21 March 2009

‘Rabindra-Radicalism: Re-reading Rabindranath Tagore for the Twenty-first Century’

We inhabit a living planet, with inter-dependent ecological, meteorological, and oceanic systems and flows. Imposed upon that are increasingly interconnected human systems with a globalised capitalist economy driving streams of travel and transportation, information and currency flows, and surveillance. Concerns are rising that the human systems are unsustainable, are not capable of effective control and regulation, and have adverse effects on human welfare. Part of the response to these concerns in the academic world is an increasing interest in multidisciplinary working, to build understanding of these processes and their risks, and for cross-fertilisation of ideas. The proposed research is intended as a contribution to these discussions by making known Tagore’s radicalism, a neglected aspect of his work, and how this might be read by a contemporary Western readership.

The subject of this research is the Bengali poet and polymath, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), who is best known as a creative writer, but was also a radical thinker, who developed practical experiments on local self-reliance and international education. He became a public figure after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and he was revered as an Eastern mystic in some Western countries. Perception of Tagore as Poet and Seer had the effect of skewing his reputation and hindering reception of his radical ideas. Tagore was engaged in practical initiatives and a model of human development involving ‘the reconstruction of national life with the village at its centre’, with implications in the realm of ideas, philosophy and politics/ideology, going beyond anything directly related to the practical experimentation he or others were engaged in. The research will involve distilling Tagore’s radical discourse from the enormous body of his work, and then preparing introductions, which will be tested on various communities of academic readers. The results will then be analysed and the outcomes employed in a discursive synthesis and review of the findings.

I am not new to research on Tagore, having written my MA in Literature dissertation on his prose fiction. Below is an extract from that paper, its Conclusion, which serves as a sample of my writing and provides a closer view of what makes Tagore interesting and relevant to today’s world.

Conclusion from ‘The Village and the World: A Political Reading of Rabindranath Tagore’s Prose Fiction’, Dissertation for MA in Literature, Chris Marsh, September 2006.

CONCLUSION: THE VILLAGE AND THE WORLD

In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not form a class. They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name, whether through a parliament or through a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. (Karl Marx, 1852)1

 

[In Deleuze, t]wo senses of representation are being run together: representation as ‘speaking for’, as in politics, and representation as ‘re-presentation’, as in art or philosophy. Since theory is also only ‘action’, the theoretician does not represent (speak for) the oppressed group. … The banality of leftist intellectuals’ lists of self-knowing, politically canny subalterns stands revealed; representing them, the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent. (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 1988)2

To explain how the ‘missing Lydia’, in Tagore’s Pride and Prejudice novel, is a pointer to the conclusion of this dissertation, requires a slight digression – not inappropriate with a study of the mercurial Tagore, whereby new aspects constantly open up which require going back over writings of his which one thought one had penetrated. In her study of Tagore’s friendship with the distinguished Argentinean, Victoria Ocampo, Ketaki Kushari Dyson reveals a surprisingly sensuous, or even erotic, side to Tagore.3 (Curiously, this helps one understand some of Tagore’s paintings: those with the strange animate armchairs enclosing human forms.4) Tagore’s eroticism is present very clearly in one of his most admired short stories, ‘The Hungry Stones’,5 but looking back at the works studied for this essay, one sees that all Tagore’s heroines have what one might call a ‘chaste erotic’ character: Chandara in ‘Punishment’, Kamala in The Wreck, Bimala in The Home and the World, and Sucharita in Gora. Looked at in that way, Lydia is present in Gora, as Sucharita who rejects the man she was supposed to marry in favour of her own choice, as Lolita who runs away to join Binoy on the ferry, causing a minor scandal. But all Tagore’s heroines are chaste, and in that sense, Lydia is missing.

Tapan Raychaudhuri’s essay, ‘Love in a Colonial Climate’, shows how colonial rule disrupted the most private concerns of the Bengali Hindu bhadralok, and concludes with a poem by Tagore showing how ‘[t]he family as haven acquired a new meaning in the colonial context.’6 But for Tagore, the family was more than a real-life haven, it was a metaphor for all he believed in, together with woman and village, and India-in-the-world as a culturist society of community and cooperation.

