Description
The paper seeks to impart a fresh perspective in comprehending politics by centering art-music, as a space for political consideration. Music, in addition to being aesthetic, offers a different method of understanding human nature, thus allowing for a richer grasp of the origin, meaning, and importance of political problems. Music carries the potential of finding new vision (i.e. listening capabilities) rather than just new facts. In this regard, the paper seeks to dwell on Rabindra Sangeet as a source for illustrating a rhizomatic and relational methodology. The song "Tomar Holo Shuru, Amar Holo Sesh" highlights the fluidity of self and other, reflecting how identities are co-constituted through interaction and relationality. Politics has hardly dealt with music as an ontological source. The pertinent question remains: Is it possible for music as a relational and aesthetic form of thinking to provide a non-hegemonic route for rethinking the ontological ground of International Relations? In order to answer this, the paper employs a hermeneutical approach in an attempt to identify the political in Tagore's music and place Rabindra Sangeet within a larger critique of the "buffered self" based on Judeo-Christian cosmology. While the buffered self takes for granted a hard boundary between self and other, Tagore's music reveals a "relational self," in which agency is only possible in relation to others, not over others. Through the remaking of ontology through this musical-philosophical intervention, the paper makes the argument that politics is possible not through domination and isolation but through resonance, interaction, and fluidity. It aims to reconnect politics with aesthetic traditions and cultivate pluriversal forms of imagining coexistence. Music has the potential of decolonizing thought without risking the fall into replacement hegemonies, thus providing a route to more subtle, inclusive, and emancipatory accounts of the political.
