H. G. WELLS: We are gradually thinking now of one human civilization on the foundation of which individualities will have great chance of fulfillment. The individual, as we take him, has suffered from the fact that civilization has been split up into separate units, instead of being merged into a universal whole, which seems to be the natural destiny of mankind.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE: I believe the unity of human civilization can be better maintained by linking up in fellowship and cooperation of the different civilizations of the world. Do you think there is a tendency to have one common language for humanity?
WELLS: One common language will probably be forced upon mankind whether we like it or not. Previously, a community of fine minds created a new dialect. Now it is necessity that will compel us to adopt a universal language.
TAGORE: I quite agree. The time for five-mile dialects is fast vanishing. Rapid communication makes for a common language. Yet, this common language would probably not exclude national languages. There is again the curious fact that just now, along with the growing unities of the human mind, the development of national self-consciousness is leading to the formation or rather the revival of national languages everywhere. Don’t you think that in America, in spite of constant touch between America and England, the English language is tending toward a definite modification and change?
WELLS: I wonder if that is the case now. Forty or fifty years ago this would have been the case, but now in literature and in common speech it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between English and American. There seems to be much more repercussion in the other direction. Today we are elaborating and perfecting physical methods of transmitting words. Translation is a bother. Take your poems—do they not lose much by that process? If you had a method of making them intelligible to all people at the same time, it would be really wonderful.
TAGORE: Music of different nations has a common psychological foundation, and yet that does not mean that national music should not exist. The same thing is, in my opinion, probably true for literature.
—Rabindranath Tagore and H. G. Wells, “Tagore and Wells”
At the heart of conversations about internationalism in the early twentieth century lay a conflict over the teleology of the global and the desirability of communicative difference. Did increasing contact across nations and languages ultimately lead toward the homogeneity of mankind, as H. G. Wells suspected and advocated? Or, as Tagore contended, did transnational contact proliferate linguistic and cultural differences, the recognition and examination of which were never to be superseded? Wells and Tagore’s dialogue, though staged in 1930, engages questions about the social dynamics and collective effects of internationalism that are very much alive today in debates about globalization’s standardizing and diversifying force, its tendency to exacerbate inequalities but also to elicit creative forms of resistance and expression. Although both Wells and Tagore are avowedly internationalist in outlook, their odd-couple disagreements about the persistence of national culture and linguistic particularity within global formulations of collectivity betray significant differences in each man’s relationship to universality and utopianism. Whereas Wells promotes a strongly unified vision of civilization in which translation is viewed as an obstacle to be made obsolete, Tagore offers the tempered and ambiguous universal of a “common language” that “would probably not exclude national languages.”
For Tagore, achieving a common language entailed not transcending translation but negotiating it. His approach to universality did not favor the consolidation of a world language spoken by everyone, but rather the widespread development of common tools for mediating uncommonness. More than the simple transfer of content from one language to another, translation connoted such an analytical tool. It was necessary for navigating stark linguistic differences (between, say, English and Tagore’s native Bengali) but also for identifying the subtle variations within seemingly uniform tongues (such as British versus American English). If Wells and Tagore agreed that technological advances were delocalizing languages (“the time for five-mile dialects is fast vanishing”), they disagreed about the value and uses of linguistic pluralism within the arena of international cooperation that their very dialogue was intended to symbolize.1
Throughout various phases of his polymathic career, Tagore treated translation as an imperfect but necessary tool for mediating the uncommon and for broaching the topic of illegibility as central to pursuits of an anti-imperial internationalism. Tagore’s investment in the particularity of national languages and literatures is clear in the above excerpt from his dialogue with Wells, but his deep awareness of translation’s obscurities becomes explicit as the conversation shifts to music—what Wells calls the “most international” of mediums, because it would seem to obviate translation. Tagore counters: “May I add something? I have composed over three hundred pieces of music. They are all sealed from the West because they cannot properly be given to you in your own notation. Perhaps they would not be intelligible to your people even if I could get them written down in European notation.”2
Where Wells looks to extract translation from internationalism, Tagore reintroduces translation by calling attention to discrepancies across notation systems and contingencies of taste. Through his experience with translating his own work in different mediums, Tagore came up close and personal with intelligibility’s rootedness in cultural conventions, while simultaneously acknowledging the always-shifting ground of such conventions. By interjecting the inscrutabilities of translation into Wells’s utopian universalism, Tagore inaugurates the chimeric tradition of internationalism chronicled here.
Tagore self- or autotranslated several of his poetry collections, including the Nobel Prize–winning Gitanjali (1912), and he collaboratively translated his novel The Home and the World (1919) with his nephew Surendranath.3 His early poetry was widely celebrated and sponsored by canonical modernists such as W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound; however, his prose works, including The Home and the World and the partially translated Nationalism, hurt his reputation in the West. By the time he sat down with Wells in 1930, Tagore’s artistic star was fading in Europe and his political reputation as a critic of nationalism was growing more controversial.
Although several scholars have attributed Tagore’s short-lived aesthetic appreciation among modernists to orientalist fads, I try to break away from such a narrative because it paints Tagore as a pawn of the modernist milieu rather than as a strategic participant within it, whose translation practices enable us to revisit and diversify the attitudes and techniques associated with modernism.4 Tagore’s English idiom in poetry and prose may not resemble the imagistic poetry of Pound and T. S. Eliot or the ironic detachment of Joseph Conrad. Yet Tagore’s interest in the inscrutable and the unintelligible, fragmentation and synthesis, persists at levels of literary composition usually ignored or devalued by a New Critical legacy of formalism that aligns the integrity of the work with its autonomy from the specificities of print cultural practices like excerption, reprinting, anthologization, and, of course, translation.
Contemporary scholars of modernism, including Stephen G. Yao and Rebecca Beasley, have worked to rectify the imbalance between studies of modernist aesthetic form and modernist editorial and translation methods by attending to the ways in which unorthodox translation practices helped shape the works and styles we now take for granted as modernist. However, as Beasley notes, “modernist critical values worked against the appreciation of literature in translation, especially literature that claimed to be innovative in style, when the translation could not be tested against the source text.”5 With my analysis of Tagore’s translation and editing methods and reference to his Bengali source texts, I aim to widen the gap between “modernist critical values,” derived from the early institutionalization of modernism, and modernist aesthetic innovation, derived from my transnational and bilingual appraisal of Tagore’s place in the global modernist milieu.
Tagore treated his Bengali originals not as autotelic, autonomous works, but rather as strategically reproducible and changeable repositories of material (“common-wealths”) whose translation and reconfiguration brought cryptic allusion, assemblage, and collage into his Anglophone writings. His recombinatory strategies in Nationalism and Home and the World, the two works on which this chapter focuses, served the particular purpose evoked by his dialogue with Wells: to disclose the entanglement of translatability and illegibility in cross-cultural discourse and to affirm the particularity of national languages and literatures while challenging the myth of their purity and self-sufficiency. Pushing against the equation of the work of art with an organic whole, Tagore’s English writings thematize the story of their own transmission from Bengali. In doing so, they allow Tagore to reflect upon the colonial contexts of international address, to identify the practices of recombination at the heart of nation building, and to mediate uncommon experiences of common modernist reference points, such as the Great War and industrialization, for a diverse English-speaking readership.
Building processes of circulation and translation back into an account of Tagore’s style and politics redresses a tendency in scholarship about the polymath writer, painter, and musician to settle along universalist or particularist lines.6 In the 1990s, which saw the beginning of cosmopolitanism’s resurgence as a philosophy for thinking beyond the nation, Tagore, too, experienced a resurgence in popularity—not so much among literary scholars as among philosophers and historians.7 Martha Nussbaum and Isaiah Berlin identified Tagore’s antinationalism with a universal humanism, arguing that it rightfully placed human loyalty over and above national loyalty. Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ashis Nandy, and Amartya Sen, in turn, framed Tagore’s critique of nationalism as a higher form of patriotism that rightly questioned loyalty to a Hinducentric Swadeshi movement.8
In truth, both sides have ample evidence with which to justify their constructions of a “cosmopolitan” Tagore or a “patriotic” Tagore, despite Tagore’s ambivalence about both cosmopolitanism and patriotism. Yet the division rests on an untying of Tagore’s own knots, specifically the way in which he connected intra-Indian political disputes to the wider geopolitical frameworks of world war and anticolonial dissent. That the philosophical divide among contemporary scholars is also a linguistic divide is crucial to understanding the evolution of two different Tagores. By focusing on translation in my formal analysis of Tagore’s works, I reconnect the “English-language” Tagore encountered by Nussbaum and Berlin to the “Bengali-language” Tagore encountered by the subaltern school historians and scholars of Bengali literature. In my account, the internationalist Tagore is necessarily a bilingual Tagore. The demands of autotranslation enabled him to undermine metropolitan expectations of Indian literature while also refuting anticolonial nationalist principles of cultural isolationism and homogenization. In short, his innovative approach to what are usually considered second-order acts of literary production (compilation, translation, and editing) multiplies the number and scale of collectivities to which he belonged, rather than reducing them to simply the world or the nation.
