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“Subjects,” “Liberty,” and “Equity”: Queen Victoria's Proclamations and Bengali Writers
- Swapan Chakravorty
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- Journal:
- Victorian Literature and Culture / Volume 52 / Issue 1 / Spring 2024
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 15 April 2024, pp. 226-246
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Starting with Queen Victoria's address to the Proclamation Durbar in 1877, this article surveys how Bengali writers critiqued British colonialism in India through their stories, songs, poetry, journalism, and lectures, sometimes directly about the queen herself, more often when discussing governance, social reform, and the desire for political liberty.
13 - Machiavelli Reading
- Edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, Prasanta Chakravarty, University of Delhi
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- Book:
- Machiavelli Then and Now
- Published online:
- 21 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 17 March 2022, pp 235-261
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Summary
Reading, Presence, and Representation
The act of reading almost always involves a vanishing trick. It is an escape from our self-evident identity, or, to put it in a tautological gloss, from what we identify as evidence of our so-called self. Writing on the problem of the self in connection with literature, especially as it appears in the existentialist psychology of Ludwig Binswanger, Paul de Man distinguishes between four possibilities that make it difficult to find a ground on which ‘selves’ may meet the unity of the literary consciousness. Of these, two are ‘the self that reads’ and the ‘the self that reads itself ‘. Straying from the arguments of Binswanger examined by de Man, one could say that in the first, the reader felt that she was other than she at the time of reading, and that in the second, the author's self shifted with contingent interpretations of her work. Whichever way we look at the distinctions—and de Man has four, not two—they seem designed to scramble the reader's fragile ontological co-ordinates at the moment of reading. The ‘I’ who reads is not always the ‘I’ accessible to us as a sturdily cognizable object, although we are conscious of the undeniable subjective experience we go through as readers.
Readers of Wolfgang Iser may recall his adaptation of Ernst Cassirer's idea of the concept as a model of symbol usage involved in reading fiction— fiction being that species of speech that lacks a situational reference. Cassirer thought of the concept as a way of moving its object to an ideal distance so that it might be understood (one might also say, ‘so that it may be read’)—a process in which presence needs to make way for representation. Cassirer's phenomenology of knowledge was not the only idea Iser drew on. Roman Ingarden was not an idealist like Cassirer, but his phenomenological realism served Iser well. Iser agrees with Ingarden that one who reads a text is the source of ‘concretization’. The reader, instead of merely contemplating a finished object, generates significance by fleshing out the indeterminacies of the text. The reader of fiction translates the world into something it is not: into symbols that are independent of the visible, making it possible for the reader, in principle at least, to see an invisible world.
20 - Rabindranath Tagore as Literary Critic
- from Part II - Studies
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- By Swapan Chakravorty, Humanities, Presidency University, Kolkata.
- Edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore
- Published online:
- 24 December 2019
- Print publication:
- 09 April 2020, pp 352-365
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Summary
Rabindranāth Tagore believed that literature, if not all art, was free play (lilā) and led to joy (ānanda). Derived from the Upanishads and introduced to him by his deeply religious father, Debendranāth, these notions would later be fused with his own reading of Indian and Western texts. A phrase in the Mundaka upanishad (2:2:7), one that Tagore recalled on countless occasions, describes the infinite as the immortal manifested in joyous form: ānandarupamamritam yadvibhāti.
Play connects freedom with the joy we experience in what is functionally a surplus. Humans need the face for physical functions, but it is also the theatre of emotions. ‘Muscles are essential, and they have plenty of work. But we are enchanted only when the play of their movements expresses the body's music.’ Tagore said this in the 1924 address ‘Srishti’ (Creation) delivered at Calcutta University. Freedom, play, and joy are invoked in the same address: ‘This release from the fetters of fact into the world of abiding joy is no small freedom. Human beings composed songs and painted pictures to remind themselves of this freedom.’ He defended the idea of poetry as play with unperturbed humour in 1915, in reply to the social scientist Rādhākamal Mukhopādhyāy's attack on his literary thought and practice as indifferent to social reality and uncaring of human suffering. Radhakamal seemed annoyed that Tagore used words such as play (khelā), holiday (chhuti), and joy (ānanda) far too often in his writings. ‘If that is so’, answered Tagore in ‘Kabir kaiphiyat’ (The Poet's Defence), ‘one is to understand that I am possessed by some truth.’
