2016 | GITANJALI & BEYOND 1: 1–21

Transnationalist
Spirituality of
Rabindranath Tagore
Ashim DUTTA, University of
Dhaka/ University of York

Abstract:
Focusing on a selection of Rabindranath Tagore’s essays, lectures, and a
few of his creative works, this essay draws attention to the spiritual orienta-
tion of Tagore’s transnationalism. In his vast and multifaceted writings,
Tagore offers an alternative vision of transnational union of humanity,
different from and often resistant to nationalist distributions of human
relationship. Through close readings of Tagore’s works, this essay compli-
cates Orientalist notions of the East-West polarities. While strongly oppos-
ing Western imperialist ideology, Tagore was always frank about his trust in
and indebtedness to the liberal humanist values of the West. On the other
hand, despite upholding Indian or Eastern spirituality, he was critically
aware of the social and political crises of the contemporary East. A large
volume of his works betrays his scepticism about any political solution to
national and international problems. What he promotes is a spiritual con-
cord of the best in Western and Eastern cultures, connecting the liberal
humanist conscience of the West with the harmonizing, all-inclusive spir-
itual wisdom of the East. Neither completely secular nor thoroughly reli-
gious in an institutional sense, the transnationalist spirituality of Tagore
bridges the gap between the secular humanism of Western modernity and
the mystic–religious spirituality of Eastern antiquity, offering nuanced
perspectives on both.

Keywords: Transnationalism, spirituality, universal humanism, national-

ism, cosmopolitanism, culture, political, East, West.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Ashim Dutta

http://dx.doi.org/10.14297/gnb.1.1.1-21| http://gitanjaliandbeyond.napier.ac.uk/
2 | ASHIM DUTTA

he most memorable fact of human history’, according to

Rabindranath Tagore, ‘is that of a path-opening, not for the clearing of a
passage for machines or machine guns, but for helping the realization by
races of their affinity of minds, their mutual obligation of a common hu-
manity’.1 This notion of ‘common humanity’ or universal humanism is
informed by the profoundly spiritual nature of Tagore’s vision of life and
world. Tagore’s spiritually idealist stance against nationalism made him
unpopular both at home and abroad. On his lecture tours in Japan and the
USA during the globally historic moments of 1916 and 1917, he chose
‘Nationalism’ as his topic. In Japan, his valorisation of the traditional Ja-
pan against the Western-influenced ‘modern’ Japan received a generally
unsympathetic response—a condition that would exacerbate during his
later visits in 1924 and 1929. 2 On Tagore’s Chinese tour in 1924, public
sentiment was divided as to his supposed antimodern Oriental antiquarian-
ism.3 Although in America he was initially well received, he was shocked by
American journalist and New Humanist Paul Elmer More’s condemnation
of him in the Nation on 30 November 1916. More preferred to the spiritually
optimistic Tagore ‘philosophers who at least have the advantage of being
virile’ given the need of the time ‘when the devil is unchained’.4 At the same
time, Tagore’s lectures on the evils of political nationalism also caused
mistrust among the non-Bengali Indians living in the USA, so much so that
there was even a failed attempt to murder him in his hotel room on the
West Coast.5 The spiritual universalism of Tagore remains to this day a
matter of both admiration and condemnation in India and Bangladesh as
well as among the Bengali-speaking community all over the world.
It is imperative to state at the outset that the term ‘spirituality’ is used
in this essay to mean a way of looking at life and reality that prioritizes
man’s spirit, soul, or moral sensibility, and his inner subjective conscious-
ness over materialist, commercial, political, and exclusively corporeal val-
ues. As we will see, in Tagore’s usage, the word ‘spiritual’ does not have any
other-worldly or supernatural implication, but is concerned with man’s
existence in this world. The transcendence it underpins pertains to trans-
cending the overly materialistic or self-centred existence of one’s life in
order to realize one’s deeper connectivity with every living being. Whether in
his early works such as Sādhanā (1913) or in his late works such as The
Religion of Man (1931), Tagore adheres to this liberal notion of spirituality.

1 The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, ed. by Sisir Kumar Das, 3 vols
(New Delhi: Sahitya Academi, 1994–96), III (1996), 711.
2 Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded
Man (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), p. 203.
3 Ibid., p. 251.
4 Ibid., p. 207.
5 Ibid., p. 204.

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 Transnationalist Spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore | 3

As Michael Collins notes, the Upanishadic influence on him notwithstand-

ing, Tagore’s spiritual views should not be seen as ‘merely derivative’, but
as particularly distinct from the ‘orthodox Upanishadic Advaita Vedānta’
which attributes only an illusory status to the phenomenal world. 6 It is,
therefore, significant that, in The Religion of Man, Tagore calls the object of
life’s ordeals ‘transcendental Man’, suggesting that he is not after any tran-
scendental Being, outside the reach of human existence in this life. 7 This
paper will scrutinize Tagore’s views of the East–West relationship and his
promulgation of a syncretic internationalism or universalism, both of
which, it will be argued, are deeply informed by his spiritual preoccupa-
tions. If his position about the former is complex and apparently contradic-
tory, his commitment to the latter, too, is not a simple and straightforward
one. ‘The true universalism’, as he writes in ‘Notes and Comments’ (1924),
is one that does not demolish ‘the walls of one’s own house’ but offers ‘hos-
pitality to one’s guests and neighbours’. 8 Tagore’s universalism thus re-
spects cultural difference and diversity, which are natural and, for that
matter, fluid. What he is wary of is the idea of nation, which he views as a
politically motivated construction of the West.
In ‘Nationalism in the West’ (one of his US lectures given in 1916 and
1917), Tagore provides his interpretation of the concepts of ‘nation’ and
‘society’. The term ‘nation’, for him, implies a sense of ‘the political and
economic union of people […] organized for a mechanical purpose’. ‘Socie-
ty’, on the contrary, ‘is a spontaneous self-expression of man’, ‘a natural
regulation of human relationships’.9 Writing about Tagore’s notion of
svadeś (one’s own country), Partha Chatterjee explains the importance in
Tagore’s discourse of terms and concepts like ‘svadeśsamāj’ (society of
one’s own country) and ‘the collective power of self-making or ātmaśakti’.10
The term ātmaśakti also implies an inner spiritual power and is loosely
analogous to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s concept of ‘self-reliance’.11 Therefore,
despite renouncing the Western notion of statist nationalism, Tagore be-
lieved in socially and culturally unique self-identities of people of different
parts of the world. However, rather than suggesting any rigidity or mutual
exclusivity, this recognition of sociocultural unity of different groups of
people in the world is only the first step, according to Tagore, towards a
spiritually charged universal-humanist unity, forged by intercultural ex-
change, sharing, and reciprocity.

