Abstract
This essay focuses on the motif of symbolic death in Rabindranath Tagore's‘The Living and the Dead’ to explore how social injustices occur when empathy for an individual (or a group) is blocked. Arnold Van Gennep's notion of pre-liminal, liminal and post-liminal rites of passage that situate humans in efficacious, productive social relations, is used to contextualise the liminality motif in appropriate theoretical terms, while the introductory and ending references to Martha Nussbaum's idea that literary texts serve to unblock empathy (for the reader), by making invisible pain and suffering visible, draw attention to Tagore's contribution to this kind of humanising literature, and his relevance as an important literary figure in today's world.
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