Tagore also employed the word rasa in talking of art, though not always in the sense one finds in classical Sanskrit aesthetics. Rasa for him was not simply the eight affective ‘essences’, such as compassion or fury, mentioned in Bharata's manual Natyashāstra, and the ninth added to it by Abhinavagupta. For Tagore, any mixture of these or even a new rasa may lead to ānanda. Rasa in poetry is at its most intense when it pleases the ears and satisfies our intellect and emotions through its bhāva, that is, its feeling and idea. Tagore wrote something similar (without mentioning bhāva) to the younger poet Sudhindranāth Datta in July 1928.
6 - Memories of the future: archives in India
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- By Swapan Chakravorty, Presidency University, Kolkata
- Michael Moss, David Thomas
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- Book:
- Do Archives Have Value?
- Published by:
- Facet
- Published online:
- 02 October 2019
- Print publication:
- 28 September 2018, pp 89-104
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Summary
The beginnings of archives in colonial India
Archives have always been more about re-collecting the future than the past. In a neglected essay titled ‘Memories of the future’ the well-known Shakespeare and Middleton scholar Gary Taylor wrote that ‘We can imagine the future only by recollecting the past’ (Taylor, 1996, 237). Archives ‘re-member’ not simply by collecting materials from the present and the past, but also by selecting and organizing them, so that each act of collecting or ‘re-collecting’ is also at the same time an act of forgetting. ‘All the futures of the past are inaccurate’, writes Taylor (Taylor, 1996, 246). Human technologies of memory are designed to overcome the limitations of bodily memory, irrespective of whether we think of the ‘body’ from the viewpoint of a ‘naive physicalism’ or a ‘naive mentalism’. One may think of the ‘memory’ as unselfconscious of visceral processes or as cognizant of the consciousness as ‘embodied’ and of the body ‘enminded’ (Searle, 1984, 13–27). Neither position would make a difference to the perceived function of technologies of memory. While our memory-machines do the remembering for us, we aim to marshal memories for our use and to fashion a memory bank for the future the way that we would like to imagine it.
Such attempts were made in western arts of memory, such as in the place-rhetoric or topoi since Aristotle and the pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Herennium (Moss, 1996, 8). In the twelfth century, Hugh of St Victor in his De arca Noe mystica raised the machine universitatis, a memorial ark which had elements of the mappa mundi and of linea generationis, on a tablet or page of a book (Carruthers, 1990, 231–9). Hamlet is probably thinking of such a tablet (or ‘table’) when he swears to erase all ‘trivial fond records’ from the ‘table of [his] … memory’ and admit ‘Within the book and volume’ of his brain only his father's commandment to seek revenge (Shakespeare, 1988, Hamlet, 1.5.98–103).1 God had inscribed his commandments to Moses in written letters, and Hamlet does likewise with his father's injunctions. Writing is an aid to cultural memory. Keeping records on clay tablets helped Ashurbanipal to centralise power and claim in 668 BCE that he was ‘King of the Universe’.
Hypocrite Lecteur: Reading on the Early Modern Stage
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- By Swapan Chakravorty, Jadavpur University
- Edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri
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- Book:
- Renaissance Themes
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 05 March 2012
- Print publication:
- 01 July 2009, pp 33-61
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Summary
Enemies of the early modern theatre never tired of recalling that the Greeks called stage actors hypocrites. One especially truculent reminder came from Isaac Bargrave, chaplain to Prince Charles and pastor of St Margaret's at Westminster. In A Sermon against Selfe Policy, Preached at Whitehall in Lent 1621, Bargrave declared:
The Church is a Theater, vppon which some act their owne parts, being alwayes the same that they seeme, and these are all good men, but bad Actors. Others on the contrary do meerely personate, seeming perpetually what they are not, and these are all bad men, but good Actors: notorious Hypocrites, like Monkies who imitate humane actions, but remayne Monkies still […] They are such Histrionicall Mimickes, that in Greeke all Stage-Players are called by their names […] Hypocrites.
Radical Protestant polemics of early modern England routinely likened the hypocrisy of stage players to the mummery of the Catholic priest, the disguises and forged miracles of the Jesuit, and the Machiavellian dissimulation of the politic Spaniard. It was even suggested in one pamphlet that the Jesuits' investment in hypocrisy did not make market sense. This was John Gee in New Shreds of the Old Snare (1624):
The third abatement of the honor and continuance of this Scenicall company is, that they make their spectators pay to deare for their Income. Representations and Apparitions from the dead might be seene farre cheaper at other Play-houses. […]