Prior to the publication of Nationalism, poetry collections like Gitanjali, The Gardener, and The Crescent Moon, which Tagore also autotranslated, had created the image of a mystic poet, an orientalist construction that was perpetuated by reviews of his work in the British press. The London Athenaeum referred to Gitanjali as having “trance-like beauty”; the Nation suggested that The Gardener allowed English readers to “see love and death through the mystic’s eyes.”9 In Nationalism, however, Tagore’s English writings turned away from peaceful idylls and scenes of spiritual contemplation to address nationalism as a world-historical phenomenon. Its publication recast Tagore as a political polemicist and a colonial subject whose “wisdom” was far from transhistorical.
Nationalism, though undoubtedly a work that strains classification, is fruitfully read as a modernist anthology, a genre that has become of increasing interest for the way it vivifies formal and sociological mediation. Jeremy Braddock places the anthology at the center of modernist collecting practices and describes its form as a “system” with its own internal logic. The anthology’s logic makes the social positioning and material circulation of literature difficult to separate from its aesthetic and epistemological interventions.10 For Rebecca Walkowitz, what makes an anthology specifically modernist is its disruption, and at times its undermining, of the practices of social grouping and comparative analysis employed in the making of a traditional anthology.11
My argument builds on Walkowitz’s in that it considers traditional anthologies to be cultural totems, hefty objects that embody the weight of the cultural tradition they encapsulate—think of the Norton anthologies of American literature, women’s literature, or African American literature. Tagore’s modernist anthology breaks down that totemic structure by blurring the line between itself as an object (a book) and as a product of the uncontainable institutional and geopolitical networks that shaped its production. The form (or system, to borrow Braddock’s term) of Nationalism reveals the overlaps between aesthetic object and social field through its strategies of rhetorical self-presentation, framing, and compilation.
Nationalism is an anthology that contains three lectures on nationalism in different locations (the West, Japan, and India) and one poem by Tagore entitled “The Sunset of the Century.” The entries attack rather than reaffirm their master category. Tagore understood that nationalism in all parts of the world derived its power from its perceived autochthony, and consequently, he aimed to discredit its organicism by treating it as a political abstraction of the Western imagination. Nationalism reconstructs nationalism as an imperial ideology that claims to affirm diverse, culturally contained groups but can do this only by disavowing its universalizing spread as a European method of political organization. To point out the globally standardizing architecture behind nationalism, Tagore redirects anthological strategies designed to affirm tradition making to the opposite project: exposing the contours of nation-based traditions. Nationalism consequently emerges in the anthology not as the unique expression of individual countries but as a global contagion of political feeling that threatens to extinguish authentic cultural differences across the non-Western world.
Despite Tagore’s stringent antinationalism, it is important not to confuse his polemic with a stance against sovereignty, or even against national community. Tagore saw intranational social reform as inseparable from international collaboration. For him, a national consciousness that disavowed outside influence endangered the collective models he most valued. He therefore used the anthology, so often the genre used to confirm literary and cultural nationalism, to contest the worst tendencies, within particular nationalisms, toward belligerent self-interest, competition, and xenophobic violence. Treating nationalism as an imperial abstraction rather than a spiritual emanation (Volkgeist) led Tagore to privilege analyses of its transmission over analyses of its origination.
The focus in Nationalism on the power dynamics of cultural contact within an increasingly integrated world makes it an early twentieth-century account of globalization. It combines anticolonial politics with a desire for transnational solidarities, which includes saving Europe from itself. On one hand, Tagore asserts that “the world-flood has swept over our country [India]” (Nationalism, 16), in order to identify the power imbalances upon which empires flourish and colonies drown. On the other, he writes, “The whole world is becoming one country through scientific facility. And the moment is arriving when you also must find a basis for unity which is not political” (119). This second statement is far more conciliatory, and it searches for an ethical spirit that might balance autonomy with cooperation.
Ironically, this is the statement that compelled more vitriol. The Detroit Journal, critical of the timing of the publication of Nationalism (the same year the United States entered World War I) warned readers against Tagore’s internationalist aspirations, which it deemed the “sickly saccharine mental poison with which Tagore would corrupt the mind of the youth of our great United States.”12 The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman reviewed the anthology with more equanimity but, in light of its wartime appearance, rued the inefficacy of any moral appeal without an army to back it up. What stands out particularly to the Times Literary Supplement reviewer is Tagore’s equal-opportunity critical eye. Indicting Indian nationalists and British imperialists alike, Tagore spoke on behalf of no side.13 The British could not claim him for the Raj, despite his criticism of nationalist campaigns in India, and, as Gauri Viswanathan has shown, Indian nationalists considered his public criticism of swadeshi tantamount to imperial collaboration.14 Tagore’s internationalist protest ironically left him without any nation to call home.
Tagore’s nonpartisanship may have earned him enemies across both Asia and Europe, but his neutrality—that is, his refusal to be claimed by any one nation—was useful for analyzing collective identities in lieu of conforming to them. Tagore displays and manipulates his affiliations to multiple groups in Nationalism. The anthology’s paratexts provide evidence for this claim, for they are the spaces in which Tagore’s national identity (and the collective identity of Nationalism) are most in flux. As Samuel Kinser has argued, “paratexts indicate the forces that have shaped the text: they show how contexts invade the text. But they are also an arena in which the author can, more or less openly, combat such forces.”15 Kinser assumes a rivalry between literary text and historical context that the paratextual arena formalizes and exploits. Paratexts become thresholds from which authors can intervene in the reception of the text, but also places from which their authorial personae may be constructed in ways outside their control.
The paratexts of Nationalism show both possibilities for Tagore’s collective identity. The title page introduces Tagore in Anglicized fashion as “Sir Rabindranath Tagore, author of ‘Gitanjali,’ ‘The Crescent Moon,’ Etc.”16 It emphasizes Tagore’s Britishness by pointing to his knighthood and previous English-language poetry collections, framing Nationalism as continuous with works that had been uncontroversial in England due to their apolitical content and spiritual thrust. The opening preface, however, downplays Tagore’s association with Britain by referring to India as his country of origin. In the main text, Tagore aligns himself with the nonnational category of the colonially dispossessed, the “we, who are no nation ourselves” (Nationalism, 19).
Comparing Tagore’s shifting affiliations across various paratexts and the main text reveals an authorial identity deeply implicated in overlapping traditions: British, Indian, and colonial. Tagore courted these overlaps rather than denying them, to render a single category of belonging not only untenable but also inaccurate with regard to the ways in which collective identities are formed. He uses the anthology to track the history of his own self-translation and to push back against rigid notions of national partisanship on behalf of either himself or his anthology.
His status as an autotranslator capable of revealing the multiple cultural and political contexts of his work is clear from the anthology’s opening preface. It elaborates the many sites of production from which the anthology emerges as a coherent object and thus refuses to reduce the location of Nationalism to any one national tradition. If context invades text through the paratext, then Tagore’s prefaces are the book’s major contact zones: the places where the stories of the anthology’s making intervene in its reading experience. Mary Louise Pratt coined the term “contact zone” to denote the “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of power.”17 The prefaces of Nationalism remind us that such spaces include the literary and that reading itself creates a kind of historical encounter. Reading Nationalism, we encounter history in two forms: the material circumstances of East–West relationships in the midst of World War I, and the material circumstances of the anthology’s own making as it reflects upon its achievement of objecthood (in the form of a printed book). The latter form of historical engagement is key to understanding the former.
There are two prefaces in Nationalism: the opening preface and the preface to its last entry, a poem entitled “The Sunset of the Century,” which I will refer to as the second preface. The opening preface reminds the reader of the work’s medium specificity as a book, its geographic specificity as a work that was written across multiple countries, and its period specificity. It lists the contents of the anthology in relation to these contexts:
“Nationalism in the West” [the first entry in the anthology] is one of a series of lectures delivered throughout the United States during the winter of 1916–1917. “Nationalism in Japan” is based on two lectures delivered in Japan before the Imperial University and the Keio Gijuku University in June and July 1916. “Nationalism in India,” written in the United States late in 1916, is the poet’s reflection on the state of his own country, and gives world-wide completeness to the discussion of Nationalism. The poem at the conclusion of the book, “The Sunset of the Century,” was written on the last day of the last century.