6 Empire, Nationalism and the Postcolonial World: Rabindranath Tagore’s Writings

on History, Politics and Society (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 40.
7 English Writings, III, 106.
8 Ibid., 493.
9 Nationalism (London: Macmillan, 1924), p. 9.
10 qtd. in Poulomi Saha, ‘Singing Bengal into a Nation: Tagore the Colonial Cos-
mopolitan?’, Journal of Modern Literature, 36.2 (Winter 2013), 1–24 (pp. 7–8).
11 See ‘Self-Reliance’, in The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by
Brooks Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library, 1950), pp. 145–69.

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4 | ASHIM DUTTA

Despite the overabundance in his writings of terms such as ‘East’ and

‘West’, and their Bengali equivalents, ‘pūrba’ and ‘paścim’, or ‘prācya’ (Ori-
ent) and ‘paścātya’ (Occident), one should not ignore the coexistence of the
notions of cultural uniqueness and syncretism in Tagore’s thoughts. That
is to say, his use of the above terms is less contentious, polemical, and
oppositional than that of Edward Said. In Orientalism and much of the
debates that it inspired, the distinction between the Occident and the Ori-
ent appears to be always-already preconditioned by an unequal power
relationship. As Said puts it in his Introduction to Orientalism, ‘The rela-
tionship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domina-
tion, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony’.12 While Said’s insight into
the way power works through apparently benign forms of literature (in a
broad sense) is a great contribution to cultural theory and postcolonial
literary criticism in general, it often proves limiting in our search for any
extrapolitical understanding of human relationship across cultures, races,
and nations. Particularly, in talking about Indian Orientalism, Said brings
in wonderful materials but does not develop them in a way that would
complicate his almost monolithic obsession with coercive Orientalism. For
example, he touches upon Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron’s recon-
ciliatory approach to different religions of East and West, arguing that ‘[f]or
the first time, the Orient was revealed to Europe in the materiality of its
texts, languages, and civilizations’ and ‘Asia acquired a precise intellectual
and historical dimension’. 13 Said also refers to William Jones’s ‘compara-
tive’ approach to the classical languages of East and West—Sanskrit,
Greek, and Latin—and quotes Jones’s ‘unassuming’ proclamation in 1787
‘to know India better than any other European ever knew it’. 14 But, rather
than seeing them as signs of a positive, respectful, and personally engaging
approach to ‘other’ cultures, Said characteristically emphasizes their com-
plicity with the dominant Western motive-force: ‘[t]o rule and to learn’.15
Despite acknowledging—albeit obliquely—the value of ‘the fruitful Eastern
discoveries’ by the Orientalists like Anquetil-Duperron and Jones, Said
conflates these with those works on the Orient that are more directly utili-
tarian, business-minded, and racially patronizing, and sweepingly con-
cludes that ‘all such widening horizons had Europe firmly in the privileged
center’.16
My intention, of course, is not to disregard the utility or ‘fruitful[ness]’
of these early Orientalists’ ‘Eastern discoveries’ for the imperialist regime,
which is obvious from such facts as that Jones’s Asiatic Society grew under
the ideological tutelage of the empire via the more direct encouragement of

12 Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978), p. 5.

13 Ibid., pp. 76–77.
14 Ibid., pp. 78–79.
15 Ibid., p. 78.
16 Ibid., p. 117.

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 Transnationalist Spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore | 5

Indian Governor General Warren Hastings. 17 We should, nonetheless, facili-

tate a more open-minded reading of these cross-cultural encounters that
sees them not as adumbrating the more aggressive imperialist measures
like Thomas B. Macaulay’s imperialist language policy of the later ‘Anglicist’
context, but as representing transcolonial or transnational cultural ex-
change and cooperation. David Kopf argues that ‘Said’s monolithic treat-
ment of Orientalism’ does not provide sufficient insight into understanding
the workings of Orientalism in India. 18 Stressing the importance of taking
into consideration the way Orientalism ‘was understood by the intelligent-
sia of other Asian societies, including India’, Kopf refers to Debendranath
Tagore, Keshub Chandra Sen (both leading Brahmo Samaj members), Da-
yanand Saraswati (founder scholar of Hindu reformist Arya Samaj), Swami
Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, and Mahatma Gandhi. All of these
cultural figures of India represent, in some form or other, the Bengal Re-
naissance, which Kopf rightly sees as a legacy of British Orientalism in
India.19 For our purposes, Kopf’s insight is particularly important because
it emphasizes Tagore’s connection with the Bengal Renaissance, which had
an ambivalent relationship with Orientalism or Western scholarship in
general—subscribing to, appropriating, and subverting the latter’s funda-
mental premises such as humanism, progress, enlightenment, and secular-
ism.
So far as Tagore himself is concerned, being historically tied to, and
conditioned by, the colonial context of British India, he could not have been
blind to the evils of an uneven and Eurocentric distribution of economic
and cultural capital. But, instead of holding the ‘West’ or ‘Occident’
(pāścātya) as an apparently incorrigible suspect, Tagore often saw it as a
boon for the Eastern countries, particularly India. Moreover, he did not
consider cultural influence as a negative phenomenon in itself. Rather, he
emphasized and epitomized the reciprocity of artistic and cultural influ-
ences between the East and the West, the exchange of what is best and
universal in both cultures.
The multifaceted nature of Tagore’s vision of universality and cultural
specificity is nicely captured in an oft-quoted poem of Gitanjali, poem no.
35: ‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high’. 20 Almost at
odds with the generally self-absorbed mystical mood of Gitanjali, this poem
seems well concerned with Tagore’s place and time. The opening line (quot-
ed above) seems to reflect the notion of ātmaśakti or the inner strength of

17 Michael J. Franklin, Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and
Linguist, 1746–1794 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 209.
18 ‘Hermeneutics versus History’, Journal of Asian Studies, 39.9 (May 1980), 495–
506 (p. 496).
19 Ibid., pp. 497, 501.
20 Gitanjali (Song Offerings): A Collection of Prose Translations Made by the Author
from the Original Bengali (London: Macmillan, 1913), pp. 27–28.

