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WorkRabindranath Tagore

Creative Unity

Essays from a fund-raising journey through Europe and America, closing on the plan for an international university in Bengal.

by Rabindranath Tagore139 passages held

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First published
(aged 61)
Original language
English

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Overview

Rabindranath Tagore spent most of the winter of 1920–21 in New York, asking American industrialists for money to turn his school at Santiniketan in Bengal into an international university, and the appeal largely failed; his son Rathindranath later observed that it had been easier to criticise the British Empire in England than in America. The book appeared the following year, and that journey runs through it. Its claim is in the title. A person, a poem, a religion or a society is alive to the degree that it gathers many things into one whole, the way a self holds together endless facts without effort, and it decays when that whole is replaced by a mechanism. Tagore finds the living kind of unity in a Bengali village, among the Baul singers, wandering religious minstrels he had once taken in the street for beggars, and in the Buddha's offer of salvation to everyone without distinction. He finds the mechanical kind in the modern nation, an organisation of power that looks the same wherever it is built. One essay is a letter from New York to his own countrymen, written while Gandhi's campaign of non-co-operation was under way at home: a freedom sought only as a change in outward conditions, Tagore warns, is not yet freedom, and a society walled into the compartments of caste is poorly placed to claim it. The last essay describes the university he was trying to fund, where India's own traditions, Vedic, Puranic, Buddhist and Jain, could meet each other and the cultures of the West. Its foundation stone had been laid in December 1918. Macmillan published the collection in 1922, and in 1951 the university, Visva-Bharati, became a central university by an act of the Indian Parliament.

Key concepts

What does creative unity mean?

It means the oneness that makes something alive and creative, as opposed to a sum of parts. Tagore's first example is the mind itself: it knows a room as one thing in spite of the endless facts the room contains, and a tree as one unity. A person, a poem, a religion or a society is alive to the degree that it holds many things together this way, and it decays when a mechanism takes the place of that whole.

Who are the Bauls?

A religious sect of wandering singers in Bengal who live outside social recognition, mostly among people modern education hardly reaches. They have no scriptures or system of metaphysics; their faith lives in songs. Its centre is the belief that the ultimate goal waits within ourselves, a fulfilment the Baul likens to a bud opening into flower. Tagore found in them a religion of love that needs no learning at all.

What does the book say keeps East and West apart?

Contempt more than ignorance. The blindness of contempt, Tagore writes, is more hopeless than the blindness of ignorance, because contempt kills the light that ignorance has merely not yet lit. The meetings of East and West have mostly been political and commercial, often forced, and so never disinterested. Against this he recalls a European who came to Bengal, lived among the people and spent his earnings helping poor students buy books.

What kind of university does the last essay propose?

A centre of Indian learning where the many cultures that fed India would be studied side by side: the Vedic, Puranic, Buddhist and Jain streams, the Islamic, Sikh and Zoroastrian, the Chinese, Japanese and Tibetan, and finally the Western. India's culture, Tagore argues, is a river fed by tributaries, and only by knowing its own past can it take in the West's contribution rather than living as a rag-picker in other people's dustbins.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Man of My Heart

Is religion a doctrine one receives or a life one grows into? Tagore looks for the answer among poets and village singers rather than theologians.

Tagore's poet's religion is not a creed but a way of seeing: faith watches the drama as one performance, while logic wanders into the greenroom and finds only ropes and wheels. He finds the same faith among the Bauls of Bengal, wandering singers with no metaphysics and no standing, whose songs seek 'the Man of my Heart', the divine met within. One such song was by Gagan, a village postman dead in his teens. Tagore sets them beside Buddhism: both seek fulfilment through love's release from the self.

  • spirituality
  • religion
  • love
  • poetry
  • literature
  • buddhism
  • beauty
  • emotion
  • reality
  • knowledge
  • suffering

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Living Unity Against Mechanism

A person, a poem or a society is alive to the degree that it holds many things in one whole. What happens when necessity replaces that whole with a mechanism runs through the essays.

The mind knows a room as one thing despite its endless facts, Tagore begins, and creation is that same unity made visible. Courtesy is his small example: beauty of behaviour, needing leisure as music does, while the empty kerosene can used to carry water is its opposite, a need with no patience for anything but its purpose. On a larger scale he saw gunny-bag factories crowding the Ganges of his boyhood, and a civilisation turning into a vast office with the home as its appendix.

  • unity
  • creativity
  • aesthetics
  • art
  • harmony
  • nature
  • human-nature relationship
  • civilization
  • culture
  • science

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Freedom of the Mind

India was campaigning for freedom from British rule while Tagore wrote from New York. Whether freedom can be won outwardly before it exists inwardly is what he asked his own countrymen.

A freedom that is only outward circumstance, Tagore writes to his countrymen, is open space to the blindfolded. The West, he found, flatters its peoples into believing they are free, as courtiers once flattered a king inside a gorgeous prison; India keeps living souls fixed in rigid social compartments. His answer was the university he was raising money for, where the Vedic, Puranic, Buddhist and Jain streams, Islamic, Sikh and Zoroastrian culture, and finally the West's would be studied side by side.

  • freedom
  • education
  • cultural exchange
  • colonialism
  • nationalism
  • human dignity
  • power
  • justice
  • humanity

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Within this work

passages held
139
distinct concepts
277
by passages held, corpus-wide
#435

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “love” and “spirituality”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 19 pairings. 90 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
lovespirituality9
human dignitylove7
aestheticsunity5
loveunity5
naturespirituality4
aestheticslove3
freedomspirituality3
human dignityspirituality3
educationspirituality2
freedomhuman dignity2
aestheticseducation1
aestheticsnature1
educationfreedom1
educationhuman dignity1
educationnature1
freedomnature1
lovenature1
natureunity1
spiritualityunity1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1913 Sadhana: The Realisation of Life

    Tagore's talks on the Upanishads, published in London in the year of his Nobel Prize; Creative Unity later carries the same ideas into art and society.

     EN
  2. 1916 The Spirit of Japan

    A single lecture, printed in Tokyo as a pamphlet; with "The Message of India to Japan", given a few weeks earlier, it makes up the Japanese chapter of Nationalism.

     EN
  3. 1917 Nationalism

    Written for a lecture tour of the United States in 1916–17, with his two Tokyo addresses added; the argument returns in shorter form in the essay "The Nation" in Creative Unity.

     EN
  4. 1922 Creative Unity you are here EN
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