Introduction: “Jibandevatā,” Memory, and History

In this essay, I briefly explore some aspects of the role of memory in Rabindranath Tagore's music, popular in his native Bengali culture as “Rabindrasangeet.” Rabindrasangeet is a site that brings into play the personal memory of the composer, the collective memory of the local Bengali community and of the larger Indian “sāmājik” heritage, and the more abstract memory of his species-being as a member of humanity. I will attempt an understanding of the historical and historiographical implications of the interplay of these individual, local, “national,” and global forms of memory at the time of the production of this music, a time of crises in the Indian postcolonial subjectivity. Is it possible for us to reclaim those implications in the context of our historicity today? Memory in the postcolonial context, as Tagore was keenly aware, was never outside the pale of its other, anti-memory. How is the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century process of nation-building in India through remembrance and oblivion, through a selective appropriation of the precolonial past, critiqued in Rabindrasangeet in the composer's radically futuristic and experimental outlook regarding the historical legacy of Indian music and creativity? How does a ceaseless evocation of memory in its supranational forms in this music—among other arts—help Tagore transcend the limits of various confining identity-politics and reach his idea of a culturally rooted cosmopolitanism? These are some of the questions, which have specific musicological implications, I shall try to address here. While I am aware that a discussion of the kind of musical sociology I am going to attempt here would demand a comprehensive engagement with several aspects of music as an art form, including performance, reception, modes of dissemination, structures of patronage, and so on, I will concentrate within the limited scope of this article primarily on a small set of issues pertinent to only one aspect of Tagore's music, its production and composition, while making only cursory remarks on the other related sites.

In Ātmaparichay (Introducing myself, B.E. 1347, 1940; Tagore [1990] Reference Tagore2011, vol. 14), where he contemplates the essential spirit of his life and creativity about one year before his death, Tagore presents his whole life and creative corpus as an organic whole. Not only are his apparently discrete and isolated works, he observes, expressions of a singular binding discourse that endows his life with meaning; he himself, by virtue of this unifying spirit, transcends his isolated existence of an isolated human being and gets integrated into the cosmic schema of existence. This whole process of integration into an enormous organic unity, for him, is independent of his individual man's intentions, which are confined in time and space. It is presided over by a personal guiding spirit, who he time and again refers to as “Jibandevatā” (literally, the presiding deity of one's life and personality) in his corpus, one who imposes unity over all the shreds of memories and anti-memories to form his consciousness and guide him towards his destiny. Describing him as a “poet,” Tagore tells us in Ātmaparichay:

In the introductory song to the collection of his song-texts, Gitabitān, Tagore invokes this muse of his life as “nabashrishtira kabi” (the poet of the new creation; Tagore [1973] Reference Tagore1995, 1). Again, in “Mānabsatya” (Human truth), an essay appended to Mānusher dharma,Footnote ² he talks about “three birthplaces” of Man, the spirit of composite humanity—physical, geographical space (earth); the world of time (memory); and the abode of the soul. The second of these three is of particular relevance here:

The personal memory of the individual man invoked in the earlier quotation, which helps him identify with the universal cycle of life, is complemented here with the species memory of the spirit of Man, “the Universal Man,” as the title of another Tagore text goes. This “Man,” of course, is not a tangible external collective, but a species-consciousness immanent in all individual men. He is the “Man inside. Outside there are innumerable races and communities, inside there is one Man” (Tagore [1990] Reference Tagore2011, 10:621), born into an incredibly expansive chronotope of “the whole world” and the “span of world-history.” In this perception, not only individuals, but even Mankind has a consciousness, and the faculty of memory and oblivion. Clearly, the presiding spirit of Jibandevatā, the weaver and mixer of memories and oblivions, has an impersonal dimension apart from the personal one. He guides the collective, Man, and is described in that capacity as sarbamānusher Jibandevatā’ (Jibandevatā of Mankind, 659).

Two things need to be clarified here about the idea of Jibandevatā. First, this is not a philosophical or theoretical position, but “only a personal poetic experience,” a realization Tagore has reached over time (659). Secondly, in his personal and impersonal manifestations, nor is Jibandevatā a religious concept, something akin to God. Distinguishing between “Visvadevatā” (God) and “Jibandevatā,” Tagore writes in Mānusher dharma: “God is there; He has His abode in cosmic spheres, in celestial bodies. Jibandevatā is specifically in the seat of life, in hearts, at the centre of all feelings and experiences. It is him that the Bāul calls the man of the heart (maner mānush)” (659). Again, in The Religion of Man, talking about the Bāul philosophy and the idea of “maner mānush” in particular, he spells out the nonritualistic, creedless, secular character of this construct, for “these religions are never about a God of cosmic force, but rather about the God of human personality” (Tagore [2000] Reference Tagore2008, 16).

How does Tagore conceive of the relationship between individual man, Jibandevatā or “God of human personality,” and God (“of cosmic force”)? In a letter to Mohitchandra Sen dated February 17, 1903, he attributes to Jibandevatā a mediatory function, between man and God: “He mediates between God and me—he is striving to bring to and accumulate in me God's message, command and ānanda.… It is only our mutual enrichment and completion through the ānanda of love that can lead me towards a realisation of the steady and everlasting bond of love between this world and a supra-universe” (quoted in Ghosh Reference Ghosh and Chakravorty2011, 24). Such a mediatory function of Jibandevatā, the weaver and mixer of memories of “a host of forgotten states,” Tapobrata Ghosh notes, has clear echoes of the Platonic conception of “daemon,” the “interpreter and mediator between God and man” (24). As “sarbamanusher Jibandevatā” (Jibandevatā of Mankind; the equivalent in Tagore of the Platonic “daemon of the world”), he also acts as a link between the Platonic perfect and ideational universe, once actualized, and the actual world of sin and imperfection, and thus becomes a treasure-trove of memory for men and communities trapped in the world of degenerated material existence. “The daemon of the world,” Ghosh writes, “time and again brings back the memory of the ideal mythical golden age to this depraved world of imperfection. We can say that it is this daemon of the world that infused the ideal of the republic in Socrates' mind” (16).

