Where the Mind Is Without Fear (Gitanjali 35) Cover Image

Where the Mind Is Without Fear (Gitanjali 35)

by Rabindranath Tagore

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Student Question

What examples of patriotism are shown in the poem "Where the Mind Is Without Fear"?

Quick answer:

In "Where the Mind Is Without Fear," Rabindranath Tagore expresses patriotism through a vision of India awakening to freedom and rejecting fear, repression, and division. He criticizes "narrow domestic walls" that fragment the nation, advocating for free knowledge and truth. Tagore's patriotic ideal envisions India striving for "perfection," guided by reason and continuous improvement, and abandoning "dead habit" to create a better, unified country.

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This poem by Rabindranath Tagore is an appeal to God to let the writer's country, India, "awake" into a "heaven of freedom." It is an inherently patriotic poem, but Tagore specifically equates his country's longed-for wakefulness and freedom with the removal of fear and the repression of knowledge, as well as superficial boundaries which have been placed upon it by others.

The "narrow domestic walls" which have been set up in India have contributed, in the mind of the poet, to a fragmentary feeling in the country that is counterproductive to patriotic feeling. He hopes instead for knowledge to be "free" and for a world in which "the depth of truth" is core to what is said. Patriotism longs for a world where there is no more lying or unnecessary separation of people.

The patriotic India, then, is constantly striving towards "perfection," rejecting "dead habit" and instead pursuing reason, which is imagined metaphorically as a "clear stream." Habit is the enemy of continuous improvement, but a mind led by God in pursuit of "thought and action" will be a mind that helps create a better country.

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