The Politics and Reception of Rabindranath Tagore's Drama

The Bard on the Stage

Arnab Bhattacharya, Mala Renganathan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317619406
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

This is the first volume to focus specifically on Rabindranath Tagore's dramatic literature, visiting translations and adaptations of Tagore's drama, and cross-cultural encounters in his works. As Asia's first Nobel Laureate, Tagore's highly original plays occupy a central position in the Indian theatrescape. Tagore experimented with dance, music, dance drama, and plays, exploring concepts of environment, education, gender and women, postcolonial encounters, romantic idealism, and universality. Tagore's drama plays a generous host to experimentations with new performance modes, like the writing and staging of an all-women play on stage for the first time, or the use of cross-cultural styles such as Manipuri dance, Thai craft in stage design, or the Baul singing styles. This book is an exciting re-exploration of Tagore's plays, visiting issues such as his contribution to Indian drama, drama and environment, feminist readings, postcolonial engagements, cross-cultural encounters, drama as performance, translational and adaptation modes, the non-translated or the non-translatable Tagore drama, Tagore drama in the 21st century, and Indian film. The volume serves as a wide-ranging and up-to-date resource on the criticism of Tagore drama, and will appeal to a range of Theatre and Performance scholars as well as those interested in Indian theatre, literature, and film.

Part I
The Politics of Rabindranath Tagore’s Drama

1 The Paradox of Knowledge and the Problem of the Self

The Critique of Enlightenment Epistemology in Rabindranath Tagore’s Play The Ascetic

Arnab Bhattacharya

Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.

—T S Eliot, “Burnt Norton” (181)

The reason why Rabindranath Tagore’s drama is often deemed metaphysical and abstract is that it deals most fundamentally with the problem of knowledge. Knowledge has the uncanny inability to know itself; the moment it seeks to overreach itself in terms of self-reflexivity, it is hoist pathetically with its own petard. The reason is simple: The moment we try to know something, we become conscious that we are getting to know it. That is why the phenomenologists say that consciousness is conscious of itself. For the phenomenologists, knowledge is a possibility sprung from an interplay of transcendence and correspondence, but this almost always remains ambiguous, as Edmund Husserl explains in Idea of Phenomenology, “the possibility of knowledge, with regard to its ability to make contact with objectivity, is a riddle” (25). Now, the knower that is the self of the knowing persona, or the subject, always has to contend with this ambiguity. Whenever such a self strives to know certain knowable objects, things other than those very objects, and even some aspects of those objects he seeks to know, are concealed from him. For, phenomenology would have us believe that any given object is many-sided and to know one side is to ignore others. Moreover, the totality of knowledge is a near-absurd notion simply because the human mind is incapable of grasping any object in its totality. There will always be a focus if we want to know something. For, if the focus gets too dissipated we will not get to know anything at all, and if, on the other hand, the focus does not exist, or is too concentrated, knowledge will be pitifully limited. That is what I call the inability of knowledge to know itself. When we come to know certain things, we fall easy prey to the false confidence about the validity of the acquired knowledge, so much so that we tend to forget that there are so many other things left unknown, and that the euphoria of knowledge is a tragic self-delusion. If this is pessimism, this is built into human existence and human consciousness. What art can do is to recognize this existential pessimism, and that recognition goes a long way for us to live life with humility.

Tagore’s anti-Enlightenment political philosophy has been receiving critical attention of late. Debmalya Das, an Indian critic, has pointed out how Tagore, à la Walter Benjamin, sought to “subvert, pluralize, and relativize the notion of time prevalent during the Enlightenment” (Web Source) whereas Christine Marsh, a British social worker and Tagore scholar, shows in one of her articles (Web Source) how Tagore’s vision of deep ecology and self-reliant rural economy persuaded him to defy the universalist presumption of the Enlightenment discourses of his time. Here I intend to analyze what I would call Tagore’s deep epistemology reflected in his play The Ascetic, that seeks to defuse the “ideological epistemic violence” (Spivak, 2007, 31) ingrained in the segmenting and parochializing tendency of the Enlightenment epistemology.

Tagore’s plays, especially those which we call “symbolist,” are politically ranged against what I call the “Enlightenment epistemology,” which pivots on the concept of reason. In fact, the whole conceptual paraphernalia of the Western Enlightenment is premised on the notion of reason that routinely proliferated, and kept thriving on, Manichean dichotomies such as good and evil, love and hatred, freedom and bondage, light and darkness, high thinking and low thinking, and so many others. The human sense perceptions were rationalistically explained in terms of recognizing these dichotomies and were urged to move from darkness to light through these recognitions. My attempt in this article would be to show how these dichotomies developed in Western Enlightenment discourses, and how Tagore’s drama problematized these dichotomies by underscoring the paradoxes inherent in the system of knowledge itself. Furthermore, these paradoxes are caught up with the problem of the self that is unsure of its vocation. Thus, in Tagore’s symbolist plays, the paradoxes of the knowledge system turn out to be the sources of dramatic conflicts as well as the conflicts within one’s selfhood. This is why Tagore’s drama lacks external dramatic action that would enthrall a typical theatregoer.

