Nomadic Subjectivity and the Modern Self in Tagore’s “Atithi”: Mobility, Identity, and the Crisis of Belonging

Abstract

This paper examines Rabindranath Tagore’s short story “Atithi” (“The Guest”) as an early articulation of nomadic subjectivity, foregrounding the tension between emergent modern individualism and the moral order of colonial Bengal. Through the figure of Tarapada—the adolescent wanderer who persistently resists domestication—Tagore envisions a form of selfhood defined by mobility, impermanence, and resistance to fixed identity. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of nomadology and Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity, the study argues that Tagore anticipates a proto-modern consciousness characterised by fluidity and perpetual becoming. Tarapada’s restless movement emerges not as escapism but as a philosophical critique of bourgeois modernity’s ideals of stability, productivity, and belonging. By situating Tagore within a transnational modernist discourse, this paper reinterprets “Atithi” as a meditation on the ethics of movement and impermanence, revealing how Tagore reconfigures the modern self as a dynamic process rather than a bounded identity.