(Nationalism, 7)
The preface discloses the contradictory nature of the anthology. It simultaneously reflects its generic aspirations to totality (“world-wide completeness”) and reveals the inevitable impossibility of achieving such a goal through its apparatus of selectivity, which must make choices not only about representative regions but also about the final form of representative entries. Nationalism depicts the anthology’s animating tension as a battle between method and content. Method—which regions are chosen and how their entries arrive in printed form—complicates the equation of added content (including more countries like India) with more coverage (worldwide completeness). The first two entries, the preface tells us, are versions or composites of unseen materials—either one lecture in a series of lectures (“Nationalism in the West”) or a composite of previously distinct lectures (“Nationalism in Japan”). They are printed renditions of verbal performances originating across two continents. As a framing device, then, the preface stages re-mediation (from a series of live performances to a printed book) as a synthesizing process in which the totalizing aspiration of comparison rests on a definitive statement of loss. Despite adding more nations to its list of contents, the anthology’s methods of compilation will always demand the reduction of information and the stabilization of versions of a text into a standardized entry. The anthology’s enunciation of completeness is belied by its corollary enunciation of compilation; the genre is rhetorically split between claiming totality at the level of content and declaring such totality to be, always already, a record of loss at the level of literary production.
The second preface introduces new information to supplement the opening preface. It makes translation a mediator of the anthology’s contents when it reveals that “The Sunset of the Century” was “written in the Bengali on the last day of last century” (Nationalism, 157). The lack of a calendar date echoes the language of the first preface, but the addition of the fact of translation from Bengali invites readers to consider the bilingual history behind the seemingly monolingual Anglophone work. We pick up the anthology in medias res—in the thick of several media and geographic contexts, two languages, and at least two calendar systems: the Gregorian and the Bengali. When these contexts invade the text, they become part of its story.
The prefaces put pressure on the boundaries created by the anthology’s principles of selection and remind us that selectivity operates at unexpected levels that include the languages and media of circulation. The paratexts in Nationalism accordingly turn framing into a device for insinuating the anthology’s network into the definition of its objecthood. They tell us that that the further inside Nationalism we read, the further outside the anthology we will have to go to understand its contents.
In evoking its transnational and translational formation, Nationalism pits its own heterodox worldliness against what Tagore saw as nationalism’s growing orthodoxy as the only imaginable ideology of political organization within Europe, the United States, and most recently, Asia. In his anthology’s entries and organization, he portrays nationalism as a political ideology that asserts claims to autarky while unwittingly perpetuating homogenizing forms of comparison among nations. The Oxford English Dictionary defines autarky simply as “self-sufficiency” and, in specialist circles, as a policy of “economic self-sufficiency in a political unit.” Not to be confused with autarchy, which can refer to both self-government and despotism, autarky, in denoting self-sufficiency above all, also connotes isolationism. Autarkic societies followed a logic of enclosure that understandably appealed to Japanese and Indian nationalists striving to maintain or achieve autonomy from powerful Western nations. Yet Tagore contested autarkic nationalisms as misguided from the start because, he argued, they uncritically substituted political enclosure for epistemological autonomy. One cannot paint the nation as a community of cultural and economic self-sufficiency without acknowledging the borrowed character of nationalist discourse. Even more importantly, one cannot advocate national autarky without sacrificing an internationalist collective imagination rooted in nonautarkic principles such as cooperation and interdependence.18
Tagore reproduces nationalism’s global epistemological dominance in the anthology’s formal architecture. Whereas the genre of the anthology usually presupposes the distinctiveness of each individual entry, the case studies in Nationalism are arranged like a series of Russian dolls in which less politically powerful regions become embedded in more politically powerful ones. One region’s version of nationalism emerges as a less powerful derivative of the previous one’s as Tagore appraises nationalism in the West, Japan, and India. This mise en abyme effect reinforces Tagore’s description of the ideology in sweeping terms as a “world-flood” (Nationalism, 16) or “tidal wave” (105) enveloping Asian countries within a Western structure of thought and behavior.
In structurally connecting nationalization with Westernization, Nationalism anticipates Partha Chatterjee’s diagnosis of anticolonial nationalism as a derivative discourse. In his seminal formulation, Chatterjee argued that it is impossible to conceive of colonial nationalisms as autonomous discourses. Rather, they were constituted in the paradoxical crucible of accepting and rejecting the “dominance, both epistemic and moral, of an alien culture.”19 In assuming the mantle of nationalism in a world order without viable political alternatives for statehood, anticolonial nationalists accede to a system in which they will continue to occupy subject positions not only militarily or industrially but also philosophically. Chatterjee focuses on how “thought itself can dominate and subjugate,” and situates the colonial effort to become “modern” within a discursive framework that a priori counteracts autonomy. Yes, as Chatterjee argues in a later work, Indian nationalists would manage this impasse by creating their own “domain of sovereignty” within the cultural sphere of society.20 Their tactics, in other words, reflected the displacement of the dream of autarky onto the making of a private sphere rooted in the gendered practices of domesticity, vernacular language, and tradition keeping, while the public sphere accommodated the material and technological accomplishments of the West. The outcome would be the creation of “a ‘modern’ national culture that is nevertheless not Western.”
Nationalism uses its anthological structure to show that the demand for cultural autarky is a symptom of epistemological colonization rather than an emancipation from it. Nationalism, as its chapter titles make clear, is the standard that conditions the comparison of Japan and India not with other actually existing nations but with an epistemological edifice known as “the West.” Tagore’s “West” is the preeminent setter of standards. To adopt its standards without critically examining them is to entrench European epistemology even more insidiously within the construction of Asian nations. To be clear, Tagore’s lament against the spread of nationalism was not a lament against epistemological influence or cultural appropriation but against the misrecognition and anxious vilification of these processes in nationalist rhetoric of autonomy and sovereignty. Rather than participate in the “separate spheres” theory of tradition and modernization, which informed the structure of anticolonial nationalism, he scrutinized the process by which these polarities came into being.
“Nationalism in Japan” addresses the logic of borrowing that Tagore found endemic to nationalism’s importation within Asia. He argues that nationalist feeling rests on problematic ways of seeing the selectivity of adaptation:
You can borrow knowledge from others, but you cannot borrow temperament.
But at the imitative stage of our schooling we cannot distinguish between the essential and the non-essential, between what is transferable and what is not. It is something like the faith of the primitive mind in the magical properties of the accidents of outward forms which accompany some real truth. We are afraid of leaving out something valuable and efficacious by not swallowing the husk with the kernel. But while our greed delights in wholesale appropriation, it is the function of our vital nature to assimilate, which is the only true appropriation for a living organism…
Japan cannot altogether lose and merge herself in the scientific paraphernalia she has acquired from the West and be turned into a mere borrowed machine.
(Nationalism, 70–71)
It is easy to be put off by Tagore’s statements, particularly for their evocation of old historicist tropes of Asian immaturity (“at the imitative stage of our schooling”). Yet to equate Tagore’s perspective with a pro-Empire stance is to misconstrue the thrust of his argument. Tagore is not against Japanese attempts to preserve autonomy; he is against their strategies of military escalation, which he regards as symptomatic of a “wholesale appropriation” of Western militarism. Warning against the devolution of Japan, he argues that the Japanese undermine their own claims to autonomy if they do not adequately reflect upon the conditions under which they cultivate values coded as national.
Distinguishing, transferring, discarding: these are the transnational processes of selection, which prefigure collective identity formation and which Tagore asked the Japanese—and now all readers of Nationalism—to examine closely as operations in the cohering of culture. They are also the processes by which Nationalism, as a modernist anthology, connects the bound book to the unbound network of lectures, poetry, and performances that Tagore produced prior to it. Those who do not see these processes of selection out of which both national identities and world books emerge become, via Tagore’s analogy, less selective themselves. They are the indiscriminate consumers who “are afraid of leaving out something valuable and efficacious by not swallowing the husk with the kernel.”
If the prefaces to Nationalism remind us of what the anthology leaves out, the main text suggests that leaving things out is not always a bad thing. Selection is a skill worth cultivating as an expression of autonomy superior to autarky. By describing Asian nationalisms as movements insufficiently self-critical of their selectiveness, Tagore struck at the core of national anxieties of influence. To offset those anxieties, he speaks of preserving “our vital nature to assimilate.” The pun on vital, connoting both importance and aliveness, reflects his desire to link the modern values of progress, transformation, and freedom to substantive social reform within Asian countries and not to the political reproduction of nations as “borrowed machines” from Europe.
Tagore differentiates the selectivity of assimilation from “wholesale appropriation” to emphasize the critical examination of Western influence over the instrumental exploitation of Western tools. His description of Japanese society as a vital organism muddies the distinctions between an autochthonic idea of tradition and an external idea of modernity. Outside or “Western” influence becomes a force with which organic identity must negotiate; consequently, Japan’s vitality—that is, its ability to grow and change in response to environmental pressures—counteracts the Herderian essentialism that would make the nation the repository of some primordial Japaneseness. By choosing assimilation over appropriation in the negotiation of Europe–Asia encounters, Tagore advocates critically incorporating ideas (assimilation) before putting the ideas of others to one’s own use (appropriation).
