Anubandh: Hello! My name is Anubandh KATÉ. I am a Paris based engineer and since last few months I have started taking interviews. I have started talking to authors about the books that I read and those I like. Today, I have a great pleasure to have with me Olivier DA LAGE. Welcome Olivier!
Olivier: Hello! Thank you for having me.
Anubandh: My pleasure. Olivier DA LAGE, I already had an
interview with him regarding his important book in French “Les Indiens et leurs
Langues » - Indians and their languages. We had a long session of fascinating
discussion but today what brings me here with him is the fact that on 7th
of May we have the birth anniversary of Rabindranath TAGORE. It is his 164th
birth anniversary. TAGORE was born on 7th of May 1861. We had an
idea that the best way to celebrate this birth anniversary would be to discuss and
talk about TAGORE's, one of the important books and we chose that book to be
“Nationalism”. So, here is the book that we will discuss about but before that
I would read few lines to introduce Olivier DA LAGE to my Indian audience, those
perhaps who do not know him yet.
Olivier DA LAGE was working for the RFI which is “Radio France International”. He is a specialist of International matters relations. Currently, he is a researcher at IRIS which is “Institute de Relation Internationale et Stratégique” in Paris. He is an expert on matters that relate to India as well as Arabic countries and he has stayed in India for quite some considerable period of time. Olivier is there anything that you would like to add to this introduction?
Olivier: No No.. I am blushing! Thank you, you can carry on.
Anubandh: But I will continue a bit on that line because there are few books that you wrote and I will just name them, although they are in French. The first one is « l’INDE de À a Z » - India from A to Z, which you co-authored with Nina DA LAGE. Then, « l’INDE: Désire de Puissance », India: The Desire of Power. Then you also wrote “Bombay: D’un quartier à l’autre”, Bombay from one colony to another, one area to another Then, “L’INDE: Un géant fragile”, India, a fragile giant. And you as well wrote “Le Rickshaw de Mr. SINGH”, a novel. That is quite a broad panoply of your books. They are in all 20.
Well, so what brings me to you, to have you on this session is also for the fact that you republished “Nationalism”, the book of TAGORE in French and I believe it was in the year 2020, is that right?
Olivier: Yes.
Anubandh: So, would like you to explain to my audience what was the inspiration, what was the reason you chose this book and how it all happened?
Olivier: A few years before that I had coordinated and co-authored a huge book on Religious Nationalism that was not my initiative but (of) a publisher who contacted me. I had worked with him before and he said you should do that. So, at first I was a bit apprehensive because I didn't know, I mean I was not very knowledgeable about the subject but then I decided to take the challenge and I contacted a number of specialists on various countries and in the end a huge, fat book of many monographs, so to speak plus an introduction and conclusion I wrote and one chapter on India about Religious Nationalism. Several years later, the same publisher contacted me and said , I think you should read that small book by TAGORE and given what you have done previously maybe you should write also a presentation of this masterpiece. Thus, I had never heard of that book. Of course, I knew about TAGORE but that book was totally unknown to me. Therefore, I started reading it, in the English version that he had sent me. Although it is quite a small book, I mean this is the English version book he gave me. You can see that it is not a very thick volume. I decided that it was a very good idea. Hence, I found a French translation which had been published in 1924. So, that is nearly one century ago which means that I could use that translation, it was in the public domain. Before I wrote anything, I decided to dive into TAGORE. I knew of course Rabindranath TAGORE by name and I had seen several movies which had been inspired by his works, as they are quite known in France, of course, Satyajit RAY. Though I have to confess that I had never read TAGORE. So, I started reading several of his novels, his poems. I didn't read everything he wrote, that is so (huge), I mean it would have taken a lifetime nearly because he wrote so much. But then what struck me is that in the novels, which are true novels. I mean, this is a pleasure to read. There is a plot, there are characters yet there is always some idea which is lingering beneath the story and it was quite consistent with what I had read about Nationalism and to put it in a nutshell and I stop there for the first reply. TAGORE is very wary of Nationalism per se and what it leads to.
