Abstract
This paper asks the following question: can an atheist reader fully taste the aesthetic meaning of poetry written by a theist author? This question is discussed with specific reference to the devotional poetry of Tagore. The paper discusses forms of pre-modern religious thinking which influenced Tagore’s conceptions of God, his relation to Nature, human society, and the human self. But it stresses that Tagore’s time was different from those of pre-modern believers. Tagore, as a modern thinker, had to fashion a response to the ‘problem’ of disenchantment. He constructed a philosophic vision that embraced modern science, but argued that it did not dispel the sense of living in an enchanted universe. Consequently, it is argued that a nastika can enjoy his poetry. This requires the nastika to view the idea of God not as a failure of cognition, but as a triumph of the imagination. I can continue to enjoy Tagore’s poetry without unease.
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Notes
I must make it clear that my use of the two terms āstika and nāstika is taken from the modern Bengali use in which nāstika is a translation-term for the English word atheist. These two terms are, of course, of ancient provenance in Indian philosophy. In pre-modern philosophy, āstika means those who believe in the authority of the Vedas, and nāstika those who do not (See Editorial Introduction to this issue on discussion of the distinctions and permutations.) Philosophic traditions like the Cārvākas or the Buddhists would fall under that technical description. My use here does not either refer to or draw from that pre-modern tradition of debate. I simply mean that Tagore’s philosophical position should be characterized as āstika, because he is convinced of God’s existence, and my position is skeptical — answering the modern description of a nāstika (See Editorial Introduction to this special issue on distinctions and permutations.)
I owe another point of clarification here. I do not think it is obligatory for irreligious people to necessarily believe in the rationalist thesis of disenchantment. German scholars point out that the term ‘disenchantment’ — though conventionalized through Weber’s use — has come to carry a much wider meaning in the Anglo-American literature.
‘God Almighty made existence like a verse of poetry in its structure and its order… All of the world is endowed with rhythm, fastened by rhyme, on the Straight Path.’.
Denis E. McAuley, Ibn `Arabi’s Mystical Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 44–45.
In the Arabic: Muḥyiddīn Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futuḥāt al-makkiyah, ed. Aḥmad Shamsaddīn, vol. 3 (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-’Ilmiyyah, 2006), 414. I thank Mohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed for this quote.
A meter used by Kalidasa in his Meghaduta and widely used in Sanskrit verse-making.
Tagore divided his songs into four/five cycles — pūjā (worship), prem (love), prakṛti (nature), svadeś (native land), and vicitra (assorted/many-colored). For him, pūjā is the first. Rabindranath Tagore, Gītabitān.
In fact, this equation is misleading. Atheism is a philosophic position; secularization is a process of transformation of whole societies. In another sense, secularism is a state principle.
Charles Taylor defines ‘a secular age’ by that feature.
This leads to a very important question about historical thinking: is historical time one or many? But we cannot pursue this problem here.
Taylor leaves this question open and insists that his history is a narrative of intellectual changes in Latin Christendom.
See Nigam’s discussion about Ernst Bloch, Aditya Nigam, 2020.
I have tried to show this in case of a most mundane but essential word: freedom — how the older meaning of the term mukti was initially overwritten with the new precisely secular meaning of a politically inflected freedom and how, after social change worked in its favor, the word came to bear the second meaning with stability, and the former meaning forgotten. Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The ideas of freedom in India,’ in Robert Taylor (ed), The Idea of Freedom in Asia and Africa, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004.
I explore this contrast between Weber and Tagore in greater detail in terms of sociological theory in a forthcoming paper, ‘Is disenchantment inevitable?’, University of Leipzig. Also in a Bengali essay, Kaviraj 2021
In both sense of this term: the poet’s own, and of the abstract human being evoked by the first person pronoun — ami. Some aspects of this pronoun are examined in my ‘The poetry of interiority,’ in Sudipta Kaviraj, The Invention of Private Life, Chapter, Columbia University Press, 2014.
Use of the term self or I/me in poetic enunciation is a fascinating problem which cannot be analyzed here. How something as non-transferable as the self can be used generally is an interesting question.
The idea of the self in his work is clearly suffused with associations from the Upaniṣads reflected in typical phrases like ‘e āmir ābaran’ (the cover of this self) noticed by Sankha Ghosh, E Āmir Ābaran, Papyrus, Kolkata, 1991.
Christian missionaries active in nineteenth century Bengal were mainly Protestants, and education curricula exposed them to British protestant theology.
‘Ādityavarṇam tamasaḥ parastāt’. This particular chant: ‘śṛṇvantu visve amṛtasya putrāḥ…’ was also used by Vivekananda for his reading of Hinduism.
Śvetaśvatara Upaniṣad, Chapter 2, verse 5. ‘ati mṛtyum eti, nānyaḥ panthā vidyate ayanāya’.
Which turns subjects into vedyāntarasparśaśūnya — untouched by other perceptions. Viśvanātha, 20.
brahmasvādasahodara — sibling to the taste of God. Ibid.
