Gora Tagore's Paradoxical Self
Gora Tagore's Paradoxical Self
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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
day.
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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.
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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
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