Abstract
The ideas of work and leisure, utility and uselessness formed parts of a broad discursive framework in the late-nineteenth–early-twentieth-century Indian colonial-nationalist context. The western capitalist and utilitarian discourses sought to inculcate in the indigenous people certain notions of work that were byproducts of the dominant enlightenment modernity and therefore did not rest in an easy co-existence with the existing Indian ideas of time, history, progress and society. While such alien notions of the useful and the useless were instrumental in ushering in the discourse of the nation and a state-centric social formation in this part of the world, they also were engendering certain dubious notions of gender and morality that informed the world of aesthetics. The present article would argue that Rabindranath Tagore’s music located itself in the realm of the ‘useless’ and the wonderful. His music seems to uphold an alternative regional modernity through working out certain tenets of the Swadeshi Samāj —Rabindranath’s Indian alternative to the western idea of the nation— that started to fall apart with the advent of colonialism and World-history in this part of the world. Our reception of this musical legacy today is thus informed by our participation in this hybrid modernity.
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Notes
- 1.
This and other subsequent translations from original Bangla texts, unless otherwise mentioned, are mine.
- 2.
- 3.
Samir Sengupta mentions eighteen of Rabindranath’s songs Vivekananda liked. Ten of these were included in his edited anthology of contemporary songs, Sangeetakalpataru (1887), five mentioned in Srisrirāmakrishnakathāmrita and three sung by the ascetic in Kashi probably in 1888 (Sengupta 2007, pp. 36–48). Of these eighteen, four are patriotic songs, categorized in Gitabitān as ‘Jātiya Sangeet’ (nationalist songs), four Brahmasangeets, three come under the ‘Pujā o Prārthanā’ (prayer and worship) category; three belong to the subcategories ‘Ᾱnushthanik’ (those composed for special occasions), ‘Gitinatya o Nrityanatya’ (musicals and dance dramas) and Bhānusingher Padābali but could easily pass for devotional songs; one sings the glory of the ancient Hindu Indian heritage (mistakenly attributed to Rabindranath’s elder brother Jyotirindranath and thus not included in Gitabitān) and the rest three are enlisted in Gitabitān under the category of ‘Prem’ (amorous love). Interestingly, one of these three ‘love songs’, ‘Bal golāp more bal’ (Tell me, O rose, please tell me), Sengupta tells us, quoting a letter of Rabindranath’s to Mohitchandra Sen, was actually ‘meant for children’ (43); one tells in the Kirtan tune the mythical love story of Radha and Krishna and therefore is a sanitized and sanctioned love song, and only one is unambiguously amorous. Vivekananda’s aversion to the association of music, ‘femininity’, and morality can also be gauged from the legendary actor-playwright Girishchandra Ghosh’s reminiscence that ‘Vivekananda never listened to music rendered by a woman, particularly by that sort of a woman [a baiji]’ (Ghosh 1972, p. 827).
- 4.
- 5.
Way before this, as early as 1888, in a poem called ‘Desher Unnoti’ (The Uplift of the Country)—anthologized in his first mature volume of verse, Mānasi (1890), primarily a collection of love poems—Rabindranath offered his tongue-in-cheek take on the hyper-masculinist nationalist discourse that held love poetry responsible for the sapping of the country’s vital energy: ‘“Ojosvitā” “uddipanā”/“Chhutāo bhāshā agnikanā,/Ᾱmra kori” samālochanā/Jāgāye tuli desh!/Beerjobal Bāngālār/Kemone balo tikibe ār,/Premer gāne korechhe tār/Durdoshār shesh./Jāk-nā dekhā dinkatok/Jekhāne jato royechhe lok/Sakole mile likhuk shlok/“Jātiyo” upodesh./Nayan bohi anargol/Phelibo sabe ashrujal,/Utsāhete beerer dal/lomānchitokesh’ (Tagore 1396, vol. I, pp. 295–296; ‘Exuberant enthusiasm’ and ‘ornateness vigorous’/Let our diction break into sparks/We get into criticism harsh/And arouse the country and its stars!/How does our Bengal dear/Retain its valour and vigour/With the terrible disaster/brought on it by songs amorous./Let’s get into the act for some time/Let everybody of this land and clime/get together and produce in rhymes/‘national’ counsel galore/Let there be a flood of tears/Made by brethren far and near/Enthused and spirited, valiant warriors/thrilled to the core.) I am indebted to Biswajit Ray’s article ‘Ojoswita, Uddipana and Beyond: Tagore’s Search for a New Rhetoric of Anti-Nation Humanity’ in Ganguly and Sen (2011) for reference to this poem.
- 6.
Let us put this backhanded tribute paid to the European spirit of freedom by the ‘nationalist’ Rabindranath side by side with his ‘post-nationalist’ paean to the liberal-humanist ideals of liberty, justice and individual rights upheld by Europe. For one example, he writes in ‘Nationalism in Japan’, originally delivered as a lecture in 1916: ‘Europe has been teaching us the higher obligations of public good … and the sacredness of law, which … guarantees justice to all men of all positions in life. Above all things Europe has held high before our minds the banner of liberty … the liberty of conscience, liberty of thought and action, liberty in the ideals of art and literature’ (Tagore 2009, p. 29). There are thus, for him, two Europes, one of which ‘we can claim … as our ally in our resistance to’ the ‘temptations and … violent encroachments’ of the other (30).
