IF there ever was a man who was a contemporary, in the full sense of the term, it was Rabindranath Tagore. I use the term contemporary to mean something other than simply the present. That is, I do not mean to say that Tagore perfectly embodied his times or that Tagore was a historic figure. Rather, that Tagore cultivated a very specific mode of ‘being in and of his time.’ This was a mode of instituting a certain deliberate mismatch with one’s own present – of being untimely, as it were. Here I follow the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s formulation:

Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. They are thus in this sense irrelevant [inattuale]. But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time.¹ 

The most well-known symptom of Tagore’s untimeliness was the manner in which he set himself up against dominant public discourses of his time, despite – or perhaps because of – his own iconic status. Therefore, his writings against swadeshi, a movement which had launched him as a public figure in the first place; his subsequent critique of nationalism as ideology and his espousal of universalism; his trenchant critique of history as a discipline; his disagreements with Gandhian moral politics, non-cooperation and symbolism of the charkha; his arguments against ‘national art’; and his sharp quarrels with younger authors over modern, realist writing, from which he emerged quite badly scarred.² 

 

One might or might not agree with Tagore’s position in all this. Yet, it is hard to miss the fact of his being, throughout his long career, at odds with what to most appeared as the ‘call of the present’ – whether it was nationalism or history-writing or Marxist realism or Gandhian mass politics. Tagore’s mismatch with his times has mostly been explained away either as a sign of his genius or as the anti-political individualism of a poet born to privilege and therefore uncaring of public support and public succour. I, however, feel that there is need to take Tagore’s cultivated untimeliness far more seriously.

More than any public figure of his time, Rabindranath Tagore was a man preoccupied with the question of temporality. ‘All our attachments are to territory, we fight over bits of land, but we easily give up our hold over deep stretches of time,’ he said.³ It is this preoccupation with time that I dwell on in this essay. I do so because this was a moment when the question of time seemed to have otherwise been settled. Time was chronology in which different peoples appeared at different moments of the same time, some primitive, some backward, some advanced. And history was progress and unfolded universally over ancient, medieval and modern periods, irrespective of whose history it was and where it unfolded. Tagore’s reopening of the question of time was precisely pitched against this colonial-modern commonsense. Despite partaking in this commonsense in many of his early writings, Tagore went on to work with time in unorthodox ways, bringing ‘other’ temporalities to bear upon the present, as it were. It is this that I wish to emphasize here – namely, Tagore’s way of ‘contemporanizing’, literally, by bringing face-to-face different times and histories so as to dislodge the stability of the ‘modern’ and historicist present and create the space for the untimely right at its heart.

 

Let me begin with Tagore’s take on history. We know that late nineteenth century onwards, history – as discipline, imagination and practice – became the dominant mode of thinking time in Bengal and in India. Tagore too owned up history and sought to assert his own version of it, in which he argued that India’s history was a social and everyday story rather than a political and statist narrative.⁴ As Ranajit Guha has shown, Tagore’s historical protagonist was the everyday public of Bengali countryside, engaged in each other’s stories of sukha-dukha (weal and woe), rather than a ‘national’ political public, engaged in negotiating the government.⁵ However, thus far Tagore’s position was compatible with the emerging protocols of history-writing as such.

Yet, elsewhere, Tagore went further. He criticized the current trend of pitting fact and fiction against each other, thus undoing traditional ways in which kavya and itihas cohabited. He also argued that facts on their own could not produce narratives, because they were particular, local truths. Also, the perpetual possibility of the discovery of new facts kept history forever incomplete and provisional. History, therefore, had to share in another kind of truth, namely, literary truth, for the sake of telling its story.⁶ The ‘historical’, therefore, should be understood as a rasa, perhaps a mixed rasa that had remained unspecified in the classical schema of the nine rasa-s.

 

Tagore, despite his investment in the everyday, argued that the movement of time was not always apparent to us in our everyday. To sense the rasa of history, therefore, we needed to free ourselves from our everyday and feel how an individual life, its desires and indifferences, its joys and sorrows, articulates with the great wave-like movement of time.

When the song of a historical life is sung, the main string of the veena is plucked to play the principal melody. The other four fingers strum the rear strings, thick and thin, keeping up a sombre and strange drone that can be heard faraway.

