The problem with Rabindra-religion…it is more political than spiritual

On a Saturday afternoon in Dhaka, a group of young people decided that Rabindranath Tagore needed to be erased. They arrived outside the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy in Segunbagicha, where a newly painted mural displayed the faces of Bengali cultural figures. One of them, a young woman, began smearing black ink across Tagore's portrait.

The police intervened and four people were detained, including ANM Ayas, a 29-year-old activist associated with the Rashtra Sanglap Forum who had recently attracted attention on social media through a series of provocative public antics. 

Their act of cultural vandalism soon became a criminal case. A Dhaka court placed all four on remand on October 11, with allegations involving criminal conspiracy, inciting enmity between groups and religious hatred.

One woman reportedly explained the group's motive as opposition to Indian aggression. Tagore, in this formulation, was not a poet born in Bengal decades before Partition. He was an Indian symbol to be removed from a Bangladeshi wall. 

The argument was historically impoverished. The reaction to it was more revealing.

Later, the cultural organisation Udichi assembled musicians, singers and activists on the pavement beneath the murals. A man in a blue checked shirt played a harmonium resting on a plastic stool. A woman in a green sari sang into a microphone. Others joined her in Tagore's Ekla Cholo Re, the song urging a person to walk alone when nobody answers the call.

There was no elaborate stage and microphone cables ran across the pavement. Elderly participants sat beside younger performers. Portraits of Tagore leaned against the wall, accompanied by quotations about humanity and religious tolerance. It was a modest response. Someone had attacked a poet's image and his admirers answered with his music. Then came the internet.

A video of the performance uploaded by a television channel received around 40,000 Facebook reactions. Approximately 38,000 were laughter reactions. That is 95%.

Well, the figures should not be mistaken for an opinion poll. Facebook reactions are self-selecting and vulnerable to coordinated activity. It is also poor at explaining motivation. Some viewers may have been mocking the performers, others the politics surrounding them, and some simply joining an online joke.

But the scale of the reported derision is difficult to ignore. Here was one of Bengal's greatest literary figures (if not the greatest one), defended through one of his best-known songs, becoming the object of mass digital ridicule. This irony captured a problem larger than the vandalism itself.

In Bangladesh, Rabindranath has become something resembling a religion. It has ceremonies, custodians, sacred texts, approved interpretations and accusations of heresy. The problem is that this religion is political rather than spiritual. And its most enthusiastic defenders may have helped create the backlash they now find incomprehensible.

The making of a secular deity

Rabindranath Tagore was not born to serve the cultural requirements of a modern nation-state. He died in 1941, six years before India and Pakistan emerged from British rule and three decades before Bangladesh became independent.

His intellectual life was too restless to fit comfortably inside any national ideology.

He wrote about love, nature, mortality, education, rural poverty, spiritual freedom and the limits of nationalism. He criticised imperialism while questioning forms of nationalism that subordinated individual conscience to collective identity. He was also capable of contradiction and misjudgment.

That last characteristic tends to disappear whenever a writer becomes a national monument.

Bangladesh's relationship with Tagore predates Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League's autocratic rule. His songs were part of Bengali cultural resistance during the Pakistan period. The Pakistani state's suspicion of Tagore helped make his music a symbol of linguistic and cultural freedom.

During the Liberation War, his writing offered a language of attachment to Bengal that transcended the religious nationalism on which Pakistan had been founded. Amar Shonar Bangla became Bangladesh's national anthem because its expression of affection for the land resonated with the country's struggle for independence.

There was nothing artificial about that attachment. The problem emerged when a literary inheritance became a political test. Under Sheikh Hasina, who ruled from 2009 until the mass uprising of August 2024, the Awami League increasingly presented itself as the principal guardian of Bangladesh's Liberation War identity and secular cultural tradition. Tagore occupied an important place in that narrative.

His songs accompanied state ceremonies. His image appeared in public commemorations. Cultural institutions associated with Bengali secular nationalism received prominence in the official imagination. None of those practices was objectionable in itself. Governments everywhere commemorate writers, musicians and historical figures. The difficulty begins when admiration becomes an expectation of political conformity.

Among critics of the Awami League's cultural politics, Tagore became associated with an establishment that claimed special authority to determine what counted as enlightened and authentically Bengali.

