MANIFESTO OF NONVIOLENCE: TOLSTOY, GANDHI AND THE RESPONSIBILITY OF INTELLECTUALSIN THE NUCLEAR AGE Christian Bartolf, Chair,Gandhi Information Center, Berlin
In the year 1919, Rabindranath Tagore had a letter exchange with
the French novelist and pacifist, Romain Rolland, biographer of Tolstoy, Gandhi, Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. Both, Tagore as well as Rolland, were concerned about the intellectuals' responsibility during and before war time. Rolland spread his "Declaration of Independence of the Spirit" signed among others by Jane Addams (USA), Henri Barbusse (France), Tolstoy's secretary Pavel Birukov (Russia), Benedetto Croce (Italy), Georges Duhamel (France), Albert Einstein (Germany), August Forel (Switzerland), Alfred Hermann Fried (Austria), Hermann Hesse (Germany), Selma Lagerloef
(Sweden),
(Germany),
Heinrich Frans
Mann Masereel
(Belgium), Georg Friedrich Nicolai
(GermanY), Edmond Picard (Belgium), Leonhard Ragaz (Switzerland), Bertrand Russell (England), Fritz von Unruh
(Germany), Henry van de Velde (Belgium) and Stefan Zweig (Austria) quoted from: Rolland and Tagore (ed. by Alex Aronson and Krishna Kripalani, Visva-Bharati, Calcutta, September 1945, pp. 20-24) "Toilers of the spirit, companions, scattered all over the world, separated from one another for five years by armies, by censorship and hate of nations at war, we take this opportunity, when barriers are falling and frontiers are re-opening, of making an appeal to you to re-form your fraternal union, - but let it be a fresh union, firmer and stronger than the one which existed before. The war has thrown our ranks into disarray. The majority of intellectuals have placed their science, their art and their mind at the service of States. We do not wish to accuse or reproach anybody. We know the weakness of individual souls and the elemental strength of great collective currents: the latter have in an instant swept away the former, as no provision had been
'6
made for resisting. Let this experience at least serve us for the future! And first of all, let us take note of the disasters that have resulted from the
almost total abdication of the intelligence of the world and its
voluntary subjection to the forces let loose. To the pestilence which is corroding Europe in body and spirit, thinkers and artists have added an incalculable amount of poisoned hate; they have searched in the arsenal of their knowledge, their memory and their imagination for old and new reasons, historical, scientific, logical and poetic reasons, for hating; they have laboured to destroy love and understanding between men. And in so
doing
they
have
disfigured,
dishonoured, debased and degraded Thought, whose ambassadors they were. They have made it an instrument of passions and (perhaps without knowing it) of the egotistic interests of a social or political clan, of a state, of a country or of a class. And now from this savage struggle, from which all the
warring nations, victorious and vanquished, are emerging bruised, impoverished and in their heart of
hearts (though they do not admit it to themselves) ashamed and humiliated at their orgy of madness, Thought
emerges
fallen
with
them,
compromised by their conflict. Arise! Let us extricate the spirit from these compromises, these
humiliating alliances, this secret slavery! The spirit is the servant of none. It is we who are servants of the
spirit. We have no other master. We are born to bear its torch, to defend it, to rally round it all those who have strayed. Our part, our duty is to maintain a fixed point, to point out the polar star, amidst the whirl of passions in the night. Amongst these passions of pride and mutual destruction, we shall choose none; we shall reject all. We serve Truth alone which is free,,with no frontiers, with no limits, with no prejudices of race or caste. Of course we shall not dissociate ourselves from the interests of Humanity! We shall work for it, but for it as a whole. We do
not recognise nations. We recognise the People - one and universal, - the People who suffer, who struggle, who fall and rise again, and who ever march forward on the rough road, drenched with their sweat and their blood, - the People comprising all men, all equally our brothers. And it is in order to make them, like ourselves, aware of this fraternity, that we raise above their blind battles the Arch of Alliance, of the Free Spirit, one and manifold, eternal." Rabindranath Tagore added his signature to the list of names (The only other Indian whose signature was appended to the Declaration was Dr.
Ananda Coomaraswamy.); Tagore
replied to Rolland's request dated July 9, 1919 in an open letter published in the Modern Review, July 1919, p. 81 :"When my mind was steeped in the gloom of the thought, that the lesson of the war had been lost, and that people were trying to perpetuate their hatred and anger into the same organised menace for the world which threatened themselves with disaster, your letter came and cheered me with its message of hope. The truths that save us have always been uttered by the few and rejected by the many and have triumphed through their failures. It is enough for me to know that the higher conscience of Europe has been able to assert itself in one of her choicest spirits through the ugly clamours of passionate politics; and l gladly hasten to accept your invitation to join the ranks of those freed souls, who in Europe have conceived the project of a Declaration of Independence of the Spirit..." In 1925, Runham Brown, Hon.
Secretary of "War
Resisters'
(11 Abbey Road, Enfield, Middlesex, England) issued
International"
the following
"innocent"
Anti-
Conscription Manifesto directed at the League of Nations. The English
language original of the AntiConscription Manifesto as well as Gandhi‘s comment are quoted from: The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 31 (1926),],Ahmedabad
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND PEACE, 1999