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Abstract
In Rabindranath Tagore's novel Gora (1910) and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), literary works which employ the fiction of nativity to examine a paradoxical moment of historical origin, the idea of the nation is subjected to intolerable strain. Fables of identity are constructed in both novels, yet instead of a ‘hardening’ of the metaphysical idea that sustains the allegorical parallel, what we witness is a radical dissolution or disintegration of the categories of nation and narrative at the very site of their inscription. I will argue that in both works, the symbolic equation of novel and nation opens up fissures in historical experience.
Notes
1 Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998), p.334.
2 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983); and Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations (Harry Zohn, trans.) (London: Collins/ Fontana, 1977), p.263.
3 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (Anna Bostock, trans.) (London: Merlin Press, 2003), pp.121 & 84.
4 See Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Nationalism in the West’, lecture delivered in Japan in 1916, printed in Nationalism, 1917, in Sisir Kumar Das (ed.), The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Vol.2 (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996), p.419.
5 See R.K. Das Gupta, K. Das, B. Datta, B. Chaudhuri, A.K. Mukhopadhyay, N. Majumdar, J. Bhaumik and Sankha Ghosh (eds), Rabindra Rachanabali (henceforward RR:WB), Vol.16 (Kolkata: Government of West Bengal, 2001), pp.874–5.
6 See Rabindra Rachanabali (henceforward RR:VB), Vol.23 (Kolkata: Visva Bharati, 1958), p.364. Rabindranath says, a little sarcastically, that people find things in Gora that he cannot himself, as writer, discern. He notes one critic's remark that, of all his works, only Gora shows some elements of realism, and comments: ‘People say there is a good account of traditional Hinduism in it. This makes me deduce that that must be the element of realism’. It may be noted that Dwijendralal Ray, otherwise a harsh critic of Tagore, nonetheless praised Gora in the journal Bani, calling it not just a novel but a religious text. Cited in RR:WB, Vol.16, p.880.
7 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's contemporary reports in the New York Daily Tribune were later brought out as a volume called The First Indian War of Independence, 1857–1859, published from Moscow in 1960. Politics makes strange bedfellows: but the term, though initially espoused by nationalist historians, is in disuse, especially after R.C. Majumdar's masterly demolition of its premises.
8 For the reference to the Second Afghan War, see Rabindranath Tagore, Gora, in RR:VB, Vol.6 (Kolkata: Visva Bharati, 1994), p.365, and Gora, (trans. W.W. Pearson) (London: Macmillan, 1924), p.212. I have used Pearson's translation, corrected by Surendranath Tagore during the author's lifetime, for the references in the text. It is reasonably adequate, though superseded by that of Sujit Mukherjee (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1998). One difficulty is that the chapter divisions do not correspond to those in the VB text.
9 See Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, new ed. 2010).
10 For example, in ‘Swadeshi Samaj: Parishishta’, Ashvin 1311/September–October 1904, RR:VB, Vol.3, pp.557–8, see ‘India regards the welcoming of others into itself as self-fulfillment…having been born into the world, I do not consider it right to turn my face away from it’ [or ‘reject my identity as a citizen of that world’, my translation].
11 See Rabindranath Tagore, Chithhipatra, Vol.15 (Kolkata: Visva Bharati, 1995), pp.49–50. For the controversy surrounding this speech, see RR:WB, Vol.16, pp.1202–3.
12 Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997), p.109.
13 See Tagore, ‘Nationalism in the West’, Vol.2, p. 434.
14 Tagore, ‘Nationalism in Japan’, in Sisir Kumar Das (ed.), The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Vol.2 (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996), p.440.
15 Ibid., pp.432 & 434.
16 Ibid., p.421.
17 Cited in RR:WB, Vol.16, p.879.
18 Peter Brown, ‘The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity’, in R.C. Trexler (ed.), Persons in Groups: Social Behaviour as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1985), pp.183–94.
19 Rudyard Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, and there are several references to him in Tagore's works. Rabindranath appears to have found his representation of Indian society, especially in Plain Tales from the Hills, extremely distasteful, though in the essay ‘Ingraj o Bharatbashi’ (Sadhana, Ashvin-Kartik 1301/September–October 1894 in RR:VB, Vol.10, p.389), he quotes Edmund Gosse to make his point. I have found no reference to Kim as such, though Tagore may indeed have been acquainted with this story of an Irish boy orphaned in India. Gora may be seen as consciously repudiating the politics of Kipling's Kim: Tagore's protagonist is an anti-British Indian patriot, Kipling's a young recruit to the British secret service. Kim distinguishes himself in a mission against the Russians on India's north-west frontier, while Tagore's Satish says that if the Russians invaded India he would be on the Russian side (Gora, 1924, p.212).
20 For details and citations, see RR:WB, Vol.16, pp.878–9.
21 See Edward Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Reflections on Exile (New Delhi: Penguin, 2001), p.185; and for the earlier discussion, Edward Said, ‘Secular Criticism’, in The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Vintage, 1991), p.7.
22 ‘Bauler Gan’ (composite text adapted from reviews of parts 1 and 2 of the anthology Sangit Sangraha: Bauler Gatha, published in Bharati, Vaishakh 1290 and Ashvin 1291, as found in RR:VB, Vol.2), translated as ‘Baul Songs’ in Sukanta Chaudhuri, Sisir Kumar Das and Sankha Ghosh (eds), Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Writings on Literature and Language (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p.42.
23 See Rabindranath Tagore, Creative Unity (London: Macmillan, 1922); and Rabindranath Tagore, the Hibbert lectures, 1930, published as The Religion of Man (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931).
24 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (E.F.N. Jephcott, trans.) (London: Verso, 2005), p.39. Cited by Said in Reflections on Exile, p.184.
25 See Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama (J. Osborne, trans.) (London: Verso, 1985), p.166.
26 Hayden White, ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact’, first published in Clio, Vol.III, no.3 (1974), and later in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p.99.
27 See Hayden White, ‘Interpretation in History’, in Tropics of Discourse, p.74.
28 Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p.442.
29 Leopold von Ranke, History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, 1494–1514 (G. Dennis trans.) (London: G. Bell, 1915), p.vii.
30 J.E.E. Dalberg, Lord Acton, Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, 11 June 1895, in John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence (eds), Lectures on Modern History (London: Macmillan, 1906), p.18.
31 Stephen Bann, ‘The Historian as Taxidermist: Ranke, Barante, Waterton’, in E.S. Shaffer (ed.), Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook, Vol. 3 (1981), p.24.
32 John Clark Marshman's The History of India from the Earliest Period to the Close of Lord Dalhousie's Administration, 3 Vols (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1867), commenced publication in 1863 from the Serampore Press near Calcutta, where Marshman was a missionary. It was for many years the standard history of India.
33 See Clifford Geertz, ‘Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought’, in Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (London: HarperCollins/Fontana, 1993), pp.19–35.
34 Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), p.38.
35 See Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's speech to the Indian Parliament on 14 August 1947. Text available at Modern History Sourcebook: Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964): Speech On the Granting of Indian Independence, August 14, 1947 [http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1947nehru1.html, accessed 7 Oct. 2011].
36 Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons, p.334.