Thus sync-ed human life and epochal time. Human life and epochal time were not simply continuous, nor did human life directly feed into a totality called history. For Tagore, history was an ‘effect’ – a rasa – produced out of the encounter, the twang, of a singular human life with the greater movement of temporality.⁷ 

The time of the past never quite ends

Nor does it finish its song

It leaves behind, floating in the wind, sighs of discontent.

...

Who can say where it hides, what it whispers

Epochal pains mingle like tears with everyday hurts

The time of past sunsets

Puts out its sorrowful colours

And pours in the wealth of death

To make vast the pang of a moment.⁸

 

Pasts, thus, came to bear upon the present, but not merely as evidence. Of course, if there is proof of a past, the most powerful must bow to it, for none can resist the demand of knowledge. But ‘knowing’ by itself could not give form and body to the past. Of all the traces of the past in the present, only some work as perfect ‘conductors’, Tagore says, through which the past time travels and touches our hearts. These traces are like idols, because they conduct us through an experience of the perceptible into the realm of the imperceptible. It is our ‘idolatry’, literally, which activates past times in our present.⁹ 

This animation of the past in the present is not the practice of gyan but of anubhav, a different mode of human understanding which follows from seeking ‘to become like’ or ‘in accordance with’ an object that appears separate and distinct from the self. ‘Not only to admit an external sensation, but allow something to happen inside, i.e., admit of a transformation within the self.’¹⁰ ‘This is precisely the way in which a (historical) fact exceeds its own facticity in order to become true in the way that I myself am true,’ Tagore says. And this is the way in which all eternity is held within the bounds of an individual’s transient lifespan.¹¹

 

Clearly, Tagore here is moving beyond the question of history into what he sees as the larger problematic of time itself. In a humourous play called Kaler Jatra (The Journey of Time), Tagore figures time as a great chariot, which rolls on like a behemoth and sets off one age after the other. One day the chariot refuses to budge. Time stands still. All those who had earlier boasted of pulling the chariot – the priests, the soldiers, the merchants – give up. Finally, it is a crowd of shudras which succeeds in moving the chariot – to the great outrage of all, except of course the poet.¹² 

A familiar take thus far. Right from the nineteenth century, we know, the colonial-modern present was labelled kaliyuga in popular print literature, because it was a time that witnessed the rise of the shudra in accordance to ancient puranic prophecy. Even literate men such as Vivekananda talked of democracy and socialism as the mark of the shudra epoch; and some even translated ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as ‘rule by the shudra.’¹³ 

Yet, Tagore puts a particular spin on the story. In a controversial move, he refuses to invest, in the last instance, in the shudra as the subject of history. For him, it is the rope of the time-chariot that is at stake, not the subject who pulls it. The rope, he says, carries many handprints from many ages. When inert, the rope is a snake, tying us up in knots. When it moves with time, however, it unravels and sets us free. In other words, he argues that if we imagine history in terms of the emergence of new historical subjects – the shudra in this case – we end up reifying historical agency itself. Thus, in ancient times, Brahminism reified the idea of prescriptive knowledge (shastra), in colonial-modern times, capitalism reifies wealth. Similarly, we reify labour in the name of the shudra. (Remember his disagreement with Gandhi on the charkha as symbolizing mindless labour of the honeybee.)¹⁴ Instead, Tagore says, we need to emphasize the nature of the social bond between heteronomous historical subjects (the bond, in this play, metaphorized as the rope of the time-chariot). It is the particular nature of the social relationship – mediated by class, caste or samaj as the case may be – which defines historical epochs.

 

What is distinctive in this play is the agency that Tagore ascribes to time itself, including the crushing resistance that time, in the form of the chariot, puts up when faced with social evils such as of caste. And in Tagore’s telling, the one who is able to grasp this critical work of temporality is none other than the poet. The play is otherwise peopled by sociological entities – the priest, the king, the soldier, the merchant, the shudra and the women. But the poet stands apart. But this standing apart is not the a-sociality of the renouncer, the sanyasi, with whom the poet engages in a disputation at the end.

