English - Gujlish of Gandhi and English - Bengalism of Tagore.

In the month of April 1921, Mahatma Gandhi launched a broadside against English Education. First, in a speech in Orissa, he described it as an ‘unmitigated evil’. Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Rammohan Roy would, said Gandhi, have ‘been far greater men had they not the contagion of English learning’. In Gandhi’s opinion, these two influential and admired Indians ‘were so many pigmies who had no hold upon the people compared with Chaitanya, Sanker, Kabir, and Nanak’. Warming to the theme, Gandhi insisted that ‘what sanker alone was able to do, the whole army of English- knowing men can’t do. I can multiply instances. Was Guru Govind a product of English education? Is there a single English-knowing Indian who is a match for Nanak, the founder of a sect second to none in point of valour and sacrifice? … If the race has even to be revived it is to be revived not by English education.’

A friend, reading the press reports of this talk in Orissa, asked Gandhi to explain his views further. Writing in his own newspaper, the Mahatma clarified that ‘it is my considered opinion that English education in the manner it has been given has emasculated the English- educated Indian, it has put a severe strain on the Indian students’ nervous energy, and has made of us imitators. The process of displacing the vernaculars has been one of the saddest chapters in the British Connection…’ ‘Rammohan Roy would have been a greater reformer,’ claimed the Mahatma, ‘and Lokmanya Tilak would have been a greater scholar, if they had not to start with the handicap of having to think in English and transmit their thoughts chiefly in English.’ Gandhi argued that ‘of all the superstitions that affect India, none is so great as that a knowledge of the English language is necessary for imbibing ideas of liberty, and developing accuracy of thought’. As a result of the system of education introduced by the English, ‘the tendency has been to dwarf the Indian body, mind and soul’. 

One does not know whether the Mahatma’s anonymous friend was content with this clarification. But someone who was less than satisfied with Gandhi’s view was the poet Rabindranath Tagore. He was then travelling in Europe, where he received, by post, copies of Gandhi’s articles. Tagore was dismayed by their general tenor, and by the chastisement of Rammohan Roy in particular. On the 10^th of May 1921, he wrote to their common friend C.F. Andrews, saying, ‘I strongly protest against Mahatma Gandhi’s depreciation of such great personalities of Modern India as Rammohan Roy in his zeal for declaiming against our modern education.’ Gandhi had celebrated the example of Nanak and Kabir, but, as Tagore suggested, those saints ‘were great because in their life and teaching they made organic union of the Hindu and Muhammadan cultures – and such realization of the spiritual unity through all differences of appearances is truly Indian.’ 

In learning and appreciating English, argued Tagore, Rammohan Roy had merely carried on the good work of Nanak and Kabir. Thus, ‘in the modern age Rammohan Roy had that comprehensiveness of mind to be able to realize the fundamental unity of spirit in the Hindu, Muhammadan and Christian cultures. Therefore, he represented India in the fullness of truth, and this truth is based, not upon rejection, but on perfect comprehension.’ Tagore pointed out that ‘Rammohan Roy could be perfectly natural in his acceptance of the west, not only because his education had been perfectly Eastern – he had the full inheritance of the Indian wisdom. He was never a school boy of the west. If he is not understood by modern India, this only shows the pure light of her own truth has been obscured for the moment by the storm—clouds of passion.’ 

Tagore’s letter to Andrews was released to the press, and read by Gandhi. His answer was to say that he did ‘not object to English learning as such’, but merely to its being made a fetish, and to its being preferred as a medium of education to the mother tongue. ‘Mine is not a religion of the prison – house,’ he insisted: ‘it has room even for the least among God’s creation.’ Refuting the charge that he or his non – cooperation movement were a manifestation of xenophobia, he said: ‘I hope I am a great a believer in free air as the great poet. I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off by any.’

These words are emblazoned in halls and auditoria across India, but always without the crucial first line: ‘I hope I am as great a believer in free air as the great poet.’ In truth, despite this argument in theory, in practice Gandhi and Tagore were more or less on the same side. Gandhi wrote his books in Gujarati, but made certain that they were translated into English so as to reach a wider audience. And when required he could use the conqueror’s language rather well himself. His first published articles, that appeared in the journal of the Vegetarian Society of London in 1891, were written in the direct and unadorned prose that was the hallmark of all his work in English, whether petitions to the colonial government, editorials in his journals Indian Opinion, Young India and Harijan, or numerous letters to friends.

In writing in more than one language, Gandhi was in fact merely following in the footsteps of those he had criticized. For, Bal Gangadgar Tilak’s mother tongue was Marathi, a language in which he did certainly publish essays. On his part, Rammohan Roy had published books in Persian and essays in Bengali before he came to write in English (he was also fluent in Sanskrit and Arabic). As for Tagore, this man who shaped and reshaped the Bengali language through his novels and poems, made sure that his most important works of non-fiction were available in English. His major political testament, Nationalism, was based on lectures he wrote and delivered in English. His important and still relevant essays on relations between the East and the West were either written in English or translated by a colleague under his supervision. Tagore understood that while love and humiliation at the personal or familiar level were best expressed in the mother tongue, impersonal questions of reason and justice had sometimes to be communicated in a language read by more people and over a greater geographical space than Bengali.

By writing in English as well as their mother tongue, Gandhi and Tagore were serving society as well as themselves. They reached out to varied audiences – and, by listening to other people’s views, broadened the bases of their own thought. This open – mindedness was also reflected in their reading. Thus Gandhi read (and was influenced by) thinkers who were not necessarily Gujarati. The debt he owed to Ruskin and Tolstoy was scarcely less than that owed to Raychandbhai or Narsinh Mehta. Gandhi was also enriched by the time he spent outside Gujarat—the several years in England, the several decades in South Africa, the millions of miles travelling through the country side.   

On his part, Tagore was widely read in European literature. When he visited Germany in the 1920s at the invitation of his publisher, Kurt Wolff, his host remembered the ‘universal breadth of Tagore’s learning’, their conversations revealing ‘without doubt that he knew far more of the West of the Europeans he encountered knew of the East’. Tagore had spoken, among other things, of the works of T. S. Eliot. ‘It is quite remarkable’, said Wolff, ‘that someone born in India in 1861 should display such an interest in and grasp of an Anglo – American poet thirty years his junior.’  

Moral of the Story:  ‘I hope I am a great a believer in free air as the great poet. I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off by any.’ 

(From 'The Rise and Fall of The Bilingual Intellectual' Part - II of Ramchandra Guha's Aritcle)