This distinction matters, because it vivifies the processes of editing, synthesis, and encoding (selectivity) that enable any oppositional politics of appropriation. In Tagore’s usage, tradition is defined not through imitation and insulation but through the discourse of editing on display in Nationalism. Only when Asian nations dilate and examine transnational processes of cultural contact can they arrive on even epistemological ground with the West: “In your voice [Japan’s] Asia shall answer the questions that Europe has submitted to the conference of Man. In your land the experiments will be carried on by which the East will change the aspects of the modern civilization, infusing life in it where it is a machine” (Nationalism, 75).
As is evident in “Nationalism in Japan,” Tagore disables national categories while reaffirming civilizational ones. “East” and West” come to represent ontologically different spheres of vitalism and mechanism, respectively. Tagore asserts these differences to promote a distinctly spiritual and pacifist role for Asian countries in international politics. Rather than disregard this essentialism, one must understand its function within Tagore’s internationalism. The persistence of an “East” in Tagore’s rhetoric facilitates his argument for Asia’s importance within the universalizing processes of modernity. An East capable of retaining its alterity from the normalizing regime of nationhood retains, in its countries of “nonation” (Nationalism, 19, 33, 37, 45), an ability to circulate and translate its own concepts back toward the West.
Tagore shifts the location of knowledge categories from Europe to India in his treatment of intranational discrimination. Against the subordinating comparison of regional units (the West, Japan, and India), Tagore poses questions that break down such collective units through the alignment of their social practices. In his third entry, “Nationalism in India,” he writes:
Many people in this country [the United States] ask me what is happening as to the caste distinctions in India. But when this question is asked me, it is usually done with a superior air. And I feel tempted to put the same question to our American critics with a slight modification, “What have you done with the Red Indian and the Negro?” For you have not got over your attitude of caste toward them.
(Nationalism, 118)
Tagore does not deny discrimination in India, but he suggests that the caste system functions shallowly as a synecdoche for a peculiarly “Indian” category of discrimination. Like apartheid, which would function through the second half of the twentieth century as a synecdoche for the uniqueness of South African racism, the caste system functions internationally to isolate India from the rest of the world rather than bring it into a mutual dialogue on discrimination and the status of minorities. Tagore uses comparison to resist his imagined interlocutor’s tendentious singularities. By reframing caste as an “attitude,” he turns an indictment of India based on its distinctiveness into a provocation to reexamine American progress.
Tagore’s analogy produces likeness across caste and race/class hierarchies in the name of creating a commensurability that the metropolitan reader had previously denied. Such rhetoric sacrifices historical specificity in order to reveal the double standards of those who set the standards. It also exposes the assumption behind their questions: that the United States’ history of race relations moves forward while India’s remains static. In rejecting the particularism to which the imagined American subjects India, Tagore’s strategic analogy exposes the power relations that govern when comparison takes place and when it does not; which countries are judged progressive and which are judged regressive by the terms of international dialogue.
Most obviously, then, what Nationalism arrives at is what Rey Chow calls a “post-European” perspective on comparison.21 Such a perspective does not perform a comparison without analyzing the process of comparison itself—its acts of selection, its instantiation of standards, and its consequent valuations. Tagore shows how European standards circulate, how they shape Japanese and Indian nationalisms alike, and how appropriation (without vital assimilation) leaves unexamined ambiguities and blindspots within anticolonial nationalist discourses of autonomy. Tagore’s anthology, with its mise en abyme structure, formalizes comparison as what Chow calls a “discursive situation, involuntarily brought into play by and inextricable from the conditions of modern world politics.”22 However, it also brings local and voluntary acts of comparison, such as Tagore’s comparison of caste and minority politics, to bear on the overarching colonial regime that Chow so powerfully diagnoses.
When Tagore compares nations, it is not to create a hierarchy of value but to analyze the hierarchies of value embedded in decisions to compare or not to compare. In turn, his prefaces perform their own kind of meta-textual reflection upon the anthology’s arrival in book form and its distribution to multiple reading audiences across the Anglophone world. In each preface, Nationalism invokes the history of its movement into legibility as a work of world literature, and reminds us that such legibility would not be possible without compilation and translation. These processes are vital parts of the “common language” of internationalism that Tagore proposed to Wells, yet they are also processes that create insides and outsides—material incorporated into the book and material excluded from it.
The uncommon remainders of Nationalism, the material relegated to the outside of the book, persist in the anthology’s paratexts. I think of them as what H. D. Harootunian calls “the ghosts of an unremembered history.”23 For Harootunian, such ghosts represent those stories, experiences, and pasts that modern epistemologies render “mere excess.” The phrase is compelling because it lends insight into the way in which remembered or official histories create unremembered ones: not through overt silencing but through the innocuous claims of superfluity. The anthology, a genre defined by selectivity, exemplifies this operational procedure particularly well, but the modernist anthology’s self-reflexivity about selection makes redress possible.
Recall the second preface, which introduced the fact of translation into the anthology’s production. By signaling the Bengali origins of the translated poem “The Sunset of the Century,” the preface creates a bridge between the historical present of the publication of Nationalism (during World War I) and the historical past of the poem’s initial occasion—the 1899 Boer War. The poem offers a trajectory back into a source language and source history that do not enjoy the same privileges of circulation or attention as English or World War I do. The anthology’s allusions to the peripheral language of Bengali and the peripheral past (“the last day of last century”) suggest that scholars of Nationalism have reading responsibilities that go beyond the covers of the printed book. Although we cannot recover the oral performances lost by the re-mediation of Tagore’s lectures into print, we can recover the Bengali source material from which Tagore translated “Sunset” and make it part of the remembered past of Nationalism.24
Following the trajectory of “Sunset” back to its Bengali origins is revealing but not for the reasons one would expect. The original language and original context of the poem do not provide some firmament that the translated poem lacks; rather, they reveal that origin points are sites of synthesis as well. By any conventional standard of translation, the English “Sunset” has no Bengali original because no corresponding poem exists! “Sunset” is a composite of poems 64 through 68 in Tagore’s Naibedya. Published in 1901, the collection consists of mostly devotional poetry; however, poems 64 through 68 also address the destructiveness of jatiprem, or “nationalism,” and contain warnings to India that national pride must not supplant devotion to God.25
These poems reflect Tagore’s response to the Boer War, which heightened anti-imperial sentiment across India when news spread about Britain’s terrifyingly violent tactics (such as the use of concentration camps and scorched-earth policies). The Bengal–South Africa connection that Tagore pursues in Naibedya represents some of his earliest indictments in poetry of imperial nationalism. They also offer a rare glimpse into a moment of transcolonial solidarity in which intense preoccupation with the Anglo-Boer War, evident in Indian journalism and print culture of the time, created a “shared public world between India and South Africa” without the intervention of a mediating metropolitan English center.26 When Tagore selects the Naibedya poems and recontextualizes them within Nationalism, he is using translation and transposition to generate continuities out of empire’s disjunctions. His strategies of reprinting draw a connection between colonial and metropolitan history and situate the national rivalries of World War I within a longer trajectory of imperial competition to divide up the non-Western world.
Tagore frames “Sunset” as a translation that is part and parcel of an elsewhere in order to honor origins but not to stabilize them. Yet there is no way of knowing this from the second preface alone. Readers must actually return to the poem’s Bengali originals to find out that they are not what we think they are—that is, a single poem. To modify Emily Apter’s phrase for a pseudotranslation (“a translation without an original”), “Sunset” is a translation without an equivalent, insofar as no corresponding Bengali-language poem exists. What “Sunset” does have is fragmented antecedents that belie the sanctification of the original work.
This has implications for translation theory. For instance, it tells us that actually existing originals are not always a stabilizing heuristic against which translations can be measured. Far from being an intact work, Tagore’s originals are shards of unexpected discovery that nullify any boundary between the life of an original work and the afterlife of its translation. Doing away with such before-and-after sequences, Tagore shows no piety toward his Bengali poems’ formal coherence, their wholeness, or their timelessness. His autotranslations readily subject his originals to history by turning finished poems into unfinished storehouses of raw materials to be refashioned and recontextualized by the demands of the present.
Combining poems was a frequent practice of Tagore’s in his autotranslations, one that begins at least as early as Gitanjali (1912). He describes his unorthodox approach in a 1913 letter to Ajit Kumar Chakravarty as follows: “What I try to capture in my English translation is the heart and core of my original Bengali. That is bound to make for a fairly wide deviation. If I were not there to help you out, you might probably find it impossible to identify the original in the translation.” In a later letter, dated May 12, 1913, he further explains, “The forms and features of the original become difficult in my translations—the way I do them these days. My translations are more a reflection than an exact replica of the original image.”27
Tagore’s infidelity to poetic form is the basis for the critical consensus that his translations are “degraded” versions of his Bengali originals. This consensus takes Tagore’s recombinatory technique as a corruption of the originals rather than as an aesthetic choice. I take it to be an innovation of translation rather than a perversion of literary form. Tagore’s autotranslations contest an autotelic idea of the poem in order to contest an autarkic or self-sufficient idea of national literature more generally. He facilitates the travel of his poetry in new forms and languages to multiply the situations and traditions to which it can speak. In turn, by making the history of translation visible in Nationalism, poems like “Sunset” allow otherwise unremembered or insufficiently remembered occasions to speak through them.
