Heaven of Freedom is a poem by one of the great poets of modern India, Rabindranath Tagore. It is the 35th poem in the collection entitled Gitanjali: Song Offerings, which was published in English in 1912. This publication consisted of the poet’s own translations of the original Gitanjali, written in Bengali and published in 1910. Many people assume that the English Gitanjali is a direct translation of the Bengali book by the same name. However, Tagore actually incorporated many lyrics from his other works to form his English collection of verses. Only about half of the 103 lyrics in the English Gitanjali come from the original Bengali Gitanjali.
The lyrics in Tagore’s English Gitanjali are alike in their songlike quality and in their mystical inspiration. Most of the poems are fundamentally religious in nature. But they are all-embracing in their reflections on human experience, and they resemble love lyrics in their language of devotion. In “Heaven of Freedom,” Tagore celebrates the concept of a heavenly, all-embracing unity that rises above the “fragments” of modern life.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action— Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
In the simplest sense, this verse might be seen as a cry for Indian independence. India was a British colony until 1947, and the campaign for independence had begun to gather force by the early 1900’s. But Tagore, who condemned nationalism in a series of 1916 lectures, is speaking of a different type of freedom. He hated the division of international people into “narrow domestic walls” and longed for an “awakening” into a higher unity.
Tagore derived much of his philosophy from Hindu teachings. The concept of unity embraced in Sahitya, the Sanskrit term for unity, underlies Tagore’s approach to art. But his dream of a wider spiritual unity among humankind went beyond orthodox Hinduism. Tagore’s spiritual dream was to bring the religions of the world together, and this is what his “Heaven of Freedom” describes.
Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. The publication of Gitanjali caused a sensation in the United Kingdom, where the Irish poet W. B. Yeats wrote an introduction. Bengali critics have not always been as complimentary, finding Gitanjali overly sensuous. The collection is not typical of Tagore’s other writings. His output was huge. His collected poems, stories, novels, plays, and essays take up 26 volumes. But the significance of the English Gitanjali to Tagore’s international reputation, and its influence on other writers in the West, is enormous.
For more information on Tagore, see Tagore, Rabindranath.
