1 All That is Solid Melts into Air: A Study of Rabindranath’s He (Shey) Dipankar Roy In Empire, no subjectivity is outside, and all places have been subsumed in a general “non-place.” The transcendental fiction of politics can no longer stand up and has no argumentative utility because we all exist entirely within the realm of the social and the political. Antonio Negri 1 He who is one, who is above all colour distinctions, who dispenses the inherent needs of men of all colours, who comprehends all things from their beginning to the end, let Him unite us to one another with the wisdom which is the wisdom of goodness. The Svetasvataropanishad 2 Rabindranath lived his entire life in a nation that was under foreign rule. But, his life-long quest was not merely to see an end of the story of political subjugation and to achieve independence for his country. For him, “To see India, through the foggy film of blood-stained nightmarish- visions is not to see the real India at all.” 3 His aim was far greater. It was, in short, to outgrow 'the political' and 'the historical'; two 'gifts' that colonial India has received from western modernity. He grappled hard with ideas like 'nation-state' and 'citizen-subject'. He engaged with these issues dialogically, with amazing consistency, in many of his polemical writings. One can also, with close readings, see traces of his long engagement with these ideas in his novels and his essays. My present attempt will be to try and show how he had done so through his other artistic endeavours. To draw a line of demarcation between the public sphere ('the political' and 'the historical') and the private field of creativity (srishtikshetra) was something that Tagore was trying to achieve throughout his life as a creative artist. For him, the goings on in the public sphere with its public ‘history’ – statist activities embroiled in constitutional adjustments – could only touch him as a ‘British subject’ but not ‘as Rabindranath’, the man; because, for him there are other sides to the