Question

Read the poem given below and answer the questions that follow:

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.

Rabindranath Tagore

• Why does the poet say, ‘Where the mind is without fear’?
• What are the narrow domestic walls being referred to as?
• Why are they ‘narrow’?
• How/when does the ‘clear stream of reason’ lose its way?
• What is the poet’s appeal?

Answer 1

• The poet wants people to live without fear so that they can think freely, speak the truth, and work with confidence.
• The ‘narrow domestic walls’ refer to divisions based on caste, religion, region, language, and social differences that separate people.
• They are called narrow because they limit people’s thinking, create differences, and stop unity and progress.
• The ‘clear stream of reason’ loses its way when people blindly follow old customs, superstitions, and bad habits instead of thinking logically.
• The poet appeals to God to awaken his country into a land of freedom, truth, knowledge, unity, and progress, where people live without fear and think freely.