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6 | ASHIM DUTTA

one’s self. Given the use of the phrase ‘my country’ in the last line, the
poem might very well be read as representative of the nationalist sentiment
of the Swadeshi Movement (1905–07), in which Tagore had become actively
involved.21 (Tagore, however, soon became disillusioned about the scope of
the Movement as it triggered communal rivalries and violence.) But the
third line of the poem counters this tone of national(ist) attachment by a
seemingly transnational, cosmopolitan vision that does away with the stat-
ist–nationalist ‘walls’: ‘Where the world has not been broken up into frag-
ments by narrow domestic walls […]’.22 Such a claim, too, is problematic,
considering the fact that Tagore’s attitude towards cosmopolitanism was
not unmixed. Using the term ‘cosmopolitan’ interchangeably with ‘interna-
tional’, he writes in 1924: ‘The international endeavour of a people must
carry the movement of the people’s own personality round the great spirit
of man. […] Otherwise, mere cosmopolitanism but drifts on the waves,
buffeted by winds from all quarters, in an imbecility of movement which
has no progress’.23 In this powerful observation, we note the juxtaposition
of ‘people’s own personality’ and ‘the great spirit of man’; in other words,
the cultural particularity of a group of people and the spiritual oneness of
universal humanity.
Faced with the ambivalence inherent in Tagore’s vision of transnational
or transcultural relationship, critics often take recourse to compound
terms. In order to define Tagore’s ‘counter nationalist national attachment’,
Poulomi Saha finds the phrase ‘locally rooted globalism’ useful. 24 In a simi-
lar attempt to theorize Tagore’s and Yeats’s ambivalence about both na-
tionalism and cosmopolitan universalism, Louise Blakeney Williams coins
the term ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’.25 Taking her stance against the ‘skep-
tics about Tagore’s nationalism’ like Ashis Nandy, Gauri Viswanathan, and
Martha Nussbaum, Williams considers Tagore and Yeats as nationalists of
a kind that is less typical and ‘resembles the “new” cosmopolitanism’ that
has started to gain critical currency since the last decade of the twentieth
century.26 The ‘new cosmopolitanism’, to sum up her argument, is respect-
ful of national differences, but poses a fundamental challenge to imperialist
dichotomization of some form or other. 27 Attempting to view Tagore in the
light of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s notion of ‘rooted cosmopolitan’, Fakrul
Alam qualifies Appiah’s observation by pointing out that, unlike ‘the con-

21 Dutta and Robinson, p. 151.

22 Gitanjali, p. 27.
23 English Writings, III, 493.
24 ‘Singing Bengal into a Nation’, pp. 2–3.
25 ‘Overcoming the “Contagion of Mimicry”: The Cosmopolitan Nationalism and
Modernist History of Rabindranath Tagore and W. B. Yeats’, The American His-
tory Review, 112.1 (February 2007), 69–100 (p. 73).
26 Ibid., pp. 80, 70.
27 Ibid., pp. 70, 72–73.

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 Transnationalist Spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore | 7

temporary cosmopolitan’, Tagore would not ‘celebrate’ statist ‘institu-

tions’.28
Amanda Anderson’s reformulation of ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘universal-
ism’ is also helpful to understand Tagore’s cultural–political position in the
early decades of the twentieth century. According to Anderson, the twenti-
eth-century version of cosmopolitanism ‘is defined against […] parochial-
isms emanating from extreme allegiances to nation, race, and ethnos’. 29
She also distinguishes between the ‘exclusionary’ and ‘inclusionary’ cos-
mopolitanisms. While in the former, ‘all value lies in an abstract or “cos-
mic” universalism’, in case of the latter, universalism is less vague and
‘finds expression through sympathetic imagination and intercultural ex-
change’.30 As we will see, Tagore’s vision of the world carefully eschews any
extreme national/racial/ethnic allegiances, and relies heavily on the values
Anderson defines as symptomatic of the ‘inclusionary cosmopolitanism’.
Drawing upon Lalita Pandit’s apt distinction between ‘hegemonic’ and ‘em-
pathic’ universalism, Patrick Colm Hogan maintains that Tagore is against
‘the imposition of one local set of beliefs and customs on everyone else’, but
in favour of a nondogmatic universalism ‘that fosters a sense of common
humanity’.31 Clearly, it is an equivalent of the ‘exclusionary cosmopolitan-
ism’ (as defined by Anderson) that Tagore seems to have in mind when he
argues that ‘[n]either the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the
fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship is the goal of human history’. 32 As an
alternative to a vague and apparently all-levelling cosmopolitanism or uni-
versalism as well as a jingoistic nationalism, Tagore promotes a transna-
tionalist spirituality that, while recognizing the sociocultural distinctiveness
of peoples, values the potentially moral nature as well as the spiritual one-
ness of all humanity.

Tagore’s View of the West

Tagore was born in the heyday of the ‘modern’ colonial education in India—
the first Indian universities having been established in 1857, some four
years before his birth—with its stress on ‘a general humanistic education’

28 Rabindranath Tagore and National Identity Formation in Bangladesh: Essays

and Reviews (Dhaka: Bangla Academy Press, 2012), pp. 45–46.
29 ‘Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity’, in
Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. by Pheng Cheah and
Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 265–89
(p. 267).
30 Ibid., p. 268.
31 ‘Introduction: Tagore and the Ambivalence of Commitment’, in Rabindranath
Tagore: Universality and Tradition, ed. by Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit
(Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), pp. 9–23 (p. 11).
32 Nationalism, p. 5.

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8 | ASHIM DUTTA

and ‘the teaching of English literature as the formative spiritual influence

on a colonized elite’. 33 He, therefore, could not have been unaffected by the
liberal-humanist values of Western civilization. Although he would never
cease speaking against the negative aspects of the colonial education in
India, particularly against the use of English as the medium of imparting
that education,34 he always valued the higher humanistic ideals filtered
through colonialism or, as he would say, the presence of the British in
India. As we will see, his attitude to the West always oscillated between
gratitude for its liberal-humanist values and vehement indictment of its
chauvinistic nationalism.
Both in his Bengali essay ‘Pūrba o Paścim’ (East and West), published
in 1908/09, and in his English piece ‘East and West’ (1922), Tagore main-
tains that India will be benefited by the progressive liberalism of the Eng-
lish. (Tagore mostly uses the word ‘iṃrej’ in Bengali, which literally means
the English, not the British.) In the Bengali essay, he argues that, in order
to build the Great India (‘mahābhāratbarsha’), the Indian must be united
with the Englishman. He believes that the English have come to rouse India
from her contented sleep in the ancient tradition of her forefathers and to
welcome her to the wider world.35 This chimes in with his contention in
‘Nationalism in India’ that it is ‘providential that the West has come to
India’.36 In ‘East and West’, although he is less optimistic about the British
rule in India, he expresses his conviction that, ‘if the great light of culture
be extinct in Europe, our horizon in the East will mourn in darkness’. Be-
cause, he goes on, ‘in the present age, Western humanity has received its
mission to be the teacher of the world; […] her science, through the mas-
tery of laws of nature, is to liberate human souls from the dark dungeon of
matter’.37 In ‘The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech’ (1921), he praises the
‘Humanity of the West’ and says that ‘the present age belongs to the West-
ern man with his superabundance of energy’. 38 In the above excerpts, one
notes Tagore’s adulatory use of Enlightenment images and vocabulary:
‘culture’, ‘darkness’, ‘mission’, ‘science’, and ‘humanity’. However, rather
than merely endorsing a Eurocentric cultural chauvinism, Tagore’s use of
the words like ‘mission’, ‘culture’, and ‘humanity’ seems, in a careful read-
ing, to be subtly ambiguous. Ironically turning the very concepts of En-

