Tracing Vaishnava Strains in Tagore

Abstract

The religio-cultural milieu of urban and rural Bengal within which Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) lived was variegated and dynamic with multiple Indian and foreign streams converging on Calcutta, then the capital of British India. One of the more popular but also more refined of the indigenous Bengali Indian streams was the religio-literary Vaishnava tradition of devotion (bhakti) to God Krishna and his human manifestation Chaitanya (1486–1533). Although Rabindranath was exposed to this tradition from his childhood, scholars, especially those writing in English, have tended to neglect this aspect of his experience and formation. The present article provides a corrective to this neglect by showing how Rabindranath treats Vaishnava matters in his fictional and non-fictional prose writings, including personal correspondence, and by examining how passages from his poetry resonate with basic Vaishnava themes, sentiments, and values. In summation, the article confirms that Rabindranath was well informed about the Vaishnava tradition in Bengal and that at the level of aesthetic and spiritual sensibilities, especially as expressed in poetry and song, he shared much with that tradition despite being critical of its restrictive dogmatic tendencies and alleged organisational distortions of the genuine spirituality that he would call the ‘religion of man’.