Interpretation of Taj in Abanindranath Tagore’s Paintings
The monumentalizing process of any historical symbols, events or phenomena involves both the govern-mentality and narratives together. But with the edge of immediacy and justifiable legal forces, govern-mentality overlooks the narrative aspects. It further loses the capacity to resolve counter narratives of given monuments. This becomes a challenge to the exclusive spirit of socio-cultural harmony. In response to this challenge my paper aims to show that how philosophical hermeneutics can play a crucial role in establishing the harmony among counter interpretations of historical monuments. To show this, I am using alternative narratives of Taj mahal. Taj mahal has been used as metaphor to narrate different political thoughts throughout the colonial and postcolonial era in India. It has been used as an iconic image to convey the ideological positions. From ideographic poetry of Rabindranath Tagore to curatorial description of Rudyard Kipling and from symbolic inspiration for Shahir Ludhiyanawi to revolutionised imagination of Faiz Ahamad Faiz, there is a large body of literature addressing the Taj through different lenses. But with recent debate on Taj, whether it represents the glory of Indian historical past or not as a symbol of national solidarity raised some critical responses.
Historical monuments are an important source of history. They are associated with the ideas, event or person important to the tradition. Consequently, they enchant the participants of given tradition with a holistic sensation about the person, events or conditions with whom they belong to via immediacy. This potentiality of monuments made them important in reconstruction of historical consciousness. In her article, On Interpretation and Historical Sites, Suzanne B. Schell observed that the historical monuments have been used nowadays as a tool to develop the sense of patriotism and civic value among people (07). As a symbol of events, monuments have a dimension of narratives and representation to portrait a tradition. They work as chains linking past, present and future and therefore open for interpretations.
Hermeneutics as a philosophical tradition have focussed on various aspects of understanding. It considers understanding as the work of history, work of reason, work of life and philosophy. Methodological hermeneutics, philosophical hermeneutics and critical hermeneutics are the three main accounts of hermeneutical positions in philosophy. Methodological hermeneutics was centred around the retrieval of the author's intentions by following the method of the interpretation. Against this view, Gadamer developed philosophical hermeneutics. For philosophical hermeneutics, there are no fixed meanings that exist to recover rather it is impossible to do so.
Gadamer’s hermeneutics focussed on the importance of tradition and the interpretative aspect of human subject. According to him, the interpreter and author are living in two different times and members of different traditions hence they have different sets of prejudices. These differences allow the interpreter to be open for diverse meanings in the process of understanding. All interpretation takes place against the background of a constantly changing tradition. These assumptions opens several other logically possible points of view of its subject matter and advocates that no act of understanding is complete as fact. In Truth and Method Gadamer argues that “hermeneutic work is based on a polarity of familiarity with strangeness” and that “the true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between (TM, 295).”
For philosophical hermeneutics, hermeneutic experience is inseparable from an ethical recognition of the other and otherness. This value is essential for a plural society. It de-centres subjective experience and brings the subject to an awareness of its dependence upon cultural realities that are not of its own making. Gadamer emphasised that any understanding comes only through the mediation of another. It is the other who can be in the form of a person, text, or painting brings the understanding of something. So, whenever we have any meaning of a historical monument that should consider other events too. Gadamer talks about the dependency of all understanding upon a prior acquisition of linguistic practices and horizons of meaning, which guide our initial conceptions of self and world. This assumption of self, others and world allows us to reinterpret our history. In this light, looking at different interpretations of Taj and its relation to the idea of the historic past of India will illustrate the role of hermeneutics.
Taj Mahal has a beautiful architecture to have status as a national monument, and it is historically associated with the Mughal king Shahjahan. This building was inspired by Abanindranath Tagore. He painted it as metaphor in order to expose the imperialist narration of religious domination on the cultural past of India and proposed the model of pluralistic future of India. Tagore was the founder of the Bengal school of arts. He was associated with the nationalist school of arts. He painted a series of paintings such as “Bharat Mata'' and “Mughal series” to evoke nationalism among the common people to fight against British colonisation. But two of his paintings “The Building of the Taj” and “The Last Days of Shah Jahan” were masterpieces. These paintings were exhibited at the Delhi Durbar in 1903, an event to mark the coronation of Edward VII as emperor of India.
