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Gora Tagore's Paradoxical Self

This document provides a summary and analysis of the novel Gora by Rabindranath Tagore. It discusses how the novel presents a dialectic of ideas through its characters who hold opposing views on nationalism and religious identity in colonial India. The protagonist, Gora, champions orthodox Hinduism despite actually being born English. He rejects religious reform as a threat to national identity. The analysis examines how Gora evolves in his thinking through dialogues with other characters who question his views. It argues the novel uses this dialectic approach to explore Tagore's own perspective on negotiating Indian and Western cultural influences.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
160 views12 pages

Gora Tagore's Paradoxical Self

This document provides a summary and analysis of the novel Gora by Rabindranath Tagore. It discusses how the novel presents a dialectic of ideas through its characters who hold opposing views on nationalism and religious identity in colonial India. The protagonist, Gora, champions orthodox Hinduism despite actually being born English. He rejects religious reform as a threat to national identity. The analysis examines how Gora evolves in his thinking through dialogues with other characters who question his views. It argues the novel uses this dialectic approach to explore Tagore's own perspective on negotiating Indian and Western cultural influences.

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sajid695
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Sahitya Akademi

Gora: Tagore's Paradoxical Self


Author(s): Kalyan Chatterjee
Source: Indian Literature, Vol. 49, No. 3 (227) (May-June 2005), pp. 185-195
Published by: Sahitya Akademi
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23341048
Accessed: 10-11-2019 08:31 UTC

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Gora: Tagore's Paradoxical Self

Kalyan Chatterjee

Gora isforone
it isof
an the most
allegory important
of Indian novels
nationalism, ever written
partaking in British India,
in a large measure
Tagore's own view of it, whereby religious division is replaced by the worship
of India's natural and cultural diversity. To remain confined within the
fortress of a narrowly defined religion or sect is a denial of the pluralistic
culture of the country, whose shrine is open to everyone for worship. The
allegory is presented in the form of an adoption myth and a new hero,
English by birth but Indian by adoption, questing for the essence of being
an Indian.

The question of how a novel is related to the life and opinion of the
novelist himself is one of the typical questions that are often asked about
works of fiction. Often the way to a straightforward approach is strewn with
problems, not the least for the fact that the author allegorizes and freely
invents, rather than documents, his personal life, or of others around him.
Richard Ellmann, exploring the biographical element in George Eliot's
Middlemarch, made the apt remark that "the living originals of fictional
characters are elusive because they have been obliged by the writer to answer
purposes not their own." (1) That is to say that even though some characters
in the novel could be seen as portraits of real people in the author's own
life, or of the author himself, the author nonetheless dealt with them in a
subjective and reconstituting manner. The novel would then become an
attempt to explore and define how the author has come to terms with his
self-image.
A personal narrative is an attempt at recovering from the flowing river
of time what the author regards as his self-identity. Tagore turned to this
form of writing many times, leaving behind him at least three separate works
of autobiography, and many travel diaries and letters. The historical events
of his life are in focus in these narratives, but he once wrote that his subject

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was not the historical events of his life but his life as it has revealed itself

through his poetic works (2). In other words, it is the inner history of the
self, the history of the growth of his consciousness, which is of primary
concern here. An autobiographical novel is merely the recreation of the self
in the form of a legend or story. Free from the limits and conditionality of
historical writing, such a work of fiction, is an effort of the author to give,
as Gusdorf wrote, 'the meaning of his own mythic tale.' (3)

II

Gora (1909-10) is one of the first novels in India to present a full-blown


dialectic of ideas with its implied historical context of the swadeshi movment
of that decade. Let us briefly compare the author's personal background
with that of the novel.

Tagore was born into a Brahmo family in mid-nineteenth century,


although of liberal opinion vis-a-vis the parent religion. The Brahmos being
a reformist sect of Hinduism, invited comparison with the ethos of Evan
gelical Christianity, particularly in its rejection of the traditional rites and
rituals and return to Hinduism's philosophical texts like the Upanishads and
opposition to all forms of idolatry and polytheism. Because of this foreign
inspiration behind the Brahmos and their reformist agenda, it was natural
that Tagore would regard synthesis of the East and the West as an antithesis
of orthodoxy and obscurantism, while in no way a support submission and
surrender to colonialism. In his mid-career, around the same time as Gora,
Tagore wrote an essay called "The East and West," in which he expressed
opinions, like the following (in my English translation):

If we think that no alien should step into our place of


worship, that our knowledge should remain confined to
an iron chest, then we pronounce in effect our own
death sentence in the world community.

