This was written in response to an in-seminar conversation about Tagore's The Home and the World

পরদেশী/স্বদেশী

Someone in class last week was positioning Sandip as an outsider, which you connected to the Bengali concept of the পরদেশী (pordeshi). This was interesting to me, since Sandip, of course, is a supporter of স্বদেশী (swadeshi). Compared to the caricatures he uses to delegitimize the স্বদেশী movement, Tagore makes a more subtle rhetorical choice here. স্বদেশী was a self-sufficiency movement. The British systematically destroyed nascent Indian industries to the end of making India a dependent, raw material-exporting appendage to the British manufacturing economy. Britain reaped benefits from India’s subjugation not just in the raw materials it received but in the Indian market it was able to sell back to. স্বদেশী — meaning “of one’s own country” — was a response to this foreign colonial extraction. It was a politics that looked to disrupt the colonial economy through boycott, and strengthen a local economy instead. It was predicated on its opposition to the foreigner (the পরদেশী) and its desire to strengthen and restore pride in দেশ (the homeland, the country).

But when Tagore introduces Sandip, he positions him as a পরদেশী. In the first chapter, Bimala’s frame of mind is entirely within the home: “I had so much in this cage of mine that there was not room for it in the universe” (24). Sandip’s introduction at the beginning of Chapter Two is the first moment of the book that is truly outside of the home. He is out in the world, a space foreign to Bimala’s cage. Later, in a debate between Nikhil and Sandip, Tagore has Nikhil accuse Sandip of the following: “in Europe people look at everything from the viewpoint of science…Man is infinitely more than the natural science of himself…You want to find the truth of man from your science teachers and not from your own inner being” (61). Sandip, the preacher of স্বদেশী, is the student of the পরদেশী; he looks at the world like a পরদেশী. It is Nikhil whose views come from his own দেশ. Later on, Tagore has Sandip even goes as far as saying “I want the western military style to prevail, not the Indian” (81). It was interesting to see Tagore compete for the some markers of legitimacy as the স্বদেশী movement. Instead of articulating a perspective that is explicitly conciliatory with foreign influence and willing to learn from foreign epistemologies — something one might expect from his educational endeavors in Shantiniketan — he attempts to co-opt a sense of দেশী pride and contempt for the পরদেশী to oppose স্বদেশী.