In Tagore's social imagination in the early twentieth-century postcolonial Indian context, it seems, the conflict between the “ideal golden age” of the past and the “world of imperfection” at present took the form of the dyad of “swadeshi samāj” and nation. Tagore has variously associated what he considered the imported colonial idea of nation with the state, state-sanctioned violence, imperialism, a network of exploitation and marginalization, and above all inhumanity—in short, all-round imperfection. “Swadeshi samāj” (roughly and inadequately, the indigenous civil society), his age-old alternative to “nation” in the Indian context, on the other hand, is about a spiritually informed, humane, and harmonious civil life of cooperation and self-governance that leads to all-round individual and communal fulfillment of man. In “Nation ki?” (What is a nation? 1901), he argues that the idea of “nation” is a specifically Western construct, having no political or cultural equivalent in India, and thus there exists no linguistic equivalent for the word “nation” in the Indian vernaculars (Tagore [1990] Reference Tagore2011, 2:619–22). Reiterating the question “what is this Nation?” in a later article, “Nationalism in the West”—originally delivered as a lecture in Japan in 1916—he distinguishes it from samāj in a rather strongly critical tone:

The traditional locus of the samāj is the socio-spiritual consciousness of the masses, spatially far away from and to a great extent indifferent to the functioning of the institutions of political power—for example, state and administration—till the advent of colonialism in this part of the world. Tagore's idyllic and somewhat nostalgic portrayal of the samāj goes thus:

Can one understand Tagore's wistful invocation of samāj in the postcolonial Indian context from the perspective of a possible return to a “remembered” age-old, time-tested ideal world of communal life under the guardianship of the impersonal, collective Jibandevatā? What implications does this turn to the ideal of samāj hold for his music, contemporary Indian history, and historiography? I shall return to these questions below.

The memory of an ideal personal and collective state in the past, intended to be realized once again in the future under the guardianship of Jibandevatā, involves a nonlinear and noncausal notion of time and advancement. It proposes the model of a circular time in which time past and time future are embedded in each other, and thereby questions the validity of what Walter Benjamin (Reference Benjamin, Zohn and Arendt1969, 261) calls “homogeneous empty time,” the temporal logic of the dominant Enlightenment discourse of progress and modernity, and as a corollary, of nationhood. To that extent, Tagore's foregrounding of the role of memory in guiding men and communities towards perfection is anti-progress. Thus he writes in Mānusher dharma:

In this cyclical imagination of time, history is not chronological, and is more than a discourse of man's gradual progressive ascent from a state of primitivism to one of perfection. Rather than an objective record of a series of tangible external events, it is more of a realization of renewal and rediscovery, a “revelation,” of experiences “already … in the domain of actualisation.” Such a perception of history is close to what Benjamin invokes in his idea of “Messianic time.” In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin (Reference Benjamin, Zohn and Arendt1969, 255) remarks: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” Historical knowledge for Benjamin is a contemplative rediscovery of “a past charged with the time of the now” which is “blasted out of the continuum of history” (261). History is more of “an enormous abridgement” (263), a tightly woven, compressed “nest of time” rather than a gradually unfolding narrative in homogeneous empty time. Tagore's Jibandevatā and Benjamin's Messiah, through their emphasis on “revelation,” “flashing up,” and “blasting,” point towards the limits of secular rationality and objectivity as indispensable historiographical tools. Instead, they seem to propose a recourse to realization, even vision, which have a pronounced subjective and spiritual dimension.

“World-History,” “Itihāsa,” and Historicality

The mythical imagination and memory of the golden age of perfection that a community or Mankind strives to rediscover in the future by “blasting” it “out of the continuum of history” is the seat of an alternative history. This alternative history finds its discursive locale in spiritually informed discourses inspired by the notion of circular time, nonmodern (and often premodern) discourses that are unstable evocations of the collective unconscious, like myths, purānas, and folk narratives, which the modernist thinker Benedict Anderson dissociates from his narrative equivalent of the idea of nation—the novel.Footnote ⁴ The arrival of the novel form in India with the advent of colonialism in the mid-nineteenth century was instrumental in India's integration in the dominant Hegelian (and imperial) Eurocentric discourse of “World-history,” which the historian Ranajit Guha distinguishes from the Indian discourse of “itihāsa.” Itihāsa, the precolonial chronicle-narratives of “people with no history,” was initially unacknowledged by the colonial rulers and Orientalists as “history,” and was thus relegated to the “limit” of “World-history.” But with colonialism striking its roots, India's gradual integration into the Eurocentric world order brought a cultural disruption—“the irruption of World-history” (Guha Reference Guha2002, 51)—by virtue of which the term itihāsa was appropriated by World-history as its Indian equivalent. Guha discusses “the complicity of Orientalism in hitching itihāsa to World-history. It was as if an imperial imagination had been looking for a name by which to designate history as a graft in the Indian soil and found it in itihāsa” (51). The contemporary Indian (largely Western-educated) middle class, he suggests, was divided in its reception of this whole exercise in civilizational disruption that took place “during the decades between the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the First World War” (53). While for one group, “it was a passage from myth to history, from fantasy to reason,” for another “it could be seen as a shift from a particular paradigm of storytelling to another” (54). Tagore belonged to the latter group who spoke up against the paradigm of history and rooted for itihāsa.