33 Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Disciplines in Colonial Bengal’, in Texts of Power:

Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal, ed. by Chatterjee (London: University
of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 1–27 (pp. 10–11).
34 See, for example, The Centre of Indian Culture (1919), in English Writings, II
(1996), 467–92 (pp. 474–75).
35 Rabīndra Racanābali. 31 vols (Kolkata: Visva–Bharati, 1957–), XII (1960), 263–
64.
36 Nationalism, p. 109.
37 Creative Unity (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2002), p. 103.
38 The Essential Tagore, ed. by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty (London:
Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 185

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 Transnationalist Spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore | 9

lightenment against Europe, Tagore often reminds Europe of its deviation

from these ideals.
In Nationalism, Tagore notices the contradiction between the liberal
humanist (social) values of the West and its political hatred of humanity:
‘with all its vaunted love of humanity [the West] has proved itself the great-
est menace to Man’.39 In ‘East and West’, all his faith in ‘Western humanity’
does not preclude Tagore from condemning ‘the dominant collective idea in
the Western countries’, by which he almost obviously means imperialist
nationalism:
[T]he Western mind, after centuries of contact with the East, has not
evolved the enthusiasm of a chivalrous ideal which can bring this age to its
fulfilment. It is everywhere raising thorny hedges of exclusion and offering
human sacrifices to national self-seeking. It has intensified the mutual feel-
ings of envy among Western races themselves, as they fight over their spoils
and display a carnivorous pride in their snarling rows of teeth.40

Tagore here emphasizes the connection between the nationalist politics of

the West and its capitalist greed or violently consumerist values. Hence his
morally subversive choice of diction: ‘thorny hedges of exclusion’, ‘envy
among Western races’, ‘carnivorous pride’, and ‘snarling rows of teeth’.
‘Realization in Love’, an essay in his earlier collection Sādhanā (1913),
contains the polemical statement: ‘Civilization can never sustain itself upon
cannibalism of any form’.41 This resituating of ‘cannibalism’ at the core of
European civilization is one of the best examples of Tagore’s radical rea-
lignment of the coercive terminologies of Western imperialism. What is
more, appropriating and revising the Enlightenment or Western-humanist
notions of civilization and progress, he considers the contemporary Western
aggressiveness to be ‘far worse than the […] nomadic barbarism’ of ancient
history. For all its ‘boasted love of freedom’, the West is responsible for
producing the worst type of ‘slavery […] whose chains are unbreakable,
either because they are unseen, or because they assume the names and
appearance of freedom’.42 Here, by talking about the ‘unseen’ or latent
forms of ‘slavery’, Tagore foreshadows the late twentieth-century neocoloni-
alist phenomena.
Such awareness of the deep-rooted repercussions of Western national-
ist ideologies notwithstanding, Tagore stands apart from any reactionary
counternationalist and anti-Orientalist politics because of his faith in uni-
versal humanity. That is why, in Nationalism, soon after the above-quoted
criticism of what in its vagueness might seem to be a generalized European
civilization, he qualifies it by directing his condemnation to the ‘political
civilization’ of Europe, which is ‘based upon exclusiveness’ and ‘is carnivo-

39 Nationalism, p. 56.
40 Creative Unity, pp. 109–10.
41 Sādhanā: The Realisation of Life (London: Macmillan, 1913), p. 112.
42 Nationalism, p. 56.

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10 | ASHIM DUTTA

rous and cannibalistic in its tendencies’. He adds that ‘[t]his political civili-
zation is scientific, not human’.43 By ‘scientific’, he seems to mean what is
merely technical and mechanical. We have already seen his redemptive
view of Western science. His ambivalence between such an optimistic view
of science and a highly reductive one is also reflected in his observation
that ‘science is not man’s nature. […] By knowing the laws of the material
universe you do not change your deeper humanity’. 44 This ‘deeper humani-
ty’ is the spiritual nature of man, involving his emotional and moral values.
In ‘East and West’, he similarly maintains that ‘the dominant collective idea
in the Western countries is not creative’ but is rather ‘wholly wanting in
spiritual power to blend and harmonize; it lacks the sense of the great
personality of man’.45 As we will see, against such materialistic–scientific
values and exclusively competitive political ideology of the West, he as-
cribes to the East the historical role of spiritual unity, assimilation, and
harmony of the human races.
Another essay that nicely represents the dialectical relationship be-
tween East and West, Asia and Europe is ‘The Religion of the Forest’
(1922). Tagore there dwells upon two distinctive ways in which men relate
to the world (‘the universe’): ‘either by conquest or by union’. The ‘principle
of dualism’ and the ‘principle of unity’ are seen, via what seems to be a
geographical or environmental essentialism, to be the instinctive character-
istics of ‘the Northmen of Europe’ and the men of ‘Northern India’ respec-
tively. For the former, the geographical closeness of the Sea represented
man’s encounter with a hostile and cruel nature: ‘the challenge of untamed
nature to the indomitable human soul’. Although ‘man did not flinch’ but
‘fought and won’, such an antagonistic relationship with nature left its
mark in the mould of the personality of the people of northern Europe, to
whom ‘truth’ takes on the ‘aspect of dualism, the perpetual conflict of good
and evil, which has no reconciliation, which can only end in victory or
defeat’.46 Tagore specifically focuses on northern Europe and northern
India in this essay seemingly as a prelude to contrasting William Shake-
speare with Kalidasa, a north Indian Sanskrit poet and playwright. But a
similar dichotomy of dualism versus unity or conflict versus harmony is
evoked in many other essays and lectures to be attributed to a largely gen-
eralized East–West polarization.
Significantly foreshadowing the postcolonial critique of The Tempest as
well as going beyond it by his conflation of Ariel and Caliban, Tagore argues
that, ‘through Prospero’s treatment of Ariel and Caliban we realise man’s
struggle with Nature and his longing to sever connections with her’. He
dwells at length on man’s control and subjugation of nature. Analysing

