Creative Unity

By Rabindranath Tagore

This antiquarian book contains Rabindranath Tagore’s 1922 work, "Creative Unity". Tagore’s extensive knowledge on every subject with regard to the spiritual and physical aspects of nature and man, which according to him exist for the sole purpose of creation rather than production, is the chief idea behind this wonderful book. A veritable literary extravaganza, "Creative Unity" would make for a worthy addition to any bookshelf, and is not to be missed by fans and collectors of Tagore’s seminal work. The chapters of this book include: “The Poet’s Religion”, “The Creative Ideal”, “The Religion of the Forest”, “An Indian Folk Religion”, “East and West”, “The Modern Age”, “The Spirit of Freedom”, “Woman and Home”, “An Eastern University”, etcetera. Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941) was a Bengali polymath who single-handedly reshaped Bengali literature and music. This antiquarian book is being republished now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition - complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: May 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781473374171

Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was an Indian poet, composer, philosopher, and painter from Bengal. Born to a prominent Brahmo Samaj family, Tagore was raised mostly by servants following his mother’s untimely death. His father, a leading philosopher and reformer, hosted countless artists and intellectuals at the family mansion in Calcutta, introducing his children to poets, philosophers, and musicians from a young age. Tagore avoided conventional education, instead reading voraciously and studying astronomy, science, Sanskrit, and classical Indian poetry. As a teenager, he began publishing poems and short stories in Bengali and Maithili. Following his father’s wish for him to become a barrister, Tagore read law for a brief period at University College London, where he soon turned to studying the works of Shakespeare and Thomas Browne. In 1883, Tagore returned to India to marry and manage his ancestral estates. During this time, Tagore published his Manasi (1890) poems and met the folk poet Gagan Harkara, with whom he would work to compose popular songs. In 1901, having written countless poems, plays, and short stories, Tagore founded an ashram, but his work as a spiritual leader was tragically disrupted by the deaths of his wife and two of their children, followed by his father’s death in 1905. In 1913, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first lyricist and non-European to be awarded the distinction. Over the next several decades, Tagore wrote his influential novel The Home and the World (1916), toured dozens of countries, and advocated on behalf of Dalits and other oppressed peoples.

Book preview

CREATIVE UNITY

BY

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.

This book is copyright and may not be

reproduced or copied in any way without

the express permission of the publisher in writing

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Contents

Rabindranath Tagore

INTRODUCTION

THE POET’S RELIGION

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

THE CREATIVE IDEAL

THE RELIGION OF THE FOREST

I

II

III

IV

AN INDIAN FOLK RELIGION

I

II

III

EAST AND WEST

I

II

III

IV

THE MODERN AGE

I

II

III

IV

THE SPIRIT OF FREEDOM

THE NATION

WOMAN AND HOME

AN EASTERN UNIVERSITY

Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Thakur, anglicised to Tagore, was born on 7 May, 1861 to a wealthy family based in Calcutta, British India. Tagore composed beautiful songs, wrote elegant poems, novels and plays, created celebrated artworks and was a life-long political advocate of equality and freedom. He consequently denounced the Raj and British control of Indian life, inspirationally changing his region’s politics, literature and music. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced), and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works, acclaimed for their contemplative nature mixed with an unflinching naturalism. Two of his compositions were chosen by India and Bangladesh as their national anthems. His legacy also endures in Visva-Bharati University; the establishment which Tagore founded himself. Tagore is still little known outside Bengal, however his profound, if smaller than deserved, reception has helped to introduce the best of Indian culture to the West and vice versa. Tagore started writing poetry when he was just eight years old, and released his first substantial collection of poems, The Songs of Bhanushingho Thakur, at the age of sixteen. These were published under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha (Sun Lion) and were immediately seized upon by the literary authorities; hailed as long-lost classics. However due to his father’s wishes for Tagore to become a Barrister, he moved to England at the age of sixteen and enrolled at a public school in Brighton. He briefly read law at University College London, but left to independently study the literature of Shakespeare, especially Coriolanus and Anthony and Cleopatra. The young man was impressed by the lively English, Irish and Scottish folk tunes, and he returned to Bengal in 1880, resolving to reconcile European and Brahmin traditions. In 1883 he married Mrinalini Devi, with whom he had five children. From 1890 onwards, Tagore managed his vast ancestral estates in Shelaida, and it was here that he released his Manasi poems (1890), probably his best known work. The period 1891-1895 was his most productive, and it was during this time that Tagore wrote more than half of the 84 story long Galpaguchchha. This collection revealed the poverty and suffering in an otherwise idealised rural Bengal. In 1901, Tagore moved to Santiniketan to found an ashram (a place of spiritual hermitage), it had an experimental school attached, beautiful groves of trees, substantial gardens and a well-stocked library. During his time at Santiniketan, Tagore’s wife and two of his children died. However he kept up his campaigns for social justice in the Indian provinces, as well as maintaining his prolific writing career. Tagore also kept composing, amassing a massive 2,230 songs to his credit. He became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, for his Gitanjali: Song Offerings. Two years after this accolade, Tagore was knighted by George V, however he repudiated this award in 1919, after the outrages of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. He asserted that ‘the time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in the incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part, wish to stand, shorn, of all special distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen who, for their so called insignificance, are liable to suffer degradation not fit for human beings.’ As a result of his extensive travels, Tagore felt affirmed in his opposition to societal divisions and continued reflecting on such themes in his later works Chitra (1914), Dui Bon (1933) and Patraput (1936). Tagore died at the age of 80, in Calcutta, the place of his birth, on 7 August, 1941.

