The Department of English Language and Literature invites you to the following talk:
Dr. Apala Das (University of Toronto)
“‘If I cannot find a shady shelter and a companion for my penance, I shall never turn ascetic’: Modernist Asceticism in Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘The Ghat’s Story’ (1884)”
Date: Wednesday, 21 February 2024,
Time: 17:30 (reception at 17:00)
Place: Room G-160
Abstract: This talk explains how Rabindranath Tagore’s (1861-1941) treatment of the ascetic figure offers a complex and valuable instance of “modernist asceticism,” which is a phenomenon I define as a critical-creative response to asceticism’s biopolitical and ideological forces in global modernity. While multiple historical and traditional sources seem to have influenced Tagore’s conceptions of it, the ascetic figure in his works largely appears as a vague amalgamation of available religio-spiritual (saints, monastics, mystics) and ethico-political (sovereignty, subjectivity, subalternity) models. I argue that this vagueness is not incidental but a deliberate choice, made to reconfigure the ascetic figure as an experimental literary-textual space and a cipher-like yardstick against which significant ethico-political, socio-cultural, and historical ideas could be tested and tried. With specific focus on one of Tagore’s short stories, titled “The Ghat’s Story” (1884), this talk also briefly sheds light on what is at stake in our readerly experience of such “ascetical” works of literature.
Bio: Apala Das specializes in twentieth-century global modernisms, postcolonial theory and ethics, and poetry / poetics. She received her PhD in English from the University of Toronto in 2023. Her work has appeared in the Wallace Stevens Journal, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and the edited collection Aesthetics and Politics in the Global South (Bloomsbury, 2021).