Paradisiacal Imagination: Rabindranath Tagore's Visvovod or Vision of Non-National Neo-Universalism (original) (raw)
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Rabindranath Tagore's Global Vision
Literature Compass, 2015
This 'Introduction' to a special issue on Rabindranath Tagore affirms his position as an Indian Renaissance man and assesses his stature as a leading world writer, philosopher, educationist, environmentalist, rural reconstructionist, activist and pragmatist who embodies India's 'modern consciousness' (Nandy, 1994). Tagore's international impact was phenomenal in his lifetime and his global vision continues to have universal resonance today. This project seeks to move beyond the initial response to Tagore as an 'Eastern Sage' on the world stage to Tagore as the knowledgeable intellectual (Bhattacharya, 2011) who challenges the binarism of the East and the West and seeks to facilitate a dialogue between disparate nations and peoples. Tagore's implicit belief in humankind's creative principle is a confirmation of his vision of the 'universal man' prevailing in spite of the conf lict of his times. A state-of-the field account is offered as the continuing interest amongst scholars, researchers and translators of Tagore is documented and the compilation of articles illustrates an impetus to Tagore Studies that is bound to endure beyond 'a hundred years from now' (Tagore, 1896).
Rabindranath Tagore, (1861-1941) in 1917, at the height of the world war declared, “There is only one history— the history of man. All national histories are merely chapters in the larger one.” His goal was to establish the dignity of human relationships and he refused to believe that “human society has reached its limit of moral possibility”. This prompted him to search for fairness of justice in a strife-torn humanity. Noting the ruptures in the fabric of human civilisation, he maintained that the means to re-establish balance and harmony in this unequal world were to introduce social practices of justice and ideas conducive to freedom, and the remedy did not lie in enforcing power and coercive discipline. The lack of balance and harmony (bhār sāmanjasyer abhāb), which he saw as the crisis in negotiating through the highly fractured times in which he lived, is discussed in many of his travel lectures, essays and novels and of course his poems. Some of them are relatively unexplore...
War, Violence and Rabindranath Tagore's Quest for World Peace
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), India's messianic poet and Asia's first Nobel Laureate (1913), promulgated a vision of peace through the cultivation of the ideologies of Ahimsa, or non-violence, which he derived from the Bhagavad Gita and Advita, or one-identity of the universe, which he derived from the Upanishads. This paper investigates how Tagore formulated this vision of peace against a backdrop of and as an antidote to the reckless 'jihadism' (both religious and secular) and 'war-madness' of the twentieth century, which witnessed the two World Wars as well as an ongoing violence in different forms, effectively turning the world into a 'tower of skulls.' He attributed this 'devil dance of destruction' to three intersecting forces: the unmediated materialism of modern society; belligerent nationalism which often led to nationalist selfishness, chauvinism and self-aggrandisement; and the machinery of organised religion which, he said, 'obstructs the free flow of inner life of the people and waylays and exploits it for the augmentation of its own power.' His response to it was the creation of a global human community, or a 'grand harmony of all human races,' by shunning exclusivism and dogmatism of all forms, and through the fostering of awareness that human beings were not only material and rational as creatures but also moral and spiritual, sharing a dew-drop of God in every soul.
Tagore's anti-absolutist and anti-statist stand is predicated primarily on his vision of global peace and concord-a world of different peoples and cultures united by amity and humanity. While this grand vision of a brave new world is laudable, it is, nevertheless, constructed on misunderstanding and misreading of history and of the role of the nation state in the West since its rise sometime during the late medieval and early modern times. Tagore views state as an artificial mechanism, indeed a machine that thrives on coercion, conflict, and terror by subverting people's freedom and culture. This paper seeks to argue that the state also played historically a significant role in enhancing and enriching culture and civilization. His view of an ideal human society is sublime, but by the same token, somewhat ahistorical and anti-modern.,
Deconstructing Universalism: Tagore's Vision of Humanity
[Abstract: In the article, I consider the debates on the issue of universality in contemporary Postcolonial and Poststructuralist Studies. I particularly draw on Rabindranath Tagore's ethical writings on universality to demonstrate its influence on the recent revival of universalism in postcolonial literary scholarship. In terms of organization, the first section of the article takes up some recent reflections on colonialism and universalism. This allows us to turn, in the second section, to Tagore's prescient observations on universalism in his socio-political writings on India. The final section then explores Tagore's views on Universalism in greater detail through a close reading of his short play, The Post Office.]
