In his answer to Tagore Gandhi displays more passion than he has so far shown in the controversy. On October 13, 1921, in "Young India," his stirring rejoinder appears. Gandhi thanks the "Great Sentinel"[107] for having warned India as to the pitfalls ahead. He agrees with Tagore that most essential of all is the maintenance of a free spirit.
We must not surrender our reason into anybody's keeping. Blind surrender to love is often more mischievous than forced surrender to the lash of the tyrant. There is hope for the slave of the brute, none for that of love.
Tagore is the sentinel who warns of the approach of the enemies called Bigotry, Lethargy, Intolerance, Ignorance, and Inertia. But Gandhi does not feel that Tagore's misgivings are justified. The Mahatma always appeals to reason. It is not true that India is moved by blind obedience only. If the country decided to adopt the spinning-wheel, this has been only after considerable reflection. Tagore speaks of patience and is satisfied with beautiful songs. But there is war. Let the poet lay down his lyre! Let him sing when it is over! When a house is on fire, all must go out and take up a bucket to quench the fire.
When all about me are dying for want of food, the only occupation permissible for me is to feed the hungry. India is a house on fire. It is dying of hunger because it has no work to buy food with. Khulna is starving. The Ceded Districts are passing successively through a fourth famine. Orissa is a land suffering from chronic famine. India is growing daily poorer. The circulation about her feet and legs has almost stopped. And if we do not take care she will collapse altogether....
To a people famishing and idle the only acceptable form in which God can dare appear is work and promise of food as wages. God created man to work for his food and said that those who ate without work were thieves. We must think of millions who to-day are less than animals, almost in a dying state. Hunger is the argument that is drawing India to the spinning-wheel.
The poet lives for the morrow, and would have us do likewise. He presents to our admiring gaze the beautiful picture of the birds in the early morning singing hymns of praise as they soar into the sky. Those birds had their day's food and soared with rested wings in whose veins new blood had flown the previous night. But I have had the pain of watching birds who for want of strength could not be coaxed even into a flutter of their wings. The human bird under the Indian sky gets up weaker than when he pretended to retire. For millions it is an eternal vigil or an eternal trance. I have found it impossible to soothe suffering patients with a song from Kabir....
Give them work that they may eat! "Why should I, who have no need to work for food, spin?" may be the question asked. Because I am eating what does not belong to me. I am living on the spoliation of my countrymen. Trace the course of every coin that finds its way into your pocket, and you will realize the truth of what I write. Every one must spin. Let Tagore spin, like the others. Let him burn his foreign clothes; that is the duty to-day. God will take care of the morrow. As it says in the Gitâ, Do right!
Dark and tragic words these! Here we have the misery of the world rising up before the dream of art and crying, "Dare deny me existence!" Who does not sympathize with Gandhi's passionate emotion and share it?
And yet, in his reply so proud and so poignant, there is nevertheless something that justifies Tagore's misgivings: sileat poeta, imposing silence on the person who is called upon to obey the imperious discipline of the cause. Obey without discussion the law of Swadeshi, the first command of which is, Spin!
No doubt, in the human battle, discipline is a duty. But, unfortunately, those who are intrusted with enforcing this discipline, the master's lieutenants, may be narrow-minded men. They may mistake the discipline chosen to attain the ideal for the ideal itself. Discipline fascinates them by its rigidity, for they are of the kind who feel at ease only on the narrow path. They look upon Swadeshi as essential, not as a means to an end, but in itself. In their eyes it acquires an almost sacred character. One of Gandhi's disciples, professor at the school that lies nearest his heart, the Satyagraha Ashram of Sarbarmati at Ahmedabad, Mr. D. B. Kalelkar, writes a "Gospel of Swadeshi," which Gandhi, in a preface, stamps with his approval.[108] This book, or pamphlet, is addressed to the man in the street. Let us examine the creed as it is taught by one of those who drink at the very source of the unpolluted doctrine: