DEMOCRACY, as a named entity, was not as important a preoccupation with pre-independence thinkers as it has become in political debates and for commentators in post-independence India. Democracy was both yet to be achieved before 1947 and was imagined largely as an appendage to nationalism and/or colonial rule. Nevertheless it was an important concern and its imaginaries and practices occupied a significant, if often implicit, location in our collective desires. Briefly, about five major modes of democracy can be identified in modern Indian thought. First, there is the initial, liberal version identified most with Ram Mohan Roy that consisted of discrete demands such as freedom of the press, inclusion of Indians in juries and so on, all of which could be seen as attempting to widen the representative character of the (colonial) state. It operated as claims on the state.

A conceptually richer idea of democracy was offered by Gandhi. Virulently critical of parliamentary democracy, Gandhi proposed a notion of swaraj which envisioned a decentralized democracy based on village panchayats. These would expand outwards in ever widening circles of affiliation forming an oceanic circle. At the centre of this would be the self-disciplined, individual self.

The third mode privileged development and the state. This represented a mixture of liberal democracy and state-led development, a conception favoured by Nehru. Standing in contrast was the nationalist communitarianism of Savarkar based on Hindu majoritarianism. For Savarkar, who fetishized a monolithic conception of the nation, democracy was a secondary concern and useful only insofar as it sanctioned the rule of the religious majority. Finally, a fifth mode was articulated by Ambedkar who saw Indian democracy as a contradiction. For him, political equality, as granted by the Constitution, stood severely diminished by the presence of gross and persistent social and economic inequalities.

Tagore represents yet another sixth mode. He does not really theorize democracy as such, even as he admits to the necessity for justice and rights. The core of his democratic concerns lay not so much in the ‘form’ of democracy and the dominant conception of liberalism attached to it, but in the idea of atmashakti or self-empowerment. Atmashakti, in his conception, worked at two levels – with economic self-empowerment and subject formation. Tagore was committed to the possibility of actualizing a samaj or society based on symmetrical relationships between interconnected individuals. Atmashakti was directed towards building the capacity to be equal. Though a project which was directed mainly towards social subalterns, especially the peasants, it also sought to address the social fabric as a whole, in which the superordinate zamindars could be bonded in a symmetrical relationship with their peasants. This in turn would testify to the self-empowerment of the samaj, an ambition that led Tagore to also deploy it as a nationalist objective during his involvement with the swadeshi movement. Atmashakti opened out a challenge that may have seemed fantastic, but is probably a normal project in modernity: how can relationships of equality with one’s subalterns be generated from a superior position? It is this problem that produces the distinctive salience of Tagore’s notion of democracy – the experience of democracy as an incessant dilemma.

 

Let me start with the nationalist, swadeshi, phase of Tagore’s thought. There are two significant essays – both really transcriptions of his speeches – of this period of the Swadeshi agitation in Bengal in the first decade of the 20th century. Both pieces refuse to make demands of the state, the refusal flowing from a nationalist interpretation of atmashakti. The foundation of this version of atmashakti was that the nation had to be based on an autonomous and integrated samaj or society, one which made its own choices and looked after itself. This conception derived from Tagore’s privileging of the samaj over the modern colonial state. The latter was experienced as a mechanical construct which intrudeed into and formalized social relationships, thereby creating subjects dependent on it. Politics too, as a nationalist activity, strengthens this arrangement.

There is in Tagore a deep suspicion of politics as instrumentalist and promising an unreal, short cut to freedom. This is possibly why he privileged social developmental work over political mobilization in the struggle for independence. It is against such an understanding that we must locate Tagore’s definition of samaj as a sphere of self-governance not dependent on the state and consisting of affective relationships of its members.

