Rabindranath Tagore
Humanity grows through creative freedom and an inner bond with all life – and nationalism is a dangerous idol that stunts it.
Placement
Bengali poet, educator and first non-European Nobel laureate in literature: a humanist religion of creative personality and a sharp critique of nationalism.
Key ideas
- Religion of Man
- Critique of nationalism
- Education in freedom (Santiniketan)
Influence
Influenced by 2
Yajnavalkya
influenced by
The link runs through the Upanishads, in which Yajnavalkya’s teaching is preserved: Tagore, raised with them in daily family worship, built his lectures Sadhana (1913) on them. R. Tagore, Sadhana: The Realisation of Life (1913), preface
Evidence: AI draft
Yajnavalkya › traditionally c. 800–720 BCE
Kabir
influenced by
Tagore translated One Hundred Poems of Kabir (1915, with Evelyn Underhill) from Kshitimohan Sen’s collection; many of the poems are of doubtful authenticity. R. Tagore (tr.), One Hundred Poems of Kabir (1915); C. Vaudeville, Kabir (1974)
Evidence: AI draft
Kabir › c. 1440–1518
Influenced 3
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
influenced
Radhakrishnan’s The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore (1918) presented Tagore’s poetry as a modern voice of the spirit of the Upanishads – a humanism and spiritualism he made his own. S. Radhakrishnan, The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore (London 1918)
Evidence: AI draft
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan › 1888–1975
Amartya Sen
influenced
Sen, who grew up at Tagore’s school in Santiniketan, defended Tagore’s cosmopolitan reason and his critique of nationalism in “Tagore and His India” (1997). A. Sen, “Tagore and His India”, New York Review of Books, 26 June 1997; The Argumentative Indian (2005), ch. 5
Evidence: AI draft
Amartya Sen › b. 1933
Ashis Nandy
influenced
In The Illegitimacy of Nationalism (1994) Nandy read Tagore’s rejection of nationalism as an alternative to Western-style anti-colonial nationalism. A. Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self (1994)
Evidence: AI draft
Ashis Nandy › b. 1937
Criticism
Criticizes 1
Mohandas K. Gandhi
criticised
Tagore criticised Gandhi’s non-cooperation and burning of foreign cloth as narrowing, and doubted the spinning wheel as remedy (‘The Call of Truth’, 1921; ‘The Cult of the Charka’). S. Bhattacharya (ed.), The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore 1915–1941, 1997
Evidence: AI draft
Mohandas K. Gandhi › 1869–1948
Works
- 1917Nationalism
Lectures given in Japan and the United States: the nation as an organisation of power and greed that devours the moral life of peoples.
Position
Tagore was a poet, composer, painter and educator rather than an academic philosopher. Drawing on the Upanishads and the Bhakti poets, he found the divine not beyond the world but in the creative surplus of human personality – in love, art and the striving for unity, which he called the religion of man. Education should cultivate freedom, creativity and harmony with nature, not mere obedience. In his lectures on nationalism he denounced the nation-state as an organisation of power and commerce that devours the moral life of peoples, and warned India against imitating it. He publicly disagreed with Gandhi over non-cooperation, and discussed the nature of truth with Einstein.
Life & context
Rabindranath Tagore was born in 1861 in Calcutta, the son of Debendranath Tagore, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj. Largely educated at home, he studied briefly in England. In 1901 he founded a school at Santiniketan, from which Visva-Bharati University grew in 1921. In 1913 he became the first non-European Nobel laureate in literature. He renounced his knighthood after the Amritsar massacre of 1919 and died in Calcutta in 1941.
Further main works
- Gitanjali (Bengali 1910; English as Song Offerings, 1912)
- The Home and the World (Ghare Baire, 1916)
- The Religion of Man (1931)
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