Tagore at the Conjunction of World Literature

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter contextualizes aspects of Rabindranath Tagore's literary biography against the tension between “world literature,” understood as a phenomenon of globalized inequality and geopolitical asymmetry, and the field's inclusivist claims to a canon that accommodates the rights of the historically marginalized. The analysis centralizes Tagore's 1907 essay, “Biśbasāhitya” (World literature), which imagines a universal literary space capable of disclosing an extensive account of the properly human, while establishing the specificity of the languages, historical experience, and values of India as integral to such humanism. A virtual neologism for his turn‐of‐the‐century Bengali audience, Tagore'sbiswasāhityanegotiates the disjuncture between a nascent democratizing national culture and the aspirational ideal of cosmopolitan humanism. Navigating distinctions between national and comparative literature with the transnational scope of anticolonial critique, Tagore's philological, rhetorical, and multilingual usages ofbiswasāhityaexceed the outline of a field, indexing, instead, transformations within current inheritances of “self,” “nation,” “world,” and “literature.”