The poet’s power, he claims, is not that he is able to shift the gargantuan time-chariot by his wealth or knowledge or valour or even mass. Nor is his a power born out of the steel-like mettle of asceticism. The time-chariot moves simply because the poet is able to set it to rhyme.¹⁵ In other words, the poet’s insight into time is simply because he is able to play with time with a lightness of touch. This lightness of touch is more modest and more lucid than the ardour of the historical subject, weighed down by the sovereignty of time and labouring to move it!

 

Tagore and his poet-protagonist were sharply critiqued by younger writers, late 1920s onwards. Tagore’s poet, it was said, refused to answer the call of the present, the call to become a historical subject. History demanded that the modern poet become the voice of democracy and socialism and articulate, in suitable language and form, the fetid reality of poverty, bondage and brutality of common lives. Tagore’s pastoral love for nature, his interiority, his universalism and his ‘aestheticization’ of the literary resisted this calling. At one level, Tagore’s response to this critique was banal. He said formulaic things – such as new subject-matters do not make new literature or that literature is eternal and not a mirror of the present.¹⁶ Yet, at another level, Tagore was pushed into greater self-reflexibility – tying up the question of his own apparent untimeliness with the question of what it meant to talk of the new.

In 1894, reviewing Shibnath Sashtri’s novel Jugantar (The Turning of Ages), Tagore wrote that while the novelist had successfully captured the traditional rural life of Bengal, he had failed to capture the new times. There seemed to be no characters peopling the new age, only the tumult of ideologies, opinions and associations. This was because the author himself resided at the heart of the new. Tagore argues here that it is particularly difficult to enunciate what is still ‘struggling to become’. One needs a very special ‘theatrical skill’ to capture the nuanced and conflicted nature of the unresolved and the emergent.¹⁷ 

 

Decades later, however, faced with the criticism of younger writers claiming to be of a new age, Tagore was perplexed. He responded that it was erroneous to judge literary works in terms of a succession of historical epochs – for the very purpose of a literature was to stand uniquely on its own as absolutely and perfectly ‘created’. So new literature could perhaps ‘overwrite’ but not erase or replace earlier works. No one could tell when a recent literary work would get dislodged by time and more archaic literary seams revealed.¹⁸ It was therefore a fallacy to boast of novelty.

Tagore’s position here is that novelty and creativity are very different things – the former, transient, the latter, the ability to institute the new in the eternal and the infinite. After all, youthfulness, as of the sunrise, is timeless and yet every time a fresh start. In the absence of an ability to put the ‘new’ in relationship with time itself, there occurs a fatal disconnect – like between lovers across time.

The bell rings

I settle my accounts and leave

At the door, as I look back,

I see you standing

At the threshold of new times

…

I return

I start a new act

Called by your face

Your words of love.

…

Suddenly, I turn

You are no longer there

You have left for that land

Where my past had gone with a veiled face

…

I, alone, carry on, staggering around

Crashing around in a crowd of novelties

Where there is a today

But no tomorrow/yesterday. ¹⁹ 

(Kal in Bengali means time, as also both yesterday and tomorrow.)

Mark the tone of pathos here. Indeed, Tagore goes further. If the poet’s work is to create anew, he says, it is no less the work of death. It is the poet’s painful duty – in order to bring forth from the present clutter of words the eternal and the infinite – to grant the gift of death to the superfluous, the trivial, the debris of time.²⁰ The poet, the creator of the new and the original, is also then the god of death.

 

In his later years, Tagore dwelt extensively on the question of death. It is well-known that Tagore had to face in life an extraordinary number of deaths of those close to him – wife, brother, son and many more – and therefore, the death-of-others was for him a constant philosophical reference point. This personal intimacy with death came together, in the world-war years, with Tagore’s disquiet with new global technologies of violence, mechanization and death – which to him were clear signs of a Kalantar, a ‘turning of times’, a changeover from what he saw as an emancipatory nineteenth century modernity to a brutal twentieth century one.²¹ This was when he voiced most sharply his critique of nationalism and the violence intrinsic to it.

