Abstract
This paper analyses the poetics of placelessness in Rabindranath Tagore’s The Post Office, examining how the fantasy structure of the play combines desire with indeterminacy and nostalgia. The study argues that Amal’s reveries of travel outside of his house do not satisfy their initiator because they are impossible — the spaces of his desires are only creations of his imagination, spaces where he does not belong. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, Homi Bhabha’s concept of unhomeliness, and Edward Said’s Orientalism, the article demonstrates how Tagore’s play operates within the dialectics of home and abroad, where spatial coordinates get blurred and redefined, and the character experiences an inherent sense of placelessness and confinement.
Keywords: Rabindranath Tagore, The Post Office, placelessness, space, home, diaspora, Bachelard, Bhabha, postcolonialism, imagination
Introduction
Real or imaginary, journeys free the subject from the binds of a particular location, responding to the desire and pleasure of discovery, while simultaneously threatening with the unknown. The relative freedom afforded by travel, corresponds to other sorts of confinement: the estrangement from what the traveler could call a center or a “home,” with its symbolic and phenomenological valences, the limitations triggered by the condition of homelessness. Therefore, an analysis of the poetics of placelessness underlines the significance of spaces which I find relevant in Rabindranath Tagore’s The Post Office.
In this paper, I attempt to interpret the role of the placedlessness, the fantasy structure that combines desire with indeterminacy and nostalgia in order to explicate that Amal’s reveries of travel outside of his house do not satisfy their initiator because they are impossible. In doing this, I analyze imaginary representations of home as spaces robbed of a real location given the ambivalence of polar opposites which define spatial coordinates.
Amal and Placelessness
The Post Office operates within the dialectics of home and abroad. In The Post Office home is located within the space of a house and a village where the main character is a sick child whose doctor forbids him to go outside the space of his convalescence because the fresh air would aggravate his disease; as he is able to see the Maharaja’s post office out the window, he longs to receive a letter from the Raja which will eventually happen in a surreal dénouement as the child dies.
What turns Tagore’s character into a modern individual is what the author clarifies in the Introduction to the play: “Amal represents the man whose soul has received the call to the open road.” In other words, Amal aspires to become the man in the world. The character experiences utter disenchantment with the home where he is trapped behind closed windows as predicated by his illness.
Amal is an adopted child, a former orphan, a nephew of Madhav who has recently come to live with him. Amal comes from an outside to live inside Madhav’s home. Thus, relocated into a space which is not his original home (of which we aren’t told anything), the subject longs for a reconciliation, a reunion with the homeland, a recreation of familiar places. But having lived somewhere else, in a different cultural environment has already operated a cross-cultural contagion, where estrangement eventually distorts the memory of home in a process Homi Bhabha calls the unhomeIiness.
Imaginary Spaces and the Desire for the Outside
Imagination or reverie, to use Bachelard’s term, allows Amal to identify hierarchies of familiarity in any surrounding. Like memory, the notion of home is after all free flowing. The places over there become here as one travels and inhabits them, recognizing pieces that mirror the home, or the formerly here. Insides become outsides the moment one realizes that imagination breaks away from barriers, and real geographies get deconstructed.
The sick child brings the spaces of his imagination inside his room in order to escape enclosure. Death itself is another type of escape. Rabindranath Tagore follows the cyclical philosophy according to which death is a return home, to a space he equates with an ocean, where life can start again. Tagore plays with the notion of climate, proposing a correspondence between politics and the environment. As the doctor advises Madhav that “on no account should [the child] be allowed out of doors,” he implies that the outside air will worsen his condition.
Conclusion
Locality produces different sites of conflict and alienation. Reaching the places of longing either through imagination or in reality fails to produce fulfillment because imagination triggers the awareness of intangibility; even though Amal receives the Raja’s letter, the empty page does not save the child from actual death; he will never become one of the Raja’s postmen, will never be able to visit other villages, and will never experience in actuality the joy of selling curd. The character cannot ultimately escape an inherent sense of nostalgia which the confinement to the boundaries of the home facilitates. Amal is bound only to his desire of a space, and in this way, becomes indeterminate and placeless.