The Aesthetics of Rupture in Assimilation of the East-West and the Year 1922: A Reading of Tagore’s Creative Unity

Abstract

Merging with a new country’s language and cultural codes requires attending the complex phenomenon of assimilation. With the advent of human mobility and the transnational migration, assimilation has crept in to the modern scene. The history of the confluence of East and West can be traced back to the start of colonization and the resultant relationship has often been bitter-sweet, which has given rise to the globalization and the opportunity of assimilation for the nations. The year 1922 has been earmarked as the epitome of literary modernism, reflected through the works not only from the West but from all over the globe. Focusing on the Indian subcontinent, the year 1922 has been evident of Indian Renaissance. With the invasion of the Western ethos, India had become the testing ground for the assimilation of the East West epistemology. The world by then had understood Rabindranath Tagore’s literary genius as he had become the first Asian to receive the Nobel Prize in literature in the year 1913. At surface level, Tagore’s non-fictional work, Creative Unity (1922) is a collection of essays where he covers various topics, including the creative process, the nation, Woman and home, the confluence of the East and West. But, at the deeper level, one can read the underlying aesthetics of rupture in assimilation, the failure of the East and West confluence. Homi K Bhabha in 1994 had introduced the cultural hybridity, mimicry and had better described ‘ambivalence’ as the complex mix of attraction and repulsion that characterizes the relationship between colonizers and colonized. In 2011, keeping in mind the postcolonial methodologies, Michael Collins, had discussed the reasons behind such ‘ruptures’ in assimilation had critiqued hybridity. Thus, the paper attempts to acknowledge the already available postcolonial strains in the Creative Unity and with the year 1922 as the backdrop examines the rupture in assimilation and the failure of the East West confluence.