These paintings received attention from art historians and social theorists equally. The message conveyed through the Taj was powerful and radical. Debashish Banerjee writes that the painting “The Building of the Taj” of Tagore captures a moment of the glory of ‘national creativity’ of the era when the Taj was built (32). This painting successfully able to convey the message of diverse ethnicity and religious past of Indian creativity. These paintings carried the narration of a multi-ethnic and plural idea of a nation where different religions don't live in religious hierarchy rather they exchange their cultural creativity (35). Ananya Vajpayee writes that these paintings are so powerful and original that they led the swadeshi painting movement in Indian art for many decades (140). The readings of these paintings make Tagore a nationalist. But Abanindranath’s location of the nation is not restricted to the Hindu past, it includes other cultural exchanges too. In “The Building of the Taj” painting, we can notice that Abanindranath was addressing the Indian for a participatory co-creation of their present and future against the exploitative policies of the British. They depict the Taj as product of the spirit of a non-hierarchical religious and ethnic culture and ascribe Tajmahal as metaphor for the new nation which would be based on a return to a cultural intersubjective creativity which inherited in spirit of India (Debasish, 37).
The other painting “The Last Days of Shah Jahan” presented the allegory of national subjection (Debashis, 33). This painting portrays the helplessness of Shahjahan under the orthodoxy of Aurangzeb where he was served by his loyal helpless daughter. Tagore painted through the Shah Jahan’s end as a message to the upcoming end of British colonisation. He utilised the image of helpless Shahjahan gazing at Taj as metaphor which carry forward the message of helplessness of the present situation of Indian under colonisation. This helplessness occurs due to the scientific empiricism that dominated the disciplines of history and archaeology in India at that time by concluding the fact of religious dominance in India. To counter this narrative, gazing at Taj allowed Shah Jahan to question these narratives which made familiar with the help of fact and empirical data of archaeology and history.
Gadamer’s Truth and Method claims that if anything is a work of art, then it not only recalls something whose meaning is already familiar, but it can also say something of its own, and thus it becomes independent of the prior knowledge that it conveys (TM, 143). Vajpayee looks through the Shah Jahan gazing to portray the insights into tradition of painters and his association and influences of various cultures and social events. This gazing at a structure that stands for a number of things to Shah Jahan is analogically similar to looking at the past of India through Taj by Tagore. For Shah Jahan, the looking at Taj stands with imagination of undying love for his dead queen, Mumtaz Mahal; his own erstwhile prowess as a monarch, once able to commission and supervise the building of so magnificent a monument; the fleeting nature of human life contrasted with the abiding nature of beauty itself; the political power and aesthetic refinement of the Mughals, rulers of Hindustan such as were never seen before or since; and last but not least, the facticity, the eternity, the intransigence, of Death(133). The same is true for Abanindranath Tagore, where he imagined through looking at Sahajahan at Taj stand for imagination of a nation which flourished by the plural values in one hand and alerts for a future of cruelty and oppression on the name of institutional orthodoxies and ideologies. These paintings address larger issues about the end of tolerance in Indian society. As they were exhibited at the time when the proposal of Hindu nationalism with the soon-to-come partition of Bengal (1905) and the beginnings of the two-nation theory (Shimla Deputation, 1906) was about to take place.
To resolve the problem of conflicting interpretations. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics offer willingness to involve in negotiation and agreeing to differences knowingly. He points out that understanding does not fall exclusively within the origins of the subjective since it is a social achievement. It can involve an agreeing to differ based upon a mutual, sympathetic dialogical awareness and tolerance of difference. Hermeneutic understanding is finite. It is limited by both its time and its horizon. The determinate historical location of any understanding prevents it from being able to claim completeness.
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