Music, Morality, Class, Gender, and the Nation

Abstract This chapter examines Tagore’s creative and critical negotiation(s) in music of a series of colonial and nationalist constructs pertaining to the discourses of morality, religion, class, and gender. The encounter of indigenous discursive histories with colonially induced cultures of perception resulted in the emergence of novel ways of seeing which in turn were deployed to create and bolster several nationalist iconographies. Such modes of imagining the community and its identity were geared towards disciplining and regulating the domain of art and culture, music in particular, as well as constructing nationhood from specific privileged and often exclusionary perspectives. Tagore’s polemical, musical, and musicological response to this tension between aesthetics and politics in the dominant nationalist positions, and their implications for his alternative nationalism is critically explored in this chapter. It seeks to investigate Tagore’s alternative modernity in various spheres of identity formation in its contradictions and ambivalences and how it informs the aesthetics of his music and the politics of his musicology.