To challenge that establishment was sometimes to risk being portrayed as culturally backward or hostile to the spirit of the Liberation War. The difference between defending a poet and defending a political order became increasingly difficult to maintain. This did not mean that everyone who admired Tagore supported Hasina. Many of her opponents were devoted readers and performers of his work. Nor was the Awami League the sole institution responsible for his elevated cultural status.

But the party's long incumbency gave it unusual power to associate its political identity with an established national inheritance. And that association carried a cost.

When Hasina's government collapsed in 2024 amid mass protests and a deadly crackdown, the rejection extended beyond the government itself. Symbols, institutions, cult and cultural practices perceived as belonging to its political universe came under renewed scrutiny. Tagore was among those caught in the argument.

A poet who had belonged to Bengal for generations was increasingly treated, in some political circles, as though he belonged to a recently defeated government. It was a ‘remarkable’ reduction. The Awami League had not invented Rabindranath. Yet its opponents could now behave as though rejecting the party required rejecting the poet.

This happened because the poet had been turned into a political credential under Awami watch. Once that happened, refusing the credential became a political act.

A generation that refuses the ceremony

There is another problem, one that cannot be explained entirely through politics.

Rabindra Sangeet is not naturally suited to every generation's listening habits. Much of it requires patience. The compositions often unfold gradually, placing demands on melody, language, circumstances and emotional attention. The experience can be intimate and rewarding. It is not necessarily designed to compete with a 15-second video, a hip-hop track or the immediate pleasures of contemporary pop.

That does not make younger listeners culturally deficient. Every generation develops its own musical vocabulary. Bangladesh's young people inhabit a world of rap, electronic music, independent bands, streaming platforms and global influences. Their relationship with Bengali identity need not resemble their grandparents' relationship with it.

A young Bangladeshi can prefer hip-hop to a harmonium and remain entirely Bengali. Indeed, the assumption that an educated, culturally aware person ought to appreciate Rabindra Sangeet is part of the problem. Music becomes less inviting when enjoying it is treated as evidence of moral superiority.

Still, the generational argument has limits. Tagore's compositions are not uniformly slow, and young musicians have repeatedly adapted his work. His songs contain anger, urgency, playfulness and political defiance alongside contemplation. The issue is not simply that the music has aged. It is that the institutions presenting it sometimes seem to have aged more quickly than the music itself.

A cultural tradition survives when people find new reasons to inhabit it. It becomes vulnerable when institutions insist that inherited reasons should be sufficient. For sections of Bangladesh's Gen Z and millennial population, the rejection of Tagore may therefore be about the political and social world associated with their performance.

The television footage from Segunbagicha makes the distinction worth considering. The performers appeared sincere and their protest against vandalism was legitimate. The song was appropriate to the occasion. But the visual vocabulary was ludicrously stereotype and familiar…harmonium, portraits, solemn recitation, established cultural activists, familiar slogans.

For an audience already suspicious of Dhaka's secular cultural establishment, the event could be interpreted not as just another appearance by an old political-cultural order. That became synonymous with Awami fascism

That interpretation may be unfair to the individual performers. Udichi has a history extending well beyond Hasina's government, and cultural activists have faced repression and violence themselves. Yet public perception does not always respect institutional history.

A political identity can attach itself to an artistic practice so firmly that the audience stops distinguishing between the two. The laughter reactions may partly reflect that association. They may also reflect the internet's preference for mockery over argument. But they cannot establish that 95% of Bangladeshis dislike Tagore, or even that 95% of those viewers understood what they were watching.

The collapse of cultural authority is a plausible interpretation of the episode, not a statistically demonstrated national verdict but the most revealing question is why the performance could so easily become a joke.

Perhaps the answer lies in the distance between the cultural establishment's understanding of its own significance and the public's willingness to grant it that significance. The custodians believe they are defending a universal poet but some of their audience sees a political congregation. Neither perception fully describes what happened on the pavement. But the distance between them describes the crisis.

The poet his worshippers forgot

The historical Rabindranath is considerably more interesting than the ceremonial one.

He was an aristocrat who wrote about rural suffering and a critic of imperialism who questioned nationalism. He was also a universalist who remained deeply engaged with the particularities of Bengali society. He was, of course, not immune to the political seductions of his age.

