Rabindranath Tagore's Chaturanga and the Calcutta Plague

Abstract

At a time when the ongoing COVID-19 crisis has once again laid bare that the impact of the pandemic is neither uniform nor homogeneous across cultures, it is important to acknowledge that different literary and cultural traditions have responded differently to the condition of the pandemic, and these responses have been mediated by historical and cultural specificities. In accordance with the proposed theme of this collected edition, this essay focuses on Tagore’s novella Chaturanga (1915) with a view to locating how cultural responses to the pandemic have been historically shaped by an interpellation of literary, political and scientific discourses. I will particularly focus on how the narrative intervenes into the modern discourses and approaches to contagious diseases in society with respect to colonial Calcutta in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and, within this context, how the plague emerges as a crucial instrument for staging a larger cultural debate on colonial modernity through fiction. The novella, originally written and published in 1915, is partly set in the backdrop of the Calcutta plague of 1898–1899, and although this pandemic is not central to the plot of the novella, it plays an important role within the textual space in highlighting the prejudices regarding class, caste and religion in the urban Bengali society at the turn of the twentieth century. While it is hardly in doubt that contagious diseases cut across different social and communal boundaries, Tagore held the position that pandemics such as the plague do not only disproportionately affect marginalised and impoverished communities, but also that these communities are often discriminated against in the face of the pandemic and branded as carriers of filth and disease. Writing with the awareness of how emergent discourses on public sanitation, social hygiene and clinical pathology had considerably refashioned the understanding of contagious diseases not only in Western Europe but also among the English educated intelligentsia in the major colonial centres such as Calcutta, Tagore situates the pandemic within the dialectic of endogenous tradition and colonial modernity at a particular moment in history through the contrasting perceptions of the plague in the characters of Jagmohan and Harimohan and their contradictory responses to it. The narrative, through the episode of the plague outbreak and the consequent crisis in the society, highlights how neither the combativeness of Jagmohan’s radicalism nor the conservatism in Harimohan offer any space for the reconciliation of these conflicts inherent within the public intellectual sphere at the time and instead puts forward Tagore’s notion of a “modernity” attained through samanjasya (balance/synthesis) and purnata (completion and/or fulfilment).