Haunting the Developmental Present: Rabindranath Tagore and the Cultivation of Progress

• In Event: Ghosts of Modern Futures Past – II

Abstract

Turning the corner into the long gallery toward a collection of photo prints, one got the distinct and eerie feeling of being watched. Or maybe it was the gallery goer feeing he was listening in on the past. Each of the photos was a composite of a colour background taken in the present with a silk screen print curtain put up in front depicting several scenes from the past: one of the pictures depicting a group sitting cross-legged around a white-bearded man on a concrete pedestal underneath a tree. The artists depict the man, Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali visionary and Nobel Laureate, as a political ecologist promoting an alternative to modernization—an alternative which would allow for art, literature, music and education to take precedence over soaring towers of concrete and steel.

This talk takes its inspiration from these photos, part of a project of Indian artists who portrayed Tagore as producing a space devoted bucolic nature and “living” art. I also look at the ghosts of Tagore’s imagined futures: what can be said about his cultivation of art and culture, paths of human progress largely abandoned by contemporary obsessions with science, technology and economic development? And between the dead ends of global consumerist culture, and the false alternative of religious or ethnic nationalisms, can the legacy of Tagore’s work provide the soil in which new imaginations will grow? I argue a more fecund past lost to the future can be read into the weeds of these artists’ ecological portraits.

Author

• Hilton Simmet