Search

Contrary to his usual depiction as a modern secular thinker, heteronomous imaginaries of sacrality and kingship are pervasive in Rabindranath Tagore's plays. A return to these referents, as I show in this paper, releases Tagore's thought-world from the stranglehold of derivative categories and allows for his reconstruction as a political thinker. Eschewing the nationalist ideal of valiant and noble rulers shored up from histories and myths as legitimate alternatives to the colonial regime, Tagore aesthetically employed the imaginary of an "absent king" sourced from the Upanishads. Avoiding the tropes of spectrality of a dead king or an exceptional interregnal anarchic moment, emptiness was inscribed in the very heart of the monarchical model, thereby transfiguring it into a radical instituting imaginary of the social. This curiously brought together the apparently antithetical categories of sovereignty and freedom through an insistence on creative will and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will argue that B.R. Ambedkar attacked the social law of Hindu dharma for legalizing and legitimizing Brahminical sovereignty in the form of a birth-based caste order centred around the ambivalent sacrality of untouchability. Although Ambedkar inaugurated postcolonial India's transformative constitutional project, its juridical language of secular legality was not powerful enough an antidote against the social customs of caste and untouchability. Since these practices were ultimately grounded in a Hindu theology imputing responsibility for action to a fixed immutable being, Ambedkar sought to unsettle and destabilize it by proffering a counter-theology of Buddhism that delinked action from any substantial being, and thereby opened up sovereignty as an empty place of political power. His Buddhism though, was less a religion of selfless renunciation, and more a religion of rupture mediated by the political law of fraternal freedom, actualized in the excessive subjectivity of the Dalit community of converted Buddhists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]