When Tagore calls his translations “reflections” as opposed to “replicas,” he makes their complex temporal dimensions easier to see. Forgoing an emphasis on replication or mechanical reproducibility, in which translation becomes aligned with seriality (an equivalent series of copies), he stresses the uniqueness of the translation as marking an encounter between the present moment and the ghostly past moment that it conjures up and reshapes. The etymological roots of reflection in the Middle French reflexion and the Latin reflectere suggest “to bend back, bend backwards, turn away.” Though the Latin origins of replica in replicare can also mean to bend back, Tagore’s understanding of a replica’s serial quality is more aligned with replicare’s postclassical denotation: “to repeat or recount again.”
Translations that work like reflections, for Tagore, do not simply repeat or recount the past; they bend backwards or turn away from the present moment as a way of speaking to it. They stage a resuscitation of the past rather than a replication of it, and make that staging part of their story. This is exactly the theory of translation that Tagore puts into practice in Nationalism when he weaves 1899 back into 1917. “Sunset” disorients the time-space unities framing World War I and consequently creates room for colonial voices and geographies to enter into the war’s community of fate.
“Sunset” is an apocalyptic poem that blurs organic and geopolitical imagery. Its opening line declares, “The last sun of the century sets amidst the blood-red clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred” (Nationalism, 157). Tagore puns on “West,” as a geographic marker and civilizational construct with destructive powers that masquerade as the natural cycles of the sun. Beneath its shadow, supposedly civilized nations are personified as “dancing to the clash of steel and the howling verses of vengeance.” Tagore’s latent comparison of nations to savages recasts nationalism as a modern form of tribalism that substitutes self-interest and material wealth for cooperative ideals.
As the poem unfolds, we discover that Tagore witnesses both the decadence and the degeneration of Europe from within India. Positioned at the crossroads of West and East, India occupies the unique position of witnessing the world becoming one—first through catastrophic destruction and then, possibly, through redemptive salvation:
The crimson glow of light on the horizon is not the
light of thy dawn of peace, my Motherland.
It is the glimmer of the funeral pyre burning to
ashes the vast flesh,—the self-love of the
Nation,—dead under its own excess.
Thy morning waits behind the patient dark of the
East,
Meek and silent.
(158)
Tagore places India at an interregnum, which he describes both spatially (between the mythic regimes of East and West) and temporally (between dusk and dawn). In the void created by the death of “the Nation” stands an opportunity either for more catastrophe or for a new kind of communal order to emerge—one that would measure membership not by self-love but by the spiritual principles that Tagore held dear: patience, humility, and simplicity.
Although it is difficult to imagine Tagore’s spiritual humanism supplanting nationalism, it is worth considering his attempts to alter the definition of national collectivity. India’s fate is bound up in the world’s collective fate. Tagore’s apostrophe to his motherland demands that she not think like a nation with an eye only toward her own self-interest. Such a perspective, in the above stanza, leads to a dangerous misidentification of “the light of the funeral pyre” as “the dawn of peace” and promises to make good on the destruction threatened in the poem’s title.
For Tagore, assuming the mantle of the nation-state without an understanding of international interdependence would never amount to more than a capitulation to the most destructive forces of modernity. His spiritual embrace of passivity and even meekness is not so easily dismissed if we understand these qualities as part of the dissection of belligerent nationalisms during the height of a world war. Rather than reject the nation tout court, he tried to imagine it without the core principles of ethnic homogeneity and economic competition.
Tagore’s apostrophes in “Sunset” reflect his ideals. They recompose the collectivity of the poem so that the boundaries of Indian society become difficult to distinguish from the boundaries of the anthology’s global audience. In the last quarter of the poem, the subject of Tagore’s address shifts quickly from “Motherland” to “India” to the more ambiguously universal “my brothers.” Certainly, this shift could be read within the contours of a solely Indian collectivity. However, when addressing India in a translated English poem targeted to non-Indians, “my brothers” likely carves out a wider field of fraternity. Tagore’s closing apostrophe aggregates India and the world “as one country”—transcendently in the poet’s spiritual vision and immanently in the apocalypse of war.
In the opening pages of Nationalism, Tagore states that the world’s oneness is a function of scientific facility; in its closing pages, he contemplates the implications of such oneness and roughens it through poetic facility. Tagore’s autotranslated “Sunset” registers the history of its transmission across languages, places, and dates. In drawing together discontinuous contextual formations, it does not transcend a location but multiplies the geographies through which it can and should be read. Such works demand a postnational approach to literary study—one that David Porter argues does away with the “Herderian assumption that every text incarnates the culture of its origin,” and instead treats a text as “always already a hybrid product of multiple origins…on its way to someplace else.”28
“Sunset” is a poem that concretely illustrates Porter’s more abstract claim. Born of the fragments of five Bengali poems arranged and translated into a single English one, its very wholeness testifies to the idea of a literature—national and worldly—made in translation. The poem violates the idea of an autarkic national literature by violating the ideal of a hermetically sealed text. These are important violations that the prefaces in Nationalism make visible as traces of a network that exceeds the printed book. Such traces mitigate the various acts of unexamined forgetting that mark the formation of both enclosed national traditions and open world literature trajectories. Tagore’s internationalism, then, is best described as one that balances trace against trajectory. Its modernist strategies of compilation and translation draw the English-language reader into an encounter with the untranslatable, the excess of the anthology’s synthesis.
INDIA UNBOUND: TRANSLATING THE HOME AND THE WORLD
In separating Tagore’s translation process from his final product, Tagore scholars miss an opportunity to account for the writer’s creative acts of self-mediation within a global literary marketplace. Tagore scholars have traditionally considered Tagore’s brief popularity in the West a side effect of orientalist fads that were themselves symptomatic of a consumer-driven imagination of and appetite for the East. In dismissing his English translations as pale copies of Bengali originals, they paradoxically uphold sociological values in the international sphere and aesthetic values in the local sphere. The story goes: Tagore’s English writings gained popularity in Europe and North America not because of their quality but because of a literary field that assigned value to them for confirming certain images of the Indian poet.
His Bengali writings, however, with their innovative forms and meters, are of transhistorical literary value. In fact, neither the local nor the global sides of Tagore’s reception can be described as purely sociological or purely aesthetic. We know of Ezra Pound’s attempts to place Tagore’s English poetics within a comparative pantheon of formal styles, and we understand Tagore’s own deeply privileged place within the Bengali world of letters, where he sponsored many of the most prominent literary magazines and was a major arbiter of aesthetic value in his own right.29
Thus, what is most interesting to consider is how Tagore, in the double role of author and translator, balances the sociological with the aesthetic by yoking formal innovation to the historical practices of reprinting, excerption, and recontextualization that marked the circulation of his works across languages and traditions. Tagore brings the historicity of literary production into the literary work, and his English translations register the changes that come with transmission across languages and audiences. More reflection than replica, as he put it, translations desacralize but do not deny origins. Indeed, Tagore tells us that we cannot adequately record the growth and alteration of texts without knowing something about the language and location in which they began. A literary and editorial analysis of the production of Nationalism shows that a work’s transformation serves as an important record of the diverse political histories and communities it can address.
Tagore’s collaborative translation of Ghare Baire (literally, Inside/Outside) as The Home and the World picks up on the themes of circulation, reception, and selectivity that Nationalism broached in its examination of nationalist ideology’s homogenizing force and autarkic definition of autonomy.30 If, at the level of method, Tagore’s autotranslations disregard the notion of an enclosed work of literature, at the level of form and theme they explore the impossibility and, moreover, the undesirability of an enclosed culture. Like Nationalism, The Home and the World opens up bounded political forms, such as the nation, by binding together different editions and translations of a “single” literary work. However, by shifting from political argument to a fictional tale of domestic and political strife, Tagore is able to situate the analysis of boundaries within a deeper exploration of various interiorities: those of individual consciousness, household design, and national belonging. He also is able to juxtapose different kinds of consumption: those of the novel’s English-language readership and the daily consumer practices and tastes of his protagonists, which become politicized during Swadeshi campaigns for Indian independence.
