Your Excellency,
The enormity of the measures taken by the Government in the Punjab for quelling some local disturbances has, with a rude shock, revealed in our minds that helplessness of our position as British subjects in India. 🇮🇳 The disproportionate severity of the punishment inflicted upon the unfortunate people and the methods of carrying them out, we are convinced, are without Parallel in the history of civilised 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 organisation for destruction of human lives, we must strongly assert that it can claim no political expediency, for less moral justification. The accounts of the insults and sufferings under gone 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 hearths 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 least check from the same authority, relentlessly careful in smothering every cry of pain and expression of judgement from the organs representating 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 normal 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 in to a dumb anguish of terror. The time ⏲️ has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in the incongruous context of humiliation and I for my part, wish to stand, shorn, of all special distinction by the side of those of my countrymen who, for their so-called insignificance, are liable to suffer degradation not fit for human beings. And these are the reasons which have compelled me to ask Your Excellency, with due deference and regret, to relieve me of my title of knighthood, which I had the honour to accept from His Majesty the King at the hands of your predecessor, for whose no-bleness of heart I still entertain great admiration.
Calcutta,
6, Dwarkanath Tagore Lane,
May 30, 1919.
Yours faithfully,
Rabindranath Tagore
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