Let us briefly discuss after Guha the differences between the two paradigms. While “World-history” (and the associated genres of historiography and novel), Guha argues, foregrounded the value of recording immediate “experience,” the product of the narrator's personal participation in the secular and quotidian life, “itih āsa” sought to penetrate into the veils of the immediately available reality and discover a different order immanent in the apparent one. This secondary level of reality functions upon the principle of “wonder”—as opposed to “experience”—which is a product of the narrator's impersonal, “distantiated” (60) reading of reality.Footnote ⁵ This impersonality, of course, is to be distinguished from the rational objectivity of dominant historiography; it is closer to detachment that entails subjective realization invoked in the concepts of Tagore's Jibandevatā and Benjamin's Messiah. “It is not his story. In other words, his role in the telling is not that of a witness but a reporter” (60). Such a distinction pluralizes “reality” itself. Secondly, the narratives of “experience” center upon the figure of the narrator, while those of “wonder” acquire their aesthetic impetus from the listener. The latter type is much more flexible and open-ended than the former. One important implication of this open-endedness is that it has its locus in the fluid and plural public domain as opposed to the private, individual provenance of the narrative of experience. Thirdly, and as a corollary, the narrative of experience, or history, takes shape under the aegis of the state, while that of wonder, or itihāsa, allows a much greater space for the free play of subjectivity. The latter is the narrative of the civic space. Finally, the two differ in their relation with memory and past. “The tale of wonder,” Guha writes, “lives happily with the past. Indeed, the relationship of time and story there is one of playfulness, each renewing the other in the course of an interaction that can never end if only because it has never been tied to a beginning” (69). Time here is not marked by telos; and memory instead of a mere return to some originary point, is an agent of cyclical renewal. The narrative of experience, on the other hand, thrives on an anxiety of complete oblivion, of transience and permanent loss, and therefore on an opposition to time. Drawing on Hegel's view of World-history and his invocation of the mythical opposition between Chronos and “the political god” Zeus (71), Guha shows the inherent complicity of the tale of experience, history, and historiography with the state and their adversarial relationship with time. Memory here protects fleeting experiences from being lost, but does not nurture them towards renewal or rebirth. “In other words, it is not for memory to hold the past in its womb and let time work on it slowly and creatively until it is ready to be born again in repetition” (70).

One aspect of Tagore's musical program was to snatch history away from the clutches of the state back into the realm of civil society, from the domain of the supremacy of nation and nationalism to the marginalized historical legacy of swadeshi samāj. And his strong creative attachment to the local Bengali rural Bāul and Kirtan forms in music has a lot to do with these genres' nature as narratives of wonder, of itihāsa.Footnote ⁶ In their nonstatist, civic ideological location; their reliance on detached subjectivity and nonrational realization; their listener-centric “open-ended” aesthetic; and above all their fluid nonconformism he probably discovered memories of a samāj that started to fall apart with the advent of colonialism and World-history. Bāul and Kirtan also inspire in different ways a rapture, a spiritual bliss, which is central to the aesthetics of wonder. The realm of wonder, far away from the world of experience, takes the secular everyday life as its point of departure, and transcends it to reach the realm of detached astonishment, or vismaya. It aims to explore the extraordinary within the ordinary, the infinite within the finite, and thus, Guha argues, “there is no reason why they should not be acknowledged as the stuff that constitutes a broad and comprehensive historicality” (68). The narrative of wonder produces a euphoria in the audience that is rooted in, but slowly transcends, the world of experience; bypasses the logic of causality; and thus leads towards a different order of “knowledge” that verges on the spiritual. Guha suggests:

The “self-knowledge” or realization achieved through encounter with the useless or surplus—which is “neither productive nor informative by intention,” and therefore counters the utilitarian logic of material progress—leading to “ānanda” is the final significance of the paradigm of wonder that lost the civilizational battle against the paradigm of experience in India in the last few decades of the nineteenth century and after, precisely during Tagore's lifetime.Footnote ⁷ His music, in its theme, form, and language, as well as the centrality of Jibandevatā, is located in this realm of wonder, of alternative historicality.

At one level, as Kalpana Bardhan (Reference Bardhan and Bardhan2008, xxxviii) observes, “there is frequent use [in Rabindrasangeet] of the phrases ‘ki jani’ (what do I know), ‘ke baule go’ (who says), ‘kaukhon’ (when, sometime), ‘konkhāne’ (where, somewhere), and ‘kemone’ (how) to express wonder, wistfulness, amazement, or bewilderment.” At another level, Tagore's language in invoking in his musical texts the mediatory function of his Jibandevatā that leads him to self-knowledge comes very close to that of Guha here in recounting the “joy of wonder.” “This knowing myself will never end,” the itinerant soul revels in one of Tagore's songs, in the wonder of the endlessness of self-knowledge through ānanda: “With this self-knowledge I keep knowing you. / In cycles of birth and death, to your feet / I'll surrender myself, yet remain ever beholden” (Tagore [1973] Reference Tagore1995, 36). Yet, this process of enrichment, as inscribed in the memory of the subject, is mutual, and this realization only adds to her wonder: “I know not from what distant time thou / art ever coming nearer to meet me. Thy sun and stars / can never keep thee hidden from me for aye. / In many a morning and eve thy footsteps / have been heard and thy messenger has come / within my heart to call me in secret. / I know not why today my life is all astir, / and a feeling of tremulous joy is passing through my heart” (Tagore [2003] Reference Tagore2009, 101). We can also consider “Have you not heard his silent steps? He comes, comes, ever comes. / Every moment and every age, every day and every night / he comes, comes, ever comes” (99); or “You've called me way back what morning, no one knows that” (Tagore Reference Tagore2008, 178) and so on. Together they chronicle an integrated “tale of wonder,” where, to recall Ranajit Guha's (Reference Guha2002, 69) formulation, the dialectic of time and story playfully renew each other “in the course of an interaction that can never end if only because it has never been tied to a beginning.”

It is the pathos of loss of this world of wonder, the cultural crisis this loss generated, and the personal and collective memory of the vanquished paradigm that Tagore sought to recreate and relive in his musical corpus. In other words, it is an ānanda derived out of a relentless evocation of the lost paradigm of itihāsa under the guardianship of personal and collective Jibandevatā that he lived in his life and left for posterity in his music. And is not that how Benjamin (Reference Benjamin, Zohn and Arendt1969, 255) thought historical memory functions, by bringing history out of the provenance of experience and actuality, “the way it really was,” and rediscovering it through “flash[ing it] up at a moment of danger”? It is this idea of the historicality of the narrative of wonder that helped Tagore formulate a multifaceted, critical spirit in his interface with the available hegemonic institutions and discourses of experience, nationalism, state, modernity, progress, and education, and of the Hindustani classical tradition in the sphere of Indian music.