To start with, let me discuss how Francis Bacon, one of the high priests of the Western Enlightenment, conceptualizes the perceptual dichotomy in human consciousness. In his ground-breaking book Advancement of Learning (1605), he describes the advantages of learning or knowledge in the following manner:

Alexander the Great, after that he was used to great armies, and … the great conquests of the spacious provinces in Asia, when he received letters out of Greece, of some fights and services there, which were commonly for a passage or a fort, or some walled town at the most; … he said: — “It seemed to him that he was advertised of the battles of the frogs and the mice, that the old tales went of.” So certainly, if a man meditate much upon the universal frame of nature, the earth with men upon it (the divineness of souls except) will not seem much other than an ant-hill, whereas some ants carry corn, and some carry their young, and some go empty, and all to and fro a little heap of dust. It taketh away or mitigateth fear of death or adverse fortune, which is one of the greatest impediments of virtue and imperfections of manners. (93)

Bacon’s point in the passage quoted above is that learning/knowledge expands one’s world of perception so immensely that quotidian matters seem inconsequential to him. It is learning that induces man to meditate upon the “the universal frame of nature” so much so that the earth appears merely an “ant-hill” to him. So, the perceptual dichotomy that I mentioned is self-evident here, and such a dichotomy distinguishes between the expansiveness and the narrowness of perception and obviously considers the former worthier and more desirable. This is a typical rationalistic vein of thinking that the logicians describe as disjunctive syllogism which seeks to prize an “either/or” distinction in whatever we do or think, and is predictably nonplussed in the face of phenomena that do not allow such distinctions.

Rene Descartes’ The Principles of Philosophy (1644) is yet another text often considered a cornerstone of the Western Enlightenment. In the opening section of the book, Descartes lists down the principles of knowledge. Intellectually, Descartes is a disciple of Socrates and, as such, he holds skepticism as the first stepping stone for acquiring knowledge. The first condition he lays down for learning is: “That in order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life, to doubt, as far as possible, of all things” (43). Now, this is all too simple except for the phrase “as far as possible,” which indicates it may not always be possible to doubt everything. Now, the question is if it is not always possible to doubt certain things, how can we possibly acquire knowledge about those or, in more precise terms, attain the truth relating to those. How does Descartes resolve this puzzle? Descartes explains exactly where skepticism, regarded as a sine qua non for learning, should be kept in abeyance. In his words, “[t]hat we cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt, and that this is the first knowledge we acquire when we philosophize in order” (46, emphasis mine). This, for Descartes, is a fundamental precondition of knowledge, that one cannot doubt the existence of the doubter. In other words, in order to doubt, and thereby to acquire knowledge, one has to exist in the first place. For, if one does not, one logically cannot doubt and therefore cannot know. By working out this hypothetical syllogism, Descartes bypasses the fundamental paradox of knowledge, by way of creating a distinction within the system of knowledge itself. The distinction is plain and simple, and it springs from the logical premise that the knowledge of the self cannot be doubted, but all other things excepting the self can be and should be. The logic seems infallible at first glance, but a deeper probe unearths its serious limitations. But before I delve into those limitations, let us see how Descartes substantiates his argument:

While we thus reject all of which we can entertain the smallest doubt, and even imagine that it is false, we easily indeed suppose that there is neither God, nor sky, nor bodies, and that we ourselves even have neither hands nor feet, nor, finally, a body; but we cannot in the same way suppose that we are not while we doubt of the truth of these things; for there is a repugnance in conceiving that what thinks does not exist at the very time when it thinks. Accordingly, the knowledge, I THINK, THEREFORE I AM, is the first and most certain that occurs to one who philosophizes orderly (47).

