Nation and Imagination

CHAPTER 6 Nation and Imagination THIS CHAPTER moves out into three concentric circles. The innermost cir- cle tells the story of a certain literary debate in Bengal in the early part of the twentieth century. This was a debate about distinctions between prose, poetry, and the status of the real in either, and it centered on the writings of Rabindranath Tagore. Into these debatesÐand here is my second cir- cleÐI read a global history of the word ªimagination.º Benedict Ander- son's book Imagined Communities has made us all aware of how crucial the category ªimaginationº is to the analysis of nationalism.1 Yet, com- pared to the idea of community, imagination remains a curiously undis- cussed category in social science writings on nationalism. Anderson warns that the word should not be taken to mean ªfalse.º2 Beyond that, how- ever, its meaning is taken to be self-evident. One aim of this chapter is to open up the word for further interrogation and to make visible the heterogenous practices of seeing we often bring under the jurisdiction of this one European word, ªimagination.º My third and last move in the chapter is to build on this critique of the idea of imagination an argument regarding a nontotalizing conception of the political. To breathe heteroge- neity into the word ªimagination,º I suggest, is to allow for the possibility that the ®eld of the political is constitutively not singular. I begin, then, with the story of a literary debate. NATIONALISM AS WAYS OF SEEING It does not take much effort to see that a photographic realism or a dedicated naturalism could never answer all the needs of vision that modern nationalisms create. For the problem, from a nationalist point of view, is this: If the nation, the people, or the country were not just to be observed, described, and critiqued but loved as well, what would guarantee that they were indeed worth loving unless one also saw in them something that was already lovable? What if the real, the natural, and the historically accurate did not generate the feeling of devotion or adoration? An objec- tivist, realist view might lead only to disidenti®cation. Nationalism, one 150 CHAPTER 6 may then say, presents the question of vision and imagination in ways more complicated than a straightforward identi®cation of the realist or the factual with the political might suggest. This problem of how one sees the nation was once raised in a pointed manner by Rabindranath Tagore, speaking at a meeting organized in Cal- cutta on the occasion of Sister Nivedita's death in 1911. Sister Nivedita, an Irish nationalist whose original name was Margaret Noble and who came to India as a disciple of the nineteenth-century Indian saint Swami Vivekananda, dedicated her life to serving the colonized Indians. She had been able to love Indians, said Tagore, because she was able to ªpierce the veilº of that which was objectively real: ªWe hear about Europeans who came to India with feelings of devotion toward her, having been attracted by our scriptures or by the character or the words of some of our holy men . but they returned empty-handed, their sense of devotion waning over time and discarded in the end. They could not pierce the veil of poverty and incompleteness in the country as a whole to see what they had read about in the scriptures or what they had seen in the characters of holy men.º3 It was not Tagore's contention that Europeans who were repelled by what they saw in India simply misread the country or its people. Realisti- cally seen, India could indeed be disappointing, and this European reac- tion was therefore quite justi®ed. Tagore went on to say, ªIt is beyond our comprehension as to how our manners, conversations, and everyday practices could be insufferably offensive to a European, and thus we think of their rudeness toward us as completely unreasonable.º His point was precisely that a view that was merely realist might not present an India that was lovable. To be able to love India was to go beyond realism, to pierce the veil of the real, as Tagore put it. It was this barrier of the objec- tive or the real that, Tagore thought, Nivedita would have had to over- come to ®nd in herself a true love for India: ªWe have to remember that every moment of the days and nights that Sister Nivedita spent in a dark Bengali home in a lane in a Bengali neighborhood of Calcutta, contained a hidden history of pain....There is no doubt that she would have been acutely troubled by our inertia, slothfulness, uncleanliness, mismanage- ment, and a general want of effort on our part, things that at every step speak of the dark side of our nature.