During a visit to Italy in 1926, he was initially taken in by Benito Mussolini's carefully managed presentation of fascist rule. His friend, the French writer Romain Rolland, helped expose him to information about the regime's repression. Tagore eventually condemned fascism publicly.

As documented in Amrit Sen's account of the Tagore–Rolland correspondence, the episode revealed a thinker capable of serious political error, followed by reconsideration. This is the kind of Rabindranath that a younger audience might find compelling…not a flawless sage, but an intellectual whose convictions were tested by events.

His 1917 lectures on nationalism offer an even more uncomfortable challenge to contemporary political culture. Tagore distinguished between the organic relationships of society and the machinery of the modern nation-state. He feared that nationalism, when organised primarily around power and collective self-interest, could diminish the moral independence of individuals.

His criticism was not a rejection of cultural belonging. It was a warning against allowing political organizations to consume the human purposes it was supposed to serve. Scholars have since debated the limitations and implications of that argument, including whether Tagore sufficiently appreciated the emancipatory possibilities of anti-colonial nationalism. 

But his central concern remains relevant to Bangladesh. What happens when the state claims ownership of a culture? What happens when a poet becomes an instrument for defining the acceptable citizen? And what happens when opposition to the state becomes hostility towards the culture it claims to represent? These are questions Tagore's work invites. They are also questions that a politically sanctified Tagore makes difficult to ask.

The controversy over his alleged opposition to the establishment of Dhaka University offers a smaller thought. A story has circulated for years claiming that Tagore participated in protests against the university's creation in 1912. The allegation is frequently repeated as proof that he was hostile to the educational advancement of eastern Bengal's Muslims.

But historians and researchers have challenged the claim, pointing to the absence of reliable evidence and records placing Tagore elsewhere on the date of an alleged protest. The appropriate response is historical investigation and that is not done so far conclusively.

It is not to declare every critic of Tagore a communalist. Nor is it to repeat a disputed allegation because it conveniently confirms a political grievance. Yet the debate often proceeds as though the available choices are reverence and denunciation. That is what happens when history becomes theology.

A literary figure should be open to criticism, including criticism of his class position, political assumptions, language and social outlook. Tagore was a product of a particular intellectual and economic world. His life and writing cannot be understood without examining the inequalities and privileges of that world.

His achievements do not require the suppression of those questions. Nor do those questions justify defacing his image. A mature culture can accommodate admiration and criticism simultaneously but a political religion struggles with both.

The Indian question

Tagore's place in Bangladesh has also become entangled with the country's relationship with India. This is hardly surprising. He occupies an exceptional position in the cultural histories of both countries. His compositions became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh, while his literary imagination developed across a Bengal that existed long before either modern state.

But the shared inheritance has acquired contemporary political complications. During Hasina's rule, critics accused her government of maintaining an unequal relationship with New Delhi. India's support for her administration became a significant source of resentment, particularly as allegations of authoritarian repression mounted.

Within that atmosphere, Tagore's prominence in official cultural life could be interpreted by some as another expression of Indian influence. The interpretation was politically convenient, even if historically crude.

The woman who smeared ink on his portrait reportedly invoked Indian aggression. Her reasoning illustrates how easily a writer can be stripped of historical context and assigned a contemporary nationality as though that settles his cultural legitimacy. Tagore was born in 1861. The Republic of India did not exist during his lifetime.

His family history, literary language, travels and artistic influence crossed the boundaries that later divided Bengal. To describe him simply as an Indian foreign to Bangladesh is to impose today's borders upon yesterday's cultural world. Yet the opposite mistake is also possible.

Shared cultural history should not be used to dismiss contemporary Bangladeshi concerns about sovereignty and political interference or the unequal relations with India. Those concerns can be examined on their merits without requiring either the worship or destruction of Tagore. The problem begins when literature becomes a substitute for foreign policy.

A country's cultural inheritance cannot be made contingent on the popularity of a neighbouring government. Otherwise, every diplomatic dispute would require another revision of the national bookshelf. The same confusion has shaped debates about Bengali language.

Some critics regard the Tagorean literary tradition as overly Kolkata-centric, insufficiently attentive to the Persian and Arabic influences that have shaped Bangladeshi Bengali and the speech of its Muslim majority. There are legitimate questions here about language and cultural authority.

