Theology of the “Absent King” and the Possibility of Rabindranath Tagore’s Political Thought

ABSTRACT

Contrary to his usual depiction as a modern secular thinker, heteronomous imaginaries of sacrality and kingship are pervasive in Rabindranath Tagore’s plays. A return to these referents, as I show in this paper, releases Tagore’s thought-world from the stranglehold of derivative categories and allows for his reconstruction as a political thinker. Eschewing the nationalist ideal of valiant and noble rulers shored up from histories and myths as legitimate alternatives to the colonial regime, Tagore aesthetically employed the imaginary of an “absent king” sourced from the Upanishads. Avoiding the tropes of spectrality of a dead king or an exceptional interregnal anarchic moment, emptiness was inscribed in the very heart of the monarchical model, thereby transfiguring it into a radical instituting imaginary of the social. This curiously brought together the apparently antithetical categories of sovereignty and freedom through an insistence on creative will and action.

KEYWORDS:

• Tagore
• sovereignty
• freedom
• esotericism
• theology
• politics
• aesthetics

Introduction

We are all kings in this kingdom of our king,

By what claim otherwise shall we unite with him!

These are the opening lines to a musical verse sung out by a motley group of restive young and jovial old characters from one of Rabindranath Tagore’s (1861–1941) most popular plays. Composed in 1910, Raja, translated as “The king of the dark chamber,” and the song independently are performed in public events today, as though evoking and celebrating a modern democratic sensibility.¹ The dramatic reference to a world of kings and spiritually-suffused allegories hardly seem anachronistic even to the urban sophisticates and cosmopolitan elites. Such reception is of course shaped by how Tagore was projected by the newly independent Indian state as its foremost poet-philosopher and chief cultural icon.² The first non-European Nobel laureate and the architect of an international university, three of whose songs were adopted as official anthems in the decolonizing moment by nation-states comprising different religious majorities, Tagore represented a secular ethos, scientific temper and global stature that characterized the aspirations of a new India seeking to overcome the unprecedented loss and violence that attended its founding. This paper, however, will reckon with the ostensibly heteronomous imaginaries of sacrality and kingship pervasive in Tagore’s aesthetics, particularly his plays. My aim is not to contest Tagore’s secularism or to dispute his incarnation as a democratic thinker, since these ideological terms were not integral to his own vocabulary. Rather, a return to the transcendental referents releases Tagore’s thought-world from the stranglehold of determinate categories, and as I show in this paper, it paradoxically allows for his reconstruction as a political thinker.

Attempts to decipher Tagore’s politics in scholarship have been relentless, though not entirely satisfactory.³ What has led to the question’s persistence is the intense political condition of colonial conquest, war and violence that defined not just Tagore’s times but twentieth-century India itself, followed by his politically charged appropriations in the current years. Tagore on the other hand, comes across as frustratingly indifferent to the everyday business of politics. His early portrayal as an anti-colonial thinker has been complicated by later scholars who have focussed on his critique of the nation, state and the organizational form of modern politics. Educated and weathered by his experiences of the cultural nationalist Swadeshi movement (1905–8), that splintered into massive internal violence along sectarian lines, Tagore is said to have turned his attention exclusively to the cause of social regeneration and unity. In the shadow of this moment, his subsequent critical lectures on nationalism, delivered across the United States and Japan in the middle of the First World War, and life-long differences with Gandhi’s principled non-cooperation with the British, have posed a serious challenge to the task of situating him in the nationalist thought-canon. As a result, Tagore has either been rendered as a moral humanist, a conscience-keeper of ordinary politics, or an anti-political thinker of the social.

Such a neat separation between the social and political breaks down in Tagore’s poetic creations. Above all, an opening is made for a new kind of human subject with his introduction of a dramatic figure that I call the “absent king.” As can be gleaned from the opening verse, what produces the condition for a joyful assembly of people, acting and singing in concert, is their desire to meet or unite with the king. The audacious assertion – “we are all kings” – is not made after the monarch has been decapitated in repetition of the European revolutionary history. Evidently illiberal, this desire cannot be couched in communitarian terms either. The people claiming sovereignty neither identify themselves as a nation nor trace their commonality to any pre-existing sociological or cultural identity. Other than their shared anonymous and marginal status, they unite solely and exclusively on their singular insistence and desire, thus emerging as a new collective subjectivity.

This free play of imagination and affect does appear curious in the backdrop of an existing sovereign. After all, the decisionist will of a determinate unitary sovereign, be it the monarch or the people, has been generally considered antithetical to collective freedom understood in terms of action in concert.⁴ One may of course point out that the Indian nationalist movement enfolded within it both the objectives of sovereignty and freedom; however, it is rightly argued that at the moment of independence, the latter was subordinated to the exigencies of the postcolonial state and deferred to the future as a distant prospect.⁵ Tagore’s aesthetic enterprise to forge an intersection between the incommensurable categories of will and freedom, transcendence and immanence, or, one and many, is indeed striking.

