21. Passage 1: Read the passages given below and answer the questions No. 24-27
European civilization seeks to create unity by keeping differences at bay, or by destroying difference and bringing about homogeneity. On the other hand, Indian civilization docs not deny differences, but, by recognizing them and demarcating the relation of each group with all the others, tries to find a place for all in society. "That the bringing together of the diverse into one, of making the stranger into one's own, is not the same as turning everything into a homogeneous mass - do we, in this country, have to shout this truth from the rooftops?"
The arrangement by which social unity was sought, even as differences were also recognized, is the Indian caste system. In the Swadeshi period, Tagore even claimed that had the ancient makers of the siistra known of the Muslim and Christian inhabitants of the country, they would not have restricted their rules to only the Hindu castes but "would have defined the claims of all of these alien groups with the Hindu samaj in such a way that there would not have been frequent conflicts between them." In 1911-12, when he was thoroughly disillusioned by the politics of the Swadeshi movement, Tagore was still writing, in the context of the history of caste conflicts in India: "It is not in India's nature to scatter itself among the many. India seeks unity, which is why it strives to contain diversity within the bounds of unity."
Later, in his Nationalism lectures, he says much the same thing about the caste system in India, and reminds his American audience that unlike the European conquerors of the Americas, the Aryans did not try to annihilate the non-Aryan peoples of India but instead sought to include them within society while recognizing their differences. Of course, by 1917 Tagore was far more conscious and articulate than before about the rigidity, and consequent injustices, of the caste system: "...In her caste regulations, India recognized differences, but not the mutability which is the law of life. In trying to avoid collisions shc set up boundaries of immovable walls, thus giving to her numerous races the negative benefit of peace and order but not the positive opportunity of expansion and movement."
Yet Tagore insisted at the same time that "india tolerated difference of races from the first, and that spirit of toleration has acted all through her history. Her caste system is the out come of this spirit of toleration." He had no doubt"at this time that india's ideal was "neither the colour less vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship," but social unity through recognition of the mutual differences of races and communities.
[Partha Chatterjee, "The Indian Non-Nation: Imagining with Tagore"]
Q. Indian civilization: (University of Hyderabad Ph.D 2019)
