Start of acquaintance : 22 September 1931
Born: May 7, 1861, Kolkata, India
Died: August 7, 1941, Kolkata, India
Awards: Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913
Keywords: Writer, Poet, Artist, Educationalist, Musician
Gandhi and Tagore shared immense friendship and respect for each other and continuously shared letters.
It was in 1914 that the two met in person when the members of Phoenix Settlement from South Africa were temporarily staying at Santiniketan of Tagore, before the establishment of Satyagraha Ashram. This meeting laid the foundation of a deep friendship and intellectual exchanges of both agreement and differences between the two, which lasted till Tagore’s death in 1941.
Both the personalities had immense mutual admiration. Tagore called him a “great leader of men,” and Gandhi often asked him for advices and criticisms alike for his actions. They both shared similar abhorrence for communalism and casteism.
But they also shared many differences on political and philosophical ideas which were debated in a series of articles written in Modern Review and Young India.
First, Tagore disliked Gandhi’s call for the boycott of government schools in the absence of any alternative. Gandhi justified it, claiming that the schools rendered them godless.
Second, Tagore was sceptical of the discourse behind Charkha and burning of foreign clothes which according to him, lied in economic sphere but was imposed with a moral characterisation that “foreign cloth is impure,” to which Gandhi replied that he did not make a distinction between economics and ethics.
Third, Gandhi supported the Varnashrama system, the pre-determined occupational characterisation of which was the bet means to avoid encroachment to other’s sphere of work and hence reduce the competitiveness for the pursuit of wealth. Tagore denounced it on the grounds that occupation choice should be based rather on individual capacity.
These differences notwithstanding, Tagore asked Gandhi in 1937 to become a life trustee of Visva Bharati, a college which he founded in Santiniketan and the latter arranged for its funds in times of financial crisis to help Tagore.
There is ambiguity over who gave the title of ‘Mahatma’ to Gandhi. While the Gujarat High court in 2016 clarified that Tagore used it for the first time, other sources mention that C.F. Andrews used it first in a letter to Tagore. Nonetheless, he began using this title as early as 1915 and the latter reciprocated with the usage ‘Gurudev’ for him, which surfaces most prominently in his letters to Gandhi.
Writing about ‘Gandhi-the man’ Gurudev Tagore says, “taken just as a person, he was not particularly significant. He had no commanding presence such as we associate with greatness…he was no orator, never lifted his voice above the conversational level when talking to a multitude, and there was no attempt at producing an effect. Yet the multitudes hang on every word as upon an oracle”.
“It was because he knew that when he spoke, the cause of India’s freedom spoke. That cause looked out of his eyes and suffered as he suffered. He had the significance of the cause with which he was identified…In Gandhi, the word of freedom became flesh. When he spoke, freedom spoke.” He could claim with conviction, “I know my millions”. He could take an entire nation along with him.
