By Luke McCusker, 07/15/2019. Alongside his intellectual pursuits, Martin Heidegger was a Nazi sympathizer. While the grounds for his position may have been philosophical rather than antisemitic, and he may not have supported the eventual atrocities of Naziism, his allegiance cannot be justified. It is inexcusable. His support for the Nazi party is a deep contradiction. The social imperative of Heidegger’s metaphysical project is a disavowal of the violence of objectification, dominance, and exploitation inherent in modernity; Heidegger’s own political position is a fundamental alignment with the most objectifying, totalitarian, destructive national force in history. Heidegger, then, is not merely the name of the existential philosopher of being: it is also a signifier for a common tension in late modernity, a liminal place or moment between tenderness and violence, control and compassion, modernity itself and a truly post-modern future. One foot is in the empire of dominance, the other in the redemptive wilderness of poetic attentiveness; one hand gently cups a fragile history while the other urgently reaches for a stable future. In this way, in India, Heidegger is not only in dialogue with Shankara, but with Shantiniketan.
In the 1860s, the early literary works of Rabindranath Tagore emerged and, with them, Indian modernism. His contemporaries, collaborators, students, and successors joined him in a visual, musical, and literary conversation. This dialogue was not only about language, form, and image, nor was it merely political in its concerns. Though it had ramifications for the world of politics and the world of aesthetics, its most resonant questions were ones of place, time, and personhood. In a moment of political instability, Rabindranath Tagore, along with Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose, transformed Indian art and literature by reaching back into their own history and out into a diverse range of global aesthetic practices to construct new meaning. In the spirit of modernism, they began a renaissance of classical Indian art while simultaneously dissolving visual and literary categories based on time and geography. Their work inverts the Heideggerian contradiction. It hangs suspended across the gap between colonial modernity and post-colonial, post-modern future possibilities. Kala Bhavana, their art school at Shantiniketan, has been a bridge over which generations of artists have passed, looking toward a world-possibility they hope to shepherd into being.
The Shantiniketan School stretches across more than one gap. It is positioned not only between two moments of Indian history, but also between two aesthetic engagements with modernity. The works of the Tagores and of Bose refuse both international modernism and historicist indigenism. They put aside the reduced, placeless qualities of Mondrian and the shamelessly appropriative imagery of Picasso on the one hand, and rejected provincial traditionalism on the other. Instead, they walk a middle path. Their contextual modernism responds to new forms made available and inevitable through globalization; at the same time, it remains deeply rooted in the concerns of their moment and their place, visually, conceptually, politically, and personally. This particular liminal position, with its attentiveness to the past and the future, to loss and possibility, to limits and capacities, to memory and aspiration, is not significant merely for its historical relevance to Indian art: it is a model of attentiveness that can inform choices in other times, including our own, in the arts and otherwise. Heidegger could have learned from the interdependence of considered restraint and vast ambition at Shantiniketan.
I fly to Delhi this evening. My visit to the Kala Bhavana is scheduled for the first of August.
Nandalal Bose. Landscape. Ink on paper. 1962.
In this late, quiet work, Bose responds to sumi-e Japanese painting. Perhaps the landscape is at Shantiniketan.