The world
recently observed the one hundred fifty-fourth birth anniversary of Nobel
Laureate Rabindranath Tagore. This multi-faceted personality has curved out his
own place in the annals of history by the virtue of his sheer influence on
humankind. However, successive generations may disagree on the extent of that
influence as relatively fewer people are engaging in studying the vast body of
work that he has left behind. To many, Rabindranath may represent a different,
perhaps bygone, era. A nearly seventy-four years of absence from life is a long
time to re-evaluate his relevance to our increasingly dynamic and complex
world.
Rabindranath
enjoyed a legendary reputation in his lifetime and in the twentieth century.
However, public opinion has grown more complex since his passing. We have heard
sharply critical voices that have sought to distance themselves from him or
emerge from under his shadow. On the other hand, adulatory phrases and images
have stereotyped him into obsolescence. New national and global concerns have
emerged since his lifetime, which seek solutions based on a context of thinking
that has developed its own categories and constellations.
One
hundred and fifty four years since his birth, does Rabindranath have any
relevance to the postmodern and postcolonial discourse in the twenty-first
century? Or does he belong merely to a moment in history fated to be a fossilized
relic in an archive of cultural rituals?
Interestingly,
Springer has recently come out with an anthology titled “Rabindranath Tagore
in the 21st Century: Theoretical Renewals.” This critical volume
addresses the question of Rabindranath Tagore's relevance for this postmodern
and postcolonial discourse. The volume includes contributions by leading
contemporary scholars on Rabindranath and analyses his literature, music,
theatre, aesthetics, politics and art against contemporary theoretical
developments in postcolonial literature and social theory.
The
authors take up themes as varied as the implications of Rabindranath’s
educational vision for contemporary India; new theoretical interpretations of
gender, queer elements, feminism and subalternism in Rabindranath’s literary
and social expressions; his language use as a vehicle for a dialogue between
positivism, Orientalism and other constructs in the ongoing process of
globalization; the nature of the influence of Rabindranath’s music and
literature on national and cultural identity formation, particularly in West Bengal
and Bangladesh; and intersubjectivity and critical modernity in Rabindranath’s art.
This volume opens up a space for Rabindranath’s critique and his creative
innovations in present theoretical engagements.
As the
twenty-first century draws us into an increasingly interdependent age, perhaps
a new history of exchanges and negotiations is in the making. As an agent
circulating within such transitional webs, Rabindranath embodies an internal
dialog of local, regional, national and international concerns of cultures and
their histories, and the fashioning of new ethics and aesthetics.
An index
of his significance may be seen in the aporia surrounding the two major
representations through which he comes to the public mind of our times – a
dimly remembered Oriental sage in a sepia-colored page from the album of early
twentieth century Nobel awardees; and a hugely adulated divine icon whose
portrait continues to be endlessly reproduced and whose songs are incessantly
played and learnt in almost every Bengali home.
The first
of these comprises the global reputation of Rabindranath, which rose and fell
on the wave of his own English translation of Gitanjali (‘The Song Offerings’). Translations have a life of their
own, and Rabindranath’s translated work has long been distanced by the
Anglophone modernist tradition. However, wherever sensibilities have kept alive
an ear for large cosmic themes and rhythms, such as in Latin America,
Rabindranath continues to be appreciated in translation among readers of
poetry. With the lapse of the copyright on Rabindranath’s texts, a variety of
new translations of Rabindranath are appearing in English and other languages,
providing new vehicles for a pluralistic rebirth of Rabindranath in our times.
In his
native Bengal, Rabindranath remains immortal, a phenomenon of divinity and
enduring superstar magnitude far beyond possible acclaim, the very opposite of
the peripheral significance of his global image. Apart from the simulacrum put
to use in regional and national identity politics, this tells us of the
cultural history of Bengal and the invocative and evocative powers of
Rabindranath’s texts. Rabindranath’s contribution to the modern Bengali
language remains undiminished and is, in fact, intimately linked to his
international persona.