Anubandh: I would like to pick few of your ideas and themes of this initial introduction by you. I confess as well that even if I am an Indian. I was, I mean now I am a Franco-Indian, I happened to read this Nationalism book in French, in France. I did not know about this book when I was in India. It is perhaps not a surprise because most of the people that I know in India who read quite a lot, do not really know about how important political writings of TAGORE were or are today. Hence, Nationalism book, although it is a small book, as you said, the ideas which are there and their conciseness, their preciseness is incredible. It has this universalism which goes beyond time, beyond centuries. We can say that about a lot of books but I would, if there is a list, I would keep this book in a very high ranking.
I would also like to point out to my audience that after having stayed in Europe for 11 years and nine years in France and what I could observe about the French society, I see a fascination for reading. For example, and perhaps, Olivier would say that this is on the wane, (this) is decreasing but yet when you take a metro here, when you are outside, you see people still reading and resisting the mobile. It is even more particular, specially about Paris. I have not seen that in other European cities.
Olivier: On that I would say that is from time to time I see my neighbor or the person standing in front of me reading a book, I just look at the title of the book and from time to time I go and get that book as well!
Anubandh: True. Sometimes, this also gives (us) an excuse to start a new discussion, a conversation, even with strangers. That is so wonderful! I have also seen people walking, going to their offices and still reading! So, that is quite a good sight to have. This is about why you wrote the book but you also wrote a 20 page introduction to this book. What would be the highlights of this book, or ideas of TAGORE that you would take from this book?
Olivier: Maybe before that we should recall what is the book about and how and when it was published. In fact, it was not designed to be a book. In 1916 TAGORE went to Japan and then to the US and in Japan and in the US he delivered three lectures. One in Japan and two in the US. 1916 is the height of the First World War. So, he could see, because he had been to Europe and he was in contact with Europeans. He could see the magnitude of the massacres taking place between countries which were supposed to be highly civilized and educated and so on… and it came as a shock to him. Basically, you can see how deeply shocked he is in the way he presents his ideas which barely refer to the war itself, although you can, knowing when it was delivered. Actually everything in it refers to that butchery which is happening between the peoples of Europe. Then those three lectures were put together. And that book (got) published the following year, in 1917. Still while the First World War was going on. I think it has to be kept in mind because a lot of things clearly refer to that background. That being said, he constantly, whether he addresses the Japanese audience or the American, tries to see how on the one hand he admires the European culture which doesn't mean he wants to import it to India. Like he was joking in (his) other works that the education in India by the British had young children read books about the snow in areas where they had never seen a flake! Thus, I mean that transposition of books for children in Britain to children in India made no sense. Yet, it doesn't mean that he was rejecting the Western civilization. Not at all. But he wants an Asian civilization, whether he is referring to Japan or to India to take, to draw from their own origins while not rejecting the foreign ones. Thus, he wants to make a choice to select, to dispatch, so to speak, the influences. Coming to Nationalism he saw it as one of the worst possible Western influences When he talks about the nation, very often you feel that it has nothing to do with what we in Europe and we in France consider a Nation. But It is not that clear always. He calls Nation something which would be more like a state, the cold monster that is the state. In that sense he is quite kafkanian in the way he describes the state. It is, as he calls it something which is like very efficient, very soulless, very selfish like a hydraulic press. I mean, not taking into account the feelings of the people. Just efficiency, efficacy. He has a definite rejection of Nationalism which very often can be conflated in his writing with colonialism as well. So, it is sometimes hard to know when he mentions actually the Nation, the state or the colonial power which at the time of course was Great Britain.
Anubandh: Indeed, and thank you for also explaining the
context in which these views of TAGORE were
exposed and that was during the First World War time that you mentioned. It is also important because today we are in the midst of, perhaps the end of the Ukraine conflict – War. In Gaza we have some very extensive bombings and killings, since last so many years now, or at least since (several) months. We have these looming clouds of war between Pakistan and India. Therefore, we perhaps are also in similar times. Yet, I will go back to what you were saying about his criticism of the West. The word he used there is “political civilization of the West”. Before we go into that what I propose, he not only criticized the West but he also criticized the East. He appreciated the West, he also appreciated the East and this is where I would like to go. At the end of the day, it is about coexistence and not just as a reluctant acceptation. But, something constructive and I think that is what we need.