Tagore prosecutes such a theoretical manoeuvre by withdrawing the kingly figure as soon as it is introduced. An empty palace, a vacant throne and an invisible king constitute the mise-en-scène of his plays and dance-dramas. Rather than an exceptional interregnal anarchic moment, emptiness is inscribed in the very heart of the monarchical model, thereby transfiguring it into a radical instituting imaginary of the social. This invocation of the “absent king” stands in stark contrast to the concurrent nationalist imagination, that mobilized the sites of history and myth to put in circulation a litany of exemplar rulers from the past, both as inspirational choices and legitimate alternatives to the colonial regime.

In conceptualizing his kingly imaginary, I argue in this paper, Tagore discarded nationalist historicism and theological monism as sources of political power. He marshalled a peculiar understanding of god from the Upanishads as not only lacking in physical attributes and potencies, but above all, hidden. Construing the grand project of creation to be a love-letter from god to human beings, dualism as a state of separation between the immortal and mortal lovers was understood as the basis of creative will and action. Tagore’s widely-attended plays in the most tumultuous of political times that centered around the absent god-king staged this aesthetics of separation, but not to garner support for India’s monarchical future. This choice was ultimately made in critique of the colonial-capitalist state and economy and their promise of enhancement of life. Against any such promise of gratification, the choice of absence and incompletion provoked the potentiality of the human subject in the characters as well as the audience. Finally, it is the refashioning of the modern subject, against and beyond the formal considerations of nation, state and community, that formed the horizon of Tagore’s universalist politics launched in the registers of theology and aesthetics.

Tagore’s appraisal of “absent king” in history

To Tagore, what primarily distinguished Britain’s colonial rule from every other that preceded it in Indian history, was its technical prowess and supreme efficacy. By means of the abstract mechanisms of law, institution and policy, a distant race and nation could govern a country much larger than itself in both size and population.⁶ India under Britain, in other words, resembled a well-run factory. Equally, the Indians’ perception of the colonial enterprise was consumerist, akin to the experience of wearing shoes, which was always preferable, as opposed to walking barefoot.⁷ Far from the colonizers’ foreignness, Tagore was alarmed at how the native population was totally overwhelmed by the life-enhancing quality of a mechanized commercial rule. He cautioned:⁸

when we walk barefooted upon ground strewn with gravel, our feet come gradually to adjust themselves to the caprices of the inhospitable earth; while if the tiniest particle of gravel finds its lodgment inside our shoes we can never forget and forgive its intrusion.

Through a relatable metaphor, Tagore conveyed the “powerlessness” and “lack of freedom” of the shoe-wearer or one enclosed in the false comforts of a perfectly efficient state. He added that, the “texture of our former governments was loosely woven, leaving big gaps through which our own life sent its threads and imposed its designs.”⁹ Alluding to the industrial goods that had dislodged the local handloom industry, Tagore’s claim was that the “anaesthetics” of the former lay in their resistance to manual alteration in cases of normal wear and tear, thus totally obviating their consumers’ agency, unlike the simple cotton products that could be renewed and reused by dint of human imagination and artistry.

When employed to describe the old monarchies, idioms such as an unevenly pebbled ground or a loose fabric bore a related yet specific meaning. Circumventing the question of content, or the classic debate on whether the precolonial monarchies were despotic or constitutionally-ordered, Tagore implied that the monarchical form as such was not quite solid or full, but embodied empty spaces within it. Not only was the reach of a personal sovereign naturally truncated, but his whims and fancies could even decelerate a rational government.¹⁰ For instance, the Mughal emperor’s prodigal fondness for aesthetic thrills and pleasures never dried up the circuit of cultural exchange between different denominational communities.¹¹ Rather than romanticizing the benevolence or welfarist nature of erstwhile rulers, Tagore flatly noted that, even if the Mughal king was oppressive, he was like a tiny mahout sitting atop an elephant that was India; but with the British nation, another elephant had mounted the Indian one, thereby choking and completely stifling it.¹² He thus insisted that the British crown at the metropole was hollowed out by the British nation and its practice of liberal utilitarianism in the colony, but at the same time, veered away from the appeal that welfarist monarchies had among many Indian nationalists.¹³ Tagore’s foremost accusation against the colonizers was not one of indifference or economic exploitation as commonly charged, but an ideological one, challenging the liberal foundations of the Empire. Its promise to better life chances and opportunities through the ceaseless and pervasive working of an abstract economy and a totalistic legal-bureaucratic machine, came at the price of freedom. Of course, freedom here was not simply individual liberty, which was itself a by-product of the modern state to be enjoyed privately, or even national liberation, but the very essence and expression of human life and potential.

