“...you are that beautiful spirit of fire, which burns the home to ashes and lights up the larger world with its flame. Give to us the indomitable courage to go to the bottom or ruin itself. Impart grace to all that is baneful.”
(May 04, Colombo, Sri Lana Guardian) This invocation of the spirit of nationalism which appears in Tagore’s The Home and the World rings true to life for those of us who witnessed the Tamil struggle from within. The destructive impact of nationalism, its brutalising intoxication and unscrupulous use of the impressionable young were witnessed with alarm by Tagore in his contact with the Swadeshi Movement of the first decade of the 20th Century. In the final accounting of the Tamil struggle, one might say, we burnt our home and lit up the world for the migration of a privileged section of our people, to feed in turn the flames for those struggling at home against inhuman odds.
The universal truth expressed by Tagore is voiced powerfully in the work of his admirer and contemporary, the Irish poet, W.B. Yeats. Yeats, like many of us Tamils felt the first thrill, mixed with foreboding, when the oppressed and humiliated took up armed resistance. The ambivalence is evident in his Easter 1916:
“All is changed, changed utterly A terrible beauty is born”
Three years later in 1919, the same year when Tagore’s Home and the World was released in English and Europe was in ruins after the First World War with revolutions in Ireland and Russia, Yeats gave voice to total disillusionment with revolutionary violence. In his Second Coming he saw the times as:
“When the best lack all conviction and the worst
Are full of passionate intensity”
Having completed 60 years of freedom from colonial rule, we are a sick nation finding it hard to come to terms with what happened in the past 100 years. Warnings about excesses of nationalism largely went unheeded in this country, even though the elite of this country paid nominal obeisance to the Indian struggle. The painstaking research of Kumari Jayawardena shows that our so-called national leaders were from the 1920s, laying the basis for Sinhalese exclusivism and in turn for chauvinistic divisions to engulf this country.
In place of celebrating Independence with some generous, unifying gesture in keeping with the higher principles of man, the leaders rushed, by a vulgar sleight of hand, to deprive the Tamil plantation labour of their rights of citizenship and franchise. The house had been set aflame. The same spirit of playing tawdry games with the rights of the people persists to this day.
The ICCPR
The Supreme Court in September 2006 ruled out of the blue that ‘the rights under the ICCPR are not rights under the Constitution of Sri Lanka.’ The Defence Ministry continued its rampage of murder and displacement in the North-East as though the minorities had no rights. With the European Union threatening to remove crucial trade concessions granted in the wake of the 2004 tsunami, President Rajapaksa felt a sudden longing for the ICCPR and called for a determination by the Supreme Court. And hey presto, the Supreme Court, presided over again by the Chief Justice discovered that the rights under the ICCPR are fully, if tediously, enshrined in the country’s legal system. If these rights could be toyed around with at the whims of the Executive and the Supreme Court, they are dead indeed for the people of Sri Lanka.
School children in Jaffna were taught by their peers to venerate Gandhi, Tagore and Bharathy well into the 1960s. But the gravity of their struggles and dilemmas lasting several decades were not then part of our living experience. While Sinhalese extremism had to be challenged, the cowardice, moral and intellectual failures of many that enabled the LTTE to set their home on fire endures to their shame.
Non-violent
In retrospect we are left to marvel at Gandhi’s leadership in liberating India by means. It was a truly revolutionary departure in the history of man that would have earned the derision of many. In place of violence that came naturally, hundreds of millions were led to face violence and humiliation passively. Had the flames of violent revolution been fanned in India with its bewildering divisions, there would not have been the proud nation of India today. There would only have been ashes.
Behind Gandhi’s achievements lay the confluence of some of the great minds of his time. Prominent among them is Leo Tolstoy with his memorable words, “There is no greatness where simplicity goodness and truth are absent”. Despite being the unquestioned leader of the Indian masses, Gandhi was open to the ideas of others who differed while sharing the same concerns of social and economic upliftment of the masses, bridging Muslim-Hindu differences and emancipation from caste.
Tagore saw the alienation of Muslims during the 1905 Swadeshi Movement, for which he blamed the Hindus, and dropped out of it after an impassioned youthful bomber killed two English civilians in 1908. He remained a strong voice against taking others for granted in one’s enthusiasm for a cause. To him any message, any symbol used, should appeal to humanity as a whole, including the English, and if not, should be left aside. Subramaniya Bharathy was a strong voice against all forms of sectarianism from the South. They all contributed to enrich the Indian struggle. These values and achievements need to be rediscovered by every generation and should not be taken for granted. Gujarat, which gave us Gandhi, has also given us Narendra Modhi seeking to undo the Mahatma’s work. When would we rise to be a nation from the slime of our mytho-histories and the ideologies they inspired?
- Sri Lanka Guardian
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