Description
Book SynopsisThis book is a thematic study of the poet-thinker Rabindranath Tagore's conceptual project of harmonizing the one and its many. Tagore's writings, in Bengali and in English, on religious and social themes are held together by the leitmotif of a harmony which operates across several existential, religious, and social polarities the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, and the individual and the universal. Tagore creatively appropriated materials from diverse sources such as the classical Hindu Vedantic systems, the folk piety of Bengal, and others, to configure a dialectic which shapes his writings on both religious and social themes. On the one hand, each individual is irreducibly distinct from everyone else, and, on the other hand, each individual gains their spiritual depth precisely by being placed within the dynamic matrices of an interrelated whole. Thus, we find Tagore rejecting certain monastic forms of Hindu world-renunciation and also certain ecstatic dimens
Table of ContentsChapter 1: The Harmony of the One and its Many Chapter 2: Embodying Relationality in a Fragmented World Chapter 3: Tagore’s Religiosity and the Prisms of Vedāntic Thought Chapter 4: Vedāntic Relationality Across Asymmetrical Realms
