Ranjan Ghosh

Thinking Literature across Continents

Thinking Literature across Continents finds Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller—two thinkers from different continents, cultures, training, and critical perspectives—debating and reflecting upon what literature is and why it matters. Ghosh and Miller do not attempt to formulate a joint theory of literature; rather, they allow their different backgrounds and lively disagreements to stimulate generative dialogue on poetry, world literature, pedagogy, and the ethics of literature. Addressing a varied literary context ranging from Victorian literature, Chinese literary criticism and philosophy, and continental philosophy to Sanskrit poetics and modern European literature, Ghosh offers a transnational theory of literature while Miller emphasizes the need to account for what a text says and how it says it. Thinking Literature across Continents highlights two minds continually discovering new paths of communication and two literary and cultural traditions intersecting in productive and compelling ways.

Making Sense of Interpretation: Yes-ing and the (In)fusion Approach

The aesthetics of literary studies paradoxically begin in the ‘yes’ and then within the politics of ‘yes-ing’ investigates, sans monistic and relativistic biases, the areas which can possibly enmesh, get intertextualised and be conflated. Yes-ing is what brings risk and romance into interpretation – the productive risk emerging from a conflict of views. ‘Yes’ promotes the investigative spirit, the desire to fall off the precipice and see if extinction is possible. Falling off the cliff is not as important as desiring a fall; yesness breeds this openness, making literary studies breathe, rendering more circulation to the ‘meaning’ and ‘presence’ of interpretation. This risk promotes the ‘libido’ to experiment. Engagements with disciplinary societies are a face-off with fear, a wrestle with an anxiety that the convergences of disciplines easily evoke. This fear is hand in glove with risk – undertaking which is no meretricious vanguardism – and, importantly, needs contextualisation. But it must be admitted that the fear is most when the ‘bias’ in disciplinary and conceptual navigations is minimal: areas of possible libidinous convergences are greater when disciplinary prejudices are less. Complicit in risk, romance, horizon-fusing, freshness, culture of dissent and democratic criticism, (In)fusion approach, in its ingrained ‘cultivated yesness’, has come to question the politics of ‘border patrol’, the logic of interpretive knowledge formations and ‘talking’ across cultures, traditions, systems in our understanding of the other. It is through (in)fusion approach that one comes to acknowledge the scientific, moral, aesthetic and religious claims of the text without the monadic conceptual matrix, the one theory jacket, single-concept strapping. Critical orientation need not be baggaged with commodified theory; rather, a deep understanding of conceptual paradigms can make our habitation with texts transgressive, mobile, transitive and, sometimes, manifestly difficult. The text breathes better under the efficacy of a transcendent horizon of possibilities that ingresses into the economics of theory-conceptual spheres without being assimilated or absorbed into any one of them. In tune with the spirit to welcoming all, (in)fusion approach, thus, demands a ‘decolonised’ mind (I mean discounting the hegemony of one paradigm)—a mind privileged to pry into any theoretical premise, East or West, sans prejudice. It vouchsafes for a transversality, a transpolarity, that fraternises the identity and multiplicity of several epistemic foundations and manifestations. Within a professed ‘competent fluidity’, (in)fusion approach works out the interpretive experiences, extrapolates gestaltic games, based on translational, tangential and transactional formations, preventing the ‘suppression of questions by dominant opinion’. As a compellingly conceivable mode it invents itself and

Caught in the Cross Traffic: Rabindranath Tagore and the Trials of Child Education

The article explores Rabindranath Tagore’s ideas on child education, focusing on Tagore’s notion of the child, method and nonmethod in education, a deep understanding of education in relation to the child’s surroundings, and the ways in which Tagore envisaged the relationship between the child and the teacher—the guru-shishya dynamics. These investigations are transcultural in nature in that they engage with several thinkers and different clusters of ideas from the Western tradition, namely, Tolstoy, Rousseau, William Godwin, Martin Buber, Froebel, and others. The article also demonstrates how some of Tagore’s ideas fall in line with certain contemporary discourses on child education.

Globing the Earth: The New Eco-logics of Nature

Concerted clamors ring in the corridors of our planet: “Nature is dying, and with it, life on earth. Humans! Your end is approaching.” Are we then battling the postendist phase of nature? Is living with/in nature all about encountering the spectre of the “unborn”—those who will come after us and who in some sense now must command the unfolding of present politics and society? How are we, in the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “responsible for our rose”? (Anderson 1987: vii) Are we entering a new eco-logics of nature? And how is a Green politics formed that may, in the process, globe the earth? Loren Eiseley observes: It is with the coming of man that a vast hole seems to open in nature, a vast black whirlpool spinning faster and faster, consuming flesh, stones, soils, minerals, sucking down the lightning, wrenching power from the atom, until the ancient sounds of nature are drowned in the cacophony of something which is no longer nature, something instead which is loose and knocking at the world’s heart, something demonic and no longer planned—escaped, it may be—spewed out of nature, contending in a final giant’s game against its master.(Eiseley 1960: 123-24) What happens to nature now? Is nature now what it is not? I agree with Michael Bess that nature is no longer a static, rigid taxonomy; it becomes protean, upwelling, a vital force erupting forth, proliferating, unpredictable, and metastasizing. We may actually be facing the most extraordinary frontier—the frontier of nature as an ultimately creative, responsive, and transformative power, which regards human beings simply as a trace that is overcome and left behind. (Bess 1999: 2) So what Bernard Charbonneau sees as human “freedom” (a version of natural dialecticism) is born out of seeing nature’s otherness as a self: a deconstructed self emerging from thoughts about the “death of nature,” a death that is a promise of a fresh lease on life—a postendism that transcends imponderable thresholds. Understanding nature is challenging the disciplinization of thought; the environmental crisis is a crisis of thought leading to reflexive and transversal thinking. Nature is more than what takes place without the voluntary and intentional agency of man; nature