º But ªthis was not able to defeatº Nivedita because she could see beyond the real, she could pierce the veil of poverty and incompleteness at which a realist gaze stopped.4 What did it mean to pierce the veil of the real or to see beyond it? Blending, as we will see, idioms of European romanticism with those of NATION AND IMAGINATION 151 Hindu metaphysics, Tagore sometimes explained such sight as a matter of seeing the eternal that lay beyond the ªveilº of the everyday. Of Nivedi- ta's love for the country, he said, using a language in¯ected by religion and referring to the Hindu goddess Sati's devotion to her husband Shiva: ªHer affection for the good [Tagore actually uses a more resonant word, mangal, which also connotes auspiciousness] of India was true, it was not an infatuation; this Sati had dedicated herself completely to the Shiva who resides in all men.º5 In parenthesis, we should also note that this use of the ªeternalº had already made Tagore's proposition exceed the problem- atic of nationalist vision, for the Irish woman Nivedita's love for India or Indians surely could not be called ªnationalistº in any simple sense.6 PROSE, POETRY, AND THE QUESTION OF REALITY How could one reconcile the need for these two different and contradictory ways of seeing the nation: the critical eye that sought out the defects in the nation for the purpose of reform and improvement, and the adoring eye that saw the nation as already beautiful or sublime? Tagore developed a ªromanticº strategy quite early on his literary career for dealing with this problem. His initial solutionÐI say ªinitialº because he later destabi- lized itÐwas to create a division of labor between prose and poetry or, more accurately, between the prosaic and the poetic. The strategy is illus- trated in what he wrote in a nationalist vein in the period 1890 to about 1910, when he helped create two completely contradictory images, for example, of the typical ªBengaliº village. On the one side were his prose pieces, in particular the short stories about Bengali rural life in the collection Galpaguchha, in which a tren- chant critique of society and a clear political will for reform were visible. Bengali literary critics have often noted how Galpaguchha ªcontained [stories of] the evils of dowry, the domination of wives by husbands, of oppression of women, of sel®shness between families marrying into each other, . of quarrels among brothers over property.º Critics also note the variety of characters and classes represented in this collection: ªRam- sundar, the father burdened with the responsibility of having to get his daughter married (Denapaona), the religious-minded Ramkanai (Ramka- naier nirbudhhita), . the shy writer Taraprasanna (Taraprasannar kirti), . the loyal servant Raicharan (Khokababur protyaborton)....º7 Tagore himself took considerable pride in the realism of these stories. ªPeople say of me,º he complained in his old age, ªhe is comes from 152 CHAPTER 6 a rich family . what would he know of villages?º8 His answer was unambiguously stated in an essay he wrote in 1940/41: Let me have my ®nal word here. The time has come for me to give an explanation to those who complain that they do not ®nd any traces of the middle class (moddhobitto = middle-propertied) in my writings.... There was a time when month after month I wrote stories about life in the countryside. It is my belief that never before had such pictures been serialized in Bengali literature. There was no dearth of writers from the middle-propertied classes then [but] they were almost all absorbed in contemplating [romantic historical] ®gures such as Pratapsingha or Pra- tapaditya. My fear is that one day Galpaguchha will become untouch- able ªnon-literatureº for having kept the company of a ªbourgeois writer.º Already [I notice that] they are not even mentionedÐas if they did not even existÐwhen assessments are made of the class character of my writings.9 Tagore, in fact, never lacked in realist criticisms of village life and con- tributed substantially to what became a realist, and negative, stereotype of the Bengali village. Later in life in the 1920s and the 1930s, when involved in rural reconstruction work around his educational institution at Santiniketan, he made several references to his realistic knowledge of village life: ªI have spent a long time in villages, I do not want to say anything simply to please. The image I have seen of villages is extremely ugly. Jealousy, rivalry, fraudulence, and trickery between people ®nd a variety of manifestations....Ihave seen with my own eyes how deep the roots of corruption have gone there.º10 Or here is another critical passage from later essay (c.

Load more