Tagore’s emphasis on the circulation of goods, including his own novel, across borders pushed back at prevailing nationalist discourses within colonial India that equated autonomy with the imagination of a territorially bounded state insulated from the vagaries and coercions of the world market. The pursuit of sovereignty, as Manu Goswami has shown, was framed within a peculiar logic of comparison:
Nationalist movements and nationalizing states presented themselves as universalistic within the spatial confines of a particularized national community, but as particularistic without, that is, in relation to other nations…. The doubled character of the nation form mirrored, in this respect, the spatial partitioning of the modern state system into a series of mutually exclusive, formally equivalent, sovereign states.31
Only by defining clear borders between inside and outside the national community can the nation-state declare its distinct identity—both its difference from other nations and its equivalence to them as states. As Hannah Arendt and many others after her have argued, claims to national distinction come from organic appeals to a common race or ethnicity, which ultimately compromise a liberal definition of the state as a legal and political unit uncircumscribed by ethnic or cultural affiliations.32 Although such organicism is a familiar modus operandi of nationalist discourse, what is noteworthy about Goswami’s explanation is her diagnosis of “the doubled character of the nation”: “universalistic within” and “particularistic without,” Swadeshi nationalism is a discourse grounded in “the spatial partitioning of the modern state system.” Premised not just on a Herderian cultural or racial commonality, the Swadeshi movement distinguishes itself from older European nationalisms by adopting a specifically “territorial nativism.”33 Proponents could only imagine India as a nation by first constructing it as a cartographically bounded territorial unit aligned within the world’s political geography.
The production of the Indian nation as first and foremost a bounded space took place through a variety of vernacular genres—such as novels, folk songs, and history and geography textbooks, to name a few—which displaced Mughal conceptions of geography with the positivist, cartographic imagination inherited from the colonial state apparatus. Despite deriving the borders of a future sovereign state from the territorial borders of the colony, Swadeshi nationalists attributed their geographic delimitations to the Puranas, sacred texts of Hinduism, whose citation forged a link between national territory and Hindu cultural identity. By retrieving the Indian nation as an artifact of the pre-Mughal and pre-British “Vedic era,” Swadeshi nationalism assumed an organic character that rendered Hinduism synonymous with Indianness and relegated Islam and Englishness to the status of foreign pollutants.34 Swadeshi campaigns to boycott foreign goods reinforced territorial nativism by touting the disjunctive presence of foreign, colonial capital within a newly imagined national territory. By promoting indigenous industry over and against imported commodities, these campaigns aligned political autonomy not just with economic protection from the inequalities of an imperially mediated global market but also with a vision of national coherence defined by the isomorphism of territory, economy, and identity. In simpler terms, the need for economic insulation begot the desire for cultural insularity as well. Regulating domestic consumption made it easier to separate the nation’s insiders from its outsiders, rightful inhabitants from foreign intruders.
Against the Swadeshi movement’s historical closing down and homogenizing of the national community, The Home and the World offers a narrative decisively about the production of India as an unbounded nation forged by the history of multiple colonialisms (particularly that of the Mughals and the British). In his nonfiction and his pursuits of institutional reform, Tagore would call this vision of India Visva-Bharati (“World-India”). It proffered a rhetorical alternative to the nationalist slogans “Bharat Mata” (“Mother India”) and “Bande Mataram” (“Hail, Mother”), the latter a patriotic song taken from Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Bengali novel Anandamath (1882). Whereas Bankim, widely recognized as the father of the Bengali novel, indigenized the genre as a vehicle for promoting national feeling,35 in Ghare Baire, Tagore disrupts the association between novels and nationalism by recontextualizing Bankim’s patriotic song as a mantra of unthinking obeisance. Bande Mataram and swadeshi are among the few untranslated words in Home and the World, and their untranslatability carries the effect of aligning nationalist language with the particularism that it promoted to the world beyond India. The rest of the novel, however, unmoors the steady division of home and world, nationalism and internationalism. Like Tagore’s coined phrase “Visva-Bharati,” Home and the World suggests, in both theme and translated form, that “India” is produced in its encounter with that which is thought to be outside it.
When Ghare Baire entered into the realm of world literature as The Home and the World, the contact zone of India and “world” registered in the play of text and paratexts. Rabindranath and Surendranath footnoted their translation for foreign readers, but as Home and the World has been reprinted—for instance, in both the Penguin Classics and Macmillan India editions—these footnotes have survived as part of the original translation and consequently as part of the original text, with subsequent translators’ notes becoming the new paratexts.36 The Tagores’ footnotes are simultaneously textual and paratextual. As the life of Home and the World lengthens and widens, these footnotes become more firmly entrenched within the main text and build the Tagores’ metatextual awareness of audience and reception into the diegesis of Home and the World itself.
This awareness asserts itself in the first line of the novel: “Mother, today there comes back to mind the vermillion mark1 at the parting of your hair, the sari2 which you used to wear, with its wide red border, and those wonderful eyes of yours, full of depth and peace” (italics in the text). Footnote 1 glosses “the vermillion mark” as “the mark of Hindu wifehood and the symbol of all the devotion that it implies.” Footnote 2 glosses “sari,” a Sanskrit word, as “the dress of the Hindu woman.”37 The footnotes assume a Western reader unfamiliar with Hindu culture and dress, and inject an ethnographic dimension into Bimala’s first-person interior monologue about her struggle to reconcile traditional wifely devotion with the desire of her husband, Nikhil, for a “modern” companionate marriage based on equality and romantic love. The footnoted opening line turns a domestic conflict, privately contemplated, into a scene of translation in which interiority and ethnography disrupt one another. Such a crossing of first-person intimacy with third-person detachment destabilizes the location of readers to the character whose mind we both inhabit and find glossed. The mixture of text and paratext produces an effect akin to free indirect discourse in that it introduces ambiguities of perspective and proximity into the narrative’s exposition.
The double gesture of offering the reader access to its characters’ interiorities and then preemptively contextualizing those interiorities as culturally foreign situates the English-language reader of Home and the World as both inside and outside the community of the novel. A helpful term for describing this relation is James Clifford’s “participant analyst.”38 In defining the participant analyst, Clifford speaks of a subject position that both engages an existing cultural tradition and has a hand in constructing it. That construction, in order to be recognized as a construction, requires the participant analyst’s negotiation of her proximity to her object of study, and further, her awareness of her own position as constructed through that proximity rather than prior to it. The Tagores’ footnotes create their reader as a textual insider and a cultural outsider to India, regardless of who the reader is before encountering the novel. To occupy the reader identity constructed by Home and the World is to participate in and analyze the novel’s theory of international belonging. The construction of the imagined reader as a textual insider and a cultural outsider illustrates how the territories of “home” and “world” overlap and coconstitute one another.
Of course, the novel’s real readers are not the same as its imagined ones, and the tepid reception of Home and the World in Europe speaks to that disjunction. Georg Lukács’s famously negative review condemned the novel on political grounds, wrongly accusing Tagore of collaborating with Britain by caricaturing Gandhi through the figure of Sandip.39 In oppositional times, the complexity of Tagore’s political vision did not meet Lukács’s standards of anticolonial dissent. E. M. Forster, though more generous, also found the novel lacking:
When a writer of Tagore’s genius produces such a sentence as “Passion is beautiful and pure—pure as the lily that comes out of the slimy soil; it rises superior to its defilement and needs no Pears’ soap to wash it clean”—he raises some interesting questions. The sentence is not attractive—in fact, it is a Babu sentence—and what does Tagore, generally so attractive, intend by it? Is he being dramatic, and providing a Babu of his creation with appropriate English, or is he being satirical, or was there some rococo charm that had vanished in the translation, or is it an experiment that has not quite come off? Probably an experiment, for throughout the book one is puzzled by bad tastes that verge upon bad taste.40
Whereas Lukács dismisses Tagore’s novel on the grounds of politics, Forster dismisses it on the grounds of style. His account is revealing as a metropolitan indictment of Indian English and as a reflection of the colonial stereotype it conjures. Forster’s distaste for Tagore’s “Babu sentences” has as much to do with Forster’s orientalized desire for India as it does with Tagore’s idiom and sentence structure. In the course of switching genres (from poetry to the novel) and themes (from religious devotion to earthly love and nationalist politics), Tagore, the lyrical mystic of Gitanjali, recasts himself, in Forster’s eyes, as a prosaic babu. His sentences are rebuffed as vessels of a derogatory colonial stereotype, an illustration of the obsequious failure of the Bengali novelist to imitate an English literary form.
Forster’s lackluster reception of The Home and the World as a “babu” novel reminds us of the field of social relations in which something as aspiringly disinterested as literary value operates. As a work of world literature, Home and the World does not circulate easily into another language or literary culture. Instead, it generates an aesthetic distaste (“bad tastes that verge upon bad taste”) that is inseparable from its dubious nationalism (for Lukács) and nationality (for Forster). When the novel, like a colonial subject, cannot be neatly categorized as either “Indian” or “English,” utterly exotic or fully assimilated, at least two of its more renowned readers are confused and even repulsed by the indistinction.
My point here is not to defend Home and the World by attacking Lukács’s and Forster’s culturally hegemonic standards. Rather, I am interested in using the terms of the novel’s negative reception, particularly Forster’s yoking of taste and ethnic stereotype, to bring into relief the novel’s own analyses of consumption and display and the relationship of these to the production of identity. If the translated idiom of Home and the World offended the sensibilities of British English, it felicitously illustrated at least one message of the novel: taste is conditioned by nationality (Forster’s Englishness shapes his dislike of Home and the World), but nationality, or the destabilization of it, also can be conditioned by taste (Home and the World’s “babuness” is an effect of its bad taste, not of its country of origin).