A Poet's School: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Aesthetic Education

Abstract This paper looks into the dynamics and performatives of Tagores school which was established in 1901 at Bolpur in West Bengal. He called it Santiniketan. The paper critiques Tagores notions of pedagogy in relation to the pregnant network linking the students, teachers and their natural environment; further, it investigates how the school has manifested itself as a green discourse and worked itself out within the dialectic of space and place, giving Tagores ideas and the pragmatics of execution a fresh circulation of understanding. Here, for the first time, Tagores ideas on education and nature (eco-pedagogy) are elaborately problematised through the intersections of a variety of thoughts and concepts drawn from contemporary ecocritical studies, ecosophy, discourses on nature, culture, and ethics of humane holism and bioegalitarianism.

Intra-active Transculturality*

Do not so much as imagine that I will show you the way to a world literature. Each of us must make his way forward according to his own means and abilities. All I have wanted to say is that just as the world is not merely the sum of your ploughed field, plus my ploughed field, plus his ploughed field—because to know the world that way is only to know it with a yokellike parochialism—similarly world literature is not merely the sum of your writings, plus my writings, plus his writings. We generally see literature in this limited, provincial manner. To free oneself of that regional narrowness and to resolve to see the universal being in world literature, to apprehend such totality in every writer’s work, and to see its interconnectedness with every man’s attempt at self-expression—that is the objective we need to pledge ourselves to. (Tagore, “Visva-Sahitya” 223; italics mine)

Literature: the “Mattering” and the Matter

Beyond the circle of the reading room are the world’s greatest collection of books and the finest works of art from all places and times—sculpture from the Parthenon, Ming vases, Viking jewelry, great stone bulls and lions from Assyria, Egyptian mummies, medieval tapestries—brought together and taken out of context and time, like Keats’s Grecian urn, because in themselves and in conjunction they create—they are—art. In the courtyard before the huge pillars of the classical front of a Greek temple, thousands of people waited in long lines, like pilgrims at a shrine, to be admitted to look for a few moments at the rare treasures of “hammered gold and gold enamelling” from the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen. This is not a bad image of what art and literature have come to mean in our society: the protected place where man can encounter what used to be crudely but aptly called “the finer things of life,” the point at which he can at least glimpse and wonder at what remains of the sacred: genius, harmony, vision, craftsmanship, and those “voices of silence,” as Malraux called them, whose beauty has allowed them to transcend the changes and chances of history. As has been often said, museums and libraries are the cathedrals of the modem age, for art is the place where man still seeks the soul and the special place in creation that he has lost elsewhere. – Alvin B. Kernan, “The Idea of Literature” (37)

No Schoolmaster: Aesthetic Education and Paedosophy

‘By the bank of the river Padma, in Shilaidaha, I lived a quiet life amidst my literary pursuits’, writes Tagore. ‘With a mission to create I came to Santiniketan.’ It was a sublime mission in that it endeavoured to realize an ‘ambition’ which largely knew the immense difficulties it had to encounter and yet which ceaselessly inspired him to turn an ashram into a school woven around with fresh ideals of education and a distinct aesthetics of pedagogy. This sublimity worked on the aesthetics of splendid waste, as opposed to the cringing pressures of economic gain, social prosperity and cultural recognition. The creative burst, its energy, which triggered the poet‘s dislocation, was the delightful ‘irresponsibility’ of the butterfly.

In and Out of Time: The Hungry Artist

In the operative ways of the world, Rabindranath Tagore sees a continuous inhaling and exhaling, a state of sleep and waking, a rhythm of acclivity and declivity and a halting and a restart.1 In absence and presence, in darkness and light, in concealment and manifestation is such a rhythm maintained. This speaks of a continuity – the yes and the no, the positive and the negative, the attraction and repulsion which become a part of the creative rhythm essential to our understanding of historical situatedness, our ever rhythmic connections with past and present. Tagore observes that ‘perfect balance in these opposing forces would lead to deadlock in creation. Life moves in the cadence of constant adjustment of opposites; it is a perpetual process of reconciliation of contradictions’.2

The Politics of Counter: Critical Education and the Encounters with Difference

In the fall of 1872–1873, Matthew Arnold wrote a letter to Sir Roper Lethbridge who ‘during his career served as principal of Krishnagur College in Bengal, fellow of Calcutta University, and political agent of the India Office’: