Tagore

Relocating Colonial Women in Resistance: An Interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Nastanirh and Chaturanga

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T. K. Krishnapriya1, Dr Padma Rani2, Dr Bashabi Fraser3

1Junior Research Fellow (UGC), Manipal Institute of Communication, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India; Email: krishnapriya.t1@learner.manipal.edu; ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5795-1275

2Director & Professor, Manipal Institute of Communication, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India; Email: padma.rani@manipal.edu

3Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing, Director, Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs), School of Arts & Creative Industries, Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh; Email: bashabifraserwriter@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.38

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Abstract

The Colonial Bengal of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a place of contradictions. For instance, despite certain evident advancements in the resolution of the women’s question, some of the emancipatory attempts of the period marked a rather dubious account of women’s liberation as patriarchal underpinnings hegemonized the efforts.  Amid this complex backdrop, the colonial women’s position is further jeopardized by the western feminist scholarship that contrives colonial third world women as perennial victims and beneficiaries of emancipatory actions from the West. The paper attempts to relocate the colonial women and their resistance by negotiating the fissures in their construction. This study, informed by bell hooks’ (1990) postulations on margin and resistance, simultaneously seeks to form a bridge between the experiences of marginalized women beyond borders. Rabindranath Tagore’s Nastanirh (1901) and Chaturanga (1916) are chosen for close textual reading to examine the experiences of colonial women.  The author’s women protagonists often embody the social dilemma of the period. Tagore’s Damini and Charu exist in the margin of resistance whilst Nanibala occupies the margin of deprivation.  Significantly, Charu and Damini traverse the precarious “profound edges” of the margin to imagine a “new world” free of subjugation. Thus, the resistance offered by these women subverts the predominant conceptions of victimhood of colonial women, and it enables them to be posited as active agents.

Keywords: Tagore, hooks, Colonial Bengal, Resistance, Agency

 

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Critiquing 21st Century Creative Violence: Tagore’s Concord (Milan) and Harmony (Samanjaysya) Imagining “One World”

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Ayanita Banerjee (Ph.D)

University of Engineering and Management.New-Town, Kolkata. West Bengal. Email: abayanita8@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.30

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 Abstract:

Modern science, acclaiming the success of the creative human brain as ‘progressive changes’ in the 21st century continues to prosper through prominent images of scientism, ingestion, cartelized capitalism, chemistry and rocket technology to name a few. Introspecting the 21st century from the given nexus, we are quite likely to conclude that it has remained a century when the human destructiveness has reached its creative pinnacle. ‘Creative progression’ disguised under the garb of SARS COVID-19 is currently ransacking mankind, resulting in mass genocide, destruction of cultures and worldviews. The creative human self now remains predisposed with the activation of low-grade mental illness. depression, anxiety and trauma. Tagore’s ‘creative self’ with a magisterial rebuke had always protested the prevalent dominant theories of violence and counter- violence down the time line. His philosophical vision intertwined with the humane self of ‘being’ instead of ‘becoming’ counterpoises this ‘creative enigma’ of scientific and material human progression even to this day. Standing on the threshold of the 21st century we earnestly look forward to reminiscence Tagore’s vision of Concord (milan) nurturing the “living bonds in a society” and brewing Harmony (samanjaysya) as the “wholeness and wholesomeness of human ideals” to provide a remedy for re-thinking the possibilities of “One World” (my italics) defined in terms of ‘becoming’ instead of ‘humane -being’.

 Keywords: Tagore, creative violence, mechanization, concord, harmony, one world

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“If possible, I too shall venture out into the world – that is my desire”: Reading Rabindranath Tagore’s Chhinnapatrabali as Travel Writing

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Sarbajaya Bhattacharya

Research Scholar, Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. ORCID: 0000-0001-6294-7804. Email: sarbajaya.b@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.26

 Abstract

Hugo’s description of a view from a moving train is one of many instances in travel writing which illustrates how the mode of travel (here, the railways) often plays a significant role in the creating of new landscapes within the text. The gaze of the traveller also plays a significant role in landscape production as does their relation to the land they are describing. This article seeks to examine the ways in which ‘literary landscape(s)’ produced by travel- writing are able to challenge the ‘imperial eye’ in the construction and representation of the colony, in this case, Bengal, with specific reference to Rabindranath Tagore’s letters written to his niece Indira Devi. This article shall locate Chhinnapatrabali within the broader framework of British landscape paintings of India in order to examine how Tagore’s text is formulating individual and cultural identities. It seeks to argue that the production of literary landscapes in the letters in Chhinnapatrabali must be seen within the larger colonial project of landscape production and be located within the efforts by the colonial subjects to explicitly and implicitly produce and reproduce landscapes of their own through travel narratives, where landscape becomes an interesting site/sight of Self and national identity.

Keywords: landscape, modernity, Tagore, letters, nation

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Translation as a Cultural Dialogue between the East and the West: Re-reading ‘The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech’ by Tagore

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Joyjit Ghosh

Department of English, Vidyasagar University, Midnapore- 721102, West Bengal. Email: joyjitghosh@mail.vidyasagar.ac.in

Volume 11, Number 2, July-September, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n2.21

First published September 30, 2019

Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for his English translation of Gitanjali in 1913. He was at once accepted by the Western people as one of their own poets. In the ‘The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech’, Tagore, however, categorically stated that he must not accept the laurels as his ‘individual share’ because he represented the East and it was the East in him that gave to the West. Tagore always believed in a cooperation of cultures across the world. He was certain that he belonged to an age which bore witness to the meeting of the East and the West. The present paper while making an analytical study of ‘The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech’ will try to establish that the objective of Tagore’s translation of Gitanjali into English was not merely to ‘rekindle’ the aesthetic delight which the poet once experienced during the composition of the work in Bengali but to create a space for a dialogue between two separate spheres of civilization – the East and the West.

