Before Rabindranath, I would like to suggest, Bengalis were, poetically at least, ‘self-less’. His literary art is the first to delineate a problem of modern subjectivity for poetry to explore.
1 The achievement of this new problem shows the necessary complexity of these processes, both the ambiguity of such beginnings and their incontrovertibility. New literary or philosophic concepts, new problems, new ideas do not find an easy, unproblematic entry into a culture in the way a simplistic, material conception of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ would suggest. Ideas from the ‘outside’ do not come into an empty linguistic field. They enter a pre-existing conceptual language of literature and have to express themselves by altering the earlier language ‘from within’. To be even articulated, so that it can be thought, a new idea needs to twist, manipulate, cajole an older language to express itself. There is no prelinguistic, undistorted, primal beginning of ideas from which they are expressed through concepts, words, languages, styles. These languages, which are the ideas’ means of expression, also constitute the ideas. It is generally acknowledged that one of the fundamental themes of modern literature is the exploration of the self, or of subjectivity. If subjectivity means simple self-reference, or a certain clear conception of authorship, these things existed in premodern literature as well; but modern subjectivity is marked by several distinctive features—its individuality, its mentalism, its interiority. Earlier traditions of philosophical or literary self-exploration in India did not have a language which could accomplish this modern task. Rabindranath, I should like to argue, draws on some earlier languages of the self to make this possible, by employing their terms, but displacing their meanings by carefully modulated untraditional use.
2 Finally, I should like, further, to assert that although the idea of the self that he invokes could not have arisen without an encounter with modern Western notions of subjectivity, what he eventually places inside this self is significantly different from the solutions favoured by aesthetic individualism of the Western variety. In an age in which the aggressive triumphant individualism of modern Western thought is growing weaker, and losing its hegemony as a model for cultural self-realization, it is interesting to explore what this distinctive imagination of the self was like, and what it offered. (That is, not simply showing how it is different from the standard Western models and criticizing it for this failure, for this inability to be something other than what it was.)
I
In all social worlds people effortlessly are. But as social beings people are various things. They inhabit certain regular, commonly intelligible descriptions which fit them in specific ways. They are Brahmins or Shudras, Tamils or Bengalis, Hindus or Muslims, in a recourseless sort of way. These descriptions have a dual character: first, these constitute the ways in which these individuals conceptualize their own social beings; and second, these represent the complementary and confirmatory ways in which others act towards them.
3 There is a common argument in modern social theory that modernity introduces into this matter of social identity of people a concept of subjectivity, or, on a milder version of the same thesis, although ideas of a subject and some notions of reflexivity might be present in earlier cultures, modernity introduces a new meaning of the subject and his reflexive capacities. This argument has the greatest significance for moral philosophy and literary history, for this new ‘self’ opens up two new fields of exploration, enjoyment, adventure, and reflection on subjectivity—first, a new domain of subjectivist, i.e. individual-centred, morality; and second, the exploration and description of the psychological states of this subject in the literary forms of the modern novel and lyrical poetry. I will here follow the philosophical significance of the semantic transformations of the pronoun ‘I’ (
ami). Even the first person singular is a fascinating subject for
begriffsgeschichte (historical semantics); and I suspect that careful analysis would show that we are ourselves in a distinctly different way from our traditional forebears. But this transformation of the ‘I’ bears an intimate connection with related, if not similar, transformations of the sense of we, or of collective identities. These two processes of subjectivation, being individual and collective subjects, can be connected with a reasonable historical theory. Elsewhere I have argued that modernity has an irresistible logic of change which leaves no identity untransformed, collective or personal;
4 and the essential point of connection is that modern collective identities can be composed only on the basis of a substratum of modern individuality.
One of the main principles of this modern ‘bourgeois’ individuality is famously the one of choosing: the idea that individual lives are lived and constituted through choice. This idea could take, and often did, two rather different forms. In its utopian-ideal, or some might say ideological, version, it suggested that individuals lived the lives they chose to—an unpractical and historically naïve conception of modern society as a realm of unimpeded choice. This served to show how this conception of an individual life based on choice was not a free-standing singular idea; it evidently depended on several other typically modern notions. For instance, thinking of an individual life in that radically elective way presupposed a conception of the world and its social relations as fundamentally alterable, not fixed and entirely immovable. All presentations of the principle of individuality were not so naïve; it was capable of more complex and, aesthetically, much more compelling forms. The principle of individuation could be played off artistically against an acknowledgement of rigidities of social structure. It could be said that the principle of choice marked human lives, but societies often obstructed its realization, and tragedies occurred in modern times primarily through this form. In any case, the primary narrative tension in most modern Bengali novels arises from the conflict between a recognized value of the principle of individuation, at least in matters of the heart, and placing such strongly individual personalities within the framework of a society which is extremely rigid. Even in lyrical poetry and songs, which ordinarily do not have a narrative form, and are thus less suited to the expression of this conflict, there is often a pervasive sense of melancholy arising out of this sense of interdiction against spontaneous affection.
5 Charles Taylor has argued that there were two interconnected domains in which this new ethic of choice was worked out in its fulness—in new theories of personal morality and in literature, and it is theoretically interesting to explore this connection itself.
6 In both its forms, at any rate, this was deeply connected to a new ideal of responsibility, indeed a feeling of responsibility towards a person who was not, according to earlier moral conventions, a normal object of responsibility—a responsibility towards oneself. But this change in attitude was not practically painless or conceptually simple: for this to occur, some associated conceptual changes were also required. An individual could be said to be responsible for himself, or towards himself, only if his life was seen or constructed in a new, morally rather peculiar fashion. A person could be said to waste his life if his actions did not conform to certain ideal trajectories constructed through morally and imaginatively compelling models only if it was assumed that that kind of life was in principle open for every single individual to live under the historical conditions modern societies provided. But the principle of choice also implied that there were many different options about ways in which the right kind of life could be pursued. Individuals in the real world faced serious obstacles in living the lives of their choice.
These obstacles were of two types. Some came from the acts of others, usually socially powerful agents, who lived according to traditional norms which in principle denied the rule of choice and sought, with the collusion of a traditional society, to impose these rules on rebellious romantic lovers. Impediments of aristocracy, or caste, or parental disfavour usually based on one of these grounds, constituted the primary examples. But obstacles could also rise, in a wholly liberal, non-traditional world, from the clash of wills or individualities where individuals were not impeded in what they wanted for their happiness by the presence of traditional structures or norms, but by the equally free and unconstrained will of others who happened to want the arrangement of the world to be different—a clash this time not between subjectivity and tradition, but between subjectivities. This terrain was described in great aesthetic fulness by modern novels.
It was essentially because of a half-perceived understanding of this historical conflict that the reading of novels as such, and not of any specifically offending ones, was considered undermining in traditional Bengali households. This was I suppose why the novel was by definition political, however formalistic or aesthetically superior its literary craft. To anxious traditional parents, the consequences of an untimely reading of even classics by Bankimchandra and Tagore could be as dangerous to the moral training of young girls and boys (in that order) as any salacious or improper narrative by morally unrestrained novelists. I realised much later why my grandfather considered listening to the most inane
adhunik songs morally polluting for young adolescents under his charge, though the only worrying feature I found in them was the puerile nature of their lyrics.