Beyond such empirical and material limitations, a personal sovereign also did not fully occupy the symbolic order. That is, he was neither the absolute nor the ultimate representative of the fundamental law grounding the precolonial society. In Tagore’s intellectual analysis, social relations were mediated by the comprehensive ethical law of dharma that prescribed specific duties for each caste group.¹⁴ Inscribed within it, the monarch was a formal figure-head who conducted stately affairs from a distance, such that wars and conquests did not impact the society’s churnings and daily endeavors.¹⁵ Moreover, there was a constitutive split in the founding order itself, between the Brahmin’s samajdharma or social law that preserved restrictive customary practices and the Kshatriya’s dharmaniti or law of polity that vied for unhindered expansion.¹⁶ The antagonism between these legalities came to a head in the early Buddhist years as the Shramanic kings in their bid to extend political kinship, dissolved the restrictive social barriers of Brahminical dharma.¹⁷ Contrary to the orientalist representation of its village communities as closed and dormant, Tagore averred that India had historically been a battleground of conflicting laws and ideas.

More than the institutional paradigms of a federation or shared sovereignty, Tagore thus insisted on the open indeterminacy of the socio-symbolic order made possible under monarchical rule. Power was not simply functionally apportioned among different actors, but more precisely, it was undefined and a matter of contestation. This was clearly instantiated in the first popular uprising against the British that took place immediately before Tagore’s birth, and unprecedentedly under the leadership of a Mughal monarch. What would explain this strange coalescence of 1857, especially since the rebellious mercenaries employed by the East India Company could not have expected any material support from Bahadur Shah Zafar, a frail emperor of a steadily declining dynasty? His successful predecessors had installed a culture of imperial discipleship that recognized them as sacral sovereigns – both material lords and spiritual guides of their subjects.¹⁸ But Bahadur Shah took the opposite turn, as he expressed willingness to quit the throne and become an ascetic.¹⁹ Arguably therefore, the power in concert generated by the rebels did not depend for legitimacy on Bahadur Shah or the Mughal dynasty; instead, his reduced power ensured that the space occupied by him was sufficiently empty to enable them as a united force. This world event, starkly contrastive to the French Revolution and the anti-monarchist sentiment that it spurred, would have left its imprint on Tagore’s imagination.

In Hegel’s philosophical reckoning that made state the exclusive subject of history, India, despite its rich cultural legacy, lacked history since it did not possess a state.²⁰ This explanation contributed to the alibi of the empire that tasked itself with preparing the natives towards some kind of self-government. Tagore critiqued this position with a call to broaden the horizon of historical thinking. Whilst factually agreeing on the absence of state, he added that, unlike Europe, the unity and order of Indian society was not dependent on the existence of a foreign enemy who had to be fought or defeated by a centralized monolithic power– namely, the state.²¹ Rather, the principle holding together the heterogeneous multiplicity of Indian civilization was internal. The temptation to synonymize this principle with caste norms or regard his critique as an invitation to substitute the political with everyday sociality as the object of historical enquiry would be misplaced. Tagore had also interestingly argued that the reason behind the downfall of the Maratha state – the only such in Indian history, established by Sivaji – was its perfect coincidence with a naturalized caste order that precluded dynamism and mobility.²² My argument is that Tagore’s position was an anti-absolutist one, wherein a holistic and fully-formed state or society was an anathema to freedom. Without proposing a new order of balance between the state, society and individual, outside the pale of liberalism and conservatism, Tagore reclaimed absence or symbolic emptiness as a positive instituting principle.²³

God as the “absent king”: a theology of freedom

Much before swaraj or self-rule was articulated as a political project of national liberation in the Swadeshi moment, ruminations on autonomy had begun in the early nineteenth century as well, although in a distinctly spiritual register. The imperative ensued no less from the domineering presence of Protestant Christianity propagated by the missionaries that condemned the ritualistic and hierarchal basis of the native Hindu society. Modern Hindus responded through the revival and renewal of the monistic philosophy of Advaita (or non-dualistic) Vedanta, that conceived a cosmic-level unity by subsuming individual differences in an all-encompassing absolute reality of the Brahman. This doctrine of monistic unity and identity of all beings was first institutionalized by the iconic reformer Rammohan Roy in the Brahmo movement. The new dispensation enabled householders to directly access spiritual knowledge without the heteronomous mediations of priestcraft and idolatry.²⁴ As opposed to turning them other-worldly, much like Protestantism’s capitalist ethics, observance of spiritual discipline further tightened and regimented the entrepreneurial work of an emergent bourgeois class, modeled on the ascetic-householder subject.²⁵ Roy’s associate and Tagore’s grandfather, Dwarkanath, whose proverbial success at trading with the Europeans earned him the title of “prince,” was emblematic of this socio-intellectual milieu.

With access to representational politics already severely limited under colonialism, the language of liberal contractualism that facilitated inter-racial trade and exchange came further undone by the turn of the twentieth century on the heels of the perceived attempt of the colonizers to parse apart Indian society into conflicting and competing interests. The partition of Bengal finally provided the momentum for a new kind of idealist politics of nationalism in Swadeshi that delegitimized the homo economicus.²⁶ It displaced economics for ushering a distinctly political modernity and set in motion a renewed individual subject armed with the capacity to offer disinterested sacrifice.²⁷ Enabling both revolutionary and conservative politics, the sacrificial basis of self-rule directly confronted the colonial-modern state’s chief sovereign justification of protecting human life. Despite the sharp break from the earlier liberal moment, monism remained the key theological source for this subject that sought liberation in the Brahman by desirelessly serving the nation.²⁸ The ascetic-householder model, although primed for a different ideal and purpose, also continued to prevail. In what follows, I show that Tagore expanded the scope of the subject much beyond the limits of the nation precisely by unsettling the consensus on monism. He thus launched a modern self that was the fount of creative will and freedom.

