Sara Grace Lacy :-August 15th marks Independence Day in India, and it is therefore necessary this month to contemplate how we truly understand the meaning of freedom. The world around us provides many definitions of freedom in various contexts. For example, the Indian Constitution guarantees six fundamental rights to all Indian citizens, including the right to equality; freedom from discrimination against religion, sex, caste, etc.; and freedom from exploitation or forced labor.
But in a country housing roughly one-third of the world’s impoverished people, according to the World Bank, to what extent does “freedom” really exist? How free are the rickshaw pullers who cart hundreds of pounds worth of people and objects around busy cities using, literally, only their bare hands? Or the daily wage laborers who work long hours doing manual labor in order to earn the equivalent of 1-2 dollars per day? How free are the millions of Indian people—about 456 million, according to 2008 World Bank estimates—living below the International Poverty Line of earning at least $1.25 per day? Or, perhaps worst of all, how “free” are the children we saw at the train station in New Jaigulpuri last week who had clearly been trained in the art of begging by pointing to consecutive injuries on their bodies—ones that were no doubt inflicted by whomever kept their “earnings” each day?
Earthly “freedom” is a concept that must be evaluated differently based on environment and social context. In every country in the world, however, poverty negates the opportunity to pursue individual ambition and personal comfort. That is not to say that one’s level of “freedom” is correlated to their level of wealth, for bondage to economic pressure, political ties, and material desires exist at every level of society. But the lack of choice associated with the financial and physical constraints of poverty are, undeniably, counterproductive to the political ideals that documents like the Indian Constitution claim to uphold.
Rabindranath Tagore, the renowned poet of West Bengal, writes that freedom exists “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 tireless striving stretches is arms towards perfection.” In Luke 4:18, Jesus speaks of his mission in Nazareth by explaining that the Spirit of the Lord has “anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.” In Romans Paul states that while the world suffers now, “creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God (Romans 8:20-22). The words of Tagore, Jesus, and Paul give us a different perspective of freedom: one that cannot be defined or withheld by any political entity or economic system.
True freedom—perhaps the only kind that is practically attainable—exists in knowing truth, according to Tagore; in knowing equality, according to Jesus; and in knowing goodness, according to Paul. Truth, equality, and goodness are qualities which our daily lives obscure, but which God grants access to when we put our trust in him. God provides the ability to see the world as he intended, and that is something that no person can ever take away. In working to obtain a greater level of “freedom” for an oppressed group of people, we must remember that the greatest service we can provide is to show the love and joy of God in all that we do. While job-training and English educational programs may make the words of the Indian Constitution more accurate, freedom itself is found on a much deeper level—one that we must look to God to provide.
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