 

But this leads to a dilemma. Nationalist mobilization demanded a generalization of authority since it had to work against an all-India power. Tagore was clear this required centralization and thus for him the problem was to reconcile the need for a centralized authority without surrendering the affective bonds of the samaj. The resolution for him lay in the persona of the representative social leader, the samajpati, who would personalize authority and through that, act as a point of mediation between persons who did not know each other but whose relationships needed to retain an intimate connection. The figure of the samajpati tries to transcend issues of power. But issues of power stubbornly remain and shadow the samajpati. Tagore, in a bid to clarify the concept, even compares it with the near absolute figure of the Japanese Mikado.

On the other hand, the subsequent Pabna address did not even mention the samajpati and instead concentrated on a framework of decentralized institutions. Tagore suggested a two-tier arrangement with indirect representation on one level and a combination at another. Thus at the first tier, villages would be made self-reliant with their pathshalas, dharmagolas (depots for grain storage) and banking institutions. The villages would be grouped together into mandalis (village clusters) and these in turn would function under a representative institution in each district and province. At the same time, farmers would be made to pool in their land and capital in combinations which would be extended to the service sector such as goalas (milkmen). Taken together, the two essays index an unresolved tension in atmashakti between the imperative to centralize that derives from an explicitly nationalist agenda, and the need to decentralize institutions as a measure of bottom-up self-governance.

 

While possessing different trajectories, the constitutionalist orientation of the two speeches collaborate in an absence. Remembering the phase of the Pabna Conference speech in his Russian trip in 1930, Tagore noted that it overlooked the peasant question. He recognized that the debate on centralization versus decentralization was insufficient to deal with the fluid and acute dilemma of relating to social inferiors in a symmetrical way. Actually, atmashakti had another salience. While the notion of atma was derived from Brahmanical metaphysics of the individual self that carries the essence of the cosmic self of the Brahman, Tagore reoriented the idea of the Brahman to mean the world. Thus placed, the atman then indicates the relationship between the individual self and its others in the world.

This is what marks out Tagore’s difference, both from liberal thought which conceived of separate individual selves as also from Gandhi, whose notion of interdependent selves assumes the prior sovereignty of the individual self. Indeed, for Tagore, the self is not really conceived in singular terms, whether as an individual or as a collective. For him the self was relational. He repeatedly declared that the individual self realizes itself only through others. The ‘other’ is constitutively necessary for self-formation. It was this notion of the individual in others that is both enormously complicated and productive for democratic thinking and practice.

The notion of the relational self is crucial to grasp the deeper dilemmas of democracy that Tagore chose to foreground. This is clearly evident in his role in the 1890s as zamindar of the estates of Patisar and Selaidaha in Eastern Bengal which he was asked to administer by his father. As a benevolent and progressive zamindar, he introduced new varieties of seeds and machinery and so on. At the same time he also experimented with various institutional arrangements. For instance, there was a system of arbitration in which he acted as a final court of appeal but only after the local representative institutions failed to resolve differences. Some of these experiments, however, raised suspicion. His attempt to simplify the nine administrative units of one of his estates into three mandalis which would allow for direct dealing with the zamindar, both alienated the managers of the estate as also aroused apprehensions in the jotedars that he was cleverly introducing a new way of raising rent.

 

The bigger failure was the relational element so important for Tagore. It posed major problems of selfhood. Tagore was, for one, deeply conflicted about his status as a zamindar. In his Pabna address, he stressed that the real glory of the zamindar lay in discharging his responsibilities by being generous with dana (donations), maintaining roads, wells and so on. However, he also had deep reservations about zamindari itself, since he also acknowledged (often ironically) that zamindari was a business and as such prevented taking certain initiatives to better the peasant condition. Implicit in this regret was a radical disbelief in the property holding authority of the zamindar himself. And yet, he also believed that merely giving away his land to the tenants would simply mean that the number of zamindars would increase; further, an open market in land could well pose the danger of moneylenders buying up the land.