Born in a family that spearheaded Brahmo reformism, Tagore’s training in the Vedanta (or Upanishads) and admiration for Roy ran deep. Yet, in 1894 itself, in a review of Paul Deussen’s interpretation of the Vedantic philosophy, he critiqued the liberationary horizon of monistic ideas.²⁹ Based on the theory of karma (action), monism attributed moral necessity to birth and rebirth, such that the repetitive cycle of life was dependent on the quality of deeds performed on earth, liberation from which meant the final overcoming of “ignorance.” The element of ignorance that supposedly perpetuated life and suffering, Tagore wrote, was itself “eternal and indefinable,” as acknowledged by Sankaracharya, the legendary monist of the eighth century. If immoral action was the basis of birth, there could be no explanation for the first life on earth. This signified that there was a duality at the very source of creation, irrespective of whether the primal ignorance was located in the Brahman. Tagore thus concluded that human life was inexplicable and inevitable as it could not be causally connected to the morality or immorality of actions. Further, the eternity of ignorance implied that liberation was an impossible and unachievable ideal. Citing the Brahmasutras in his review, also a part of the Vedantic canon, Tagore described the world as “the Brahman’s field of Play (leela),” “just as in this world, children playfully assume various roles like that of a king.” This depiction of the sovereign god as childlike, disabused life of its serious and miserable characterization in monism, and elementally reconfigured the meaning of being. In this understanding, the world would continue to thrive for as long as it met the playful fancy of the creator-god.

With the goal of liberation set aside, what defined the purpose of human life? How was freedom possible in a world created by god? Tagore addressed these questions in his monograph containing lectures delivered at Harvard University titled “Sadhana”:³⁰

… it is the self of man which the great King of the universe has not shadowed with his throne – he has left it free. In his physical and mental organism, where man is related with nature, he has to acknowledge the rule of his King, but in his self he is free to disown him. There our God must win his entrance. There he comes as a guest, not as a king, and therefore he has to wait till he is invited. It is the man's self from which God has withdrawn his commands, for there he comes to court our love.

It is only in this region of will that anarchy is permitted … For this self of ours has to attain its ultimate meaning, which is the soul, not through the compulsion of God's power but through love, and thus become united with God in freedom.

Whilst the divine-human relation was one of duality, it was clearly not a hierarchical one as between the deity and devotee. The idea of a fearful god who needed to be appeased through sacrifice was annulled since natural laws were deemed inexorable not only for the world but also for god who exercised self-limitation, precisely in order to be equal to humans.³¹ This mutuality was indeed a necessary condition for leela or love-play to take place between the two. Usually understood in the passionate erotic sense of divine love-making as in the Vaishnavaite tradition, Tagore transformed the meaning of leela by fusing it with the Upanishadic idea of hiddenness or self-concealment of the Brahman. As god receded into the background by emptying the human self of all laws and commands, the latter emerged as a sovereign lover. Not only was love immanentized against its typical theological interpretation as the unilinear flow of grace from an omnipotent transcendental divinity, but in a strange asymmetry, god was dependant on human love, since the very purpose behind creation was to love and be loved in return. An unawareness of this state, however, was not catastrophic for human as worldly life went on as usual, although it definitely was tragic since its realization held out the promise of a much better life.³²

Furthermore, what heightened the tension caused by the dramatic separation of the two lovers is that the Brahman was shorn of all personal attributes. Loving such a god could only result in hysteric questioning about one’s own self, where the self exceeded all bodily and mentalist parameters. As love’s containment in concrete representations like the idol, image or text seemed impossible, the Upanishadic precept of “neti, neti” – “not this, not this” – encapsulated the mortal lover’s restive dissatisfaction with finite expressions for such love. This position starkly differed from Rammohan’s iconoclasm that presupposed the autonomy of self when freed of priestly mediation. The intimate and dynamic interplay of categories such as absence (of the divine lover) and excess (of human striving) in Tagore’s imagination disrupted the certitude of the possibility of knowing god. Similarly, a more positive conception of liberty constructed around the ideal of a monistic nationalist selfhood, as in Swadeshi, was equally inadequate. In fact, Tagore outlined its exclusionary dimension and prospect of violence in some of his political novels.³³

The spiritual mood of uncertainty and incommunicability, also predominant in Tagore’s poetic verses, has been read as reflective of the loss faced by a new middle class which no longer possessed a language to engage with the past or the rapid transitions under colonial modernity.³⁴ Be that as it may, in my reading, rather than indicating lack or deficiency, this theology of abandonment and longing, primarily posited an excessive self. Tagore called it the “surplus in man,” an expression he used often, that was important and exceptional on several counts.³⁵ Not only did India of his time experience debilitating poverty, but the nationalists too framed their norm and narrative around reclaiming subjectivity through desirelessness and sacrifice. As improvement of life produced the condition of the liberal imperial state, the capacity to die was mobilized, most unconditionally and powerfully by Gandhi, to convert the individual agent into the chief bearer of sovereign will.³⁶ Tagore, however, made a paradigmatic shift by extricating the subject from life-death exigency and repositioning it as a site of endless potential.