Bangladesh's Bengali is not identical to the formal literary register historically associated with Kolkata. Its vocabulary, idioms and pronunciation reflect distinct experiences and evolving social realities. But linguistic diversity does not require the rejection of an earlier literary tradition. Nor should Tagore's language become the standard against which every contemporary variation is judged.

The trouble with sacred poets

The Segunbagicha incident essentially exposed two different forms of intolerance. The first was straightforward: people attempted to damage a public portrait because they objected to the cultural or political identity they associated with its subject. That is vandalism and it deserves condemnation.

But the response raises a separate question. Four people were arrested, and the allegations included offences concerning conspiracy and the promotion of religious hostility. The seriousness of those allegations must be assessed against evidence of what the accused actually did and intended. Defacing public art may warrant legal consequences. It does not automatically establish religious hatred or a threat to the state.

The second form of intolerance is subtler. It arises when the guardians of cultural heritage assume that respect for a writer must take a prescribed form, or that indifference to his work reveals a deficiency of national character. Thus the danger is not limited to one political camp.

An Islamist who rejects Tagore because he is insufficiently Muslim and a secular nationalist who demands reverence because Tagore represents the correct Bengali identity are making a related mistake. Both are asking literature to certify belonging. Neither is particularly interested in the freedom of the reader. A poet becomes a problem when people are no longer allowed to dislike him.

The right to ignore Tagore is as important to a living literary culture as the right to admire him. People should be free to find his music dull, his prose dated, his politics unconvincing or his philosophical arguments mistaken. They should also be free to discover him at 40 after having ignored him at 20.

Literature, after all, does not require unanimous approval. It requires curiosity and the possibility of disagreement.

There is a reason that religious metaphors fit Bangladesh's Tagore controversy so comfortably. His public image has accumulated the features of an orthodoxy: rituals of remembrance, authorised interpreters, ceremonial observance and indignation at sacrilege. But the comparison also has limits.

For many Bangladeshis, devotion to Tagore is a genuinely personal experience, connected to grief, affection, memory and the search for meaning. It is neither imposed nor necessarily political. That private attachment should not be confused with the public machinery of cultural authority.

The distinction is essential. The spiritual Rabindranath belongs to anyone who finds something in his work but the political Rabindranath is constantly being recruited. One can survive without an institution. The other depends upon it. And institutions, unlike poetry, can lose legitimacy.

Let Rabindranath become a writer again

There is a way out of this dispute, though it is unlikely to satisfy those who prefer cultural battles to cultural engagement.

It begins by separating Tagore from the political identities that have accumulated around him. His work should not be treated as evidence of loyalty to the Awami League, secular nationalism or India. Neither should hostility towards his work be considered proof of political independence, Islamic authenticity or Bangladeshi patriotism. The relationship between literature and national identity is more complicated than those equations permit.

Tagore can remain central to Bangladesh's literary history without being everyone's favourite poet. His national anthem can be respected as a constitutional and historical symbol without requiring citizens to enjoy every composition he wrote. His political thought can be studied critically rather than presented as a collection of commandments.

And his critics can be challenged through argument instead of automatically being assigned a hostile political identity.

For cultural organisations such as Udichi, the challenge is not simply to defend Tagore against vandalism. It is to make the culture they represent accessible to people who do not already belong to its familiar audience. That may require different performances, different settings, younger musicians and a greater willingness to engage with criticism.

It may also require accepting that some young Bangladeshis will never develop a taste for Rabindra Sangeet. There is no national tragedy in that.

The tragedy would be a country in which a major literary inheritance becomes so politically burdened that young people encounter it primarily as something to accept or reject on ideological grounds. The irony of the Segunbagicha performance lies in the song itself.

Ekla Cholo Re is an appeal to independent moral action. It asks the individual to continue even when collective approval is absent. It is an unusual choice for a cultural establishment that sometimes appears anxious about the withdrawal of public approval. But perhaps that is precisely why the song remains relevant.

Its value does not depend on the number of people joining the chorus, or on the balance between likes and laughter reactions beneath a Facebook video. The performers had every right to sing it and the audience had every right not to enjoy it. Neither fact required a political crisis.

Rabindranath Tagore survived colonialism, Partition and the creation of two nation-states after his death. So, his work is unlikely to be destroyed by black ink on a Dhaka wall.

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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa