Tagore, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism: Perceptions, Contestations and Contemporary Relevance., 2020
The present article deals with the subject of the literary manifestation of the result of repress... more The present article deals with the subject of the literary manifestation of the result of repression, embedded in the psyche of a discursively produced nationalist self, which is an integral part of the project of “narrating the nation,”. To analyse the issue I have selected one of Tagore’s most popular stories, “Hungry Stone,”(1895). In “Hungry Stone,” the narrator and his friend listen to a paranormal tale from a stranger during a chance encounter at a railway station, a situation somewhat similar to that of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The storyteller’s tale in “Hungry Stone” has a Chinese-box like structure. It gradually unfolds in the manner of a tale within a tale. But, unfortunately, in the end, listeners do not get to hear a complete string of stories as the train arrives and they have to bid adieu to the storyteller. For my argument, the motif of a storyteller telling a tale – a storyteller who is a Scheherazade-like figure – is very important. Through tellings and re-tellings of a story, experience passes on from generation to generation; the hallmark of any “oral tradition.” “Hungry Stone,” in this context, is a tale in which the experience of “two hundred and fifty years,” of India’s close, intricate relationship with the Muslim culture, experience that is repressed in the dominant nationalist discourse bursts forth. In my analysis of the story I shall refer to Sigmund Freud’s celebrated essay, “The Uncanny” and try to point out the intricate relationship that, according to Freud, exists between the process of repression and the feeling which he labels as the “uncanny.”
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Papers by Dipankar Roy
The Extremist Movement, in a rather straight-forward manner, forms the backdrop of the novel. In fact, the first edition of Char Adhyay (1934) carried an 'Abhash' ('Pre-text') by Tagore in which there is a direct reference to Upadhyay. Words and expressions like man, manliness, bravery, valour and the like galore in this text. The discursive treatment of manhood has an important corollary in the text: violence. The dialogism that we witness between Indranath and Atin in this novel is significantly different from the same feature noticed in Tagore's other texts. Unlike other texts, here, Indranath and Atin do not engage in direct 'wit-combats'. In texts like Gora and Ghare Baire prototypes of 'nationalist self' like Gora and Sandip fail to fundamentally change the natures of their 'doubles'. In Char Adhyay we see the 'verbal-ideological worlds' of Indranath and Atin ultimately coalesce. Atin turns swadharmabhrashto and swabhabchyuto (fallen from one's own nature) in the end when he tries to follow Indranath's instruction to erase Ela permanently. The link that finally binds Indranath and Atin is violence.
The primary objective of the paper is to show how, for Tagore, as his association with Baul songs and Baul way of life became deeper and deeper with the passage of time, the Baul-world (‘Baulsphere’) gradually emerged as a powerful metaphor: a metaphor which served him as a model for a juster, more perfect form of human community.
By setting his novel in ‘the tide country’ of the Sundarbans, by selecting characters in an ‘across the board’ fashion, by incorporating both the temporality of ‘state history’ and the longue duree of the world of nature, by intermixing the scientistic discourse of ecology of a region and the mythical perceptions of the nature of the man-animal relationship by a group of people-- Ghosh, in this novel, takes the reader to the unfathomable mohona of ‘representations’, beyond the ‘limits’ of ‘ordinary’ experience.
Since all representations are, in a way, acts of translations, I would like to look at the novel as Ghosh’s attempt to translate the ontology of a culture in a language which is not its own. I shall try to show how Ghosh’s search for what Walter Benjamin calls a ‘pure language’ to capture the marvel called ‘life’ becomes poignant through an intricate crisscrossing of myriad discursive formations and narrative modes.
The Extremist Movement, in a rather straight-forward manner, forms the backdrop of the novel. In fact, the first edition of Char Adhyay (1934) carried an 'Abhash' ('Pre-text') by Tagore in which there is a direct reference to Upadhyay. Words and expressions like man, manliness, bravery, valour and the like galore in this text. The discursive treatment of manhood has an important corollary in the text: violence. The dialogism that we witness between Indranath and Atin in this novel is significantly different from the same feature noticed in Tagore's other texts. Unlike other texts, here, Indranath and Atin do not engage in direct 'wit-combats'. In texts like Gora and Ghare Baire prototypes of 'nationalist self' like Gora and Sandip fail to fundamentally change the natures of their 'doubles'. In Char Adhyay we see the 'verbal-ideological worlds' of Indranath and Atin ultimately coalesce. Atin turns swadharmabhrashto and swabhabchyuto (fallen from one's own nature) in the end when he tries to follow Indranath's instruction to erase Ela permanently. The link that finally binds Indranath and Atin is violence.
The primary objective of the paper is to show how, for Tagore, as his association with Baul songs and Baul way of life became deeper and deeper with the passage of time, the Baul-world (‘Baulsphere’) gradually emerged as a powerful metaphor: a metaphor which served him as a model for a juster, more perfect form of human community.
By setting his novel in ‘the tide country’ of the Sundarbans, by selecting characters in an ‘across the board’ fashion, by incorporating both the temporality of ‘state history’ and the longue duree of the world of nature, by intermixing the scientistic discourse of ecology of a region and the mythical perceptions of the nature of the man-animal relationship by a group of people-- Ghosh, in this novel, takes the reader to the unfathomable mohona of ‘representations’, beyond the ‘limits’ of ‘ordinary’ experience.
Since all representations are, in a way, acts of translations, I would like to look at the novel as Ghosh’s attempt to translate the ontology of a culture in a language which is not its own. I shall try to show how Ghosh’s search for what Walter Benjamin calls a ‘pure language’ to capture the marvel called ‘life’ becomes poignant through an intricate crisscrossing of myriad discursive formations and narrative modes.