 

There was also in him a deep unease with radical politics of class struggle, which too spoke the language of war, even if metaphorically. Add to all this Tagore’s trepidation in the face of radical new literature of the times, with its in-your-face portrayal of a brutal and ugly reality and its use of a violent, street language. (At one place, Tagore worries over the use of the term khoon in place of rakta in recent writings, as if the former term expressed redness of blood better!²² )

Unlike the Gandhian preoccupation with nonviolence, then, Tagore’s became a preoccupation with death. It was through the question of death – and the experience of one’s own superfluity and finitude in face of the ‘new’ – that Tagore sought to reinvent himself. Death is the ‘key’, he said, which opens the door for the pilgrim in time – uninvited visitor to the present, as if from another time, who is launched outside himself so he can watch over his own self weave through the unruly maze of the novel, the unprecedented, the emergent.²³ So he will write:

My body, amassed like savings from the past,

Stood forth, on the ground of the imminent,

Mountain-like, face to the future.

That, I see today

Is merely a tired cloud of dawn, fallen

Off the horizon.²⁴ 

 

Continuing the same set of poems:

O great judge, gracing the throne of time

Give me power, give me power

Give me a thunderous voice

So I can shame the murderous force,

The slayer of woman and child

Consign it forever to a disgraced legacy

On that very day when this silenced, terrified, shackled age

Burns without sound in its own funeral pyre.²⁵ 

 

Here death brings together the intimate and the historical, personal redundancy and worldwide war. Death shows up time as intensely personal yet universal, common yet epochal. Death – the defining fact of the past and the only sure promise of the future – brings past and future into conversation, leaping, as it were, over the present. In this way, Tagore seeks to rescue death from the simplifying and moral problematic of violence, nonviolence and war, for at stake in death is also one’s encounters with the new and the next.

It is proper, then, to end here, abruptly, in deference to Tagore’s own death and to death as such. For close to a century Tagore was preserved either as an unassailable icon to the Bengali bhadralok or as beheaded king to the Bengali revolutionary poet! One could, however, now say, safely, that Tagore lives on – but only because he had never lived fully in his own present. It is then Tagore’s ‘original untimeliness’ that lends him to us as our contemporary.

 

* Many thoughts in this essay are inspired by conversations with colleagues at CSDS who are also thinking through the idea of the contemporary. All extracts from Tagore are from the Visva-Bharati, 1991 edition of Rabindra Rachanavali (hereafter RR). Translations are all mine.

Footnotes:

1 ‘What is the Contemporary?’ in Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, Stanford, 2009, 39-55, 40.

2. Ashis Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of the Self, Delhi, 1994; Michael Collins, ‘Rabindranath Tagore and Nationalism: An Interpretation’, Working Paper 42, South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, 2008; Amit Kumar Gupta, Crises and Creativities: Middle-Class Bhadralok in Bengal, c. 1939-1952, Delhi, 2009.

3. ‘Anabashyak’, 1920, RR XV, 57-59.

4. ‘Bharatbarsher Itihas’,1902, RR II, 703-09.

5. Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World History, New York, 2002, 75-94.

6. ‘Aitihasik Upanyas’, 1898, RR IV, 685-88.

7. ‘Aitihasik Upanyas’, ibid.

8. ‘Atit Kal’, 1924, RR VII, 161.

9. ‘Anabashyak’, op cit.

10. ‘Sahityatattva’, 1933, 472-82.

11. ‘Sahitvatattva’, ibid.

12. ‘Kaler Jatra’, 1922, RR XI, 249-297.

13. Nirmal Kumar Basu, ‘Mahatma Gandhir Varnashram ebang Communism’, Desh, December 1935, in Sipra Sarkar and Anamitra Das (eds.), Bangalir Samyavad Charcha, Calcutta, 1998, 195.

 14. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Call of Truth’, in Sisir Kumar Das (ed.), The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, III, New Delhi, 1996, 412-25.

15. ‘Kaler Jatra’, op cit.

16. ‘Sahityarup’, 1928, RR XII, 511-517.

17. ‘Jugantar’, 1895, RR V, 579-81.

18. ‘Sahityarup’, op cit.

19. ‘Nutan Kaal’, 1932, RR VIII, 237-39.

20. ‘Kabir Abhibhashan’, 1927, RR XII, 507-11.

21. Kalantar, a collection of essays written in the 1920s and ’30s as reflections on the turning of times in the world war years, RR III.

22. ‘Kabir Abhibhasan’, op cit.

23. ‘Prantik’, poem 15, 1934, RR XI, 118.

24. ‘Prantik’, poem 1, 1937

25. ‘Prantik’, poem 17, 120.