Rabindrasangeet, “Bengal Renaissance,” and the Hindustani Classical Tradition

The age in the history of Bengal that inspired an unprecedented urge for self-expression in the Bengali community, produced its best creative minds, and thus gave a new direction to its history—the so-called “Bengal Renaissance” of the nineteenth century—was also the time of the conflict between the paradigms of World-history and itihāsa in this part of the world, of the shaping of Tagore's creative consciousness and the beginning of the history of production of his music. The latter history, of course, would continue to spill well over the residual energy of the Bengal Renaissance, deep into the twentieth century. However, Tagore's participation in the radical spirit of awakening signaled by this historical phenomenon, unlike many others', was marked by an element of ambivalence, for he was pathetically aware of the widening shadow under the lamp, of the slow but sure historical defeat of itihāsa that went largely unnoticed in the excitement over the renaissance. He writes:

Tagore's, therefore, was a degree of departure from the mainstream, a marginality that informed the spirit of his experiments in the sphere of music. Furthermore, his interaction with the local cultural developments in Bengal cannot be seen in isolation from the larger Indian politico-cultural developments that elicited major ideological dissents from several leading voices of the time. The difference over the double menace spawned by colonial modernity is exemplary in this context. On the one hand, there was what Tagore considered the alienating, segregating, and dehumanizing discourse of nationalism; on the other, there was a homogenized universalism, as much an offshoot of Enlightenment Modernity as nationalism, believed by some to be an antidote to this nationalism. The alternative to this universalism that several thinkers, including Tagore, had in mind was “a distinctive civilizational concept of universalism,” a specifically Indian concept in this context, “embedded in the tolerance encoded in various traditional ways of life in a highly diverse, plural society” (Nandy [1994] Reference Nandy2000, vi–vii).

Such syncretist diversity of existence, for Tagore a part of the Indian collective sensibility since time immemorial, would form the basis of his discourse of swadeshi samāj. This pluralistic political-ideological position, which sought to address in the same breath both the Orientalist and nationalist varieties of homogenization, had its regional manifestation in his response to the high cultural slant in the Bengali urban middle-class appropriation of the energy generated by the Bengal Renaissance. He sought to take the spirit of awakening out of its restrictive class-cultural location—into the village, the rural masses, the locus of the constructive aspects of Indian and Bengali heritage, of the authentic “history” of India, and thereby weld the East and the West together in an indigenous modernity. His shift from the high-cultural seat of his ancestral home in Kolkata to the heart of rural Bengal is instructive here. The true ingredients of this pluralistic history of the spirit of India for him were not momentous events and experiences surrounding “empires and rulers and their public affairs” (Guha Reference Guha2002, 72) but the variegated expressions of an ancestral popular socio-spiritual consciousness. Thus he sought to construct and create an alternative cultural history of the spirit of India through his literary works, especially poetical and musical, through rediscovery and renewal of the legacy of the cultural memory inscribed in the Indian collective unconscious. He looked for the traces of memory, or oblivion, of a range of discourses of wonder—from the “high” philosophies of the Upanishads and Buddhism, through the precepts of the popular medieval figures of Nanak, Kabir, Dadu and Razzab, Ravidas, Mirabai, Vidyapati, and Chandidas, to the subaltern Sufi saints, the Vaishnava mystics, and the Bāuls—in the social and psychic life of the modern-day masses.Footnote ⁸

The collective unconscious is a continent of memory presided over by the Jibandevat ā of a community, the “Janaganamana-adhinayaka bhāratabhāgyavidhātā” (“Ruler of people's minds and builder of India's destiny”; Tagore [2007] Reference Tagore and Ghosh2008, 59) in the Indian context, created in time that far precedes nation, state, and India's integration into World-history. Again, the “bhāratabhāgyavidhātā” is no less than the Jibandevatā of Man, for in a letter to Pulinbihari Sen Tagore refers to him as “that eternal charioteer of human fate” (“yugayugāntarer mānavabhāgyarathachālaka”).Footnote ⁹ The treasures of this communal memory, often manifested through the grid of individual creative subjectivity—for example, that of the itinerant Bāul singers—was thus for him a sight of itihāsa, albeit doomed to defeat. This is one way, through the circuit of memory, that his personal Jibandevatā, the Bāul's “maner mānush” (the man of the heart), and the collective Jibandevatā are linked in guiding individuals and cultures in the ever incomplete journey towards fulfillment.

In his own local cultural context, Tagore intervened by challenging the urban middle class and Sanskritic high-cultural hegemony through adding a strong rural, subaltern, “folk” dimension to the emergent modern Bengali subjectivity that lay at the heart of all his creative-critical-praxiological endeavors, musical in particular. The passion for welding together the secular, rational, liberal humanist spirit of European Enlightenment and the indigenous classical Sanskritic and Upanishadic heritage, at the heart of the strong nineteenth-century urban Bengali reformative impulse, was critiqued as well as bolstered by his relentless invocation of a return to the soil. Suchismita Sen (Reference Sen1996, 3) writes how “Tagore was instrumental in channeling much of the nationalistic fervor of his countrymen into appreciation for the older folk and epic traditions, including the medieval Vaisnava lyrics and the Baul songs.” The musicologist Dhurjati Prasad Mukerji (Reference Mukerji2001, 52) comments on the composition of Tagore's “reference to the Collective Unconscious,” which for him comprised “(1) The Upanishads, (2) The Vaishnava Padābalis and philosophy, and (3) the folk-religion, literature and songs, e.g., the Bāul, the Sahajiyā and other humanistic, mystical and synthetic (Hindu-Muslim) cults that had sprung from the life of the people in protest against the Brahminical ritualism and logomachy.” Tagore's intervention in the formation of the new Indian and Bengali subjectivity was thus geared towards a renewal of the pre-nation pluralistic social formation of samāj, the seat of a distinctive civilizational itihāsa, and its synthesis with the positive contributions from the West.