INTRODUCTION

It costs me nothing to feel that I am; it is no burden to me. And yet if the mental, physical, chemical, and other innumerable facts concerning all branches of knowledge which have united in myself could be broken up, they would prove endless. It is some untold mystery of unity in me, that has the simplicity of the infinite and reduces the immense mass of multitude to a single point.

This One in me knows the universe of the many. But, in whatever it knows, it knows the One in different aspects. It knows this room only because this room is One to it, in spite of the seeming contradiction of the endless facts contained in the single fact of the room. Its knowledge of a tree is the knowledge of a unity, which appears in the aspect of a tree.

This One in me is creative. Its creations are a pastime, through which it gives expression[vi] to an ideal of unity in its endless show of variety. Such are its pictures, poems, music, in which it finds joy only because they reveal the perfect forms of an inherent unity.

This One in me not only seeks unity in knowledge for its understanding and creates images of unity for its delight; it also seeks union in love for its fulfilment. It seeks itself in others. This is a fact, which would be absurd had there been no great medium of truth to give it reality. In love we find a joy which is ultimate because it is the ultimate truth. Therefore it is said in the Upanishads that the advaitam is anantam,—the One is Infinite; that the advaitam is anandam,—the One is Love.

To give perfect expression to the One, the Infinite, through the harmony of the many; to the One, the Love, through the sacrifice of self, is the object alike of our individual life and our society.

THE POET’S RELIGION

I

Civility is beauty of behaviour. It requires for its perfection patience, self-control, and an environment of leisure. For genuine courtesy is a creation, like pictures, like music. It is a harmonious blending of voice, gesture and movement, words and action, in which generosity of conduct is expressed. It reveals the man himself and has no ulterior purpose.

Our needs are always in a hurry. They rush and hustle, they are rude and unceremonious; they have no surplus of leisure, no patience for anything else but fulfilment of purpose. We frequently see in our country at the present day men utilising empty kerosene cans for carrying water. These cans are emblems of discourtesy; they are curt and abrupt, they have not the least shame for their unmannerliness, they do not care to be ever so slightly more than useful.

The instruments of our necessity assert that we must have food, shelter, clothes, comforts and convenience. And yet men spend an immense amount of their time and resources in contradicting this assertion, to prove that they are not a mere living catalogue of endless wants; that there is in them an ideal of perfection, a sense of unity, which is a harmony between parts and a harmony with surroundings.

The quality of the infinite is not the magnitude of extension, it is in the Advaitam, the mystery of Unity. Facts occupy endless time and space; but the truth comprehending them all has no dimension; it is One. Wherever our heart touches the One, in the small or the big, it finds the touch of the infinite.

I was speaking to some one of the joy we have in our personality. I said it was because we were made conscious by it of a spirit of unity within ourselves. He answered that he had no such feeling of joy about himself, but I was sure he exaggerated. In all probability he had been suffering from some break of harmony between his surroundings and the spirit of unity within him, proving all the more strongly its truth. The meaning of health comes home to us with painful force when disease disturbs it; since  health expresses the unity of the vital functions and is accordingly joyful. Life’s tragedies occur, not to demonstrate their own reality, but to reveal that eternal principle of joy in life, to which they gave a rude shaking. It is the object of this Oneness in us to realise its infinity by perfect union of love with others. All obstacles to this union create misery, giving rise to the baser passions that are expressions of finitude, of that separateness which is negative and therefore máyá.

The joy of unity within ourselves, seeking expression, becomes creative; whereas our desire for the fulfilment of our needs is constructive. The water vessel, taken as a vessel only, raises the question, Why does it exist at all? Through its fitness of construction, it offers the apology for its existence. But where it is a work of beauty it has no question to answer; it has nothing to do, but to be. It reveals in its form a unity to which all that seems various in it is so related that, in a mysterious manner, it strikes sympathetic chords to the music of unity in our own being.

What is the truth of this world? It is not in the masses of substance, not in the number of things, but in their relatedness, which neither  can be counted, nor measured, nor abstracted. It is not in the materials which are many, but in the expression which is one. All our knowledge of things is knowing them in their relation to the Universe, in that relation which is truth. A drop of water is not a particular assortment of elements; it is the miracle of a harmonious mutuality, in which the two reveal the One. No amount of analysis can reveal to us this mystery of unity. Matter is an abstraction; we shall never be able to realise what it is, for our world of reality does not acknowledge it. Even the giant forces of the world, centripetal and centrifugal, are kept out of our recognition. They are the day-labourers not admitted into the audience-hall of creation. But light and sound come to us in their gay dresses as troubadours singing serenades before the windows of the senses. What is constantly before us, claiming our attention, is not the kitchen, but the feast; not the anatomy of the world, but its countenance. There is the dancing ring of seasons; the elusive play of lights and shadows, of wind and water; the many-coloured wings of erratic life flitting between birth and death. The importance of these does not lie in their existence as mere facts, but in their language of  harmony, the mother-tongue of our own soul, through which they are communicated to us.

We