This is particularly evident in the philosophic arrangement or architecture of a text like the Ujjavalanīlamaṇi. All the nine rasas are deployed, along with the technical terminology of vibhāva, anubhāva, vyabhicārī bhava, the distinction between rasa, rasābhāsa.
I think the language of expression of love in the vastly popular Hindi films of the 1950s and 1960s speaks this language — almost exclusively.
Krishna is God himself.
Hans Joas’s recent study (Joas, 2021) has an interesting discussion about the role of the expressive in religious thought.
Vivakṣā - which pervades all creation - is remarkably similar to the ideas about geist in Hegel.
Asīmkāler je hillole joyār-bhaāṅṭāy bhuvan dole, nāḍīte mor raktadhārāy legeche tār tān. Gītabitān, 430.
Mahārāja e ki sāje ele hṛdaya pura mājhe, caraṇatale koti śaśī sürya mare lāje/Garba saba tutiyā mūrcchi pade lutiyā, sakala mama deha mana vīṇāsama bāje/ E ki pulaka vedanā bahiche madhubāye, kānane jata puṣpa chila milila taba pāye. Palaka nāhi nayane, heri nā kichu bhuvane, nirakhi śudhu antare sundara virāje. Gītabitān, 206.
This surprising claim — that when the eyes learn to see the world, they see a beauty that resides ‘inside’ — is uncannily similar to an ancient Kashmiri description of meditation: अन्तर्लक्षं बहिर्दृष्टि निमेषोन्मेष -वर्जिता एषा हि शाम्भवी मुद्र सर्वशास्त्रेषु : antarlakṣaṃ bahirdṛṣṭi nimeṣonmeṣa-varjitā eṣā hi śāmbhavī mudra sarvaśāstreṣu gopitā : ‘The attention is directed inwards, the unblinking look outwards: this posture (mudrā) indeed, called Śāmbhavī, is implicit in all scriptures.’
Sāj can mean any aspect, or decoration, dressing up.
Because rūpa in both Bengali and Sanskrit can mean two related but distinct ideas: a form and form that has beauty. Any physical body has rūpa, form. But when he writes, Āmi rūpe tomāy bholābo nā, bhālobasāy bholābo [I shall capture your heart not with my beauty, but with my love.] rūpa carries the second meaning (Tagore, 1970, 307).
Āj tārāy tārāy dīptaśikhār agni jvale, nidrābihīn gagantale. 577.
I am putting this in quotes, though this is paraphrase, a loose transfer into English.
Her incarnation is interpreted in the classic Vaisnava work, the Caitanyacaritamrta:
Tagore has a spectacular poem with the title, jhulan (the swing) (Tagore, 1972,).
Kusume kusume caraṇacihna diye jāo, pare dāo muche; ohe cancala, belā nā jete khelā keno taba jāy ghuce, Gītabitān, 428.
Viraha madhura hala āji madhurāte/ gabhīra rāginī uthe bāji vedanāte. (Tagore, 1970, 376). Kashmiri aesthetic theorists make a distinction between two forms of śṛṅgāra (erotic feeling) – of union and separation (vipralambha).
Which can mean both erotics and decoration.
All the nine rasas are redeployed, just as all its secondary concepts — like vibhāva, anubhāva, vyabhicārī, or sthāyī and sañcārī rasas. This general conceptual structure of prior rasa theory extends from early texts like the Abhinavabhāratī, to the Daśarupaka with the commentary by Dhanika, the Kāvyaprakāśa, down to Sahityadarpaṇa, the last text just about a century before Sri Rupa Goswami’s texts on Bhaktirasāmṛta Sindhu.
For a detailed exploration of Weber, see Joas 2021.
Anglo-American sociology widened the meaning of disenchantment at critical points. In a sense, it is this conception of ‘secularization’ rather than Weber’s narrower notion of disenchantment that has become a default position in modern social science.
Though they certainly desisted from taking the step towards accepting the immanent frame.
Tomārei jena bhālobāsiyachi śatayuge śatabār, janame janame yuge yuge anibār (Tagore 1972, 96).
Dekhi tāri adṛśa aṅguli svapne aśru sarovare kṣaṇe kṣaṇe dey dheu tuli
In an extraordinary song on memory, Tagore describes its many modes: ‘if I go far away, if this love is covered over by new love, if I stay so close that it is hard to know if I am there or not, like a shadow’. ‘Tabu mane rekho’.
Bhālabesechinu ei dharaṇīre bhalabesechinu. Gītabitān, 563.
For Weber, an idea — if it is not rational, is irrational. In Indian thought, an idea, if not rational, can be imaginative. Or in Shulman’s phrase, ‘more than real’ (Shulman, 2007).
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Kaviraj, S. Can Nāstikas Taste Āstika Poetry? Tagore’s Poetry and the Critique of Secularity. SOPHIA 60, 677–697 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00869-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00869-x