Gitanjali's Weak Theology: The Poetics of Tagore and Caputo

Abstract

Gitanjali's Weak Theology: The Poetics of Tagore and Caputo Bharatwaj Iyer Tagore's collection of songs that won him world renown as a poet was named by him Gitanjali, which, in both Bengali and Sanskrit, means song offerings. At first, it appears that the addressee in these songs is God, but reading the songs again and again at different points of time, I am convinced that that conclusion is far from obvious or is at least not as simple as that. Gitanjali contains 103 songs in the English translation by the author, and every single one contains religious or, even, theological significance. So, it does make sense to consider the songs as offerings to God. The difficulty arises when one tries pinning this God down. What is the nature of this God that Tagore is singing to? To respond that because the God of Gitanjali is indistinct one is here faced with a mystical God that ought to preoccupy negative theology is problematic. It is clear from Gitanjali and other important works like Sadhana, Creative Unity, The Religion of Man, and Personality that our poet's God is intensely personal, and instead of the transcendence attributable to mysticism, it appears more apt to ascribe to it the immanence of the God of the poet and of poetry. Then again, what is this God? How does this God manifest itself? What function does it play in the life of the human being? What religion does it belong to? These questions assume importance the moment Tagore's religious language in his poetry and prose is taken seriously. This study of Gitanjali—a study that shall make use also of the four other spiritual‐mystical prose texts of Tagore above mentioned—proposes that Tagore's God is very similar to the God proposed by postmodern theology, especially the radical turn taken by theology at the hands of John Caputo. If that tall aim of the study needs dilution, then we could say that the study at least aims to better elucidate Tagore's religious language in comparison with the language of radical theology. Both these aims go hand in hand and are compatible. The God of Gitanjali We began by asking an elementary question: who or what is it that these songs are being offered to? One could say it is God as every critic of the collection has immediately accepted, but this would be acceptable only if the solution is taken in a provisional sense, later to be elucidated through analysis. To compare Tagore to a postmodern theologian is interesting, mainly for being so apparently out of place. However, Kenneth R. Stunkel has already drawn out the difficulties attending a postmodern reworking of the prose and poetical works of Tagore. His focus is on the literary devices and language structures in Tagore, along with his ideas on aesthetics, which speak strongly for the endurance of authorship and the reality specific to art, while our focus here would be to re‐read in a postmodern light the religious and theological underpinnings in Tagore's poetry, with Gitanjali in particular, that Stunkel's analysis misses. It is in Tagorean cosmopolitanism and in Tagore's metaphysical ambivalence in general that Stunkel finds this possible postmodern reading. The point of ambivalence is recorded also by an early expounder of Tagore's philosophy, S. Radhakrishnan, where he says that nowhere is there to be found a set system of his own philosophy, all his spiritual prose works being but sighs of the soul. Radhakrishnan also notes how European writers saw in the Gitanjali an expression of Christian mystical thought. This view is rejected by him in favor of a more homegrown one that Tagore is an interpreter of the Upanishads. Through recourse to a mystical interpretation of the Vedantic sort, an engagement with the theological implications of the songs of Gitanjali is avoided. And this is because of the identification of theology with what Caputo calls “strong theology.” But if there is an ambiguity as to who the object of the singing is in these songs, how justified are we to expect a theology out of them? A study of the songs in search of their...