Surplus creativity arose from the human subject’s realization of a split with god, and more fundamentally (due to god’s hiddenness), in its own self. This knowledge of dissonance, an out-of-joint experience of the self, radically transformed its way of seeing the outside world. Matter, nature and life itself were most truly accessible in their “more-than-themness,” beyond calculation and objective analysis, when supplemented by an excess of desire sourced from the perceiving or imagining subject.³⁷ Truth was neither out there, nor simply within the self’s inner recess to be discovered through sacrificial renunciation, but made visible through creative insistence. Freedom in creation exercised thus was “superfluous” and “wasteful,” in breach and excess of national necessity.³⁸ Yet, it was the most universal and sovereign potentiality and capacity that the human subject uniquely shared with the playful god who “was an eternal waster of time.”³⁹

Surely, Tagore was life-affirming in contrast to his nationalist contemporaries, but it is important to insert a further caveat. Unlike the new sciences invested in enhancing human potency for a capitalist economy propelled by surplus generation of profit and pleasure, “surplus in man” manifested in ephemeral moments of creative joy (ananda) that thwarted quantification and the logic of possession itself. Thus, it simultaneously rejected the possibility of emancipation through egalitarian transfer of property as in Marxism. Neither was it a state of spiritual transcendence which too, in signifying the possibility of a different life, implied a kind of completion. In opposition to these views, the condition precedent for the surplus subject was non-possession and incompleteness. As per Tagore, death was monistic and life dualistic in its constant interplay of appearance and truth. Only a self radically opened up, and not already mastered, could grasp the volatility and contingency of life. The vehicle for apprehending the real world soaked in self’s excess, was aesthetics.

“Absent king” and a people in search of truth

Tagore confessed before an academic audience in the University of Oxford that his views on religion developed not so much out of active philosophical scholasticism, but a continuous stream of uncanny experiences since childhood, whose unity found expression in his poetical compositions and yet “remained unrevealed” to him.⁴⁰ Sharing between them a “mysterious line of growth,” it was as though his poetical and religious lives were wedded to each other “in a long period of ceremony” that “was kept secret” from him.⁴¹ His was after all, “a poet’s religion.” What is evident in these declarations is Tagore’s unwillingness to reveal the impact and influence of theology on his aesthetic creations, as such an act of disclosure would have meant loss of freedom for the readers.⁴² He used the same language of secrecy and mystery to entreat the Indian audience to actively participate in the esoteric world of the plays, rather than be guided by ideological interpretations.⁴³ Other than the openness of the narrative itself, the broken disjointed form of the plays and the lyrical quality of dialogues forestalled their passive and sentimental consumption. Above all, Tagore was not an anarchist thinker. Despite an air of freedom in the plays, he made the king the central pivot precisely because he was not interested in a flight to utopia as a temporary break from the colonial disciplinarian society, but to open possibilities for recovering subjectivity within a society constituted by laws.

“Raja,” the play with which I began the paper, is centered around a king in hiding, who does not for once appear on stage. His absence becomes a source of anxiety, perplexity, sorrow and joy for his own subjects, but also other kings and foreigners who gather in a spring festival organized by him. While the kings conspire to usurp the kingdom and abduct the queen of the hiding monarch, the foreign visitors are astounded by the broad open streets and the unmitigated access allowed to the commoners everywhere irrespective of their caste background, contrary to the maze-like crooked lanes that they are used to which strictly regulate one’s movements. They wonder about the possible reasons behind the king’s absence – if he is too ugly or weak, or perhaps altogether non-existent. A grand old man, referred by all as “thakurda” (grandfather) and who claims to be the king’s friend, offers an explanation to the band of boys that follows him: “it is only because our king is not seen in one place that his entire kingdom is full of kings – how can the place (of the king) be empty then! He has turned us all into kings.” It is the queen’s indomitable desire to see the king, who meets her only in a dark chamber, that results in a series of unfortunate events. Without the absent king’s direct intervention, but a disembodied presence that is only felt at certain moments by the characters themselves, the rebel queen and the enemy-king finally dissolve their respective ambitions and join thakurda on the streets in search of their “king covered in dust and soil.”

