Beyond ‘kalapani’ and Tagore’s search for a shared regional identity

Abstract

In 1927, Rabindranath Tagore wrote a series of letters during his ‘pilgrimage’ to the countries of the Southeastern Rim of the Indian Ocean. He was convinced that India had forgotten its ‘gained’ territory that could be traced in some of the local customs and cultures. The presence of stories from the Puranas including The Ramayana and The Mahabharata led Tagore to believe in a larger imaginary Indianness outside its political realm. He held the imposition of ‘kalapani’–the Hindu religious sanction against crossing the ocean – as a stumbling block that had eventually forced India to isolate itself. For him, without any concerted vision, it was impossible to attain true unity through ‘lip-union from public platforms’ [Tagore, R. (2010). Letters from Java (I. Chaudhurani and S. Roy, Trans., and S. Roy, Ed., p. 73). Kolkata: Visva-Bharati]. Recent scholarship has problematized the civilizing force of Indic values that Tagore expounded in his Letters from Java. However, Tagore’s call for consciousness building to rediscover and refine the common areas of Asian tradition and culture merits revisiting. Thus the paper purports to chart the cartography of the minds that once united different places and constituted a cultural capital as well as to survey the various metaphorical implications of ‘kalapani.’