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History in Poetry Nabinchandra Sens Palashir Yuddha and The Question of Truth
History in Poetry Nabinchandra Sens Palashir Yuddha and The Question of Truth
History in Poetry Nabinchandra Sens Palashir Yuddha and The Question of Truth
ROSINKA CHAUDHURI
One day, lord L … visited the Babu and his family in Calcutta, and
having surprised Aru with a novel in her hand, he told the two girls,
“Ah! You should not read too many novels, you should read histories.”
Toru replied, “We like to read novels, lord L …”
“Why?”
The bright young girl replied smilingly, “Because novels are true, and
histories are false.”
—Clarisse Bader’s introduction to Toru Dutt, Le Journal de
Mademoiselle D’Arvers, 18791
Rosinka Chaudhuri (rosinkac@gmail.com) is a Fellow in Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies
in Social Sciences, Calcutta.
1
Toru Dutt was the first Indian woman to publish English poetry to great critical acclaim; she also
translated French poetry and wrote a novel in French. This quotation is taken from the introduction
to the original French edition of her novel, Le Journal de Mademoiselle D’Arvers (1879) by Clarisse
Bader, reprinted by Penguin in 2005.
2
Conceivably, it could be the American Indian that Certeau has in mind when he says “Indian” here,
following from his discussion, in the preface, of Jan van der Straet’s etching for Americae decima
pars (1619), in which Amerigo Vespucci is shown confronting the Indian America. This confusion
of the Americas for India has, of course, an old and venerable history. Nevertheless, India would
still figure as a constituent of the third world, the last-mentioned entity on his list.
3
Certeau is quoting here from Louis Dumont, “Le Probléme de l’histoire,” in La Civilization
indienne et nous (Paris: Colin, Coll. Cahiers des Annales, 1964), 31–54.
4
These ranged from literary criticism that judged it with reference to another poem, Hemchandra
Bandyopadhyay’s mythological epic Brittasanghar, to a feud between east and west Bengali writers,
to its selection as a textbook, to the British government’s queries about certain objectionable pas-
sages, which were charged with sedition.
5
Here and throughout this essay, translations from the Bengali are those of the author.
“The laws of history” and “truth” come together again in this passage, and Akshay
Maitreya’s excitability is deprecated; certainly Maitreya seems to have made
something of a career out of violently attacking many established reputations
in the various genres of poetry, the novel, and art.6 In his view, writers of fictions
were supposed to invent everything in their narratives—characters, events, plots,
and themes—whereas the historian invented nothing but certain rhetorical
flourishes or poetic effects to tell a “true story.” But as for the writer at the con-
junction of history and poetry, who was depicting past events under the rubric of
the novel or the poem—did his practice belong to history or to literature?
The relationship between historiography and literature is a tenuous and dif-
ficult one. “In part,” Hayden White suggests,
6
Maitreya took issue with Abanindranath Tagore in a series of articles in 1911–12 on the ideals, the
history and the foundations of Indian art that were later collected and published as Bharat Shilper
Katha [The Story of Bharat’s Art]. He also charged Surendranath Ganguly with ahistoricality in
“The Flight of Lakshman Sen” in the Modern Review (January 1909), pp. 61–63. Maitreya rejected
the historical foundation of Surendranath Ganguly’s painting The Flight of Lakshman Sena, which
was exhibited under the aegis of the Indian Society of Oriental Art and reproduced in black and
white in the January 1909 issue of Prabasi (p. 62). Maitreya argued that recent archaeological evidence
unearthed by Rakhaldas Banerjee at Bodh Gaya, among other proof, showed that the story of the seven-
teen horsemen of Bahktiyar Khilji putting an aged Lakshman Sena to flight was a complete fabrication, a
false myth in Indian history. Subsequently, in the March 1909 issue, Coomaraswamy defended the
painting, writing, “Art is not archaeology. … It can never be the function of an archaeologist, as such,
to criticise the work of an artist.” For a fuller discussion, see Guha-Thakurta (1992, 220).
