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.
Tagore's sentence-prayer sketches an ethical blueprint for a free nation. Each subordinate clause names a condition—fearlessness, truthful speech, rational clarity—that colonial rule had eroded. The poem's single sentence mimics the unbroken horizon he envisions, flowing forward until the plea for awakening.
Although written before India's independence, the poem continues to resonate as a civic checklist. Freedom is not mere political transfer but a mental revolution: demolishing "narrow domestic walls," resisting "dead habit," and aligning thought with action. The closing invocation frames liberation as both human effort and divine aspiration.
Interpretation generated with assistance from Claude.