Abstract
What encourages a blogger to connect photographs of pairs of same-sex lovers from the late nineteenth century with texts from entirely different contexts such as poetry, fiction, letters, and lyrics to narrate what, according to the blogger, the couples might be saying, doing, and feeling? What makes a queer film director–actor use Tagore’s apparently innocuous dance drama Chitrangada as a major prop for his film to reinterpret the play in terms of gender identity, as a means of understanding his own self as well as the character he is playing? This chapter attempts to examine how irrespective of the original intentions of Tagore, latter-day gay spectators and readers misread, sometimes deliberately, Tagore’s texts. In the chapter, the author uses the idea of the “fantasmatic spectator” (as enunciated by Brett Farmer) for discussing the queer reception of a few Tagore texts, mostly focusing on Rituparno Ghosh’s reinterpretation and resituating of Chitrangada.
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Notes
- 1.
Lamos uses the term in “The Ethics of Queer Theory” (1999: 141−150).
- 2.
Bhakti is a medieval movement in Indian culture. A.K. Ramanujan discusses the Kannada movement of Bhakti. Here, for example, is the Vachana poet, Dasimayya:
If they see
breasts and long hair coming
they call it woman,
if beard and whiskers
they call it man:
but, look, the self that hovers
in between
is neither man
nor woman
O Rimanitha!
(Ramanujan 1978: 27) And, here is Vasavanna:
Look here, dear fellow:
I wear these men’s clothes
only for you.
Sometimes I am man.
Sometimes I am woman.
O lord of the meeting rivers
I’ll make wars for you
but I’ll be your devotees’ bride.
(ibid. 29)
It is a peculiar irony that the advent of colonial modernity made Indian readers and believers homophobic denying fluidity of gender identity in the face of traditions such as Bhakti and Vachana poets.
- 3.
Baul is a mystical, Vaishnava tradition that combines with it the Muslim Sufi tradition of devotion. It is also a musical tradition of a particular kind. Tagore was deeply influenced by this tradition.
- 4.
Kabir was a fifteenth century saint poet of North India, largely known for his oral poetry, where he criticized the evil practices prevalent in both contemporary Hinduism and Islam. His oral poetry, which had an overt reformist message, was produced as doha, which is the couplet form in verse, in the written composition. Doha is a type of couplet composed in verse, which rhyme together. A poet like Kabir whose poetry is often associated with this form, being unaware of alphabet, never wrote anything in his lifetime. This form was chosen by his followers when they decided to commit his oral poetry into written form.
- 5.
Maithili is a language with its own rich literary tradition which dates back to fourteenth century and own script known as Mithilakshar, spoken in Mithila, the northeastern region of Bihar and some parts of Nepal. It is often misunderstood as a dialect of Hindi. Vidyapati Thakkura was a fifteenth century poet of Mithila, who composed in both Sanskrit and in Maithili, but is popularly known for his Maithili love songs about Radha and Krishna. Grierson was the first colonial administrator to collect and publish some of the popular songs of Vidyapati in late nineteenth century.
- 6.
Walter Benjamin (1968) offers a detailed analysis of this phenomenon in his cult classic, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
- 7.
I have checked versions of the Mahabharata, including the Bengali version by Kashi Das, for this episode, and there seems to be no precedent to the innovations we notice in Tagore. It is impossible to ascertain whether there had been newer versions in folk yatras or Baul songs that Tagore knew.
- 8.
I borrow this from Brett Farmer’s Spectacular Passions (2000).
- 9.
Shohini Ghosh, a queer critic herself, looks at another text by Tagore, Streer Patra (The Wife’s Letter) especially, the film version by Purnendu Patrea (1976) in the same way (S. Ghosh 2012).
- 10.
An allusion to Goddess Durga, the annihilator of the evil demon, Mahisasura.
- 11.
Though physical transformation through supernatural intervention is not unknown in Indian mythology and folk narratives, I call such transformation in the context of Tagore “Ovidian” because such metamorphosis is central to all of Ovid’s tales as is the case with Tagore’s text.
- 12.
I borrow this term from Kristeva. See her Powers of Horror (1982).
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Satpathy, S. (2015). “As Though She Were a Man”: Chitrangada and Contemporary Queer Appropriations of Tagore. 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_13
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