Tagore establishes the link between taste and the production of identity in the novel through his protagonists’ interior monologues, which recall and reflect upon disputes about the distribution, consumption, and display of commodities. One such scene, recollected by Sandip, focuses on obstacles to his Swadeshi campaign’s goal of spreading the boycott of foreign-made goods. His disciple Amulya reports how Hindu campaigners burned a Muslim trader’s ornate and colorful “German-made shawls.” He then raises doubts about the ethics and effectiveness of such tactics: “Should we be so rigorous in our boycott of foreign flannels and merinos” given that “there is no such thing as cheap and gaudy Indian woolen stuff” (Home and the World [HW], 113)? Amulya sees German shawls as reflective of consumer tastes in general; however, Sandip responds by separating Hindus from Muslims through distinctions in taste. A love of country, which Hindus have, conflicts with a love for “gaily coloured” shawls.
Sandip’s version of swadeshi thus replicates imperialism’s divide-and-conquer tactics by obscuring the messy details of class-based consumption beneath a religious divide. Buying foreign, which was in fact cheaper and therefore appealing to many in the lower classes, ossifies into a stereotype of Muslim decadence, whereas locally made woolens become synonymous with a righteous Hinduism. When Sandip responds that revolution is “not the time to think of looks,” the novel indicates that “looks” is exactly what tests overly coherent constructions of patriotism along ethnic lines.
Looks, or artful display, play an equally significant role when we move from Sandip’s discussion of cloth to the drawing room of Bimala and Nikhil, wherein foreign and domestically made goods exist side by side. Bimala prefers ornate English-style goods and rues her husband’s taste for the minimal:
My husband still sharpens his Indian-made pencils with his Indian-made knife, does his writing with reed pens, drinks his water out of a ball-metal vessel, and works at night in the light of an old-fashioned castor-oil lamp. …We had always felt ashamed of the inelegant, unfashionable furniture of his reception-rooms.
(HW, 95)
Bimala goes on to say that when European guests came, she often would replace Nikhil’s brass pots with European-made crystal vases, leading Nikhil to respond “that brass pot is as unconscious of itself as those blossoms are; but this thing [the vase] protests its purpose so loudly, it is only fit for artificial flowers.”
Despite Nikhil’s claims to guilelessness and moderation, Bimala’s description suggests that his tastes are equally affected and constitute, perversely, a form of ostentatious asceticism. Nikhil objects to a crystal vase on the grounds of loudness, yet to prefer a brass pot, “unconscious of itself,” shows how self-conscious he is about the connection between taste and political affiliation. Taste thus determines what is domestic or foreign to the household, rather than the material fact of where the object was made—whether England, India, Germany, or anywhere else.
In detailing how a gaudy cloth becomes Muslim, a brass pot becomes Hindu, and a crystal vase becomes English, Tagore shows how aesthetic preference, usually a feature of one’s individuality, becomes an index of national character and ethnic stereotype. His descriptions of “reception-rooms,” threshold spaces within the architecture of the home, establish how processes of domestication and foreignization work: Although several kinds of foreign objects exist within every domestic setting, some become more visible than others. As characters establish what is glaring within the home and what is unassuming, they reproduce and consolidate the ethnic stereotypes of outsiders (Muslim and English) and insiders (Hindu).
By focusing on material objects and the rhetoric of their display, Tagore refuses to vilify Indians’ shared vanities as Muslim luxuries or to promulgate Hindu identity as synonymous with the sacrifice of luxury. Swadeshi campaigns may have objected to what they deemed foreign capital, but they had no problems with capital itself. Indeed, the Swadeshi movement defined autonomy through capital accumulation. For Tagore, such an anticolonial strategy shored up inequality rather than restructuring Indian society, and thus it allowed the dream of the nation to mask the hegemonic practices of Hindu nationalism and elide the social reform to which he committed himself.
We see this if we return to the excerpt of The Home and the World that Forster quoted—not for its reflection upon the reviewer but for the subject that it treats. The line “Passion is beautiful and pure—pure as the lily that comes out of the slimy soil; it rises superior to its defilement and needs no Pears’ soap to wash it clean” (HW, 81) is from Sandip’s interior monologue, and it expresses his wish to liberate India not only from English rule but also from English taste. That taste is registered literally and symbolically in Pears soap. Sandip’s invocation of Pears shows the extent to which Swadeshi nationalist sentiment (metaphorized by the lily) organized itself around an economic and cultural emancipation from English commodities, yet the larger declaration reveals his internalization of the discourses of purity and dirt that English ideologies of domesticity perpetuate.
The distinct mention of the Pears brand is no accident on Tagore’s part, for it emphasizes the Englishness of the product and its concomitant imperial associations. Indeed, he and Surendranath changed the brand of soap for the English edition, from Vinolia, in Ghare Baire, to the more iconic Pears. As Anne McClintock has shown, Pears’s advertising campaign was infamous for framing the imperial project as a civilizing mission enhanced by the rituals of cleanliness and purity. Writing in reference to how Pears soap helped consolidate English national identity, McClintock also points to its pivotal role in imperialism’s “cult of domesticity,” which spread far beyond the traditionally feminized space of the home to the colonial peripheries.41 Sandip’s allusion to Pears enables Tagore to comment on domesticity—in McClintock’s enlarged sense of the term—as a relation of power predicated on disciplining colonized peoples.
Sandip’s rejection of Pears for its English iconicity initially makes sense as a resistance to such disciplining, yet Tagore suggests that Sandip’s thought process only reinforces his “wholesale appropriation” (to recall that key phrase from Nationalism) of a Western-style militarism and materialism. He wants to expel the product, but he accepts and even admires the market and social logic that makes it available. Whereas Sandip uses Pears to clarify distinctions between an invasive Englishness (the soap) and an organically rooted Indianness (the lily), Tagore shows that Sandip’s inward identification with capitalist modernity translates imperial values into his nationalist campaign:
Life is indefinite—a bundle of contradictions. We men, with our ideas, strive to give it a particular shape by melting it into a particular mould—into the definiteness of success. All the world conquerors, from Alexander down to American millionaires, mould themselves into a sword or a mint, and thus find the distinct image of themselves which is the source of their success.
(HW, 80)
This passage ironically reveals Sandip’s nationalism to be as outward looking as Nikhil’s appreciation of an English education and companionate marriage. Sandip values definiteness and distinction as a model of personal and national selfhood, and he looks to insert himself into the pantheon of world conquerors, from Alexander to American millionaires. Although he never praises the British directly, he aspires to imperial might and cleaves to the clarity of “a sword or a mint” to alleviate the “hideous confusion” (HW, 81) that marks life in the colony. Fittingly enough, Tagore’s placement of Pears soap within Sandip’s corrupted logic muddies rather than cleanses, increasing the instability of icons of domesticity at a time when the Swadeshi movement sought to clarify the definition of domestic goods and domestic partnerships (i.e., marriage) as a way of clarifying definitions of the proper way to be Indian.42
The Home and the World shows that the economic expulsion of English goods does not solve the larger problems posed by swadeshi’s redirection (not rejection) of consumption to indigenous goods. As capital is de-Anglicized and made a property of national identity, the hideous confusion of colonial modernity gives way to the clear vision of an Indian state with Indian goods. Yet this clarity, Tagore suggests, comes at the cost of coercion when regulating taste consolidates ethnocentric paradigms of national culture. Rather than avoid confusion, he amplifies it in his depiction of the Bengali home’s interiors. Describing the drawing room in particular as “a thing amphibious—half women’s apartment, half men’s” (HW, 36)—Tagore uses the liminal spaces of the traditional household to push back against the pull of definiteness. If the drawing room is the threshold between ghare (inside) and baire (outside), Tagore uses its “amphibiousness,” its quality of occupying two states of being at once, to model an attitude toward cultural habitation that is different from that of any of his protagonists. The changing patterns of the drawing room as both a designed and an actively lived-in space become an index of the vernacular processes that disrupt the partitions of ethnic and gender identity.
In the amphibious room, as in the translated novel, cultural settings are not found but are made through the activities of their occupants (recall my classification of the reader as a participant analyst). The characters’ strategies of decoration and design reveal a lifestyle that cannot be described as Indian without first constructing an “elsewhere”—what the Bengali novel calls “outside” and the English translation calls “the world.” Tagore draws on the amphibious reality of colonial culture for the historical grounding of his internationalism. He asks that the confusion of everyday life in the colony, however hideous or anxiety inducing, be written into the definition of the Indian nation rather than disavowed beneath the atavistic rhetoric of a motherland.