7 I conceded later that he was a much better sociologist than me, and he saw in these nondescript jingles an intolerable and dangerous celebration of the principle of subjectivity, of the terrifying idea that his daughters, especially, could live their lives as they chose rather than the way others had lived before them. Both these types of conflicts abound in Rabindranath’s novels, and their complexities are explored aesthetically—between subjectivity and tradition and between incompatible subjectivities. Occasionally, as in
Gora, he introduces enormously delectable complexities—like Gora’s attempt to express in a language of choice a life pattern which ruled it out, a traditional sense of life disguising and expressing itself at the same time through the language of subjectivity.
8The first narratively significant feature of this modem aesthetic is the association of the principle of choice with the living of lives. Especially in a society ruled by the system of castes, this is an emphatically novel and unsettling idea. The system of castes was of course subject to the historical pulls and feints of human ingenuity, and people who lived in what must appear to us, with our non-caste view of the world, as positions of unbearable moral disability managed to formulate strategies which used to their full the flexibility that the system afforded in practice. Still, the idea of living one’s life according to one’s choice went against the grain of the central principles of Indian society. This meant not merely that people could not deviate from largely set social trajectories in the actual lives they lived.
One consequence of that social arrangement was that lives were not individuated in the modern sense. Individual lives were often considered narratable; but that was primarily because they illustrated some social principle, associated with a certain walk of life, or trade, or occupation, carried to its extreme and noblest limits. Stories were told of individuals who exhibited exceptional fidelity as wives, or loyalty as servants, or constancy as friends, or trustworthiness as soldiers. However, these could not be treated as stories of individuation in the modern sense. Nothing happened to their lot which did not to somebody similarly socially placed. What was surprising and therefore narratable was the extraordinary intensity of their devotion to their roles and their internal values, but not the trajectories themselves.
With the coming of modernity, society does not of course change obligingly all of a sudden; but the principle of plasticity of individual fates and destinies is recognized. This also involved a fundamentally new way of looking at an individual’s life. Life was an opportunity, a time which lay undetermined in front, to be filled up with acts and events of one’s own making.
9 Such elected lives, to the extent they are possible (and it would be much later, with the infusion of socialist critiques of capitalist modernity, that the sense of the limits imposed on choice would appear clearly to the Bengali intelligentsia and find articulation in its literary world), exemplify a process of singularization, making each life interestingly different from others. Singularization in this sense was, in these days of early bourgeois ideology, both a descriptive fact and a moral ideal. Individuals who lived their lives inside the social contexts of modern cities were seen to be singularized in this sense; their lives moving through a series of unpredetermined events in previously unthinkable and self-created trajectories. But this fact of descriptive sociology was shadowed, or hallowed subtly by the presence of a normative ideal. Colonial modernity created, because of the perverse impartiality of the British rulers, a field of careers open to talent in modern India/modern Calcutta (indeed this confusion between India and Calcutta was very persistent; but it was also pardonable because ‘modern’ India was really for a time modern Calcutta), within which individuals could seek their individual social and moral destinies. There was a close connection between this change in the way people looked at lives and told stories about the more interesting cases.
The singularization of individual lives, or individuation, raised some problems of practical narrative aesthetics. Traditional literary forms in India worked on a standard and easily recognizable theory of narrative eligibility of characters. The artistic repertoires of poets or other literary practitioners could be used to celebrate only exemplary lives or their combinations. This exemplariness was defined quite clearly. The life of Rama satisfied this criterion of narrative eligibility precisely because it was an exemplar: in subtle ways it managed to show how a life should be lived both for kings and celebrities, and also for ordinary householders. The Ramayana was so significant for the delineation of the Hindu moral world precisely because it presented such a number of exemplars in combination—of Rama, of Sita, of Laxman and Bharat, and Hanuman, each in their own way carrying a certain individual principle of human relationship to their point of ultimate excellence.
Narrative eligibility according to the modern idea became completely different. Aesthetic principles of the new literature retained the theoretical connection between exemplariness and narrative eligibility; it was still something exemplary which made a life or a part of it a fit object for literary representation. But in modern aesthetics what made a life or a slice of it exemplary was displaced in a most radical fashion. It also, at the same time, altered the meaning of ordinariness and its connection to literary representation. To the new aesthetic consciousness lives were exemplary not because all individuals of a relevant class were alike and the protagonists’ story showed the essence of the story of all lives. Rather, behind their mask of ordinariness all individual lives were unique. It was this certainty of their being unique and narratable in a non-heroic sort of way which made them fit for such literary attention. Modern novels especially presented the results of this new aesthetic principle by making narratively interesting the lives of individuals who were unremarkable by traditional norms.
Choice, the element of election, brought in a rationalist logic into the living of individual lives; and one implication of this was an accompanying rule of corrigibility. Bourgeois individuals had eminently corrigible selves. Just as the bourgeois, literally, learnt from mistakes in mercantile transactions and altered their commercial ways, early modern narratives of subjectivity constantly portrayed the corrigibility of selves who ceaselessly renegotiated relationships. Stories in early modern novels are full of misunderstandings, misjudgements, clarifications, reconciliation—between parents and children, between friends, and of course paradigmatically between people in love. In all such acts and incidents they were actually searching for ways of finding their selves, what they truly were.
This kind of recursive and corrective reflexivity required an enormously significant conceptual object, which is a precondition for this kind of living of individual lives, a requirement for all its adventures, misunderstandings, soul-searching, and sorrows. This is called the self—the conceptual representation of the individual’s life which the individual could return to in thought and constantly revise. Living this kind of life practically required a conceptual representation of individual life-histories as peculiar stories to which the individual bore a dual relation as actor and narrator. This relation is of course apotheosized in the literary form of the autobiography; and not surprisingly this civilization, practised in reticence about one’s own exploits, suddenly burst in the nineteenth century into a veritable cackle of autobiographic voices—of how singular individuals found, lost, regained, regretted, confirmed the lives they had led. The autobiography was ubiquitous. They were written, remarkably, by writers, politicians, civil servants, actors, actresses (a considerably daring feat in the early years), teachers, housewives, even darogas (petty police officers).
Under the bewildering variety of individual life-stories was the invariable sense of the pleasure and surprises of individuation—of individuals escaping the rigid destinies of caste society for the astonishing uncertainties of a world being remoulded by colonial power. Even in the oddest circumstances, the autobiography was a celebration of autonomy. Partha Chatterjee has shown how child widows, denied the most important accompaniments of a full life, would, with amazing ingenuity, turn their lives by reflection into triumphs of subjectivity.
10 They would very often illustrate another feature of this new conception of the self for recounting their narratives of subjective autonomy.
In the literature on autobiography, there is considerable discussion about the creation of this sense of an interior self. First, the privileged place of the self, the site where the self was created, or marked, as it were, was, as Locke famously proposed, the site of individual consciousness; mental states. Second, these mental states, and particularly the consideration of moral dilemmas, was regarded as a process which went on inside the mind. This interiority did not merely mean that what went on in someone’s mind could not be seen from the outside. This mental inside was also gradually seen as an expanse universe in itself, distinct and separable from the worldly universe outside, a recourse and a retreat from its tribulations.