In the nineteenth century in India, where the discourse of myth belonged not to
the “archaic” past but to the recent past, and the newly constructed site of scien-
tific Indian historiography seemed ever to be in danger of slipping back into “fic-
tional” discourse, Akshaykumar’s agitation can perhaps be understood with a little
more sympathy than Tagore displayed when he condemned Maitreya for violat-
ing the “laws of history,” which demand objectivity or “calm.” Recent theories of
discourse have solved the problem in their own way by dissolving the distinction
between realistic or historical discourse and fictional discourse based on the pre-
sumption of an ontological difference between their respective referents, the real
and the imaginary. Instead, what is emphasized is their common aspect as semi-
ological apparatuses that produce meanings by the systematic substitution of sig-
nifieds for those extradiscursive entities that serve as their referents. In these
semiological theories of discourse, narrative is held up as a particularly effective
system of discursive meaning; to conceive of narrative discourse in this way allows
us to account for its universality as a cultural fact. It also adds perspective to the
debate on “historical objectivity” by showing that there really is no such thing as
“complete objectivity.”
The distinction between historical and fictional discourse has been discussed,
in the wake of such poststructuralist interpretations, by the French political phi-
losopher Jacques Rancière, who writes in The Names of History about the
“poetics of knowledge” that constitute the discourse of history and the “set of lit-
erary procedures by which a discourse escapes literature, gives itself the status of
a science, and signifies this status” (1994, 8). Distinguishing the characteristics
that give certain texts the status of history, Rancière writes,
It may be that “the poet’s path knows no impediments,” but in his selec-
tion of historical portraiture he cannot in all places act without restraint.
If the poet had stuck to “real history” (prakrita itihas) while writing about
this unfortunate young king who was tricked, imprisoned, and then met
with an untimely death, his composition would have touched our hearts
much more. In fact, it would perhaps have been better had the poet
taken refuge in his own imagination, then his imagination would not
have been so much in the mould of Macaulay at ever step. Macaulay’s
Battle of Plassey is also poetry—it is not history. If the poet had not
clung to him with all the eagerness with which a blind man clutches
his cane then the unfortunate Sirajuddaula’s ghost could have been
protected from the harsh hand of so many baseless attacks. That is the
only reason that has compelled me to write an analysis of the calamitous
mistakes made by one of our country’s most celebrated poets. (2006,
266)7
7
The phrase “the poet’s path knows no impediments,” literally, “the poet’s path has no thorns”
(nishkantak), that Maitreya quotes in this passage is from Nabinchandra’s one-page appendix to
This distinction between history and poetry, whereby Macaulay’s history is sarcas-
tically identified as poetry because, presumably, it bears so little resemblance to
“truth” or factuality, is based not merely on a certain formalization of the style,
frame, and method of history writing in early twentieth-century India, when, fol-
lowing Western philosophers from Hegel onward, prose was identified as the
most appropriate medium suited to a history that claimed to embody truth.
Macaulay’s history is prose, but also lacks credibility as history because it does
not tell the truth. On the other hand, Nabinchandra’s so-called history is also
not history, not only because it is written in verse but because it fails, once
again, the test of truth.
Palashir Yuddha, in which he gives the reader somewhat sketchy details of his sources for certain
historical events portrayed in his narrative, concluding, in the last instance, “whether this story is
true or false its author could not tell me, nor is it necessary for the poet to know; for his path
knows no impediments” (120). This last phrase so irritated Maitreya that he quoted it many
times in his text within quotation marks, sometimes ironically, sometimes sarcastically, repeatedly
drawing attention to the absurdity of such an assertion.
8
Nabinchandra Sen (1875). Palashir Yuddha, Nabinchandra Rachanabali [Complete Works of
Nabinchandra], vol. 4 (Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishat, 1984), 55.
9
See Bimala Prosad Mukerji, “History,” in Gupta (1958, 368).
10
Banerjee used this name in his academic works, whereas in his Bengali works, he signed his name
Bandyopadhyay. Both names are used in this paper depending on the context.
For Hegel, early in the nineteenth century, poetry was figured in terms of
development in the history of Spirit (Geist). In this history, poetry emerged
11
See Bimala Prosad Mukerji, “History,” in Gupta (1958, 361–85).
first, prior to prose, and was characteristically united in “the original presentation
of truth, a knowing which does not yet separate the universal from its living exist-
ence in the individual” (1975a, 2:973). Prose came later, splintering this unity into
a relativity that was constitutive of history, for history feeds on prose. The con-
ditions for the production of history were then made complete, after the
advent of prose, by the state, “which not only lends itself to the prose of
history but actually helps produce it” (1975b, 136).
