Nationalism, Ways of Seeing, and Music

Abstract This chapter discusses the dominant nationalist politics of replicating in the Indian context the Eurocentric World-historical discourse through foregrounding certain monologic and reductive notions of reality, with specific reference to the ideas of work and nature. The colonial governmentality, a logical corollary of capitalist biopolitics, engendered a complex mechanism of control over the functioning of the biological body of the subject and the geographical body of the earth, nature. This chapter investigates Tagore’s holistic critique of this biopolitics, adopted by nationalism in equal measure, through proposing alternative ways of seeing reality, especially though his music and musicology. These alternative ways of seeing that draw on both Western and indigenous discursive traditions, the chapter argues, are central not just to his alternative musical nationalism, but also to his larger political project of “provincializing Europe.”