For
Bengali as a language aspiring to embody a distinct modern subjectivity,
Rabindranath, with his superhuman output in every genre – over one thousand
poems; two thousand songs; eight volumes of short stories; two dozen plays;
eight novels; and many books and essays on philosophy, religion, education, and
social topics – stands out as an avatar of literature. Irrespective of their
qualitative difference, all of these must be taken integrally, each
illuminating and being illuminated by all the others. Thus, we find that
whether through affective invocations to nature, man, woman or God, or critical
responses to the problems of modernity or nation, the psychodrama of social
archetypes, or the participative text of the educational and creative community
of Shantiniketan, Rabindranath prepares a universal and integral humanism,
preserving the marks of singularity yet reaching beyond the human.
Attentive
to the empirical reality of humanity and modern ideals of liberty, equality,
and fraternity, Rabindranath nevertheless refused any bounded essence for the
human. Drawing on Upanishadic intuitions, his thinking of the human privileged
becoming, thus converging with the open horizon of phenomenology and
existentialism, and crossing the human/anti-humanist divide. Yet such a
becoming is not a mysticism which seeks its fulfillment in historical isolation
in Rabindranath; its contemporaneity lies in his thinking through the
possibilities of self-exceeding as a human problematic at our peculiar cusp of
world history. The notion of this ‘overman’ (visva manav) champions a plural cosmopolitanism and forms the
cornerstone of an alternative understanding of world literature.
To arrive
at a cosmopolitan and egalitarian world, free of biases and oppressions of
race, ethnicity, class, or gender, in which such exchanges based on autonomy,
singularity, and creativity become possible, constitutes the ethics of
Rabindranath, an ethics whose activism is enacted not in the streets but in the
hearts of humans, through the psychology and aesthetics of subject formation.
Rabindranath’s
unconventional social status, cultural exposure and formal discipline of varied
kinds, provided the impetus to a rich and wide-ranging creative exploration of
home and world, rooted in native culture and language. The replication of these
conditions at an institutional level served as the basis of Rabindranath’s
educational aims, a personal creative project with the production of creativity
as its goals. He worked tirelessly for the furtherance of the national/regional
cultural text through the insistent privileging of mother tongue. Although the
implementation of his ideas was limited, his work in education opens up ideals
for the future and also experimental practices which others continue to attempt
to establish institutionally.
Rabindranath’s
critical and creative texts engage extensively with the question of the space
and subjectivity of woman in the nascent emerging nation. Particularly in his
fictional works involving human relations – his novels, short stories, plays,
and dance dramas – the negotiations between tradition and modernity centering
on woman develop a complex and nuanced unsettled repertory. Although it has
been pointed out that in several instances his female characters were
compromised for the prevailing patriarchy, the radical possibilities of female
emancipation in his texts should not be overlooked.
Rabindranath
constructed a regional modern Bengali subject thought the hybrid discourses he
brought into engagement in the poetry and music of his songs in the form now
known as Rabindrasangeet. Classical
ragas, a variety of regional and national folk idioms and Western musical
forms, were braided to create a community address whose locus was a new urban
vernacular identity, braiding elite, subaltern, and cosmopolitan
subjectivities. In the present times, we do find critical and creative function
of Rabindrasangeet in autonomous
projects of soul-making.
Rabindranath
inherited the Vedantic lineage from his father to which he belonged as a
Brahmo. That lineage kept its intimate closeness to the Vaishnav theism which
formed his earlier family heritage. This granted coherence to the world and to
the invocatory power of language as expressions of the god-in-life, jibandebata, that he related to all his
life. In his last years, his philosophy took an Advaitic turn in which words
and images lost their significance, instead becoming merely indicative of
transcendence and utter non-duality. This is a final refusal of representation,
a post-human border-crossing, whose implications are yet to be fully
articulated or understood.
A century
after receiving the Nobel Prize, Rabindranath Tagore’s significance continues
as a beacon in the milieus of his reception at home and in the world and as a
subjectivity which escapes definition.
[SUBHODEV DAS]
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