Olivier: Exactly. To support what you just said, one of the sentences you find in his lecture to Japan is: “I cannot believe that Japan has become what she is by imitating the West”. And he is desperately pleading in Japan, for Japan not to follow the steps of the Western colonial powers. If he does that it is because obviously there (were) already the seeds of imperialism in Japan after the Meiji era when they borrowed from the West the modernization. He saw that the expansion is looming towards China, Korea and so on… TAGORE obviously knows all that. He feels that and he is trying to say, “your culture, the special relations that the Japanese people have with nature”, should not be compromised by borrowing the worst from the Western civilization. Take what is good and keep what is good from Japan. At the same time he is, I am not saying he is over optimistic. Because he is writing somewhere, I don't remember in which of the three lectures. But I think it was in Japan. “I know that my voice is too feeble to raise itself above the uproar of this bustling time.” So, he is passionately pleading for culture, peace and understanding between the people. At the same time he is quite perceptive about the fate of his exhortation.
Anubandh: Yes, one common criticism which comes to TAGORE is that often he is considered someone as being dreamy, being non realistic, in his idealistic mood. But I would argue that what worth is human life if not for the supreme ideals? Be it any country, any society.
I would like to come back and develop more that argument. I will invite later your comments. So, his criticism first about the West. I propose to read few of his lines. He says, “The West talks about freedom but it has also chained humanity with slavery”. Therefore, we have also the famous ideals of the French Revolution; liberty, Equality and brotherhood (fraternity), but we also know the colonial past. Now, we know the Neo Liberal presence of the Western countries. He says that, we, the people of the world are united by great ideals. He says even if European political history has been very severe, or very dominant, brutal. There were also people who believed in universal values and they fought for it. He calls them as “knight errants of modern Europe” and he says, “Europe is supremely good in her beneficence where her face is turned to all humanity. Europe is supremely evil in her maleficent aspects where her face is turned only upon her own interest, using all her power of greatness for ends which are against the infinite and the eternal in man.”
So, would you like to comment on what TAGORE says here?
Olivier: He says that here and he says it elsewhere, I mean, what you said about people feeling that TAGORE was maybe over idealistic, and daydreaming, (thinking) impossible things. You could say that if you stopped at this book and the time when it was written, but if you envisage the entire life of TAGORE from the beginning of his public involvement till the last days in 1941. What has struck me really, it struck me as being very linear. He is going straight. Not that he cannot be mistaken and then he corrects, but on the whole, he is just refining his original thoughts with more arguments. That is when after the war he starts traveling again to Europe, he stays in France with a man called Albert KAHN. He was very close to Romain ROLLAND, a French writer who was a communist and very pacifist because he had fought during in the trenches of the First World War. They shared that pacifism but what strikes me also is that he is probably the only man I heard about who successfully stood up to GANDHI. He was very respectful, actually he is the one who gave him the nickname of “Mahatma: A Great Soul”. But he saw in the Congress movement, I mean the Indian National Congress as it was developing, a nationalist movement that was importing, potentially at least, all the defects, all the flaws of the Western Nationalism. He was fearing that the fight that GANDHI was leading, he was then, he had been briefly president of the Congress Party, and he disagreed on that. GANDHI took great pain to try to convince him with, to no avail. The only thing that TAGORE didn't do was to criticize him publicly, but he never signed on the fight on the same terms as GANDHI.
Anubandh: Yes, you are right. This disagreement between GANDHI and TAGORE was quite important but I wouldn't say he did not criticize him publicly because in 1925 he wrote an essay which is called “The Cult of the Charka” and in which he criticized the “Swadeshi movement” and rebuked…
Olivier: Yes, the Swadish movement. We are talking back of the turn of the century. That was his first political experience. He was quite involved in that but then all the excesses of Nationalism he saw there, defined his future commitments to fight Nationalism.