43 Ibid., p. 60.
44 Ibid., p. 54.
45 Creative Unity, p. 103.
46 Ibid., pp. 45–47.

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 Transnationalist Spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore | 11

Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale, Tagore at-
tempts to show ‘the gulf between Nature and human nature’ in Shake-
speare, which, he considers, is caused by ‘the tradition of his race and
time’. Not disregarding Shakespeare’s depiction of the beauty of nature in
his works, Tagore notes there a failure ‘to recognise […] the truth of the
interpenetration of human life with the cosmic life of the world’. The same
is also true of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Despite its beautiful descrip-
tions of the heavenly garden, Tagore discerns in the text a lack of ‘kinship’
between man and animals. The latter ‘were created for man’s enjoyment;
man was their lord and master’, as suggested by the impenetrability of the
‘seclusion of the bower’ of Adam and Eve in Paradise. 47 What Tagore wants
to stress here is clearly the materialist anthropocentrism of the West,
which he connects with its imperialist ethnocentrism.
It is against such exclusive Western sense of ‘superiority of man’ that
Tagore places ancient Indian syncretism, which does not deny man’s supe-
riority but rather sees it reflected in ‘the comprehensiveness of sympathy,
not in the aloofness of absolute distinction’.48 Tagore thus envisions an
aesthetic of spiritually comprehensive harmony and union which, he seems
to claim, is essentially Eastern. Although he notes a trace of this in the
English Romantic poets and mentions Wordsworth and Shelley in particu-
lar, he sees the Romantic phenomenon as symptomatic of the ‘great mental
change in Europe’, caused by its interest in Indian philosophy. 49 On this
note, let us move on to consider Tagore’s vision of the East.

The East, where the sun rises

As with his view of the West, Tagore’s view of the East is also a site of am-
bivalence and contradiction, which is all too natural given his complex
cultural–historical background. There are moments in his works when he
believes, like his Japanese friend, Okakura Kakuzo, that ‘Asia is one’. 50 At
other moments, Japan’s rise as a materialist and imperial power shatters
his idealism about the singleness of the Orient. Although India remains at
the centre of Tagore’s notion of the East, the constant shift between ancient
and contemporary India in his writings poses an intellectual challenge for
us in trying to place his preference. However, for the sake of clarity, it is
possible to note two dominant modes in his thoughts on India. On the one
hand, he idealizes ancient India as a land of harmony, peace, and unity,
and also sees in its spiritually syncretic model the ideal future of the hu-
man world. On the other, he dwells upon the problems of contemporary

47 Ibid., pp. 62–64.

48 Ibid., p. 64.
49 Ibid., p. 63.
50 Dutta and Robinson, p. 247.

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12 | ASHIM DUTTA

India, most alarming of which is its loss of a sense of its own greatness. For
reviving its self-respect or ātmaśakti, Tagore stressed the importance of
reforming India’s social institutions, particularly religious and educational
ones.
In ‘Nationalism in Japan’, delivered originally as lectures in Japan in
1916, Tagore writes that ‘in Asia great kingdoms were founded, philosophy,
science, arts and literatures flourished, and all the great religions of the
world had their cradles. […] For centuries we did hold torches of civilization
in the East when the West slumbered in darkness’. 51 As is obvious from his
self-conscious tone and diction here, Tagore is responding to Eurocentric
notions of the East. Although he does not mention any particular writer of
the West, the notions he seems to be revising or writing back to remind us
of G. W. F. Hegel’s chauvinistic contention in The Philosophy of History
(1837) that ‘[t]he History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe
is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning’ or ‘[the East] is the
childhood of History’.52 Hegel contests that, in its obsession with the One
supreme power, India or the Orient ignores the individual existence and
lacks ‘subjective freedom’. What is more troubling is his notion that ‘outside
the One Power […] there is only revolting caprice, which […] roves at will
without purpose or result’.53 Tagore, too, maintains that, after its initial
glory, there ‘fell the darkness of night upon all the lands of the East. The
current of time seemed to stop at once, and Asia ceased to take any new
food, feeding upon its own past, which is really feeding upon itself’.54 While
more of this type of self-criticism on behalf of the East will be seen in his
reflection on India’s contemporary social decadence, it suffices for now to
say that Tagore did not believe this state of stagnancy to be an essential or
natural condition of the East. Moreover, far from seeing the West as the
end of history, he strongly believed in the potentiality of the spiritual East
for saving humanity from the degeneracy of the materialist ideologies of
international politics dominated by the West.
For taking up the new historical role as preserver of humanity, the
East, of course, has to synchronise the old and the new, the ancient and
the modern. That is why Tagore ostensibly praises ‘Japan, the child of the
Ancient East’, for accepting ‘all the gifts of the modern age’ and for
‘com[ing] in contact with the living time’. By combining in herself ‘old and
new’, the ‘immemorial East’ and the modern West, Japan ‘has given heart
to the rest of Asia’.55 Such optimism, however, cannot have been unmixed.
Two years before coming to Japan, Tagore expressed his grim apprehen-

51 Nationalism, p. 50.
52 Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. by J. Sibree (London: George Bell
and Sons, 1894), pp. 109, 111.
53 Ibid., pp. 111–12.
54 Nationalism, p. 50.
55 Ibid., pp. 52–53.

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 Transnationalist Spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore | 13

