A Reading of Tagore's 'Children's Literature' as Cultural Counter-Sites

In its very essence, nonsense literature subverts the cultural hegemonic tropes of a society. It fundamentally uses humor in caricaturing those tropes to evoke anti-establishment ethos. Rabindranath Tagore’s “Khapchara” (1936) dissects a multitude of issues from colonial Bengal, falling under the larger spectrum of socio-cultural themes. The marginalization of ‘nonsense literature’ as a literary space marks its existence as a heterotopia. Michel Foucault defines heterotopia as “counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted.” This paper seeks to trace how Tagorean nonsense acted as a heterotopia, demolishing certain entrenched ways of comprehending ‘sense’ in colonial times, eventually highlighting new uncharted ways of understanding that very ‘sense’ and how his ‘nonsense’ still holds extreme relevance in making ‘sense’ out of the neoliberal Indian society in the twenty-first century.