Hegel’s characterization of poetry as the “original presentation of truth” was in
concordance with a Romantic conception of the poetic that dominated the nine-
teenth century, elevating all that was “literary” to a domain above the merely his-
torical. It was also a view that animated Jadunath Sarkar, a student and teacher of
English literature before his turn to history, in his preface to Bankimchandra’s
Anandamath, in which he spoke in terms of what he called chirasatya, or “eternal
truth.” This quality, he felt, inhered to the elevated sphere of the successful work of
art and transcended the demands of the merely “historical.”
Jadunath Sarkar, in the “historical introductions” that he wrote to some of
Bankimchandra’s novels for their centenary edition publication by the Bangiya
Sahitya Parishat, launches into a detailed discussion of what constitutes literature
and what history, with specific reference to the conception, an entirely new one in
Bankim’s time, of the “historical novel.” This discussion was a continuation, in a
manner, of extensive argumentation among many eminent Bengali historians fol-
lowing Akshaykumar Maitreya in the first few decades of the twentieth century
on the status of literature and history with reference to Bankimchandra’s histori-
cal novels. Bankim himself, in his introduction to Rajsingha, had not wanted any
of his “historical novels” to be read as such, adding that Rajsingha was, in fact,
actually the first historical novel he had written. Of these, the novel Sitaram
alone had invited reams of indignant commentary from the likes of Satishchandra
Mitra, author of Jashore Khulnar Itihas (The History of Jessore and Khulna,
1922), Ramaprasad Chanda, Akshaykumar Dasgupta, Rakhaldas Banerjee and
others. Satischandra Mitra, whose work on the history of the eponymous king
Sitaram was the most extensive and authoritative, made a charge against
Bankim in 1922 that replicated, almost word for word, Maitreya’s original com-
plaint against Nabinchandra Sen:
That the Bengalis were “a self-forgetful race” (atma-bismrita jati) was a state-
ment made famous by Haraprasad Sastri in his seventh address to the Bangiya
“How close is Anandamath to historical truth?” asks Sarkar, echoing the amateur
historian, Akshaykumar Maitreya, who had asked exactly the same question
apropos of Nabinchandra’s Palashir Yuddha. The professional historian, para-
doxically, then proceeds to give a startlingly different answer, asserting, essen-
tially, that the truth of historicism is limited, whereas the truth in
Bankimchandra’s historical novels is above the historical truth and in the realm
of that which is eternally true, for which his word is chirasatya. Sarkar claims
that although the characters in Anandamath are not historical characters, in
the portrayal of the politics, society, and main events of the time they represent,
they are certainly entirely borrowed from history. Sarkar then furnishes support-
ing historical evidence from all the sources at his disposal, both medieval and
modern, to show Bankim’s fidelity to the historical. “It might be true,” he con-
cedes, that “if people investigate every particularity of dates and events they
may find, in this genre of novels, much that is wanting and self-created; in
who, in the introduction to his 1919 historical novel Bener Meye [Merchant’s
Daughter], had used both words in close proximity:
The entire thrust toward “scientific” history writing was being led at the time by
Rakhaldas Banerjee, whose reliance on the dateable archaeological artifact and
preoccupation with precise dating and epigraphic evidence perhaps lent itself
to the adjective “stony” or pathure being used by Haraprasad. Akshay Maitreya
and the group belonging to the Barendra-Anusandhan Samiti (Varendra
Research Society) were among the more ardent believers in the use of rock
inscriptions and copperplate edicts, using these as their primary evidence in
the Gaur Lekhamala (Inscriptions of Gaur) in 1910, which they considered
the only reliable indices of historical proof. Paradoxically, the most fervent cham-
pion of scientific history and archaeology, Rakhaldas Banerjee, had then
declared, in the introduction to his monumental Bangalar Itihas (Bengal’s
History, 1915), that what he had “constructed” was merely the “skeleton” of a
history and that he “could not say whether it would ever attain body and
become complete.”12 In order to achieve that corporeal state, like Haraprasad,
he had turned to the historical romance, revealingly titled Pashaner Katha, or
“The Stone’s Story,” which, he clarified, “was a narrative written in the image
of history, not a history written in the scientific method.” (Bandyopadhyay
1914, i). A decade after Jadunath Sarkar wrote his historical introductions to
Bankim’s novels in 1939, the issue was still alive and kicking, and the historian
Niharranjan Ray resurrected the imagery of a dead history when he wrote in
1949, in his own introduction to his Bangalir Itihas (The History of the Bengalis),
My Bengal and Bengalis are not there in the pages of any old punthi
[manuscript], nor in any royal epigraph and decree; they are the land
and the people that exist before my eyes and reside in my heart. The
ancient past is for me as real and as alive as today’s present. And it is
that palpable living past that I have endeavored to bring forth in this
book, not the skeleton of a dead history.13
12
Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay, preface to the first edition of Bangalar Itihas [History of Bengal],
vol. 1.
