ISAS Working Papers

On 30 May 1919, the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, following the massacre perpetrated by British troops at Jallianwala Bag h in the Punjab, renounced his knighthood through a letter written to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford. Tagore stated that his action was motivated by a desire “to give voice to the protest of millions of my countrymen suppressed into a dumb anguish of terr or”. 2 On the broad canvas of India’s struggle for freedom, it was but a small act. But Tagore shared the sentiment of another contemporary literary genius from a distant part of the globe, Leo Tolstoy of Russia, who had argued that true life is lived through tiny actions that occur. Both great men struggled against oppression through their articulations, wrote of war that savages societies, and peace that humankind constantly seeks to achieve. This was evidence of the intellectual bond that tied Russia and Bengal, then, and which continued to percolate down through ages.