sion, in the context of Japan’s rise as a military power in 1915, that ‘Japan
has her eyes on India. She is hungry—she is munching Korea, she has
fastened her teeth upon China and it will be an evil day for India when
Japan will have her opportunity’.56 We note again Tagore’s use of food met-
aphors to suggest the carnivorous consumerism that Japan imported from
the West in the name of modernization. The whole lecture on ‘Nationalism
in Japan’ oscillates between his optimism and apprehension so far as Ja-
pan’s tilt towards modernity was concerned. Seemingly keeping Japan’s
aggression towards its neighbouring countries in mind, he wants to remind
Japan of ‘those days when the whole of Eastern Asia from Burma to Japan
was united with India in the closest tie of friendship, the only natural tie
which can exist between nations’.57 Here he tries to forge a pan-Asiatic or
an ideal Eastern identity. Many years later in 1937, he would similarly
think of a China–India spiritual coalition, distinctly nonpolitical, and
founded upon the ‘intercourse of culture and friendship’ that dates back
‘eighteen hundred years’. 58 In the same year, he would also inaugurate the
Department of Chinese Studies at Visva-Bharati University.
However, returning to ‘Nationalism in Japan’, Tagore cautions Japan
against the fatal contagion of the ‘political civilization’ of Europe, arguing
that the civilizations of Greece and Rome have become ‘extinct’, whereas
‘the civilization, whose basis is society and the spiritual ideal of man, is still
a living thing in China and in India’. 59 Here he clearly connects the social
and the spiritual, pitting them against the political and the materialist.
Japan should not be dazzled by the lustre of materialist modernization into
ignoring her ‘inherited ideals’, because, modernity, as Tagore defines it, is
‘freedom of mind, not slavery of taste’. Therefore, the East should welcome
‘the true modern spirit’ of the time from the West without taking recourse
to mimicry of its culturally specific external details. 60 The ‘true modern
spirit’ of the West, like its liberal-humanist values, seems to be essentially
compatible with the spiritual values of the East, and is not to be confused
with the ‘false’ or superficial modernity.
We have already seen how, in ‘The Religion of the Forest’, Tagore offers
a critique of the self-centred, isolationist, or anthropocentric ideologies of
the West encapsulated in Shakespeare’s plays. On the contrary, Kalidasa’s
plays uphold ‘the true Indian view’, according to which, human ‘conscious-
ness of the world […] is perfect when [it] realises all things as spiritually
one with it’. 61 Diverging from Hegel’s argument (quoted above) that Indian
philosophy ignores the world in its obsession with the One, Tagore’s analy-

56 qtd. in Dutta and Robinson, p. 200.

57 Nationalism, p. 58.
58 English Writings, III, p. 711.
59 Nationalism, p. 61.
60 Ibid. p. 75.
61 Creative Unity, p. 49.

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14 | ASHIM DUTTA

sis of ‘the Indian view’ ascribes to individual human consciousness the

spiritual agency of a deep empathy for all living beings. Similarly, in his
Bengali essay, ‘Śakuntalā’, the forest-hermitage in Śakuntalā is seen as an
antithesis of the island in The Tempest.62 Tagore also characteristically
blurs the nature–civilization distinction in his analysis of the play. As Amit
Chaudhuri argues, although Tagore’s use of nature in these instances
involves anti-imperialist politics, it does not fit in the frame of typical post-
colonial writings:
If Tagore were to fit in with our stock idea of the post-colonial writer, he
would have enlisted the wildness of nature, of the indigenous landscape, as
a trope of resistance against European civilisation and the Enlightenment.
Instead, for Tagore, nature is the site of civilisation, refinement, and of cer-
tain ideals of the secular enlightenment, such as the ideal of living in har-
mony with the world. […] Tagore, audaciously, not so much critiques the
Western Enlightenment and humanism, and the idea of ‘civilisation’ itself,
but snatches them away from their expected location and gives to them an-
other source and lineage in India and its antiquity.63

We have already observed Tagore’s use of Western humanist concepts to

criticize Western imperialist praxes. Chaudhuri here aptly points out Ta-
gore’s appropriation of, rather than resistance to, Western humanism and
Enlightenment ideas on behalf of India. However, I do not read Tagore’s use
of nature in the essay ‘Śakuntalā’ or elsewhere as suggestive of any ‘secular
enlightenment’ model. Rather, to my mind, the model of enlightenment he
proffers as an alternative to the (scientific–materialist) Western one is pro-
foundly spiritual. He wants to revive the spiritual civilization of the East,
which, once revived and renewed, will be her contribution in the transcul-
tural exchange. Tagore’s transnationalist spirituality, of course, is not ab-
solutely Eastern or Indian, but is rather a constructive mix of Western
liberal humanism and Eastern spirituality. Such conflation also saves him
from promoting an alternative ethnocentric world-vision with the East or
India at its centre.
In his glorification of ancient India, Tagore did not ignore the alarming
social degeneracy his contemporary India had fallen into. Even for India’s
misery at the hands of the colonial West, Tagore held her partially respon-
sible. Towards the end of the Bengali essay, ‘Pūrba o Paścim’ (East and
West), he puts the blame for the cruelty and cowardice of the British in
India on the Indians’ lack of self-confidence and a sense of India’s great-
ness. The Indians have partly attracted the baser qualities of the British

62 ‘Shakuntala’, trans. by Sukanta Chaudhuri, in Selected Writings on Literature

and Language, ed. by Chaudhuri (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001),
pp. 237–51 (p. 237).
63 ‘Two Giant Brothers: Tagore’s Revisionist Orient’, in Clearing a Space: Reflec-
tions on India, Literature and Culture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 122–39 (p.
134).

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 Transnationalist Spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore | 15

colonizers by not standing in front of them as equals.64 Although such

statements might be taken to represent Tagore’s elitist or pro-Western
mentality, a comprehensive understanding of Tagore’s works allows one to
find a different meaning in these lines. He always wanted to cling to the
essential goodness of man, Eastern or Western, the colonizer or the colo-
nized. That is why, in the same Bengali essay, he sees the ‘Englishness of
the English’ as benevolent and humane, rather than materialist, capitalist,
or colonialist—qualities, which are ‘against the best nature of the English’
(translation mine).65 Reading such statements as symptomatic of Tagore’s
protoimperialist sympathy ignores the fact that he struggled hard to keep
up his faith in a spiritually benevolent nature of man across racial and
territorial divides. It is to this greater nature of man, and not to any tempo-
rary deviations from that, that he refers in the above observations.
Moreover, he employs a similar kind of positive essentialism in his con-
struction of the East or India, too. If he is hard on contemporary Indian
society, it is because he wants India to realise her essential greatness—her
spiritual egalitarianism and openness—lost amidst a rigid and reified social
compartmentalization. In two of his major plays, Acalāẏatan (1912), which
means ‘obsolete structure’, and Tāser Deś (1932), which literally translates
as ‘the country of cards’, Tagore exposes the meaningless and degenerative
nature of the orthodox Hindu society. The inhuman absurdity of rituals as
well as the sheer immobility (acal means immobile or fixed) of orthodox
practices are subjected to incisive irony, mockery and ridicule in these two
plays. Given this grim realization of the ‘immobility of our social struc-
tures’, Tagore criticizes the contemporaneous Indian nationalists’ indiffer-
ence to the need for ‘the constructive work of society’, born out of their
nationalist ‘creed’ that ‘this social system has been perfected for all time to
come by our ancestors’.66 Such apathetic self-complacency is conducive to
the West-infected ‘delusion that mere political freedom will make us free’. 67
Tagore, therefore, did not think that India was ready for ‘political freedom’
until it addressed its social crises rooted in inequality of different sorts. He
feared that ‘the narrowness of sympathy which makes it possible for us to
impose upon a considerable portion of humanity the galling yoke of inferi-
ority will assert itself in our politics in creating tyranny of injustice’. 68 The
glaring relevance of such insightful observations to today’s Indian or South
Asian context can hardly be overstated. Tagore was painfully aware of the
religion- and caste-based discriminations that the socially marginalized
communities had been subjected to for long in the then undivided India. 69

64 Rabīndra Racanābali, XII, pp. 270–71.

65 Ibid., p. 271.
66 Nationalism, pp. 122, 125.
67 Ibid., p. 123.
68 Ibid. pp. 122–23.
69 Dutta and Robinson, p. 274.

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16 | ASHIM DUTTA

In his novel Home and the World (1915), set in the context of the Swadeshi
(svadeśī) movement of 1905, Tagore addresses some key factors behind
Hindu–Muslim rivalry. One of his major concerns, revealed in this novel,
seems to be that Indian nationalist movement is not dealing with this cru-
cial internal antagonism sensitively enough.

