By Victor A. van Bijlert
A new impulse to produce better translations of and to encourage a less mawkish involvement with
Tagore arose in the mid-eighties. The first fruits of this new preoccupation can be seen in the recent
works published by such people as William Radice (1987; 1991), Martin Kämpchen (1989; 1990),
and Ketaki Kushari Dyson (1991). As Tagore was and still is known mainly as a poet, these translations
are for the most part (on the whole rather well executed) renderings of poetry.
But Tagore wrote more than poems and songs, more than short stories, novels, travelogues, plays and
letters. As a perceptive intellectual of his times he also commented on politics, social questions and
religious and cultural matters in numerous essays and lectures. This body of religious, cultural and
political writings has been little studied so far, in spite of the fact that it made an important contribution
to the canon of Bengali nationalist literature of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, a truth
to which Tapan Raychaudhuri in his book Europe Reconsidered, Perceptions of the West in
Nineteenth Century Bengal, (1988) frankly testifies (Preface, p xii).
Subaltern Studies
Also in the two recent books by Partha Chatterjee (1993 2nd ed.; 1993) on Bengali and Indian
nationalism in the colonial nineteenth century we find only scant reference to Tagore. Chatterjee,
belonging to the prestigious historiographical school of the Subaltern Studies and now one
of the editors of the volumes bearing the same name, prefers to analyse the conceptualizations of Indian
nationalism by the earlier great Bengali writer Bankimchandra (1838-1894). In this Chatterjee follows the
current postmodern, text-based trend of writing cultural history within the Subaltern Studies. The latter's
founder, Ranajit Guha, frequently refers to Bankimchandra, while Sudipta Kaviraj, also belonging to the
Subaltern Studies group, has devoted a fresh study to this writer.
The above-mentioned niche of Subaltern Studies seems to be meandering along slowly to join the field
of Cultural Studies proper. The latter is a multidisciplinary attempt at writing and interpreting human
culture. After it sprang up formally in Birmingham at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and
gained importance in the seventies, it is now rising to prominence in the North American, and Australian
human sciences. Largely an outcome of the postmodern experience, it seems to hold out credible but
heavily contested promises to build novel and creative passages towards a more refined, if fragmented,
understanding of how cultural production comes about and what forces make it 'work' in human
societies.
Its early theoretical 'canon' of Cultural Studies embraces among other schools Marxism, the Frankfurter
Schule, English literary theory and a bit of classical Anarchist thought, as well as authors like Clifford
Geertz, Bourdieu, and Stuart Hall. This canon is now expanding in various directions and incorporates
many new fields of sociological and historical study such as women's and minority studies. The most
recent unfolding of Cultural Studies can be grasped from a number of anthologies, among which the ones
edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler (1992); Simon During (1993); and Valda
Blundell, John Shepherd, Ian Taylor (1993), are the more prominent. The monographs by Norman K.
Denzin (1992) and Fred Inglis (1993) offer vigorously critical and historical surveys of the entire field.
The Leiden Tagore Projects
The Leiden projects on Tagore, which are conducted by myself, draw critically upon the theoretical
frameworks and possibilities offered by both the Subaltern Studies and Cultural Studies. Thus the present
Tagore projects will be drawn into the orbits of these fields. This will widen the horizons of the study
of Bengali culture as well as those of Cultural Studies as a whole. Fragments of Tagore's poetry,
nationalist and religious thought will be presented in this light as instances of Bengali cultural
studies.
The first result, to appear in the course of 1995, is a translation from Bengali into Dutch of the
Gitali (1914), a volume of Tagore's poetry which has hitherto been translated into English
only once, and that somewhat poorly. The Gitali is the last of three consecutive volumes of which the
first, Gitanjali (1910), partly paraphrased into English by Tagore himself in 1912, brought
his fame to the attention of the Western world. My translation of the Gitali will appear in the series 'Kern
Institute Miscellenea'.
This literary presentation will soon be followed by two studies in English. The first one (with translations
from various Bengali sources) will deal with the constructions of nineteenth century Indian nationalism,
understood by its protagonists as being of a predominantly Hindu-cultural character, and its diverse
ideological and political perspectives within the context of the British Raj. This volume will bring to light
certain aspects of the (cultural) nationalism of this period, which neither Tapan Raychaudhuri, Partha
Chatterjee, nor Sudipta Kaviraj have treated in detail in their respective explorations.
Around the turn of the century Tagore wrote with penetrating insight about European nationalism and its
relevance to the Indian reality. Tagore wrote in a period in which what Benedict Anderson (1993) calls
'print capitalism' was already well established in India. The printed word had become a major vehicle
for spreading ideology among the educated middle class, using not only English, but also the
vernaculars. By means of the printed word Tagore tried to disseminate a distinctive brand of nationalism
in which cultural theories, (mainly liberal Hindu) religious inspiration, historical imagination as well as
invention and humanist ethos blended almost inseparably.
This blend with its shifting accents forms the subject of the second publication. It will contain a full
English translation from Bengali with annotations of Dharma, a volume of Tagore's early
religious essays, published in book form in 1908. In these essays Tagore construes a national religious
ideology with different strands, ranging from utterly individualistic religious experience to broad concepts
of a unitary Indian nation whose predominant flavour is humanist religious and spiritual. The exercise
of translation and annotation (a rather traditional performance) is refined by commentatorial readings of
the texts themselves. These readings will highlight some disturbing problems of the original texts and
pose some disagreeable questions about the texts. It will be underscored that these problems and questions
have not lost much of their historical and social pertinence.
Among the more agonizing problems is the present rise of religious political discourse, commonly
labelled fundamentalism and communalism. But also nationalism with its seeming pretensions to secular
religiosity shakes the (post)modern worldview down to its very roots. Within the context of modern
Indian political and cultural history, I will extract the genealogy of these phenomena right back to the
period in which Tagore was active. This will to some extent enable us to gain a better understanding of
the way in which Indian cultural productions exerted their influence in colonial society and in whose
interest, and how various politically motivated readings of the same cultural product evokes different
responses and different re-readings.
Anderson, Benedict 1993 2nd ed: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism. London - New York: Verso.
Chatterjee, Partha 1993 2nd ed: Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A
Derivative Discourse. London: Zed Books.
Denzin, Norman K. 1992: Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies: The Politics
of Interpretation. Oxford UK and Cambridge USA: Blackwell.
During, Simon ed 1993: The Cultural Studies Reader. London, New York:
Routledge.
Dyson, Ketaki Kushari 1991: Rabindranath Tagore: I Won't Let You Go, Selected
Poems. Bloodaxe Books.
Grossberg, Lawrence; Nelson, Cary; Treichler, Paula eds. 1992: Cultural
Studies. London, New York: Routledge.
Inglis, Fred 1993: Cultural Studies. Oxford UK and Cambridge USA:
Blackwell.
Kämpchen, Martin 1989: Auf des Funkens Spitzen, Weisheiten
für das Leben. Kösel Verlag.
Radice, William 1987: Selected Poems, Rabindranath Tagore. Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books.
1991: Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Short Stories. Translated with Introduction
by William Radice. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
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