Modern readers may squirm at the unceremonious erasure of corporeal sensuality and eroticism from the experience of love, and even discern a suppression of feminine desire in the queen’s story. Contrarily, it has been convincingly shown that such a manoeuvre displaced the disproportionate attention on physical appearances and external forms that arrested the prospects of especially women characters in medieval poetical aesthetics.⁴⁴ As evidenced by a full-blown exploration of the emotional and intellectual evolution in the queen, Tagore sought to inaugurate a subjectivity that was individuated and interiorized. Even in his own lifetime, Tagore was harshly criticized for ignoring the material questions of passion and poverty by a younger generation of socialist writers. They sociologically related the poet’s high-minded abstractionism to his elite background. Yet, the king in “Raja” stands out in his disregard of aristocratic grandeur, so much so that his best lieutenants are subaltern figures, like the whimsical and jovial thakurda or the queen’s maidservant. Not romanticizing poverty either, the idea is to completely divest the process of subject-formation of the regime of property and rights. As thakurda cherishes his friendship with the king – a relation not mediated by material interest but free choice, the young boys sing aloud: “we are all kings in this kingdom of our king/by what claim otherwise, shall we unite with him?” What the kingly subjects share with the monarch is his pure substanceless subjectivity. Evacuated of all special meritorious qualifications and moralistic qualities, the king in hiding is not an exemplary representative figure, but resembles the Brahman in his reciprocity with the citizen-subjects, such that an inconceivable indistinguishability arises between the divinity or kingliness of human-subjects and the humanity of the kingly god or godly king.

Thus, the question of the social and political in Tagore break on the shore of subjectivity. Although one can make sense of the continuing appeal of the play in democratic cultures, yet, Tagore sharply steered clear of the monistic narrative of a people stepping into the shoes of the prince to emerge as the new sovereign.⁴⁵ Equally, despite being dotted by various sociological entities, “Raja” does not celebrate the colorful pluralism of pre-formed identities. Flouting any guarantee of stability, the dualistic and esoteric dimensions of the play unleash in its characters an unmitigated desire to be subjects of truth. If not interregnal anarchy, this condition is also vastly different from that produced by the inescapable spectrality of the king’s law. An emotionally charged people risk transgressing caste strictures, as they leave the fold of ritually enclosed household spaces to form affective solidarities on open streets that are suspected to be wild, unpredictable and dangerous. The spatiality of wide roads alongwith the temporal frames of festival and holiday – both denoting a kind of release or exit from the status quo as if in extension of the subject’s excess – repeatedly occur in Tagore’s oeuvre. Interestingly, the eagerness to uncover truth is shown mostly by characters – such as, old bards, mad fools and inexperienced children – that are not conventionally considered to fulfill the criteria of an autonomous subjectivity.⁴⁶ Even in the plays, they operate at the limits of language and reason, mainly led by the exigency of spirit, will and intuition. However, the implication is not that subalternity by itself is any criterion to be closer to truth, or that marginal figures are pre-disciplinary and always already subjects of truth.

When kings do make an appearance in Tagore’s plays, they are found to be in flagrant violation of their caste or dharmic duty to uphold and maintain sacrificial laws. “Visarjan” (Immersion, 1927/1936)⁴⁷ opens with the king imposing a ban on the ritualistic sacrifice of animals practiced by Kali worshippers in his country, moved by the query of an orphan girl who in a state of deep shock at seeing a pool of sacrificial blood, disarmingly asks him – why so much blood! On facing stiff resistance from his subjects, the king initially renounces his palace, but is welcomed back after the temple-priest realizes the truth behind the king’s decision and tosses the idol of Kali into the river. Again, the king in “Sarodotsav” (Autumn festival, 1907) celebrates the call of the new season by donning the attire of an ascetic and assisting an orphan boy in assiduously paying off “debts” (rina) to an exacting and cunning master. Although repayment of ancestral debt is a strictly inheritable duty of an upper-caste Hindu male tethered to the ultimate goal of liberation from the cycle of birth, the economy of debt was thus universalized as a disinterested form of social exchange that dispelled any expectation of benefit in return. Without explicitly discarding any of the vital concepts of Hindu theology like dharma, karma or rina, Tagore affirmatively sabotaged each one of them by renewing and repurposing their meaning, value and function.⁴⁸ Alternatively, the overlapping themes of non-violence, renunciation and defiance of caste injunction indicate the influence of early Buddhism on Tagore’s thinking. Primarily, the model of an itinerant monarch taking pleasure in breaking caste and patrilineal laws – for instance, by adopting orphan children (as is the case in the abovementioned plays) – is in contradistinction to the archetypal ascetic-householder subject of nationalism discussed previously.

Another fascinating account of the king in hiding is in “Raktakarabi” (Red oleanders, 1926) where he surfaces at the very end of the play, rebelling against his own ministers. If truth is hidden, so is the operation of its oppositional category, described by Tagore in his prefatorial remarks as a “civilization of extortion and theft.”⁴⁹ Referring to the acquisitive logic of modern capitalism, Tagore wrote how its power of attraction (akarshan) had insidiously destroyed village economies by luring away the peasants from cultivation (karshan).⁵⁰ The play revolves around a community of miners who obsessively extract gold from the interiors of the earth under the directions of their monarch who has shut himself behind a deep, impenetrable web. This spell of a machine-like existence is broken with the arrival of Nandini, whose breezy, free-willed spirit suddenly catches on to the king and his subjects like an inexplicable contagion. As they become aware of their condition of self-exile, the miners under the leadership of their king seek to dismantle the governmental apparatus. Here too, as in Raja, the process of self-realization undergone by the characters is shrouded in mystery and not laid out for analysis or emulation. This is because, unlike commodities and facts, or the play’s metaphorical gold, that could be extracted, classified and studied, truth was inherently subjective, experiential and belied all sensual forms of representation. Yet, as is evident by the ordinariness of the plays’ characters, the search for truth was not at all a specialized private affair, but hugely popular, finding expression in the subversion of norms and institutions.⁵¹ Equally, truth could not be owned and possessed like knowledge, labour-power or belief, since its pursuit demanded suspending the very certainty and solidity of self.

