ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the historical and historiographical implications of the complex interplay of various forms of memory in the music of Rabindranath Tagore, especially his songs on nature and human love. Produced at a time of crises in the Indian postcolonial subjectivity, the chapter argues that Tagore’s music offers a critique of the Hegelian Eurocentric notion of “World-History” and the dominant discourse of nationalism, by invoking alternative Indian concepts of Itihasa and swadeshi samaj. In its critique of several homogeneous impulses that marked the dominant discourse of Indian nationalism, this music offers an alternative universalism that is as much human as a specific civilisational concept. The chapter also explores the implications of this change in Tagore’s imagination for the twenty first century postcolonial subject.