Another passage from the same essay is like this:

We must make a success of our meeting with the


Englishman. This weighty responsibility of building
the greater India has devolved on us today. Attitudes
like we should turn away from this meeting, we should
go our own way, we should take nothing from others,
will not enable us to reverse what is the order of the

day.

186 I Indian Liter,ature : 227

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Gora, the novel's eponymous hero, would, however, find these remarks
utterly repugnant. How does the author then resolve the paradox of making
a colossus out of him, standing far above those around him by force of
conviction? Gora is not only not a Brahmo, as the author himself was, but
a champion of orthodox Hinduism. He consciously rejects reformist views
as collusive to foreign rule and hurtful to the wholeness of India's self
identity as a nation. Even a greater paradox is that he is in reality an
Englishman, the knowledge of which, however, is withheld from him until
the very end, although not from the reader.
The way to deal with this paradoxical novel is to see it implicated
in an ongoing dialectic of its own. The method is to work by contraries.
The novel is dialectical in both senses of the term. It develops through
interactions between carefully opposed sets of characters with opposite
points of view. But even more importantly, the hero evolves from what he
thinks he is through what he is in reality to what he becomes by his sheer
mental strength of redeeming his cancelled past by an altogether greater
vision of a new mission in life.

It is dialectical also in the other sense, that of dialogues, in which a


philosophical character is being provoked by his interlocutors, the latter
providing the cue questions and the former refuting them or developing them
into ideological positions. This is seen most in Gora's dialogues with Brahmo
critics like Haran, Borodasundari, and to a lesser extent, Paresh Babu, but
most of all Sucharita, a young Brahmo woman, who nevertheless admires
him.

Gora sees something in her that makes him eager to talk about his
faith and Sucharita in spite of their different faiths, is attracted to his radiant
personality and ardent patriotism. It has all the interest of love between two
apparently irreconcilable characters. She also serves as the interlocutor asking
him the cue questions to set him going, untiring as he is in defending his
faith. She has, however, one should hasten to add, a mind of her own and
is not quite like the one-shot single-dimensional interlocutors in Plato's
dialogues.
Gora is in conflict of opinion with most of the characters, including,
sometimes, his best friend and interpreter Binoy, but enunciates his views
with astounding eloquence when faced with a contrary proposition. He finds
his culture threatened from outside both by foreign rule and by missionary
onslaught on the so-called unscientific beliefs of his countrymen. Indeed,
he comes off not so much as a religious character as a fiery patriot. His
religious orthodoxy is only a strategy to fight the incursion of foreign ideas;
he upholds his Hindu religion with all its faults because he does not want
to show weakness before the enemy. He even rejects reform movements like

Kalyan Chatterjee / 187

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Brahmo-ism as surrender to the foreigner. The all-important question for a
patriot was whether such reforms were aimed at giving back to the people
a purer form of their religion without teaching them to disrespect it.
The paradox is that Gora is not born into Hinduism, and therefore
not entided to the sacred rites according to his own orthodoxy. The author
means it as an irony that Gora should be so blind to such repugnant Hindu
customs as untouchability. He would not even eat in his beloved mother's
room because of her Christian maid. It is of course not a personal matter
for him, but an article of his orthodox faith. The revelation that he himself
is white, whose mother died shortly after he was born, and who was then
brought up by Anandomoyi as her own son without any regard for untouch
ability, comes to him only towards the end of the novel. His father, a born
again Hindu, reveals this long cherished secret to him only when he is faced
with the prospect of his funeral rites being performed by Gora, a mlech-cho
himself! Neither he nor Anandomoyi had quite managed to tell Gora the
truth.

Ostensibly, it is as if to make this final revelation very dramatic that


the young Gora has been shown to be far outdoing his adoptive parents in
orthodox Hinduism, whose tenets he is always ready to preach with untiring
zeal. He is an earnest and dedicated person, not one to do anything by half.
Once he espouses a faith, he pursues it with so much zeal that he invites
comparison with his very opponents, namely, the Evangelist preachers. Hindus
in general are known to be passive and unused to convert others to their
faith. But for Gora religion is neither passive nor cloistral; it is integral with
a person's social being. It cannot be separated from the nation. Here too
he is like the Christian missionary and bears unwitting testimony against
himself.