Anubandh: Right. And one more argument which TAGORE had against GANDHI was that GANDHI was treating the Indians as if they were children. TAGORE wanted to recognize them as adults or as citizens, as people who can think, not can, people who think! And have emotions and in their entirety. Thus, I think that was a difference of approach between them but to come back again to TAGORE's criticism of this “political civilization of the West”, I propose to read a small paragraph and then I will have your comment, if you have and then we can move on…
It says, “The political civilization which has sprung up from the soil of Europe and is overrunning the whole world like some prolific weed is based upon exclusiveness. It is always watchful to keep the aliens at bay or to exterminate them. It is carnivorous. It is cannibalistic in its tendencies. It feeds upon the resources of other people and tries to swallow their whole future. It is always afraid of other races achieving eminence, naming it as peril and tries to thwart all symptoms of greatness outside its own boundaries, forcing down traces of men who are weaker, to be eternally fixed in their weakness.”
Olivier: Yes, this is TAGORE! I mean, actually like many people who fight Nationalism, he considered that Nationalism is exclusive, excluding. Putting away people considered as enemy. But he is a “patriot”. He loves India, he keeps reminding everyone that he loves India and Indians and the Indian culture. Because patriotism is the positive love, Nationalism in his view is the negative hate, hatred against the other. A lot of people think that there is no difference between Nationalism and patriotism but in fact in his view, and in the view of many people who follow that analysis, Nationalism is the exclusion of the other whereas patriotism is the positive appreciation for what you are.
Anubandh: Exactly and I think both TAGORE and Pandit NEHRU, they recognized this human need of the attachment which humans have with their culture, with their language, their country… So, that needs to be fed. I mean that that needs to be recognized. Yet, they were against the excesses of these tendencies and they called it Nationalism.
Now, moving on, I would also like (to talk about) some very pertinent comments which TAGORE made on how science is looked upon and what he says, I will again read few paragraphs and then invite your comments.
So he says, ”Science is not
man's nature. The real truth is that science is not man's nature. It is mere
knowledge and training. By knowing the laws of the material universe you do not
change your deeper humanity. You can borrow knowledge from others but you
cannot borrow temperament”.
There he says, there is a
difference between the temperament in the West and in Asia, in the East.
“But at the imitative stage of our schooling we cannot distinguish between the essential and the non-essential, between what is transferable and what is not. It is something like the faith of the primitive.”
That is one paragraph.
I propose to read the second one and then I will invite you to comment.
He says, why science is mere
like a sport for him.
“Life based upon mere science is attractive to some men because it has all the characteristics of sport. It feigns seriousness but it is not profound. When you go a hunting the less pity you have the better, for your objective is to chase the game and kill it, to feel that you are the greater animal, that your method of destruction is thorough and scientific. And the life of science is that superficial life, it pursues success with skill and thoroughness and takes no account of the higher nature of man but those whose minds are crude enough to plan their lives upon the supposition that man is merely a hunter and his paradise the paradise of sportsmen, will be rudely awakened in the midst of their trophies of skeletons and skulls.”
Olivier: Yeah, this is what I wanted to say. Yes, based on those paragraphs one could think that TAGORE was against science but he was not. He strongly believed in the unity between the human being, the nature and the knowledge and he certainly was wary and despised pure science. That way, you cannot call him a scientist, I mean a scientist is not the word but he was not believing blindly to the progress through science. He thought that science could bring progress and could have also negative aspects. Maybe, this is the time to say that TAGORE was not just a writer, a philosopher, a political thinker.. whatever he puts things into practice and when he decided against the will of his family because he took a lot of money from his family for that and they were not happy about it, to create the school of Shantiniketan. It was not in the heart of Calcutta. It was in a village (Bolpur), I mean in countryside and he was teaching under the tree and you could say, Oh… that is one of those naive nature like Gouru and all that… no, he was inviting academic people from all over the world to come and teach and to stay with him, so he believed in inclusion. We said that Nationalism is exclusion, he believed in inclusion. He took what was good from elsewhere, he took what was good from his place and he tried to build better people by teaching them and having people to teach them in communion with the nature at the same time as with the knowledge. Thus, he believed that certainly knowledge was an asset and a necessity for children to be better citizens better human beings and that you had to pick up to do your markets, shopping everywhere where (there are) good things and to merge everything into that teaching.