13
Niharranjan Ray, “Nibedan” Ashvin 30, 1356 (October 16, 1949), in Guha-Thakurta (2004, 133,
335).
It has been forty-four years now since Bankimchandra has been taken
from us. But he who has drunk the secret “rasa” of Anandamath has
seen, with his inner eye, the rishi who initiates us into national awareness
[swajatiyata] standing upon a mountain-top in the Himachal, his body
bathed in light, calling to the entire people:
ANTI-MUSLIM RHETORIC
14
For a discussion on this image as a nationalist trope, see Chaudhuri (2005).
Battle at Katoya,” Maitreya, following the methodology of his first book, carefully
presents the historical accounts of this battle, citing sources such as Malleson’s
Decisive Battles of India and Ghulam Husain Tabtabai’s Sair al-mutakkherin,
depicting, in emotionally charged language, the bravery of Mir Qasim’s foremost
general, Mohammed Taqi Khan, who had fought with such courage and aggres-
sion that he had single-handedly almost turned the tide of the battle in favor of
the nawab until his unfortunate death in an English ambush. Following this, he
turns his attention to the gross misrepresentation of historical fact in the scenes in
Chandrashekhar, which he does not name, that deal with Taqi Khan, asking at the
outset, “Why have such infamous and baseless allegations been put up against
someone as loyal and brave as Mohammed Taqi? Why was it necessary to cast
such an indelible stain upon so patriotic a Muslim king as Mir Qasim?” The
blame, as usual, lies at the door of the literary impulse, and he answers,
“Perhaps it is the novel that is culpable, as the historical mode has been put
aside in the interests of the creation of beauty. Let history be abandoned—the
novel has certainly become brighter!” (Maitreya 2004, 94).
The novel Chandrashekhar shows the character of Taqi Khan going person-
ally to kill the “beautiful seventeen-year old wife of Mir Qasim,” renamed (and
Maitreya is sarcastic about this) from Daulat un Nisa as “Dalani Begum.”
Maitreya comments, “Even in the days of the ‘cow-slaying, shaven-headed’
[‘go-hatyakari, kshaurita-chikur’] Muslim’s rule, the Faujdar was never sent
personally for executions—a professional executioner was always employed for
the purpose.” (Here he identifies in a footnote the phrase within quotation
marks—describing the Muslims as “shaven-headed cow-slayers”—as occurring
in a historical essay by Bankim in which the mere mention of a Muslim historian
calls forth such a phrase.15 The narration in the novel continues with Taqi Khan,
smitten by the ripe beauty of Dalani, ending up propositioning her, to which she
reacts by kicking him. The unlikely end to all this in the novel is Dalani’s sub-
sequent death by self-poisoning and Taqi Khan being slain by Mir Qasim’s
sword! “The novel is thus made appetising,” Maitreya concludes, outraged, and
“when it is acted on the stage, the applause is resounding! The genuine contempt
in which the Hindu heart holds the ‘shaven-headed, cow-slaying’ Muslim is also
revealed. But alas! Neither Taqi Khan nor Mir Qasim can be recognised any more
as historical characters” (Maitreya 1904, 96).
This sacrifice of history at the altar of the creative impulse offended Maitreya,
and it impelled him to a strident condemnation of the communal feeling that he
detected residing in the heart of so many works by Bengali stalwarts in their
15
Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Bangalar Itihas Sambandhe Koyekti Katha [A Few Words on the
History of Bengal], Bankim Rachanabali, vol. II (Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 1998), p. 291.