It would be a great mistake to think that Gora is a religious reactionary,


following a programme of orthodoxy for its own sake. Hindus did not know
that they were an unscientific, superstitious bunch, until the missionaries told
them so. Apparently it is for this reason that Gora, an untiring critic of India's
intellectual surrender to the colonister, upholds the so-called faults of Hin
duism, like caste-ism, untouchability, strict observance of rituals etc. These
for him represent India's multiform life; it is not merely religion, but the
essence of her cultural existence. In his opinion it is useless to compare India
with England. On the contrary, Indians should "with all our might and all
our pride embrace everything that belongs to the nation and not feel ashamed
for her" (5:22). (4)
Here one may consider a touching vignette from the novel. Gora wants
to go to Triveni to take a dip in the Ganga, flowing by the town. His father
wonders why he could not do the same in Calcutta itself (as the same river

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flows by it). The authorial comment brings out Gora's reason. By going to
Triveni for the ostensible purpose of taking the holy dip, Gora would be
part of that huge concourse of people coming there from all parts of the
vast country, the great gathering of people forming as it were a river by
themselves (6:26). This idea is very much like those expressed in Tagore's
hymns to India like "Bharat-Tirtha." The seed of his future evolution to
worshipping India rather than any particular religion, lies in this warm
embrace in which he holds his nation in all its concrete manifestations.

Gora had in fact been attracted to Brahmo preaching, such as that


of Keshub Chandra Sen, a great orator, but not for long (neither was the
saindy Debendranath Tagore, Rabindranath's father). Gora came to regard
attacks on Hinduism as playing into the hands of the colonist, and leaving
the fold of the new religion, went back to becoming an unapologetic Hindu.
He urges upon his followers not to be ashamed of being an Indian and not
surrender abjecdy to the colonist and his ethos, as, in his outspoken opinion,
the Brahmo reformers have sometimes tended to. This too has a bearing
on Tagore's own evolution from Brahmo critique of Indian tradition to an
enlightened patriotism, whose burden was to awaken India to her greatness
as the confluence of races and religions.
Gora gives expression to some of the noblest patriotic sentiments ever
uttered by an Indian. Arguing with his friend Binoy, who is actually his best
disciple and interpreter, but favours a moderate style, Gora bursts into a
passionate defence of his country: "I want my India," says he, "no matter
how you fault her, how you dispraise her, I want only her with all her so
called short-comings; I do not want myself or any other person to be greater
than her. Personally I do not want to do anything that could cause me even
a hair-breadth split with my country, my Bharatbarsha" (53:239). Speaking
to Sucharita, at once an interlocutor and admiring woman, Gora says, "As
you have surely known, India has her own characteristic nature, her own
strength, her own truth. It is only by their full development that India [like
any other nation] can succeed and save herself. If we have not known this
[historical truth] despite our strenuous study of English history, then we have
not learnt anything [from this study]" (20:99).
These are only random selections from such numerous-well-argued
declarations by Gora of his love for his country, his motherland, which
makes us realize that he is not meant to be a religious obscurantist, but one
who stands up for his people and protests against the attempt of negative
critics to tear up the intricately woven cloth of India's history into shreds
and then hold up each shred for ridicule. This insufferable insult and
humiliation of his nation is what he thinks it is his mission to oppose. To
serve the country and its people is ever the fire that burns in his soul. As

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his friend Binoy defends him ably, "Gora accepts all the practices of the
Hindu society in their totality, because he sees India in an altogether larger
perspective. All things in India, no matter how great or how small, blend
into something greater, a noble unity." It is for this reason that Gora, as
Binoy went on to logically establish, is not against caste-ism, which is neither
good nor bad in itself, but is concerned about the function that it is meant
to serve (8:31).
Gora is not a religious obscurantist; not at all. On one side of him
is his born-again Hindu father, making a fetish of superstitious rituals, and
on the other the intolerant and narrow-minded anglophiles and Brahmo
neophytes. He belongs to neither side. His great passion in life is to preach
untiringly to make India give up slavish imitation and wake up to her true
tradition. The daily insults and humiliations heaped on her by the mighty
Empire only serve to make him go out blazing at his country's detractors.
The irony is that, as the author comments, educated Indians as a rule do
not share this self-respect and try to prove to the ruling class that they are
better than the rest of their compatriots. Tagore, either in the person of Gora
or directly, ridicules this snobbery time and again in the novel. As always,
Tagore's hero Gora appears as a lone figure of dignity among small men.
He counts his motherland's detractors in both foreign rulers and in
the disunity and self-degradation of his own compatriots. His crusade is not
only against the coloniser, but also against the missionary, against reformists,
against sycophants and mindless critics of the native tradition. Gora con
siders them complicit with the colonial influences; they have diluted the
tradition of the country by imitation of the foreign. As Binoy ably defends
him before his Brahmo friends, the reform movements have failed to get
at the heart of the Indian civilization, its 'idea' and character (18:83). Gora
views the Indian national tradition as indivisible, and therefore stands by
those very features of Hinduism that were commonly the very targets of
reform, such as complex rites and rituals, the caste system, and other
orthodox practices.
Gora is always ready to defend Hindu practices not at all as a fanatic
but as one with a higher understanding of them. The laws and traditions
of Hinduism, the society, and the country itself are bound together with
an invisible historical tie and the true son of India cannot but respect them
and fulfill them in their life. This is the summary of the arguments, carried
on in great detail and with all the interest of a dialectical novel. His
opponents disagreed with him, but none could ignore him.
It is time to signal that all these views echo Tagore's patriotic poems
and songs. Sometimes he appears to be a mouthpiece character, the author
making him enunciate his own philosophy; some other times the relationship