Anubandh: Exactly. He was against parochialism. He was against being petty minded. Because that prevented us from looking broader and then choosing or interacting. But I would also like to make a distinction.. I mean, distinguish between “science” and “scientific temper”. Because if you read, if you read his poem, “Let my Country Awake”, I mean, there is so much scientific there and he is inviting. He is motivating Indians to leave behind the old habits, just for the sake of them and cultivate the scientific temper. And that is coming from the greatest poet of India! That is really incredible.
Before we close on this chapter, I also wanted to make a reference to this hegemony of the United States. I am very keen on that because when I came to France, I did not anticipate that the United States, its culture would be so dominant, so present in France. For example, most people in France do not speak English for different reasons. Yet, the music, the Hollywood, the films, the American culture (is so much present here)… even if you take (school) history books of France, you find (that) we talk a lot about United States, its different States, its culture, its industry, its economy… and I was quite amazed with this dominance not just of West, but dominance of the United States in France and in Europe. Do you have a comment on that?
Olivier: I think it’s not specific to France, you'll find it in a lot of, even in Eastern European countries, even though for decades they were under the control of the Soviet Union. Maybe for that very reason actually. The culture coming from the United States of America was prevalent among the youth and very present. No, I think, definitely after the Second World War the “G.I.”s came with their chewing gums, their chocolates and Hollywood movies and that was part of the soft power that the US has successfully managed to use in Europe and elsewhere in the world and definitely it has influenced even our culture, even though the French are so proud of the so called cultural exception and so on but yes we borrowed a lot from the US. No doubt about it.
Anubandh: Yeah, that was just an observation. Now let's move to the East. So far, this was appreciation of the West and also criticism (of it) by TAGORE. He does the same with the East.
First the things that he
criticized or he also talks about the accusations made against East by the
West.
I propose to read a small paragraph where he says, “It was said of Asia that it could never move in the path of progress. Its face was so inevitably turned backwards. We accepted this accusation and came to believe it in India. I know a large section of our educated community, grown tired of feeling the humiliation of this charge against us, is trying all its resources of self-deception, to turn it into a matter of boasting but boasting is only a masked shame. It does not truly believe in itself.”
That is one very important paragraph which is relevant even today.
Another small paragraph I would read and then invite your comment..
It is the example he makes, a very strange example and what inspires me is when he compares East and West. He compares the West as being a “Sprinter” and the East as someone who runs a “Marathon”. I will develop this. He says that, “the charge is brought against us that the ideals which we cherish in the East are static. That they have not the impetus in them to move, to open out new vistas of knowledge and power. That the systems of philosophy which are the mainstays of the time-worn civilizations of the East despise all outward proofs, remaining solidly satisfied in their subjective certainty.”
That is the accusation. Later he says, “You do not make any progress. There is no movement in you.” This is what the accusation by the West. He says, I asked him or that person, “How do you know it? You have to judge progress according to its aim. A running train makes its progress towards the terminal station. It is movement but a full grown tree has no definite movement of that kind. Its progress is the inward progress of life. It lives with its aspiration towards light tingling in its leaves and creeping in its silence sap.” Yeah, this is what I wanted to introduce here.
