'History' to 'itihāsa'

Tagore's Tentative Resolution about the 'Past'

Deb Kamal Ganguly
Associate Professor, Dept of Film Direction
Film and Television Institute of India, Pune
(deb99kamal@yahoo.com)

Abstract

When a lingusitic-cultural community finds an icon to celebrate, like Goethe or Tagore, during the later
efforts to study them, the community often ties to converge all the related quests to the beings of the
persona of the icon and hopes to find solutions from the perceived thoughts of the person being
celebrated. This collective intellectual and imaginative aspiration often can guise the complex path the
thinker actually had to travel to raise a question and to arrive at some kind of solution. As one of the
principal pre-occupations of 19th century, 'history' became a point of central concern, both for the
colonial rulers and the indigenous intelligentsia in India – how the 'past' is to be represented and
appropriated became important, so that the discourse about the 'present' gets justified. Rabindranath
Tagore also participated in this discourse, the trace is available mainly in some of his essays. His
objection to the methods and contents of academic history was categorical. The 'bloody history' of
kingdoms and battles and accounts of five-years terms of British Governors – did not look to represent
the 'past' of Indian people for Tagore. The materialist practice of epigraphy and numismatics to date the
past in rational quadrants also had limited appeal to him. He wanted to 'sense' the collective emotion of
the eras, which, according to him, hardly can be figured out from the so called 'historically important'
incidents of the past. He gave indication that the living pulse of the society need to be felt to have an
idea of its past, which is far from the methods of academic history.

Regarding the state of Indian society, Tagore's views seem to be pulsating from compassion to
reservation, at times even to irony. It seems Tagore was unable to draw a rational curve from the
imagination of his sense of past to the 'pathetic' and 'degenerated' state of village society, as he
perceived in his own time. His ambivalence was not unknown to him (as he clearly stated in 'The Crisis
of Civilization'). As if to answer about the historical accomplishments of Indian society within the
framework of Western notion of progress and material-growth-oriented history, Tagore cuts the
paradigm vertically to propose that Indian accomplishments lie in converging and assimilating the
assault of differences. We know that this notion of 'unity in diversity' later becomes a rhetoric in post-
colonial India.

Though Tagore's mode and language of this discourse was at times apologetic and emotional in nature,
actually contemporary propositions have been able to concepually separate out the tradition of 'history'
and the tradition of 'itihāsa'. While history becomes primarily a narrative of injustice, in indigenous
imagination, the itihāsa-purāṇa tradition becomes a narrative of harmony and justice (covering the
phases of disharmony within them). Though Tagore used the word 'itihāsa' for 'history', but he, all the
time mentioned about the requirement of another kind of account of the past, which is more than a
rational account, which also should evoke 'bhāva' in the mind of the reader. He even stated
passionately, how a poet can cut across the historical moment, while being immersed in the 'history'.
He further questions – why that poetic vision of past cannot be the part of the collective accounts of the
past. It seems the need for a different methodology of accounting and recounting the past is one major
reason for his experiments in the field of education.