In the India-in-the-world of Tagore’s vision, there would be no Lydia, because she represents the victim of the nation-state-oriented society of the modern world. She has needs and desires, and notional rights and freedoms, also protection and restrictions under the law – one could see her as the proletarian, with the freedom to be exploited in the global job market – but she lacks the security of belonging to a culturist society, based on well-understood duties and mutual responsibilities, or dharma. But perhaps that is taking a ‘political reading’ too far for a literature studies dissertation.

From a postcolonial literature studies perspective, the main conclusion to this dissertation is that Tagore did not represent the villager or ryot (peasant) in his prose fiction, as if anticipating Spivak’s assertion: ‘The subaltern cannot speak.’7 The short story, ‘Punishment’, is unusual in that the main characters are from a peasant family, but even here, the underlying meaning turns out to be a universal one, about wifely and domestic dharma. Tagore usually wrote from a middle-class perspective, sometimes privileged, more often humble, and given that this class was subservient to the British Raj, this was subaltern too. Even so, Tagore was communicating, through allegory, principles relating to a universal model of life.

My exploration of Gora, in particular, has shown that one must question the idea that Tagore was ‘writing back’ on behalf of the people of his country, in order to ‘represent’ them artistically or philosophically, in Spivak’s terms. As with Tagore’s short stories, so in Gora, this was real life, what the author saw, and what became his life’s work, his personal dharma, to turn around. Uma Das Gupta devotes her biography of Tagore to conveying the lesser known aspects of Tagore’s life, as an educator and rural reformer. This was work he began whilst managing the family estates, and turned his full attention to after withdrawing from the Swadeshi movement.8 As this work progressed, and as a result of his search for someone with expert knowledge to bring to the village reconstruction project, he recruited the Englishman, Leonard Elmhirst, who went on to establish a rural reconstruction project of his own in Dartington in Devon.9 Tagore’s international university was intended to be the seed of his ideas on ‘the village and the world’ spreading everywhere.

Tagore’s novel, The Home and the World, is a vehicle for his ‘anti-politics’, which is present in Gora too as a rejection of both of the two factions competing to take political power in India. What Tagore was against, politically, coincides with what Niall Ferguson in his book, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World believes India owes the Empire:

Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world. Those empires that adopted alternative models – the Russian and the Chinese – imposed incalculable misery on their subject peoples. Without the influence of British imperial rule, it is hard to believe that the institutions of parliamentary democracy would have been adopted by the majority of states in the world, as they are today.10

The assumption which Tagore’s political thought makes one question is that ‘liberal capitalism’ plus ‘parliamentary democracy’, on the one hand, and the totalitarianism called ‘communist’, on the other, are the only two possible options – together with the more subtle point that there have to be ‘economies’ and ‘states’ in the world with the power to choose between them. Tagore wrote about ‘this organization of politics and commerce, whose other name is the Nation’ as follows:

When it (society) allows itself to be turned into a perfect organization of power, then there are few crimes which it is unable to perpetrate. … When this engine of organization begins to attain a vast size, and those who are mechanics are made into parts of the machine, then the personal man is eliminated to a phantom, everything becomes a revolution of policy carried out by the human parts of the machine, with no twinge of pity or moral responsibility.11

Nandy describes Tagore as a dissenter politically.12 During the period when Tagore was writing the novels which are the subject of this study, right up to the time of his death, the Calcutta middle classes, whether belonging to the reactionary orthodox Hindu group, or to the Westernized tendency, whether Brahmo Samaj or secular like Nehru and his colleagues, were eager and impatient to get their hands on this organization of power. In 1917, Indian men with political ambitions were negotiating with the Government for a transition to ‘responsible government in India, as an integral part of the British Empire.’13 It was when they became disenchanted with the false promises from the authorities that Gandhi brought to their struggle his ‘Gift of the Fight’.14 Gandhi shared Tagore’s aspiration for a culturist future for India, and believed that an independent India would re-claim its village-based traditions, but Gandhi did not share Tagore’s vision of international involvement in a modern India.

