They had fundamental differences on certain issues.
Mahatma Gandhi and Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore were born in the same decade. Tagore on 7.5.1861. Gandhi on 2.10.1869. Their affection and respect for each other never diminished. On non-co-operation, charkha, boycotting schools, burning foreign clothes they had fundamental differences.
GANDHI: In three forceful letters, the Poet has endeavoured to give expression to his misgivings, and he has come to the conclusion that Non-cooperation is not dignified enough for the India of his vision, that it is a doctrine of negative and despair. He fears that it is a doctrine of separation, exclusiveness, narrowness and negation.
GANDHI: Nor need the Poet fear that Non-cooperation is intended to erect a Chinese wall between India and the West. On the contrary, Non-cooperation is intended to pave the way to real, honourable and voluntary co-operation based on mutual respect and trust. The present struggle is being waged against compulsory co-operation…
The Poet’s concern is largely about the students. He is of the opinion that they should not have been called upon to give up Government schools. Here I must differ from him. I have never been able to make a fetish of literary training. My experience has proved to my satisfaction that literary training by itself adds not an inch to one’s moral height and that character-building is independent of literary training. I am firmly of opinion that the Government schools have unmanned us; rendered us helpless and Godless…
If India is ever to attain the Swaraj of the Poet’s dream, she will do so only by Non-violent Non-cooperation.
TAGORE: From our master, the Mahatma—may our devotion to him never grow less!—we must learn the truth of love in all its purity, but the science and art of building up Swaraj is a vast subject. Its pathways are difficult to traverse and take time. For this task, aspiration and emotion must be there, but no less must study and thought be there likewise. For it, the economist must think, the mechanic must labour, the educationist and statesman must teach and contrive. In a word, the mind of the country must exert itself in all directions. Above all, the spirit of Inquiry throughout the whole country must be kept intact and untrammelled, its mind not made timid or inactive by compulsion open or secret.
TAGORE: But his call came to one narrow field alone. To one and all he simply says, “Spin and weave, spin and weave”. Is this the call: “Let all seekers after truth come from all sides”? Is this the call of the New Age to new creation?
TAGORE: Where Mahatma Gandhi has declared was against the tyranny of the machine which is oppressing the whole world, we are all enrolled under his banner. But we must refuse to accept as our ally the illusion-haunted magic-ridden slave mentality that is at the root of all the poverty and insult under which our country groans. Here is the enemy itself on whose defeat alone Swaraj within and without can come to us.
GANDHI: I regard the Poet as a sentinel warning us against the approaching enemies called Bigotry, Lethargy, Intolerance, Ignorance, Inertia and other members of that brood.
GANDHI: I must not be understood to endorse the proposition that there is any such blind obedience on a large scale in the country today. I have again and again appealed to reason, and let me assure him that if happily the country has come to believe in the spinning wheel as the giver of plenty, it has done so after laborious thinking, after great hesitation. He must not mistake the surface dirt for the substance underneath. Let him go deeper and see for himself whether the charkha has been accepted from blind faith or from reasoned necessity.
GANDHI: Swaraj has no meaning for the millions if they do not know to employ their enforced idleness. The attainment of this Swaraj is possible within a short time and it is so possible only by the revival of the spinning wheel. In burning my foreign clothes I burn my shame.
GANDHI: Nor is the scheme of Non-cooperation or swadeshi an exclusive doctrine. My modesty has prevented me from declaring from the housetop that the message of Non-cooperation, Non-violence and swadeshi, is a message to the world. It must fall flat, if it does not bear fruit in the soil where it has been delivered.
I have found it impossible to soothe suffering patients with a song from Kabir. The hungry millions ask for one poem—invigorating food.
GANDHI: My complaint is, that by the promulgation of this confusion between Swaraj and charkha, the mind of the country is being distracted from Swaraj.
TAGORE: If Swaraj has to be viewed for any length of time, only as home-spun thread, that would be like having an infantile leg to nurse into maturity. A man like the Mahatma may succeed in getting some of our countrymen to take an interest in this kind of uninspiring nature for a time because of their faith in his personal greatness of soul. To me it seems that such a state of mind is not helpful for the attainment of Swaraj.
TAGORE: It may be argued that spinning is also a creative act. But that is not so: for, by turning its wheel man merely becomes an appendage of the charkha; that is to say, he but does himself what a machine might have done: he converts his living energy into a dead turning movement.
TAGORE: Members of Congress who spin may, while so engaged, dream of some economic paradise for their country, but the origin of their dream is elsewhere.
GANDHI: It is not my purpose to traverse all the Poet’s arguments in detail. Where the differences between us are not fundamental and these I have endeavoured to state—there is nothing in the Poet’s argument which I cannot endorse and still maintain my position regarding the charkha. The many things about the charkha which he has ridiculed I have never said. The merits I have claimed for the charkha remain undamaged by the Poet’s battery.
At the end of their correspondence, Gandhi narrowly got the better of the Poet.