'Natural Supernaturalism?' 1 The Tagore-Gandhi Debate on the Bihar Earthquake

This article is a study of the confrontation between Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) on the Bihar earthquake of January 1934. Gandhi who was then campaigning against untouchability in South India called the earthquake 'a divine chastisement for the great sin we have committed and are still committing against those whom we describe as untouchables ... '. Reading this statement in the press, Tagore wrote to Gandhi pointedly disagreeing with him: 'I am compelled to utter a truism in asserting that physical catastrophes have their inevitable and exclusive origin in certain combinations of physical facts'. This article examines the differences in their position over this topic and discusses the implications of their contrasting stands on it. In addition, I also look at Gandhi's other statements on the earthquake as I do at Tagore's exchanges with Einstein on the relationship between the observer and the phenomenal world. Perhaps no other disagreement between Gandhi and Tagore better illustrates the differences in their attitudes to life, their notions of what constitutes the relationship between physical phenomena and the realm of human morals, or between nature and God, within a broadly Hindu framework of understanding. But departing from the conventional view that Tagore's position is rational-scientific-modern, while Gandhi's is religious-superstitious-traditional, I argue that the contestations are not as much between rationality and faith, science and superstition, or modernity and tradition as between two kinds of rationality, two ideas of science, and two approaches to modernity. I try to show how both Tagore's and Gandhi's positions are intellectually more complex, nuanced, and compelling than might appear at first. Ultimately, both Gandhi and Tagore contributed, even with their contrasting perspectives, to the richness that made up Indian modernity, with its unique attempts to integrate rationality with a spiritual view of the world.