Abstract
What is the source of Rabindranath Tagore’s discomfort with nationalism? Are his creative and critical writings in consonance on this theme? If he is ambivalent towards the nationalist project, what is his idea of a good society? Highlighting the irregularity that emerges out of Tagore’s own hesitancy in dealing with nationalism, revolutionary ideologies and imperialism, this chapter wishes to tease out the meanings of Tagore’s ‘no-nationism’ or ‘alter-nationalism’ by revisiting some key texts, both primary and secondary, that have addressed this issue. In the process, we shall also revisit Georg Lukacs's hostile review of Ghare Baire, Irving Howe’s and Frederic Jameson’s ideas of the political novel, and Tagore’s debt to Dostoevsky, both unacknowledged and as yet unnoticed. It is only out of such an investigation into Tagore’s investment in the libidinal that we might get to the heart of his unease with the politics of anti-imperialism. Does this mean that Tagore was anti-national? Probably not, but he certainly seems to have been anti-revolutionary.
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Notes
- 1.
Economic and Political Weekly, 51.6 (6 February 2016): 39–45, earlier presented as the keynote address at the conference on ‘Tagore and Nationalism’ at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, from 5 November 2015 to 7 November 2015. An earlier version of this paper was also presented in the concluding plenary of the same conference.
- 2.
I am grateful to Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri for pointing me to these two papers.
- 3.
Professor Harish Trivedi makes a similar point in ‘Nationalism, Internationalism and Imperialism: Tagore on England and the West,’ which Michael Collins tries, quite unconvincingly, to refute: ‘Harish Trivedi is quite wrong when he claims that Tagore ‘confused’ nationalism and imperialism. Tagore’s point was that the shift away from a social-religious form of life towards a state-political form—which embodied the transitions from ‘peoples’ to ‘nations’—inevitably led to the aggressive, competitive and acquisitive practice of imperialism. To posit an analytical corollary between nationalism and imperialism is, in itself, nothing exceptional; nor is it to confuse the two’ (24). Surely, not all nations have become imperialistic, nor are all forms of nationalism inherently murderous.
- 4.
There are other examinations of the relations between the political and the libidinal, especially the ways in which ‘the novel enacts the social anxieties connected to the production of the “new” Indian woman at the turn of the century’ (Mitra 244). See Datta (2003) for such readings, notably Tanika Sarkar’s.
- 5.
The first English translation by Constance Garnet (1916) popularised the book as The Possessed, but the original title, Bésy (Russian: Бесы), apparently, refers to those who possess rather than the possessed. The title was subsequently both rendered as The Devils (Avrahm Yarmolinsky 1935) and as Demons (David Magarshak 1954).
- 6.
Once again, generalizations are dangerous and misleading when it comes to breadth of Tagore’s creative output; we do see such characters in his short stories and plays, Chandalika being, perhaps, the most famous example.
- 7.
An unlikely, though not unsurprising confirmation of Tagore’s abhorrence for revolutionaries comes from Edward J. Thompson. During his second meeting with Tagore on 13 November 1913 at Santiniketan, he mentioned Sister Nivedita:
‘I didn’t like her,’ he said: ‘She was so violent.’ He added: ‘She had a great hatred for me and my work, especially here, and did all she could against me. She was so confident that I was unpatriotic and truckling to modern thought.’ I asked: ‘Wasn’t she responsible for a lot of the bloodshed in Bengal?’ ‘Yes,’ he said: ‘She used to say most wrong and foolish things’ (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v08/n09/ep-thompson/memories-of-tagore).
This account, written on 17 November 1913, was meant for private circulation, that too only to friends, but was recalled and published by his son, E.P. Thompson. Indrani Mitra’s reading of the novel also endorses Tagore’s aversion to any violent or revolutionary overthrow of established authority: the novel upholds ‘the ‘home’ as the symbolic space of nationalist politics and non-violent activism as its only true form’ (244) and ‘the text recoils violently from the political option posed by Sandip. Rather than explore the dangerous possibilities, Bimala is cast back into the darkness of the zenana at the book’s end’ (257).
- 8.
In a personal email communication on 7 December 2015, Debashish Banerji, author of The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore, corroborates this view: ‘Behind this alter-theory [of the nation], I completely agree with you, there lies the image of the Mahamanav or Vishwa Manav. This universal plural (not an empty or stereotypical cosmopolitanism) is the aporetic ideal towards which individual praxis becomes the primary political foundation. So long as this individual praxis is lacking either in sincerity or in vision, no secondary foundations of politics can be secured. … The call to individual praxis towards the self-making of the image of the Vishwa Manav or Mahamanav (Universal Human or Overhuman) is the central political message of Tagore; while the statist structures, or secondary political foundations, can all be inhabited by that individual praxis as a micropolitics. Such a micropolitics of praxis, due to its vision and will (aspiration), will by definition be anti-authoritarian and revolutionary across a gradient of degrees’.
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Paranjape, M.R. (2017). Tagore’s Nation: Swadeshi Samaj and the Political Novel. In: Tuteja, K., Chakraborty, K. (eds) Tagore and Nationalism. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3696-2_6
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