 

The deep disbelief in his status as zamindar even as he sought to transcend it by engaging in welfare activities, was intensified by the problems of recognition. He tried to relate directly to his tenants. He would often stand and talk to many of them on his morning walks. There were even more spectacular acts that announced his commitment to social equality. He refused to take a seat on a level placed higher than that of his tenants, a practice which was resented by his managers. But such acts were also shot through with unresolvable dilemmas. He was painfully aware that his tenants related to him as a zamindar and that he had to enact that role to meet their expectations. He was condemned to be a mask. This also implied, as he clearly understood, that he had to be ethically committed to a position in which he could only begin to work by accepting the distance that separated him from the peasants and the distrust that was historically structured into the relationship.

But paradoxically, he failed to realize the possibility that the distrust would not be simply of irresponsible zamindars, but of zamindars themselves. Tagore may have been distrustful of zamindari but he was also committed to achieving a relationship of mutuality between a zamindar and his tenants. The latter imperative meant that he could not afford to recognize the possibility of a structural suspicion of himself as a benevolent zamindar from his peasant other.

Tagore’s double relationship with zamindari corresponds to a conundrum of relational selfhood. He is willing to accept his own suspicion of zamindari but is unwilling to do so when it comes from the ‘other’, even as both points of view refer to the same phenomenon, that is, the impossibility of zamindari to benefit the peasant. Significantly, it is in the fictionalization of interior gender relationships that he came to accept the other’s perspective more readily than his own. In Ghare Baire, Nikhilesh, the benevolent zamindar encourages his wife Bimala to achieve a more companionable and equitable relationship with him. However, this leads to a situation where she comes to love his friend, Sandip. Bimala realizes her mistake but the reconciliation scene with Nikhilesh departs from the convention of reunions, for Bimala returns to her old self by falling at his feet. Nikhilesh muses that he could no longer object to her reiteration of formal submission. His project of making her believe in equality was just that, his project. He now had to accept what she offered, even if that meant a suspension of mutual communication, for that was her own belief.

 

Clearly Tagore’s dilemma arose from the unresolved relationship between bestowing power and liberation on the one hand and a commitment to self-governance on the other. The latter imperative is more evident in cases when the concerned subjects are less threatening to the projects of the self. The experiment with children’s pedagogy is illuminating. The early years of the Brahmacharyashram, the children’s school founded in 1901, which was the seedbed of the later Visva Bharati, combines intimacy and personalized relationships with fairly radical democratic institutions. Teachers were conceptualized as those who would help children to recognize the world rather than instruct them in its ways. Children would elect their own monitors and determine the punishments to be levied for infringements of discipline. At the same time, teachers would live with the students in their dormitories. The principle of intimacy was extended to the relationship with nature by taking classes in the open and encouraging children to enter into tactile relationships with trees and other elements of surrounding nature.

The democratic self-organization of children supplied, to Tagore, a criteria of assessing a society. Among the experiences that most inspired him in the Soviet Union was the surprisingly open, democratic culture of an orphanage he visited. He noted that they accepted him as one of their own without any burden of humiliation. Their self-confidence corresponded to the fact that they ran their own lives and only asked elders for advice. There was no physical punishment but a mild version of social shaming. The elders were regarded as the last court of appeal only after disagreements could not be sorted out by the children themselves.

 

The visit to Russia made Tagore reflect self-critically on his Visva Bharati experiment. There were different, specific causes he attributed to these apparent failures but, for us, what is interesting is that these correspond to a conceptual shift in his understanding of relationships. In the writings on Russia and on cooperatives, Tagore rejects two modes of social relationality he had earlier used. These were dana or donation/gift and seva or service. Dana was associated with patronage and with zamindari, while seva was a nationalist mode of working for the poor and humiliated. Tagore had regarded his work in his zamindari for peasant empowerment as dana. Post his Russian visit, he reflected that one could only help those who were equal. In other words, there was a recognition that at its best, dana was ineffective and that, seen unsympathetically, it both needed and perpetuated inequality. Similarly, the nationalist imperative of seva was linked to the notion of daridranarayan, or the divine poor and hence to hierarchy. Indeed, Tagore’s criticism of nationalist volunteers in Ghare Baire was that they sought to produce a nation that would retain its system of social dependencies.