Because Muslims did not shave their heads completely, “shaven-headed” might have been a rep-
resentation of the vulgarized word commonly used for converts, nede, which itself could conceiv-
ably have been a legacy from converts to Buddhism.
respective fields. Certainly, he has no rival among the protagonists of the so-
called Bengal Renaissance in the disinterestedness of his objective idealism; in
his defense of history and historical accuracy, it can be said without a doubt
that Akshaykumar Maitreya did not take sides. He, too, was motivated by a
patriotic impulse similar to the high idealism Jadunath Sarkar had identified as
a validation of Bankimchandra’s immense gift, for he repeatedly marshaled his
argument in favor of historical “truth” with a view toward strengthening the
nation. “British writers proclaim the triumph of British heroes who are dedicated
and dutiful in poetry, history, literature and the novel—at every place they main-
tain the historical character intact, and these examples then serve to illuminate
their national life. The literary guru of New Bengal has read, from beginning
to end, the history of a dedicated, dutiful, and self-sacrificing Muslim hero, resi-
dent of Bengal, such as Taqi Khan, yet when he composed his novel he concealed
the natural beauty of the historical character and disfigured it with the stain of
chicanery, betrayal, and cowardice” (Maitreya 2004, 96). Mohammed Taqi
Khan’s defeat was, according to Maitreya, “a vanquishing of the entire Bengali
race,” and his memory has been lost among our people.
Otherwise it would not have been possible for the name of somebody as
dutiful and brave as Mohammed Taqi Khan to be defiled in a novel. It is
only where the common people of the country do not feel any pain in
their hearts at painting so unrestrainedly black a stain upon so brave a
character that the novel has gained such genuine enthusiasts; it is only
in such a country that the stage has reverberated with the sound of clap-
ping; it is only in such a country that people have the courage to fight with
historians in order to establish the absolute authority of the poet’s clan.
(Maitreya 2004, 97)
he had been impeded—once when his horse was shot and then upon a bullet
entering his shoulder—but had pressed on regardless, exhorting his men to
fight, and making advances, when a sudden discharge by hidden English soldiers
caused a bullet to pierce his brain and killed him instantly, creating a turnaround
in fortunes that resulted in the battle, and subsequently Bengal, being lost),
Bankimchandra’s inventions do appear unforgivable, culpable, and remorseless
to the reader. Why, then, did Jadunath Sarkar not address this particular
charge in his introduction to Chandrashekhar at all, and why did he defend
Bankimchandra from the charges of historical inaccuracy, and from the allegation
of communal ill will?
The answer seems to lie in Sarkar’s perception of the role of creativity and the
creative artist in relation to history or the historical novel. The fact that literature
differs significantly from historiography in dealing with historicality was the point
that Jadunath was making in Bankimchandra’s defense, and this very issue has
been taken up for discussion by Ranajit Guha as recently as in 2002, in his
History at the Limit of World History. In that book, taking the example of
Tagore, Guha identifies “wisdom” as the most essential category in a “truly crea-
tive writer,” whose task it is to renew the past creatively through language in a
manner that is not available to the academic historian. Hegel’s concept of
world history is governed by a “narrowly defined politics of statism”; to escape
it, one must turn away from the narrative of public affairs that is the concern
of the historian and toward the poet’s eye, which engages with the past as a
story of man’s being in the everyday world. Using one of the poet’s last recorded
essays, Sahitye Aitihasikata (1941), as a manifesto, Guha feels it is Tagore’s inten-
tion here to declare, “Historicality, too, demands facts,” but the historicality that
resides in the creative impulse is somehow free of “the bounds of historiography”
(Guha 2002, 79). Guha quotes from Heidegger to establish that the factuality
involved in the work of the creative artist is “ontologically totally different from
factual occurrence of a kind of stone,” a metaphor that uncannily echoes the
whole Bengali debate on “a stony scientific history.” The concept of “facticity,”
which, according to Heidegger, “implies that an ‘innerworldly’ being has being-
in-the-world in such a way that it can understand itself as bound up in its
‘destiny’ with the being of those beings which it encounters in its own world”
(79), is then harnessed by Guha to explain that the poetic moment resides in
this understanding of facticity, which is opposed to the “object-historical conven-
tions of historiography.”