Posited against the backdrop of this unfolding, unequal battle between World-history and Indian and Bengali itihāsa and its various regional consequences, Tagore's critique of the hegemony of the dominant Indian genre in the sphere of music—that of Hindustani classical—in the age of nationalistic fervor, and his attempts at pluralizing this “great” tradition by infusing into it the spirit of root folk and subaltern “little” traditions hold larger historical and historiographical significance. Such attempts, he hoped and believed, would ignite in the urban middle-class Bengali community—the locus of the novel, enticing nationalist consciousness in his culture—the almost forgotten memory of the swadeshi samāj at a time of uncritical submission to the ideology of nation and nationalism. Like the Platonic “daemon of the world,” who acts as a link between the once actualized perfect ideational universe and the actual world of imperfection, and thus becomes a treasure-trove of ideals for men and communities, his Jibandevatā of Man, at least in his Indian incarnation, sought to reconnect us with this alternative history and life.

The rediscovery of a state of idealized existence through memory and revelation has personal micropolitical and collective macropolitical dimensions. Commenting on Kant's idea of Enlightenment, Michel Foucault (Reference Foucault and Rabinow1984, 35) suggests that “Enlightenment must be considered both as a process in which men participate collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally. Men are at once elements and agents of a single process. They may be actors in the process to the extent that they participate in it; and the process occurs to the extent that men decide to be its voluntary actors.” The individual consciousness relentlessly explored in Tagore's musical texts at one level seeks to negotiate between the available modes of imperfect subjectivity and the alternative habitus of an ideal subjectivity through “self-making.” At another level it has a representational and cultural aspect: Rabindrasangeet is arguably the best aesthetic expression of the newly discovered urge for self-expression and aesthetically informed self-fashioning of an entire collective. It is one of those sites through which this cumulative personality of a community was groping for directions towards fulfillment in an age of transition, confusion, and modernization. Taking the subject on a journey through an endless cycle of birth and death “in the realisation of Man's ideal of perfection,” his personal Jibandevatā seeks to connect him with God through ānanda. “When was it I came out singing your own note— / it surely wasn't today, it wasn't today,” he wonders, “Since when I've been seeking you, I forgot— / it surely wasn't today, it wasn't today” (Tagore Reference Tagore2008, 172). Or, one can think of “I do know since what ancient times / You set me sailing in the stream of life— / All of a Sudden in stray moments, in homes and vales / My love, you graced my life with ecstasy /… These my eyes are a storehouse / In so many ages in so many worlds / In various new shades of light / Of visions of the formless” (Tagore [1973] Reference Tagore1995, 125); “Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. / This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, / And fillest it ever with fresh life. /… Ages pass, and still thou pourest, / and still there is room to fill” (Tagore [2003] Reference Tagore2009, 3); “The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long. / I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of / light, and pursued my voyage through the wilderness / of worlds leaving my track on many a star and planet” (25), and several others. In the introductory song to Gitabitān, “Prathama yugero udayadigangane,” he invokes the Jibandevatā of Man who inspires Man (and himself as a part of humanity) to reconnect with the purity of primal existence in the dawn of creation:

Tagore attributes the same power of invoking memory of cyclical realizations of perfection, in past and future, to music as an art form itself. In one of his early pieces on music, “Sangeet o bhāb” (Music and sentiment; 1881), he writes after Herbert Spencer:

What kind of temporal imagination can accommodate the “shadow” or “reflection” of a distant future entity? Music in this perception creates an enormous abridgement of time through pointing towards a possibility of remembrance of things future once actualized. For Tagore, music as an art form clearly tells a “tale of wonder” that binds time in an endless “playful” renewal, and in the process it gets itself renewed. In a letter to Indira Devi on September, 20, 1895, he writes: “No other thing in the world holds the marvellous magical power of music—it is a novel creator. I do not know if music conjures up a new world of illusion or just reveals the wonderful innermost realm of permanent truth immanent in this ancient universe” (Tagore [1966] Reference Tagore2004, 192). In another letter to her written six days later, music is seen to capture the spirit of “timeless everlasting estrangement” hidden in familiar natural phenomena (193). Several other correspondences to her emphasize this “wonderful” nature of music by underscoring its “non-experiential” dimension. Music here is placed in the everyday, the quotidian, and yet understood as transcending the ordinary experiences by penetrating into the mask of appearance. This is how it reveals the unusual in the usual, infinite in the finite order of experiences (191–92).

Music is thus variously associated with the ideal and the universal, the nonrational and the wonderful—artistic embodiment of a once actualized schema of being that makes itself part of the present through inspiring memories of an elevated state of existence. It is this wonder-inspiring ideal yet real universe of perfect harmony that is being invoked in “The sky full of the sun and stars, the world full of life, / in the midst of this I find myself— / so, surprised, my song awakens. / Wave after wave of infinite time, to whose ebb and flow earth sways, / the blood in my veins courses to that measure— / so, surprised, my song awakens” (Tagore Reference Tagore2011, 333).Footnote ¹⁰ This is an order of things, a spiritual realization close to that of God, that the speaker (individually and as a representative of larger collectives) seeks to attain through ānanda under the guardianship of Jibandevatā; hence his search for the unknown at the heart of the known: “I've … looked for the unknown in the midst of the known.” Music wells up from the wonder of the individual man's and Man's memory of a timeless ancient harmony with the enormous cosmic design: “In this great universe, in infinite space and eternity / I, child of Man, wander in marvel alone, wonderstruck /… In this endless time and space, amidst countless luminous spheres, / You sit still staring at me—I at you” (Tagore [1973] Reference Tagore1995, 140).

