Tagore’s Idea of “World Literature”

Abstract

This essay tries to position Rabindranath Tagore’s little-known essay “Visva–Sahitya” (World Literature) in cross-cultural articulations of such an idea. Considering the circumstances leading to Tagore’s text, it explores the origins of comparatist literary studies in eighteenth century Europe and to colonial context in India. The attempt is to locate Tagore’s ideas of the world literature in the wider circulation of texts across different cultural milieus and the webs of power within which such texts are situated. Though Tagore comes to the world literature only at the end, his essay is an important statement of his view of man, the purpose of human life, and the role of art in its fruition; indeed, we might consider the essay to be a concise formulation of Tagore’s esthetic philosophy itself. What Tagore meant by the world literature was the essential unity of human experience and therefore of human creativity. But more than that, it signified to him the ever-evolving, never-complete edifice of the best and most authentic expression of human creativity, fashioned by so many hands, spread in so many parts of the world, but still part of the one narrative of the human race. He also believed that we reveal ourselves in the literature more profoundly than in mundane activities of self-interest and self-preservation. Moreover, it is only by giving ourselves to others that we can know or express ourselves. Such self-giving is effortless and joyous because in it lies the realization of our own nature. Everywhere, the universe revels in such joyous self-giving which exceeds any functional requirement or necessity. It is this plenitude or surplus that is beautiful and joyous; the artist in his self-giving is thus a part of a fundamental tendency of nature itself. We may call this the surplus value of art theory that Tagore believed in and which he enunciates so eloquently in this essay.