by overwhelming the very humanity of human beings.
Those who are the Dvija have to give up their work at one point in their life. From that point onwards, they are no longer Brahmins, nor Kshatriyas, nor Vaishyas — from that point onwards they become the eternal human being — from then onwards, work for them is no longer a vow, and therefore it can be given up without effort. In this way, the Dvija society was able to preserve both Vidyā and Avidyā — they said, “avidyayā mṛtyuṁ tīrtvā vidyayā’mṛtamaśnute”[ii], after crossing beyond death by the help of Avidyā, attain immortality by the help of Vidyā. This samsara is the very abode of death, this itself is Avidyā — if you want to go beyond it, you must go through it; but you have to travel in such a way that it does not become the supreme goal. If work is given the utmost primacy, then this samsara becomes supreme; thus, it becomes impossible to overcome death; and the very goal of attaining immortality is lost, there being no time to pursue such a goal. Hence the necessity to limit work, hence the necessity to associate work with dharma — that is why work is not left to instinct, to thrill, to the tremendous momentum generated by work; and that is why work is divided and assigned to specific communities of people in India.
This, then, is the ideal. I for one do not see any other way of maintaining the harmony between dharma and work, and making the human being worldly on the one hand and worthy of liberation on the other by releasing the mind from the various shackles of action. This ideal is the noblest of all, and it is the ideal of India. We must put our minds to finding a way by which the present society can lay claim to this ideal and be guided by it in general. No one has to make an effort to incite action and instincts – and thus make them intractable – by breaking down all societal bonds. That state is catching up with the society on its own, by way of inertia, by laxity of discipline.
I am fully aware that this Indian ideal will not be able to quickly and easily capture the imagination of the entire society due to the prevalence of foreign education system and in the face of adverse economic conditions in the country. Neither do I cherish the hopeless notion that it would be easy for us to adopt the European ideal. The easiest way, of course, is to forsake all sorts of ideals – and that indeed is the easy route that we have taken. The ideal of the European civilisation is not some loose thing that can easily find its way into one’s grip like the low-hanging ripe fruit that is merely waiting to be plucked.
There is a balance between the forces of destruction and preservation in every old and great ideal. That is to say, when one of these two forces tends to destroy an ideal by committing excesses, the other checks and protects it. In our body too, there is a physiological process to get rid of the excess work that is harmful to the body, while extracting as much work as is necessary. The body accepts only that portion of the bile which is essential, and ensures that the inessential part is continually thrown out.
All these fine faculties, refined through a long-drawn-out process involving many actions and reactions, have given the society’s physiology its present form. When imitating others, we cannot make this entire natural process our own, just like that. And so, what brings good in other societies becomes the root cause of evil in the imitators’ own society. We could consider seeking one or two fruits from the tree of European civilisation which the nature of the European people has made fructuous through its incessant work of a prolonged time, but we cannot make all of the tree our own. That past of theirs is past our reach.
But even if our Indian past has stopped bearing fruit for us due to lack of care, yet that great past has not perished, it cannot perish – for it is that very past which, living inside each of us, is repeatedly rendering our imitation of the other out of place and unsuccessful. When we bring in the new by neglecting that past, then the past silently takes its revenge – it destroys the new, turns it putrid, and thus pollutes the very air we breathe. We may as well think that we need this new thing, but unless we have reached a clear settlement with the past by means of a thorough negotiation, there’s no way we can gain entry to the new merely on the pretext of necessity. Even if the novelty is snuck in, it all comes to naught unless the old and the new have assimilated with each other.
That is why we have to inject new strength into our past itself, we have to breathe new life into it. This new lease of life cannot be given to it by dry analysis and debate alone. Neither will it happen if we allow things to continue in just the same manner as they are going on at the moment. A sublime mental state prevailed in Ancient India. The joy exuding from this mental state inspired our free-spirited forefathers to meditate, to sacrifice, to work, and to lay down their lives. If we can fill our lives to the brim with the joy and the nectar of that mental state, then that joy itself will dissolve all barriers between the present and the past using the forces of its prodigious strength with unimaginable ease. Instead of trying to hypnotise people by complex expositions, their hearts should be filled with the rasa of the past. If you can do that, then our fundamental nature will carry on its work on its own. When that nature does its work, only then the task is accomplished. We cannot even account for its workings – no intellectual or scholar can ever predict the method or model of how that work is carried out. Help comes from even those quarters that are perceived by logic as obstacles, and even those things that are proved to be insignificant turn out to be substantial.