11This principle, particularly essential in repressive and illiberal early modern Bengal, was the translation of autonomy into interiority. Women were its greatest aesthetic and practical proponents because they were so often the most repressed and disprivileged elements in society; and with astonishing ingenuity, some remarkable individuals among them turned this interiority of the self into the realm of their unconquered autonomy. And the literary form of the autobiography was the realm of their spiritual triumph over a society which still kept them under strict repressive surveillance. This is why the autobiography, the organization of memory around an abstract individual self, was so central to the development of the cultural styles of modern subjectivity. A life contained innumerable and potentially recoverable incidents of varying degrees of significance. The autobiographical form turned this infinite stretch and chaos of a life into a history, in much the same way as histories brought a form and intelligible structure to the infinite stretch of the past of a people. Like history, the autobiography was also subtly, subliminally, and ineradicably political. It sought to privilege one particular narrative of this life over other possible ones, and thus implicitly it made a distinction between simple memory, the recall of incidents of the past by a subject, and its organized form, which edited and structured it explicitly for presentation as a bildungsroman.
Another feature of this new subjectivity was that it introduced gradually, through unconscious and subtle ways, sometimes through the sheer exigencies of translation of English thoughts into unaccustomed Bengali phrases, a new language of possession in the depiction of this subject. Undoubtedly, the basic determinants of this process in Bengal were fundamentally different from those in Europe. It is generally accepted that in European thought and linguistic practice, the attributes of a person, which would have been traditionally considered integral, that is indivisible from him, came to be seen gradually as his properties, i.e. belonging to him. And this term, initially more ambiguous and general, eventually slid towards a firm coincidence of meaning with the idea of possession. As a consequence, the attributes of an individual were seen as his properties, in the sense of being his possessions, making possible the unprecedented alienation of attributes which would have been inconceivable under earlier social and linguistic organization. The strangeness and peculiarity of capitalism lay in the fact that it made possible the alienation not only of properties that were present in an individual, but even his future properties, like his ability to do labour in the future. This in turn made possible a whole range of new productive arrangements of capitalist modernity.
It would be unhistorical to suggest that it was similar large-scale transformation of the Bengali economy under colonial capitalism that altered this language of description of individual attributes. The economic changes brought in by colonial administration were far removed from this kind of thoroughgoing capitalism, which would have required a corresponding transformation of language for the enforcement of labour laws and contracts. Yet, although unforced by such economic changes, there is an unmistakable introduction of the language of subjectivity through primarily cultural and literary means. Asok Sen grasped a fundamentally significant truth about the intelligentsia in colonial Bengal when he argued in the 1970s that it desired the cultural arrangements of capitalism without its basic economic transformative processes.
12 It was a highly cerebral, and naturally highly idealized version of bourgeois subjectivity introduced through literary forms of self-constitution.
Literary subjectivity stressed the peculiarity of each individual life, and of its attributes; but it also required a language in which these attributes, and these incidents could be conceptually detachable from the person. This was required if individuals had to reflect on their own lives as narrators, judges, and evaluators; if they had to arrange a relation with events and experiences of their own lives which was both interior, because no else could have the same privileged relation to it, and at the same time external, because they required to have towards their own lives the impartial attitude of the narrator and the judge. The language of possession made all this possible. It was crucial not merely for the success of contracts, but also for autobiographies. Thus this language, which speaks commonsensically, of one’s experiences, events of one’s life, and one’s attributes as one’s possessions—not in a way that these could be alienated, but that they could be narrated—was a fundamental precondition for the origin of some types of modern literary forms. We do not sense the utter peculiarity and newness of these linguistic conventions, because we have been so used, in the last hundred years, if not to the experience of living in a capitalist society, at least to the conventions of describing ourselves as neutral attributeless selves to whom attributes are added later on.
13There was another aspect of this conception of subjectivity which was significant for literature. This self is considered a kind of interior space, but not a narrow space in which only the physical or other attributes of the individual were kept tightly together. Its attributes were also psychological. One of its fundamental capacities was to have mental states, reflect on them, evaluate them, vary them, return to them in memory and moral judgement. The mentalist features of the modern self invested this interiority with a new quality. This self contains many marks of creative ambiguity. From the outside it might look like a point, existing with other such points of subjectivity in the wide social world; but it contains precisely because of those qualities of the individual consciousness an internal immensity unheard of in earlier cultures. This self is conceived as a whole new universe added to the external universe outside, but infinite in its psychological slates and thus equally intractable to adequate description. Just as it was natural science which could give us adequate intimations of what the outer world was like, the interior world required a new language of literature to be described with any adequacy. Selves thus stretch in the form of life histories—stretching from either birth as a point of origin or some other elected time as a point of origin of consciousness, with the time given to it stretching undetermined in front, with a space-like quality to this virgin time which was to be filled with appropriate events. Explorations of this inner universe of the self occurred in two different literary modes. Novels described and interpreted events and gave their fulness an aesthetically intelligible form. Poetry was the form which specialized in exploring its complexities not through the tangibility of incidents but by depicting states of emotion.
These changes happened in a period of about fifty years in modern Bengali literature, and in these changes Rabindranath’s art played a decisive role. He created the language of this new poetry, expressing with greater success and complexity this self-directed poetic emotion. He also fashioned a language adequate for the mundaneness, complexity, and psychological subtleties of the modern novel.
14 It goes without saying that he also created a new language of poetry, so palpably modern in its diction, tone, tropes, and images that it encountered intense resistance and ridicule from traditionalists when it first emerged and was looking for its own distinctive poetic accent. Inevitably, Tagore’s poetry involved an obligatory exploration of this self. But the novelty of his exploration does not end there. It is not merely the subject of the self which is entirely new, but also what he eventually puts inside that subject, the way he eventually defines it in his poetic art. In reading Tagore I am surprised by the turn that this exploration of the self takes after a time, making his resolution of the problem of self quite distinctive, and very different from the standard norms of bourgeois subjectivism.
Tagore did not merely present this new object of poetic aesthetics in Bengali literature; in the course of presenting it, he had to fashion a new language which could be an adequate vehicle for its expression. He did so not by inventing new words, but by displacing through imaginatively unconventional deployment the meanings of older ones. Not surprisingly, the world at the centre of this invention of a new vocabulary was the word
ami, the Bengali term for ‘I’.
But the fact that Bengali had this term did not indicate that it had any previous conceptual tradition of self-making in the modern sense. All languages have grammatical forms of self-reference, arrangements that allow speaking about the speaker. But the idea of this ‘I’ is not philosophically equivalent to the modern conception of the self. I think it is indicative of something significant that any translation of the term ‘self’, as a free-standing noun (i.e. not as an adjectival prefix, like
atma-jivani, atma-katha, atma-jignasa, etc.), is still plagued by an acute linguistic awkwardness.