Tagore suggests, according to Guha, that “it is only by confronting historio-
graphy with creativity” that “we can hope to grasp what historicality is about …
As the two sides are lined up, it turns out to be a confrontation between, on
the one hand, the externality and publicness [sic] of academic historical represen-
tation and, on the other, the inwardness of the self’s labour of creation and its
claim to what accrues inalienably from it” (Guha 2002, 87). In this contest, for
Guha, it is the creative process that wins, for that is the side that argues for
“a notion of the past so big and broad” that it allows for “history … [to] fulfil its
promise in the plenitude of historicality” (90). Jadunath Sarkar might not have
put it in quite these words, and whereas Guha emphasizes Tagore’s “inward
eye” or “inner soul” compared to Sarkar’s highlighting of Bankim’s “high-
minded idealism,” the end result describing the transcendence of the creator
or the work of art is remarkably similar. The words used by Sarkar to describe
Bankimchandra’s triumph in the historical novels (“taking a few material truths
from history, adding to these his incontestable talent in imaginatively creating
characters, and pouring into it all his high-minded idealism, thus breathing life
into these novels and gifting Bengali literature an astonishing thing”) are strik-
ingly of a kind with those of Rabindranath that Guha uses to validate the
creator above the historian: “The creator gathers some of the material for his cre-
ation from historical narratives and some from his social environment. But the
material by itself does not make him a creator. It is only by putting it to use
that he expresses himself as the creator” (98). Where the two might have differed
fundamentally, however, would have been in their understanding of the role of
the historian, for Sarkar never confuses the historian with the litterateur,
whereas Guha clearly says that it is to the neighboring field of literature that
the historian must now turn to avoid the pitfalls of the academically pedantic his-
torian. Sarkar, one might be reasonably certain, might never have gone so far,
only claiming, for the creative artist, a higher plane and a greater achievement
than any historian could hope to accomplish.
This national and cultural self-consciousness of the status of art, which pre-
sented itself as a principle of integration overriding all others, is in large part
to be accounted for by the preeminence accorded to it throughout the long nine-
teenth century. Overturning the usual notions of this period as a time of conven-
tion and conformity, Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling have remarked, in the
context of the English literary scene, “Nothing so much shaped the identity of
the Victorian Age as its consciousness of being modern,” and this, of course,
was only the continuation “of a defining trait of the preceding cultural epoch
of the nineteenth century” (1973, 4) in the Romantic period, which also was
marked by a lively awareness of progress and change. A defining feature of
this awareness of modernity in the colonial context in the time of Nabinchandra
was the view of art and its function that was held by the great writers and critics of
the time. In England, Coleridge had represented poetry as the mediator between
man and the universe, whereas Shelley had said that the true basis of ethical life
was in the exercise of the imagination as it was brought into activity by poetry—
poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. A little later in the
century, the great prose stylist Thomas Carlyle wrote an epochal essay, “On
Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History” (1840), in which he set his
intensely held view that the decisive element in all cultural achievement is the
individual person of genius, whereas John Stuart Mill wrote “What Is Poetry,”
an essay that shows him to be one of the best readers of poetry in that age.
Nabinchandra Sen might or might not have read one or the other of these influ-
ential works—a direct correspondence does not need to be drawn. What matters,
rather, is a general awareness in this time of the power of poetry, which gathered
into itself the hegemony of spirit that had hitherto been found in the domain of
religion, in an accelerating commitment to what Hegel called, in his Philosophy
of History, “secular spirituality,” a commitment that, in the colonial context, was
indispensable in creating a space for the commitment to nationalism.
Therefore, Nabinchandra Sen’s lofty response to Maitreya, that Palashir
Yuddha was not history but poetry, was precisely meant to indicate perhaps
that his poem was not concerned with dispelling false beliefs about the past;
instead, it endowed real events with the kinds of meaning that only literature
is enabled to give. Art and literature, wherever and however they are produced,
are paradigmatic in that they claim an authority different in kind from that
claimed by both science and politics. This notion of the authority of “culture,”
always a problematic notion, was what gave Nabinchandra Sen the space to trans-
cend, in an Arnoldian formulation, the nitty-gritty of historical fact to create an
autonomous zone of creativity, a zone that Tagore invoked in a different way
when he stated, “in his own field of creativity, Rabindranath [referring to
himself]” was “tied to no public by history,” a view that also seems to inform,
essentially, Jadunath Sarkar’s perception of universal truth or chirasatya.
List of References