After rehearsing beautiful sentiments that spring out of a noble but untempered idealism, Sir Rabindra Nath proceeds : " So much for the social and political regeneration of India. Now we come to her industries, and I am very often asked whether there is in India any industrial regeneration since the advent of the British Government. It must be remembered that at the beginning of British rule in India, our industries were suppressed, and since then we have not met with any real help or encouragement to enable us to make a stand against the monster commercial organisations of the world. The nations have decreed that we must remain purely an agricultural people " (p. 126).
So far, so good. But instead of making any con structive proposals for the future Sir Rabindra Nath again plunges into exalted rhetoric. " I personally do not believe in the unwieldy organisations of the present day . . . . Beauty is the signature which the Creator stamps upon his works." From another book called " Personality " (Messrs. Macmillan and Co.) we gather that Tagore has deve loped some views concerning the rights and functions of womanhood. It must be a profound instinct that led him to make the following weighty statement : " At the present stage of history, civilisation is almost exclusively masculine, a civilisation of power in which the woman has been thrust in the shade. Therefore it has lost its balance, and it is moving by hopping from war to war. Its motive forces are the forces of destruction, and its ceremonials are carried through by an appalling number of human sacrifices. This one-sided civilisation is crashing along a series of catastrophes at a tremendous speed because of its one-sidedness." (" Personality," p. 172). We
do not know what Miss Christabel Pankhurst would think of the above declaration, but it contains, in a nut-shell, the secret of the failure of a man-made civilisation. I believe, all sane-minded suffragists would hail the statement as a precise and powerful argument for active co-operation between the sexes. Yet, they will soon be disappointed, if they felt elated over Tagore's conversion to the cause of women's suffrage, for he seems to be out of touch with the mighty forces that are impelling the women's movement, with active, progressive, constructive feminism.
If the one-sided civilisation has failed, how else could it be made complete and harmonious except by organised women capturing the control now denied them over the affairs of the State, and sharing it with men ? But Tagore continues : " Woman's function is the passive function of the soil, which not only helps the tree to grow, but keeps its growth within limits. . . . Woman is endowed with the passive qualities of chastity, modesty, devotion and power of self-sacrifice in a greater measure than man is " (Ibid. p. 172-73). Tagore is quite broad minded enough to concede that " the human world is the woman's world " and yet he would say—to a very large extent, quite rightly—that " This domestic world has been the gift of God to woman." We will only to man also.
In the meanwhile we are grateful for the prophecy " And in the future civilisation also, the women, the feebler creatures . . . they will have their place, and those bigger creatures will have to give way " (" Personality, " page 184).