Plastic Moment: Kavi-Aitihāsik

Abstract

Abstract Working through what Ghosh calls the plastic rhythm, this chapter executes a close reading of Rabindranath Tagore’s writings on history; it tries to develop his theory of history and establish the character of his historical consciousness. Tagore’s philosophy of history can be distinguished from Western models of historical thinking and is resistant to any form of aligning with nationalist and revivalistic narratives that speak only of one culture, one nation, and one community. The chapter identifies plastic moments in historical thinking and works out a theoretical premise based on Tagore’s engagement with time, historical distance, the everyday, history as life view, historical fiction, historicality in literature, and the notion of the historical-now or presentism. Substantiated by the notion of a kavi-aitihāsik, ‘poet-historian’, Tagore’s historical theory works at the limits of ‘global history’, which is now often misappropriated through the principles of unifocality and bounded rationality. An inherent philosophy of plasticity frees Tagore’s sense of itihasa from the univocality of world history; it creates its own ‘worlding’, its historicality, enriching and disturbing our notions of global history.