Rabindranath Tagore - Page 2

‘There is Nothing as Old as a Child’: Childhood and Language in Rabindranath Tagore’s The Crescent Moon

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Josephine A. McQuail, Tennessee Technological University, USA

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 Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore was influenced by the British Romantic poets as well as by the sights, sounds and tradition of his own Bengali culture.  Tagore’s attitude to childhood is certainly similar to the adulation of the child begun as a cultural movement by the British Romantic poets. Tagore praises both the purity of the child as well as the Platonic essence of childhood in his writing on nursery rhymes. The child’s perspective is delightfully captured in his volume The Crescent Moon (1913). In a sense, through his exploration of the unconscious components of the mind of the child, Tagore in essence becomes father to himself:  his language eludes the Order typically imposed on linguistic expression in the Oedipal stage of development. Tagore’s recourse to childhood freedom arguably translated in his poetry to his radical experiment with language, which unfortunately cannot be reproduced entirely in translation. Keep Reading

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Tagore’s Philosophy of Life – a Study of Sadhana

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Marie Josephine Aruna, Tagore Arts College

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This paper seeks to study the collection of Tagore’s lectures in the book Sadhana which deals with his philosophy of life. At various instances in his lectures Tagore repeatedly emphasizes on the Indian philosophy of oneness of Being that is the cause for the progress of the soul towards the union with the Brahman. The collection is compiled of eight lectures, based on ideas of the individual’s relation to the universe, soul consciousness, evil, self, of love, of action and of beauty and finally the nature of union with the Infinite. The Infinite can be attained through endless means of activities found in joy and love. His sadhana has been in writing poetry and in living his life in all its hues and colors and thereby attaining realization of life. Keep Reading

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Love of Creation and Mysticism in Tagore’s Gitanjali and Stray Birds

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Paula Hayes, Strayer University, USA

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This paper is concerned with examining two of Tagore’s collections of poems, Gitanjali and Stray Birds, from the perspective of the poet’s love of nature and of God. The paper seeks to find a religious explanation for Tagore’s perpetual praise of the natural world, a praise that he was able to connect dynamically to his love of God. The explanation given is that Tagore’s repetition of nature motifs and his ability to link these motifs to a harmonious pursuit of the divine is rooted in an appreciation for cosmogony of the Rig Veda. The paper ends by addressing briefly how Tagore’s naturalism, rooted in a tradition extending back to sacred text, leads the poet to a mystical expression of personality through his poems. Keep Reading

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The Scientist and the Poet: Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose and Rabindranath Tagore

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Biswanath Banerjee, Visva-Bharati, India

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This article attempts to explore the scientific discourses of Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose and Rabindranath Tagore, to whom science did not signify a mechanistic analysis of facts, but rather a broader interpretation, a wider perception of the universe. Having their beliefs firmly rooted to the preachings of the ancient Hindu Upanishads and the Vedas, they conceived Nature not merely as a physical phenomenon, but a living spirit, which could help man to realize the essential Truth of Life. Keep Reading

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The Sexologist and the Poet: On Magnus Hirschfeld, Rabindranath Tagore, and the Critique of Sexual Binarity

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J. Edgar Bauer, Researcher and Author                 

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Between 1930 and 1932, German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) undertook a world journey that he eventually reported in Die Weltreise eines Sexualforschers (1933), arguably the first non-Eurocentric, anti-colonialist critique of Asian cultures from a sexological perspective.  Saluted as “the modern Vatsyayana of the West,” Hirschfeld met during his stay in India personalities such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Jagadish Chandra Bose, and Radindranath Tagore, whom he visited at his family residence in Calcutta.  Against the backdrop of Hirschfeld’s “doctrine of sexual intermediaries” and his general postulate that truly creative artists have mostly “united in themselves both sexes in especially pronounced form,” the study analyzes and assesses his reference to Tagore’s femininity. While acknowledging the correspondences between the sexologist’s universalization of sexual intermediariness and the poet’s premise that “[t]he Creator must be conscious of both the male and female principles without which there can be no Creation,” the elaborations focus on their divergent conceptualizations of sexual difference, womanhood, and the erotic life. Keep Reading

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In the World of Men: Tagore’s Arrival in the Spiritual Domain of Nationalism

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Banibrata Goswami, Panchakot Mahavidyalaya, India

Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore was born in a family which, on one hand, inherited a legacy of rich Indian culture, and on the other, did not hesitate to welcome the modernism, freshly arrived from Europe through waves of Enlightenment. He was sent early to England to imbibe the gifts of modern science and rationalism that could lead him to a standard and secured career. But even though the discipline of work, love for liberalism and quest after scientific truth and technological perfection there impressed him much, in its over all effect the West’s efforts of de-humanization disappointed Tagore and disillusioned him as well. This led him finally to the realization and reconstruction of the motherland that is India. He came to meet the common man and his everyday sorrows and tears in rural Bengal, in Silaidaha, Patisar and Sazadpur where he was given the duty to look after the family estate. The raw and rough smell of the soil, the whirl of the waves in river Padma, the play of seasons on the strings of nature lent him a unique insight. He learnt to weave his words offering a perfect slide show of mutual reciprocation of man and nature, accompanied by a hitherto unheard melody of folk tune that glorifies the struggles of that life and thereby consolidating it gradually to a consciousness out of which a nation is born. The present essay intends to seek and understand the secrets of that story, which, though lacking miserably in sound and fury, strives towards a steady self emergence and emancipation paving the way for political freedom. Keep Reading