Tagore made the choice of the literary genre precisely in opposition to the nationalist preference for history as the key site of producing the Indian nation. This choice itself was therefore markedly political – a point that is often missed by scholars who attempt to recreate the political Tagore by parsing apart his essayistic and epistolary interventions from the poetical and aesthetic ones. Such a conflation of the political with the prosaic is not only mistaken, but in overemphasising his role as a critic, it fails to bring out what is most creative in Tagore’s politics. After all, as a twentieth century Indian thinker, the imperative of action loomed large, and he actively used the medium of the plays to stage his political ideas. Although Tagore took inspiration from history as I have shown in the first part of this paper, he deployed the kingly figure in aesthetics mainly because it lacked historical heft.

In fact, Tagore revealingly wrote that: “there was ample rasa in the actions of Mughals and Pathans staged in bloodstained theatres, but not enough history.”⁵² Rasa or literary juice signifies an aesthetic effect that is neither merely representational (confined exclusively to the actors on the stage) nor experiential (such that the audience becomes oblivious of its separation from the world of the play) but a distinct third effect that produces a common mode of being and imagining.⁵³ Crucially, the libidinal economy of rasa eludes the fixity of history that is burdened with establishing identity between the past and the present – a unity that is central to the imagination of the nation. On the other hand, Tagore by the above assertion converted history into a rasa, such that the poet emerged as the sovereign subject bringing together diverse times, places and peoples into a contingent and creative pact exceeding the limits of the nation. Recused of reading the past from the vantage point of the present, Tagore marshalled a counter-narrative of fabulous kings to open futural prospects for the modern subject.

Conclusion

With aesthetics serving as the vehicle for theological ideas, as I have shown in this paper, Tagore could bring together the disparate categories of sovereignty and freedom, even as he radically reappraised them. Such a construction was possible through the mediation of “absence” as a positive basis for the institution of society. Absence however did not imply a completely empty space of power indexed to a unitary people, but one dotted by the presence of god, king – even if only imaginary – and their laws. This was in clear departure from the monistic and monotheistic foundations of political theology in European thought. However, more than signifying an order of pluralistic coexistence, the duality of being promised a tensed state wherein every norm and representation seemed amenable to intense probing. Above all, the gap opened up in its wake invented a subjectivity always in excess of any pre-given identity, thereby instigating it to exercise creative will and freedom. The provocation of incompletion of the subject in aesthetics not only militated against the promise of life’s enhancement under the colonial state and economy, but also the monistic determinism of caste laws and nationalism.

Penned by Tagore in 1911, the first stanza of “Jana Gana Mana” was officially accepted as India’s national anthem in 1947. The song evokes the imagery of a divine lordly figure who is addressed as “the dispenser of India’s destiny” and around whose throne, people of different religions have united forming a garland of love. Despite allusion to a variety of aural experiences, there are no physical descriptions attributed to this figure. Rather, to confound things further, the initial masculine trope of imagining it, is discarded by the end through an explicitly maternal reference which is equally abstract and not physiognomic. Although it has controversially been related and identified with historical persons, much more convincing is Tagore’s continuation with the theme of what I have described in this paper as an absent king. Given the closures of a nation-state and formal democracy, the adventure of freedom could be retrieved through the imagination of a sufficiently vacant kingly center.

Acknowledgements

My foremost thanks to Shruti Kapila, Robert Yelle and Moiz Tundawala for many helpful comments on this paper. I am also grateful to the organizers and participants of the “De-provincializing Political Theology” conference where an earlier draft was presented, and to the anonymous reviewers of this journal.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Salmoli Choudhuri

Salmoli Choudhuri is a doctoral candidate working on ideas of self, sovereignty, freedom and universality in RabindranathTagore's political thought. She has previously done her MPhil in South Asian Studies from the University of Cambridge, BCL from theUniversity of Oxford and BA, LLB (Hons) from National Law University, Delhi.

Notes

1 For William Radice’s remarks on the subject of democracy in the play, see “Tagore’s play Raja to go international”. Outlook, February 19, 2012. https://www.outlookindia.com/newswire/story/tagores-play-irajai-to-go-international/752027 (last accessed on November 3, 2021).

2 See for instance, Prime Minister Nehru’s description of Tagore as a “democrat with proletarian sympathies” who “represented essentially the cultural tradition of India,” and above all, his embrace of the latter as his intellectual mentor. Nehru, Discovery of India, 340–1.

3 Most recently, Datta Gupta, “Tagore’s View of Politics in the Contemporary World,” 279–93. Reproducing his strong remarks: “The tragedy of Tagore was that his notion of politics … made him a persona non grata.”