Syncretic Internationalism of Tagore

Tagore’s view of India remains incomplete without taking into account his
idealism about India’s role in the realization of his universal-humanist
vision of unity. In his novel Gora (1910), Tagore represents this dream as
well as the multifarious impediments on the way to its realization, such as
the internal, caste-based segregations among the Hindus, the division
between the Hindus and the Muslims, the Hindu–Brahmo antagonism,
and, of course, the friction between the colonizers and the colonized. Gora,
the son of a deceased Irish soldier and raised as a Hindu by Anondomoyi
and Krishnadayal, holds on to Hindu orthodoxy, including the caste system
and idol worship, as part of his nationalist resistance to the British colonial
rule in India as well as to the attempted Westernization of the educated
middle- and upper-class Indians. The family of Paresh Babu is the epitome
of the Brahmo Samaj. While Paresh Babu represents the philosophical and
spiritual wisdom born of his Brahmo faith, his wife and Panu Babu, a fami-
ly friend and a leading member of the Samaj, are remarkable for their ex-
tremist anti-Hindu ideology and their slavish contentment about British
rule in India. Tagore’s Brahmo inheritance notwithstanding, the novel be-
trays his scepticism about the possibility of the Brahmo Samaj’s being the
epicentre of the true Indian unity. (It is significant that, by that time, the
Brahmo movement had become rife with clashes, conflicts, and schisms,
and Tagore’s efforts to unite its different branches as well as to see it as
inseparable from Hinduism had resulted in failure and invited severe criti-
cism.)70 Nor could he trust Hindu orthodoxy with such a historical role. The
novel zooms in, among other things, on Gora’s journey towards self-
realization (in more than one sense), which could also be read as the self-
realization of bhāratbarsha or the Great India. What is more, as Syed
Akram Hossain suggests, Gora’s voyage from Hindu nationalism to univer-
sal humanism also reflects his author’s similar ideological evolution. 71
Having remained engrossed in the Kolkata-centric Hindu–Brahmo con-
troversy so far, it is during his tour of the rural Bengal that Gora comes
face to face with the Hindu–Muslim divide as well as the caste system and
its worst offshoot—untouchability. In a Muslim village, Gora and his com-

70 Dutta and Robinson, pp. 32, 93–94.

71 Rabīndranāther Upanyas: Cetanālok O Śilparūp (‘Rabindranath Tagore’s Novel:
Thought and Craft’) (Dhaka: Ekushey Publications Ltd., 2001), p. 167.

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 Transnationalist Spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore | 17

panion, Ramapati, are faced with a dilemma with regard to accepting the
hospitality at the house of a low-caste and untouchable Hindu barber, the
only Hindu family in the village. What exacerbates the case for Gora and
Ramapati is the fact that the wife of the barber has temporarily adopted the
son of a Muslim farmer, Faru Sardar. Faru was the leader of the rebellious
tenants of the village, and, for standing against the indigo planters’ oppres-
sion, suffered persecution. Finding Faru’s son Tamiz starving for days, the
Hindu barber’s wife felt compelled to take him home.72 When Ramapati,
after hearing this story, becomes adamant about refusing the hospitality of
this Hindu transgressor and accepting, instead, that of Madhav Chatterjee,
the Brahmin rent collector of the indigo factory, Gora chooses to accept the
hospitality of the barber. 73 He cannot make himself refuse the food of the
good-souled barber merely in order to ‘preserve his caste’. 74 Torn between
his long-cherished prejudice and his superior moral sense, Gora self-
critically questions the ‘terrible wrong’ of ‘making purity an external
thing’.75 Here Gora takes his first significant move towards the spiritual
humanism that finds most eloquent expression in Tagore’s 1930 collection
of Oxford Hibbert Lectures, The Religion of Man. Far from expressing alle-
giance to any institutionalized religion, Tagore there distinguishes between
man’s biological and transcendental selves, and maintains that man’s
‘religion’ lies in his spiritual journey from the former towards the latter:
‘Man […] is truly represented in something which exceeds himself. He […] is
not imperfect, but incomplete. He knows that in himself some meaning has
yet to be realized’. 76 This ‘meaning’ is the spiritual self-realization, namely
the realization of the universal humanity in oneself: ‘in our life we must
touch all men and all times through the manifestation of a truth which is
eternal and universal’.77 The eternal/universal truth or the spiritual experi-
ence he pursued all his life was to be sought for and realized in this life
through actions that ‘touch all men’.
Gora, of course, is yet to realize the full implication of this universal
unity. For all his sympathy for the poor and the lowly, he is kept from feel-
ing a sense of true equality by ‘an unseen gulf of separation’. 78 It is only at
the end of the novel, when Gora’s birth-secret is revealed to him, that he
feels himself free and exclaims with a terrible joy: ‘Today I am really an
Indian! In me there is no longer any opposition between Hindu, Mussul-
man, and Christian. To-day every caste in India is my caste’.79 In his own
self, Gora also unifies Europe and India. Despite the fact that Gora has

72 Gora (London: Macmillan, 1924), pp. 133–34.

73 Ibid., pp. 135–36.
74 Ibid., p. 136.
75 Ibid., p. 136.
76 English Writings, III, p. 106.
77 Ibid., p. 106.
78 Gora, p. 406.
79 Ibid., p. 406.