Rabindranath Tagore: A Reappraisal of His Universality and Relevance
Rabindranath Tagore stands as a millennium in himself reflecting the ancient Indian wisdom through the raptures of his lyrics and mystic vision. His metaphysical bent of mind was quite rooted to the realities of his time inasmuch as he served as an anchor of intellectual moorings upon which the emerging nation state was to set foot on to shape a new course of journey. As a liberal humanist he advocated for Inclusive nationalism. The national anthem itself speaks of universality of Indian thought. He crystallised the Indian Renaissance of new awakening in the 19 th century via the path of Bengal Renaissance which first stimulated all the Indian vernaculars of a promise of lofty creative potentials. Tagor's international repute as the first noble Laureate of Asia helped the subalterns to gain a voice during freedom struggle. Though the English translation of his poems and other literary works lost the vitality of language, the mellifluous rhyming quality, lyrical beauty and the word-magic but the power of his vision continues to be a source of great inspiration for whoever reads them. This paper is attempted to illumine on Tagore's universality as a poet-seer and his relevance in modern time when the world is still reeling under indeterminacy of post modern fluidity that continues to witness global terrorism, religious hatred, racism, rampant corruption and discrimination of various sorts. Hence, it is worth that the myriad minded man, 'the East of Suez', may be reviewed afresh for his universality and relevance ever.
‘Crisis in Civilisation’: Rabindranath Tagore’s Perspectives on Nation and Nature
2020
European colonialism had its devastating effects not only on the native cultural traditions of India but also on the uniquely divergent environments of the Indian subcontinent. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), as a colonial subject and as one of the leading intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, critically engaged himself with both the issues. He was critical of the erosion of native cultural values as an inevitable effect of Eurocentrism, and bitterly castigated the Western concepts of nation and nationalism that, he believed, were at the root of colonialism and imperialism. He believed that Western civilization was obsessed with power, materialism, and consumerism. Mastery over science and technology had not only given them the power to dominate over the non-European nations; it was also the source of power for them to exploit nature. While denouncing Europe for its unbridled greed, Tagore had advocated the harmony between not only man and man, nation an...
Tagore on Modernity, Nationalism and 'the Surplus in Man'
Rabindranath Tagore's reflections on the concepts and practices of civilisation, nationalism, and community are directly concerned with the nature of modern political power and its underlying assumptions about human life. This article interprets these reflections by reading them along with and in the light of his philosophical anthropology as articulated in a variety of philosophical essays, focusing closely on The Religion of Man. It concludes by underscoring the contemporary import of these reflections as a philosophical resource for thinking about possibilities of human communities that go beyond the way the dominant tendency in political power tends to capture human life under its multiple regimes.
Tagore : Seductions and Perils of Nationalism
2010
Nationalism, implicated as it is in the modern imagination, is a deeply contested idea. So is nation – also referred to as an “imagined community” – which evolved as a sociopolitical institution, fairly recently, and which is characterised by either a unifying cultural signifier or an overarching ideology. Empirical studies reveal that the idea of nationalism often originates with the elite or with an aspiring middle-class, the rest of the society are appropriated into it. Tagore dismissed such nationalism as “the organised self-interest of a people,” which is “least human and least spiritual.” He saw it as a constant threat to humanity. This paper argues that Tagore’s diatribe against nationalism is a recurrent motif in all his writings and lectures. For him the nation is distinctively and exclusively Western. He developed an alternative conception of modernity which would take into account inclusive and synergic interaction between cultures that can take the world towards harmony ...