4 Moyn, “Hannah Arendt on the Secular,” 71–96.

5 Mehta, “The Social Question and the Absolutism of Politics”.

6 Tagore. “Rajbhakti” (Devotion towards king, 1905). In Rabindra Rachanabali (hereinafter, “RR”). Vol. 13. Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1990, 223–7. All translations from Bengali in this paper, unless otherwise stated, are mine.

7 Tagore, Nationalism, 24.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 “Ingraj o Bharatbashi” (The English and the Indians, 1893). RR, Vol. 13, 192–5. Tagore argued that the relation between ruler and subject under the imperial Mughals was not governed by terms of interests.

11 Ibid., 192–3.

12 “Bahurajakata” (The rule of many, 1905). RR, Vol. 13, 228.

13 Tagore elaborated elsewhere on how the colonizers depoliticized the royal rituals even when imitating them. See, “Rabindranather Rashtranaitik Mawt” (The political thought of Rabindranath, 1929). RR, Vol. 13, 715–6. For contractualization of the ruler-subject relation under colonialism, further see, Cohn, “Representing authority in Victorian India,” 165–210.

14 “Swadeshi Samaj” (National society, 1905), 43–6, and “Bharatbarsher Itihasa” (History of India, 1903), 123–4. In RR, Vol. 13.

15 Ibid.

16 “Bharatbarshe itihaser dhara” (The course of Indian history, 1911), RR, Vol. 13, 491–501. For a generative discussion on this constitutive tension in the Indian socio-political order, see, Tundawala, “In the Shadow of swaraj: Constituent Power and the Indian Political”.

17 “Bharatbarshe itihaser dhara,” ibid.

18 Moin, The Millennial Sovereign.

19 Devji, The Impossible Indian, 33–40.

20 Guha, History at the Limit of World-History, 7–23.

21 “Bharatbarsher Itihasa,” see note 14 above, p. 124.

22 Tagore, Rabindranath. “Shibaji o Guru Gobindasingha” (Sivaji and Guru Gobind Singh, 1910) in Itihasa, 73–74.

23 Implicit in this paper is an engagement with Lefort’s “empty place of power” and Castoriadis’ “imaginary institution of society”; although, such reference can only be tangential and indirect, as unlike them, Tagore was not post-secular. Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-political?” 148–87; Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society.

24 Scott, Spiritual Despots.

25 Bayly, Recovering Liberties; Hatcher, Bourgeois Hinduism.

26 Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History.

27 On the centrality of the individual subject as the agent of political action in Indian thought, see, Kapila, “Self, Spencer and Swaraj”.

28 On the political centrality of the discourse of sacrifice and “desireless action” as sourced from the Bhagavad Gita, see, Kapila and Devji, eds. Political thought in Action.

29 Tagore, “Foreign Exposition of the Vedanta, 1894”.

30 Tagore, Sadhana.

31 Tagore wrote: “it is his own will that has imposed limits to itself … if God assumes his role of omnipotence, then his creation is at an end and his power loses all its meaning”. Ibid., 49–50.

32 On the self-concealment of Brahman, see, Ganeri, The Concealed Art of the Soul.

33 “Ghare-Baire” (The home and the world, 1916) and “Char-Adhyaya” (Four chapters, 1934).

34 Chaudhuri, Reading the Poet Today, 15–60.

35 For Tagore’s elaboration on the “surplus in man”, see, “The religion of man” (1930). In The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, 99–108.

36 See note 19 above.

37 Tagore’s letter to CF Andrews in “Letters to a friend” (January 14, 1921). In The English Writings, 276–7.

38 See note 35 above.

39 Tagore’s letter to CF Andrews in “Letters to a friend” (March 5, 1921). In The English Writings, 285.

40 See note 35 above, 85.

41 Ibid., 121.

42 On esotericism in Muslim political thought, and particularly, in the works of the poet Mohammad Iqbal, see, Devji, Muslim Zion, and “Secular Islam”.

43 Preface to “Raktakarabi” (Red oleanders, 1926). In RR. Vol. 13. Calcutta: Paschim Bangla Akademi, 2015, 31–33.

44 Kaviraj, The Invention of Private Life, 159–218.

45 For a monistic narrative of kingship and popular sovereignty in India, see, Banerjee, The Mortal God.

46 For a generative discussion on religion as “will and freedom without autonomy” – coined by Derrida –, see Skaria, Unconditional Equality, 55–63; On Tagore and the figure of the child, see Bandopadhyay, “On the Seashore of Endless Worlds: Rabindranath and the Child,” 254–67.

47 Derived from Tagore’s own novel “Rajarshi” (The saintly king, 1887).

48 I borrow the term “affirmative sabotage” from Spivak, An Aesthetic Education.

49 See note 43 above.

50 Ibid.

51 In contrast to the elitism of the private practice of pre-modern esotericism discussed in Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography.

52 Tagore in Itihasa, 58, 121.

53 Banerjee, Elementary Aspects of the Political, 192.