Tagore's ambivalent relationship with the formative great tradition of Indian (primarily Hindustani) classical music also can be understood from the perspective of his rejection of the statist narrative and history of experience for the civic discourse of wonder. At one level he is deeply attached to the nurturing and sustaining capacity of this ancient Indian tradition, which for him continuously invoked the memory of an ideal universe. In a letter to Dhurjati Prasad Mukerji, he describes this tradition as “the Indian musical continent created over ages” that is home to people including himself (Tagore [1966] Reference Tagore2004, 130). Elsewhere, in “Sangeeter mukti” (Freedom of music) he writes: “The world of our rāgas is [that of] heaven, always already complete. This is why the ethos of these rāgas is universal” (50–51). And yet in another letter to the same recipient written on August, 13, 1932, he wrote: “I have been composing songs by forgetting Hindustani tunes” (128). Tagore refused to accept what he considered the hegemony of this “institutionalized” tradition on several counts.

What is particularly significant in the present context is the nationalist and statist iconography of this music—along with several other “cultural” artifacts—broadly during his time. Hindustani classical music was going through a complex process of reformation and modernization in the second half of the nineteenth century and after. At a time of the emergence of the middle-class Hindu nationalist discourses and the attendant passion for writing the nation through inscription of such discourses on all spheres and institutions of life, especially “cultural,” the Bhatkhandes and the Paluskars embarked upon the project of retrieving the classical tradition through all-round modernization.Footnote ¹¹ The efforts of the musicological doyens contemporary to Tagore, Pandit Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (1860–1936) and Pandit Vishnu Digambar Paluskar (1872–1931), in different degrees, carried forward and legitimated the orthodox Hindu cultural nationalist program of inscribing the homogenized Indian nation upon what was variously claimed and represented as the “Hindu” and “Sanskritik” tradition of music. Similar projects of musical modernization taken up in Kolkata around the same time by the likes of Kshetramohan Goswami, Raja Shourindramohan Tagore, and others, in their treatment of Indian and “Hindu” music, bolstered this nationalist and statist iconography of Hindustani classical music.Footnote ¹²

Tagore's admiration for Pandit Bhatkhande's useful pedagogical approach in systematizing the Indian musical paradigm is well recorded. Yet, he never failed to offer a critique of what he considered the conservative revivalist—as opposed to the radical renewalist—element in this program. Both Bhatkhande and Paluskar—like Shourindramohan and others in Bengal—aimed primarily at archiving, reorganizing, and disseminating the traditional and systemic “Indian” music. For Tagore, the figure of the virtuoso performer, the ustād, was unreliable because of his lack of creative originality with regard to conventional musical knowledge. The ustād for him was creditable mainly for his role as a reservoir of this traditional knowledge. For Bhatkhande, the figure of the “uneducated” ustād was suspect just for the opposite reason—not because of his lack of creative originality and individuality, but rather because of his nonintellectual and merely praxiological approach to his art, his lack of Shāstric knowledge of the authority and resultant inadequate conformity to the tradition or system, which effectively led to a chaos in the realm of classical music over the last few centuries. For Tagore, the dependence on memory in Bhatkhande's (and at large the cultural nationalists') approach was mechanical and academic, reproductive rather than creative. Here is a narrative of experience that thrives on an anxiety of complete oblivion, of transience and permanent loss, and therefore on a straitjacketed opposition to time. Memory and history here act as agents of nationalism and the nascent state alike, both of which would require the seamless fantasy of a unified, homogeneous India. Memory in the narrative of wonder, on the other hand, is an agent of playful cyclical renewal. Tagore's lifelong emphasis on creative musical renewal of available classical knowledge is significant in this context, as is his departure from the broad historical impulse and the linear framework of the functioning of time and memory adopted by the Orientalist and nationalist schools. The latter's was an impulse that he considered more ancestral than futuristic, revivalist rather than regenerative, geared more towards disciplining and consolidation of a “static” tradition for the purpose of returning to a dated past and grafting it onto the modern nation-state through musical memory than towards making both the music and the nation living and dynamic through playful renewal. Let us remember in this context Frantz Fanon's insight in “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” into the moribund psyche of the colonial bourgeoisie: “The national bourgeoisie of under-developed countries is not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor labour; it is completely canalized into activities of the intermediary type” (Fanon [1967] Reference Fanon and Farrington2001, 120). Fanon suggests instead that “an authentic national middle class … put itself to school with the people: in other words to put at the people's disposal the intellectual and technical capital that it has snatched when going through the colonial universities.” That is precisely what Tagore does in his appropriation and reinvention of Indian classical music inspired by, among other things, the radical experimental spirit of Bengal Renaissance, which in its turn was an unwitting contribution of Western education.

The stratification of the classical musical tradition in India, at one level, was a symptom of its progressive dissociation from the public provenance at a time of the ascendency of the narrative of experience through interaction with World-history. Tagore's solution for the problem lay not in greater academicization and mechanical reorganization to shut people further out of it, but in greater popular participation in this culture through pluralization, experimentation, and original creative intervention. He sought to wrest the initiative away from the ideologues of noncreative reproduction by reconnecting classical music with its original subaltern roots, thus giving specific local hues to the general rāgas and thereby pluralizing Indianness in terms of musical and political ideology. These initiatives involved the invocation of memories of a subaltern Indian samājik past marked by an ethos of syncretic decenterity drawing sustenance from innumerable regional little traditions. These also implied an emphasis on local collective memories in the formation of ethnographic subjectivity. Though Hindustani classical music, several musicologists have suggested, came to be gradually identified with the elitist culture of the court and the drawing room of the rich patron, in origin it had strong folk connections.Footnote ¹³ Tagore's valorization of Bāul and Kirtan and several other folk musical genres and his experimental hybridization of these forms with canonical rāgas imply also a journey from the individual or the genre to the collective listener. For Bāul and Kirtan, especially the latter, are marked for their pronounced participatory dimension. Hiteshranjan Sanyal writes about the collectivist quality of Kirtan:

Elsewhere Sanyal also discusses the specific dhrupadik classical dimension of Kirtan (10). Furthermore, he suggests possible parallels between Tagore's ideas of samāj and the social structure embedded in the culture of Kirtan in general and in the social formation promoted by the most prolific and well-known school of this music, the Goudhiya Vaishnav Samāj (Vaishnav School of Goudh), in particular (187–88).