Returning to what Tagore favoured, culturally and politically, his vision was not about ‘representation’ in the alternative sense, which both Marx and Spivak refer to. If developed as a political model, Tagore’s ‘village and world’ would involve cooperation at the local level, with a sharing of knowledge and skills internationally, rather than a hierarchy of power working through cities and nation-states, and so would involve participative or direct democracy, rather than representative democracy. The idea of dharma, which we have seen brought out in the short stories as a new Ramayana, with the focus on domesticity as village, home and the role of women, is crucial to re-creating the self-governing rural community which Nehru and Marx wrote of having been destroyed by the British Raj, in both its Company and its Crown incarnations.

This study has shown how fascinating Tagore’s ideas and his ways of expressing them become, when one sets aside Western assumptions, and how potentially valuable is his vision. But that leaves us with a question about how Tagore’s ideas and vision could reach the West, given the barriers of language and general Western arrogance. According to Dyson, ‘Tagore does not belong to the Bengalis or to the Indians only. … He belongs to the whole world, if only the world would care to claim its rightful heritage.’15 Later in her book, Dyson condemns ‘excessive reliance on English… [which] encourages a monoculture of the mind… obliterating … nuances that genuinely matter.’ Furthermore, Dyson argues, English is connected with Britain’s imperial past and the new power of the U.S.A., and brings with it ‘many troublesome neo-colonial assumptions.’16

In the closing days of editing this essay, I read two books: Tagore’s The Religion of Man (1931),17 which I had not been drawn to because its title is off-putting to an atheist, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906).18 Tagore’s correspondence with Sinclair is referred to in Selected Letters, with the editors saying that ‘Tagore could never have adopted socialism as a creed’ but shared Sinclair’s ‘repugnance for commercialism and the dehumanising effect of machines.’19 Oddly enough, these two books by Tagore and Sinclair share a weakness, in that they are both rich, in their different ways, but uni-dimensional, so a reader must accept or reject them wholesale. In contrast, the power of Tagore’s prose fiction is its hidden depths, and insights one has sought out and found for oneself are life-changing, and have global implications.

1 Marx, Karl, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. by David McLellan (Oxford University Press, 1977), pp.300-325 (pp.317-8).

2 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, (Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education, 1994), pp.66-111 (p.70).

3 Ketaki Kushari Dyson, In Your Blossoming Flower-Garden: Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria Ocampo (New Delhi: Sahita Akademi, 1988), p.20.

4 Dyson, Plate 32.

5 Radice, pp.233-43.

6 Raychaudhuri, Tapan, ‘Love in a Colonial Climate: marriage, Sex and Romance in Nineteenth-Century Bengal’ (Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2. (May, 2000), 349-378 (pp.377-8).

7 Spivak, p.104.

8 Uma Das Gupta, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography ( New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), p.16.

9 Michael Young, ‘The English Experiment’, in The Elmhirsts of Dartington (Totnes, Devon: Dartington Hall Trust, 1996), pp.103-29 (pp.127-8).

10 Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World ( London: Penguin, 2004), pp.365-6.

11 Tagore, Nationalism, p.12.

12 Nandy, p.vii.

13 ‘A Joint Address from Europeans and Indians to His Excellency the Viceroy and Governor-General and the Right Honourable the Secretary of State for India’ (Calcutta: C.H. Harvey, 1917), Dartington Hall Trust Archive, Leonard Knight Elmhirst Collection: LKE/IN/43.

14Marjorie Sykes, ‘Gandhi and Tagore: The Candid Friends’, in Jehangir P. Patel and Marjorie Sykes, Gandhi: His Gift of the Fight (Rasulia, Hoshangabad, India: Friends Rural Centre, 1987), pp.9-29.

15 Dyson, p.20.

16 Dyson, p.353.

17 Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man: Being the Hibbert Lectures for 1930 (Boston: Beacon, 1961)

18 Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (London: Penguin, 1936) first published 1906.

19 Selected Letters, pp.304-5.

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