Keywords: Culture, Dialogue, Meeting, Mission, Translation

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Cognitive Study of Image Schema and Dying-mind in Tagore’s Near-Death Experience (NDE) Poems

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Mohammad Shalauddin1, Mohammed Shamsul Hoque2 & Touhid Bhuiyan3

1Human Resource Development Institute (HRDI), Daffodil International University (DIU),Bangladesh. Email: salauddin@hrdinstitute.org

2Department of English, Daffodil International University (DIU), Bangladesh.

3Department of Software Engineering (SWE), Daffodil International University (DIU), Bangladesh.

 Volume 9, Number 2, 2017 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v9n2.31

Received May 31, 2017; Revised July 10, 2017; Accepted July 15, 2017; Published August 18, 2017.

Abstract

This study aims at analyzing image schemas (Johnson, 1987) and stages of grief (Kubler-Ross, 1969) in Tagore’s near-death experience (NDE) poems written in the last ninety days before his death. Selected verses of the period in question are analyzed using benchmarks set by Johnson and Kubler-Ross. Relation between the schemas and some linguistic forms, themes and moods of these poems are also analyzed. Findings include Dying-mind is centered to self and influences the type and frequency of all the schemas within it. Similar mental stages of grief—Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance — are also found in the NDE poems. Though death is depicted by Tagore even to the stature of “Shyam” in his earlier poems, it is presented as “A moving screen of varied fears” in the end, which is supported by the theory of Kubler-Ross.

Keywords: Cognitive Linguistics, Image Schema, Kubler-Ross model, NDE poems, Tagore.

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Challenging Enlightenment Paradigms: Responses of Benjamin and Tagore

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Debmalya Das, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India

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Abstract

European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century marked a paradigm shift in its perception of time and in the practice of historiography. The idea of linear/teleological classification of time and the notion of empirical documentation of history was combined with the notion of progress, which saw civilization as a development from the state of barbarity to that of refinement. The appropriation of this progressivist ideology by the powerful in society has served as a tool of domination. Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) and Rabindranath Tagore’s “Crisis in Civilization”(1941), written in the wake of World War II, provide us with two radical perspectives which challenge such progressivist assumptions. Expanding the critical span into their other writings, this paper seeks to historicize the two figures in their varied positions of marginality as two counter-Enlightenment ideologues, writing at a moment of human history when the idea of being civilized was continually threatened by manifestations of barbarity in the socio-political/cultural dynamics of the entire world. Keep Reading

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Tagore’s Educational Experiments and Right to Education Bill: a Comparison

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Falguni P. Desai, V. S. Patel College of Arts and Science, Gujarat, India

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Abstract

As one of the earliest educators to think in terms of the global village and free education for all, Rabindranath Tagore’s educational pattern Loka-siksha has a distinctive understanding and suitability for education within multi-racial, multi-lingual and multi-cultural situations, amidst conditions of acknowledged economic discrepancy and political imbalance of contemporary times where education and cost are twined. The paper proposes to focus on Tagore’s philosophy on education an idea of extending equal right of education for all. Keep Reading

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Tagore’s Paintings: a Creation of Genius[i]

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Rajdeep Konar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

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Abstract

Standing even at his 150th birth anniversary, there still remains a tendency to see Rabindranath Tagore’s paintings as “aberrations” to his aesthetic creed. This article makes an attempt at understanding the “thought gesture” behind Tagore’s paintings and thus relocating them in his personal tradition of art. This argues that the significance of Tagore’s painting will be fully realized not in a minute technical analysis of his painting. There have been numerous attempts at asserting judgmental views on Tagore’s paintings concerning the absence of any “methodological approach” to his painting. Rather, the pertinent questions which should be posed are: Why did Tagore essentially began painting? And why did he paint what he did? These questions could lead us towards comprehending the potentially infinite “thought gesture” which lies beneath the finite, pragmatic act of painting. This could let us into a greater understanding of his act of painting as not an event of ‘exception’ but as a development of the very ideas and concepts which constituted his consciousness in whatever he did. Keep Reading

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On Reading ‘Streer Patra’, Mrinal’s Letter to Her husband

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Shyamali Dasgupta, Seth Soorajmull Jalan Girl’s College, India

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Abstract

Tagore’s famous short story, ‘Streer Patra’, highlights the suffering, ignominy and neglect that women have to face in a male dominated society. Although set in late nineteenth century Kolkata, Tagore’s story has relevance for the discerning reader even today. It dwells upon issues like child-marriage, commoditization of women, the appalling state of woman-and-child healthcare, high rates of infant mortality as well as the marginalisation of economically dependent women. The story also exposes the terrible plight of orphaned, homeless girls without any means, like Bindu whose way to survive was to accept servitude and total humiliation, from which death becomes the only form of escape. Mrinal’s final rejection of her marital state and decision of leaving her husband is a lone woman’s act of defiance against the relentless subjugation of women in society. Keep Reading

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Two Cosmopolitan Friends: Tagore and Cousins

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Utpal Mitra,Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India

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The word cosmopolitanism has different connotations. According to the philosophical cosmopolitans, who are also designated as Moral Universalists, there does not exist any boundary between nations, states and cultures, as they believe all human beings to be fellow citizens and compatriots. This article attempts to address the cosmopolitan ideas of Rabindranath Tagore and James H. Cousins. Moving beyond the parochial notion of nationalism, both Tagore and Cousins adopted the notion of universalism that assimilates all cultures, races and religions under the broader category of Humanism. Keep Reading

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