 

One can guess at the ferocity of the dilemmas which resulted in the shift from his deep commitment to zamindari benevolence and its possibilities of mutuality with economic dependants. But there was also a positive reason. This lay in taking cooperatives seriously as a conceptual and practical possibility. Tagore was greatly influenced by the Irish cooperative movement relating to the peasantry, especially the work on cooperative democracy by George Russell or AE. Cooperatives promised two important things. The first was economic independence that seemed the logical result of the pooling in of resources and labour. It would thereby eliminate the burden of economic dependence on which the zamindari system, with its value of dana, rested. Moreover, it would do so without foregoing private property which Tagore valued. The second effect was that it would do away with the need for representative democracy which Tagore, following AE, regarded as vulnerable to takeover by a plutocracy of money power as had apparently happened in the United States.

In his comments on Russia, Tagore deplored the confiscation of property rights for he held that private property expressed the individuality and difference of a person. It simply needed to be regulated. Cooperatives built on this principle by producing a new subject who would be self-dependent and not because of the success of a patron’s project. Instead, it would achieve its autonomy through embedded, institutionalized relationships with others. In other words, the relationship of the self with its others would ensure the empowerment of the individual self. Cooperatives appeared to be the apposite institutional embodiment of the relational self.

Cooperative democracy appeared to resolve yet another dilemma in Tagore which we encountered in his nationalist swadeshi phase, that is, the contesting pulls of centralization and decentralization. Cooperatives were clearly balanced in favour of decentralization, but they did so by promising a certain coherent social form that could perpetuate itself. By enabling economic independence, they did away with the problem of patron-client relationships. Cooperatives appeared to give form to atmashakti since they drew on the immanent social relationships between people to empower both individual and the collective simultaneously. In a fundamental sense, they could do away with the samajpati because they did away with dependence altogether. Cooperatives could thus, arguably, generate a new form of democratic organization from below that would be impregnably self-dependent, because it needed the other and not a leader.

 

But the promise of cooperatives appeared too epiphanic to be true. The practice of running cooperatives raised new dilemmas – the main one related to operating in a desperately poor and hierarchical society. The poor members could not often pay off the loans. Internally, the economic divisions between the peasants remained insurmountable, while differences in literacy levels impacted on deciding who would control the cooperatives. And finally, even though the cooperatives were part of a public enterprise, they remained anchored to the patriarchal presence of Tagore and activists like Kali Mohan Ghosh who ran them with immense integrity, but ran them all the same. The fundamental problem was that the embedded democracy of interrelationships could not survive autonomously; it had to reckon with social and economic structures that had a hand in shaping individuals and relationships.

In conclusion, there is no conclusion. In this paradoxical statement may lie a key lesson about democracy that Tagore offers. The practical imaginary of Tagore reveals that each act of superceding or displacing yet another project of democracy is one that runs up against new limits, a fresh set of dilemmas. Democracy is actually committed to superceding itself for it draws upon the imaginary of equality. And equality is never really achieved even as it motivates the commitment to be realized. Without equality, democracy – the individual/collective and symmetrical access to power to govern one’s life and decisions – is never really achieved. This is an insight that Tagore’s thought makes evident precisely because it is moored in the notion of a relational self. This is a notion that avoids attributing sovereignty either to the individual, the community or state. It is a notion that operates between and under these various sovereignties to constantly bring out the self-limits to democracy each one imposes.

In operational terms, what the relational self insistently demonstrates is that democracy is constantly compromised by institutional structures on the one hand and by economic, social and cultural asymmetries that go into the making of relational complications, on the other. This does not mean that democracy does not also drive the need to find better institutions and more appropriate conditions for working out symmetrical relationships between people. Indeed, the merit of holding on to a notion of the relational self is that it enables democracy to incessantly question itself, demanding new visions and revisions.