Given that taste plays such a vital role in the articulation (and frustration) of collective identity in both the plot of The Home and the World and its international reception, it seems right to consider the faculty of taste in more detail. Arendt, drawing on Immanuel Kant, argues that taste exerts an unexpectedly political force because it is a faculty of judgment that is not strictly private. Rather, it requires the judging person to anticipate a public realm in which taste will guide communion with others. The notion that taste might be primarily thought of as a collective impulse is counterintuitive, given conventional understandings of taste as a marker of the personal and even idiosyncratic. Against the popular adage “There is no accounting for taste,” Arendt argues, it is precisely the accounting that creates taste as a political judgment and makes it an arbiter of collectivity:
To classify taste, the chief cultural activity, among man’s political abilities sounds so strange that I may add another much more familiar but theoretically little-regarded fact to these considerations. We know very well how quickly people recognize each other, and how unequivocally they can feel they belong to each other, when they discover a kinship in questions of what pleases and displeases. From the viewpoint of this common experience, it is as though taste not only decides how the world is to look, but also who belongs together in it.43
When Sandip and Nikhil attribute gaudy tastes to Muslims and reserved tastes to Hindus, they are deciding how India is to look and who belongs together in it. Both make their claims for taste in the presence of others—most notably Bimala—in an effort to “woo the consent” of their interlocutors.44 Kant’s language of love, quoted by Arendt here, aptly reminds us that persuasion is a gentle art that requires romance as well as rational argument. This captures, in a nutshell, the double plot of The Home and the World: it is a love triangle that is also a competition in persuasion. Sandip and Nikhil both desire that Bimala will share his taste, which is a reflection of the ethical and political values of each man. Sandip emerges as corrupt in the novel not because he is a nationalist but because he deceives, manipulates, and eventually coerces in order to persuade; Nikhil retains his nobility not because he is cosmopolitan, as Martha Nussbaum has argued,45 but because he wishes for Bimala to choose him freely, to consent to his judgment in both politics and love.
Yet, as Bruce Robbins has observed, Nikhil’s attempts to liberate Bimala from the position of worshipping wife and transform her into a consenting partner only end up reflecting the patriarchal structure of their marriage, in which Nikhil hopes Bimala will freely choose wife-hood rather than assume it as a fait accompli.46 Nikhil is a more ethical wooer, but even he cannot change the social conditions that make persuasion in the novel an imperfect expression of Kant’s and Arendt’s ideal of a freely aggregated collectivity based on shared taste. In asking readers to understand taste as a bridge between the individual and the collective, and between the vernacular practices of the drawing room and the strategic politics of nationalism, Tagore is also asking us to see ethnic distinctions as artifacts of aesthetic judgment. But that aesthetic judgment is always subject to sociological factors beyond a single person’s control.
The case of The Home and the World clarifies how Tagore’s interest in the circulation of material objects, including his own books, shapes his theory of aesthetic judgment’s role in forging collective identities. Bimala and Nikhil’s and Sandip and Amulya’s disputes over the distribution and display of commodities turn those products into cultural objects that signify autochthony or foreignness—or, in the novel’s parlance, home or world. By displaying their strategies of appraisal in Home and the World, Tagore undermines the topologies of swadeshi’s territorial nativism. The categorical distinctions of “Hindu,” “Muslim,” and “English” become the results rather than the conditions of taste.
Maulana Mohamed Ali, the editor of the Calcutta newspaper the Comrade and later president of both the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, helps us to see the importance of Tagore’s meditations on taste for the ethnically conflicted milieu of colonial India. His 1912 article “The Communal Patriot” posits the rise of communalism as an aporetic feature of the desire for a nation-state, or what he calls “territorial nationality”:
[The Hindu communal patriot] refuses to give quarter to the Muslims unless the latter quietly shuffles off his individuality and becomes completely Hinduised. He knows, of course, the words “India” and “territorial nationality” and they form an important part of his vocabulary. But the Muslims weigh on his consciousness …and he would thank his stars if some great exodus or even a geological cataclysm could give him riddance.
The Muslim “communal patriot” owes his origin to a very different set of circumstances. …The spectacle of a go-ahead Hinduism, dreaming of self-government and playing with its ancient gods clad in the vesture of democracy, dazed the conservative Muslim who was just shaking himself free from the paralyzing grip of the past. …He felt as if he were being treated as an alien, as a meddlesome freak, who had wantonly interfered with the course of Indian History.47
In describing patriotism as “communal,” Ali suggests there are always competing versions of it. Nationalist unity reveals itself as a pseudouniversality rather than a genuine one, and territorial nationality promises to give form to an exclusivist Hindu spirit. The desire for a Muslim exodus, which Ali attributes to the Hindu communal patriot, is a desire that Tagore would explain, in that same year, as symptomatic of Hindu nationalism’s “idolatry of geography.”48 Tagore argued that, by fueling a longing for an organic connection in which a people would become identical with a territory, Hindu nationalism rendered “Indian” spirit into a dangerous and inflexible spatial abstraction that demanded both closed borders and a homogeneous population.
Indeed, communal patriotism’s language of formal abstraction returns at the end of The Home and the World, when Nikhil, guilty over Bimala’s thefts on behalf of the Swadeshi movement, blames himself for her actions: “There was a despotism in my desire to mould my relations with Bimala in a hard, clear-cut, perfect form. But man’s life was not meant to be cast in a mould. And if we try to shape the good, as so much mere material, it takes a terrible revenge by losing its life” (HW, 197). When Nikhil detects “despotism” within his attempts to persuade Bimala, he couches his guilt in the language of a rigid spatial abstraction that haunts the conclusion of the novel. Nikhil speaks these words before rushing, possibly fatally, to stop a Muslim riot that has broken out on his land in response to Sandip’s fostering of communal tensions.
The novel’s tragic ending is significant because it suggests the bleak but still undetermined future of a colony seeking sovereignty on the basis of territorial nativism. The specter of a “hard, clear-cut, perfect form” transposes the breakdown of Nikhil and Bimala’s marriage onto the breakdown of Hindu–Muslim relations in the novel. Although Tagore could not have known what his novel presaged, his use of formal abstraction foreshadows the crucible of partition, in which hard, clear-cut forms drawn on maps would result in the destruction of families in so much real-world violence.
Though The Home and the World remains suspicious of the definiteness and distinction that aesthetic and communal form confers, the ending of the book does not abandon the potential for meaning embedded in most notions of form. Rather, it solicits a new, more chimeric theory of form—one that, in altering perceptions about the perfection of an aesthetic object, might also change expectations for the unity and cohesion of a political community. More powerfully, Home and the World exemplifies the theory of form it promotes. The translated novel grafts together what look like firm oppositions—home and world, Bengali and English, the aesthetic and the sociological, creation and reception—in order to tell a story of nationalist politics in an internationalist way.
VISVA-BHARATI
Tagore’s writings contest the sorts of cohesion that he understood nationalism to demand, both within India and beyond it, as the dominant ideology of political self-definition throughout the world. As Nationalism and The Home and the World show, Tagore was unwilling to suspend inconvenient truths about militarized nationalism, communalism, and marriage in the name of revolutionary goals. Such a legacy makes Tagore himself an inconvenient figure within Indian colonial history; many would rather remember him as the composer of two national anthems (India’s and Bangladesh’s) than as a fervent critic of the nation.
Nonetheless, Tagore’s theories and practices of translation are especially worth remembering as part of an anticolonial cosmopolitics, because they show the limits of partition and autarky as solutions to questions of power and inequality at several scales (local, national, and global) and of several types (ethnic/religious, linguistic, metropolitan versus colonial). Rather than isolate Indian literature and culture in the name of a national organicism, Tagore developed a style of translation that, in defying aesthetic presumptions about the boundaries of a literary work, enabled him to defy political presumptions about the boundaries of a community’s identity.
More than simply representing the material conditions by which his works circulate, translation, compilation, and editing, in Tagore’s hands, become modernist strategies of collage and defamiliarization. He used them to dispute not only the self-sufficiency of national literature but also the frictionless exchangeability of a Wellsian world literature propelled by the utopian dream of a universal language. Tagore’s collaborative translations and autotranslations suture together disparate ideas about production (i.e., authorship and translation) and location (i.e., nationality and worldliness) to puncture utopian internationalist equations of commonality with universality.
Yet they do not back away from promoting their own impossible vision of collective life, in which translatability and illegibility coincide as reciprocal features of global consciousness. The paradoxical communication of opacity in Tagore’s translations lends analytical force and perhaps even modest material existence to his aspirational abstraction of Visva-Bharati (World-India). They illustrate that national-cultural difference is not a stage to be transcended in a progressivist view of political transition but a density to be achieved through continuous traffic with a wider world.
Beginning with the translations of his Bengali poems, Tagore found himself privileging theories of literary networks and versioning over theories of the singular and auratic work of art. Chafing against hermetic ideas of literary form and national tradition, he devised editorial and translated forms that would address multiple audiences and draw those audiences into the analysis of cross-cultural dialogue. For Tagore, modernist acts of transfer brought definition to an Indian internationalism in which the dream of postcolonial sovereignty would not preclude the circulation of mixed cultures or the diffusion of political solidarities beyond the nation. It would require them.