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Abstract
This essay focuses on the motif of symbolic death in Rabindranath Tagore's‘The Living and the Dead’ to explore how social injustices occur when empathy for an individual (or a group) is blocked. Arnold Van Gennep's notion of pre-liminal, liminal and post-liminal rites of passage that situate humans in efficacious, productive social relations, is used to contextualise the liminality motif in appropriate theoretical terms, while the introductory and ending references to Martha Nussbaum's idea that literary texts serve to unblock empathy (for the reader), by making invisible pain and suffering visible, draw attention to Tagore's contribution to this kind of humanising literature, and his relevance as an important literary figure in today's world.
Notes
1 Mohammad Quayum, The Poet and His World: Critical Essays on Rabindranath Tagore (Mumbai: Orient BlackSwan, 2011), pp.18–20.
2 Ibid., pp.18–19.
3 David Damrosch, What is World Literature (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003). Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Vishva-Sahitya’ (trans. Amrit Rai), in Asit Kumar Bandhyopadhyay (ed.), Ravindra Rachana Sanchayan, 125th Centenary Volume (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademy Press, 1987). Translations from Hindi are mine.
4 Damrosch, What is World Literature, p.5.
5 Ibid.
6 Tagore, ‘Vishwa-Sahitya’, p.656.
7 Ibid., p.655.
8 Ibid.
9 Arnold van Gennep, ‘The Classification of Rites’, in his The Rites of Passage (trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabriella L. Caffee) (London: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp.1–13.
10 Ralph Ellison quoted in Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘The Narrative Imagination’, in her Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (London: Harvard University Press, 1997), p.87.
11 Ibid., p.91.
12 Ibid., p.92.
13 James Phelan, ‘Rhetoric/Ethics’, in David Herman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Narrative (London: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p.203.
14 Martha C. Nussbaum, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp.83–5.
15 ‘Kakima’ is a kinship term for one's aunt or father's brother's wife, literally, Aunty-Mummy.
16 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Living and the Dead’, in Ramsingh Tomar (trans.), Rabindranath Kee Kahaniyan (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademy, 1961), p.39. Translations from Hindi are my own.
17 See for instance Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, The Poison Tree (trans. Miriam S. Knight) (London: T. Fisher and Unwin, 1884), included in Project Gutenberg electronic archives; and Sharat Chandra Chatterjee, Srikanta (trans. Krishenendu Chaki) (New Delhi: Penguin India, 1993). Though Bankim and Sharat do not as insistently focus on widowhood taboos in their writings, they too show women's exclusion from life's personal joys and public work, as well as the heavy social, moral, and psychological cost of this exclusion. Sometimes their ‘extraordinary’ women are representationally empowered and exert a great deal of influence. Bankim was Tagore's predecessor and Sharat his contemporary.
18 Homi K. Bhabha, Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994, rpr. 2004), pp.2–3.
19 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tifflin, ‘Liminality’, in Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2000), pp.130–1.
20 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Living and the Dead’, in Madhuchchanda Karlekar (trans.) and Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed.), Selected Short Stories of Rabindranath Tagore (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.74.
21 Ibid.
22 Tagore, Rabindranath Kee Kahaniyan, p.37, emphasis added.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 This stage, as in some forms of yogic practice, is said to require the intervention of a mentor or master and a discipline of undoing habitual modes of thought and life, so that the initiate can cross the threshold.
26 Gennep, The Rites of Passage, p.21.
27 During their agyatavasa (living in disguise) the Pandavas must remain in hiding; if they are found, the term of their exile will be repeated.
28 Tagore, Rabindranath Kee Kahaniyan, p.27.
29 Ibid., p.28.
30 Ibid., p.29, emphasis added.
31 Arpad Szakolczai, ‘Liminality and Experience: Structuring Transitory Situations and Transformative Events’, in International Political Anthropology, Vol.2, no.1 (2009), p.141.
32 Alta is the red paste used to decorating the feet, and sindur is the red powder that adorns the parting of the hair on a woman's head.
33 Joseph LeDoux, ‘Remembrance of Emotions Past’, in his The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), pp.212–3.
34 Jaak Panksepp, ‘Subjectivity May Have Evolved in the Brain as a Simple Value-Coding Process that Promotes the Learning of New Behaviors’, in Paul Ekman and Richard J. Davidson (eds), Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.315.
35 Ibid., p.314.
36 Richard J. Davidson and Paul Ekman, ‘Afterward: What is the Relation between Emotion and Memory’, in Paul Ekman and Richard J. Davidson (eds.), Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp.316–8.
37 Tagore, Rabindranath Kee Kahaniyan, p.30.
38 Ibid.
39 Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (New York: St.Martins, 1995), p.46.
40 Tagore, Rabindranath Kee Kahaniyan, p.30.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., p.27.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid., p.31
48 Ibid.
49 Szakolczai, ‘Liminality and Experience’, p.141.
50 Tagore, Rabindranath Kee Kahaniyan, p.31.
51 Ibid., p.32.
52 Ibid., p.33.
53 Ibid., p.34.
54 Ibid., p.35.
55 Ibid.
56 Rabindranath Tagore, Chandalika, in Amiya Chakravarty (ed.), A Tagore Reader (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), pp.169–79. As is evident in this play, any contact with or the touch of a person of the untouchable caste is considered contaminating; nothing touched by such a person can be consumed by others. In Tagore's play, the Buddhist monk, Ananda, drinks water offered to him by Prakriti, the untouchable girl, as he argues against caste taboos that consign untouchables to the social realm of the unhiemlich (uncanny, unnatural). Prakriti falls in love with Ananda; yet Ananda cannot now ‘touch’ her for a different reason, because she is a desirable woman and he has renounced sexual desire, and the objects of such desire.
57 Tagore, Rabindranath Kee Kahaniyan, p.37.
58 Ibid.
59 Aguirre Manuel, ‘Liminal Terror: The Poetics of Gothic Space’, in Jesus Benito and Anna M. Manzanas (eds), The Dynamics of Threshhold: Essays on Liminal Negotiations (Madrid: The Gateway Press, 2007), p.15.
60 Ibid., p.31.
61 Tagore, Rabindranath Kee Kahaniyan, p.39.
62 Ibid., p.30.
63 Ibid., p.39.
64 Nussbaum, Not For Profit, p.111.