The month of May is memorable for marking the birthdays of Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray. Their achievements are acknowledged the world over, just as their attitudes and values are recognised too. There is, therefore, an irony in the fact that their birthday celebrations were taking place while tensions between India and Pakistan had resulted in action. An act of ruthless terrorism in Pahalgam, Kashmir lies at the root of the tensions. Tagore was acquainted with militant nationalism during the struggle for Independence and his mature writings show that he was against it. Of course, he did not know the kind of terrorism that is the curse of recent times, so it would not be fair to speculate how he would have felt about the retaliation to that. He was strongly patriotic in his swadeshi phase when he was a young man, but he moved far away from the sentiments of that period as time went on.
But because Tagore’s thinking was highly nuanced and ever-evolving, it is not always easy to pin down. He was certainly against imperialism and its violence and cruelty, perhaps best symbolised by the return of his knighthood after the killings in Jallianwala Bagh. He felt that Indians had to be independent, dependent only on the strength within; but the nation he envisaged was not exclusivist as he believed the nations of the West to be. So an aggressive nationalism is not something he supported. Tagore was also deeply affected by the divisions between communities that he possibly saw as partly imposed or encouraged by imperialist rule. His vision of civilisation was not that of exclusivist nations but of a community held together by ethical imperatives with hospitality and mutual engagement as priorities in the value system. His ideal of a shared humanity is best seen in the university he founded, Visva-Bharati, in his abode of peace, Santiniketan, where scholars from all over the world came to work, teach and learn.
It is not surprising that Ray should choose, among other Tagore stories, Ghare-Baire or The Home and the World, for filming. Ghare-Baire and Char Adhyay were two of Tagore’s most controversial novels, criticised for messages that seemed to go against militancy in aggressive nationalism. But Ray’s attitude to war was most lucidly and entertainingly depicted in his fantasy film, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. The warlike king of Halla, made evil by a magic potion, fails in his plan to fight against Shundi, ruled by his long-lost benevolent twin, because the two eponymous heroes freeze the army in its tracks with the magical power of their song. The war is limited to music — the aggressive marching song of Halla’s army against the melody of the heroes asking what they will gain by war. Ray’s message of peace lies in the depiction of the superior power of unwarlike music as Tagore’s lies in the rich ideal of a shared humanity.