Rabindranath Tagore’s (1861–1941) critique of the political and urban civilisation of the West as opposed to the spiritually oriented civilisation of the East consolidated the materiality/spirituality binary in the Manichean world of colonial Bengal. This dichotomy is codified in Tagore’s commentary on cultivated leisure, establishing the nebulous idea of taste through negating the ‘thingness’ of subject-object relations. Complicating such absolute discursive divisions, this paper proposes materiality as a method to read Tagore’s 1929 novel, Relationships (originally published in Bengali in 1929 as Yogāyog). Contextualising the ambiguities of ‘thing theory’ within the colonial context of Bengal, this paper examines Tagore’s navigation of modernity and its conflictual materialities beyond an overdetermined rejection of the corporeal. Informed by Tagore’s writings on material culture, it locates interruptions in the novel’s metaphysical mode, disturbing the ‘humility of things’ to reveal implicit materialities that mark the leisured spaces of retreat from the colonial praxis.
Sagar Das (Fri,) studied this question.