If the Kirtan form inspired in Tagore the memory of a collective, earthy, and syncretic mode of existence that could flourish in a fluid public domain outside the aegis of the state, the rural Bāul genre provided him with a more individualistic and introspective—but no less euphoric—variety of this pluralistic aesthetic that could lead to self-knowledge through wonder and ānanda. This realm of an alternative historicality is presided over by an earthier and more intimate equivalent of his own Jibandevatā—maner mānush (the man of the heart). Like Kirtan, Bāul for him championed a syncretic philosophy and a nonconformist aesthetic of the public space that successfully resisted the nationalist cultural iconography. In the introduction to a collection of Bāul songs, later anthologized as “Baul Songs,” Tagore's idea of the historical significance of this genre comes out:

Like Kirtan, Bāul is thus perceived to be located in a nonmodern space, bypassing the political, nationalist, and statist “platforms of public speech-making” and offering a fluid domain of knowledge production and dissemination, a “historicality” “outside the ken of the modern schoolmaster or college professor.” Both these forms invoke rapture, a spiritual bliss, which is central to the aesthetics of wonder. In spite of their engagement with the everyday, the ordinary, they are far away from the world of “experiences” and do not claim, to recall Ranajit Guha's (Reference Guha2002, 67) formulation, “to produce anything out of a given set of causes nor inform anybody of objects attainable by the common means of knowledge. Neither productive nor informative by intention, [they are] still a knowledge in the most profound sense of the term.” “I hunt for the golden stag,” sings the Bāul in one of Tagore's songs, composed in Behāg Bāul. “You may smile, my friends, but I pursue the vision that eludes me. / I run across hills and dales, I wander through nameless lands /… You come and buy in the market and go back to your homes / laden with goods, but the spell of the homeless winds has / touched me I know not when and where. / I have no care in my heart; all my belongings I have left far behind me” (Tagore Reference Tagore and Ray2007, 1:95).

These genres thus point towards an alternative social consciousness to the dominant secular narrative of the nation. At a time when the great Indian classical tradition was increasingly becoming enmeshed in the dubious (Hindu) nationalist vision of a homogeneous India and thereby segregating itself from its original syncretic, subaltern, samājik sensibilities, Tagore sought to creatively address the fatal oblivion by revisiting certain forms of music and Indian history and reestablishing the snapped vital link between the two traditions. His conviction about the validity of such an alternative pluralistic musicological (as well as historical and historiographical) position, consistent with his imagination of alternatives in various other discursive and praxiological domains, was getting stronger with his gaining greater artistic and ideological maturity and certain developments in Indian and Bengali history at the turn of the century.Footnote ¹⁴ Dhurjati Prasad Mukerji (Reference Mukerji2001, 100) writes: “After the Barsha-Mangal (1921) his compositions became genuine outcastes, the antyaja of music.” But even in 1905 alone, Tagore would compose as many as eighteen songs either on various folk tunes—Bāul, Kirtan, Sāri, and Bhātiyali—or on their hybrids with classical rāgas. These songs create a participatory space for collective memory and self-realization, and invoke a non-nationalist, inclusionist patriotism. A few examples include “Suddenly from the heart of Bengal / You have stepped out in such amazing beauty!” (Bibhas-Bāul; Tagore Reference Tagore, Alam and Chakravarty2011, 318); the national anthem of the present Bangladesh, “My golden Bengal, it's you I adore. / Your sky, your air, play flute forever in my soul” (Bāul; Tagore Reference Tagore and Bardhan2008, 307); “O the earth of my motherland, I touch thee with bowed head / In you are the shelters of the protector Goddess of the world and the earth-mother / … You are the all-enduring, ever-tolerant mother of all mothers” (Bāul; Tagore [1973] Reference Tagore1995, 244); “In your dry creek now comes a high tide, say Joy Ma and launch the boat. / Oy O boatman, where's the boatman! Call him today as hard as you can” (Bāul and Sāri; Tagore Reference Tagore and Bardhan2008, 313); and “Let the earth and the water, the air and the fruits of my country be sweet, my God” (Kirtan; Tagore Reference Tagore and Ray2007, 2:342).

It is indeed ironic, and symptomatic of the prevalent order of things, that “Āmār sonār Bānglā” (My golden Bengal) and “Janaganamana,” two songs that emphatically locate themselves outside the logic of the nation-state and World-history, should come to be appropriated by this logic through their cooption by two modern nation-states as their national anthems. The former was composed in 1906, one year after Tagore invoked the idea of swadeshi samāj—his alternative for “nation”—for the first time in an article titled “Swadeshi samāj,” and the latter in 1911. In Gitabitān, both were originally anthologized by Tagore himself under the category of “Swadesh”—literally “one's own country”—which contains his patriotic songs. And his imagination of “swadesh” as a nongeopolitical construct, a deterritorialized imagined community with a long tempo-spatial itihāsa, locates it in the sphere of the creative-regenerative agency of the people who inhabit a land. He writes in “Satyerahvān” (The call of truth) during the heady 1920–21 days of the noncooperation movement:

Once more, this time in search of “one's own country,” we are directed from the world of external organization to the realm of internal realization, to be achieved through the awakening of individual and communal ātmashakti, which is more a spiritual force than a political one.

