Page 118 - DENG104_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_I

Unit 11: Where the Mind is Without Fear By Rabindranath Tagore

11.3 Central Idea Notes

This poem is a reflection of the poet’s good and ideal nature. He has utmost faith in God. He
prays to God with all his heart that He should guide the countrymen to work hard, speak the
truth, be forward and logical in approach. Rabindranath Tagore aspires to see the country and
his people to be in peace and prosper. He loves his country a lot and wishes for its welfare.

11.4 Theme

When we pray, if we pray for riches, certainly we are very poor. If we pray for health, we are
then certainly sick. And if we pray for freedom, we are in shackles, bondage and our hands
and feet are fettered. Rabindranath Tagore wrote his poem Where The Mind Is Without Fear
in the first decade of the Twentieth century. It is the 35th song in his famous book Geethanjali
which was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. He wrote this poem during the peak
hours of the cruel and brutal British Rule in India. It is his Utopia, in a sense, in which he
prays to God to let his country awake to a blissful heaven of freedom that is his dream. The
distance between his dream and the real state of affairs in his country is far, and he skilfully
brings to world’s attention the state into which his great nation has been fell into by the
mighty British Empire. He does this without offending anyone and as is expected from an
England-educated noble genius. As an aftermath of the second world war and due to the
severeness of the Indian Independence Movement, the British however were forced to leave
India during 1947. But 6 years earlier, Tagore had died without seeing a free India. In the
present times, this poem serves a dual purpose. It unveils the horrible downtrodden position
to which his country and its heritage was brought to by Britain. At the same time it is a scale
to measure whether India has progressed any after half a century of her independence.
By describing his visions of the characteristics of a glorious country, he emphasises the pitiful
plight of his native land. He prays for a heaven of freedom, to denote the hell of submission
and slavery prevailing then. People cannot express themselves fearlessly. The Nation’s head
is forced to be held low and stooping. Knowledge is not free. The Nation is broken up into
fragments by narrow domestic walls, divided into isolated segments by geographical and
politically induced barriers. It is true that Lord Curson’s cunning partition in 1905 of his
native Bengal into Muslim and Hindu Bengals as part of the notorious policy of Divide and
Rule heart-broke and frustrated the poet, the strong emotions emanating from which are
reflected here. It is relevant to note that Tagore was a dedicated and committed national
leader too.
The poet then denotes that spoken words no more come out from the depth of truth, the
meaning of which anyone can guess. The ancient stream of reason which once flowed clear
and unhampered through the ages has now lost it’s way into the desert sand of Unindian dead
habits. A God-fearing nation has now become captainless and the once-ever widening thought
and action of a mighty people, have stuck where it has been decades back. So he prays to God
to raise his country into that heaven of freedom where everything is opposite. Even though
disguisedly pungent, this poem contains exquisite music as was usual with all Tagore songs.

11.5 Critical Appreciation

Rabindranath Tagore’s writing is highly imagistic, deeply religious and imbibed with his love
of nature and his homeland. RabindranathTagore’s poem, ‘Where the Mind is Without Fear’
,included in the volume called Naibedya, later published in English ‘Gitanjali’ is a prayer to a
universal father-figure, presumably, God to elevate his country into a free land. Here Tagore
defines Freedom as a fundamental system of reasoning of a sovereign state of mind, established

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