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RABINDRANATH AND RABINDRANATH TAGORE: HOME, WORLD, HISTORY
Author(s) -
GHOSH RANJAN
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
history and theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.169
H-Index - 41
eISSN - 1468-2303
pISSN - 0018-2656
DOI - 10.1111/hith.10782
Subject(s) - presentism , literature , nationalism , world history , narrative , philosophy , narrative history , philosophy of history , epistemology , intellectual history , historiography , history of ideas , aesthetics , history , sociology , art , politics , ancient history , archaeology , political science , law , economic history
This article, through a close reading of Rabindranath Tagore's writings on history, tries to develop his theory of history and establish the character of his historical consciousness. Tagore's philosophy of history is distinguished from Western models of historical thinking and is resistant to aligning with nationalist and revivalistic narratives that speak only of one culture, one nation, and one community. The article works out a theoretical premise based on Tagore's engagement with time, historical distance, the everyday, history as life‐view, historical fiction, historicality in literature, and the notion of the historical‐now or presentism. Substantiated by the notion of a “poet‐historian,” Tagore's historical theory works at the limits of “global history,” which is now often misappropriated through the principles of unifocality and bounded rationality. The article develops Tagore's sense of itihasa that frees history from the univocality of world history, creates its own “worlding,” its historicality, enriching and disturbing our notions of global history.