15 My hypothesis is that the word
ami earlier referred to the grammatical ‘I’ which did not have an association of a vast an explorable interiority which poetry and novelistic prose could illuminate. Gradually, in Tagore’s hands, it shifts and complicates its meaning, and comes to mean the self, or the philosophic-psychological ‘I’.
But I wish to make a further point as well. Although, undeniably, the question of the self in this form arises through a contact with modern subjectivist literature from the West, his poetic sensibility moves away from Western individualistic solutions. What he takes from the West is essentially the technique of drawing an outline of the concept, what he places inside that to give it content comes from an intelligent and constantly searching reading of indigenous traditions which spoke of the self in different religious and theological contexts. These indigenous sources were primarily, for Tagore’s poetic biography, the Upanishads; the aesthetic of restrained tragedy (or tragic moderation) he found in Buddhism—which sees in death and suffering an aspect of the meaningfulness of life (and death as suffering in its ineffable, inexpressible form); and Bengali traditions of syncretistic religiosity, especially the songs of
bauls. I shall try to show the outline of this question and the sources of the answer by reading one particular poem. Its title is
ami, in
Parishesh, written on 11 February 1931, roughly ten years before Rabindranath’s death.
II
This poem is actually one of several called
ami, which Tagore composed at different points of his prolific poetic life: it is indeterminate between the grammatical and the psychological ‘I’, between the thin ‘I’ and the deep self. But although I shall focus on one single poem, it may be useful to present a short genealogy of these poems within Tagore’s poetic oeuvre. His poetic evolution shows something interesting about the connection between the search for the language and the search for this object, indeed their inextricability. In a very early poem in ‘Sandhyasangit’, which by his own later evaluation was before he had found his distinctive poetic voice, already shows the problematic of the self in an inchoate form. It is still not a self which is distinguished from its own living experiences, seen as a being to whom experiences happen, and who therefore possesses it; but it already shows the possibility of this distinction within one’s undifferentiated ‘I’ through the play of memory. The poem is intriguingly titled ‘
amihara’,
16 which indicates a lost ‘I’, but also implies underlyingly the presence of a part of this ‘I’ which is the subject of this loss, a part at least of this ‘I’ which has done the losing, and can therefore express its sadness at this alienation from its self.
But the loss of the self is arranged by a temporal division. It is an interesting idea, because it suggests that the ‘I’ is a moment, not the entire stretch of the person’s life or experience. When we say ‘I’ it refers only to the transparent self-consciousness of that particular moment, a kind of existential self-consciousness of immediate being. From the vantage point of this point-like self, it then becomes possible to reflect and deplore the loss of earlier selves. Selfmaking is thus a synthetic activity, it is done by a point-like consciousness of the present, but it can at will distance earlier states of its own life and mind, or assimilate them; it asserts a curious sovereignty of this immediate point-like self in time over the entire material of its own past, which it can use for remembrance. But this is not otherwise mysterious: ‘It is the bud of my childhood’, it is my innocent self; ‘the two of us have travelled after losing our way.’ I have thus ‘lost my I’ (
harayechhi amar amire); and it is not surprising that ‘at times, on evenings my lost companion comes back for a moment into my heart.’ This theme of self-interrogation remains with Rabindranath to the end of his life, a constant sense of surprise at the experiences of sorrow that waited for him and the strategies by which he was able to overcome and sublimate them. He expressed this beautifully in one of his songs:
apnake ei jana amar phurabe na
sei janar-i sange sange tomay chena.
I am not concerned here with his process of self-recognition, only with the manner in which he fashioned a natural and conceptual language for this, the resources from indigenous philosophical traditions which he used in this interrogation. He wrote two poems with the title ami, both in the later stage of his poetic career, one in Parishesh and the other in Shyamali. It was the latter he decided to include in his selection of poems called Sanchayita. Both of these poems enter into an explicitly philosophic exploration of the self, but I have a preference for the one in Parishesh because while it seems to show most of the basic traits of the modern bourgeois individuality in its question, it tries to provide an answer that is distinctly non-individualistic. This was by no means his last or testamental utterance on the problem of the self. Rabindranath famously returned to the question of ‘who am I’ in his last poems, in a Shyamali poem, and most poignantly in two or three poems immediately before his death, ‘Pratham Diner Surya’ or ‘Rupnaraner Kule’. But I think in his reflection on the poetic self the poem from Parishesh is particularly important, because it gives us some clues to the sources of which he constructed his sense of the self.
The poem
I wonder today if I know
Him who speaks in my words,
Who moves in my movement,
Whose art is in my paintings
Whose music rings out in my songs
In pleasure and sorrow and happiness
Day after day in the varied space of my heart.
I thought he was bound to me.
All the laughter and tears of this heart
Have bound him to all my work and my play.
I thought this I was my own.
It will flow down my life to end at my death.
Who do I remember then in inexpressible delight
At the touch and sight of my love,
On the further shore of an unfathomable sea of happiness
Again and again
I had met that I beyond my self?
I know thus
That-I is not imprisoned within the limits of my being.
In the greatness of the heroes of epics,
Losing my self,
I find that-I within me, crossing in a moment (great gulfs of)
Time and space.
I find in the illumined annals of the saints
The acquaintance of that-I which lies hidden behind
Shadows in my mind.
That-I has learnt about itself in the
Words of poets down the ages.
The rain comes down in the horizon
With blue clouds and the dank gusty wind.
I think
This I from one age to another,
In countless forms,
In countless names,
Crosses countless births and deaths
Countless times.
I shall watch this I today within
The endless indivisibility of man
Which takes inside the past and the future (what has
Happened and what has not)
In silence,
This I who exists everywhere.
Aj bhabi mane mane tahare ki jani
jahar balay mor bani
jahar chalay mor chala
amar chhobite jar kala
jar sur beje othe mor gane gane
sukhe dukkhe dine dine bichitra je amar parane
bhebechhinu amate se bandha
e praner jata hasa kanda
gandi diye mor majlle
ghirechhe thare mor sakal khelay sab kaje
bhebechhinu se amari ami
amor janama beye amar marane jabe thami
tabe kena mane pade nibid harashe
preyashir darashe parashe
bare bare peyechhinu tare
atal madhuri-sindhu-tire amar atita se amire.
je ami chhayar abarane
lupta haye thake mor mane
sadhaker itihase tari jyotirmay
pai parichay
Jani tai se ami to bandi nahe amar simay
juge juge kabir banite
sei ami apanare perechhe janite
digante badal-bayu-bege
nil meghe
barsha ase nabi
base base bhabi
ei ami kata murti dhare
kata janma kata mrityu kare parapar
kata barambar
bhut bhabishyat laye je birat akhanda biraje
se manab-majhe
ebar dekhiba ami se-amire
sarvatragamire.
There is, I believe, a clear architecture in the poem. It is structured in the form of a question, and an answer, or at least an attempt at one, both of which are quite explicitly philosophical, their philosophic sources or roots, i.e. where the question and the answer come from, are also quite evident. The poem sets up the question of the self, in the first stanza, to a first suggested individualist answer to it (second stanza); shows why that is not satisfying, and offers the outlines of a non-indivdualistic solution (the last stanza). Consider the first stanza:
aj bhabi mane mane tahare ki jani … The question itself is obviously unprecedented in literary terms. Traditional people could have wondered about the difficulties of knowing others, but not knowing one’s self. And this has firm foundations in the social world in which they lived. If one person’s life experience is mirrored by those of others, particularly in the absence of a psychologizing notion of the self, the certainty, familiarity, repetitiveness of experience does not require a questioning.