Nothing is attained simply by asserting that one wants it — one should never expect that the aid of the past is going to make itself comprehensively attainable merely because we are saying that it is the need of the hour. When our intellect, mind and soul are duly initiated in the ideal of that past, only then shall we see that the ancient is exuberantly expressing itself to us in a new mode, in newer shapes and in newer manifestations. It will then no longer remain the sapless kindling of the cremation-bed, but will have grown into a fructuous tree in the sanctuary of life.
Like a tsunami that rises from the suddenly swelling sea, when the joy of the ideal will deluge our society, then all these ancient riverbeds of our land will be filled to the brim. Then our country will spontaneously rise up with the support of the brahmacarya[iii], it will wake up to the music of the Sāma hymns, it will arise as Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas. Those very birds that used to fill the sylvan hermitage with their music at daybreak, will sing once again, and not the cockatoos on its decorated perch nor the caged canaries and nightingales.
The whole of our society is becoming restive to attain that ancient Dvija-hood, and our minds are filled with hope when we see its signs every day. There was a time when we made efforts to hide our Hindutva[iv], we tried to get rid of it – and in that hope, for a long time we went around the shops in the bazaars of Chandni[v] and dutifully flocked the lobbies of the Chowringhee[vi] area. If today the lofty ambition of establishing ourselves as Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas has arisen in our minds, if today we wish to attain to greatness by ennobling our society with nothing but ancestral glory, then it is truly a day of rejoicing for us. We do not want to become Firangis, we want to become Dvija-s. Those who hinder this due to the pettiness of their intellect and engage in meaningless squabbles, those who cannot see its far-reaching success amidst the dust of arguments, those who do not cease the futile disputations of their diminutive erudition out of shame before the greatness of the sublime ideal – such people are enemies of the very society in whose protection they have grown. From time immemorial, India has been calling upon her communities of Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas. Europe, having categorised and segregated her knowledge and her sciences into numerous parts, has in a state of bewilderment started looking for the unity among those parts in recent times. Where is the Brahmin of India, who, by the powers of his innate genius, can effortlessly point out the hidden but direct path of unity amidst all that vast complexity? India is inviting this Brahmin to take his seat, in a meditative posture, upon the preceptor’s dais amidst the sylvan hermitage, far from the city’s noise and bustle and far from the strife of self-interests. By drawing the Brahmin away from all his insults, India is trying to remove her own humiliation. By the blessings of God, perhaps the beatings of the shoe that the Brahmin received will not go in vain. When the slumber becomes too deep, it needs to be interrupted by such a rude blow. In Europe the men of action are entangled in the web of work, they are unable to find a way out of it, and so they are rummaging about in every direction. The ones who are fit to take up the solemn vow of the Kshatriya or that of the Vaishya in India – may they glorify work by means of dharma in today’s world. May they prepare themselves to surrender their lives with unflinching devotion to the summons not of the instincts, nor of thrill, but of dharma, without getting solely addicted to the desire for the fruit of action. Otherwise, the Brahmin will become Shudra every day, the society will be diminished at every moment; and the greatness of Ancient India, which stood firm as an immovable mountain, will melt into thin air like a cloud, like the mist, on the farthest horizon of a distant historical memory; and the rush to drag one of a pair of gigantic shoes into an underground cavity with all their might – like those files of tiny black ants – will be considered as the only way of living one’s life by a large community of work-fatigued clerks.
(End)
[i] ‘Dvija’ is a Sanskrit word which literally means the ‘Twice-Born’. Those who undergo the upanayana saṃskāra (i.e., the ceremony of investiture with the sacred thread or ‘upavīta’ for one’s initiation into the study of the Vedas by the ācārya, the preceptor) are known as the Dvija, indicating that they have been born anew, as it were, into the life of the spirit through the ritual ceremony of upanayana saṃskāra.
[ii] Mantra 11 of the Īśopaniṣad
[iii] The first of the four stages of a Dvija’s life as mandated in a traditional Hindu society. In this stage, the young Hindu prepares for a life of the world through learning and practising strict discipline while living in the household of the ācārya, the preceptor.
[iv] The word used in the original text is “Hindutva/ হিন্দুত্ব”.
[v] A Muslim-majority neighbourhood in Kolkata.
[vi] A neighbourhood in Kolkata, famous as the business district of the city since the British colonial times, home to important merchant and government offices.
