Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World, translated by Surendranath Tagore, with introduction by Anita Desai, and preface by William Radice (London & New York: Penguin Classics, 2005) (" 'Can one ever finish a subject with words?' " Id. at 11. " 'I am willing,' he said, 'to serve my country; but my worship I reserve for Right which is far greater than my country. To worship my country as a god is to bring a cure upon it.' " Id. at 29. " 'It is the same thing. Where our country makes itself the final object, it gains success at the cost of the soul. Where it recognizes the Greatest as greater than all, there it may miss success, but gains it soul.' " Id. at 80. " 'Our country,' I tried to explain, 'has been brought to death's door through sheer fear -- from fear of the gods down to fear of the police; and if you set up, in the name of freedom, the fear of some other bogey, whatever it may be called; if you raise your victorious standard on the cowardice of the country by means of downright oppression, then no true lover of the country can bow to your decision.' 'Is there any country, sir,' pursued the history student, 'where submission to Government is not due to fear?' 'The freedom that exists in any country,' I replied, 'may be measured by the extent of this reign of fear. Where its threat is confined to those who would hurt or plunder, there the Government may claim to have freed man from the violence of man. But if fear is to regulate how people are to dress, where they shall trade, or what they must eat, then is man's freedom of will utterly ignored, and manhood destroyed at the root.' " Id. at 129. "'We think, he said, 'that we are own masters when we get in our hands the objects of our desire -- but we are really our own masters only when we are able to cast out our desires from our minds.' " Id. at 134. From the backcover: "Vividly depicting the clash between old and new, realism and idealism, The Home and the World (1916) is a haunting allegory of India's political turmoil in the early twentieth century.").
Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Poems (Penguin Classics), translated by William Radice (London & New York: Penguin Books), 2005).
