30 May 1919
Your Excellency,
The enormity of the measures taken by the Government in the Punjab for quelling some local disturbances has, with rude shock, revealed to our minds the helplessness of our position as British subjects in India. The disproportionate severity of the punishments inflected upon the unfortunate people and the method of carrying them out, we are convinced, are without parallel in the history of civilized governments, barring some conspicuous exceptions, recent and remote. Considering that such treatment has been meted out to a population, disarmed and resourceless, by a power which has the most terribly efficient orgnisation for destruction of human lives, we must strongly assert that it can claim no political expediency, far less moral justification. The accounts of the insults and sufferings undergone by our brothers in the Punjab have trickled through the gagged silence, reaching every corner of India, and the universal agony of indignation roused in the hearts of our people has been ignored by our rulers – possibly congratulating themselves for imparting what they imagine as salutary lessons. This callousness has been praised by most of the Anglo-Indian papers, which have in some cases gone to the brutal length of making fun of our sufferings, without receiving the last check from the same authority, relentlessly careful in smothering every cry of pain and expression of judgment from the organs representing the sufferers.
Knowing that our appeals have been in vain and that the passion of vengeance is blinding the noble vision of statesmanship in our Government which could so easily afford to be magnanimous as befitting its physical strength and moral tradition, the very least that I can do for my country is to take all consequences upon myself in giving voice to the protest of the millions of my countrymen, surprised into a dumb anguish of terror. The time has come when badges of honor make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of my countrymen who, for their so-called insignificance, are liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings. And these are the reasons which have painfully compelled me to ask Your Excellency with due deference and regret to relieve me of my title of knighthood which I had the honor to accept from His Majesty the King at the hands of your predecessor, for whose nobleness of heart I still entertain great admiration.
Yours faithfully
Rabindranath Tagore
About Post Author