By contrast, two features of modern existence constantly give rise to questions about the coherence of a self. First, the twists and turns of careers which can throw individuals into new and unfamiliar situations and contexts, disrupt the continuity of their lives, and raise the question of what they are making of the life given to them. (It seems Ramakrishna was adept at turning the minds of his followers constantly towards this threat of inconstancy.) Second, with the acceptance of an idea of a psychological self, a mind which is sufficiently detached from its own experiences to be able to reflect on and criticize them. It is in fact increasingly seen as an intellectual responsibility of this self to reflect critically about the life story that is unfolding before it. It also turns its own psychological states, additionally, as an object of its reflection. This is what turns the self, the ‘I’, the person who is closest to oneself, into a problem. The unproblematic quality of the pronoun as it was seen traditionally is thus fractured, and replaced by something that is less homogeneous, and containing a multiplicity of relations inside itself, between itself as the subject of experience and the narrator, between the narrator and critic, between present and past selves. The direction of the solidly integral ‘I’ which is required for even asking this question is wholly new, and to do this the literary language of Bengali is hardly equipped or practised. Tagore has to make words do unaccustomed things; but the added difficulty is that within this poetic diction he does not have time or circumstance to offer a philosophical introduction to this novel use of bits of language. It has to be done while using the language itself. Poetry does not have the luxury of an interruption, a reconstruction of the necessary language before it is put to use. In poetry, language has to be used and its use altered at the same time.
We find both a connection and a disjunction between this and the earlier poem, ‘Amihara’. The early poem plays the later self against the earlier in a temporal sense, using the infinite divisibility of the life of the subject, and asserting in a sense the representational immediacy of the point-like temporal present, the transparency and the presence of consciousness to itself. In that sense ‘Amihara’ is not a poem which is experimenting with a radically new language of the self. It is simply using a narrower definition of the self, the immediate, present sense of the ‘I’, and differentiating from similar immediate self-perceptions of earlier times; the access of the self to itself is not in doubt or unclear, or complicated. It is simply that it is the focus of an accumulation of experiences, and the self, because of its finitude, is condemned to live in a kind of permanent present. It loses its earlier presents. Its only way of setting up a relation with those moments is through memory, which is not a presence but a loss.
In the poem in Parishesh the self that is disengaged and conceptually posited against the flow of experience is clearly more philosophical, not one temporal segment of a life reflecting on its relation with another, and deploring its subtle, inner decline. Here, by contrast, it is a properly reflexive self; that is, the self that must be distinguished and posited as distinct if the self of ‘amihara’ has to bring its own temporal presence under reflection. The problematic thing is not about the past, but the present, not what the self has lost but what it is. This clearly shows the reflexive self of the distinctly modern subjectivity, distinguishable from the experiences of the individual’s life, which, as it were, looks on them, and reflects on their meaning. It is the presence of this self which makes experiences capable of recall and representational organization. It is indeed the self which is the essential writer of autobiographies, distinct from the person whose life is reported on.
The proper topic of reflection for this ‘I’ is the swathe of experiences of its own life; but that requires this awkward and linguistically unprecedented disjunction. It is interesting how resolutely Tagore stays within the terms of the Bengali vocabulary and syntax, how he avoids recourse to the Sanskritic terms
atma (self). Michael Madhusudan had before him immortalized a particular autobiographical use of this term by writing his poem ‘Atmabilap’. The Tagore poem stays obstinately within the vocabulary of Bengali, avoiding the temptation offered by the Sanskrit
atma, so that the term
ami is obviously directed. To indicate both the person who speaks, and what he speaks about, the poem has to use the pronoun
ami; but the necessity and pressure of this distinction forces it to prefix it as this-I and that-I (
ei-ami/sei-ami). The use of the third person pronoun creates not merely a sense of discreteness between the two, but also a strange effect of distanciation, in the strict sense an objectification of the subject; and the deliberate awkwardness of language reflects the philosophical awkwardness of putting the same person on two sides of the cognitive equation. And the very first sentence shows the difficulty of this peculiar effort at knowing, which ought to be the easiest of all to know (
aj bhabi mane mane tahare ki jani).
There are two further moves in the poem. The first is to suggest an individualist answer to the question of the site and limits of the self. But the locutions of the stanza itself makes it clear that this is inadequate. However, the manner in which the phrase ‘I thought’ is used suggests to me that there is perhaps a more complex hint in it towards both its unsatisfactoriness and plausibility. It is clear from the decisiveness of the phrase ‘
bhebechhinu’ that it is a way of thinking that the poet has put behind him; at the same time, there is a subtle hint that there was nothing surprising about thinking like that. It suggests a rise in stages of self-cognition, as if the individualist conception of the self is a natural stage in this understanding, but one that would be eventually transcended. The second stanza of the poem displays all the characteristic features of an individualist self-perception. This self has a finite, bounded site of existence; it is anchored and bounded inside his life, a combination of the themes of fulness of experience and boundedness within its determinate events. A life is determinate, with a clear boundary; it is made of precisely those experiences and no other; and that is the entirely privileged private material on which an individual’s memory plays. The singularity of individual lives is marked by what it contains inside itself, and how its boundaries are marked by the two uninfringeable, ineffable points of origin and end, birth and death. It is this that turns the necessary raggedness and unnarratable infinity of actual lives into the bounded intelligibility of a life-history.
Most interestingly, in its unobtrusive and understated way, which makes it almost likeably lyrical, it also employs the language of possession—bhebechhinu se amari ami, this I, I thought was my own, which in Bengali has an ineradicable sense of the phrase ‘I thought I owned it.’ It is important to recognize the plausibility of this thesis. The entire educational training of the middle-class Bengali disposed him towards this individualist solution to the problem of his individual identity. Also, the background assumptions of literary practice, of the writing of novels, of lyric poetry, reinforced this definition. Most significantly of all, the entire thrust of modernist discourse went against traditional philosophic thought which seemed to posit metaphysical concepts like brahman, god, or all-pervading consciousness, all fatally undermined by the triumphant march of scientific rationalization. People were obliged, in this disenchanted world, to accept their finite, delimited, individual selves. It is this solution that Tagore finds troubling and seeks to transcend; the rest of the poem is devoted to this task.
As the poem moves on, this individualist subjectivity is slowly questioned and shown to be inadequate; but characteristically, Tagore avoids direct polemics and the superseding of this individual sense of the self is done through the characteristic gentleness of interrogative sentences.
17 And the reflection on the self moves through three levels of mediation. The features of the concept of the self slowly abandoned/ undermined are its boundedness,
18 its definitive enclosure into the inside of the individual,
19 and its relation of possession to the subject.
20 In a strange manner, I think it reflects the movement of literary themes in Tagore’s own poetic life. It discovers that the creation of one’s own self is something like a discovery, even the startling discovery of one’s own emotions, in their astonishing and startling range and depth, which depends on another through romantic love.
