86 SOCIAL SCIENTIST enough to latter. And in a letter to Gandhiji exactly a day before the Amritsar tragedy, he makes clear his misgivings about Satyagraha as a political weapon against the powerful and ruthless enemy: I know your teaching is to fight against evil by the help of good. But such a fight is for heroes and not for men led by impulses of the moment. Evil on one side naturally begets evil on the other, injustice leading to violence, and insult to vengefulness. Unfortunately such a force has already been started... and our authorities have shown us their claws... Amartya Sen in the foreword says: (although) "a collection of letters cannot give a representative view of an author' s work, especially in the case of a person whose poetry is as important as Tagore' s... on deliberative subjects the letters provide the greatest insight..." Tagore was a thinker far ahead of his time, as these letters demonstrate. On ideas of nationalism, India and Indianness, traditionalism, and most important, freedom of mind, Tagore had much to say. A poet, who obviously identified with his country with every nerve and fiber of his body, could still write that "patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity". Tagore was a passionate nationalist, yet electric enough to abhor all "isms". His was a voice of sanity. His insistence on the need to be strongly local and strongly global affected his practical work - in education, politics and social reform. An therein lies his message for our times. In one of his most significant novels, Ghare Bairey the character Nikhilesh comments. "lam willing to serve my country, but my worship I reserve for right... to worship my country as a God is to bring a curse upon it". His ideas were not easy to get across in the 1940s but today, they make perfect sense. In fact, the only kind of sense. Peace of both the inner and outer variety are recurrent strains in Tagore' s letters - to his wife, to friends in far-flung corners of the globe, to C.F. Andrews, "Christ' s Faithful Apostle", who left missionary work and joined Tagore to work for Santiniketan, Andrews merits a record twenty-one letters in this collection, and Mahatma Gandhi, thirty-two. Dear friend, lately you have looked so distracted and seemed (so) unhappy that it has made me anxious for your sake... I always earnestly wish that you can have inner peace amidst your multifarious burden of works... a great part of your mind' s burden