Concluding Notes: The Last Few Songs

Seven of Tagore's last eight songs can be seen as a fitting finale to his lifelong fascination with memory—personal, communal, and human—as the mediatory field of the leelā (playfulness) of Jibandevatā, as leading to wonder and ānanda, and finally as an important constituent element in the marginalized discourses of samāj and its itihāsa. The first of them, “Visvavidyātirthaprāngana” (August 1940; Tagore [1973] Reference Tagore1995, 862) literally refers to the samāj for the first and the last time in Tagore's musical oeuvre. The poet invokes the samāj to put an end to “the endlessly long wait of the dark night”: “Come O the man of deeds, O the seeker of knowledge, come the contemplator of people's welfare / Come O the greatest of the ascetics! / Come the samāj of the wealth of intellect, wisdom and potency, free of all barriers.” He clearly invokes here an inner spiritual strength, ātmashakti, made possible by the deployment of “one's own knowledge, intelligence, love and effort” at the micro- and macropolitical levels, leading to a realization of swadesh. “Shrābanero bāridhārā” (The ceaseless downpour of Shrabana; September 1940; Tagore [1973] Reference Tagore1995, 911), “Jārā bihān-belāy” (Those who in the dawn hour; November 1940; Tagore [1973] Reference Tagore1995, 911), and “Āmār hāriye-jāoā din” (My long-lost days; December 1940; Tagore [1973] Reference Tagore1995, 912) capture the solitary subject's tryst with his personal past. “Shrābanero bāridhārā” completes a circle with his conjecture of rediscovering that past in some near yet indistinct future: “Is the unwritten letter of the remote past written / On the shore of distant times, in the mind's dark canvas. / Does the lightning in the clouds bring back / Flashes of some forgotten agony in a fiery pace.” The second one returns to the realm of personal memory in a crooning melody: “Those who in the dawn hour brought songs in my mind / in shadows of the dusk hour they're slowly disappearing. / … tonight they're back, hovering about the door of my realm of dream” (Tagore Reference Tagore2008, 147), while the third one takes off from personal memory and transcends it to step into the realm of some remote impersonal memory inscribed in the apparently silent nature: “My long-lost days / Will I ever find them back / They're fused in the dark shadows / Of the monsoon-day skies— /… In the depths of the forest-shadows / The silent message from ancient times / waits for somebody, speechless.” “Ālokero pathe prabhu” (On the way to light, my Master; November 1940; Tagore [1973] Reference Tagore1995, 867) and “Oi mahāmānaba āse” (Yon! The mighty man comes; April 1941; Tagore [1973] Reference Tagore1995, 867), paeans to the Jibandevatā of Man (“mahāmānaba,” literally “the great man”), effectively hope against hope for the return of the “unvanquished Man” and “his lost human heritage” at a time of all-round crises in civilization. This “lost human heritage” includes wonder, ānanda (“romāncha”/thrill), and a promise of eternal renewability (“mānaba-abhyudaya”/“the rise of Man”): “Yon! The Mighty Man comes / Thrilling each straw of grass / In the mortal world everywhere /… Arrives the auspicious moment of the Great Birth /… Chants of ‘fear not’ fill the eastern peak with promises of new life / ‘Victory, victory, victory to the rise of Man’ / Drums in the heavens.”

“Hey nutan” (O herald of the new; May 1941; Tagore [1973] Reference Tagore1995, 868), Tagore's last composition, is the ultimate melodic expression of the theme of the endless cyclical renewal of life. Composed significantly in the poet's favorite Bhairabi, the daybreak rāga, like “Oi mahāmānaba āse,” the song invokes a return to the mysterious prenatal darkness, which would be ripped apart by the “revelation” of Jibandevatā who would encapsulate and manifest in his self the “eternal wonder of the infinite,” the ever-new, and ultimately perform the highest mediatory role of bringing to man “God's message, command and ānanda”: “O herald of the new, / Let the auspicious hour of birth come around once again. / Reveal yourself from the midst of a mist-filled sky / Like the sun. / Burst through the heart of the void and unveil yourself. / Let life be revealed as triumphant / Let the infinite's endless marvels be revealed in you” (Tagore Reference Tagore2011, 355). With its reference to prenatal darkness and its dissolution with daybreak, the last lyric of the poet's life also takes us back to the first lyric of the volume, “Prathama yugero udayadigangane” (In the eastern horizon of the first epoch of creation; Tagore [1973] Reference Tagore1995, 1), thereby completing the musical cycle of memory created in Gitabitān and stretching the scope of the mnemosynic nest further to accommodate the cosmic memory of the dawn of creation.

Tagore's music, in its musicological and ideological invocation of several layers of memory, thus, points towards the blinkers of colonial modernity and its web of associated discourses that resulted in a series of historical ruptures in individual and collective life in this part of the world. It is the inexorable logic of this modernity with its homogenizing universalist ambition—which has consigned the distinctive Indian civilizational concept of universalism woven into the texture of this music almost to the realm of oblivion—that has been the dominant, if not the only, ideological contingent in shaping our consciousness and our listener's “horizons of expectations” since the late nineteenth century. The history of the veritable failure of Tagore's renewalist project of novel individual and communal self-fashioning through music—as also that of his search for “alternatives” in many other discursive domains—which also signifies the “pathos of historicality,” and is evident in all spheres of our life today in the age of late capitalism, started in his lifetime itself. Ashis Nandy observes:

The culture of reception of Tagore's music—and that of other older musical traditions in Bengal, including Bāul and Kirtan, that have traditionally acted as cultural reservoirs of collective memory—thus has been fraught with ambivalence over the last century and more.Footnote ¹⁵ The virtual death of Bāul and Kirtan and the dwindling fortunes of Rabindrasangeet today cannot be seen in isolation from the effective demise of the Indian paradigms of swadeshi samāj and its itihāsa.

However, this is not to suggest that these musical traditions, the “structures of feelings” they are products of, and the social formations they invoke are matters of absolute past. There is still scope for much debate on, for example, the implications of Jurgen Habermas's (Reference Habermas and Pensky2001) idea of “post-national constellation” in the South Asian context, and the role of cultural artifacts in such social organisms. “The criterion of the social truth of music today,” Theodor Adorno (Reference Adorno and Livingstone1999, 12) suggested, “is the extent to which it enters into opposition to the society from which it springs and in which it has its being—in short, the extent to which it becomes ‘critical,’ however indirectly.” Few musical traditions in India today are more “critical” than Rabindrasangeet of the society from which they sprung and in which they have their being. But whether this forgotten critical potential of this music can ever revive itself in our memory and inspire us to explore the limits of our consciousness at the micro- and macro-political levels, and thereby devise an alternative, more inclusive, pluralistic, humane, and context-sensitive modernity, only time will tell.