Olivier: I don't have many comments on that. I mean, I think it is quite pertinent and I would say that, from what I understand reading him is that he is criticizing a number of Asians. But that refers mostly to Indians, in that case, for feeling shy about having their own culture and saying that the only science and culture can come from the West. On the other hand, he is quite severe about the mindset of many Indians and especially referring to the stratification in castes. He is not against the caste system per se but he is against the caste system being a kind of a prison for those who are put in one specific caste, and (those who) cannot move out of it and how everything is decided by the other. Basically (he is) against (it). He is for the fluidification of the relations between the human beings, the nature and the peoples. At some stage in his book, he makes a strange comparison between Switzerland and India. He says, he had argued until then that in Europe, they can speak about nation because they are homogeneous people. Therefore, the notion of State Nation can make sense in Europe but it cannot in India. So, many a times in that book he says that India is not a nation. I mean, I just read one quotation but there are several others. “We who are no nation were ourselves. We are a non-nation.” But that can be understood as in the context of colonialism, of course, but also because of the ethnic and cultural differences of all the people, between all the people which are composing, which are making up that whole which is called India even before there was an Indian State, a federal State. It was still called India. I mean before that but he says in Switzerland, they have managed to make a unification despite having various ethnic groups. I guess, he refers to Italians, Germans and French. And he seems to suggest that it would be a good idea for India. I mean, being able to unite people while respecting their differences and still considered themselves as a whole but that was too early a stage in the reflection. In the history of India, we know that much later something was made out of it but it is, I am not sure it was already in his mind but he pointed out the difficulty of being one single nation in the sense that the Europeans are Nations. In India, with so many various people.
Anubandh: That is where I would also add that TAGORE and NEHRU for me were two great personalities of India who were not just rooted… their feats were not only rooted deep in the Indian culture and traditions but they also had this outward looking vision which not only observed and studied, analyzed different cultures and societies and countries in the world, they make parallels (with India).. and which is perhaps an obvious and natural process and there was an exchange, there was an invitation and that I find really incredible.
Moving on and now we are
reaching the end of this interview soon but I would like to pronounce few of
his comments on Japan and why he qualified Japan as being a different example
than other Western countries. He also warned Japan in a way, that you are
different and you shouldn't do the same mistakes because your power is
recognized by the West in your strength in destroying the “others”, in the evil
that you can bring but that cannot be a criteria worth pursuing. He says, “What
has impressed me most in this country, which is Japan is the conviction that
you have realized nature's secrets. Not by methods of analytical knowledge but
by sympathy. Dominating nature from outside is a much simpler thing than making
her your own in love's delight which is a work of true genius.” He further
says, “the genius of Japan has given you the vision of beauty in nature and
the power of realizing it in your life.”
With this, if you have any comment to add on this Japanese chapter.
Olivier: As I was mentioning earlier, I mean he is striving to convince the Japanese not to take the route, the roads of imperialism that he is foreseeing. Imitating the West and its colonialism and so on.. but I quoted a passage where he said that he was not stupid enough to not to understand that his voice was feeble compared to the strength, the power of the opposing opinions and also he mentions very subtly that his lectures were criticized, I mean his interviews his works his comments were criticized in Japanese newspapers. While praising him they were a bit making fun of his naivety, so to speak. Therefore, yes he sees that train which is going to a wall or to an abyss we don't know and he sees that It is gaining speed and he tries, if not to stop, it at least to divert the path and he is fearing rightfully that he won't be able to stop it or to divert its path soon enough.
Anubandh: Yeah and taking the feather of universalism from
TAGORE’s writings, I would like to congratulate you as well for the immense
writings that you have done on India, the interest that you take in India and
the bond, the bridge that you build between these two countries and people.
I am really glad for your work and all your contribution. Thank you Olivier for this discussion and I hope we will have many more..
Olivier: Thank you so much!
Anubandh: You are welcome.
Olivier DA LAGE is a former journalist at RFI (Radio France Internationale). He is a specialist of international relations and is currently a researcher associated with IRIS (Institute of International and Strategic Relations). Olivier is an expert on matters that relate to the Arabian Peninsula as well India.
He has published twenty books, mainly devoted to the Persian Gulf and India.
Anubandh KATÉ is a Paris based engineer and co-founder of
the association, “Les Forums France Inde”.
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