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between the two is not so direct, suggesting that the author himself is trying
to formulate a personal faith, which is not necessarily Brahmo-ism.
There is, for example, more than religion that goes into the making
of this fictional champion of Hinduism. The author cleverly plays upon
Gora's white man like features and personality, although he is himself
ignorant of his white birth. His physical prowess, of which there are several
explicit examples in the novel, earns for him that awe and respect reserved
for the Tommies. The tall and fair Gora towers over his peers and when
he speaks he 'roars' (a native auditory image of the English soldier). Once,
stung by his elder brother's ridicule, he says with revealing irony: 'In all things
I tend to express myself with more force than necessary—I do not seem
to know how very difficult it is for others' tolerance' (2:11). In other words,
he is more like the English, perceived in the Indian context to be unbending
and assertive. To develop the point further, his best friend Binoy is his exact
opposite. Binoy's name literally means 'modesty,' and the author takes pain
to develop him as a tolerant person, loving and forgiving. He is the male
counterpart of Gora's mother Anandomoyi, the very spirit of love and
forgiveness. Therefore, one can suspect that the author is saying something
here too.

It is also true that Gora, though admired by his compatriots, increas


ingly becomes a lonely figure, for none is equal to the fire in his soul. It
is not only that the people at large do not quite understand his idealism.
Even his dear mother wishes that he were not so rigid about principles having
precedence over personal emotion. For example, in spite of his great de
votion to Anandomoyi, his adoptive mother, who is a symbol of life-virtue
both by personality and name ('blessed with ananda, 'joy"), he indulgently
criticizes her relaxed attitudes to orthodox Hindu rites and rituals. He argues
convincingly—he is skilful in debate, that Indians must be strong in their
faith and not give up any part of it in order to meet headlong the attack
on it by the conversionists. Gora's staunch Hindu nationalism is presented
with so much ardour in the novel as to make one wonder why Tagore,
himself a Brahmo, builds him up so strong a character. His force of
personality is felt by everyone else, including Sucharita, one of Tagore's
unforgettable women characters. How does this new Indian woman with a
fine intellect and earnest social conscience see Gora?

We turn to a particular cameo-like scene from the novel. Sucharita


sees the tall and fair Gora sitting in their drawing room debating in earnest
with some members of her own community (Brahmos)(5). His physical
strength, his brave and undaunted bearing, his moral earnestness shining in
his fair forehead, his readiness to defend with his sharp wit disparaging
remarks about Hinduism, so fashionable among Brahmo enthusiasts, all this

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and more she sees. As she watches him from a corner in the room grappling
with people far below his noble earnestness and love of the country, she
comes under a spell best described as a spiritual vision or epiphany: She "saw
for the first time in her life what man is in essence and what is that in him

that gives him a soul; and as this ineffable feeling pervaded her soul, she quite
forgot her own self" ( 20:96). This goes to show how deep ran her loving
admiration for Gora. The author too came under the spell of his own
creation himself, his paradoxical hero; Gora's faith, declared so passionately
throughout the novel could not have derived their eloquent conviction
otherwise.

