The Flute, Gerontion, and Subaltern Misreadings of Tagore

Ordinary history is traditional, higher history mythical, and highest mystical.

—Goethe, cited in Bhudev Mukhopadhyay's epigraph to Pushpanjali

In the epilogue to his History at the Limits of World-History (2002), Ranajit Guha, the founding father of subaltern studies, turns, in an act of despair, to the poet Rabindranath Tagore, who had apparently stated in an essay that the past "renews itself creatively in literature, unlike academic historiography with its insistence on keeping its narratives tied strictly to public affairs." Guha uses Tagore to voice his own reproach on the "poverty of historiography," turning Tagore's meditation on the processes of creativity into an emphatic call on all historians to move toward a "creative engagement with the past as a story of man's being in the everyday world."¹

History as a narrative concerned with the everyday world: this is the objective Guha wishes historians to attain, and for a ready-made manifesto for this program he turns to one of Tagore's prose writings called Sahitye Aitihasikata, or Historicality in Literature (1941). Guha sees Tagore, in this essay, speak up against the "pedantic historian," and consequently, somewhat startlingly, he endorses the idiosyncratic approach of the creative writer to history as an aim for historians generally. Guha's attempt to sidestep the necessity, for a historian, of the tools of the trade, of facts that constitute the "net of external events," leads him through Tagore and the Upanishads to the "facticity of being" in Heidegger, which is opposed to the "factuality of historiographical representation." It is facticity that leads to that desirable historicality that Tagore invokes, for facticity, in Tagore, is "an instrument of appropriation by which the self has made the world his own." The "object-historical conventions of historiography" that Tagore opposes is countered by a facticity located in the primal scenes of his childhood, for, "unlike the factuality of historiographic representation, the facticity of being must be grasped in advance" (79). This is an ideal method, proclaims Guha, for the prehistory of Tagore's growth as a writer is contained there; thus historicality is situated at a depth beyond the reach of the "academic historian."

Guha's need to challenge and change the nature of historiography thus leads him to a different field altogether, "over the fence" as he puts it, "to neighboring fields of knowledge" like literature, which historians must learn from in order to deal with "historicality" (5). While the foundational aim of the subaltern project had been to critique elitism in South Asian historiography, twenty years on Guha stretches that intention to its limits, and at a depth, he acknowledges, unknown to his work until now. Guha's vision of a new historiography had been located then on the question of subaltern representation in history; "history from below" had, in a sense, incorporated an element of creativity and imagination from its very inception. But the extraordinary plea here for the historian "to recover the living history of the quotidian," this appeal to "recuperate the historicality of what is humble and habitual" (94) (in effect, Tagore's own description of his aim in writing the Galpaguchha), attempts to turn the historian, it seems, into a creative writer. Ironically, literary history shows that it was, in fact, the high-modernist conception of art that defined the task of the creative writer as involving such a recuperation of the "living history of the quotidian": Proust, Joyce, and Woolf come to mind immediately.

In an appendix to his book, Guha takes it upon himself to translate the essay by Tagore that he has discussed in the epilogue to History at the Limits of World-History. The reading of Guha's appendix and epilogue is an interesting experience, because it alerts the reader to a number of simultaneous developments in the thinking of not only Guha but also his colleague and fellow subaltern historian, Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his essay on Tagore, "Nation and Imagination," in Provincializing Europe (2002...