Later, his poetry advances from
Gitanjali onwards to an appreciation of much subtler, much longer, deeper relations with ‘others’ in history and memory and culture. Tagore’s poetry from
Kadi-o-Komal onwards, as he himself recognized, emphasized that some of our deepest inner experiences involve the existence and mediation of the other, the duality of romantic love. In this again there is an interesting play of indigenous and Western themes. While the emphasis is on the choosing self, the individual who is in a sense a victim of his own caprice of love, he/she has no control over whom she falls in love with because there is a strange magic net of love stretched across the world (
amra jalasthale kata chhale mayajala pati). A result of modern notions of individuality, this can quickly intermingle with familiar themes of theological doctrine of self-knowledge through one’s other. In the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition, to take only a proximate example, Krishna famously created Radha because, according to the
Chaitanyacharitamrita, he wished to understand his own self, and ‘taste’ it.
21 True, the self is an interior reality, and it is full of precious, significant, inexpressible moments of poignancy of experience. It can reflect on these aesthetically and philosophically; but those experiences, although they in a sense reside deep within us, could be possible only in a relationship with someone else. Krishna can reflect and refine his understanding of what his self is; but this knowledge is not self-standing; it is utterly dependent on the consciousness of Radha, and the essential mediation of their relation.
In personal relationships, similarly, for Tagore, the individual comes to realize and understand his self even in terms of his emotions, because these emotions cannot arise in him unaided. They arise only through an emotional intentionality, through their directedness towards someone else we love. It is true that through these emotions and the relationships we come to understand our own selves better, but at the same time we are utterly dependent on that mediation. This is also why we are never complete; our lives are constantly open towards more experiences. Interiority therefore does not negate relations with others; its boundedness, its apodectic certainty about itself, if construed in a hermetic way, is entirely misleading. These experiences happen to the individual and are preserved in his consciousness; yet these are not intrinsic, but relational. In other poems, which I do not wish to bring in too fully into this discussion, Tagore also suggests the inevitable textuality of our own relation to our experiences. These experiences of love, even the experience of sight, are given to us not by the physical eye, but with the assistance of images which are sedimented in our consciousness through texts. The way I see a woman is therefore textual. Those texts, invisible but real, lie in the charged distance between her and me.
These experiences, as all readers of Indian poetry know, are sources of pleasure that are limitless, because the mind can return to them always in memory. Much of romantic or erotic poetry in classical Sanskrit is devoted to the ambiguity of a remembrance, the returns in memory, their strange mixture of reality and illusion.
22 What gives firmness of form to individual lives is the organization of memory—because this inner self constitutes the present out of elements which are drawn from both its temporal supplements, by the mind reviving the events of the past and reflecting on the possibilities of the future, both aspects of this inner self. But memory again is an entirely private individual affair, although it is deeply personal and irreducibly interior. We do not have a wholly private language of our memory, or a repertory of images. The private memory and fantasies of individual selves requires a language-like template of collective memory out of which our self-interpretative moves are created. Like individual memory, it does not present all the events of history at the same time, but only those elements which illumine the particular moments that need recall and interpretation. This interior self is thus a text, an object of reading;
23 and it is appropriate that Tagore will seek implements by which his self can be ‘read’ in this sense.
The final move of reading the self is the oddest of all. One central principle of the individualist construction of modern subjectivity is its ‘this-worldliness’. This-worldliness does not merely rule out confusingly mystical ideas about extensions of the self through rebirths, etc., it also centres on a strong connection between this-worldliness and hedonism. One of the primary capacities of this individual subject is his ability to take pleasure from the world, the self’s ability to extract enjoyment from life.
24 Inevitably, the autobiographic account becomes a recounting of these joyous moments around which the contours of a life are built. The temporal boundedness of this self and its this-worldliness therefore make this notion of the self strongly opposed to ideas of afterlife or
janmantar—a succession of births through which human beings find fulfilment of their existence, which is a notion that suffused Indian traditional thought, common to both the Hindu and the Buddhist traditions. Tagore evinced a deep suspicion of some of the central metaphysical ideas of Brahminical Hinduism, and
janmantar, with its association with the justification of caste-practices through deserts of an earlier, invisible life, is particularly repugnant to the Brahmo consciousness. But as his thought on these questions evolves, it develops a strange capacity to transcend the parochial conflicts between Brahmos and Hindus. Tagore seeks to construct his own individual model of an Indian tradition, which is typically modern, and extremely eclectic between its various constitutents. The move in this direction is clearly indicated in the long but subtle and fascinating polemics in the pages of
Gora. Both Gora and Panubabu are seen as dogmatic and narrow-minded, in which Gora’s depiction is not surprising, but from a Brahmo intellectual the depiction of Haran as a bigot, little better than orthodox, caste-ridden, Brahminical Hindus is a startling departure. Some narrative episodes in
Gora also suggest that Tagore was bothered by the Brahmos’ eagerness to stress the similarities between their religion and Christianity. The more Tagore constructs an eclectic Indian tradition, the more he renders the local disputes between Hindus and reformers redundant. He therefore turns away from the Brahmo reading of Hindu metaphysics in purely theological terms. Accordingly, in his mature work there is an immensely expansive, inexhaustible playfulness about that idea of
janmantar—of the after-life. In reading the concept in its theological literality, as Brahmo polemicists tended to do, he saw the waste of an aesthetically suggestive idea. Thus he engages in this poem in something which can be seen as a strong and repetitive tendency in his works, a re-translation of Hindu theological ideas into an aesthetic register, giving it a complex and quasi-historical significance.
His poetry is full of the themes of an elusive return, which is sometimes just an intense longing and confirmation of his experiences in life, sometimes a play on memory. At times this is simply a wish that confirms the idea of this-worldliness:
abar jadi iccha kara abar asi phire.
25
But it is clearly marked in this wish itself that this is not materially or theologically possible. It is a theological idea displaced into a wonderful aesthetic meaningfulness. Or take another poem of this strange return: Chira-Ami, which says despite his not being there after he takes his leave,
takhan ke bale go sei prabhate nei ami
sakal khelay karbe khela ei-ami
natun name dakbe more bandhbe natun bahur dore
asba jaba chiradiner sei-ami
takhan amay nai ba mane rakhle.
26
Translation
Who can say I shall not be there in that dawn?
I shall be a part of all its play
I will be called by a new name, bound in the embraced of new arms
The same me—the me of all times—will come and go
Would not matter if I am no longer in your memory.
But the fact that he is not remembered does not matter any more, because he will be present in his absence, in the continuing life of others. Yet the most interesting feature of all this is a resolute refusal to slip into metaphysical or mystical vagueness. The continuity of life is interpreted in an almost material fashion, through the presence of a person in others’ memories, his ability to affect others’ experiences even beyond his death.
Aji naba basanter prabhater anander leshamatra bhag
ajikar kono sur bihanger kono gan ajikar ei raktarag
anurage shikta kari pari jadi pathaite tomader kare
aji hate shatabarsha pare.