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Jatiyo Itihaas vis-à-vis Manab Itihaas: Tagore the Historiographer

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Sajalkumar Bhattacharya, Ramakrishna Mission Residential College, West Bengal, India

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Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay wrote Krishnacaritra (1858) with an aim to counter the bias of the western scholars in the history of India recorded by them. But Rabindranath Tagore’s review article of Krishnacaritra is even more interesting, for it provides us with fascinating insights into Tagore’s views on history and historiography. These views are not only more modern and rational than those of Bankim, but they also appear to anticipate the takes of many sociologists, historians and novelists of today. This article attempts to analyse some of Tagore’s review articles as well as some of his essays to examine this alternative method of historiography proposed by him. Keep Reading

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Unheeded Caveats: Examining Pax Americana in the Light of Tagore’s Nationalism

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Abin Chakraborty, University of Calcutta, India

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Rabindranath Tagore’s much discussed opposition to nationalism has often been seen as a source of consternating confusion which not only invoked the ire of many contemporary nationalists who interpreted his vision as one of helpless inaction as well as by certain contemporary critics who have considered Nationalism to be a disorienting product of “impassioned myth-making” which falls within the tradition of English liberalism[1]. This paper seeks to analyse Nationalism, as well as other related texts, in a different light, by comparing Tagore’s assessment of ‘Nation’ and Nationalism in the West’, with both the Communist Manifesto, as well as Lenin’s Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism in order to reveal how Tagore’s explorations constitute a sustained and scathing critique of capitalism, as manifested through the European bourgeois nation-state which is also relevant for this present age of U.S. imperialism and its consequences as many of the crises unfolding around us were presaged by Tagore’s unheeded caveats. The paper also suggests that whatever post-imperial vision we may imagine for our future, they must always be based on those values that Tagore championed throughout his life and which have often been dismissed as sentimental naivety. Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Representation of the ‘National Self’— Novelistic Portrayal of a New Cultural Identity in Gora

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Dipankar Roy,Visva-Bharati, India

 Abstract

Any colonial rule involves a systematic and ruthless attack on the culture and heritage of the colonized race. This often results in a total loss or at least maiming of the sense of ‘self’ for the colonized people. The masculinist self of the colonizer labels the self of the colonized as ‘effeminate’. In reaction to this, the nationalist consciousness of the colonized people often tries to replicate the macho virility of the colonial masters in an act of fashioning a ‘nationalist self.’ In the context of Indian colonial history we see development in similar lines. But, the codification of the dominant strand of the nationalist consciousness in overt masculinist terms often have strange reverberations. This paper is about such an act of fashionning selves and its after-effects. To study the issue in the Indian colonial contexts I have chosen Rabindranath Tagore’s novel Gora as a case-study. The conception of this novel’s central character is largely modelled on the issue of an ‘ideal’ national self.  The author, however, by observing the dialogic principle consistently in the text, problematises the dominant ideas connected with the figure of ‘nationalist self’. How he does it will be my main concern in this article. Whether it is possible to arrive at a general tendency of the nature of India’s colonial encounter with the British in relation to the issue of the development of the national character will be dealt with in the concluding section of this essay. Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Open Texture of Nationalism: Tagore as Nationalist

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Gangeya Mukherji, Mahamati Prannath Mahavidyalaya, Mau–Chitrakoot, India

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“The attempt to evaluate the relationship of Tagore with the phenomenon of nationalism is hardly uncomplicated and defeats easy categorisation, naturally drawing attention as it must, to the porosity of the concept of nationalism. Although it is the received wisdom in many quarters that Tagore unlike Gandhi was opposed to nationalism, a close analysis may reveal why in his obituary of Tagore Gandhi chose to say: ‘In the death of Rabindranath Tagore, we have not only lost the greatest poet of the age, but an ardent nationalist who was also a humanitarian’.  Was there a nationalist hidden in Tagore which appealed to Gandhi’s nationalism? This paper will try to examine Tagore’s nationalism and his different understanding of the constituents of the nation – culture, language, history, idea of nationhood, memory, non violence – which led him to occasionally take stances that appeared to strike at the roots of the conventional notion of nation, exploring in parallel the extent to which the category of nationalism can be stretched without becoming something of its opposite. Waismann’s idea of open texture, more generally used in the philosophy of language, indicates that notwithstanding definitions there still remain possibilities of a definition being inadequate, although being different from vagueness insofar as the definition may be fairly accurate. This paper on the nation of Tagore will look at the open texture of nationalism.” Keep Reading

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