Rabindranath Tagore and Music in the Age of Nationalism

Abstract The volume Rabindranath Tagore and Music in the Age of Nationalism explores, in suggestive combination, several major lines of inquiry in the political, social, cultural, and emotional history of Bengal, adding up to a connected account of the development of modern Bengali subjectivity. The unifying theme is the creative and critical progress of Rabindranath Tagore, the biggest single nodal point of modern Bengali culture and one of the makers of modern India, especially in the sphere of music. Fruitfully bringing in modern critical theory and recent musicological methodologies, the book engages intensively with the organic transaction of music as an art form with some major developments in Bengali, Indian, and European discursive life in the age of the hegemony of colonial modernity and anti-colonial nationalism. The study attempts a comprehensive investigation of Tagore’s music and musicology through an intertextual engagement with the other realms of his arts and activism, several other music and performance traditions in contemporary Bengal and India, including Hindustani music, “Folk” music and the hybrid tradition of “Bangla Gān,” and the literary and musical work of his Bengali predecessors and contemporaries. The book traces the movement of Tagore’s music and musicology towards a formulation of his personal secular religion, a religion of man and the poet, through a sustained exploration of an “ontology of love.” Offering a critique of what Tagore perceived as the loveless, mechanical ethics of the nationalist biopolitics, the study suggests, this music contributes to the formulation of an alternative provincial and Indian modernity.