Gora'S Journey From Abstract To Concrete From Contemplation To Action

GORA’S JOURNEY FROM ABSTRACT TO CONCRETE FROM
CONTEMPLATION TO ACTION.
Tagore’s novel Gora represents his most ambitious effort at projecting his image of India and has been
rightly acclaimed as the “greatest novel ever written in India”, where he holds up the problems of
colonization which brought about a major identity crisis. The loss of self under colonisation results in
the colonisation of mind.And in this novel Gora’s journey to enlightenment shows his fight towards his
inner prejudices and the actions he takes to combat them.
The eponymous protagonist Gora, an orphan, born of Irish parents during the turbulent days of the
Sepoy Mutiny in 1857. He is brought up by childless Bengali Brahmin couple- Krishnadayal and
Anandamoyi. Growing up in a Hindu family, Gora turns out to be a fanatic Hindu and a staunch
proponent of Swadesh and Hinduism. He is ever ready to challenge anyone on that issue. The novel
records the protagonist’s intense search for the real India and a search for the “self”.
In the course of the novel, gora develops himself as a staunch believer and practitioner of orthodox
Hinduism with all its extreme ritualistic and caste based form. Gora becomes most punctillous about
rituals- bathing regularly in the Ganges, performing ceremonial worships in the morning and evening
and taking particular care about what he touches and eats . He even stops drinking at his mother’s room
because she keeps as maid, Lachhmia, a woman from the lower section of the society and a non-
Brahmin, the touch of whom is a threat to Gora’s orthodox Hinduism. In dress, Gora becomes an
incarnate image of revolt against modernity. It is interesting , however ,to note that it is only when he
feels bad about the humiliation of his own land and of his religion by the British, Gora clutches ever
more strongly to the traditional rituals and moorings of Hinduism.For Gora Hinduism and Bharatvarsha
becomes inextricably one. He feels that foreign and native criticism ofn Hinduism can best be rebutted
by holding firmly to our own customs and beliefs. He strongly opines “…. We must not feel apologetic
about the country of our birth-whether it be about tradition, faith or its scriptures-neither to others nor
even to ourselves. We must save our country and ourselves from insult by manfully bearing the burden
of our motherland with all our strength and all our pride.”
Tagore now introduces the first of the many incidents that shakes the self-complacency of this
incorrigible neo-Hindu nationalist and sets him on the path of self-introspection. Although rigid in his
stand for the defense of Hinduism, Gora is restless from the start, representing the youth of his time as
it was between the opposite pulls of orthodoxy and liberalism, revival and reform, tradition and
modernity. Initially Gora being stirred by the new spirit of the cultural nationalism proudly embraces
even the obscurantist form of Hinduism without question.Eventually as he comes in direct contact with
the people, he has hunches about the validity of the orthodox ways. One such incident is the death of
Nanda. Nanda meets a premature death due to the spread of tetanus by a chisel because his mother
insists on calling an exorcist instead of a doctor. This incident speaks volumes about the chasm
exixting between the elite and the real mass of illiterate subaltern classes living amidst poverty,
superstitions, caste, unhygienic conditions etc. Gora is left shocked and horrified at this incident and
realizes that the line between religious orthodoxy and superstition is a fine one.
However,Gora gets arrested by the police for the flimsiest of reason- for trying to protect a group of
young students from the wrath of a police constable and picking up a fight with him. Gora’s time in jail
gives Gora time to reflect on himself and it [is here that he begins to have a concrete image of his
Baratvarsha. At first, he tried to link religion with country, but his vision of Bharatvarsha slowly
evolves from the abstract to the concrete i.e. from symbolic to the actual. The events of Nanda’s death,
the Muslim man and his shopping basket being knocked aside by the Brahmin cab, the discrimination
at Ghoshpara and the views of rural Bengal brings forth a new face of Bharatvarsha. It is no more an
ideal but a land filled with millions of people. This is also the time when Gora sees Sucharita’s face in
his mind and has a renewed realisation and detects a major flaw in his earlier concept of Bharatvarsha :
it excluded women all together. If women exixted for him at all, as symbol of grace, purity and
motherhood , they were supposed to perform their function in the enclosed domestic space, invisible to
the outside world. But at the end of the novel, thorugh a long and circuitous way, he arrives at a
position which considers his mother as his Bharatvarsha, as his everything- “Ma, you are my mother.
The mother for whom I have looked for everywhere-all this time she was sitting in my house.. You are
my Bharatvarsha.” Tagore’s vision of religion and India gets merged in the one beautiful composite
figure of Anandamoyi . Gora’s journey from the narrowness of the institutionalised religion he believed
to disillusionment and enlightenment as “human being” can be said to have been hastened and eased by
his mother.
At the end, Gora’s cry of pain upon discovering the truth about his birth becomes simultaneously a cry
of liberation. Ironically, it is in losing everything that had previously marked his sense of identity-
nation,caste religion, parentage-that Gora becomes free to claim his identity as a true Bharatvarshiya.
The revelation is not at all devastating for Gora. He is able to recognise the positive potential of his
dispossession, because he has already undergone a process of mental development, and the preceding
events have conditioned him for a transformation of perspective. Gora declares that his “foreign”
parentage by making him an outcast has actually helped him to transcend all the castes and creed and
religious boundaries that divides a nation and thus he now stands as a spokesman not of Hindu
orthodoxy but as an embodiment of India in her entirety.

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