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18 | ASHIM DUTTA

been subjected to authorial irony throughout the novel, and that Tagore in
this novel splits himself into different characters (for example, Binoy,
Paresh Babu, Anondomoyi, and Gora), Gora’s above syncretic epiphany
about a pluralist India seems to be Tagore’s, too.
In a poem, written in the same year as Gora, a similar vision of India or
the Great India finds eloquent expression. The poem, ‘Pilgrimage to India’
reads much like the ending of Gora:
Aryan and non-Aryan come,
Hindu and Musulman:
Come, O Christian; and today
Come, O you Englishman.
Come, brahman, with a heart made pure
Hold hands with one and all:
Come, you outcaste: let your load
Of insult from you fall.80

In another important stanza of the poem, the list is enlarged further to

include, apart from those mentioned above, ‘Chinese, Dravidian, | Scythi-
an, Hun, Mughal, Pathan’.81 The refrain that threads through the poem
and concludes it reads: ‘On India’s ocean-shore of great humanity’.82 It is to
this India of ‘great humanity’ that Tagore invites all the diverse races of
human beings. Significantly he uses the image of ‘ocean-shore’, symboliz-
ing India’s openness to the world. The intricately rhymed, incantatory vers-
es of the original Bengali version of the poem accentuate the tone of all-
inclusive harmony.
The fact that Tagore, in the above poem, includes the ‘Englishmen’
among the races to ‘merge and be merged’ in India is particularly signifi-
cant in the colonial context (lines 22–24).83 It is intriguing that, rather than
asking the Englishmen to ‘quit India’, he should be asking them to ‘come’
and join the throng. In a letter to William Rothenstein, dated 20 April 1927,
Tagore eloquently defends himself against E. P. Thompson’s suggestion (in
his biography of Tagore) about his (Tagore’s) anti-English feelings: ‘Of
course, I have my grievances against the British Government in India, but I
have a genuine respect for the English character which has so often been
expressed in my writings’ (letter 218). 84 In the same vein, ‘Pilgrimage to
India’ welcomes the humanist, not the colonial or the political, West. As he
writes in The Religion of Man, ‘[w]hen the streams of ideals that flow from

80 ‘Pilgrimage to India’, trans. by Sukanta Chaudhuri, in Selected Poems, ed. by

Chaudhuri and Sankha Ghosh (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.
200–02 (p. 202, lines 64–71).
81 Ibid., p. 200 (lines 17–18).
82 Ibid., pp. 200–02 (line 76).
83 Ibid., p. 201.
84 Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore, ed. by Krishna Dutta and Andrew
Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 349.

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 Transnationalist Spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore | 19

the East and from the West mingle their murmur in some profound har-
mony of meaning it delights my soul’. 85 Clearly, it is the transnational har-
mony of an extrapolitical nature that he is proclaiming here, inspired by
the belief that ‘the best in the world have their fundamental agreement’.86
Tagore’s transnational–humanist vision was also reflected in the edu-
cational institution he founded in Santiniketan, India, which he significant-
ly named ‘Visva-Bharati’, meaning wisdom of the world or universal
knowledge. In Tagore’s vision, ‘Visva-Bharati acknowledges India’s obliga-
tion to offer to others the hospitality of her best culture and India’s right to
accept from others their best’. 87 The founding of the university testifies to
Tagore’s serious commitment to a meaningful and respectful union of the
East and the West. Such union, needless to say, is Tagore’s alternative to a
merely politically motivated coming together of nations. The latter, however,
continued to frustrate his hope till the end of his life. In Crisis in Civilization
(1941), he reveals his scepticism about European civilization and his fearful
apprehension of the ‘stark misery’ the British would ‘leave behind’ in India.
Nevertheless, he is reluctant to commit ‘the grievous sin of losing faith in
Man’ and ‘look[s] forward to the opening of a new chapter in [Man’s] history’
to be dawned, probably, in ‘the East where the sun rises’. The dawning he
looks up to is the dawning of spiritual humanity, when the ‘unvanquished
Man’ (cf. the ‘transcendental Man’ of The Religion of Man) will reclaim ‘his
lost human heritage’. 88
To sum up, Tagore’s views of East and West are not rigid but fluid,
and, for that very reason, rife with contradictions. Despite always identify-
ing himself with India or the East in the hemispheric polarization, which he
found impossible to completely transcend, he was not blind to the problems
of his country or the East in general. Although he strongly opposed West-
ern imperialist politics and often wrote back to Western misconceptions
about the Orient, he distinguished, if not always very neatly, the humanist
West from the imperialist West, and never completely denied his admiration
for the former. Tagore’s criticism of the West was corrective and sympathet-
ic, not racially subversive. ‘I speak bitterly of Western civilization’, he writes
in Nationalism, ‘[only] when I am conscious that it is betraying its trust and
thwarting its own purpose’.89 Given his belief in the spiritual essence of
man, he took care not to harbour any ‘distrust of the individuals of [any]
nation’.90 His transnationalism thus relies heavily on the spiritual nature or
the superior moral sense of human beings. This sense of morality, inherent
in his transnational world-vision, coheres with the mystical spirituality of

85 English Writings, III, 119.

86 Ibid., p. 119.
87 qtd. in Dutta and Robinson, p. 220.
88 Essential Tagore, pp. 215–16.
89 Nationalism, pp. 109–10.
90 Creative Unity, p. 110.

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20 | ASHIM DUTTA

the vast majority of his works, connecting the public and the private, the
political and the poetic, and the national and the transnational in his oeu-
vre. Tagore ends The Religion of Man with the following excerpt from the
Upanishads in his own translation: ‘He who is one, and who dispenses the
inherent needs of all peoples and all times […] may he unite us with the
bond of truth, of common fellowship, of righteousness’.91 This threefold
unity needs to be taken into consideration in order to understand Tagore’s
transnationalist spirituality.

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About the author

Ashim Dutta has been a Lecturer in English (currently on leave) at the University
of Dhaka, Bangladesh, since July 2008. He is also a Ph.D. candidate in the De-
partment of English and Related Literature at the University of York. After graduat-
ing from the University of Dhaka, Ashim received a Fulbright Scholarship to study
M.A. in English at Montclair State University, USA. A recipient of the University of
York’s Overseas Research Scholarship, Ashim is writing his dissertation on
Rabindranath Tagore and W. B. Yeats. Besides that, Ashim is also interested in
Modernist literatures, Romantic poetry, American Romanticism, and Postcolonial-
ism. Recently at York, Ashim taught an undergraduate module on Global Litera-
tures in Spring 2016. Ashim’s Bengali article on Tagore, ‘Geetabitane Aalo
Andhakar’, has been published in Bhismadeb Chowdhury ed. Probhatshurja:
Rabindranath Shardhoshato Janmabarsho Smaron (Dhaka 2011), and his article,
‘Thoreau’s Moral Elitism and Ambivalence’ has been published in Bangladesh
Journal of American Studies (Dhaka 2015).

GITANJALI AND BEYOND 1: 1–21 | 2016