But to quote here another passage, epiphanic as above. Gora is talking


to Binoy, his academically brilliant friend, who has fallen in love with Sucharita's
cousin Lolita. He can see that Binoy's love comes to him as the very image
of the truth of life over and above his love of books, the only form of love
he has known heretofore. They talk over it the whole night. Gora then goes
on to say that he too has known love but of a different kind. It is the love
of his country, his motherland, an all-suffusing love that has made him see
the truth of India. Loving formerly his country in a bookish way, he had
no idea that the love of motherland could so pervade his being that it would
appear to him like a living presence. In the agitation of his soul, Gora stands
up and walks up to the roof as the night is coming to an end. As he sees
dawn breaking out in the horizon, he has almost a spiritual vision: "For only
a moment, he stood utterly amazed. He felt as if a ray of light emerged out
of some opening in his head like a lotus stem and bore a hundred flowers
of light in the sky, pervading it quite. His entire soul, his entire consciousness,
and powers spent themselves up in an inexpressible delight of soul" (15:64
65). Can there be any doubt that Gora's patriotism is more than the ordinary
kind and that it borders on a spiritual vision?
As orthodox Hindus, Gora and his group of anonymous adherents
are adamandy opposed to have any social contact and marriage relations with
other sects, not only Christians, but also Brahmos. An element of romantic
comedy lies in that Gora and Sucharita, in spite of her being a Brahmo girl,
have a budding romance. It is a love that is not spoken, but cherished in
the silent regard that they have for each other. A further counterfoil is offered
by the Lolita-Binoy duo, where Lolita's intemperate Brahmo mother is cen
sorious of Lolita's love for Binoy, reciprocating in this manner Gora's or
thodoxy. This sectarian negativism balloons out of all proportion in the novel
and threatens to ruin human relations, such as Lolita's love for Binoy and
Sucharita's love for Gora. The countervailing force comes, not from Gora,
for he cannot seek personal exemption from his principles, but from his
mother Anandomoyi, his friend Binoy, and Paresh Babu, Lolita's Brahmo

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father and Sucharita's uncle. Paresh Babu may be called another foil: he is
a committed Brahmo, and yet at loggerheads with his own community for
his compassionate liberalism. This group suffers from no sectarian exclusive
ness and are wise enough to place human relations above dogma and com
munalism, a message that Tagore tried to give in his other forms of writing,
including poems, addresses, and essays. Gora belongs to this group by
personal des and friendship, but not by ideology. There is therefore a gap
besides this meeting point between the two sets of characters.
The key to Gora's ideology lies in that he identifies his religious
orthodoxy with patriotic resistance to the foreign rule. Colonialism had
created a schism in the Indian consciousness whereby the traditional form
of Hinduism was coming into disrepute among the Anglicised elite. From
his early youth Gora has vowed to be a true Hindu both in the observance
of its complex rituals and in the defence of its theology. His friend Binoy
is liberal, but is wholly impressed by the steadfastness with which Gora
defends India's culture under attack. He describes Gora's orthodoxy as both
the method and the aim to stop being caught in the swirl of upsetting change
let loose by the coloniser: "When the fortress is besieged by the enemy, then
to defend it is to close its doors and windows and all other entrances to it
including even the smallest openings" (4:15).
Again and again comments are heard about Gora's resolve and enthu
siasm to vindicate Hinduism with all its old beliefs and even superstitions,
and again and again we are told in Gora's person or in that of his devoted
friend Binoy that the rite« and rituals, repugnant as they may appear to be
to the English educated, are indivisible from the life of this ancient society.
He becomes a champion of orthodox Hinduism in ways undreamt of by
the liberal Anandomoyi and the born again Hindu Krishnadayal. Gora fights
the Christian missionary by himself espousing his patriotic cause like a
missionary. Gora is in effect saying: go out into the world and uphold your
own faith and culture, and make it your whole mission and endeavour, for
otherwise the foreign rule like a rising tide would carry you down to the sea.
Long before Gandhi appeared on the national scene, Tagore had
articulated through his paradoxical character some of the noblest sentiments
ever uttered by an Indian nationalist. The Brahmos are pro-Western, while
Gora stands for the old culture, considering its religion to be its indivisible
part. Yet it is the country, the nation that motivates Gora to defend the old
religion with all its faults.
The romantic element of the plot, Gora's attachment to Sucharita, ,a
Brahmo girl, offers a further source of irony in the plot. A climax of a sort
arrives when Gora, putting faith above friendship and even love, refuses to
participate in his friend Binoy's marriage, just because his bride is a Brahmo.