So, it is clear that Descartes convinces himself that the knowing self should always be exempted from epistemological skepticism, for otherwise the very epistemological base of knowledge will simply collapse. The great philosopher professedly feels “repugnance” at such a speculation. This “repugnance” is a non-philosophical word, and Descartes himself seems at a loss here to account for this “repugnance,” making his own speculation highly suspect. Life has its principles of contrast that are deceptively innocuous and dangerously intertwined. Descartes makes the cardinal error of interpreting these principles in terms of distinctions or contradictions or differences, instead of looking upon those as paradoxes. Rationalistic paradigms of thought nurtured in the Enlightenment philosophy have all along been plagued by the dangerously naïve presupposition that the formulation of rules depends on observations that apply to most cases, while the rest can conveniently be consigned to the category of exceptions. Making distinctions facilitates this process but, in so doing, skims only a superficial layer of truth. From the above explanation, Descartes moves on to make further distinctions in the eighth point: “That we hence discover the distinction between the mind and the body, or between a thinking and corporeal thing” (47). Descartes’ point is that the mind which is the repository of consciousness is the thinking subject, and therefore it precedes the corporeal thing which is the world itself and whatever is contained in that. How far is this distinction sustainable? How can a mind know if there is no “body” around? Can the mind exist in isolation apart from the body? And how can the mind know itself? These questions remain bafflingly unanswered in Descartes’ philosophical postulations.

Immanuel Kant in A Critique of Pure Reason (1781) has sought to answer this question in a slightly different manner. Kant develops the notion of a priori that, he maintains, is the basis of all cognitions and the very soul of intuitive knowledge. Now, the question is how can one have this notion about an object? Kant answers this question in the following manner:

We here propose to do just what Copernicus did in attempting to explain the celestial movements. When he found that he could make no progress by assuming that all the heavenly bodies revolved round the spectator, he reversed the process, and tried the experiment of assuming that the spectator revolved, while the stars remained at rest. We may make the same experiment with regard to the intuition of objects. If the intuition must conform to the nature of the objects, I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori. If, on the other hand, the object conforms to the nature of our faculty of intuition, I can then easily conceive the possibility of such an a priori knowledge. Now as I cannot rest in the mere intuitions, but—if they are to become cognitions—must refer them, as representations, to something, as object, and must determine the latter by means of the former, here again there are two courses open to me. Either, first, I may assume that the conceptions, by which I effect this determination, conform to the object—and in this case I am reduced to the same perplexity as before; or secondly, I may assume that the objects, or, which is the same thing, that experience, in which alone as given objects they are cognized, conform to my conceptions—and then I am at no loss how to proceed. (21–22)

I have quoted this passage from Kant’s writing in order to demonstrate his way of ratiocination with regard to the problem of acquiring knowledge. Kant avowedly took his cue from Copernicus in his approach to knowledge. The governing principle of this approach, to put it simply, is this—we will have to proceed with at least two sets of hypothetical models if we intend to decipher a yet unknown and yet unfathomed phenomenon. If the initial observations do not quite substantiate the first set of suppositions, the researcher is always at liberty to throw that overboard, and have recourse to the second set, anticipating that this time the things will fall into place. Copernicus tasted success following this method of research. Now, inspired by Copernicus’ success, Kant here takes occasion to apply this methodology to his notion of ‘a priori.’ His first set of supposition is that the intuition conforms to the nature of objects. But he finds that if that really is the case, man can never hope to have a prior knowledge of the world of objects. But this finding strikes at the very root of Kantian doctrine of a priorism, because in the preface to the 1781 edition of the book, Kant explicitly states, “Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind” (1). So, by Kant’s own admission, reason, the most precious gift of the Enlightenment, is not a potent enough tool to answer those questions that “transcend every faculty of the mind.” The realm of such suprarationalistic questions is what Kant identifies as the domain of metaphysics. Now if this claim of metaphysics has to be validated, then one has to accept that empirical verification is an imperfect mode for answering metaphysical queries. Therefore, in the perspective of metaphysical reasoning the first supposition does not stand to reason and, by the same token, the second assumption that objects conform to intuitions gains validity by the simple application of hypothetical syllogism. Again, if we proceed to the next level of the problem which concerns granting cognitive validity to intuitions, we will be, as Kant shows, back to square one, since once again the question of prior conceptions conforming to the objects as representations crops up. Negating this assumption on the same metaphysical ground as before, we are left with the option that objects conform to conceptions and they are the only valid and authentic base of knowledge. Thus, in the passage quoted above, we see Kant challenging the very rationality of the theory of reason that thinkers such as Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, the illustrious proponents of the Enlightenment, had so proudly upheld.

But Kant too made a cardinal mistake in formulating the a priori basis of knowledge, having corrected the rationalistic bias. He created another dichotomy, though different from the Baconian or Cartesian kind. This is not a distinction between expansiveness and narrowness of vision à la Bacon’s, nor one between the body and the mind à la Descartes, but the one between the empirical and the nonempirical knowledge, between knowledge and intuition, between the physical and the metaphysical. Thus, while declaring that the rationalistic deductions have to be taken with a pinch of salt, Kantian theory is not rid of the distinctive cum contrastive methodology of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: The Drama of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941)
• PART I The Politics of Rabindranath Tagore’s Drama
• PART IIThe Reception of Rabindranath Tagore’s Drama
• Appendix
• Contributors
• Index