27
Translation
If I could send to you even the tiniest part of the joy of this dawn,
Any tune of today, any of its birdsongs, this [sky’s] red glow
If I could drench them in my affection and send them to your hands
A hundred years from now.
This is an emphatic assertion of the continuity of life after death. Yet it is done through a completely credible play of memory. The aesthetic translation or the idea of
janmantar also figures in this poem and results in undermining or transcending all central markers of the individualist construction of the self—the bounded time in which the life is lived, the name which gives it an indelible mark of singularity, the limits of death as a final horizon. Even in entirely material terms, a life cannot be said to have ceased if its consequences are still active in the world. If he is able to present the resonances and the colours of an evening sunset to readers after a hundred years,
28 his poetry, such a central part of himself, certainly has not ceased to exist. Dying is not thus ceasing to exist; and birth signifies only in a shallow, superficial, uncomplicated sense, an origin of one’s consciousness. What is gratifying to historians is the fact that what he invokes most effectively against atomic individualism is no metaphysical mystical idea of the interconnectedness of individual to universal life through brahman, etc., but an essential principle of historicity of selves.
III
The poem seems to me to have a fundamental central idea. The first stanza enunciated a question; the second offered it the standard individualist answer. The third puts it into question and goes on to provide three examples, which have one thing in common. They all show that the deepest experiences of the self, which mark the self as what it is, which provides the reflexive capacities of the self with the experiential material on which it reflects and to which it returns in memory, are not created by its own self-enclosed activity. These, which are the most intimate personal markers and constituents of the self, are all produced by its mediation with others. The mediation first invoked is that of love, in which the most inner and precious feelings of this self are generated by the presence of the lover. In a way, this also calls in question the idea of the other being distant rather than near. This shows that in some cases there is an ‘other’ who is also the nearest to the self, so agonizingly close as almost to be its part. Tagore’s language also shows something more interesting: the most intense contact with our being, ourselves, is not casually achieved; these do not have a self-evident presence like our body. We come to touch and capture it at rare moments—
bare bare peyecchinu tare, I received that touch of my self at times. It is not securely and physically given, this intense sense of the self has to be achieved. And what is rarely achieved thus has the most astonishingly awkward and astonishingly beautiful locution
amar atita se-amire, the ‘I which is beyond this I.’ There is a symmetrical paradox in the manner of getting to this larger self. To get one aspect of that self, in the glories of the great heroes of the myths, the small, enclosed, bounded self has to lose itself to get its larger form:
apana haraye, tare pai apanate deshkal nimeshe paraye, which makes a clear play on the two verbs of losing and finding (
paoa and harano). To find that larger, fuller, more fulfilling self, the narrower self, which imprisons an individual within his life, has to be lost.
There is a most interesting aspect to the third moment in the poem which affirms a non-atomistic conception of the self in the last stanza. It recovers a whole range of locutions from the language of transmigration of souls, but these are now divested of their metaphysical grounding in a karmic theory of responsibility and moral causality of fates. The new sense of the self can transcend the enclosing of time, it can move across ages (juge jugantare), it can reincarnate itself (kata murti dhare), it can go beyond deaths and lives (kata janma kata mrityu kare parapar). It can do all that not because there is an immortal unliberated soul which is caught endlessly in the ineradicable imperfectness of our living a human life. It does so because it recognizes two fundamental things about its self: its most intimate experiences are created in transaction with others; and the language through which he can relate to the world outside and the universe within himself is a gift of his language. But this language is what it is because it is also the language of others, including others in time, and contains a memory that is not individual but cultural. It can thus find its place in a great seamless continuity of historical being (bhut bahbishyat laye je birat akhanda biraje). It can go anywhere. Thus the two attributes of the almighty—being antaryami and being sarvatragami—are now transposed to this human self.
A most interesting feature of this self-exploration is that it accepts and acknowledges a final disenchantment of the world. It recognizes that for a modern consciousness the path of return to the metaphysical beliefs of traditional Hinduism is closed But that does not mean that there is a fully articulated alternative system of beliefs with its ready rationalistic language into which he can transport himself. Tagore’s thought reduces the metaphysical ideas but translates them into a historicist and aesthetic register, and finds reasons for believing in them without shame or defensiveness.
Janmantar, the great central concept of Hindu metaphysics, turns into a metaphor of memory, and asserts a position very similar in some respect to German historicism. He does not abandon his language—either in the sense of the natural language, or the conceptual one. He does not reject Bengali, with its inextricable Sanskritic memory, as inadequate for a modern sensibility, and begin to live in English. Nor does he abandon ideas like
janmantar as being disreputable relics of superstition. He improvises a displacement of their meanings and turns them meaningful again by a translation that is historicist and aesthetic.
This also serves another important purpose, quite central to the Indian nationalist discourse about modernity. It does not accept a world in which the search for meaning has become meaningless and undermined. It argues that the world must be re-enchanted by poetry. It acknowledges that there is no way back into the language of tradition. That does not force it to simply plagiarize the West and reproduce a lisping imitation of Western languages, but to improvise an idiom of its own peculiar sense of the modern. Tagore, like most of what is modern in India, cannot be understood without the language that comes from the West as much as the language that comes from his past.
29If we turn the reflection of this poem into the less delectable language of social theory, it asserts that the inescapable historicity of existence makes atomistic individualism a false theory of the self. True, we do not have other lives and their memories, as in karmic theory; but our lives, the lives that we live in intense privacy and selfishness, rely on other lives and memories, which are internal and inextricable from them. Our deepest experiences, which both mark and define ourselves, happen, or are brought to language, only through the mediation of others, breaking in many interesting ways the bounds of the narrow, bounded ‘I’. We live our own lives through others’ words and memories; and others’ lives and memories, because they are indispensable to our negotiation of the world outside and the universe inside us, continue to exist through our own. To live a fully human life we constantly interpret ourselves, but our conceptual and interpretative means come from a larger memory than our own. Individual lives are therefore in a certain sense unbounded and unconcluded. At least the standard atomist conceptualization and accounting of its happiness and suffering is shown to be unsatisfactory. We discover eventually that the sense of the poem, if its meaning is displaced into the language of social theory, is that the individual subject, despite the uniqueness of his inner life, is not a monadic, windowless unit, but an ensemble of historical relations.
References
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Joshi, V.K., ed. 1979. Rammohun Roy and Modernisation of Bengal. New Delhi: Vikas.
Kaviraj, Sudipta. 1992. The Imaginary Institution of India. In Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (eds), Subaltern Studies VII. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Kaviraja, Krishnadas. 1985. Chaitanyacharitanrta. Ed. Sukumar Sen. Kolkata: Ananda Publishers.
Sandel, Michael. 1974. The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self. In
Political Theory, 12 (1984), 81–96.
Sen, Asok. 1977. Iswarchandra Vidyasagar and His Elusive Milestones. Calcutta: Riddhi.
Tagore, Rabindranath. 1910. Gora. Kolkata: Visvabharati.
———. 1972. Sanchayita. Calcutta: Visvabharati.
Taylor, Charles. 1985. Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This essay was first published in Bharati Ray and David Taylor, eds, Politics and Identity in South Asia, Kolkata: K.P. Bagchi, 2001.