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By this act, he denies himself too Sucharita's love for him, for he cannot
practice what he condemns—inter-religious marriage. He decides to become
a monk, while she is resolved to become a Hindu, not because she wants
to persuade Gora to change his mind, but that she wants to break loose from
the sectarian narrowness of the Samaj. It may be noted that her liberal uncle
Paresh Babu too is not too much of a Samaj man in that respect; much to
the annoyance of Haran-like apparatchiks, he encourages his daughters and
niece to read the Gita and the epics. But now Sucharita comes even closer
towards meeting Gora in fulfillment of the love that is threatened by Gora's
own orthodoxy.
As Sucharita is on the point of being given in marriage to an odious
widower, the long-expected denouement comes suddenly. Gora's father Krishna
Dayal, who has become an extremely orthodox Hindu in his old age, is very
ill and fears that Gora, being so particular about the religious rites, would
perform his funeral rites, which is anathema to him: the right to perform
a man's funeral belongs to his sons and sons only, and not to an adopted
son like Gora, who, moreover was born a Chrisdan. So, in order to stop the
sacrilege of his funeral being performed by a non-Hindu, he suddenly
discloses to Gora his real parentage, as this is the only way of stopping this
very dutiful and very orthodox "son" from taking part in his father's funeral.
This is the novel's peripeteia, its reversal and turning point.
In a single moment, Gora's universe breaks apart. He had earlier
debarred his family's faithful Christian maid, without prejudice of course,
from their religious functions; now he stands, by the same token, self
debarred from Hindu observances. By one fell stroke his own parents rob
him of all that he is, his religion, his parentage, his country and nationality,
his God. His past is obliterated, and there is no future for him, only existential
vacuity. What a terrible loneliness that is!
But only momentarily so (one wishes that he had taken more time to
resolve his dilemma), for nothing can rob him of his mother's love, of Binoy's
friendship, and of the catholicity of the liberal Brahmo Paresh Babu's good
will. It is to him and Sucharita that he rushes forward to give them the
message that he has become a new man. As he does so, he realizes, to
paraphrase the novel, that he has grasped a greater truth, that he can belong
to something greater than particular religions, castes, and communities—that
is, the country itself. All this is a bit sudden, smacking of the facile idealism
with which Tagore was wont to resolve tragic conflict and intensity; he was
not the one to look steadfasdy into the vortex of turbulent emotions and
let them work out their own logic.
The novelist means to say that with his religion gone, that which was
deeper inside his hero, that is, his patriotism, now comes to the fore, to be
pursued with the same zeal. He has shown that a new awareness had been

194 / Indian Literature : 227

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growing in Gora so that he went out into the multitudinous life of the vast
country to be part of it in body and soul. Almost gleefully, Gora tells to the
bemused Paresh Babu and Sucharita, 'Don't you understand what I am
saying? I have become what I had been trying all this time but failing; today
I have become one who is of this country, a true Indian. Today I have
reconciled in myself all religions, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam" (76:349).
He begins, in other words, to speak the language of Tagore's many hymns
to the nation.

His country is no longer a fortress of ancient faith to be defended


against foreign and internal enemies, but the perennial India of the confluence
of nations and nationalities, creeds and communities, and a mystic unity in
its manifold diversities. It is a joyous temple from where he welcomes the
world.

There is however another way of looking at it. Tagore hardly ever


allowed his characters to break loose from him, but Gora had grown under
his hand and broken the mould. The novelist had secredy admired him and
shared his obdurate nationalistic pride and indomitable courage to defend
his culture. It is this Gora, the unashamed champion of his own religion
and culture that won Sucharita's admiration and then love. It is not that she

had loved him any less before he came loose from his faith and became a
new man. The new Gora that emerges in the last pages of the novel mouths
a noble idealism, but is devoid of passion and is somewhat bloodless. This
dialectic has not been resolved in the novel. One may even be tempted to
slightly alter Ellmann's remark: A fictional character like Gora can be elusive
because he has been obliged by the writer to answer purposes not his own.

Notes

1. Along the 'Riverrun (1988; Penguin Books, 1989), p. 115


2. Opening page of the first part (1905) of his Atmo-Poricboj ['introducing myself]
completed in 1940.
3. Georges Gusdorf, "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography." 1956. Trans
James Olney. p. 48.
4. The translations from Tagore's works throughout this essay are mine. The first
item in the brackets is chapter number, the second page number, which refers
throughout in this article to volume 9 of the collected works of Tagore (in
Bengali), called the Centenary Edition (Calcutta 1961: in 15 volumes).

5. Sucharita is not a born or converted Brahmo, but raised in the household of


his Brahmo uncle Paresh Babu and aunt Borodasundari, observes the faith, as
is brought out by her attempt to debate Hindu idol-worship and polytheism
with Gora.

Kalyan Chatteijee / 195

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