Can anybody give me the explanation of the poem Where The Mind Is Without Fear by RabindraNath Tagore?

Question

The poem goes like this:
Where The Mind is Without Fear

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.

Please do help me
I am in a desparate need
Love u all
Tania

Answer 1

The original Bengali version of this poem was entitled "Prayer" and this is basically what it is. It is often interpreted as a plea for India's independence from Britain, but I think the political overtones are just a metaphor for ideas that are really more fundamental. The human mind tend to enslave itself through fear, habit, dogma, and basically just narrow-mindedness of various sorts. The mind/knowledge is not free so long as it flees from itself – the truth of its Being. In this case, "fleeing" takes the form of building walls to protect itself from what it perceives to be an invading enemy, but which in fact is the truth of its own Being. We hide behind walls that we think are protecting us from an enemy, but these walls are actually a sort of prison that we have built for ourselves. The truth of our Being is a Unity, and it is the implications of this Unity that the mind tends to fear. Thus we shatter the Unity into fragments by building the "narrow domestic walls" referred to in the poem. Again, the overt message seems political (as in the political boundaries of the Indian nation) but the deeper message is spiritual, and more fundamental to the nature of human existence. The same can be said for the "heaven of freedom" into which he wants his country to awaken. Again it is political on the surface (freedom from Britain) but spiritual in its deeper meaning (freedom from the prison we build for ourselves through fear and the "dreary desert sand of dead habit").

As an aside, you might wonder: What is it, really, that we fear? I've referred to the depths or Truth and Unity, but why should we fear Truth and Unity? Tagor does not address that question is this little poem, but here is my own interpretation (with which, I believe, Tagor might roughly agree). I've been using the word 'Unity' because Tagor's prayer is for the mind to reconnect with the world in such a way that it is no longer "broken up into fragments" – implying that the Mind and the World are primordially One. This Oneness, however, implies that insofar as my deepest metaphysical essence is concerned I cannot really blame "others" for my suffering because those "others" are in some sense really just projections of my own nature. My "enemies" are, in Truth, various manifestation of my Self. Why should this be a problem? Why should I fear this knowledge? If my enemies are really just projections of my Self, then this should be GOOD news because it means I ought to be able to get control over them and stop my suffering by just getting control over my Self. But here, exactly, is the problem: I don't not consciously know how to get control over my enemies, which means that I don't know how to get control over my Self, which means that I really don't know how to stop my suffering. And furthermore, Oneness implies that there is no "other" to save me – I must ultimately save myself. The complete burden is upon me, insofar as my Self is One with the world. The fate of all existence rests, so to speak, upon me – not my temporal human ego, but my eternal Self which is the deep essence that we all share. Basically I fear the knowledge that – as the Unity of Self/Existence – all of the world's suffering is my suffering and the burden of responsibility is ultimately upon "me" (not just my mere ego, but my deeper Self) to stop the suffering. This is a frightening thought. We don't want the responsibility of being our own savior; we want a God to save us and make everything ok. So rather than confront the stark reality of our own deep freedom and responsibility, we fragment the world – we build walls to make it seem like parts of ourselves are really "other". We can blame the "other" (in the form of our enemies) for our suffering, and have faith that a great "other" (in the form of God) will ultimately save us and make everything come out all right. The walls we construct become our habitual ways of thinking, and this habitual way of thinking muddies and diverts the pure waters of reason, so we no longer experience the "clear stream of reason" that Tagor refers to in the poem.