Indira Debi's Rabindrasmriti

Maybe because I need to go through so many academic articles, I tend not to read too many literary criticisms for my non-academic life. Something I do need to address, and put more essays on my reading lists.

Just finished reading Indira Debi's Rabindrasmriti. Memories of Rabindranath, that's what the title would look like when translated into English. The book is interesting to me for two reasons. One, the Rabindranath-industry in Bengal had survived to a large extent on producing these memoirs of other people about Rabindranath himself. That, in itself, is a highly charged phenomena.These memoirs, in lots of ways, not only constructed our perceptions of Rabindranath, but I would say, controlled them. For any writer/observer/theorist of culture,reading these memoirs a little bit against the grain becomes an imperative, precisely because such readings will go right into the heart of the processes through which the middle-class Bengali (male)main-stream have constructed the figure of Rabindranath. Although to be perfectly honest, it will probably be harder to find any other figure in Bengal about whom so many women have penned their memoirs. Which brings me to my second point. I was vastly fascinated by the ways in which Indira Debi's stories about herself kept seeping through the stories of her celebrated uncle. If read carefully, those stories can tell us a lot about the ways in which the Tagore-family was carrying out its own project of modernization. It also tells us a lot about how women were central to such a process of modernization, and the women themselves, weren't exactly mute spectators or little porcelain dolls who were allowing themselves to be recreated. And if that's how they often wrote about their own childhood and youth, as these periods when they let themselves be "constructed" by their liberal fathers, brothers and uncles, then we need to think why they wrote about themselves in that way. In short, we need to think of their narrative passivity as a rhetorical strategy rather than as an unmediated representation of what actually happened.

But I was also thinking of the concept of "innovation" while reading the book. Innovation is one of the words that go around the poetry circles a lot. I must confess, I don't have any specific fondness for this word. To me, it's too loaded, it has excluded too many different modes of writing and more specifically, writings generated by women and people of color throughout the world. Anyways, this is not a post about those processes of exclusion, for they are complex.What struck me when I was reading this book was, the intense ways in which Rabindranath engaged with the existing musical genres of his time to create his own music. Hindustani classical, certain forms of Bengali popular music, Western classical and the folk-popular ballad traditions of the British Isles that filtered through the colonial modes of distribution. In other words, the musical innovations he did were rooted within specific histories.And in fact, what he was innovating, were engagements/conversations with the pre-existing forms and conventions. And I will say, social histories too. Especially if we consider the fact that aesthetic forms do embody social histories in extremely complex ways. So, what I am trying to get at is, innovation is always contextual and historical. It never happens within a vaccum, nor does it fall on someone's lap from the sky. One of the biggest problems of the modernist philosophy of aesthetics and cultural productions is that, it makes the word "innovation" an end in itself.Thus, there is a very serious separation of the word from histories--both aesthetic and social. Personally I think, nothing is more detrimental to the process of art-making than this separation, but I won't go into it now. That will require a whole different post.