1 I do not wish to deny that elements moving in this direction can be found in earlier writers, but these are mere elements. I would assert that the fully developed problem of subjectivity does not appear in Bengali writing before Tagore. Before him, Bankimchandra’s characters sometimes reflect upon their own situations, and, in a manner generally admired at the time, show conversations between two sides of their mind. Michael Madhusudan Dutta, over the latter part of his career, repeatedly reflected on his destiny and wrote formally autobiographic poems. Biharilal Dutta discovered that explorations of the mental or psychological states of the mind constituted an important poetic subject.
2 The question of linguistic change has been given much greater attention in discussions of social practice. But literary practices also require, at least in cultures like the modern Indian, a sensitive exercise in historical semantics
(begriffsgeschichte).
3 This does not mean that others’ handling of my identity is entirely confirmatory of my proposals about it. If their handling differs sharply from mine, I am forced to take note of that and respond. In actual social practice, what we call the identity of an individual is always transactive.
5 To take a random example from Tagore’s own songs, one can think of this early one:
sakhi bhavana kahare bale
sakhi jatana kahare bale
tomra je bala dibasarajani bhalobasa bhalobasal
sakhi bhalobasa kare kay
se ki kebali jatanamay.
7 Adhunik means, literally, modern.
Adhunik songs were a genre of popular love songs which often celebrated the feeling and deplored the impossibility of its consummation in repressive Bengali society. It was precisely the universality and unindexed character of their utterance which made them appear so dangerous. Their expression of desire could be transferred all too easily from the protagonists in film stories to ordinary adolescents in real life.
8 In the first part of the novel, before he comes under the influence of a liberal Brahmo family, Gora, the central character, espouses an aggressively traditional form of Hindu religion, but defends it, in an interesting complexity, in a language of choice. He had, in effect, elected to reject the principle of election. See Tagore 1910.
9 The idea of self-making is slightly different and potentially distinct from the idea of an elective life. This could, at least, avoid some of the worst forms of the elective ideology. Self-making could mean an individual’s attempt to live his life steadfastly accordingly to some guiding principles, often in face of the irrationalities and oppositions of real society. The self that is eventually made is an accomplishment precisely because of the dangers and difficulties attendant on it.
10 See Chatterjee 1993. The subject of women’s autobiographies has been an astonishingly fertile subject in recent years, with important contributions by Malavika Karlekar, Jasodhara Bagchi, and Tanika Sarkar.
11 Taylor 1985 gives a particularly felicitous account of the development of these ideas in the Western tradition.
12 See his contribution to the debate about the nature of the ‘Bengal renaissance’ in Joshi 1979; and Sen 1977.
13 The most well-known discussion of this process of minimalization of the self into an abstract attributeless point is Sandel 1974.
14 Although Bankim undoubtedly created an aesthetic of modernity, his attention was drawn almost exclusively to large, political, in a sense public questions, like history and colonialism. Bankim had little time for this kind of exploration of subjectivity. His novels consequently have more of the aesthetic and narrative structure of drama, rather than the descriptive fulness of the distinctively modern bourgeois novel form. In that sense Tagore is really the maker of the modern novel in Bengal.
15 For instance, I have considerable trouble thinking of a Bengali version of the title of this essay: ‘Tagore and the Self’. I have to get round it by making it self-questioning or self-making,
atma-rachana or
atma-praniti, but that precisely is to be avoided. Pradyumna Bhattacharyya suggests
atma, literally self, but it looks unfinished, bare, and unnatural, waiting uneasily for a suffix. Pradyumna Bhattacharya, personal communication.
16 The title is untranslatable in a straightforward way. It means a subject who has lost himself. But the intriguing and interesting thing is that the modern self is incapable of losing itself in quite this way (
harayechhi amar amire) except in spells of irrationality or failures of memory.
17 Tabe kena mane pade nibid harashe preyasir darashe parashe
bare bare peyechhinu tare, etc.
18 Bhebechhinu amate se bandha … gandi diye mor majhe bendhechhe tahare mor sakal khelay sab kaje—these are all verbs of binding and boundedness.
20 Bhebechhinu se amari ami.
21 Svado kidrsho va madiya, etc. Kaviraja 1995: sloka 6, 1.
22 One of the permanent favourites from classical Sanskrit poetry would be
Kalidasa’s lines in Abhijnanasakuntalam:
ramyani biksya madhuransca nisamya sabdan
paryutsuke bhabati tatsukhitohpi jantuh
taccetasa smarati munamabodhapurvam
bhavasthirani jananatarasauhridani.
But a more poignant one, again a favourite from Chaitanya onwards, is from Mammata’s Kavyamimamsa attributed to Silabhattarika:
yah kaumaraharah sa eva hi barah sa eva caitraksapa …
23 Although it cannot be stated at all fully in a footnote, I wish to suggest that we should take the verb ‘reading’ here in a rather imaginatively expanded sense—to mean all the things we do with the texts, not just a passive relationship with its marks. I suggest elsewhere that in the Indian tradition of living with texts, a great number of paratextual activities are allowed which are not merely receptive.
24 This idea of this-worldliness was a constant terrain of conflict between Indian writers of the nineteenth century and their image of Western thought. In their view, Western thought was homogenized around a core of materialist, eudaimonist ideas. Individual thinkers saw different implications of this persistent hedonism of Western civilization and sought to reject its claims in various ways. A very common move was to concede the material superiority of the West but claim a compensating spiritualist eminence for Indian civilization. Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, Tagore’s senior by two decades and one the most theoretically perceptive Bengali intellectuals, connected the militarist character of Western modernity with its insatiable appetite for material goods and pleasures. He also thought that this increased internal conflicts between classes, as much as external conflict between states. Gandhi’s critique of Western modernity, several decades after him, closely resembled Bhudev’s arguments. Tagore followed a somewhat different route. He accepts the idea of this-worldliness, the idea that there is no otherworldly supplement to the life lived on earth, nothing that can dilute or complement its finality. Yet he constantly played on some of the metaphysical ideas of Hinduism to give them an aesthetic meaningfulness. He also emphasizes the significance of an ability to take pleasure from life, but turns it in a direction of a Buddhist ethic rather than the materialistic, hedonist interpretation of this idea in modern Western thinking.
25 Gitabitan in Tagore 1972.
28 ‘Aji Hate Shatabarsha Pare’, ibid.: 268.
29 This is by no means an exhaustive discussion of Tagore’s attempts at poetic self-exploration. In his later writings, especially a series of poignant last poems, he returns to this theme of knowing the self, but occasionally with a more radicalized doubt about the question itself. The two last poems, written actually during his last months, ‘Rupnaraner Kule’ (May 1941) and ‘Pratham Diner Surya’ (July 1941), take up the same theme, but with a final detachment: the rising sun on the first day of life had asked, ‘who are you?’, without an answer; and the setting sun on the last day of life asked again, ‘who are you?’, but found none. Does this mean it is impossible to answer the question altogether, or that it is always incomplete and therefore always inadequate and false? Tagore 1972: 832, 833.