- 7.
This secular idea of dharma—in the present Tagorean sense—is pivotal to Tagore’s idea of human subjectivity in general and Indianness in particular. His polemic against the exclusionist, homogenizing, aggressive aspects of the dominant discourse of Western modernity, strewn across his writings on rural reconstruction, education, nationalism, Swadeshi Samāj and so on, is most comprehensively summed up in his dyad of the ‘spirit of violence’ and the ‘spirit of Man’ in ‘Crisis in Civilisation’, apart from that of ‘horsepower’ and ‘spirit-power’ in this essay.
- 8.
See Guha (2009) for some detailed discussion of the I/You dialectic in Rabindranath’s poetry.
- 9.
It is not that Dwijendralal eschewed the genre of love songs completely. But being a trained practitioner of north Indian classical music in both production and performance, he almost always turned the subject of love, as in classical bandishes, into mere ritual occasions for indulging in musical experimentations. Seen from this perspective, the contributions of Rabindranath’s junior musical contemporaries such as Atulprasad Sen and Kazi Nazrul Islam in the domain of songs of love was possible because of his pioneering departure from the dominant bhadralok nationalist aesthetic ideology. These two were great admirers of the poet, while Dwijendralal, it is well known, was one of his major nationalist detractors who accused him, in the preface to his satirical play Ᾱnandabidāy, of ‘corrupting’ Bengali literature through indulgence in ‘nyakami’ (roughly, feminine affectation) and ‘immorality’.
- 10.
See ‘Sabistār’ in Bandyopadhyay (2001).
- 11.
Rajyeshwar Mitra thus laments: ‘It is rather astonishing that the liberal mindset that inspired in the contemporary educated people a larger and more open outlook to life was never extended to the sphere of music. It seems that music in general was seen as a product of lack of education, as if all musical works were like obscene abuse’. See his article ‘Nidhubābu o Bānglār Tappā’ in Bhattacharya (2007).
- 12.
For detailed and incisive discussions of the state of Indian classical music and the ideological implications of the reformative cultural nationalist intervention in this sphere in the late nineteenth–early twentieth century see Bakhle 2005 (for Hindustani classical) and Subramanian 2011 (for Carnatic classical). Kumarprasad Mukhopadhyay’s Khayāl o Hindustāni Sangeeter Abakshoy (Kolkata: Dey’s Publishing, 2003) and Sudhir Chakraborty’s ‘Bānglā Sangeetchintār Nabajanma’ in Bhattacharya (2007) provide with some informative accounts of the culture of classical music in Bengal around this time.
- 13.
Let me just submit parenthetically that while I agree with Chakrabarty in his analysis of the genesis of Rabindranath’s critique of utilitarianism, I am not very comfortable with the way he seems to elide here (and in the entire book) the tensions within the nationalist discourse, for example those between Rabindranath’s and Bankim Chandra’s versions of nationalism, and thus the possible collusions of the colonial and nationalist discursive paradigms.
- 14.
Biswajit Ray also has discussed Bichitra Prabandha and used part of this passage in his essay ‘Rabindranath’s Re-reading of Maghaduta: An Alternative to Colonial Notions of Work’ in Dasgupta et al. (2014). I have drawn largely on his translation of the passage.
- 15.
In fact, as Bikash Chakravarty has argued, for him ‘the state and the community were not competing categories; they were, in the best of times, complementary’ (Ganguly and Sen 2011, p. 29). Partha Chattopadhyay’s ‘Rābindrik Nation Ki?’ holds some insightful and provocative discussion on the complexities in Rabindranath’s idea of the nation. See his Prajā o Tantra (Kolkata: Anushtup, 2005).
- 16.
I have also discussed some of these points related to Rabindranath’s creative adaptation of the rural musical genres in greater detail in “World-History”, “Itihāsa”, and Memory: Rabindranath Tagore’s Musical Program in the Age of Nationalism” in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 75, Issue 02, May 2016: pp. 411–32.
- 17.
See Bakhle (2005) for a detail discussion of this religious iconography of Hindustani classical music in the nationalist paradigm. Particularly interesting is her understanding of the distinction between the ‘liberal’ Bhatkhande model of ‘secular’ Hindu nationalism and the ‘orthodox’ Paluskar model of ‘religious’ nationalism.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
This is Fakrul Alam’s translation (Tagore 2011, p. 302), with the third and the fifth lines being mine.
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Dasthakur, S. (2017). The Useless and the ‘Wonderful’: Work, Leisure and Being ‘at Home in Modernity’ in the Music of Rabindranath Tagore. In: Tuteja, K., Chakraborty, K. (eds) Tagore and Nationalism. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3696-2_23
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