Abstract
The last in a series of Tagore dance dramas centering women, Shyama is haunted by a poetic query: “Who will relieve the beautiful from bondage in the hands of the cruel?” Far from being isolated, this troubling linkage of beauty and pleasure with masculinist domination recurs in a number of gender-centered works Rabindranath Tagore wrote late in life. In this essay, the author takes issue with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s and Ashis Nandy’s positions on nationalist aesthetics and demonstrates how, in such late dance dramas as Chitrangada (1935) and Shyama (1939), Tagore imagined ways to choreograph the desires of marginal women (a warrior, a courtesan) so as to critique nationalist articulations of proper manhood (sexually chastened/celibate; morally elevated) and instead to explore the ethical potential of women-nurtured beauty and sexuality.
Who will relieve the beautiful from bondage in the hands of the cruel?/Sundarer bandhan nishthurer hate ghuchabeke?
Rabindranath Tagore, Shyama, 1939
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Notes
- 1.
This observation resonates with Promothonath Bishi’s in Rabindrakabyaprobāaha (201–210). For a succinct and insightful assessment of Tagore’s drama in a vein similar to Sankha Ghosh, see also Asitkumar Bandyopadhyay, Adhunik Bangla Sahityer Sankhipta Itibritta (120–126).
- 2.
For a prescient reading of post-colonial textual politics along these lines, with emphasis on South Asia, see Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony.
- 3.
See my discussion of “transcultural” aesthetic politics in Empire, Media, and the Autonomous Woman.
- 4.
For details of the agreements and disagreements between Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, see The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates Between Gandhi and Tagore 1915–1941, compiled and edited, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. Bhattacharya presents a succinct overview of the debates in his Introduction.
- 5.
Tanika Sarkar presciently delineates the nationalist argument that education turns a woman into a pseudo-man. See especially her “Mrinal Anya Itihaser Sakshar.” See also Chakravarti. See my discussion in Chap. 1 of Empire, Media, and the Autonomous Woman on women’s education in colonial India.
- 6.
See Dimock (48–49). See also, Sushil Kumar De. For notions of self-surrendering versus self-loving desire (parakiya and swakiyaprem), see Inden and Nicholas (24)
- 7.
See Chap. 1 in my Empire, Media, and the Autonomous Woman. See also Himani Bannerji (74).
- 8.
I derive these notions of “contrapuntal” and “discrepant” reading from Edward Said’s formulation. See his Culture and Imperialism.
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Niyogi De, E. (2015). Gender, Nation, and the Vicissitudes of Kalpana: Choreographing Womanly Beauty in Tagore’s Dance Dramas. In: Banerji, D. (eds) Rabindranath Tagore in the 21st Century. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 7. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2038-1_12
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