The futures of the colonised

A reading of Rabindranath Tagore’s last testament—Sabhyatar Sankat 11] (published in English as Crisis in Civilization 12])—reveals that it is an instance of how the colonised have shown at times astonishing capacity to make a transition from realistic criticisms to utopia, which serves as the most volatile critique of the colonial situation. Utopian thinking in the colonial world counters the reality of power, inspires and becomes the basis of hope and resistance. Dissolution and farewell—the two recurrent strains in Tagore’s essay—express the meaning of the rite of dreaming by the colonised. They also spiritualise the dangerous act of dreaming the future by those who feel their fate to be sealed. While politics of the present goes on, all along that, and all through that time, parallel attempts go on to re-make the nation into a new political society based on the incipient ideas of those times of justice and freedom. An overlapping historical sense prevails in a critical time, as it prevailed at the time Tagore wrote his last testament, and the clue to the overlap can be found only in an awareness of the contentious politics of the present, which a later-day chronicler will read as an act of seeing the future. History’s excess is future—the excess that defies rationality, like Tagore’s expectation of the advent of the Man from the East that defied logical explanations about the politics of his time.